MESSAGE
| DATE | 2009-03-03 |
| FROM | Michael L Richardson
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Free Software Cooperative - it is in the genes
|
"It takes a village to raise a child".
Ruben Safir wrote:
> March 3, 2009
> Basics
> In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue
> By NATALIE ANGIER
>
> In seeking bipartisan support for his economic policies, President Obama
> has tried every tip on the standard hospitality crib sheet: beer and
> football, milk and cookies, Earth, Wind and Fire.
>
> Maybe the president needs to borrow a new crib sheet — the kind with a
> genuine baby wrapped inside.
>
> A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or
> overhaul the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go,
> nothing can beat a happily babbling baby. A baby is born knowing how to
> work the crowd. A toothless smile here, a musical squeal there, and even
> hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the head and weak in the knees.
>
> In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary
> social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human.
> Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of
> its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes
> many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that
> often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to
> share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s
> lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me,
> myself and mine.
>
> As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, “Mothers and Others: The
> Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding,†which will be published
> by Harvard University Press in April, human babies are so outrageously
> dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never
> have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing.
> Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring
> pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.
>
> Human beings evolved as cooperative breeders, says Dr. Hrdy, a
> reproductive strategy in which mothers are assisted by as-if mothers, or
> “allomothers,†individuals of either sex who help care for and feed the
> young. Most biologists would concur that humans have evolved the need
> for shared child care, but Dr. Hrdy takes it a step further, arguing
> that our status as cooperative breeders, rather than our exceptionally
> complex brains, helps explain many aspects of our temperament. Our
> relative pacifism, for example, or the expectation that we can fly from
> New York to Los Angeles without fear of personal dismemberment.
> Chimpanzees are pretty smart, but were you to board an airplane filled
> with chimpanzees, you “would be lucky to disembark with all 10 fingers
> and toes still attached,†Dr. Hrdy writes.
>
> Our capacity to cooperate in groups, to empathize with others and to
> wonder what others are thinking and feeling — all these traits, Dr. Hrdy
> argues, probably arose in response to the selective pressures of being
> in a cooperatively breeding social group, and the need to trust and rely
> on others and be deemed trustworthy and reliable in turn. Babies became
> adorable and keen to make connections with every passing adult gaze.
> Mothers became willing to play pass the baby. Dr. Hrdy points out that
> mother chimpanzees and gorillas jealously hold on to their infants for
> the first six months or more of life. Other females may express real
> interest in the newborn, but the mother does not let go: you never know
> when one of those females will turn infanticidal, or be unwilling or
> unable to defend the young ape against an infanticidal male.
>
> By contrast, human mothers in virtually every culture studied allow
> others to hold their babies from birth onward, to a greater or lesser
> extent depending on tradition. Among the !Kung foragers of the Kalahari,
> babies are held by a father, grandmother, older sibling or some other
> allomother maybe 25 percent of the time. Among the Efe foragers of
> Central Africa, babies spend 60 percent of their daylight hours being
> toted around by somebody other than their mother. In 87 percent of
> foraging societies, mothers sometimes suckle each other’s children,
> another remarkable display of social trust.
>
> Dr. Hrdy wrote her book in part to counter what she sees as the reigning
> dogma among evolutionary scholars that humans evolved their extreme
> sociality and cooperative behavior to better compete with other humans.
> “I’m not comfortable accepting this idea that the origins of
> hypersociality can be found in warfare, or that in-group amity arose in
> the interest of out-group enmity,†she said in a telephone interview.
> Sure, humans have been notably violent and militaristic for the last
> 12,000 or so years, she said, when hunter-gatherers started settling
> down and defending territories, and populations started getting
> seriously dense. But before then? There weren’t enough people around to
> wage wars. By the latest estimates, the average population size during
> the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded the
> Neolithic Age may have been around 2,000 breeding adults. “What would
> humans have been fighting over?†Dr. Hrdy said. “They were too busy
> trying to keep themselves and their children alive.â€
>
> Dr. Hrdy also argues that our human ancestors became emotionally modern
> long before the human brain had reached its current average volume of
> 1,300 cubic centimeters, which is about three times the size of a
> chimpanzee brain — in other words, that we became the nicest apes before
> becoming the smartest. You don’t need a bulging brain to evolve
> cooperative breeding. Many species of birds breed cooperatively, as do
> lions, rats, meerkats, wolves and marmosets, among others. But to become
> a cooperatively breeding ape, and to persuade a bunch of smart,
> hot-tempered, suspicious, politically cunning primates to start sharing
> child care and provisionings, now that took a novel evolutionary
> development, the advent of this thing called trust.
>
> To explain the rise of cooperative breeding among our forebears, Dr.
> Hrdy synthesizes an array of new research in anthropology, genetics,
> infant development, comparative biology. She notes that recent research
> has overturned the longstanding insistence that humans are a patrilocal
> species, that is, with women moving away from their birth families to
> join their husbands. Instead, it seems that young mothers in many
> traditional societies have their own mothers and other female relatives
> close at hand, and who better to trust with baby care than your mom or
> your aunt? New studies have also shown the importance of postmenopausal
> women to gathering roots and tubers, the sort of unsexy foods that are
> difficult to disinter and lack the succulent status of, say, a freshly
> killed oryx, but that just may help feed the kids in hard times. Other
> anthropologists have made the startling discovery that children have
> entertainment value, and that among traditional cultures without
> television or Internet access, a bobble-headed baby is the best show in
> town.
>
> However cooperative breeding got started, its impact on human evolution
> was profound. With helpers in the nest, women could give birth to
> offspring with ever longer childhoods — the better to build big brains
> and stout immune systems — and, paradoxically, at ever shrinking
> intervals. The average time between births for a chimpanzee mother is
> about six years; for a human mother, it’s two or three years. As a
> result of our combined braininess and fecundity, humans have managed to
> colonize the planet; exploit, marginalize or exterminate all competing
> forms of life; build a vast military-industrial complex all under the
> auspices of Bernard Madoff and with one yeti of a carbon footprint, and
> will somebody please hand me that baby before it’s too late.
>
>
--
Read the GUARANTEE: www.paymymortgageearly.com
|
|
