Ch. 1: Apes in the Family

Ophelia · Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 9:24 am Post subject:

Chris wrote:

DWill · Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2008 4:09 pm Post subject:

I've come to this book late. It's certainly much different in approach and tone from the similarly titled book some of us are also reading. We can marvel at our physical relationship to fish, but have a hard time developing much fellow-feeling with them! Not so with apes, as De Waal shows us skillfully.

De Waal's and Shubin's intents are similar, though, in their locating the origins in other animals of traits we might otherwise assume to be ours alone.

What I cannot explain about the empathy topic others have commented on, is how empathy would develop, how it could come about that an "empathic variant" of a primate appeared in the first place. Can anyone help me out with this? It seems we're talking about something far different from the bones in a fish's fin. Empathy, after all, is just what we call the trait we observe in people (the phenotype). What is it genetically, and how did it appear on the scene? Maybe it appeared in phases somehow as the complex eye did, or maybe it was at first a side-effect of some other variant. It doesn't seem sufficient as explanation just to point out that we can see caring behavior increasing in animals as we move forward in evolution, and that eventually this caring behavior becomes that ability to know what a fellow creature is feeling. This is a description but not an explanation. Of course empathy can be assumed to increase the rate of survival, but the question is still going begging, as far as I see. Have we reached the limits of our current knowledge with this kind of question, or is there something I'm missing?
DWill

Saffron · Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2008 10:15 pm Post subject:

DWill wrote:

tarav · Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 5:01 pm Post subject: Apes are not Monkeys

The media, including some documentaries, constantly refer to chimps as monkeys. Since this is a mission of mine, I thought I'd point out how well De Waal explains the difference between apes and monkeys. The bottom of p 13 does a good job! Yay!

DWill · Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 11:26 am Post subject:

[quote="Saffron]
I can see how mammals that better tolerate their offspring would be more successful and therefore tolerance would be selected. Over time higher and higher levels of tolerance would become outright attentiveness and eventually develop into being able to anticipate need. Now it's just a short hop to empathy. [/quote]

Well, maybe in evolutionary time, the "hop" to empathy took a few thousand generations, but I see what you mean. Right now, I'm puzzling over something that has never occurred to me to question, and that I suppose is this matter of the randomness of variants that may appear. Having a variant of greater empathy appear at random is hard for me to grasp, and I don't see any scientific explanation offered for it, if by scientific we might mean an explanation of the regularities of a process. To call the appearance of variations random is to say that science doesn't have a handle on the deeper workings that might show order underlying an apparent randomness. Or, it might be to say that science, as practiced at least, cannot reach into this phenomenon because it may have an inherently unpredictable element of spontaneity.
DWill

Robert Tulip · Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 9:09 pm Post subject:

There is a story in today's edition of The Economist illustrating the evolutionary basis of exchange behaviour. The endowment effect: Mankind’s inner chimpanzee refuses to let go. This matters to everything from economics to law. See
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11579107

Robert Tulip · Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2008 9:12 am Post subject:

DWill · Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 11:23 pm Post subject:

Robert Tulip said:

Robert Tulip · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2008 12:56 am Post subject:

Hi DWill
This discussion of empathy opens the question of to what extent character traits are genetic or learned. The jury is still out on that, but de Waal is arguing that genetics has a bigger role than commonly understood in causing friendly behaviour. In an environment where empathetic individuals have more progeny, such as Bonobo paradise in pre-modern Congo, any genes which support this friendly tendency would increase within the population.

The evolution of humans to the biblical 'three score and ten' age shows that 70 has long been the normal life expectancy barring mishap, of which there were many more in earlier times. There is a clear adaptive explanation for human longevity, in that a mother who had living parents in a hunter-gatherer society would have more children survive. Sure, this genetic basis has been affected by modern technology, but it remains an underlying explanation for the abundance of elderly wisdom in our world Rolling Eyes

DWill · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2008 9:24 am Post subject:

Hello Robert,
There seems to be good evidence that empathy is innate. The kernel of empathy then can be 'trained up", or not, depending on the individual's culture/family. My puzzlement is over how traits like empathy occur through natural selection. I think that natural selection, though central, is not sufficient in itself, and that principles of self-organization having to do with complex systems must be at work before the selection even takes place. Not my own idea, of course; there is a growing body of work on complexity theory and self-organization. If you have time to look into Stuart Kaufmann's two most recent books, I think you might find something to like. He has a chapter in Reinventing the Sacred called "The Evolution of the Economy"--right up your alley! The difference between you and him might be that it is the principles of self-organization (or "order for free") that are similar in biological and human systems--not the manner in which forms are selected for survival. I can't travel that far with Kaufmann into the technical justifications, but I find his summary ideas to be potent and inspiring. His "mission" is to reclaim for us humans some of the ground we totally conceded to reductionistic science, reinvent the sacred, and restore a God who can be either the creator God of theism or the creativity in the universe of non-theism.

DWill

seeker · Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 7:12 pm Post subject:

"Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society."
-Richard Dawkins, The Washington Post Magazine

I had given up on this forum as being dominated by a bunch of reactionary social Darwinists, but this discussion is luring me back. I just ordered the book from Amazon. I hope I'm not too late!

Trish

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
- Charles Darwin (1809-1882)


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