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Most of what chimpanzees and humans do today is not directly comparable

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Re: Most of what chimpanzees and humans do today is not directly comparable

#31

Post by brighteyes »

The headline probably wasn't chosen by the author, and is pretty bad. The minor headline is actually quite good:

> Although there is merit in recognizing how we resemble our primate relatives, sometimes we need to understand what sets our species apart.

That's 100% true. Both sides are right.

But it's not just the headline which is bad. The author goes too far in one direction:

> The argument goes that if warfare, sexual coercion, male aggression, the creation and use of tools, hunting, and other patterns show up in both chimpanzees and humans, then these are evolutionarily old, shared traits. Thus, understanding the reasons behind these behaviors in chimps can offer insight into similar behaviors in humans. This premise is nice, but it is mostly wrong.

No, as the previous sentence says, it can offer insight - not complete answers, but some amount of insight. How much is still very open to debate.

> We have evolved the capacity to be the most compassionate, the cruelest, the most creative, and the most destructive of all life on this planet.

The first two - most compassionate, cruelest - are an overly anthropocentric perspective. It would take extraordinary evidence to claim that humans are more compassionate than all other animals. And that's just not likely to be true - why would it?

> Racism and global climate change are not explained by our shared history with chimpanzees, nor are gender diversity

No, some amount of them probably are explained that way.

Re: Most of what chimpanzees and humans do today is not directly comparable

#32

Post by hyperion2010 »

Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates, the only difference is that we have the gall to think that walking erect seems to have freed us from our vicious primate past. Spend some time watching a group of primates or work with a group of them over time as I did a number of years ago, and you will start to see that humans behave in almost the exact same way, our brains lie to us about our motivations so we are obivious to the fact that we are acting from ancient primate social instincts, and worse you get stuff like this piece which pulls on the old great chain of being.

Chips may not have governments, as the author says, but I suggest that he go back an take an introductory course in political science, because our entire understanding of modern political structures is founded on the idea that in some sense all politics are family politics (in group behavior). Macaques, chimps, baboons, and many more have extremely well studied and understood family group politics.

One of the steps on the road to enlightenment is the realization that the monkey on your back is you.

Re: Most of what chimpanzees and humans do today is not directly comparable

#33

Post by ThrustVectoring »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #28

Several years ago I attended a distinguished lecture by a researcher with a long history of working with non-human primates. For an entire hour we watched clip after clip of chimps failing at trivially easy human mental tasks mostly involving 2nd order cognition, even after extensive training and guidance by researchers in each task, and videos of research data in which the researcher had anthropomorphized the observ…

I'm not sure I have a good sense of what mental tasks require 2nd order cognition - what are some examples of the tasks that you saw?

Re: Most of what chimpanzees and humans do today is not directly comparable

#34

Post by joe_the_user »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #32

Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates, the only difference is that we have the gall to think that walking erect seems to have freed us from our vicious primate past. Spend some time watching a group of primates or work with a group of them over time as…

Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates, the only difference is that we have the gall to think that walking erect seems to have freed us from our vicious primate past.

I thought the difference is that by dint of our language use and our ability to modify our environment, we have the potential reproduce all the different social behaviors that the various primate species have - as well as social behaviors from even non-primate species.

Sure, it's wrong to image one is entirely outside of a social species, that things like dominance and submission don't play any part. But it seems just as wrong to make a single analogy to a single species and be done. We can be like wolves (predictors), sheep (prey), chimps (violently competitive), Bonabos (nonviolently cooperative), and so-forth but it's the complex structures of human society that are going to determine which of these sorts of animal we wind-up with.

It's important not to let the shock of realization "wow, human are just animals" stand in the way of thinking, "but we can still collectively shape which animals we will resemble".

Re: Most of what chimpanzees and humans do today is not directly comparable

#35

Post by aalleavitch »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #32

Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates, the only difference is that we have the gall to think that walking erect seems to have freed us from our vicious primate past. Spend some time watching a group of primates or work with a group of them over time as…

You’re right and wrong here. Humans are cultural creatures to the point where humans not exposed to some sort of cultural milieu simply don’t develop correctly. Walking erect didn’t free us from our vicious primate past: but culture absolutely can. You’re right in that many of our more basic instincts and psychology are a direct continuation of those evident in our evolutionary relatives, and even many of our cultural structures echo that. But we are no more bound by our instincts to be violent and selfish than we are bound by our physiology to be incapable of flight. Of course, exactly like chimpanzees, we could never fly by flapping our arms, but unlike chimpanzees we can figure out how to build and operate an airplane. Likewise, no matter how saddled we may be with primate psychology, we are capable of structuring our society to overcome that.

Re: Most of what chimpanzees and humans do today is not directly comparable

#36

Post by kazinator »

tkahnoski wrote: post #22
kazinator wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that racism is rooted not specifically tribalism but more broadly in inductive reasoning (particular-to-general heuristics) which has been absolutely indispensable to survival and evolution. It is critical to classify a creature as friend or foe based on what class it belongs to, rather than granting the instance benefit of doubt. How previously observed members of a group have behaved in the past constit…

Trying to understand the thread of reasoning here so correct me if I didn't interpret this correctly. An individual observing some members of a group with different physical characteristic with a certain behavior, an individual infers all members of that group behave that way. Then with an individual being exposed to a sampling of that groups behavior due to say the news or social media algorithms the individual make…

> individual infers all members of that group behave that way.

E.g. "all sharks bite legs off"

This leads to survival: not having your legs bitten off.

Re: Most of what chimpanzees and humans do today is not directly comparable

#37

Post by dang »

brighteyes wrote: post #31

The headline probably wasn't chosen by the author, and is pretty bad. The minor headline is actually quite good: > Although there is merit in recognizing how we resemble our primate relatives, sometimes we need to understand what sets our species apart. That's 100% true. Both sides are right. But it's not just the headline which is bad. The author goes too far in one direction: > The argument goes that if warfare, se…

I'm not sure that splitting the difference is accurate here because the article contains "This premise is nice, but it is mostly wrong."

But the title is arguably baity, so we replaced it with a representative sentence from the text.

Re: Most of what chimpanzees and humans do today is not directly comparable

#38

Post by froboz »

kstenerud wrote: post #19
deft wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic HN. Layman comments to tell us why a trained professional knows less than them.

Cannibals and Kings - Marvin Harris Warriors and Worriers - Joyce Bennenson Sex at Dawn - Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá

Well, Harris has been out-of-date for decades in anthropological circles, I'm afraid. He's a fun read, but I wouldn't take his books too seriously at this point. It's pretty well understood now that a strict economic materialist framework doesn't explain why people do what they do (humans are _not_ rational actors, by any stretch of the imagination), but he was never able to allow himself to think outside his Marxian box.

Granted, I've only had a cursory look at Bennenson, Ryan, and Jetha, but they're a couple of psychologists and a medical doctor, none of whom seem to have a deep background in cultural anthropology. Unsurprisingly, their works appear to fall back on the usual just-so stories taken from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.

TL;DR: I respectfully disagree with the implication that these sources are strong counterarguments to the article's thesis.

Re: Most of what chimpanzees and humans do today is not directly comparable

#39

Post by kstenerud »

froboz wrote: post #38
kstenerud wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cannibals and Kings - Marvin Harris Warriors and Worriers - Joyce Bennenson Sex at Dawn - Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá

Well, Harris has been out-of-date for decades in anthropological circles, I'm afraid. He's a fun read, but I wouldn't take his books too seriously at this point. It's pretty well understood now that a strict economic materialist framework doesn't explain why people do what they do (humans are _not_ rational actors, by any stretch of the imagination), but he was never able to allow himself to think outside his Marxian…

I've definitely noticed a tendency in modern times, especially among Americans, towards all-or-nothing-ism. Someone's work is either completely right, or completely worthless. All you have to do is poke a few holes, and then you can dismiss the whole thing as nonsense. Usually, it culminates in an insular attitude of "I don't need to see the evidence to know it's wrong."
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