Author: Brian Hale, Vanessa Woods
Source: Machinery Industry Press Book "Friends Survival: The Evolutionary Power of Being Good"
Preface
Our Life Value
Not in
How many enemies have we conquered,
But in
How many friends have we made,
This is the secret of our survival.
/01
From survival of the fittest to survival of the friend
cooperation is the key to our survival as a species because it increases our evolutionary fitness. But at some times, "fitness" becomes synonymous with body fitness. The logic is that in the wild, the bigger you are and the more willing you are to fight, the less other animals will provoke you, and the more successful you will become. You can monopolize the best food, find the most attractive spouse, and have the most offspring. In theory, there is no folk theory about human nature in that causes greater harm or mistakes than "survival of the fittest". has been the basis for social movements, corporate restructuring and the extreme views of free markets for the past century and a half. It is used to argue for the abolition of the government, to determine a group of people as inferior people, and then to defend the cruel acts that have been triggered. However, for Darwin and modern biologists, the meaning of "survival of the fittest" is very specific - the ability to survive and leave fertile offspring. Its meaning will not go beyond this range.
Before and after the fifth edition of Darwin's "HTM6 Origin of Species " published in 1869, the view that the strong and the ruthless will survive while the weak will perish has been consolidated in people's collective consciousness. So he wrote in the book that as a substitute for the word "natural selection", "'survival of the fittest' is more accurate, and sometimes both are equally useful."
Darwin has been impressed by the phenomenon of kindness and cooperation he observed in nature, writing: “Those groups that contain the most and most compassionate members, most thriving and will nurture the largest number of offspring.” He and many biologists who followed him have documented that the ideal way to win in the game of evolution is to maximize friendliness and thus allow cooperation to flourish.
The concept of "survival of the fittest" that exists in the public's imagination can become a terrible survival strategy. research shows that being the largest, strongest, and meanest animal will cause you to endure stress for life. Social stress can consume your body’s energy budget, weaken your immune system and reduce the number of your offspring. Aggression also comes at a cost, because fighting will increase your chances of injury or even death. This suitability can be exchanged for the highest status, but it can also make your life "dirty, savage and short-lived". Friendliness can be roughly defined as some intentional or unintentional cooperation, or positive behavior towards others. Friendliness is very common in nature because it is extremely powerful. Between people, it can be as simple as approaching someone and wanting to interact socially, or it can be so complex that you can understand other people's minds in order to cooperate to achieve a common goal.
Friendliness is an ancient strategy. Mitochondrial was a free-floating bacteria until they entered larger cells. Mitochondria and larger cells join together to become batteries that power cell functions in animals. Your microbiome enables your body to digest food, make vitamins and develop organs, and it is the result of a similar mutually beneficial partnership between microbiology and your body. Flowering plants appear later than most plants, but their mutually beneficial relationship with pollinating insects has allowed them to evolve very successfully and are now dominating the surface landscape. The total weight of ant is estimated to be equivalent to 1/5 of all other terrestrial animals on the planet, which can form super-individuals composed of up to 50 million individuals and operate as a social unit.
Every year I test my students to use evolution theory to solve problems in this world. In this book, we present ourselves with the same challenges. This is a book about friendliness and how it becomes a favorable evolutionary strategy. This is a book about understanding animals - in which dogs play the protagonist, because this allows us to better understand ourselves. This book is also an exploration of the opposite of our kindness—the ability to show cruelty to those who are not our friends. If we can understand the evolution of this dual nature, we can find powerful new ways to solve various social problems.
/02
Homo sapiens is the friendliest human being
We tend to think that evolution is a creation story. Something happened a long time ago and then went on in a linear way. However, evolution is not an orderly route for life forms to develop towards "perfect" Homo sapiens. Many species are more successful than we humans. They have lived tens of millions of years more than we have and have brought about many other species that are still alive today.
Since we separated from our common ancestors with bonobos and chimpanzees 6 million to 9 million years ago, our own lineage evolution has produced dozens of different species in the genus of humans. There is fossils and DNA evidence that for most of the 200,000 to 300,000 years since Homo sapiens existed, we shared the earth with at least four other human species. Some of these human brains are as big as ours, or even bigger. If brain capacity is the primary condition for success, these other humans should be able to survive and grow as much as we do. On the contrary, their population is relatively sparse, their technology, although worthy of praise compared to non-human species, is still limited, and at some point in time, they are all extinct.
Even if we are the only humans with big heads, we still have to explain why there is at least 150,000-year time difference between our appearance in the fossil record and the explosion of our population and culture. Although physical traits that distinguish us from other humans have been shown in the early days of our evolution, our culture has remained unmatured since at least 100,000 years since our emergence in Africa.
If you set odds for which human species would be the final winner 100,000 years ago, we would not be an obvious winner. The more likely competitor to win is Homo erectus , who left Africa 1.8 million years ago and became the most widely distributed species on the planet. Homo erectus is an explorer, survivor, and warrior. They colonized much of the earth, and in the process they learned to control fires for heating, self-defense and cooking.
.1 million years ago, we were still using the hand axe that appeared 1.5 million years ago than we were, invented by Homo erectus. Genetics evidence suggests that our population may have been reduced to near extinction. Homo erectus may think that we are just another new thing in the Pleistocene that will live and die in the morning.
time fast forward to 75,000 years ago. Homo erectus still exists, but their technology has not improved, and you might guess that the Neanderthals will succeed in replacing them. Neanderthal brains are as big as us, or even bigger. They are as tall as we are, but heavier, and most of their extra weight comes from muscles. Neanderthals were dominant during the ice age. Although it is omnivorous to be exact, they tend to eat meat, which means they must be skilled hunters. Their main weapon is a long and heavy spear intended to penetrate the animal's body at close range. Carnivores usually hunt animals smaller than their size. Neanderthals hunted every large herbivore during the ice age.
Neanderthals are far from muttering cavemen. We share with them a variant of the FOXP2 gene that is believed to be responsible for the fine movement required to speak. They buried the dead, cared for the wounded, applied themselves with paint, and dressed themselves with jewelry made of shells, feathers and bones. By the end of their time, many of the tools they had were the same as we used.
When Homo sapiens first encountered Neanderthals, the Neanderthal population was the largest ever. Because they adapted to the cold, they replaced us as we fled Europe in the face of the coming ice age.If you were to bet who could survive the uncertain climate for thousands of years to come, the Neanderthals would be a good bet.
However, by 50,000 years ago, the situation began to turn in our favor. The ASheli Hand Axe has served all human species for more than a million years, and we have developed a much more complex toolbox. By improving the Neanderthal wooden spear, we developed projection weapons, such as spear caster . We have made tips for weapons, tools for carving, cutting blades and drills for perforation. We have bone harpoons, nets and traps for fishing, and condoms for birds and small mammals. Even if the Neanderthals have superb hunting ability, they are just medium-level carnivores. We become the ultimate predators with our new technology, largely exempting ourselves from being preyed by other species.
We bravely walked out of Africa and quickly expanded to Eurasian . We may even have arrived in Australia in thousands of years. This arduous journey requires planning and packing food for an indefinite journey, bringing tools to repair unforeseen damage and obtaining unfamiliar food, as well as solving problems expected in the future, such as replenishing drinking water at sea. Early sailors had to be able to communicate in depth, which led some anthropologists to hypothesize that humans had already had very mature language during this period.
25,000 years ago, it was obvious that we were already winners. Instead of wandering like nomads, we live in more fixed camps with hundreds of people. We eat well, with tools to grind and mash food, allowing us to process and process foods that would otherwise be inedible and even toxic.
We have real clothes made with fine bone needles instead of just draped or loosely tied with fur. A close-fitting winter clothing means we can better withstand the cold without having to evolve the calorie-consuming body like the Neanderthals. Such equipment allows us to advance all the way north even during the cold ice age, eventually reaching America, becoming the first human species in history to complete this journey.
But the distinctive feature of this period is not just the upgrade of weapons and living conditions. It is during this period that we begin to leave evidence of unique cognitive forms, especially our ever-expanding social network. Jewelry made of shells were found hundreds of kilometers inland, meaning that these items of no practical value were either worth transporting from a distance or obtained from others on our earliest trade routes.
This is the modernity of behavior: our appearance and behavior are like modern people. Our culture and technology suddenly became stronger and more advanced than any other human being. How did this be done? What changes have happened to us, and why have these changes only happened to us?
/03
The front and back of friendship
allows us to grow and grow as other humans are becoming extinct, which is a cognitive superpower: A specific type of friendship called cooperative communication. We are experts in working with other people, even strangers. We can communicate with people we don’t know about a common goal and cooperate to achieve this goal. As you would expect, chimpanzees have cognitive abilities as complex as humans in many ways. However, although chimpanzees are very similar to us, they have a hard time understanding that communication is to help them achieve a common goal. This means that, despite being smart, chimpanzees are hardly capable of synchronizing their behaviors with each other, coordinating different roles, delivering their innovations, and not even making communications other than some basic requests. We develop all these skills before we can walk or talk, and they are the entrance to the complex social and cultural world. They allow us to insert our thoughts into the thoughts of others and inherit the knowledge accumulated over the ages. They are the basis of all forms of culture and learning, including complex languages, and it is these dense groups of cultured humans that invent advanced technologies.
When I first studied animals, I was so focused on social competition that I never thought that communication or friendliness between animals and even our own might be important for cognitive evolution. I think the improvement in manipulation or deception skills can explain the evolutionary fitness of animals. But I found that just getting smarter is not enough. Emotions play a huge role in finding something valuable, attractive, painful or disgusting. Our preference for solving certain problems plays an important role in shaping our cognition, just like our computing power. Those most complex social awareness, memory and strategies can only promote innovation after being paired with the ability to cooperate and communicate with others.
This kind of friendliness is evolved through self-domestication.
Domestication is not only the result of artificial selection of which animal to choose for reproduction, but also the result of natural selection. In the latter case, the pressure of choice lies in friendliness, friendliness to similar or other species. This is what we call self-domestication. Self-domestication gives us the friendly advantage we need to continue as other humans move towards extinction. So far, we have seen this in ourselves, in dogs, and in our closest cousin, the bonobo. This book focuses on scientific discoveries that link our three species together and helps us understand how we are.
As humans become more friendly, we are able to live in large groups of 100 or more people. Even without a bigger brain, our larger and better coordinated groups can easily outperform other human species. Our perception of others allows us to collaborate and communicate in increasingly complex ways, bringing our cultural capabilities to a new level. We can innovate and share these innovations more quickly than anyone else. Other human species are out of the blue.
However, our friendliness also has a dark side. When we feel that the group we love is threatened by other social groups, we can remove this threatening group from our psychological network and we will dehumanize them. , which should have been empathy for , and empathy, has now disappeared. If we cannot empathize with threatening outsiders, we will not regard them as fellow humans and will become able to perform the most cruel actions. We are both the most tolerant species on Earth and the most ruthless species on Earth.
The hypothesis of self-domestication told in this book is more than another creation story. It is a powerful tool that can suppress our tendency to dehumanize others. It is a warning and reminder: In order to survive and develop, we need to extend the definition of who belongs to ours.
Author Profile:
Brian Hare Professor of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University.
Vanessa Woods Research Scientist at the Center for Canine Cognition at Duke University.
Contributor: Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods
Editor: Wang Zheng
Reviewer: Li Shuanglei
"Friends Survival: The Evolutionary Power of Being Good"
Author: [US] Brian Hare [US] Vanessa Woods
A powerful new evolutionary hypothesis, a little-known brief history of human beings, re-understanding "survival of the fittest", a good medicine for the era. Popular science masterpieces spanning psychology, anthropology, , biology and other fields.
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