Walking With Beasts Episode 4: Next of Kin Tuesday, Feb 23 2010
videos 3:39 pm
Contrary to common wisdom among intellectuals, television is not completely useless — it can help us learn about the EEA, that humorously elusive concept. Take some of the program with a grain of salt. After all, it is a dramaticization.
Fun fact: Homo sapiens spent about 70% of its evolutionary history in small bands in the plain/forest mixed environment of sub-Saharan Africa. Extensive water exposure was probably involved as well. The EEA is a complex thing.
The more you understand the EEA, the more non-surprising all types of human behavior are today.
Bonus topic: how did Jesus of Nazareth artfully play to certain human evolutionary desires while downplaying others? Is the Church that Jesus preached about fundamentally a social project or a personal one?
Extra bonus: If Australopithecus existed today, would we justify their enslavement by calling them subhuman, like we do to Sus scrofa and Bos primigenius today?
http://www.aquaticape.org/
The arguments against the AAH seem a lot stronger than those for it.
Completely agree with your point: “The more you understand the EEA, the more non-surprising all types of human behavior are today.”
But regarding EEA I’ve always found infantisation / neoteny / the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood to be more elegant and powerful than other theories / factors of what drove human evolution.
Thanks Russell. I was hoping someone might post something contrary to the AAH so I could see it.
Mark, neoteny is definitely important. I find it insufficiently predictive, and too ancient, to call it the most important part. I think what characterizes us are more recent-term evolutionary innovations, including evolution that took place since departure from Africa. (See Cochran’s 10,000 Year Explosion.)
“I think what characterizes us are more recent-term evolutionary innovations, including evolution that took place since departure from Africa.”
Do you imply that those who left Africa underwent more evolutionary pressure thus becoming better than those who didn’t?
No, more evolution is not necessarily “better”. There’s just a lot of interesting genes present at high levels in populations mostly outside Africa, like the gene for lactose tolerance.
Very well. How does the geographical distribution of “better” IQ scores and all kinds of “better” stuff that seems to be, though not necessarily, associated with it like clean water, electricity, sufficient nutrition, health care, education, democracy, communications networks, roads, mechanized mass production, etc. collectively called modern high tech civilization that exists primarily, though not necessarily completely (any more), outside of Africa fit this picture? Are there obvious dots to connect here or is this just a bias of some sort?
Geo, that’s such a huge, complex, and controversial issue that we can hardly address it adequately in a comments thread. There are already many blogs on the Internets that address such issues. If you wish to discuss it anywhere, you could also set a positive example by using your real name and not a pseudonym.
I actually don’t find these issues very interesting or constructive to spend time on since they will no longer exist in a post-Singularity world which will be much, much longer one than history so far.
Could you clarify on why you said the EEA was *humorously* elusive? Working on my rationality and wondering if I’m overlooking something.
It’s humorously elusive because it’s all based on conjecture, just like the rest of paleontology. It also doesn’t correspond to an exact or time place, but a weighted average of a range of environments. It’s so important to understand, so our temporal removal from it is frustrating. One powerful guide to the EEA is probably the world’s last remaining uncontacted tribes.
I think its ok to “enslave” any animal or process which is not able to communicate with me on a human level, just so you know. You do as well or you would not advocate for friendly AI.
If we bred chimpansees with humans, i.e. we impregnate a chimpansee with human semen (or force gestation in some manner), and we get offspring – would we be legally allowed to harvest the hybrid for organs?
…likewise if we genetically introduced human DNA in a chimpenase genome, and we begat something that while it looked human, were a chimpansee at any level of genetic scrutiny, could we me moral if we harvested this creature for organs?
…if we decided to draw a line in the sand in these matters, would certain countries decide against (and suffer loss of competitiveness, or revenues) while other countries might choose to vote for (and suffer significant benefits)? Might we get ‘pseudosimian organ tourism’ ?
What if a country condoned using chimpansees as birth mothers -say China decides to quickly catch up its lack of females by producing millions of human females – by using a genetically engineered human-like primate as ‘industrial womb’ ? What if China decided to grow a few million ‘idealized females from quality genetic stock’ this way?