MESSAGE
| DATE | 2009-03-03 |
| FROM | Michael L Richardson
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Free Software Cooperative - it is in the genes
|
No village idiots raise themselfs.
Ronny Abraham wrote:
> It takes a village to raise an idiot.
>
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 9:25 AM, Michael L Richardson
> >
> wrote:
>
> "It takes a village to raise a child".
>
>
> Ruben Safir wrote:
>
> 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.”
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
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>
>
>
>
>
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