I think we have to start thinking about the idea that humans in the last 30, 40, or 50,000 years have been domesticating ourselves. If we're following the bonobo or dog pattern, we're moving toward a form of ourselves with more and more juvenile behavior. And the amazing thing once you start thinking in those terms is that you realize that we're still moving fast. I think that current evidence is that we're in the middle of an evolutionary event in which tooth size is falling, jaw size is falling, brain size is falling, and it's quite reasonable to imagine that we're continuing to tame ourselves. The way it's happening is the way it's probably happened since we became permanently settled in villages, 20 or 30,000 years ago, or before.
That's from Taylor's interesting new book Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human. Taylor does stress that this hypothesis is speculation rather than established fact.
By the way, our skulls are becoming thinner, a process known as gracilization.
As Stephen Jay Gould emphasized, neoteny – retaining juvenile features in the adult – is a potent evolutionary motif. It is one of the most persistent themes in human evolution, but contrary to Wrangham, it has been accompanied by an extraordinary increase in brain size, the very increase that distinguishes us from the other great apes.
We domesticated ourselves. Doesn’t that mean we should be looking for parallels with cats rather than with dogs?
I think we’ll find that the social aspect of evolution is what made us unique, with such qualities as empathy, being able to place ourselves in someone else’s shoes, and compassion, which made the individual more likely to succeed over temporary setbacks within a group, whereas hunting alone out on the plain was, evolutionarily speaking, a way to get, or keep, a head.
Bill,
Primitive humans usually hunt in groups, like dogs,lions or chimps, especially when after big game. Hunting tends to be a cooperative activity – even today, when high powered weapons make us more than a match for the most formidable predators and prey.
A primitive hunter who hunted alone would have little chance against a big game animal, and even if he did get a deer would be very likely to lose it to big cats, wolves, or other apex predators.
Neoteny is what has enabled us, as humans, to find novel solutions to complex problems. Unlike other species, we still engage in play as adults. This has been a positive force more often than a negative one.
Cochran and Harpending wrote a great book recently on the theme of recent human evolution, with genetic and other evidence, that uses the metaphor of domestication too.
The 10,000 Year Explosion.
Humans taming humans makes a lot of sense to me. Particularly if the context is dance. You need something to drive the process that compels brain growth. The driver has to be intense.
See http://bit.ly/tUzYF for additional thoughts regarding neoteny and taming.
Great! In 20,000 years we will all look and act like poodles. Oh, wait…
“oh great! trepanation is getting easier!”
Those tribesmen who could be trepanned easily would have the evil spirits let out of their heads, and so survive to have many children.
It’s logical really.
There are profound echoes of Nietzsche here, in the content and even the name of the “genealogy of morals”. Nietzsche viewed the process as taking place solely on the moral/social level, but I’m sure he would have been just as happy to see it happening on the genetic level — after all, he viewed it as a genealogical process. Maybe this will be a good opportunity for Alex and Tyler to add Nietzsche to the list of philosophers discussed in the blog.
Does this mean the world described in ‘Idiocracy’ is coming?
JMC- ‘Idiocracy’ is here, it is now, it is rampant in the USA:
The herd bellow in distracted, electrolyte-swilling UFC bloodlust as Goldman Sachs dictate self-serving economic policy. Retarded and reactionary media mobilize ‘teabaggers’ to cry out for the cutting of their own throats. The oligarchs heartily applaud the dimwitted masses who perform these self-destructive spectacles of buffoonery.
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