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Sapiens - Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

#159: May - July 2018 (Non-Fiction)
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Re: Sapiens - Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

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Harry wrote:This event is an example of the sort of evidence with which Stephen Jay Gould challenged the standard model of evolution. In his popular writings is an account of rapid adaptive change driven by selection but not by mutation. In Gould's typical account, mutation is a background process more useful for genetic clocks than for speciation. If you think about it in this case it makes some sense.
In the most basic sense, selection must have something to select. Where does the initial variation come from that is selected for? I guess I have to read the article you're talking about. Do you have a link?
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Re: Sapiens - Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

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Dexter wrote:. . . And the puzzle of why the big brains, when it didn't have obvious evolutionary advantage until much later -- although I suppose in hindsight you could say that it proved effective. I remember reading an explanation -- I assume he talks more about this later, don't remember if it was him or someone else -- about how the big brains were mostly needed for navigating the social environment. I'm a little unclear on when the social environment became significantly more complex than for other animals.
This is just hypothetical, but if a slightly bigger brain improved our language ability, than there's the selection for an even bigger brain, much like the development of the eye. A primitive eye that sees a little light confers a slight advantage and leads to a more complex eye.

I would guess our social environment grew in proportion to our bigger brains. Now with the internet and computers, our culture is changing at supersonic speeds.
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Re: Sapiens - Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

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Interbane wrote:
Harry wrote:This event is an example of the sort of evidence with which Stephen Jay Gould challenged the standard model of evolution. In his popular writings is an account of rapid adaptive change driven by selection but not by mutation. In Gould's typical account, mutation is a background process more useful for genetic clocks than for speciation. If you think about it in this case it makes some sense.
In the most basic sense, selection must have something to select. Where does the initial variation come from that is selected for? I guess I have to read the article you're talking about. Do you have a link?
I have spent a few hours poking around online for something suitable. Unfortunately the topic I have picked out of my memory of my readings is not one that Gould or the discussion around him have made much of, so the essays that are "archived" for him do not include much on the topic. The closest I found was on "Hopeful Monsters", an early-ish essay in which he takes on saltation and gradualism:

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/ ... sters.html

I also found some general info on variation of copy numbers of genes, a popular topic in biology it seems, but not any reference within SJG essays on line.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920192/

My books of SJG essays are in boxes with hundreds of other books, so I am not going to re-read them to try to find the right material, as enjoyable as that would be. Too much unpacking and repacking required, I'm afraid. But I am plowing through his "Structure of Evolutionary Theory" in Google books, which unfortunately omits bunches of pages as a paywall. If I find something helpful, I will get back to you on it.
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Re: Sapiens - Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

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DWill wrote:. . . I also wonder whether it's true that homo was just scraping by 150,000 years ago, as Harari says. A population of a million doesn't seems that shabby when you take into account that human bands would need large territories. Different species of homo becoming extinct doesn't necessarily indicate that the niche of this genus lacked opportunity or was under particular stress.
One of the more interesting tidbits in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel was that for eons of time, early humans lived with almost no change whatsoever. That every early human lived the same as their fathers . . . and their fathers before . . . and their fathers before . . . for millions of years. It's interesting to consider this remarkable period of stasis. But then things began to change with the advent of tools (and bigger brains), which itself took millions of years. Harari points to the beginnings of our culture as when early sapiens began to stand out from the multitudes of other animals. It’s as good a place of demarcation as any, I suppose.
DWill wrote:. . . What did you all think of Harari's idea about the origin of our fears and anxieties? I can't see that our relatively sudden vault to the top of the food chain caused us not to be able to develop the confidence and aplomb that Harari says other apex predators have. Nice try, but our anxieties must have something to do with being too smart for our own good.
This was an interesting point of speculation, I thought, that our rise to the top of the food chain happened so fast that we are like a “banana republic dictator, full of fears and anxieties over our position.” Dawkins has said that we are are perfectly evolved for how conditions were 10,000 or 20,000 years ago. With so many dangers out there, our anxieties were appropriate and kept us on our toes (and more likely to remain in the gene pool). Today those anxieties don’t make as much sense. As such they are vestiges of a bygone era. I suppose Harari is being a bit over-simplistic with the banana republic dictator analogy. Though certainly our violent past (and present) does perhaps suggest that were are an insecure species.

Something else Harari said struck me as a bit overstated. The fact that humans are born underdeveloped means that we can be molded into just about any shape. As Harari says, “they can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving.”

While there must be some truth to this, the idea that humans are a blank slate has been shown in recent years to be much less true than once believed. We are steered by genetics and our evolutionary (psychology) heritage to a surprising degree. This was the subject of Pinker’s book: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. I’m sure Harari will discuss evolutionary psychology in much detail.

I’m really enjoying Sapiens so far. It’s quite engaging and accessible. I’m ready to dive in.
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Re: Sapiens - Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

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geo wrote:
DWill wrote:. . . What did you all think of Harari's idea about the origin of our fears and anxieties? I can't see that our relatively sudden vault to the top of the food chain caused us not to be able to develop the confidence and aplomb that Harari says other apex predators have. Nice try, but our anxieties must have something to do with being too smart for our own good.
This was an interesting point of speculation, I thought, that our rise to the top of the food chain happened so fast that we are like a “banana republic dictator, full of fears and anxieties over our position.” Dawkins has said that we are are perfectly evolved for how conditions were 10,000 or 20,000 years ago. With so many dangers out there, our anxieties were appropriate and kept us on our toes (and more likely to remain in the gene pool).
Going on Safari in Kenya brings this point home. Lions, and even cheetahs, pretty much ignore the obnoxious Land Rovers that buzz around them. They will look straight at you and blink their indifference.

Given the stuff I heard not long ago about chimps organizing coalitions of rivals, I suspect what we are afraid of has mainly been other humans from pretty early on. Yes, Harari is right that we don't have the apex predator's confidence, but the Masai still kill lions with spears if the lions are raiding livestock. Learned confidence.
geo wrote:Something else Harari said struck me as a bit overstated. The fact that humans are born underdeveloped means that we can be molded into just about any shape. As Harari says, “they can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving.”

While there must be some truth to this, the idea that humans are a blank slate has been shown in recent years to be much less true than once believed. We are steered by genetics and our evolutionary (psychology) heritage to a surprising degree. This was the subject of Pinker’s book: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
Sounds like an interesting book. I like Pinker's stuff. And I think it's a good point. Much as I agree with his "Better Angels" thesis that we have gradually gotten more civilized, it is a good idea to keep in mind that a lot of our nature is inflexible. The barbarian sleeps below the surface, and it doesn't take all that much to throw us back into dog-eat-dog antagonisms.
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Re: Sapiens - Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

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Interbane wrote:
Harry wrote:This event is an example of the sort of evidence with which Stephen Jay Gould challenged the standard model of evolution. In his popular writings is an account of rapid adaptive change driven by selection but not by mutation. In Gould's typical account, mutation is a background process more useful for genetic clocks than for speciation. If you think about it in this case it makes some sense.
In the most basic sense, selection must have something to select. Where does the initial variation come from that is selected for? I guess I have to read the article you're talking about. Do you have a link?
I’ve been thinking about this for the last couple of days. I suspect Gould was right about mutation serving as more of a background process, but the story of evolution has changed a lot since Gould, hasn't it? The theory has become much more complex. Genomes are known to be more plastic and responsive to environmental changes, which actually goes along with what Gould was saying. Maybe he will be proved correct on this notion. I came across this article about Adaptive Mutation Theory, which isn’t widely accepted, but there does seem to be a mechanism that allows for mutations to take hold in times of stress, allowing the organism to adapt and survive. Dwarfism would be a simple example of an emergent property of evolution, though I’m not sure how mutation fits into this picture.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/beating- ... -20170816/

I see sort of a parallel in our own early history, which Harare discusses in Part I. Early humans tended to live in small bands and roam constantly in search of food. Their movements were influenced by the seasons and migratory patterns of animals they hunted.
They usually travelled back and forth across the same home territory, an area of between several dozen and many hundreds of square miles. Occasionally bands wandered outside their turf and explored new lands, whether due to natural calamities, violent conflicts, demographic pressures or the initiative of a charismatic leader.
So early humans would only jump from their home turf when they had to, under duress. It is likely that many of the wandering bands came to a bad end. They may not have found food or wandered into territory occupied by other humans. But those who survived pushed the frontier of where humans could live, and paved the way for homo Sapiens to eventually dominate the planet. The ability to adapt to changing circumstances must be a very important component of evolution and one that is not really well understood.
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Re: Sapiens - Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

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geo wrote:
DWill wrote:. . . I also wonder whether it's true that homo was just scraping by 150,000 years ago, as Harari says. A population of a million doesn't seems that shabby when you take into account that human bands would need large territories. Different species of homo becoming extinct doesn't necessarily indicate that the niche of this genus lacked opportunity or was under particular stress.
One of the more interesting tidbits in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel was that for eons of time, early humans lived with almost no change whatsoever. That every early human lived the same as their fathers . . . and their fathers before . . . and their fathers before . . . for millions of years. It's interesting to consider this remarkable period of stasis. But then things began to change with the advent of tools (and bigger brains), which itself took millions of years. Harari points to the beginnings of our culture as when early sapiens began to stand out from the multitudes of other animals. It’s as good a place of demarcation as any, I suppose.
Hi geo. I'm enjoying the book, but unfortunately it's not a feel-good read for us Sapiens. Hariri does what non-specialists are sometimes good at--looking at the bigger picture and not being so cautious about assertions. It will make for good discussion. I will be inactive for a few weeks though, shortly.

I'm not completely convinced that a cognitive revolution is needed to explain the victory of sapiens. Harari himself says that we know very little about early human groups, so it seems to me possible that normal, slow evolution accounted for the advanced cognitive abilities that we assume enabled sapiens to win. Harari agrees with the experts who have said that something special must have occurred 70,000 years ago, though no one knows why or how that happened. Regardless, Harari's contribution seems to be that the specific ability that put sapiens over the top was the ability to create fictions. I haven't heard anyone say this before. Usually we hear about bigger brains leading to better tools (although neanderthals are said to have had even bigger brains) or the more focused social cooperation of sapiens. But the ability to create non-existent entities he identifies as something new and revolutionary. This ability is so much a part of our being "human" that we can't conceive of humans who may have lacked it, but Harari seems sure about this, and it's intriguing. I can see how acquiring this ability would have allowed sapiens to take social organization to a new level.
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Re: Sapiens - Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

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DWill wrote:I'm not completely convinced that a cognitive revolution is needed to explain the victory of sapiens. Harari himself says that we know very little about early human groups, so it seems to me possible that normal, slow evolution accounted for the advanced cognitive abilities that we assume enabled sapiens to win. Harari agrees with the experts who have said that something special must have occurred 70,000 years ago, though no one knows why or how that happened. Regardless, Harari's contribution seems to be that the specific ability that put sapiens over the top was the ability to create fictions. I haven't heard anyone say this before. Usually we hear about bigger brains leading to better tools (although neanderthals are said to have had even bigger brains) or the more focused social cooperation of sapiens. But the ability to create non-existent entities he identifies as something new and revolutionary. This ability is so much a part of our being "human" that we can't conceive of humans who may have lacked it, but Harari seems sure about this, and it's intriguing. I can see how acquiring this ability would have allowed sapiens to take social organization to a new level.
Although many or most evolution changes are gradual, there are also times of rapid change—Gould's punctuated equilibrium. But I don't see why the human brain couldn't become bigger very gradually, and that our language abilities came gradually too. Harari's idea that we are the only species that can create fictions is fascinating. I told my wife last night that companies (like Peugot) don't actually exist in the world. We pretend they exist and everyone goes along with it. She looked at me like I was crazy. It's a strange concept to be sure.

I would guess that critters without our capacity for language cannot create fictions. Did the other homo species that lived 12,000 years ago have language skills to a lesser degree than Sapiens? Is that why only Sapiens are still around to talk about it?

I hope that wherever you're going, DWill, that you will soon be back.
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Re: Sapiens - Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

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geo wrote:
DWill wrote:I'm not completely convinced that a cognitive revolution is needed to explain the victory of sapiens. Harari himself says that we know very little about early human groups, so it seems to me possible that normal, slow evolution accounted for the advanced cognitive abilities that we assume enabled sapiens to win. Harari agrees with the experts who have said that something special must have occurred 70,000 years ago, though no one knows why or how that happened. Regardless, Harari's contribution seems to be that the specific ability that put sapiens over the top was the ability to create fictions. I haven't heard anyone say this before. Usually we hear about bigger brains leading to better tools (although neanderthals are said to have had even bigger brains) or the more focused social cooperation of sapiens. But the ability to create non-existent entities he identifies as something new and revolutionary. This ability is so much a part of our being "human" that we can't conceive of humans who may have lacked it, but Harari seems sure about this, and it's intriguing. I can see how acquiring this ability would have allowed sapiens to take social organization to a new level.
Although many or most evolution changes are gradual, there are also times of rapid change—Gould's punctuated equilibrium. But I don't see why the human brain couldn't become bigger very gradually, and that our language abilities came gradually too. Harari's idea that we are the only species that can create fictions is fascinating. I told my wife last night that companies (like Peugot) don't actually exist in the world. We pretend they exist and everyone goes along with it. She looked at me like I was crazy. It's a strange concept to be sure.

I would guess that critters without our capacity for language cannot create fictions. Did the other homo species that lived 12,000 years ago have language skills to a lesser degree than Sapiens? Is that why only Sapiens are still around to talk about it?

I hope that wherever you're going, DWill, that you will soon be back.
I've had that "you're crazy" look from my wife, too.

I think you must be right that this advantage of mental conceiving that Harari highlights would have been reflected in Sapiens' language. That didn't occur to me, and I don't remember Harari saying it either.

I've got this hiking bug, so my absence is just for tramping along the Appalachian Trail--northern Mass. to Penn. this time.
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Re: Sapiens - Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

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geo wrote: But the ability to create non-existent entities he identifies as something new and revolutionary. This ability is so much a part of our being "human" that we can't conceive of humans who may have lacked it,
Harari's idea that we are the only species that can create fictions is fascinating. I told my wife last night that companies (like Peugot) don't actually exist in the world. We pretend they exist and everyone goes along with it.
This is a big issue these days with the gig economy casting into doubt what is a job, what is an employer, etc. Just learned today that a lawyer is trying to sue the hell out of Facebook for being a publisher but not living up to the legal obligations of a publisher. But these types of questions have been around a long time. In the age of J.P. Morgan it was not clear what an "owner" was of a corporation. In the 80s the question of what made something a "bank" was a hot one. We learn to define our fictions more and more carefully, and technology teaches us that we weren't careful enough.

Of course we are also learning that we didn't really know what was meant by "woman" or "man." Intersex and trans people have showed up fictionality in even such apparently non-fictional categories.

Of course my favorite is money. "How does the Central Bank create money?" they ask. "They used to have to print it, but now they just put a larger number under assets in their accounts," I answer. I don't tell them that they also put a larger number under liabilities, because they haven't studied double-entry bookkeeping yet.

The truth is out there.
geo wrote:Although many or most evolution changes are gradual, there are also times of rapid change—Gould's punctuated equilibrium. But I don't see why the human brain couldn't become bigger very gradually, and that our language abilities came gradually too.
Well, I think Harari puts the time span at something like 50,000 years, which is fairly gradual if you think about it. But I have trouble believing the "single dramatic mutation" explanation. I rather suspect there was something in our behavior that required large-scale cooperation, like sending one band to wait at the bluffs for the herd to get stampeded over the edge, and it just selected at a high rate for those who could discuss the matter. You don't even have to posit starvation for the inarticulate: higher status alone is enough to give reproductive advantage.

And at some point apparently gossip began to be an advantage.
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