[ExI] The ugly Neanderthal

[William Flynn Wallace]

Rafal wrote:  immature individuals are less aggressive than adults.
Where did you get this?  In humans the vast amount of violent crime is done
by men 25 and under.    bill w

On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 3:11 AM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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 t!
>  he 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
>
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