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“[W]e are born of risen apes, not fallen angels.” —Richard Ardrey
Chimpanzees, bonobos and humans share a common ape ancestor that lived about five or six million years ago. Some of those apes’ descendants became chimpanzees and bonobos, and others became humans. How did our ancestors break away from typical ape ways of life and become human?
Past theories focused on individual human intelligence and attributed its gradual increase to such factors as tool construction, language and the use of fire to make food more digestible (permitting an increase in brain size). But, beginning in the 1980s, researchers studying human origins began seeing these factors as secondary. According to an emerging consensus, humans evolved under conditions where ecological pressures forced them to develop advanced forms of cooperation.
Other apes did not face the same conditions. Without evolutionary pressure to cooperate, their mode of living remained static, developing (almost) only through the slow processes of biological evolution. Cooperation allowed our ancestors to progress rapidly by acquiring new modes of working together.
Once you see the role of cooperation in human life, you can’t unsee it.
The daily texture of human life consists of a constant exchange of objects and services with others. No other animal, with the partial exception of social insects, lives like this. The unique communication system of human language, so integral to what it means to “be human,” could only have evolved in creatures that already communicated intensively, and whose survival chances would improve if they could communicate even better. All but the simplest human tools are collaborative products, refined over time by many users and passed down from one generation to the next through both passive learning and active teaching. Our ancestors were able to move into and thrive in new environments because they learned to coordinate their behavior in novel ways.
How did we become so cooperative?
One theory, dating back to ideas sketched by Darwin, depends on the idea of group selection. According to this view, groups that could cooperate better had a leg up on survival and so came under selection as groups. But evolutionary biologists who have looked at group selection closely have come to realize that it can occur only under special circumstances. Various sophisticated arguments offered by such authors as Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis have been used to demonstrate that cultural factors can provide just those circumstances. However, culture itself is a product of advanced cooperation. Their analysis could, therefore, only apply late in human evolution, once our ancestors had already gone far along the cooperative path. How did we get started in that direction?
In his books and papers, philosopher of biology Kim Sterelny has advocated a position he shares with psychologist Michael Tomasello: that conditions in protohuman evolution were such that cooperation benefited individuals, not just groups. The potential for cheating was inherently limited in such circumstances, and what temptations to cheat remained could be addressed through the simple mechanism of partner choice. Through a long period of coevolution of cooperation and cognition, our ancestors developed what might be called a psychological operating system for cooperation.
This book presents Sterelny and Tomasello’s ideas about the origin of human cooperation and its progression from early, simple forms of cooperation up through the ability to pass along large amounts of information from generation to generation in the form of complex culture. It concludes with four essays that apply these ideas to several contemporary issues to illuminate both the ideas and the issues.
ASIN : B0BW1733RC
Publisher : Spontaneous Order Publications (February 15, 2023)
Publication date : February 15, 2023
Language : English
File size : 7549 KB
Simultaneous device usage : Unlimited
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 438 pages
Customers say
Customers find this book informative and entertaining. They find it a great introduction to the subject, with amazing details about the natural world and thought-provoking content on the history of human ancestors and the development of cooperation. The book is well-written and easy to understand, making it a good choice for those interested in the topic.
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