with Arthur Noll and Chris Lucas
Arthur Noll writes:
People are interdependent, social beings. We do not, and cannot, live as the independent tiger, or orangutan, coming together only to mate briefly, all child care and education provided by the mother.
This has seemed obvious to me, and probably it is obvious to most, but it is such an important principle to base further observations on, and logically it is often ignored in the present scheme of things, so I think we should look at the reasons. Let’s start with your naked body. Can you manage to clothe and feed and shelter this body, with no hands touching any article except your own hands? If you can make your own tools and live independently for just a few weeks or months, this is interesting, but of course real independence would be a lifetime of this, a reproducing lifetime, so it does fall considerably short of the mark. Additionally, it is an interesting thing that we are communicating, I have written and you are reading this paper. Independent organisms don’t behave like this, if you were independent, your only concern for me should be to tell me to get out of your way, or that you want to mate, and you need no language beyond what the tigers and orangutans use for this. I have heard people say, that they could live independently if they chose. To those few who feel that way, well, you haven’t chosen that path if you are reading this, so if you want to choose it now, then I think you ought to take off your society made things and go. We will send a biologist to study how you live – if you live.
Next question, is a male- female unit capable of independence? The answer is quite important to the issue of reproduction.
I have never heard of this being done, and I don’t believe it can be done. Working together, a man and woman with the proper education might make primitive tools and cover some basic needs, if resources are abundant. But wherever resources are abundant, you are going to find competition. Predators can be a serious problem with just primitive weapons, and just two people, one of which might be pregnant or holding an infant. It is true that most large predators are afraid of human beings at the present time, but animals of all kinds eventually test the limits. Domestic animals can be very sensitive about electric fences, for example. You can turn off the fence for weeks, after they learn about wires giving shocks. But they eventually test and learn, and are out. You would not likely find it workable to stay together all the time, either, and the one carrying the child would be alone and vulnerable. And of course, human predators working as a pack, a social group, certainly exist and are the most powerful threat of all. While fantasies are common about individuals and couples escaping social groups, the reality is different. Groups of people have made the rules for individuals for a long time.
It is interesting to note that walking on two legs has not been all that uncommon in the history of life, but I can think of no other species that has attempted pregnancy on two legs. Two legged creatures have always been egg layers, or marsupials, have never attempted the balancing act of a pregnancy on two legs. I think it is only possible within a social group.
Further problems are having very little backup for minor sprains or illness. Loneliness can be a big problem, even for couples, as most of us eventually crave other people in our lives.
The genetic and archaeological evidence indicates that we split off from chimpanzees, which are social creatures, and that we stayed social.
Chris Lucas writes:
Arthur you wrote: “But wherever resources are abundant, you are going to find competition.” Yet neo-Darwinism says the opposite, only when there is scarcity is there competition, after all if there is enough for all then animals don’t squabble (that is not to say that there are not many ‘sub-animal’ humans that do so for reasons of ‘abstract’ greed !).
Arthur Noll
Yes, I wrote those words, and I still believe them to be true. The problem, I think, is time frame. Competition is practically a given. It seldom takes much time for predators to converge on a lush area, and use it and reproduce on it. In less lush areas, I might travel long distances before I see other humans, or other large predators. The scarcity itself becomes competition to my continued living. But where resources are abundant, it won’t be long before I find serious competition.
The point I was making when I wrote this, was that people are not independent. It is pretty easy for people to see that they couldn’t live alone in a desolate area, with scattered game and plant life, scattered water. I was addressing the myth that it was possible to be independent anywhere. So I wrote, “Where resources are abundant, you will find competition”. And that is true. You will.
On other matters, I do agree with the problems of reciprocity. My feeling is that we need to live by the model of an individual body, and figure the energy efficiency and sustainability of what we do, and then freely give and take within those limits, and not worry about specific exchanges between individuals. Otherwise, no matter how it is done, the accounting becomes a tremendous drain by itself, and people are always either left out, or given far more than they need.
Chris Lucas
I take your point that animals (and people) will gravitate to areas that are abundant in resources (which is itself a strategy to reduce selective pressures), but it is still a fact I think that the only reason they compete is because there is not enough to go round *at that location* (due to everyone converging there !). Like most issues in the area of complex systems there is more than one factor involved in a full explanation – in sparse areas we compete with nature, in abundant ones with each other instead 😉 There is a balance here between the chaos of random natural fluctuations and the stability of static human resource needs, the system self-organizes so that the problems of the one balances the problems of the other! People’s tolerance varies on many value dimensions, so we see a spread of ‘optima’ from isolated hermits to city billionaires…
I certainly agree with your treatment of the myth of independence, and it seems to be the case that in sparse areas people co-operate of necessity (they have a commonality of interest), showing I think the power of synergy to get a better quality-of-life out of limited resources. Thus even when resources are relatively abundant the same efficiency gain could be expected, except that in this case we seem to have a conflict of interest that often stops us working together – the problem of the commons ! We need to find a effective way to overcome that problem still, or any synergic society will soon degenerate back to a adversarial one due to the inherent system dynamics (i.e. cooperation is an unstable trust-dependent state subject to infiltration by parasites).
It is perhaps this instability that leads us to generate those collections of social ‘rules’ that, well-meaning though they may be, generally serve to inconvenience the many whilst doing little to restrain those whose behaviour is suspect ! We do as a species seem to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy on such bureaucracy, accounting for and controlling trivia, in keeping people apart rather than bringing them together, of disabling rather than enabling our talents. Anything that can free those resources for better purposes would be welcome – which seems to suggest rather less ‘accounting’ rather than another layer, but we do need some method of ensuring fairness. 😉
Arthur Noll’s initial statement is a quotation from his book Harmony which is available online here. Chris Lucas is an English scientist whose work can be read here.