EXCERPTS FROM DR. EDWARD C. GREEN’S FORTHCOMING MEMIOR (TENTATIVELY TITLED) ‘CONFESSIONS OF A RENEGADE ANTHROPOLOGIST’

Could cooperative communication skills, like that of other non-adaptive traits seen in domesticated animals, be a by-product of the domestication process?

 

At the insistence of Wrangham, who suspected that they were, Hare travelled to Russia and visited Belyaev’s silver foxes to test this very notion.

 

Following a series of tests to both regular and friendly fox kittens he and an assistant conducted, which also included hiding food under two bowls and pointing to the bowl where the food is hidden, Hare concluded that the experiments “provided strong evidence that the basic skill behind the cooperative communication we observed in dogs as the product of domestication.” Furthermore, Hare also came to the conclusion that domestication made animals not less intelligent but friendlier. Cognition appeared to be another by-product of the domestication process.  

 

Could the friendliness and cooperation of humans also be a lucky by-product of this incredible metamorphosis of self-domestication?

 

In the 19th century, Darwin was constantly impressed with the kindness and cooperation he observed in nature and wrote that “those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.” Darwin and his predecessors have documented that the ideal way to win at the evolutionary game is to maximize friendliness so that cooperation flourishes.

 

(On the contrary, the great American biologist/neuro-scientist Robert Sapolsky and others have observed that being the biggest, strongest and meanest animal can lead to a lifetime of stress, which weakens the body and can result in fewer healthier offspring. Definitely not what any creature wants including us humans.)

 

Considerable debate still surrounds the hypothesis that humans are a self-domesticated species (as dogs and bonobos are suspected of being). 

 

(Some critics argue that “Not enough credit to the effects of intergroup aggression, and other points arising from Richard [D].Alexander’s thinking” [those other points include the Balance of Power Hypothesis or the Ecological Dominance Social Competition Model aka EDSC developed by Alexander and his colleagues and students starting in the 1960s].While others say that “Alternative mechanism may apply” in the creation of human friendliness and cooperation.

 

The couple argue that natural selection acted on Homo sapiens in favor of friendlier behavior that enhanced our ability to flexibility cooperate and communicate. Over generations, individuals with hormonal and developmental profiles that favor friendliness and thus cooperative communication were more successful.

 

If we believe that self-domestication has occurred in the course of human biological evolution, then it gave us the friendly edge we needed to succeed as other hominin species went extinct.

 

(There is fossil and DNA evidence that for most of the approximately 200,000 to 300,000 years that Homo sapiens has existed, we shared the planet with at least four other human species. Some of these humans had brains that were as big as, or bigger than, ours.)

 

What this increasing friendliness and cooperation did, says Hare and Woods, was to allow Homo sapiens to make the shift from living in small bands of ten to fifteen individuals, like the Neanderthals, to living in larger groups of a hundred or more. 

 

Our sensitivity to others in these larger groups allowed us to cooperate and communicate in increasingly complex ways that put our cultural abilities on a new trajectory. We could innovate and share those innovations more rapidly than anyone else. 

 

Technological innovation exploded 50,000 years ago during the Pleistocene, and according to the couple, the friendliness and cooperation initiated by our self-domestication also caused a rapid expansion of social networks.

 

“Social networks are crucial in many ways, but they are essential to the development of technology. When populations lose their connection to a larger social network, technology does not just stop advancing-it can even disappear.”

 

We know that selection for friendliness causes physical changes in domesticated animals. Therefore, if humans are self-domesticated, there should be evidence for these types of physical changes in our ancestors. The book provides some examples of the physical evidence that human bodies, particularly face shape, skull size and brow ridge projection did start to change 80,000 years ago prior to human population explosion and improved technology.

 

One modern physical trait that the couple points to as undeniable evidence of human self-domestication are the whites of our eyes. Only humans have white sclerae, the absence of pigment, while other primates do not. At some point, the couple argue, we went from camouflaging our eyes to advertising them. The evolution of white sclerae, which they believe occurred more than 80,000 years ago, was the result of selection for friendliness.

 

Our friendliness bred not only more tolerance but, like our cousins the bonobo, towards strangers we were also helpful and kind. 

 

We recognize group identities. Our social awareness allow us to see these group identities as flexible or elastic. This plasticity is vital to the emergence of social norms (implicit and explicit rules that govern social interaction), which allows us to identify and embrace humans beyond our immediate families.

 

The neuro-chemistry behind this argue Hare and Woods, is the neuro-hormone oxytocin.

 

“Basically, serotonin increases the impact of oxytocin. Decreases in available testosterone also increase the ability of oxytocin to bind with neurons and change behavior. With increased available serotonin and decreased testosterone, during human self-domestication, an increase in the efficacy of oxytocin is predicted. It is this increased power of oxytocin over our behavior that likely explains how our species evolved the ability to perceive our group as if they are family,”

 

During the course of our evolution there was development of the new social category, the intragroup stranger, members of our particular group whom we have never encounter previously. We are not only tolerant of such individuals but are prepared to go out of our way to help them.

 

But here is where things start to go dark.

 

The love we have for our own group heightens the fear and aggression towards outsiders with different group identities (in all hunter/gatherer societies studied by anthropologists, men conduct preemptive raids on other groups as a way of protecting their own communities).  

 

The prejudice that social scientists ascribe to one group’s dislike or having negative feelings towards the other group is insufficient, says the couple.

 

“The human self-domestication hypothesis suggests our worst behaviors towards other groups cannot be explained as mere “negative feeling” towards others,” writes Hare and Woods. “It suggests we also evolved the ability to dampen the activity of the mental network that produces the unique features of our theory of mind. This allows us to blind ourselves to blind ourselves to the humanity of people outside our group when we feel threatened. This blindness is a far darker force than even prejudice. Unable to summon empathy for outsiders, we feel no connection to their suffering. Aggression is permissible. Rules, norms and morals for their humane treatment no longer apply.”

 

According to the authors, several studies have demonstrated that reduced activity in every region of our theory of mind network has been linked to negative treatment of outsiders.

 

Fueling this murkier, sinister side of humanity’s friendliness are some enduring myths and misconceptions of human evolution. Misunderstandings that have contributed to negative social and political attitudes and consequences over the past generations (good science does indeed have social utility as Hare and Woods demonstrate). 

 

One example is the phrase “survival of the fittest” and how it led to, among other things, discriminatory attitudes towards groups of people (as was illustrated in the US school desegregation episode) that sadly has lasted to this day.

 

The phrase was first coined by Herbert Spencer, the 19th century English philosopher and polymath renowned for his hypothesis of social Darwinism. However, Charles Darwin in the 5th edition of his magnum opus “Origin of Species” used the phrase as an alternative or synonym for natural selection. He wrote: “Survival of the fittest is more accurate, and sometimes equally convenient” (Josef Stalin reportedly hated the phrase, which he saw as an inherently American capitalist idea and justification for those with superior strength of intelligence to amass wealth while workers lived in poverty).

 

Sadly, the word “fitness” over the decades since Darwin became misconstrued with physical fitness and not evolutionary fitness (our ability to survive and reproduce in the environment we are in.

 

Yet another misconception or misrepresentation is the “March of Progress” (“Ascent of Man”) iconography. The enduring image of the evolutionary progress of “man”, which was meant to illustrate 25 million years of human evolution.  

 

This misrepresentation has led to the emergence of two enduring myths among the general public: the first is that evolution is linear in character AND that humans were inevitably headed for the top of the animal kingdom (as the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was fond of saying, evolution is a branching bush not a ladder of inevitable progress). 

 

Studies done by Harvard-trained social psychologist Nour Kteily of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University used the March of Progress illustration as a measure for dehumanization of other ethnic and religious groups. Kteily found that most of the white Americans he surveyed (172 in total) perceived half the ethnic groups they were asked to rate in terms of their evolutionary development as less than fully human (of course all the groups are fully human without variation in terms of one group or groups being a sub-species or inherently having more or less intellectual capacity than any other.