Eveille
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- Posted: Wed, 14 Mar 2012 18:14:51 +0000
So I hear this argument a lot on here: 'It's just human nature'.
Seems like a copout to not take responsibility for our decisions, like we just can't help it and can't possibly be blamed for it, solutions shouldn't be sought out to change it because it's internal and impossible to be rid of. I hear it for things like war, how they will never go away because 'it's human nature' to covet and fight and kill. It is also used for things like creativity and the desire to explore things and solve puzzles, so it isn't always used negatively.
What is it really though? What is it about humans that (non-physically) differentiates us from all other life forms? What is human nature truly? In fact, does human nature even have to be something that differentiates us? Can we share our characteristics with other life forms and still be have it be part of our defining features?
What is intrinsic and what is learned? Is there anything that ISN'T learned?
4-11-12: Smithsonian Link
Bumping this because I keep hearing how it is our nature to be violent and because I finally got around to reading this month's Smithsonian and saw this article. This guy says it much better than I can: cooperation is also part of us.
Seems like a copout to not take responsibility for our decisions, like we just can't help it and can't possibly be blamed for it, solutions shouldn't be sought out to change it because it's internal and impossible to be rid of. I hear it for things like war, how they will never go away because 'it's human nature' to covet and fight and kill. It is also used for things like creativity and the desire to explore things and solve puzzles, so it isn't always used negatively.
What is it really though? What is it about humans that (non-physically) differentiates us from all other life forms? What is human nature truly? In fact, does human nature even have to be something that differentiates us? Can we share our characteristics with other life forms and still be have it be part of our defining features?
What is intrinsic and what is learned? Is there anything that ISN'T learned?
4-11-12: Smithsonian Link
Bumping this because I keep hearing how it is our nature to be violent and because I finally got around to reading this month's Smithsonian and saw this article. This guy says it much better than I can: cooperation is also part of us.
Quote:
In his newly published The Social Conquest of the Earth—the 27th book from this two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize—Wilson argues the nest is central to understanding the ecological dominance not only of ants, but of human beings, too. Ants rule the microhabitats they occupy, consigning other insects and small animals to life at the margins; humans own the macroworld, Wilson says, which we have transformed so radically and rapidly that we now qualify as a kind of geological force. How did we and the ants gain our superpowers? By being super-cooperators, groupies of the group, willing to set aside our small, selfish desires and I-minded drive to join forces and seize opportunity as a self-sacrificing, hive-minded tribe. There are plenty of social animals in the world, animals that benefit by living in groups of greater or lesser cohesiveness. Very few species, however, have made the leap from merely social to eusocial, “eu-” meaning true. To qualify as eusocial, in Wilson’s definition, animals must live in multigenerational communities, practice division of labor and behave altruistically, ready to sacrifice “at least some of their personal interests to that of the group.” It’s tough to be a eusocialist.
As Wilson sees it, human beings are eusocial apes, and in our brand of extreme togetherness we stand apart—from other living monkeys and apes, and from the many hominids that either preceded or coexisted with us and are now extinct, including Homo neanderthalensis.
Yet our eusocial nature, Wilson emphasizes, is nothing like that of the robotic ants. It developed along an entirely different route and is bound up with other aspects of our humanity—our anatomy, our intellect and emotions, our sense of free will.
Our hypersocial spirit is both a great blessing and a terrible curse. Experiments have shown that it is shockingly easy to elicit a sense of solidarity among a group of strangers. Just tell them they’ll be working together as a team, and they immediately start working together as a team, all the while attributing to each other a host of positive qualities like trustworthiness and competence—an instant five-star customer review.
Yet we are equally prepared to do battle against those who fall outside the fraternal frame. In experiments where psychologists divided people into groups of arbitrarily assigned traits—labeling one set the Blue team and another the Green, for example—the groups started sniping at each other and expressing strong prejudices toward their “opponents,” with the Greens insisting the Blues were untrustworthy and unfair. The “drive to form and take deep pleasure from in-group membership easily translates at a higher level into tribalism,” Wilson says, and can spark religious, ethnic and political conflicts of breathtaking brutality.
By this reckoning, some of our impulses are the result of individual selection, the competition of you against everybody else for a share of life’s goodies. Other traits are under the sway of group selection, prompting us to behave altruistically for the sake of the team. It appears our individually selected traits are older and more primal, harder to constrain, the ones we traditionally label vices: greed, sloth and lust, the way we covet our neighbor’s life and paper over our failings with pride. Our eusocial inclinations are evolutionarily newer and more fragile and must be vociferously promoted by the group if the group is to survive. They are the stuff of religions and Ben Franklin homilies and represent the virtues we admire: to be generous, kind and levelheaded, to control our impulses, keep our promises and rise to the occasion even when we are scared or disheartened. “The human condition is an endemic turmoil rooted in the evolution processes that created us,” he writes. “The worst in our nature coexists with the best, and so it will ever be.”
The social scientist Steven Pinker, also of Harvard, argues in his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature that war and violent conflict have been declining steadily and may soon be obsolete. Like Wilson, Pinker believes that evolutionary forces have shaped human nature into a complex amalgam of the bestial and heroic, the compassionate and pitiless (although in Pinker’s view, those forces do not include group selection). Yet Pinker argues that, even while we retain our base and bloody impulses, historical trends such as stronger governments, increased prosperity, literacy, education, trade and the empowerment of women have allowed us to effectively tame them.
For his part, Wilson cultivates a beautifully appointed gloom. “We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions,” he says. “We thrash about” and are “a danger to ourselves and the rest of life.” Our conquest of earth has happened so quickly that the rest of the biosphere has not had time to adjust and our heedless destruction of species shows scant signs of abating.
As Wilson sees it, human beings are eusocial apes, and in our brand of extreme togetherness we stand apart—from other living monkeys and apes, and from the many hominids that either preceded or coexisted with us and are now extinct, including Homo neanderthalensis.
Yet our eusocial nature, Wilson emphasizes, is nothing like that of the robotic ants. It developed along an entirely different route and is bound up with other aspects of our humanity—our anatomy, our intellect and emotions, our sense of free will.
Our hypersocial spirit is both a great blessing and a terrible curse. Experiments have shown that it is shockingly easy to elicit a sense of solidarity among a group of strangers. Just tell them they’ll be working together as a team, and they immediately start working together as a team, all the while attributing to each other a host of positive qualities like trustworthiness and competence—an instant five-star customer review.
Yet we are equally prepared to do battle against those who fall outside the fraternal frame. In experiments where psychologists divided people into groups of arbitrarily assigned traits—labeling one set the Blue team and another the Green, for example—the groups started sniping at each other and expressing strong prejudices toward their “opponents,” with the Greens insisting the Blues were untrustworthy and unfair. The “drive to form and take deep pleasure from in-group membership easily translates at a higher level into tribalism,” Wilson says, and can spark religious, ethnic and political conflicts of breathtaking brutality.
By this reckoning, some of our impulses are the result of individual selection, the competition of you against everybody else for a share of life’s goodies. Other traits are under the sway of group selection, prompting us to behave altruistically for the sake of the team. It appears our individually selected traits are older and more primal, harder to constrain, the ones we traditionally label vices: greed, sloth and lust, the way we covet our neighbor’s life and paper over our failings with pride. Our eusocial inclinations are evolutionarily newer and more fragile and must be vociferously promoted by the group if the group is to survive. They are the stuff of religions and Ben Franklin homilies and represent the virtues we admire: to be generous, kind and levelheaded, to control our impulses, keep our promises and rise to the occasion even when we are scared or disheartened. “The human condition is an endemic turmoil rooted in the evolution processes that created us,” he writes. “The worst in our nature coexists with the best, and so it will ever be.”
The social scientist Steven Pinker, also of Harvard, argues in his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature that war and violent conflict have been declining steadily and may soon be obsolete. Like Wilson, Pinker believes that evolutionary forces have shaped human nature into a complex amalgam of the bestial and heroic, the compassionate and pitiless (although in Pinker’s view, those forces do not include group selection). Yet Pinker argues that, even while we retain our base and bloody impulses, historical trends such as stronger governments, increased prosperity, literacy, education, trade and the empowerment of women have allowed us to effectively tame them.
For his part, Wilson cultivates a beautifully appointed gloom. “We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions,” he says. “We thrash about” and are “a danger to ourselves and the rest of life.” Our conquest of earth has happened so quickly that the rest of the biosphere has not had time to adjust and our heedless destruction of species shows scant signs of abating.
