Are weapons and poetry blind “body-external” mutations?
Many a woman in ”labour” would surely prefer to be a chimpanzee wife.
What the h …is your crazy meditator now driving at?
Once upon a time man had the same brain size as chimps. Now ours are three times bigger. Then a new child painlessly slipped out of its mother. Now the big brain causes her a lot of pain. So, why not change? Especially as this would have one more advantage. Chimps are truly potent machos, three times as strong as modern men. So why shouldn’t the woman dream of a strong chimp instead of a brainy weakling?
I’ll leave such dreams to the dreamers. My serious problem is to understand how blind natural selection has chosen men with big heads and weaker bodies than their closest relatives and rivals. I will suggest – seriously – that most of what we call “human culture” is but a new form of biological mutations.
On the 16th of February this year a chimp, who had been a nice family member for fourteen years, went berserk and destroyed the face of a woman. Had a man tried to stop it, he would most likely have been killed. Now the chimp was killed. By a shot from a policei. That is a good example of what I am trying to show. The chimp had the bodily strength, the police the body-external weapon.
Normally we think of mutations as something inside our bodies. Culture, in its mental or physical forms, we see as something external, possibly as a “meme” but still something that doesn’t have to do with our bodies.
This might be a mistake. Both mental and physical tools and weapons might better be understood as united with our bodies, even if less visibly than the Egyptian combination of lions and humans into sphinxes or the Greek of horses and men into centaurs. And, which is my point, these external changes are as necessary for survival as any claws and muscles united to our bodies.
Behind us we have some three million years of different brain growth between us and the chimpanzees. If a human generation is set to 20 years, it means 150,000 generations. In less then one hundred generations, an East Asian wolf can be bread into any modern pet- or pitbull-dog. I am now talking about 1,500 times as long a period. What has happened in this long period? What does palaeo-archeology and genetic studies tell us?
At the same time as man’s head – with its intelligence or astuteness – has increased in size, his claws and teeth as well as his muscles have become smaller and weaker. While the chimps remain largely as they once wereii.
Had this been the only change in man, the strong chimps would surely have become the dominant animal. A few surviving group of humans might have been living behind bars in some Zoological Garden, amusing chimp children. Why isn’t it so? Why is it just the opposite?
The weapons our human brains have developed to kill our enemies at a distance have been as important in the struggle for survival as any muscular arms on a world champion in boxing. External bodily elements have replaced parts of our bodies, permitting old muscles, claws and teeth to become smaller and weaker.
Have not these outer changes been as important for mankind’s fabulous reproductive success over the latest ten millennia as any inner changes in our DNA? If so, shouldn’t we look upon them as “body-external mutations”.
To me, this hypothesis seems quite justified when it comes to comparisons between the chimps and us. But then, how is it for the latest ten millennia, when man’s struggles for survival increasingly have been against other men? Isn’t my hypothesis still valid?
As between animals and men, different degrees of IQ in different human groups or Superbrainsiii may result in different tools and weapons. May not these differences, too, have been of importance for victories and defeat in the internecine human struggles for reproductive success? Are not very small differences in the weapons of different human groups as important as once any small differences in muscular strength between man and chimps? May not the body-external mutations even help to explain surprisingly fast genetic mutations in the latest 40,000 years? iv
Isn’t my hypothesis, that also the body-external cultural tools and weapons are forms of blind biological mutations, giving reproductive success, well justified?
Between us and the chimps I see only one difference of true importance: with their small brains the chimps would never have been able to commit a suicidal extinction of their whole species. Not “thanks to” but “due to” our bigger brains, we humans now are!
This being the case, might we not understand ourselves a bit better if we, instead of worshipping science and technology as a panacea for everything, looked upon that form of “progress” as a blind biological body-external mutation process?
adler.karlsson@capri.it
www.philosophicalpark.org
i Bryan Walsh, “Why the Stamford Chimp attacked”, TIME-CNN, Febr. 18th. 2009.
ii At least one serious study has shown an ”Evolutionary trade-off between weapons and testes”,
Smaller testes, as in men versus chimps, might be traded for with bigger weapons!
iii L W Simmons and D. J Emlen, PNAS Oct. 31, 2006, p. 16346. On Superbrains, see my The Biological Origin of Evil. Arena, Malmö, 2008, p.83.
iV John Hawks et. al. ”Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution.” PNAS Dec. 26, 2007, p. 20753.