I think this is the third person in maybe a month or two that I have had this same collision with. I’m online, trying to tell people that evolution is as alive and well today as it has ever been, and it seems to fail the very same way each time.
Here’s the latest real example, the author of Chaos! Posted a popular soundbite from the late great E. O. Wilson.
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Peter Gleick@petergleick@fediscience.org
E.O. Wilson, who must have spent much of his life thinking about comparisons between ants (one of the major subjects of his research) and humans, once said:
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”
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Which I tried to turn into a lesson for people, clearly not in a productive way:
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the Amygdalai Lama@punishmenthurts@neurodifferent.me (Me)
This ought to be out of date. I love him too, but the idea of Paleolithic emotions smacks of the permanence of creationism, not the constant change of evolution.
Paleolithic people or chimpanzees are not the problem. The bloody CURRENT model is the problem.
This is an example of what I call “evolution in name only,” the new word, referencing the forever brain paths, where we blame some initial condition that really isn’t there.
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This is my usual train of thought, part of my whole divergent worldview. I don’t really expect people to understand or agree, and I’m afraid I’m getting short, I’m getting cynical that my long explanations are any better. I’m starting to just say it, bluffing, sort of, trying to make it sound like I know what I’m talking about and I don’t care if you get it – which is sort of true. Divergent, as I said.
I changed my mind about that, I guess, and I tried to continue, make sense of it for folks:
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I mean, did evolution stop, regarding us alone? Why?
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Someone asked:
It didn’t stop… who said it stopped?
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He said we have Paleolithic emotions, that means our emotions stopped evolving what, 12,000 years ago?
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Someone said:
Not really. It just means that our set of emotions is considered stable enough that evolution hasn’t made any breaking changes recently.
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Which I wasn’t having:
Same answer different words.
EVERYTHING changed since then, everything. Everything but us and our feelings? It is SUCH Allistic science! EVERYTHING changed – because We are All the Same and Always Have Been.
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Someone said:
The Amygdalai Lama, why would you expect that evolution, for a trait so deep and for a species so complex, could produce any noticeable change in that trait, for the entire species, after such a short time?
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There were other things along with that, and I’ll put all my answers together:
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Short time? Three, four, five hundred generations since the Neolithic revolutions? What is evolution if it doesn’t operate in every generation? What adds up to change if there is no change every generation?
What would be the point in adapting to something generations after the fact? Evolution is not an origin story; it is as real today as it ever was.
The environment is changing and so are we, you are probably different from your parents, because your world is, and whatever adaptations they made are in you.
Again, if evolution is real and it is, it is happening, always, we didn’t somehow stop it.
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Why did traits “originate,” 12,000 years ago and not anymore? This is like religion, like in ancient times, God used to reveal Himself, used to appear and talk to people – just not anymore.
The thoughts map together perfectly.
You’re repeating yourself, “deep traits,” is circular, they’re “deep traits,” because you say they “originated,” 12,000 ya.
So, I will too: evolution is real, today, it is not an origin story that happened in prehistory. Evolution makes everything – not everything “except culture.”
World wars are evolution.
Bad evolution, but evolution.
When something didn’t exist, and then it does?
– that’s evolution.
Your insistence on long periods of time is out of date for every creature on Earth – except human beings, for some reason.
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With the religion comparison, you can see how the shape of this thought existed about religion, long before Wallace and Darwin were born, I think this thought is an evolved one, about a Before Time and a Now.
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Someone argued that “in ways, nothing has changed,” or something:
OK, so you don’t think there has been a noticeable change in human life since the Paleolithic?
The cities, the industry, the agriculture, the tech, the wars – not “noticeable? any of that? All there, always? I don’t get it. Is it simply circular, we were the same because we were the same?
Sorry, I don’t get it.
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Someone said (along with some other things):
“The cities, the industry”—those things aren’t “deep” traits encoded in genes.
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“The cities, the industry,” – these are not traits, these are environments, new, different environments that living creatures adapt to, that’s my point.
You seem to think the environment keeps changing but the creature making it stays the same, at least anatomically and emotionally, and that’s not evolution. Again, that’s Before Time vs Now, something like the creationist shape of things.
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Just because a creature starts having serious impacts on its environment and becomes its environment’s main driving factor, even – doesn’t mean it stops adapting to that environment, is my point, and that does seem to be what we think, if we think about it, doesn’t it? Like someone’s “in charge,” or something, us, or evolution, and of course not.
We are creating our environment, adapting to it and then recreating it every generation, getting more and more . . . something, let’s not divert into what exactly, but getting more and more adapted to and for something – this is not “Paleolithic emotions,” this is present day adaptation of our minds and our emotions.
And that is relevant and can be dealt with – whereas, sorry, you’re stuck with era-old emotions is pointless and hopeless. Again, the shape of creationism, fate.
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I’m sure y’all got an emotion or two your Paleolithic ancestors didn’t have, like dreams of world domination, or fears of Armageddon.
And maybe we shed a few too.
Sure, there’re probably some common ones, why not?
But why does it have to sound like the Same, Forever?
Or if they’re the same, what does the past have to do with anything, if we’re still in that same era that way?
I mean, why is the past causative, but the present is not?
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That’s the shape of a creation myth, the past is causative, and the present is not, right?
In the past, bears kept us in fight or flight mode, today, police keep us in fight or flight mode – why is the bear causative and the police are not? Maybe we think of the past as humanity’s childhood, our formative years?
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That would be a fallacy, just saying.
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It occurs to me that I read a whole book about how we lost an ancient emotion to become this modern thing.
It was The Goodness Paradox, by Richard Wrangham, a lovely man, and he was promoting a sort of a Dual Nature for humanity, to explain the conflicts, but the main thread of the book was that chimpanzees and animals generally have a reactive sort of violence, that they fight when attacked or put upon unreasonably, and that what humans developed was a more proactive sort of violence, where we suppress our natural reaction to bullying and authority, and live with, giving and taking a more planned sort of violence, punishments, and war and whatnot – but that the natural chimpanzee reactivity is why they are terrible employees and you are not.
So, there’s a Paleolithic emotion we don’t actually have anymore, and a case that the violence our world suffers now is not incumbent, the old thing in the world, but our NEW innovation.
Stay and learn, they who have ears to hear, probably meaning neurology to hear.
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I hadn’t changed topics. I thought the Goodness Paradox made the case that the troublesome emotions are new ones, not the OG primate ones.
But there’s a matter of interpretation, of time scales – whenever this happened, if it began 300,000 years ago when they start counting us as human, I would still say that is “new,” because we are new, and that we should think about our latest modifications as new, the latest, not the OG features: these features changed and we became human, this is our current species, and what changed to make us human is our most recent history, not our genesis.
It’s sort of the point of evolution that there is no genesis.
And if it’s only twelve thousand years ago, then I think it’s REALLY new. Part of my theory is that Allistics have been in the majority, or had the upper hand in this period, for twelve to fifteen thousand years now – and that is a flash in the pan for a species and they have soiled the bed spectacularly in no time, that the Allistic isn’t a viable genetic option.
Sorry, too much?
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Really, what I replace the “Paleolithic Emotions,” meme with is the Antisocialization we all get in our lives today, we do not have to go cherry picking the deep past for emotions that of course we are going to have if we are treated badly, and we are, this is really what I think.
Sorry about that, it’s the ’tism, everything comes out sideways.
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Having said that, it’s all part of it, creating this Antisocialization is what I call the new “emotion,” the new emotional manipulation, and I think it became the dominant way of life during what we call the Neolithic Revolutions, and this is not far from what E.O. said, that we are living with something from back then, except it’s crucial in my mind that what it is we are living with is not an old, “natural,” set of forever emotions, but a newer and more sinister thing than normal animal emotions, a sort of a hack, a system of making ourselves feel bad, of forcing people into their worst emotions.
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Somebody said I’m simply taking a pithy soundbite too seriously.
Ah, OK . . .
If it were a one-off, maybe – and maybe it was for him, I can’t say. I don’t build these edifices over a single utterance, though, the whole world agrees with him . . . perhaps literally isn’t the word, is it, uh, mythologically? As a background to what they think about?
Yes, it’s the normal narrative: we had Original Sin, and now we have Paleolithic Emotions, it maps perfectly, so everybody basically believes it – whether the great man really did in his complex thoughts or not.
Trivers said we all speak in single notes and melodies, and E.O. spoke in chords, every word having six meanings, honestly, I know I am no-one to take on E.O. Wilson.
But this expresses a social belief, a common one. That’s what I’m arguing with. The popularity of the meme, not the author.
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Same as those ones from Voltaire and Chomsky. Ha.
Jeff
June 2nd., 2024
Abuse with an Excuse 