Who, me?

by: pootie

Tue May 05, 2009 at 19:12:38 PM EDT

Compare and contrast:

DKos, pff, FSZ, and here.

In line with their common ancestry, humans are remarkably similar to other apes. Like their larger brained, bipedal "cousins", Great Apes also use tools and exhibit rudimentary understanding of causality and Theory of Mind. However, unique among apes, humans possess much greater mutual understanding.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is convinced these "emotionally modern" humans emerged early in the course of hominin evolution as a byproduct of shared parental and alloparental care and provisioning of young known as "cooperative breeding".
According to widely accepted chronology, large-brained, anatomically modern humans evolved around 150,000 years ago, and behaviorally modern humans, capable of symbolic thought and language, more recently still, between 50-80,000 years ago.
Hrdy argues that emotionally modern humans, newly interested in the mental and subjective states of others and characterized by prosocial impulses to give and share, emerged in the genus Homo far earlier, perhaps by the beginning of the Pleistocene, 1.8 million years ago.

It's cute to laugh at social impulses, but basically stupid. We ARE social creatures.

Have a cracker...

"Darwin and the Ascent of Emotionally Modern Man"
Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
University of California, Davis
Tuesday, May 19, 2009, 7 pm
California Academy of Sciences
San Francisco, CA

pootie :: Who, me?

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Who, me? | 2 comments

Her challenge seems...like common sense (0.00 / 0)

Why anyone would accept the 'widely accepted chronology' about a species' unprovable behavior shift is beyond me.
Does posting this mean you agree with her challenge? Because I think you were basically arguing the opposite a few weeks ago

by: Laura @ Tue May 05, 2009 at 18:41:24 PM CDT

I've been a Hrdy fan for a few years now. Her stuff makes sense. (0.00 / 0)

This is more a technical details discussion. From a review of "Mothers and Others" http://www.amazon.com/Mothers-...

Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution.
Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends-and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Sarah Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. Mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not.

I can see where Theory of Mind, the ability to understand and act as if there is a Me in You, in an intellectual/problemsolving way could exist in modern hominims, and I can see how there could be an emotional version, Theory of Feelings, or to follow Damasio, a Theory of Emotions, an understanding of how another member of the species would react emotionally to a particular stimulus-feeling pair.

(I'm presuming familiarity with Damasio's idea that stimuli produce feelings which have a combination of instinctual and learned reactions which produce emotions. "The Feeling of What Happens" is the book I'm referencing. Highly recommended for a close reading. Seminal.)

by: pootie @ Tue May 05, 2009 at 20:04:40 PM CDT

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