I am working on a novel, parts of the novel rely on certain premises that I am assuming.I thought great debates might give me more insight and perspective. I am going to start with primitive and work toward modern if the thread gets going. Here are some premises that I have accepted as factual.
Part of mans success in advancing so far above animals was that he evolved to feed off of validation and praise that came with success at most anything important or worthwhile.
The hormones and chemicals triggered by the validation not only rewarded the recipient but also elevated his capacity to learn, and reason.
This would be most closely related to his drive to reproduce his own genes.
Having more status in a tribe would elevate his testosterone.
Having established oneself as a contributor to the group is an essential part of mans identity
A woman would not have to same need for testosterone, instead validation would increase her loyalty to family and group. .
All social animals seek social/familial approval. I don’t see how humans are unique in this respect.
The neurotransmitters released by positive reinforcement do spur learning, but they do not necessarily increase an individual’s innate capacity for learning.
Reason and learning are not closely related within the brain. You can have one without the other. Neither is closely related to an individual’s reproductive drive.
There is some correlation between social status and testosterone levels. But it’s unclear which is the cause and which is the effect. Maybe we just happen to live in a society that rewards aggression.
It feels like you’re cherry-picking premises to arrive at some theory of innate societal roles for men and women.
I don’t understand what the debate is. Are you trying to start with factual premises, or are you asking what follows from your premises, whether they are factual or not?
Well, I don’t agree with these premises. Here’s why.
I often hear claims that human beings “evolved to” do such and such behavior. Humans evolved to be peaceful, to be warlike, to be monogamous, to be polygamous, to plan for the long term, to plan only for the short term, etc… All of these assume that evolution functioned in such a way as to cause human beings to behave in a particular way, to react to certain circumstances in certain ways, etc…
Now evolution shapes genes only; nothing else. If humanity evolved in a certain way, that’s equivalent to saying that humans have a gene or set of genes which cause us to behave in that particular way.
Nobody has yet found any gene that has been firmly proven to cause people to be warlike, or a gene that causes people to be peaceful, or a gene that causes people to be monogamous, or a gene that causes people to be polygamous, etc… Nobody has ever found a set of genes that does so. If no such genes have ever been found, it’s most likely because they don’t exist.
No one really knows how or why human intelligence evolved.
You can make a good story or morality play around any premise, even if it’s not historically accurate. That’s fiction for you. You could say aliens or gods uplifted humans but in our pride we turned away from them. Or that we were peaceful matriarchal hippies until big bad agriculture and permanent settlements came along.
I don’t find your idea particularly entertaining or evocative at first glance. I think the most fun ideas are either the bicameral mind or the stoned ape theory. Probably dead wrong too, but certainly creative.
Seems likely to me that human intelligence was driven by sexual selection, because the runaway expansion of the brain is like the explosion of other ornaments. It may have kept going, but was limited by the birth canal/giant head problem. So in this case intelligence would be attractive to mates – you can play music, make art, tell stories and jokes, and so on. I find this satisfying, because hunter gatherers are way smarter than they need to be. They didn’t need to do calculus or make orchestras just to survive. But runaway selection is a way to supercharge a trait like this, and the pressure of falling behind would maintain it (insert Idiocracy joke here).
The main problem I have with a lot of explanations is why humans? There’s plenty of other social mammals most of these proposed ideas could work on, and some can manipulate their environments, e.g. elephants can hold a paint brush in their trunk, raccoons can get into damn near anything.
Other less social ideas include cooking allowing us to get more calories from food, especially meat, or that bipedal locomotion led to the delay of the fusion of skull plates in infants, which allowed the brain to expand, but presumably there would have to be some pressure to make it want to expand – brain tissue is expensive, calorie-wise.
Genes as you describe would be very hard to identify simply because they would tend to manifest themselves differently under different circumstances. There are many examples of very aggressive people becomming quite amicable when there circumstances changed. The whole point is that we neurologiacaly respond to whatever chemicals are released and tend to repeat the behaviors that gave us favorable outcomes or at least what we perceieved as favorable.
You bring up some interesting perspectives, only a small part of the novel will focus on this. The main character is developing a huge theme park that is very expensive. His plan goes against most all proven business models. He needs to be able to sell his plan to investors to raise capital and I am building arguements he will be facing. A large part of the novel will be built around the capacity humans have to function at higher levels when motivated by more primal feedback than money. Without financing we are forced to put together a group of volunteers which ultimately become the proof of concept.
Amongst all the lifeforms on the planet it is our ability to communicate abstract concepts to one another and our ability to think on the abstract level that makes us sucessful.
While we share plenty of dna with our nearest relatives there are apparently some significant differences in brain architecture.
A bunch of monkeys who can scratch out a map on the sand and discuss the future have an obvious advantage over those who lack these abilities.
We have strung the planet with wires and hung satellites in the sky to facilitate this.
Anyone who has helped a baby to grow knows how much easier it is when they can tell you what they want.
Individually we are small and weak. Collectively we are the most dangerous animals.
The .375 H+H round was introduced in 1912. Not really a plinker. One man could reliably kill anything short of the big sea mammals.
We got here by talking and thinking.
Money is an abstraction. Lots of powerful abstractions came before it.
The sense of belonging has motivated some very extreme behaviour.
“Men whose genes inclined them to feel rewarded by the validation and praise that came with success instead of only the immediate physical benefits, tended to pursue success for its own sake more often, leading them to outcompete both their peers and the rest of the animal kingdom, and eventually pass on these genes.”
It’s an interesting enough idea, and closer to how evolution is thought to work
[QUOTE=HoneyBadgerDC]
Part of mans success in advancing so far above animals was that he evolved to feed off of validation and praise that came with success at most anything important or worthwhile.
The hormones and chemicals triggered by the validation not only rewarded the recipient but also elevated his capacity to learn, and reason.
This would be most closely related to his drive to reproduce his own genes.
Having more status in a tribe would elevate his testosterone.
Having established oneself as a contributor to the group is an essential part of mans identity
A woman would not have to same need for testosterone, instead validation would increase her loyalty to family and group.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=HoneyBadgerDC]
A large part of the novel will be built around the capacity humans have to function at higher levels when motivated by more primal feedback than money.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not entirely sure what this line of reasoning is trying to propose. Men (but not women) are evolutionary selected to strive to succeed at things that are “important or worthwhile” in order to (from a subjective standpoint) receive validation and praise, because that (from an evolutionary standpoint) raises their status in the group and presumably their reproductive fitness? But woman who receive social approval “increase [their] loyalty to family and group”? Which is something that doesn’t happen with men?
I think that your premise here is that male humans are primed to seek social dominance through intellectual creativity, whereas women don’t want social dominance and are all about the warm squishy feelings. :rolleyes: If you want to make a connection between intellectual achievements and our evolutionary history, you might want to spend some time actually looking into the anthropological literature on technologically primitive cultures. Both men and women learn, reason, and are creative, both men and women are valued for their intelligence and creativity, both men and women have variable positions within social dominance structures (although the way these structures work are usually different between the sexes), and both men and women have, and are expected to have, “loyalty to family and group”.
It’s absolutely true that people perform better when given incentives other than money. Your attempt to link this to some kind of sexually dimorphic selection seems to be coming from the pool of “folk evolutionary theory” that is influenced more by the lingering sexism of our cultural history than any actual biological, anthropological or paleontological evidence. (Like that abysmally stupid “men = tools, women = relationships” bullshit.)
I can’t stand this idea that living in technologically primitive societies somehow doesn’t require any kind of brainpower. Head out into the uncharted wilderness with nothing but some sticks and rocks and see how well you do.
Hunter-gatherers do plenty of thinking and planning and problem-solving. It takes a lot less mental effort to go down to the supermarket and grab a frozen Swanson dinner than it does to start with a pile of dried grass and a tree branch and make from them a net bag and digging-stick so you can go figure out which roots are edible when boiled and which roots will kill you. The mental capacity that gives us calculus and orchestras isn’t different from the mental capacity that gives us language and tool use.
Moreover, how are these hypothetically separate evolutionary pressures for men and women supposed to work in practice?
Female children inherit genes from both parents, just as male children do. Only one out of 23 chromosome pairs is differentiated by sex, and most of the traits that humans inherit genetically are carried on other chromosomes.
So sexual reproduction, through the hundreds of millennia, has gone on producing both women and men who are aggressive and ambitious, both women and men who are loyal and nurturing, etc.—in short, producing both women and men with just about any combination of innate traits you care to name.
So how’s this Just-So Story about men evolving for achievement and women evolving for loyalty supposed to translate into the actual process of genetic inheritance?