Some time ago, I began to suspect that we humans tend to downplay our animal capabilities and exaggerate our differences with evolutionarily close cousins, specifically primates and mammals in general. If you had been in my high school biology class in the late ’60s you would have learned that there are absolute differences that make us something more than animals:
- Language (we have it, no one else does)
- Consciousness (we can contemplate the fact of our existence, they can’t) and related emotional states
- Awareness of the past, present and future and ability to seamlessly plan across these temporal barriers
- Animals do everything by instinct, we have none (or maybe just the incest taboo)
That’s the basics and they also came with other unexamined propositions:
- Life is a struggle and only the strong survive
- We can only really act out of self interest
- Competition brings out the best in people
But the more I came to learn about evolution, genetics, the history of life and human history, especially prehistory, the more these propositions seemed flawed and incomplete.
One of the first chinks in this armor was the discovery that prehistoric people often lived many years after crippling injuries, even to the point of losing a limb. This strongly suggests that 100,000 years ago, humans were already caring for people who couldn’t entirely care for themselves. Why? And by the way, this also seems true for Neanderthals.
If the last 10,000 years of history suggests an ever-growing concentration of power among a small percentage of people, the prior 300,000 years of modern human history seems more about the slow growth of the species accompanied by a growth in the social structure of people. Put simply, if 200,000 years ago the average person might only come into contact with a few dozen people, that number slowly increased and by 50,000 years ago, we start to see things happen that could only mean contact with hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And over great distances — trade was already underway.
All of this has not gone unnoticed by evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, archeologists, and others who study these things. Recently, a new school of thought has emerged that survival of the fittest has often meant survival of the friendliest, i.e., the survival of humans (and many other species) is dependent on working out cooperation not only between humans, but between humans and other species, whether that’s domestication or mutually avoiding each other despite the lure of food.
But perhaps the discovery that most changed my thinking was the discovery of mirror neurons. Every mammal, and some other animals as well, seems capable of understanding basic things about other conspecifics (members of the same species). A dog knows when another dog is happy, aggressive and so on.
How?
There are likely multiple ways this happens, but one of the primary ways is that our brains mirror the actions of others. What? Ok, let’s see if we can unpack this.
First, when you decide to, say, wave at your friend, one part of your brain says “that’s my friend, I should say hi.” Your brain remembers that in our culture, we wave at friends. Another part of your brain gives the order to move the right muscles and you wave.
But what happens if your friend waves first?
Your brain says, oh, that’s my friend. And they’re moving their arm. Do I do that? And your brain imagines moving your arm, it remembers the exact commands it needs to issue to your arm muscles (and face and so on) and it remembers that you did that when you felt friendly toward someone. So you conclude that your friend is showing friendship.
This process happens all day every day for most people. It’s a big component of empathy, which I define as the ability to understand that another person has an independent mental life that I can grasp at least the outlines of.
Empathy is crucial to our ability to live together. It’s not just a human characteristic, either. Social animals have the same need to read their fellow conspecifics. Sheep, for example, have been shown to be able to identify at least 50 different sheep for years based on their facial anatomy. But they also can recognize the emotional state of other sheep based on their facial identity, but also their ears and other markers of mood.
At a minimum, sheep can recognize that another sheep is calm, or stressed, or in pain.
And so can we. We are still learning about what our brains do outside of our direct awareness, but it’s a lot. And its these capabilities that likely have fueled our long evolution of ever larger and more complex social groupings. In fact, the variety and complexity of our social groupings might be an under-appreciated difference between us and other primates and large mammals. And it seems clear that our brains are wired to encourage and reward this, not the least way through secreting the hormones that make us feel good around other people.
So human society is based far more, IMO, on this sort of awareness and action than on the competition for food and mates. At the least, let’s consider them equals and recognize that each has its place and time.
Much of my fiction writing has explored the value of empathy. But that’s just part of our consciousness. The time is ripe for a convergence of neurology, psychology, genetics and social sciences like economics and anthropology to try and take the next step in probing how our own minds work.
Why do we bond to some strangers, yet fear others, even when the two groups aren’t fundamentally that different? And what role does difference play in our reactions to others? When is novelty attractive and when and why is it the opposite?
What happens when we change our minds about something important? What happens when we don’t? How do we weigh the lessons of the past with the needs of the immediate and longer term futures? Why do we do things we know are harmful, whether that’s smoking cigarettes or buying a gas guzzler like a Hummer?
These are important questions a more robust form of psychology, rooted in human physiology but informed by human flexibility and resilience, might help us answer. In the meantime, I’ll plump for empathy.
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