Hunter gatherer violence

[robbo203]

stuartw2112 wrote:

This is what I meant when I said Robin was in danger of making his socialism a hostage to fortune. Violent and warlike tendencies almost certainly are a part of our human nature. And it's also why I said I was relaxed about it. Because whatever the case is, whatever our human nature turns out to be, we are more than capable of moulding human institutions, including those involved in war, to engineer the happiest outcomes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b014kj65R

 Thats an interesting post, Stuart, for which thanks.  My observations on the above snippet are two fold.Firstly, I think all we have the potential to be violent but I don't think that is the same thing as saying that "violent tendencies are part of our human nature".  "Human nature" to me suggests more than just potential; it suggests an irrepressible and ever present aspect of our behaviour and it is for that reason that i don't think one can say violent tendencies are part of our human nature – anymore than pacific tendencies, for that matter.  So it depends on what you mean by "human nature", I guess. Secondly, you have to make a distinction between violence in general and war which is particular form of violence that is, of its nature, a collective enterprise.  This is something that  gets to the heart of what this thread is all about. There is no convincing evidence that wars actually happened in the sense of systemic intergroup lethal conflict  much before the advent of agriculture some 10,000 years or so ago.  I wont rehearse the arguments behind this claim as they have already been made at length at various points in this long thread.  Even in the case of contemporary hunter gatherer groups  where the mechanism of conflict avoidance (that would have functioned in the case of prehistoric HG groups) has been considerably undermined by contact with "civilisation" and by significant restrictions on the traditional freedom to roam, we find that, overwhelmingly, violence is an individual affair i.e. one on one violence  (see Soderberg and Fry's recent survey) Thus, if war is a pretty  recent phenomenon as far as us human beings are concerned, there would simply not be enough time for "warlike tendencies" to have been naturally selected for.   For that reason too, as well as the above, it is simply not possible to say warlike tendencies are part of our human nature and the notion that some of  us possess a  so called "warrior gene" seems to me to be just a piece of poetic licence

[stuartw2112]

Thanks Robin, good points well made!On your first, I think you're just playing with words. No one I've ever read on the subject has made your distinction that, to count as human nature, something must be irrepressible. In that case, eating and sex are not part of human nature!Your points about war are well made, but I'm not sure what they amount to. Chimps, for example, engage in one-on-one violence, and collaborate collectively to inflict violence to the extent that they're capable of such cooperation. Perhaps humans, building on their natural capacities, go to war, ie organise their inborn individual violence collectively, simply because they can. As with any inborn part o our nature, no doubt circumstances play a big part. It's hardly a surprise that collective violence is more likely if you have to defend your territory thn if you wander free in a forest of abundance. As for the warrior gene, it's a shorthand for a statistical phenomenon – I don't think anyone knows precisely what the gene does except to predispose its carriers to violence and psychopathic behaviour. But that's what "gene for" means.

[robbo203]

stuartw2112 wrote:

Thanks Robin, good points well made!On your first, I think you're just playing with words. No one I've ever read on the subject has made your distinction that, to count as human nature, something must be irrepressible. In that case, eating and sex are not part of human nature!Your points about war are well made, but I'm not sure what they amount to. Chimps, for example, engage in one-on-one violence, and collaborate collectively to inflict violence to the extent that they're capable of such cooperation. Perhaps humans, building on their natural capacities, go to war, ie organise their inborn individual violence collectively, simply because they can. As with any inborn part o our nature, no doubt circumstances play a big part. It's hardly a surprise that collective violence is more likely if you have to defend your territory thn if you wander free in a forest of abundance. As for the warrior gene, it's a shorthand for a statistical phenomenon – I don't think anyone knows precisely what the gene does except to predispose its carriers to violence and psychopathic behaviour. But that's what "gene for" means.

Hi Stuart Well, statistically or  socially speaking, eating and sex are "irrepressible" in the sense that if we didn't do these things, we would cease to exist as a species.  In that sense these things are naturally selected for – that is to say, are part of our human nature.  Can the same be said of violence – let along violence in the guise of war. I don't think so. This is more obvious in the case of war in the sense that there is evidence to show that human societies have indeed lived without war but the same is true of violence in generalI just don't buy the argument that we have an "inborn individual violence" and if we did have such a thing then we would need  somehow to express it in the same way as we need to have sex and eat.  i.,e. that such a thing is irrepressible and ever present.  I agree that we are capable of violence, just as we are capable of being peaceful and in a sense these two capabilities cancel each other out such that neither can really be said to be part of our inborn human nature. However the capacity to respond violently to a given situation is not the same thing as having an inbuilt disposition to behave violently which implies that it would happen anyway without any external trigger simply by virtue of being "inborn"

[stuartw2112]

Thanks Robin, will leave it there. Just to be clear, if it's not already, I'm not arguing that violence is inborn and hence inevitable. I'm a pacifist! But if you're going to be a pacifist, it is no help to pretend you're not violent – can't see it arise in you, see your (probably inborn) tendency to violence rise up from potential to the danger zone of realisation. To see this, you don't need any scientific or anthropological theory. You can just pay attention. (Unles of course it's just me – perhaps I have the warrior gene!)All the best 

[robbo203]

stuartw2112 wrote:

Thanks Robin, will leave it there. Just to be clear, if it's not already, I'm not arguing that violence is inborn and hence inevitable. I'm a pacifist! But if you're going to be a pacifist, it is no help to pretend you're not violent – can't see it arise in you, see your (probably inborn) tendency to violence rise up from potential to the danger zone of realisation. To see this, you don't need any scientific or anthropological theory. You can just pay attention. (Unles of course it's just me – perhaps I have the warrior gene!)All the best 

 Hi Stuart This might be of interest. Came across it on the Money Free Party FB site.  Unfortunately I can't see Youtube on my antique computer but the write up sounds juicy…http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/peace-code-in-the-human-brain-robin-grille/cheers

[ALB]

It seems we're not the only people discussing this:http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-decliningAnd I thought Pinker was a pessimist …

[Dave B]

It was fairly interesting Scandinavian ‘socialism’ stuff; but the stuff I liked might be different to what others would; and what the speaker was concentrating on. It was be nice to your kids stuff and they will grow up better, possibly in a hardwired kind of way re the brain development of the mirror neurone empathy centres etc. Mirror neuron Eg from almost the top of the list of a google search I just did , but have read around to subject elsewhere. http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct05/mirror.aspx It has moved beyond speculative theory as with CAT scans on brains etc. Thus; as it goes the patterns in the brain that light up when one individual experiences something themselves are very similar to when that individual ‘sees’ another experiencing they same thing etc. I think perhaps you can actually ‘observe’ this in yourself, which is often not a bad place to start; like when to ‘wince’ when you see someone hurt themselves or even make a dramatic social faux pas? Or is that just me? But more often than that perhaps it is reflective and involves a less immediate contemplation or imagining of the other persons condition?   [For the 150 year old ‘trick cyclists’ it would probably fall under the category of ‘projection’ and ‘transference’- it is a pretty old observation.] There are, extra curricula, another thread implications, as regards this ie ‘telepathic’, in big inverted comma’s, proto-communication. Ie a baseline position clearly demonstrated by even populist TV people like David Attenborough with capuchin Monkeys? That is just gagging for an evolutionary 'audio'  improvement? I can dig the youtube video out probably.  The speaker, really interestingly, also hinted at ‘epigenetic’ Lamarkism; the idea is, depending somewhat on who or from whom it is being contemplated, is something like; We have a whole library of acquired genes; most of which are switched off, that is not too controversial, most genes appear to do nothing, or what they used to do are ‘turned off’.    The speculative hypothesis, don’t laugh too soon, is that environmental stress etc or equally the lack of it. Can lead to genes being, by some ‘biochemical’ mechanism being switched on or off. And, in principal, from that process to some extent or degree being passed on in, after, or during ‘reproduction’ etc. Some researchers believe that they have observed that in bacteria. The basic idea is dealt with as below for instance 27 minutes in; Star Trek The Next Generation Season 7 Episode 19 – Genesis http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2672rd_star-trek-the-next-generation-season-7-episode-19-genesis_tv  I prefer to approach the ‘hypothesis’ from a somewhat different perspective and maybe something similar to how Engels endorsed Lamarkian theory. It would be a brilliant material ‘existentialist’ solution to a problem and nature never ceases to amaze us as regards finding solutions to ‘problems’. It would certainly fast track ‘cosmic ray’ accidental and adaptive revolutionary mutation theory. Our speaker probably relies a lot on the bane of serious scientists, correlation statistics, and implied cause and effect and ‘Scandinavian socialism’. So the sun shines and people eat more ice cream; so eating ice cream makes the sun shine? Then there is the sometimes hidden, tertiary effect.  Statistical data mining, made so much easier by computing power, has become a pseudo scientific gold mine of social scientists. On empathy etc they did one fairly recently on;  ‘do you think you think you know what is going on in your pet dogs head?’  With associated questions like what job do you do, what educational qualifications do you have and do you think the moon is made of cheese etc. Upon statistical analysis of the data the results were alarming.  There was a definite and statistically significant skew towards ‘yes’ when it came to ‘rational’ professional scientists.

[Dave B]

They did a follow up survey on the ‘pet dog survey’ focusing on and interviewing the ‘deranged scientist group’. Like they do. It just got worse!

[twc]

Dave B wrote:

Engels endorsed Lamarkianism

Please support your claim by supplying us with a precise post-1859 [Origin of Species] instance.For example, in his private 1876 notes “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man”, i.e. in the transition from natural evolution to social [cultural] evolution, Engels’s account may appear awfully like Lamarkianism, but that isn’t necessarily so.You see, cultural evolution, being man made, always appears to be Lamarkian.  But Marx’s and Engels’s materialism was devised to show precisely that what man culturally proposes, the inexorable internal logic of his social system, disposes.Engels always treats culture as ultimately independent of man’s wishes, and—on the contrary—that the organisation of human labour determines his culture and his will to action.For Marx and Engels, society subverts man’s intentionalism.  Intention is determined by social need, and not the other way round.  They repudiated social Lamarkianism—or the idealist explanation of culture—point blank.

Engels, in Part Played by Labour, wrote:

Before the first flint could be fashioned into a knife by human hands, a period of time probably elapsed in comparison with which the historical period known to us appears insignificant.But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation.Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour.Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini.But the hand did not exist alone, it was only one member of an integral, highly complex organism.  And what benefited the hand, benefited also the whole body it served; and this in two ways.In the first place, the body benefited from the law of correlation of growth, as Darwin called it.  …Changes in certain forms involve changes in the form of other parts of the body, although we cannot explain the connection.The gradually increasing perfection of the human hand, and the commensurate adaptation of the feet for erect gait, have undoubtedly, by virtue of such correlation, reacted on other parts of the organism.  However, this action has not as yet been sufficiently investigated for us to be able to do more here than to state the fact in general terms.Much more important is the direct, demonstrable influence of the development of the hand on the rest of the organism.It has already been noted that our simian ancestors were gregarious; it is obviously impossible to seek the derivation of man, the most social of all animals, from non-gregarious immediate ancestors.Mastery over nature began with the development of the hand—with labour—and widened man’s horizon at every new advance.  He was continually discovering new, hitherto unknown properties in natural objects.On the other hand, the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual.In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other.  Necessity created the organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate sound after another.

Now all of this, especially the bit in bold, can be read in Lamarkian terms.    But it is actually concomitant with the pure 19th century Darwinian adaptive evolutionary speak of Darwin’s circle, e.g., Huxley, but extended by Engels to explain the origin of humanity as cultural, rather than as purely natural, beings. Engels is merely using the 19th century language of Darwinian adaptation, still used as shorthand today, even though today we are impelled in formal Darwinian discourse to treat the evolutionary process as a purely natural one of differential individual survival rates leading to new species under purely fortuitous changed environmental circumstance.But 19th century Engels is not so impelled to adopt the strict discourse of the new Darwinian synthesis, etc.  In any case, he adopts a discourse concomitant with the transition from new species to new culture that he is thinking through in these amazing unpublished notes.More importantly, Engels is primarily concerned with the transition from the domination of hominids by Darwinian evolution to their gradual freeing themselves from total Darwinian domination, and entering the phase that Marx and Engels first discovered thirty years earlier—man’s gradual domination of himself by his self-produced social evolution—a transition that neither the extraordinary Darwin nor his naturalist acolytes successfully explained.In Vere Gordon Childe’s memorable phrase, Engels is here postulating the pathway to “man creating himself”—social man, never absolutely freed from the necessities of his natural roots, but increasingly freeing himself, by himself, from them.Thus, for example, Stephen Jay Gould in the first published volume of collected essays from his “This View of Life” monthly column on evolutionary theory in Natural History:

Gould, in Ever Since Darwin wrote:

Indeed, the nineteenth century produced a brilliant exposé from a source that will no doubt surprise most readers—Frederick Engels.In 1876, Engels wrote an essay entitled, ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’.  It was published posthumously in 1896 and, unfortunately, had no visible impact upon Western science.Engels considers three essential features of human evolution:  speech, a large brain, and upright posture.He argues that the first step must have been a descent from the trees with subsequent evolution to upright posture by our ground-dwelling ancestors.“These apes when moving on level ground began to drop the habit of using their hands and to adopt a more and more erect gait.  This was the decisive step in the transition from ape to man.”Upright posture freed the hand for using tools (labour, in Engels’s terminology);  increased intelligence and speech came later.

Now if anybody knew a thing or two about Darwin and Lamark, it is the father of evolution through punctuated equilibrium, Stephen Jay Gould.  He does not read Engels through Lamarkian spectacles.For Gould on Lamark, see pp. 62–64, and Ch. 3 of his enormous historical overview “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory”—so named in honour of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, which gave Gould the inspiration and the courage to demolish Darwin’s gradual evolution mechanism for Gould’s now accepted stasis–punctuation–stasis mechanism.For us, as for Marx and Engels, our current great task is to free ourselves from the tyranny of blind subservience to our capitalist mode-of-production social being, as described in our Declaration of Principles, and institute a consciously comprehended socialist mode-of-production social being as described in our Object.For Dave B, please explain how a 19th century adaptationist Darwinian could describe the emergence of cultural evolution without using quasi-Lamarkian language.  [While at it, you might also care to show us Engels’s supposed phrenology.]

[Dave B]

That was a bit of a touched raw nerve reaction. I think you are correct up to a point in that in ‘Darwins time’ there was as yet no very clear distinction between Lamarkism and Darwinism. If you think Darwin’s own pangeneses (?) hypothesis was a bit ‘Lamarkian’. I think Mendels work sort of shifted the ground more to our ‘modern vulgar schoolboy Darwinism’ I think it was a little bit later that August Weismann started the process of completely ‘discrediting’ Lamark. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Weismann A process that continued through most of the 20thcentury? I think fairly recently scientists have realised they have made a mistake and obviated the embarrassment by calling it something else. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics Don’t want to derail this thread too much.

[alanjjohnstone]

i watched this video from the website Robbo recommended another video from. I thought it worth sharing, as are many on that website…well worth exploringhttp://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/we-are-built-to-be-kind/

[robbo203]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

i watched this video from the website Robbo recommended another video from. I thought it worth sharing, as are many on that website…well worth exploringhttp://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/we-are-built-to-be-kind/

 Hi Alan, As I can't see Youtube on my old computer could you possibly summarise what the video had to say?  Cheers R

[alanjjohnstone]

Greed is good. War is inevitable. Whether in political theory or popular culture, human nature is often portrayed as selfish and power hungry. UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner challenges this notion of human nature and seeks to better understand why we evolved pro-social emotions like empathy, compassion and gratitude. We've all heard the phrase 'survival of the fittest', born from the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Keltner adds nuance to this concept by delving deeper into Darwin's idea that sympathy is one of the strongest human instincts — sometimes stronger than self-interest.The Evolution of Pro-Social EmotionHistorically, research on emotion has emphasized the intrapersonal characteristics and functions of emotion, addressing such questions as: What is the experience of emotion? How does emotion influence judgment? Advocates of a social functional approach assume that emotions enable individuals to respond adaptively to the problems and opportunities that define human social living, from care-giving to status negotiation, and have begun to address how emotions shape social interactions, relationships, and roles. This work is guided by the notion that these emotions are important commitment devices, motivating pro-social, other-oriented action in the face of self-interest.For example, we have documented the nonverbal display of love and how it covaries with oxytocin release in the bloodstream, that humans can communicate emotions like gratitude and compassion with one second touches to a stranger’s forearm, that a region of the autonomic nervous system is centrally involved in pro-social positive emotions, and that awe expands the self to more communal conceptions. We have begun to understand the emotion of awe, which is elicited by appraisals that the self is in the presence of something vast and the perceived need to accommodate one’s current beliefs to new knowledge or insights, which promotes curiosity and humility. We have learned that awe is readily conveyed in brief vocalizations, and facial muscle movements. We have started to look at how laughter relates to altruism and generosity. We have documented how people who report the trait-like tendency to experience compassion show an elevated profile of vagal tone, see common humanity with others, and are more likely to engage in altruistic actions and be trusted and trusting of others in relationships.Power, Social Class, and HierarchiesPower is central to social interaction and social structure. In a theoretical synthesis published in Psychological Review, my colleagues and I have argued that elevated power, defined by control, freedom, and the absence of social constraint, lead to approach-related behaviors and relatively automatic thought; reduced power, in contrast, increases inhibition and vigilance. In the past three years my students and I have published empirical tests of several of the propositions outlined in this theory. We have documented how increased power: (1) reduces the accuracy with which we judge others’ emotions; (2) reduces felt compassion toward others who suffer; and (3) alters emotions. We have offered two new theoretical extensions in our thinking about power. The first concerns who obtains power, and here we have argued, based on several years of data, that power is afforded to those who advance the interests of the collective, and not to those who act in selfish ways. And second, we have begun to explore how socio economic status operates in similar (and different ways) to power dynamics.LINKhttp://greatergood.berkeley.edu/ 

[twc]

Dave B wrote:

That was a bit of a touched raw nerve reaction.

No, a normal response when there are “none so poor to do him reverence”.Consider the trashing of Marx’s scientific credentials a generation ago, culminating in Steedman’s effective influential demolition job, Marx After Sraffa [1977].Socialism had its marxian foundations ripped from underneath.  It was “proven” mathematically—and none among the dwindling tribe of marxian mathematical economists could disprove it for 30 years, try as they might—that marxian value, surplus-value and rate-of-exploitation could all be mathematically negative, and worse they could still be negative when profits were positive!That was a genuine paradise for putdowns of Marx’s scientific credentials.So, in the case of your throwaway putdown of Engels’s scientific credentials:I’m genuinely interested in seeing an actual Engels reference that substantiates your claim that he endorses Lamarkianism,I’d genuinely like to comprehend what motivates your own putdown of Engels’s scientific credentials.

[stuartw2112]

Fascinating stuff from Alan there. The idea that emotions influence our behaviour and that emotions are an evolved mechanism, ie are determined by genes, ' seems entirely uncontroversial. Perhaps that kind of talk will seem more convincing to people than "genes for" language, even though they're saying the same thing.

[Author]

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