MESSAGE
| DATE | 2009-03-02 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Free Software Cooperative - it is in the genes
|
March 3, 2009
Basics
In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue
By NATALIE ANGIER
In seeking bipartisan support for his economic policies, President Obama
has tried every tip on the standard hospitality crib sheet: beer and
football, milk and cookies, Earth, Wind and Fire.
Maybe the president needs to borrow a new crib sheet — the kind with a
genuine baby wrapped inside.
A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or
overhaul the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go,
nothing can beat a happily babbling baby. A baby is born knowing how to
work the crowd. A toothless smile here, a musical squeal there, and even
hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the head and weak in the knees.
In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary
social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human.
Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of
its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes
many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that
often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to
share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s
lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me,
myself and mine.
As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, “Mothers and Others: The
Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding,†which will be published
by Harvard University Press in April, human babies are so outrageously
dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never
have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing.
Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring
pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.
Human beings evolved as cooperative breeders, says Dr. Hrdy, a
reproductive strategy in which mothers are assisted by as-if mothers, or
“allomothers,†individuals of either sex who help care for and feed the
young. Most biologists would concur that humans have evolved the need
for shared child care, but Dr. Hrdy takes it a step further, arguing
that our status as cooperative breeders, rather than our exceptionally
complex brains, helps explain many aspects of our temperament. Our
relative pacifism, for example, or the expectation that we can fly from
New York to Los Angeles without fear of personal dismemberment.
Chimpanzees are pretty smart, but were you to board an airplane filled
with chimpanzees, you “would be lucky to disembark with all 10 fingers
and toes still attached,†Dr. Hrdy writes.
Our capacity to cooperate in groups, to empathize with others and to
wonder what others are thinking and feeling — all these traits, Dr. Hrdy
argues, probably arose in response to the selective pressures of being
in a cooperatively breeding social group, and the need to trust and rely
on others and be deemed trustworthy and reliable in turn. Babies became
adorable and keen to make connections with every passing adult gaze.
Mothers became willing to play pass the baby. Dr. Hrdy points out that
mother chimpanzees and gorillas jealously hold on to their infants for
the first six months or more of life. Other females may express real
interest in the newborn, but the mother does not let go: you never know
when one of those females will turn infanticidal, or be unwilling or
unable to defend the young ape against an infanticidal male.
By contrast, human mothers in virtually every culture studied allow
others to hold their babies from birth onward, to a greater or lesser
extent depending on tradition. Among the !Kung foragers of the Kalahari,
babies are held by a father, grandmother, older sibling or some other
allomother maybe 25 percent of the time. Among the Efe foragers of
Central Africa, babies spend 60 percent of their daylight hours being
toted around by somebody other than their mother. In 87 percent of
foraging societies, mothers sometimes suckle each other’s children,
another remarkable display of social trust.
Dr. Hrdy wrote her book in part to counter what she sees as the reigning
dogma among evolutionary scholars that humans evolved their extreme
sociality and cooperative behavior to better compete with other humans.
“I’m not comfortable accepting this idea that the origins of
hypersociality can be found in warfare, or that in-group amity arose in
the interest of out-group enmity,†she said in a telephone interview.
Sure, humans have been notably violent and militaristic for the last
12,000 or so years, she said, when hunter-gatherers started settling
down and defending territories, and populations started getting
seriously dense. But before then? There weren’t enough people around to
wage wars. By the latest estimates, the average population size during
the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded the
Neolithic Age may have been around 2,000 breeding adults. “What would
humans have been fighting over?†Dr. Hrdy said. “They were too busy
trying to keep themselves and their children alive.â€
Dr. Hrdy also argues that our human ancestors became emotionally modern
long before the human brain had reached its current average volume of
1,300 cubic centimeters, which is about three times the size of a
chimpanzee brain — in other words, that we became the nicest apes before
becoming the smartest. You don’t need a bulging brain to evolve
cooperative breeding. Many species of birds breed cooperatively, as do
lions, rats, meerkats, wolves and marmosets, among others. But to become
a cooperatively breeding ape, and to persuade a bunch of smart,
hot-tempered, suspicious, politically cunning primates to start sharing
child care and provisionings, now that took a novel evolutionary
development, the advent of this thing called trust.
To explain the rise of cooperative breeding among our forebears, Dr.
Hrdy synthesizes an array of new research in anthropology, genetics,
infant development, comparative biology. She notes that recent research
has overturned the longstanding insistence that humans are a patrilocal
species, that is, with women moving away from their birth families to
join their husbands. Instead, it seems that young mothers in many
traditional societies have their own mothers and other female relatives
close at hand, and who better to trust with baby care than your mom or
your aunt? New studies have also shown the importance of postmenopausal
women to gathering roots and tubers, the sort of unsexy foods that are
difficult to disinter and lack the succulent status of, say, a freshly
killed oryx, but that just may help feed the kids in hard times. Other
anthropologists have made the startling discovery that children have
entertainment value, and that among traditional cultures without
television or Internet access, a bobble-headed baby is the best show in
town.
However cooperative breeding got started, its impact on human evolution
was profound. With helpers in the nest, women could give birth to
offspring with ever longer childhoods — the better to build big brains
and stout immune systems — and, paradoxically, at ever shrinking
intervals. The average time between births for a chimpanzee mother is
about six years; for a human mother, it’s two or three years. As a
result of our combined braininess and fecundity, humans have managed to
colonize the planet; exploit, marginalize or exterminate all competing
forms of life; build a vast military-industrial complex all under the
auspices of Bernard Madoff and with one yeti of a carbon footprint, and
will somebody please hand me that baby before it’s too late.
--
http://www.mrbrklyn.com - Interesting Stuff
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://fairuse.nylxs.com DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
"Yeah - I write Free Software...so SUE ME"
"The tremendous problem we face is that we are becoming sharecroppers to our own cultural heritage -- we need the ability to participate in our own society."
"> I'm an engineer. I choose the best tool for the job, politics be damned.<
You must be a stupid engineer then, because politcs and technology have been attached at the hip since the 1st dynasty in Ancient Egypt. I guess you missed that one."
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