I’ll agree there’s hot debate about which human social behaviors are instinctive and which are learned/acquired, but I don’t see how there can be much debate that some human social behaviors are instinctive. All mammals have instinctive social behaviors. That can be proven experimentally by seeing the same social behavior replicated in groups of animals far apart from one another who have had no opportunity to learn the behaviors from an outside source. Some of our most basic social behaviors are duplicated in our close primate relatives, which I’d say argues pretty strongly for their genetic origin. It’s not like any human was teaching the bonobos to kiss mouth-to-mouth or have sex face to face.
I’d like to believe we humans have some genetically-ingrained instinct not to abandon or kill crippled or retarded babies, but I don’t see much evidence that it’s so. Our compassion for such people is probably learned, and in some societies it appears that it was not learned.
Right now (where now = past hundred thousand to a million years), intelligence has served us well and is our #1 asset. But it’s no guarantee for evolutionary immortality. It may turn out to be our own undoing (unless we can learn to be wise and intelligent). Or it may be useless against a natural disaster that cockroaches will easily survive. Intelligence may help use prevent/survive a natural disaster, but in general, we certainly don’t seem to put a lot of energy into long-term planning.
Subjectively, intelligence certainly seems to be a great trait, but we have no objective model to compare it against (no other independently evolved ecosystems that we know about).
Intelligence suited Neandertals for a while too, but they’re gone now.
Bugs, nothing! In Full House S.J. Gould notes that the mode in any census of living things populating the earth would be a bacterium. They have been around longer, in more environmental niches, have more species and more creatures per species, than all higher animals, including insects, and all plants, taken together.
As for MetropoChris, he appears to be what one might call a “benign trolloid” – he wanders into GD every couple of weeks and posts a response-provoking OP, not always well thought out but always provocative in nature, and then disappears for a while, evidently never responding to the threads he starts. There’s elements of trollery in that, but also elements of good posting style. So don’t be too quick to tar him with the troll brush.
Danimal, the statement wasn’t presented seriously, it was just the setup for the following paragraph- a sarcastic response to what I thought was a particularly fatuous statement.
