[ExI] The ugly Neanderthal

Rafal Smigrodzki rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com
Sat Dec 12 09:10:57 UTC 2020


On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 4:10 AM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> '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.
>
### Young bucks 400k years ago were not cautious - they were as aggressive
as apes, which is to say, insanely aggressive by modern human standards.
Apes have a very weak sense of fairness, if they have a momentary advantage
they tend to use it regardless of the amount of harm they inflict on troop
mates. Back when killing another man required getting up close and
personal, it was dangerous to pre-emptively confront a male, regardless of
how nasty he was to others. Only once men learned to shoot arrows *and*
coordinate attacks by gossip, it became possible to take out the most
aggressive guys safely. Of course, since men can sire children throughout
their normal lifespan in the wild, being murdered at any time after puberty
would reduce a man's evolutionary fitness.

Also, gaining wealth is a very modern phenomenon, since material wealth was
only invented in the past 15 thousand years. Gaining political power is
also rather modern, since hunter-gatherer groups had always a very flat
social structure, with only weakly organized leadership structure.
Domestication on the other hand has been going on for at least 200k, maybe
up to 400k years ago, right when humans and Neanderthals were splitting.
---------------

> 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.
>

### Most of the domestication selective process occurred way before there
were leaders, as evidenced by changes in cranial morphology (which
correlates with behavioral traits as a part of the domestication syndrome)
over hundreds of thousands of years. We are most definitely not talking
about "nurture" here. Domestication is a purely genetic process, with
defined genetic contributions and high heritability. Wolves can be tamed
but they cannot be domesticated, except by selective breeding, just as it
happened 30k years ago.

Humans are not yet fully domesticated, even after hundreds of thousands of
years. Humans differ in their levels of fearfulness and aggression and even
now there is continued selection against the highest levels of aggression,
whether by prisons or by gang warfare.

It's very important to differentiate between "hot" aggression, typical of
apes and stupid men, and "cold" aggression, found in humans only (also we
are not talking about hunting behaviors, which are found throughout the
animal kingdom, and are controlled by different parts of the brain). The
leader who is only hated doesn't stay as a leader for long. The successful
leader may use fear to keep competition under control, and fear is not
something you instill by being stupidly aggressive - it's something that
takes a keen wit, empathy, and cold ruthlessness.

Yes, humans first domesticated each other, and only much later domesticated
dogs.

BTW, being a dog-person is apparently largely genetic. Humans underwent
coevolution with dogs and other domesticated animals. Humans who were fond
of dogs were able to benefit more from their best new friends than
dog-haters.

Rafal
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