Posts Tagged ‘evolution’
the language apes – how we differ from bonobos etc
It seems that language is what separates us from every other species, and what has enabled us to dominate our planet. I suppose that’s stating the obvious, but how this language feature of ours evolved isn’t so obvious, as we can’t examine the brains of our more recent hominin ancestors, or listen to them talk, if they could, to connect all the dots. All we have to go on is an increasingly detailed knowledge of the neurological correlates to human language, and similar brain regions in chimps and bonobos. It’s an enormously complicated subject for the brain of a near 70-year-old ignoramus to dive into, so let’s do it.
What is ‘theory of mind’? It’s the ability to attribute mental states to others. We can do this with dogs and cats and other creatures we’re familiar with, in a vague way, but our fellow humans communicate this – not always accurately or honestly of course – with language. Certainly language is a tool that gives us an incalculably enormous advantage over other species, and we have created many thousands of them – languages, that is. It helps that we have brains some three times the size of our closest living relatives, but size isn’t everything, as we know, for example, from corvids and other smart species.
So we’ve been studying certain areas of the brain, such as Broca’s area, involved in language production, and Wernicke’s area (language reception) for many decades, and have found similar regions in other primates, though there are important differences. The human Broca’s area is larger in the left than in the right hemisphere, and there are similar but different enlargements for the left Wernicke’s area. The same asymmetry exists for their smaller, less developed analogues in other primates. Interestingly, left-handed types, like myself, have less asymmetry (or I’d prefer to say, more symmetry) than right-handers.
Sadly, we can’t study the brains of Neanderthals or any other extinct hominid in close relation to H sapiens to determine whether they had anything like our language skills, or indeed whether the first members of our species had them. According to AI (never lies), gathering info from such sources as the Australian Museum, Reddit, Wikipedia, Science Daily and Discover Magazine, ‘complex’ language (as opposed to complex language) was in operation among humans from 200,000 to 50,000 years ago, so it’s all a bit vague.
Exploring the issue by way of brain processes is more than problematic because I can’t see how we’ll ever have evidence outside of modern H sapiens, but what about the physical structures required to produce speech? There’s a difference, at least in my mind, between speech and language in that speech doesn’t necessarily involve grammar, it just starts with vocalisations representing objects, states (fear, pleasure, anger, warning etc). To produce these requires particular ‘hardware’. Here’s AI again:
The ability to speak required specialized “hardware” that differs significantly from other primates:
- Lowered Larynx: In humans, the larynx (voice box) is positioned lower in the throat, creating a larger space (the pharynx) that allows for a wider range of resonant sounds.
- Tongue and Mouth: Unlike other mammals, the human tongue is thick, muscular, and almost circular, allowing it to move vertically and horizontally to shape complex sounds like vowels.
- Breath Control: Humans evolved finer control over the muscles used for breathing, which is necessary to sustain the long exhalations needed for sentences.
The third item mixes hardware with neural developments, no doubt, but our current and perhaps permanent inability to trace these developments back in time is teasingly frustrating.
One interesting finding has to do with the FOXP2 gene, aka ‘the speech gene’, which we share with Neanderthals. It’s so named because it encodes the FOXP2 protein (Foxhead box protein P2), which is found in many vertebrates, and is associated with vocalisation, including birdsong and echo-location.
References
https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2025/09/speech-gene-foxp2-huntingtons-wysocka.html
on sentience
I’m reading Dennett’s 1996 book Kinds of minds, which, from my dilapidated copy, I must’ve read before, but… anyway, I’m a bit disappointed so far, as I was hoping it would be about the minds of other creatures – cetaceans, elephants, bonobos and such – but so far, nearly halfway through, it’s been dealing with much more basic species, as well as the more complex systems created by humans as of 30 years ago. He does have some interesting things to say about that slippery concept known as sentience, though, so I thought I might think on those thoughts. A brief escape from the political scene.
So here’s Dennett’s first take on the concept:
Since there is no established meaning to the word ‘sentience’, we are free to adopt one of our own choosing, if we can motivate it. We could refer to the slow but reliable responsiveness of plants to their environment as ‘sentience’ if we wanted, but we would need some reason to distinguish this quality from the mere sensitivity exhibited by bacteria and other single-celled life forms…
Kinds of minds, p66
It’s groping at the idea of some kind of awareness which certainly isn’t consciousness but above ‘mere sensitivity’. But these are just words. It suggests something on a certain level of complexity which isn’t quite mammalian – or rather it embraces a complexity which starts at a pre-mammalian stage. Something which provides focus. Descartes, in his attempt to capture human consciousness, imagined that there was a central focussing medium in the human pineal gland. Of course he was wrong, but the idea of such a central processing medium or system, from which sentience emerges, hasn’t died.
If we replace ‘sentience’ with, say, ‘self-awareness’, something that we’d likely deny to plants, and grant to mammals, cephalopods, fish (whose status in self-awareness, and general intelligence, as bestowed by humans, has risen in recent years, I’ve noticed), and maybe crustaceans, but not to oysters and other such mollusks….and then what about insects?
So the more I think on the term, the more uncertain I am about its usefulness. Perhaps that’s because the more we look into particular species or genera, the more we feel we should grant sentience to them. That’s to say, our system of valuing broadens. Lately I’ve been reading about whales, and watching recent videos about them. The history of human relations with cetaceans has been marked by a complete transformation in the past 150 years, more complete, arguably, than that for any other mammal, but the fact is, the more we investigate any living beings, the more we’re made to think along ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ terms, which becomes a kind of ‘transference of sentience’ to other life forms.
So here’s a story. A few days ago, I was at the state library here in Adelaide with my laptop, writing. I was at a long white bench stretching across the back wall, with other people working in a seemingly similar way at a fair distance from me on either side – a kind of Edward Hopper scenario. My researches were interrupted though by a mildly insistent buzzing to my left. I looked over to the young woman some metres away staring intently at her computer. Perhaps she was watching a video. I tried to ignore it – it wasn’t too loud, but monotonous, stopping sometimes, then starting again. I looked over again, puzzling at it, and then I noticed a black speck moving in circles on the bench between us. It was a blowfly, and the sound was its wings beating on the bench. It was upside down and desperately trying to right itself. Issue resolved, I focussed again on my writing, and meanwhile the fly’s struggles brought it closer to my workspace. I had a bag on the bench beside my computer, and the fly managed to get itself, still upside-down, on the bag’s strap, which meant that it was no longer horizontal but tilted slightly towards normality. It remained there, immobile for a while – no more wing-beating. It seemed to be resting, gathering strength, summing up its new scenario. Then it flipped back onto the bench, right-way up. It remained still for quite a while, almost lifeless it seemed. I went back to work, and when I looked again, it was gone.
The lifespan of a blowfly is three to four weeks on average, and I suspect this event would’ve been momentous for this blowfly. Would it be remembered? Perhaps yes, but of course not in any human sense. Sentience, though is generally seen as more basic – Wikipedia starts out with a simple sentence: ‘Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations.’ Sentience is an ability? Is there a difference between a feeling and a sensation? Language so often confuses with distinctions without differences. Was this piece of sentience or experience life-changing for this fly, rendering it in some way different from other flies? Changing its future pattern of behaviour? But that would go beyond sentience to a kind of learning. But what would sentience be for, other than that? A sensation that tells or teaches us to move towards or away from. So sentience is about more than just sentience. There is a purpose to it, a survival purpose, and possibly more. An evolutionary purpose – those who have more effectively learned from their sensations – or simply have had more or a greater variety of sensations to learn from, to survive, will live to copulate and multiply, producing more of their kind of effective learners. Something along those lines was how Darwin thought, surely, and then genes were uncovered, adding more complexity, for how ever could experience be encoded?
Evolution has no purpose, I’ve heard. It’s just that sentience of a certain kind has survival value. The more sentience, the more value? A battle of the sentiences? A battle of the codes for sentience? How could all this be related to nucleic acid sequences? It’s all too mind-boggling, just shut up and connect….
How much sentience is too much? It’s all so exhausting, and then we die, like flies…
References
Daniel Dennett, Kinds of minds, 1996
stuff on sexual selection, and our humanity
As perhaps mentioned, I’ve started reading The descent of man, or to be accurate, I started reading it a while ago, then stopped, what with all the other pleasurable and thought-provoking reading I’ve been doing. In fact one of those books is Matt Ridley’s Birds, sex and beauty: the extraordinary implications of Charles Darwin’s strangest idea, to give its full title, and it’s maybe a bit of a spoiler, because I’ve heard that The descent contains a section on sexual selection, that ‘strangest idea’ aforementioned, an idea that, as Ridley tells me, was found more questionable than general evolution by many scientists of his time, and even afterwards. Wallace, who developed his evolutionary theory independently of Darwin, and became a close associate afterwards, was quite skeptical, along with most of Darwin’s other backers, and Ridley, quite rightly I think, points to the reason. Evolution was obviously a rather serious assault on religion – and is still felt that way – whereas sexual selection was an assault on patriarchy, though many of its detractors may have been oblivious of the fact. Patriarchy’s so insidious that many people still think it’s normal! Duh…
So what exactly is sexual selection? Well, just about everyone points to the obvious case of the peacock, with his extravagant tail feathers. Can such a stunningly colourful but ungainly mass to drag around you be anything but a hindrance? It’s kind of exhausting just to look at them. Can a peacock actually fly? Well, yes, but certainly not like an eagle. And how does it sneak up on its prey? Does it only eat blind mice? Actually they’re omnivores, but probably easier to be veggo with all that get-up. And of course they can be prey as well as predators, and you should be able to guess the rest – one minute you’re a mate, next you’re dead meat. It’s just a matter of getting things in the right order.
So sexual selection is about males so impressing females, whether by looks, dancing displays or some other spectacle, that the female offers herself happily, or complacently, to him. And males are often in competition with other males for the honour, the point being that it’s the female who sexually selects. This type of selection goes on in species of birds, fish (eg guppies), insects (eg fruit flies), mammals (eg elephant seals) and reptiles (eg most lizards). It also goes on in humans (eg party hardcore, referenced below), but not generally for the purpose of reproduction. As for bonobos – well, that’s another story, and it’s complicated, much as with humans.
So what about humans? We like to think we’re too complex and sophisticated for that sort of categorisation, and anyway, we in the WEIRD (non-Catholic) world don’t connect sex so tightly with reproduction. Even so, when we do decide on reproduction, we surely, male and female, do it on the basis of having selected, more or less mutually, the best partner available. This is of course a best-case scenario – we can be fooled, perhaps by our hormones, into being convinced that this person will be the best father/mother for our child/children, not to mention a variety of other scenarios which result in pregnancy. If we think of sexual selection in terms of pairing rather than pregnancy, it may be that neoteny, the preservation of youthful characteristics, including by artificial means – make-up, cosmetic surgery, mode of dress and so forth – has played a role, but this doesn’t appear to be a scenario in which only the female does the selecting. Certainly it’s less clear ‘who’s zoomin who’, if anyone. Darwin, I think wisely, considered sexual selection in humans has worked in both ways, with hairlessness in females being selected for by males, and males’ reduced hair ‘going along for the ride’ to some degree (also because of ‘genetic correlation’, though Darwin didn’t know about genes, and so could not consider genotype-phenotype examples), while reduced sexual dimorphism and, in contrast, the greater difference between the voices of adult males and females, are being selected for by their opposites. The reduced sexual dimorphism argues for greater monogamy (compare gorillas). Even so, females may in general be selecting for height, muscularity, and deeper voices. I give up.
Seriously, the scenario is complex for humans, which is to be expected. From Wikipedia:
In a study measuring female attraction to males with varying levels of masculinity, it was established that women had a general masculinity preference for men’s voices, and that the preference for masculinity was greater in the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle than in the non-fertile phase. There is further evidence from the same study that in fertile stages of the menstrual cycle, women also had a preference for other masculine traits such as body size, facial shape, and dominant behavior, which are indicators of both fertility and health. This study did not exclude males with feminine traits from being selected, however, as feminine traits in men indicate a higher probability of long-term relationship commitment, and may be one of several evolutionary strategies.
I don’t want to think too much about male dominant behaviour being indicative of fertility or health – especially mental health – but this finding that the menstrual cycle affects female preference seems just too ‘beyond our control’ for my liking, which isn’t to say it’s not true. As other sources have pointed out, there’s a sort of more-or-less understandable ‘muddle’ between selecting for ‘tough guys’, in both physical and emotional senses, or for caring-and-sharing softies who’ll be reliable providers – they hope. But isn’t that typical of women – they can never make up their effing minds.
Clearly, though, there are two strategies that are more or less blindly operating in humans. A video by ‘Brainstorm’, linked below, puts it neatly:
Sexual selection is an extremely powerful tool to explain much of evolutionary change in behaviour in animals – in humans it becomes a bit more complicated – we’re neither clearly a tournament species [males fighting for dominance (e.g gorillas)] with huge extremes re sexual dimorphism, nor are we sexually identical in behaviour, aggression or life expectancy… we do see dimorphism in bone structure, muscle mass and levels of aggression…
These male-female differences are not extreme, and we might just be able, with work, to make them less extreme. Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually work toward this. The sexual dimorphism among bonobos is minimal, and it would make sense, given their society, that it is diminishing, though we have no substantial evidence that this is so. Humans, of course, still have a way to go, given all the warfare and violent confrontations that are still occurring.
Anyway, once again, vive les bonobos. We have so much to learn…
References
Charles Darwin, The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, 1871
Matt Ridley, Birds, sex and beauty, 2025
Darwin and me – one more time
As some of my posts might indicate, I’ve become a bit of a Darwin obsessive over the years, and I think I’m often more interested in personalities than ideas. I’ve even become quite protective of him, even though I have every reason to be pissed off by the privileges he benefitted from. Darwin was brought up amongst the ‘whig aristocracy’, his father being a wealthy doctor and a smart investor, closely associated with his wife’s Wedgwood wealth, and I really mean wealth. Basically, he inherited smarts as well as wealth. I only inherited smarts, but comparisons are odorous, I’m told.
So Darwin was born with ‘connections’, and lived in a large Shrewsbury estate with servants and plenty of land for hunting and collecting and an inheritance that included grandad Erasmus with his many intellectual and sensual pursuits. Some 150 or so years later, I lived in a rental purchase home in Elizabeth, a working class region north of Adelaide, South Australia, where I started my first job at 15 or 16 in a washing-machine factory. I’d recently left school after having been slapped very forcefully in the face by the headmaster for chewing gum while he was talking to me. I’ve had fantasies ever since of slicing his penis off, ripping his intestines out and observing his reaction. Sorry about that – but Edward II, the so-called ‘hammer of the Scots’, got away with doing that kinda thing to William Wallace… that’s the upper classes for you.
As a young man, Darwin was sent to Edinburgh to finish his education. He mostly studied medicine and the natural sciences, but he couldn’t cope with dissection, not to mention the Scots’ murder of the language, and after some family discussion he transferred to Cambridge. In both institutions, his family name and fame provided him with a number of intellectual connections, and that’s how he got the Beagle assignment. This was definitely the making of him as a naturalist, though his role was supposed to be that of a gentleman’s gentleman to Captain Fitzroy, who, as a Tory toff, didn’t much like the idea of being cooped up for some years in an almost embarrassingly tiny boat with a lot of unlettered sea urchins. The voyage lasted nearly five years and ultimately circumnavigated the globe. Darwin was 22 years old when it set out.
In my five years from the age of 22 I spent much of my time on the dole, having previously worked in two washing-machine factories, a factory that made mobile classrooms for over-crowded schools, a factory making metal pipes for various purposes, a foundry making metal baskets also for various purposes, and a stint as a nurse’s aid in an institute quaintly named The Home for Incurables.
So, after all that, at 22 I moved into a share-house with an art student of the same age, and a much older social worker (at 28!) who was openly homosexual and never wore clothes in the house. It was a very happy period for me, I began to write a regular diary and found myself on the fringes of an arty-farty crowd. My main literary influences then were, I’d say, two very different self-obsessives, Michel de Montaigne and Franz Kafka, and I began to take a little pride in my intellect.
In my 24th year I enrolled in a College of Advanced Education (CAE), an education facility created in the 70s and 80s, above high school but not quite a university, doing a thing called Communication Studies. A couple of essays I wrote caused enough interest that the head of the college invited me into his office and suggested that, with his help, I could be transferred to Flinders University, perhaps to study philosophy. On further questioning, though, he found that I was failing in at least one subject, mathematics, which I was more or less completely ignoring, and he changed his mind. I dropped out of the college at the end of my first year.
Over the next few years I moved from share-house to share-house and lived with a number of interesting characters. It was a carefree, easy-going time of reading, writing, and chit-chat. I lucked into a job as a kitchen-hand in a swank French restaurant and became quite interested in cooking, which raised my status among share-house comrades.
And then Darwin arrived back in England. He’d gained much self-confidence and something of a reputation, having sent off some intriguing fossil specimens from his labours in South America, and soon made contact with Charles Lyell, whose first volume of Principles of Geology he’d read on his travels, as well as his erstwhile associates Henslow, Sedgwick and Fox. He published his ‘Journal of researches’ in 1839, and subsequent geological and biological works earned him membership of the Geological Society and the Royal Society, and acquaintance with such worthies as William Whewell, Richard Owen and John Gould, and later with up-and-comers Joseph Hooker and Thomas Huxley, among many others. Also in 1839, at the age of 29, he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood.
At the age of 29 I started studies at Adelaide University, where I remained for nine years, shifting from subject to subject – a little philosophy, a very little biology, a major in French, and some months of teacher training, until finally, forced for financial reasons to get a factory job once more, at Rupert Murdoch-owned Griffin Press (now defunct), chucking unbound books onto a conveyor belt during the afternoon and attending university classes, very bleary-eyed, in the mornings. I earned enough to go full-time again and obtain a fairly useless but quite easy Honours degree in English, thus ending my university career, aged 38, as unemployable as before.
Into his thirties, married and with children in quick succession, Darwin became more and more interested, even obsessed, with the dangerous concept of the transmutation of species. Lamarck had been one of the first to broach the idea, with the publication of Philosophie zoologique in 1809, which was much ridiculed in British intellectual circles in the 1830s and 40s, including by Darwin himself, albeit with a difference. Lamarck may have missed the causal principles of transmutation (as did Darwin, since genes were unknown in his day), but the extent to which he ‘got it right’ is still debated. But Darwin was certainly on the trail of an evolutionary theory, as many of his notes show. The appearance, in 1844 of the controversial bestseller, Vestiges of the natural history of creation, published anonymously by Robert Chambers (another very clever Scot), which Darwin and many of his natural philosophy friends devoured, taught him above all else how fractious the topic of species and their origins could be, and he was constitutionally averse to controversy. Having moved with Emma and his growing brood to a rambling country estate in Kent, courtesy of his wealthy family, he made a decision, of sorts, to narrow his biological focus to one particular class of Crustacean, barnacles – though he didn’t give up on his other species explorations and their human connections.
So, having finished with university, and being somewhat buoyed by the odd academic compliment on my writing abilities (though I received a bare pass and a screed of sarcastic comments from a philosophy lecturer for an overdue essay I wrote, methinks under the affluence of inkahol), I had the bright idea of writing to the editor of a local news-and culture rag, The Adelaide Review, offering my services as a journalist-writer of sorts. I made the letter très jazzy and up-beat, suggesting a number of possible topics, including something about my mis-spent youth in working-class Elizabeth. To my great surprise the editor called me more or less instanter, quoted with amusement some witty line I’d written, and asked me to send a piece on Elizabeth. It was published in the next issue, and I found myself a published writer, in miniature. I was rather nonplussed at how easy it had been. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? Could I make my living as a writer somehow? The Adelaide Review piece was a one-off, I quickly realised, but maybe I could expand it into a memoir-novel of hijinks and wit, or what might pass for it. I had recently moved into a share-house with an older, twice-married woman (I’d been desperate to move out of a house I shared with another older woman whose interest in me I was unable to reciprocate), and we began a romantic liaison – again my cooking skills appeared to be key. I think, though, that I’d already written most of my Elizabeth novel by the time we became a couple. I suppose I should check my journals, which I never read.
So we were now in the mid 1990s, and, perhaps through the auspices of The Adelaide Review, my expanded writings about my Elizabethan childhood were sent to and accepted by Wakefield Press, and I was given a State grant to help me along. I bought my first computer and began to navigate that Great New Thing, the internet. The novel was completed in 1996, my fortieth year, but it was put through an exhaustive editing process, which I like to think, for vanity’s sake, was standard practice. It was published in late 1997, and for a brief period my life became public. I was written up in the The Advertiser’s Weekend Magazine, together with a full-page pic of my handsome dial, and I was interviewed on local TV and radio. Over the next week or two I received two dismissive reviews, one in Adelaide University’s weekly rag, On Dit, which was a real piss-off (private school kid, no doubt), and one tiny positive one, from somewhere. And so began and ended my public career as a writer.
So that’s it about me. Darwin ended his love-hate affair with barnacles in about 1849, his fortieth year, but his explorations and speculations re speciation continued apace. He’d also managed to father a large family. I’m not sure how this was done, having no experience in the matter. He suffered the death of his favourite child, Annie, from scarlet fever, and he suffered his own aches and pains – biliousness, flatulence – for which he tried the water cures that had become super-popular in mid-nineteenth century England, especially among the upper classes. They seemed to work for him, and his embarrassments aren’t so much mentioned into the 1850s (all this from Janet Browne’s bio). He grew and crossed various plant species, raised pigeons, and kept up a rich correspondence with breeders and fanciers throughout Britain, and overseas. He became particularly interested in how seeds could be dispersed over long distances, in sea-water, or in the feathers of birds, or even via the poop of any number of species. He worried, though, that he was unable to see the forest for the trees. He was building up a great load of possibly related information, for a thesis he clearly trembled over, but was driven by….
References
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, 1995
Stewart Henderson, In Elizabeth, 1997
Charles Darwin and me
Erasmus Darwin, senior, progenitor, from whom Charles got some ideas, and his big nose
It seems I should be quite an expert on Darwin by now – last year I read The Origin of Species for the third time, and I followed that up, at the end of the year, with his Voyage of the Beagle. I’ve even read the first 20 pages or so of The Descent of Man (not quite into it yet), and I’m currently reading, and have nearly finished, Janet Browne’s superlative (and I really do mean that) Charles Darwin – voyaging, the best biography I’ve ever read, of anyone. I’d venture to say that the intimacy with which she deals with just about every aspect of his public and private life is – not quite what only a woman could achieve, but something women generally do so much better than men. And this is only the first volume, leading up to his writing of The Origin. I’ll definitely be buying volume 2, Darwin – the power of place, in the near future. I should also say that Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the barnacle, which I read some 15 years ago, was totally gripping and memorable (except that I can’t recall too much of it now – not her fault, I’d be saying the same about any book after 15 years, sadly. Still, I must read it again…).
So just to further prove my soi-disant expertise, I’ve also read Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s biography, simply called Darwin, and which is described in the back-cover blurbs, as a tour de force, definitive, enthralling, rivetting, compellingly readable and more. I probably found it so at the time, but twenty or so years later I can’t remember a thing about it. And the same goes for David Quammen’s The Kiwi’s Egg: Charles Darwin & natural selection, bought for me in 2008 by my closest friend, and read more or less immediately, I’m sure. All I remember about it is that I definitely read it, honest. I may even have written about it, and the other books mentioned here, in some of my earlier, long-forgotten blogs. And to round things off I’ve just been given, for my birthday, Matt Ridley’s most recent (2025) book, Birds, sex and beauty: the extraordinary implications of Charles Darwin’s strangest idea. I really do love this stuff, honest again. I just this morning watched a video on octopuses and – well I wish I was young and magically proficient at scuba diving so that I could connect with these brilliant creatures.
But thinking about Darwin’s life, activities and achievements (compared to my own, haha), I can’t help thinking about free will and determinism, a long term interest of mine, about which I’ve written a number of times. Darwin was born into a very rich, science-minded family, including a somewhat notorious, larger-than-life grandfather, Erasmus (father of at least 14 children, some of whom were ‘legitimate’, a term I’ve always loathed), philosopher, poet, botanist, inventor, abolitionist and Lamarckian-style evolutionist (before Lamarck). He (Charles) was sent to a couple of Britain’s best universities, Edinburgh and Cambridge, where his family name gave him entrée to a world of intellectuals, leading to an offer to join The Beagle on its round-world voyage of scientific exploration. It was his class rather than any scientific knowledge he’d acquired that recommended him to Robert Fitzroy, the ship’s commander, who felt the need of a ‘gentleman’ to keep him company. But Darwin made the most of this opportunity, which effectively was the making of him as a natural philosopher. His geological researches, and the fossilised specimens he sent home, quite quickly raised his reputation among intellectual and scientific circles in Britain, including the geologist Charles Lyell, the polymath William Whewell, and even one of his own great heroes, Alexander von Humboldt.
So Darwin, in the 1840s, richly married, well-connected, member of the Geological Society and the Royal Society, was basically a privately funded researcher into all, or many, things biological and geological, and in correspondence with professors, cattle breeders, horticulturalists, bug collectors and the like, all the while worreting over the consequences of his increasingly dangerous ideas. And so again, vis-à-vis free will, had I been born in early nineteenth century England, I’d have been more likely, as a pint-sized skinny kid, to die of chimney sweeps’ carcinoma just as I reached my teens, than to have been cosseted and educated and sent as a gentleman’s gentleman on a voyage of exploration around the world. Which doesn’t, I should add, lessen my interest in and admiration for Darwin and his life’s work. I suspect I will indeed reread all those Darwin books I’ve mostly forgotten, and read new ones. In fact, I’m wondering if I’ve actually read Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s dangerous idea. I seem to recall, but I’m not sure….
References
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: voyaging, 1995
Various other Darwin biographies read by me, or not….
more on ‘evolutionary psychology’, humans and bonobos
bonobo kids have plenty of baby-sitters
So Ryan Ellsworth’s attempt to dismiss the possibility that bonobos can serve as any kind of model for sexual and political behaviour in humans has obviously got my dander up, as this is my third post on the matter, and it has renewed my interest in searching for the origins of patriarchy, and in how we can reduce patriarchal attitudes, at least in the WEIRD world – and especially among the soi-disant intelligentsia.
One important resource I’ll be relying on in this exploration is Angela Saini’s The patriarchs: how men came to rule, but I’ll start again with Ellsworth’s critique of Block, and in effect others who advocate ‘free love’ and other such fantasies through ‘misinterpreting’ bonobo culture, as well as advocating that we [i.e. women] ‘release our inner bonobo’. Of course there seems to be some naïveté in Block’s praise of bonobos, which I find quite forgivable, unlike Ellsworth:
It is egregiously naïve to conclude that, “bonobos reveal that an incredible range of sexual diversity is normal for animals like us” (p. 99, emphasis in original).
The fact is that humans do engage in an incredible range of sexual diversity – though not all at the same time. On the other hand, humans, especially under patriarchal religion over the last few millennia, have sought to stifle sexual diversity with a vengeance, especially among women. And considering that writing to any copious degree has only existed for a few millennia, our sexual practices, dating back to our primate ancestors, are something of a black box – though orgiastic practices get a mention here and there.
Of course one of the obvious barriers to ‘sexual licence’ in humans is clothing – making ourselves ‘decent’, which we learn in childhood, becoming early aware that there are parts of our bodies that it would shock others to see. But would we be shocked if we weren’t told, virtually from birth, that we should be shocked? If we were taught that clothes were solely for decoration and warmth, and were entirely optional? And when did this clothing business start? We can give some sort of vague starting date – say 100,000 years ago – but we also know that Australian Aborigines were shamelessly wearing nothing, or nothing much, when we started wiping them out with guns and germs a little over 200 years ago. So, it was culture wot done it. There seem to have been a mixture of factors – to wrap someone in clothing makes them unavailable to the general public, in sexual terms, and it also becomes a form of decoration, conveying status, or clubbish belonging – business suits, cycling togs, pyjamas (well, maybe not) and haute couture, whatever that may be.
So in modern Australia Aboriginal people will be arrested for indecent exposure if they were wear nothing but strings around the waist for carrying dilly bags and such. This reminds me of an Aboriginal man, of impressive physique, who used to walk up and down a busy street near my home wearing nothing but the skimpiest of budgie smugglers – a fascinating clash of manliness and cultural cringe, or something like that.
So, clothing – the fact and the concept – has played a major inhibiting role. There’s also monogamy, which, for most of its history has been about male ownership of females – though, in some societies the very upper classes got away with polygyny, as described in Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest people in the world, and also in Korean historical dramas (though they present a rather tame version for modern susceptibilities).
Ellsworth claims that “Sex differences in promiscuous impulses are minimized in Block’s account”, which is an odd remark, because in order to know whether such sex differences are minimised, or maximised, we need to know what they are. And surely this is more an individual thing than a sex/gender thing. But clearly, Ellsworth is claiming that he knows. It’s funny that, just yesterday, I received a ‘shorts’ video on my feed – presumably ‘shorts’ being a rival to ‘tik-tok’, in which a young woman was admitted to hospital after having sex with 500+ men in one day. According to the video it was all her idea, but she reflected that it was probably ‘a bit much’, as she’d never had sex with more than 29 men in one day before – or was it 59, I’m not sure, and these ‘shorts’ videos disappear as suddenly as they arrive – one day of fame at most. And of course, whether this was promiscuity or an obsession with breaking records is unclear. Anyway, here’s more from Ellsworth, and I’ll make it the last:
Block refers to babies to care for, and reputations to protect, but does not seems to understand the significance of these two things for understanding human sex differences in sexual desire. Perhaps she privately does, but to acknowledge the significance of these forces on the evolution of human sexuality would severely compromise her arguments, as it demands recognition of the fact that women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men.
I may have commented on these remarks before, but they’re worth revisiting. Caring for her baby is a mother’s role, but assistance in this task is varied depending on culture. Bonobo females help with birth, supporting both mothers and infants in the post-partum period. Bonobo males also play with and support young infants. The degree to which humans do this is dependent on culture, not to mention class, with wet-nurses and such. As described in previous posts, the pressure in patriarchal societies on women’s sexual behaviour, regardless of their proclivities, has been enormous and often life-threatening. This is all about culture, not evolution in the Darwinian sense.
The sexism in Ellsworth’s paper is obvious to me, and I assume, or hope, that others have pointed this out before me, as it was published back in 2015. Then again, evolutionary psychology doesn’t have a great reputation, so maybe it’s best ignored. Meanwhile, Angela Saini’s work is much more recent and much more interesting, so that will be my focus in the immediate future.
References
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: how men came to rule, 2023
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300115
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020
Darwin’s On the origin of species, some reflections
I’m just finishing off my third reading of On the origin of species, and hopefully I’m a little wiser. It’s likely I read it the first time, in Penguin Modern Classics, just to be able to say I’d read it – but unfortunately, nobody asked. Many years, perhaps decades later, I read it again, the same copy. I remember nothing about it, or the whys and wherefores. This time I’ve read it as part of the four-volume set, edited by James Watson, including The Voyage of the Beagle, which I very much enjoyed, and The Descent of Man and The expression of the emotions in man and animals, which I look forward to with some trepidation, due to the wealth of detail he presents, and the archaic language, which I struggle with.
The thesis that Darwin presents, so threatening and generally offensive to the much more religious world of his time, is natural selection, or descent with modification. In presenting the thesis he had to provide a multitude of examples, from his own observations and experiments, to those of colleagues in the ‘naturalist’ world, many of whom – no doubt the majority – were hostile to that thesis. For those of us who aren’t naturalists or biological scientists, or inhabitants of the 19th century with its often out-dated nomenclature, this makes for difficult, though often enlightening, reading. And I’m left impressed with the detail of his analysis, the work he did not only on cirripedes (barnacles) and pigeons, but various plants, beetles, ants and bees, amongst other beasties. Reading his Beagle book, with all its descriptions of the wildlife and geology (and the ‘savages’) of South America in particular, was good preparation for this third reading – just as The Origin will surely prepare me for The Descent of Man, though I’m still feeling a bit daunted, pre-embarkation. First I’ll finish reading Janet Browne’s biography, which is a joy.
I’ve been trying to process this wealth of detail, while being well aware that it’s only a fraction of what has since been discovered. Bats, as he notes, are able to inhabit, to carve out a niche for themselves, in islands far from other lands, due to their powerful flight systems, while other mammals are scarce in such isolated places, or are more unique in their anatomy. Island birds’ wings become vestigial due to a lack of predators and an abundance of ground vegetation, but why did they develop wings in the first place? Darwin hints at what we now know – that the Earth’s activity may have connected or separated today’s islands or continents, over a period of history far greater than was previously thought. His friend Charles Lyell’s geological observations were far from accepted at the time, though Darwin himself (doubtless influenced by the first volume of Lyell’s 3-volume Principles of Geology, which accompanied him on the Beagle voyage) found shell fossils in the mountain regions of western South America. Generally speaking, many of his researches raised more questions than answers, but those questions couldn’t be resolved by the accepted creationist model. Blended inheritance, from what I’ve read, tended to be his explanation for minute differences developing over eons, but this conjecture, I think, isn’t mentioned in The Origin.
Darwin’s thoroughness, the multitude of examples he presents, are the best sign of his realisation that what he was presenting was revolutionary – ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea’, as Daniel Dennett termed it. Its impact, as we know, was massive, and somewhat negative at first, but it surely helped in the acceptance of the genetic thesis in the 20th century, and led to the greater scientific grounding of biology and biochemistry. Darwin’s doggedness, his unrelenting recognition of the importance of his theme, while recognising that so much more remained to be discovered, so many questions remained unanswered, gives the work a modern feel, though that’s often undermined by what we now consider archaisms, and the sense, accurate enough, that he was a wealthy amateur aiming his work at other wealthy amateurs (more or less exclusively male), who nevertheless held the future of science in their hands. The situation is better these days – somewhat.
Reference
James Watson, ed, Darwin: the indelible stamp: four essential volumes in one, 2005
the evolution of complexity
Gould’s view of the movement to complexity
I’m not sure if this is a controversial topic – perhaps it depends on whether you think complexity is in some sense superior to simplicity regarding organic life, and I suspect that we humans are a bit biased on the issue.
Bacteria and archaea are still thriving in our biosphere, in vast numbers. These two classes or domains of prokaryote differ in various ways. The eukaryotes, the third domain into which organisms have been divided, are believed to have evolved from an ancestor of modern archaea.
A question. With such forms of life thriving from billions of years ago, why become more complex? In what way would it have been more advantageous? But in thinking of advantage, aren’t we thinking outside of the prokaryotic box? Shouldn’t scientists (I’ve seen this written) confine themselves to ‘how’ questions rather than ‘why’ questions? But since I’m neither a scientist nor a philosopher, I don’t know what to think.
In any case, ‘how’ questions seem quite a bit easier to answer. One way to think about it, I suppose, is to think of ‘accidents’, or simply differences, that confer an advantage. What might be called imprecise (or just varied) replications mostly wouldn’t survive, but some would turn out to be beneficial to survival, and so, over eons – complexity.
Problem solved.
Stephen Jay Gould provides an explanation for complexity in his book Life’s Grandeur, which I find overly verbose, but I think I can simplify it, in my simple way. These early prokaryotes would’ve replicated themselves almost perfectly, but not quite. Sometimes, very rarely, they would’ve missed something, or messed something up, during replication, called binary fission in prokaryotes. This would mostly have made the next generation non-viable, because generally prokaryotes are so tiny and simple that if they were any simpler they’d come up against a ‘wall’ of non-viability. The only way a different but viable next gen could be created would be if something was added rather than subtracted.
But how could this happen? Well, the ‘addition’ might be something genetic, but let’s not go there for now – Darwin didn’t need genetics to develop his theory of natural selection, nor did he need a concept of progress, though, unsurprisingly, he fell into that trap now and again. I’ve not looked deeply into binary fission but maybe the fission might occasionally lead to something not quite the same as its predecessor, in the way that archaea are not quite the same as bacteria, or that the first eukaryotes weren’t quite the same as those ancestral archaea. That’s the funny thing about the term ‘evolved from’ – it’s so easy to say, but a lot harder to pin down precisely. Anyway, maybe some kind of genetic ‘doubling up’ made some difference, a hardiness, a more diverse diet – if prokaryotes can be said to have diets. In any case, it was all about ‘more’ – a very all-encapsulating four-letter word. For example, think of stromatolites, those colonies of cyanobacteria. Was it colonisation from the start, or did some genetic change create this kind of super-organic effect?
All of this is as hard to pin down precisely as life from non-life, but we know it happened. And we also know that once life got itself well started, it thrived pretty much everywhere, not just over our planet, but quite deeply under the surface, in the most unlikely places. And considering the vast numbers, all of them replicating, the possibility of something more complicated surviving and battening on to others in an advantageous way becomes plausible, surely.
So, prokaryotes to eukaryotes. Were there intermediate stages? Let’s look at the differences. Eukaryotes are all the life we see. Prokaryotes are invisible to us without microscopes, etc. We’ve divided them into archaea and bacteria, based on a number of differences, notably the structure of their cell walls, but these structures also differ between species of bacteria. Gould has explored the issue of ‘progress’ and complexity from a bacterial perspective in the lengthy penultimate chapter of Life’s grandeur, entitled ‘The Power of the Modal Bacter, or Why the Tail can’t Wag the Dog’. I looked up Modal Bacter online and came up empty, which is why Gould irritates me so, as a writer for ‘the general public’. I’m guessing it means the bacterial mode of life. I’m going to use Gould’s chapter for the rest of this post, which looks like being a long one. So, at the beginning of the chapter, he writes this:
… simple forms still predominate in most environments, as they always have. Faced with this undeniable fact, supporters of progress (that is, nearly all of us throughout the history of evolutionary thought) have shifted criteria and ended up grasping at straws. (The altered criterion may not have struck the graspers as such a thin reed, for one must first internalise the argument of this book – trends as changes in variation rather than things moving somewhere – to recognise the weakness).
I’m not quite sure what this means, but ‘progress’ sticks out. We can make progress in learning a language/trade/sport, but has life made progress? I would tend to agree that this term isn’t useful from an evolutionary perspective. The criterial shift is surely toward complexity, and this is surely happening in the human line of development. Unfortunately we can’t measure neural complexity in our most recent ancestors – the closest living connections we have are chimps/bonobos, and here’s something from the Cambridge University Press website:
while chimpanzee brains are markedly smaller than those of humans, their brain anatomy is so similar that a discourse comparing the two might be little different from this declaration: The chimpanzee brain is a human brain with one-third of the neurons (Herculano-Houzel & Kaas, 2011).
This odd observation – very similar anatomy with one third of neurons – is a head-scratcher. I would have thought that neural organisation, perhaps especially in the prefrontal cortex, would be key here. After all, isn’t this the point of such comparisons? We’re looking at neurology to help us understand the differences we see in the culture and behaviour of Pan troglodytes and Homo sapiens, are we not? And it’s surely fair enough to say our human behaviour is more complex, what with our language, our science, our culture, our cities and whatnot? To point this out is not to be hubristic. In pointing this out we need to be aware, and many of us are, of the downsides – our altering of the atmosphere, our responsibility for species loss, and so on. I should also point out, since I’ve mentioned hubris, that free will is a myth, as I’ve argued in more than one previous post. I didn’t choose to be human, it just happened to me. Not my achievement. Nothing to be proud or ashamed of. Just something to make sense of, as best I can.
So, bearing this in mind, human complexity is worth studying, and it’s not about patting ourselves on the back. This particular complexity of humans – and it may be that, in the vastness of the universe, different living complexities have evolved – is clearly a product of evolution. We wouldn’t be here without the ‘Modal Bacter’, as Gould calls it, or without the chain of connection that goes back to the earliest life forms.
So, it seems to me, that Gould, in trying to question, or demolish, the pedestal he believes we have placed ourselves on, and to give himself credit for so doing, is missing the point by raising up the ‘Modal Bacter’, as if it should somehow be given obeisance for being the great survivor and the great progenitor, while we are the mere accidental offshoots. Take this quote (along with my insertion):
Wind back the tape of life to the origin of modern multicellular animals in the Cambrian explosion [or indeed to the ‘Modal Bacter’ millions of years before], let the tape play again from this identical starting point, and the replay will populate the earth (and generate a right tail of life) with a radically different set of creatures. The chance that this alternative set will contain anything remotely like a human being must be effectively nil, while the probability of any kind of creature endowed with self-consciousness must also be vanishingly small.
S J Gould, Life’s grandeur, p 214
There’s an obvious flaw in the logic here. If you take the tape back to the Cambrian explosion or any other point in time and replay it, you’ll get the same result, because it’s the same tape! What he presumably means, is that if some condition was changed back in the Cambrian, or earlier, then a very different result would ensue for later generations. Or, that we humans are just ‘accidents’ resulting from particular initial, or previous, conditions. And so with all life, including his much-vaunted bacteria. Not to mention all planets, stars, etc. This should hardly be seen as a revelation. Which makes me wonder just what Gould is on about.
So let’s explore further. Here’s another of his ‘critiques’:
Under the traditional model of evolutionary history as a ‘cone of increasing diversity’, life moves ever upward to greater progress, and outward to a larger number of species – from simple Cambrian beginnings for multicellular animals to our modern levels of progress and range of diversity. Under this iconography, pathways actually followed run along predictable courses that would be at least roughly repeated in any replay.
Again I find this sort of writing overly tendentious. Either life has become more diverse in expression or it has not, and this has nothing to do with progress. And researchers are exploring this question, hopefully without recourse to ‘iconography’. It may be, as Gould argues, that vertebrates were in a ‘tenuous position’ before the Cambrian explosion and that, with some tweaking of prehistory, they wouldn’t have survived and we wouldn’t be here. So presumably this means we should be more humble and less overlordly. But is this something to be humble about, or proud of? Maybe it’s worth being aware of, just as I wouldn’t exist if my parents hadn’t met. But the fact is, they did, and vertebrates didn’t go extinct. So, if we stick with the facts, life would be a little more tractable. And no need to worry about progress or perhaps even complexity. We find complexity everywhere, from bacteria to the biosphere, and on to black holes and big bangs. It’s such a fun world to explore! And that’s the thing that easily makes me remain ‘umble. The world’s complexity isn’t my doing, obviously, and I hardly comprehend even the tiniest part of it….
References
Archaea vs. Bacteria
Stephen Jay Gould, Life’s grandeur, 1996
stuff on punctuated equilibrium and organic complexity
isolation, strong selection, rapid change – an example of peripatric speciation
I’ve read a few books by Steven Jay Gould, and have found them sometimes a bit heavy-handed and clever-clever, though I’m sure I’ve learned a lot from them. I’ve also strongly disagreed with his notion of NOMA or non-overlapping magisteria, and have written about it in the long ago. The notion didn’t last long, it seems. So I’m wondering about how the concept of punctuated equilibrium, developed by Gould and others back in the day, is faring.
The idea was first proposed by Gould and Niles Eldredge in 1972. The PBS evolution library puts it this way:
… species are generally stable, changing little for millions of years. This leisurely pace is “punctuated” by a rapid burst of change that results in a new species and that leaves few fossils behind. According to this idea, the changes leading to a new species don’t usually occur in the mainstream population of an organism, where changes wouldn’t endure because of so much interbreeding among like creatures. Rather, speciation is more likely at the edge of a population, where a small group can easily become separated geographically from the main body and undergo changes that can create a survival advantage and thus produce a new, non-interbreeding species.
This is strange and interesting. I had thought that the ‘rapid burst of change’ was considered to be due to a sudden change in external conditions, brought about by, say, a burst of volcanic activity, or a massive meteorite, or whatever caused the Cambrian explosion (of new life forms) over 500 million years ago. I might return to that shortly. The type of speciation mentioned above, in which there is separation and isolation, creating unique circumstances for diversification in small populations, is called peripatric speciation. It’s one of the four modes of speciation generally recognised, the others being allopatric, parapatric and sympatric. Peripatric speciation is described as ‘a special version of the allopatric speciation mode’. A good example of this allopatric speciation mode, it seems to me, is the separation of the ancestors of bonobos and chimps into these two species about two million years ago. To back me up here’s a quote from UC Berkeley’s Understanding Evolution website:
Allopatric speciation is just a fancy name for speciation by geographic isolation… In this mode of speciation, something extrinsic to the organisms prevents two or more groups from mating with each other regularly, eventually causing that lineage to speciate. Isolation might occur because of great distance or a physical barrier, such as a desert or river…
So to round this out, I must inform myself about parapatric and sympatric speciation, which means trying to put other people’s explanations into my own words. Parapatric speciation occurs when there’s no outside barrier to gene flow (the movement of genetic material, often in the form of individual carriers of genetic material, from one population to another). Think of human migration, where the mixing of genes might not be random, due to culture barriers, but of course the chances of mixing would be much greater than if there was no migration. Sympatric speciation involves a reduction of gene flow without distancing or physical barriers. In humans it could happen when a particular set of humans breeds only with others of that set. This would take a very long time, and for humans it would involve a very artificial situation, but it has been known to occur, though rarely, in some species of insects and fish.
So, back to punctuated equilibrium. That this concept has been explored, with some evidence found but also disputed, is perhaps an indication of how novel and complex the whole topic of evolution still is. We look for traces of evolution in the fossil record, but that record is piecemeal and easily subject to ‘contamination’ over time. To be honest, much of what I’ve read from the proponents of punctuated equilibria goes over my head, requiring, it seems, an understanding of macroevolution, cladogenesis, phyletic gradualism and much much more. So I’m at a crossroads, sort of. Should I just give up, or plough on, with my not very efficient plough? How important is the topic? I really don’t know.
Here’s an example of the problem, as I see it, from ScienceDirect.com:
Cladogenesis is a phenomenon of evolution that occurs by the divergence of taxa due to positive selection for the adaptation of sister populations from a common ancestor to different environments due to their anatomical, morphological, geographic, temporal, ecological, and/or ethological (behavioural) isolation.
Ah, so that’s what cladogenesis is! But really, what’s a clado (a clade?) and what are taxa? Who’s this being written for? Obviously not dilettantes like me. I’ve turned instead to videos, and found one by someone I know well – sort of. Robert Sapolsky, whose big books Behave and Determined I’ve read with great interest in recent years. Sapolsky gives the story of gradualism versus punctuated equilibrium a humorous twist, with the proponents of gradualism calling the punctuators ‘jerks’, while they in turn were called ‘creeps’. Maybe, but is this really a big issue? Isn’t it quite reasonable to assume that just as the Earth’s biosphere itself has changed gradually but with the odd convulsion along the way, both forms of speciation, or many forms, have occurred?
So I’ve finally found a more enlightening (for me) video, obviously made some time ago, because it featured both Gould, who died in 2002, and Eldridge talking about their work, in good old layperson terms.
Anyway, for me the controversy or non-controversy over punctuated equilibrium is nowhere near as interesting as the one highlighted by Gould in his 1996 book Life’s Grandeur:
The basic theory of natural selection offers no statement about general progress, and supplies no mechanism whereby overall advance might be expected. Yet both Western culture and the undeniable facts of a fossil record that started with bacteria alone, and has now produced exalted us, cry out in unison for a rationale that will place progress into the centre of evolutionary theory.
This is particularly fascinating/amusing for me, as it plays into the ‘directed evolution’ concept which seems to me to be the god-botherers’ last hope for their world-view, though it seems to rule out ‘young Earth creationism’, though you never know with these people. I recall the late Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s most controversial Catholic, trying to argue for God-directed evolution shortly before sex-based controversies caught up with him and he disappeared from public view. Unfortunately, you need to make scientific sense of what this God-thing is, given that our planet is only one of probably billions out there, each of which has its story to tell, as part of a 13.8 billion-year universe.
Gould tries to deal with this conundrum – the undirected nature of evolution, from the point of view of ‘progress’, and how this process has produced ‘exalted us’ – in the last 60 pages or so of Life’s Grandeur, but I find that his tendency to use verbose language really gets in the way of comprehension (the key seems to be a fixed boundary condition) – so much so that I prefer to look to other sources. A research article from 2000, ‘Evolution of biological complexity’, points out, fairly obviously, that the key is to effectively define and perhaps quantify complexity – a difficult task, it seems. After all, complexity is complex.
Definitions may vary and not everyone is likely to agree, but what this article focuses on is genomic complexity, and information – ‘the amount of information a sequence stores about its environment’. I’m not sure what’s meant by a sequence here – perhaps a sequence in an evolutionary chain. The article is long and, for me, forbiddingly mathematical, but as it concludes in the abstract..
We show that, because natural selection forces genomes to behave as a natural “Maxwell Demon,” within a fixed environment, genomic complexity is forced [my emphasis] to increase.
So what is a ‘Maxwell Demon’ (I do know that it comes from James Clerk Maxwell, and that it has to do with the second law of thermodynamics), and how has this ‘proof’ fared in the 14 years since it was published?
Does the emergence of complexity of life on Earth need to be explained? Some, of course, want to explain it in terms of ‘purpose’, opening the door to agency and all that stuff, but I’m not going there. Others might worry about it in terms of that pesky second law (entropy always increases), but then there are ‘closed systems’, such as the Earth’s biosphere, which temporarily act against the ‘growth’ of entropy. Don’t worry, life will become extinct here eventually, and the whole planet will fall apart – the centre doesn’t hold.
Darwin himself was a bit contradictory about this issue. Often he enjoyed, it seems, to point out the directionlessness (to coin a word?) of natural selection, as it seemed to stick in the craws of some, but more often he fell in with his own culture and class and wrote of savages and the less advanced, in at least pseudo-evolutionary terms.
Anyway, complexity has arisen, or evolved, on this planet, so I’ll try to think about it further, with the help of reading and listening to others, in my next post.
References
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/5/l_035_01.html
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/modes-of-speciation/peripatric-speciation/
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Punctuated_equilibria
Stephen Jay Gould, Life’s Grandeur: the spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin, 1996
do bonobos have families – and should humans have them?
‘We all belong… to an MAC – a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from 15 to 25 assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents – everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teenagers’.
Susila, in Island, by Aldous Huxley, 1962
Bonobo mum with adopted child
I’ve mentioned how, in childhood, I perused a book called Children of the Dream, which looked at a different way of rearing children, in which they had a variety of adults and older kids to learn from, and they could gravitate towards some and away from others according to their inclinations. I was hungry for ideas like this as I felt trapped in an embattled family situation and yearned for both freedom and some kind of instruction or sponsorship that would promote my development in the most positive way. I was five when our smallish nuclear family (2 adults, 3 kids) moved from Scotland to the other side of the globe, so I had no experience of an extended family. And we lived together within a brick construction divided into compartments for eating, watching TV, sleeping and reading, washing our clothes, washing ourselves and defecating, surrounded by some land on which we could grow grass, various plants, or nothing much.
Twenty-five or so years later, I learned about bonobos, our closest living relatives, equally with chimpanzees. The lifestyles of these two other types of ape provided a fascinating contrast, while both types provided an equally fascinating contrast with H sapiens.
Returning to my childhood, I gradually learned that, outside of my family, which was female-dominant, the human world was dominated by the males. They were the headmasters, the bosses, the political leaders and so forth. We kids were, rather suddenly, sent to Sunday school where we were taught about our Father who was in heaven, but also everywhere else, who made us and made the world and loved us and watched over us constantly, and whose son died for our sins on a wooden cross long ago. None of this made any sense to me, and it seemed of a part with Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, only the adults who told us these stories took it all so seriously that I felt no inclination to question them. I was a timid child, but also skeptical before I knew the word.
Much later, I came to wonder more about this religious double act of the Father and Son, and about the Church as it existed before the Protestant Reformation, with its history of male Popes, and its male Cardinals, male Archbishops, male Bishops and male Priests. And of course I learned about the history of male political leaders, generals, dictators, monarchs and emperors, and the tiny sprinkling of females among them, and it all stuck me as very odd and sad. And a bit stupid. And then, again, bonobos.
We are, of course, the only mammals who build our own structures for our nuclear families to live in. In doing so we have in a sense, ‘naturalised’ the nuclear family. And this happened not so long ago in the history of H Sapiens, which goes back to around 315,000 years ago according to the findings from Jebel Irhoud in present-day Morocco.
The term ‘housing’ isn’t so easy to define. If we think of purpose-built structures for living in, what about termite mounds or bee-hives? And before these human structures we imagine cave dwelling, but just how many caves are there dotted about the place? It’s likely that our first domiciles combined natural shelter and human ingenuity, using wood, bones, skins and such. Fireplaces would probably have featured. But it surely wasn’t just families in the modern sense that built or used these sites. Think again of bonobos:
Bonobos live in fission-fusion social groups where a large community of individuals separate into smaller groups, or parties, of variable size and composition. These “unit-groups” range from lone individuals to groups of 20 or more bonobos (Badrian et al. 1984; White 1988, 1996).
The size of human groups would have evolved over time – not too big, not too small, and quite likely having flexible fission-fusion lifestyles for much of human history. This also reduces inbreeding, as even chimps/bonobos have come to realise (unlike the Habsburgs).
What I’m really getting at, though, is when did we, as kids, come to recognise and acknowledge that we had one father, one mother, and the odd sibling? And that we belonged to this grouping, were in effect ‘owned’ by it? In spite of the great service the internet has provided for us over the past few decades, I can’t find any clear answer to this question – unsurprisingly, I suppose. Neither chimps nor bonobos are monogamous, but of course they live in ‘troops’, with the mother as principal care-giver, but with plenty of other adults or adolescents to help out, siblings or no. This is especially the case in bonobo society, which can, at a stretch, be seen as one big Mutual Adoption Club. The difference of course is that the bonobo way developed naturally, it simply evolved, whereas the ways of the Kibbutzim and Huxley’s MAC have a seemingly top-down artificiality about them. Interestingly, we’re having the same problem with our own gender issues, with a ‘natural’ understanding, based on neurology and the study of history, not to mention a multitude of writings such as Woolf’s A room of one’s own and Beauvoir’s The second sex, that women have been intellectually undervalued for millennia, together with a more artificial quota system for women/girls in STEM, or women in government. In any case, with the gradual receding of patriarchal religious systems (very gradual in some places), and obvious successes of women in science, business and politics, as well as the much more publicised behaviour of men behaving badly, re warfare, political machinations, capitalist exploitation and the like, it seems inevitable, to me at least, that we will gradually, in a two steps forward, one step back fashion, evolve into a female-dominant human culture (remembering that that there’s no gender equality among any of the social mammals – gender inequality isn’t just the norm, it’s universal). It seems to me unproblematic that the gender that brings humans into the world should be the ones in charge – with a little help from their friends.
As for the compartmented nuclear family thing – who knows? Change is a constant, and we now accept same-sex marriages, no-fault divorce, single parentage and the like, all in the last few decades. Our society has also become more child-focussed, just as we’ve reduced family sizes. No more corporal punishment in schools (too late for me, sadly), no more ‘bastards’, and more government assistance in terms of subsidies, childcare centres, maternity leave and so on. The concept of family itself has been altered and extended, and evolution is a never-ending story…
References
Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz (note especially the subsections ‘children’ and ‘child rearing’)
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-female-wild-bonobos-infants-social.html