[ExI] The ugly Neanderthal

[BillK]

On Wed, 9 Dec 2020 at 07:22, Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> There are some voices claiming that Neanderthals were nice, peaceful people who lived in harmony with nature, the big-brained, strong silent types who unfortunately got slaughtered by those despicable H.sapiens, greedy, capitalist and unnatural.
>
> "The Goodness Paradox" by Richard Wrangham offers the opposite perspective - Neanderthals were untamed, violent, reckless and dangerous. We know that because their skulls do not show signs of the domestication syndrome. There is a consistent pattern of changes that diverse animals undergo during domestication - they become juvenilized, or neotenic. Whenever an animal is under selective pressure to reduce aggression and fear, this syndrome is observed, sometimes within a few generations. It is easy to see why - individual maturation is under the control of just a few genes, immature individuals are less aggressive than adults and less fearful, so grossly turning the dials on the maturation mechanism for reduced aggression is, evolutionarily speaking, the low-hanging fruit - the kind of adaptation that is likely to happen relatively quickly compared to other more precise adaptations.
>
> Humans domesticated each other when the beta males learned how to use gossip to plot assassinations of alpha males, and how to do it very safely. Chimps kill each other too - but they tend to do it in hot action, in a flurry of blows and teeth, with some risk of injury to participants. Humans plan murder while maintaining deniability, gauging reliability of allies, they kill with ranged weapons and in ambush, essentially immune from the victim's retaliation. Just watch The Godfather for tips on how to do it right. To engage in safe intragroup coalitional violence you have to be socially savvy, or else it's you who will end up like a pincushion, not the other guy. Once humans started killing each other in cold blood, there was a strong selective pressure to be less aggressive, since it's the aggressive guys who everybody hated that ended up getting killed first. And there was selective pressure to develop social cognition, including a very strong fear of being left out of the gossip, since it's the odd guys who nobody cared about that ended up being killed next.
>
> It's strange to think that the better angels of our nature were born in cold-blooded slaughter but then the ways of evolution are mysterious, indeed.
>
> Rafal
> _______________________________________________


'evolutionarily speaking' that only applies if the aggressive guy is
assassinated before he has passed his genes on to his children. Young
unmarried bucks are still being cautious, trying to gain wealth and
power.
A hated powerful leader is more likely to have many wives and many children.
However humans have more intelligence and quickly learn that bad
behaviour can lead to assassination and other bad consequences. That's
learned behaviour, not genes.
The usual 'nature or nurture' argument.


BillK