posted
I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other day about which human traits were genetic and which were culturaly learned so to speak. We started talking about war and fighting and competition and the human drive for whatever. We both agreed this was a genetic trait, the struggle for survival and all.
My friend said that he wondered if given a different set of circumstances how differently we could have developed. Like if things were different, humanity would never fight or wage war or have this will to dominate. His belief was that those traits were only inherent to us because of the conditions on this planet and that evolution could occur in drastically different ways.
I disagree completely. I said that evolution isn't possible without competition. It's because of that competition and battle for resources that evolution occurs. Because if there wasn't a struggle for resources there'd be no selective advantage of one trait over another trait. There'd be some evolution do to climate changes and the like. But in a utopian world with unlimitted resources there'd be no competition leading to the selection of traits that helped in survival, like claws, or strong teeth, or fast legs, or a brain, or moevement at all, in fact, I don't think we'd even get that far. Would skin or muscles or organs or anything evolve without that competition?
So for instance, I feel that if there was an alien species that we met that did not wage war it'd be because they had evolved passed that, culturally, possibly genetically too(i don't know if that's possible. can a gene for a particular trait sort of de-evolve when its' advantage isn't necessary anymore? Or would it always stay there, latent, waiting for it to become an advantage again?). Anyway, they would have to have gone through it in their history. No matter how different the conditions for life were, whether they were a sea creature, or 500 feet tall with 12 arms, or a silicon based life form...regardless of how different their realities would be from ours...all sentient creatures that develop, come about through genetic evolution, random mutation and natural selection, in response to competition for resources, resources that allow them to replicate more effeciantly than other creatures.
He disagreed with me. We came to a standstill. He used a huge whale as an example. Other than humans, who just started hunting huge whales recently in our history, mammoth whales don't have much to worry about in terms of competition. They eat what they want and don't have to worry about predators. He said, lets say they were the creatures that happened to evolve into intelligent sentient creatures on this planet. Culturally they would be completely different, without our tendency to fight and control. And I said the whole thing isn't valid because those whales would never have come about in the first place without competition.
Am I wrong? Evolution as I understand it can't really work the way he is trying to use it.
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Boon
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I think the fact that we are intelligent means we don't have to be as fast/large/whatever to survive, so didn't evolve to be.
posted
Once a species would achieve sapience, evolution is no longer a matter of natural selection, but brings about a certain degree of artificial selection. We have certainly done so (ie. with domesticated animals). At that point, the possibility of artificially selecting for less agressive traits would arise. I'm not sure, though, how successful that could be in a context of limited resources where such a program would be anything less than fully inclusive. If a modern nation set about to modifying its own people's levels of aggression, a more aggressive neighbor would probably annex them.
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posted
Boon, but we do. Maybe not large with poisonous claws. But we had to evade predators and catch food. The only difference with us is that our brains developed and we learned to use tools and so on. But I don't think that quite affects what i was saying. Regardless of the way in which we survived and thrived, we survived, and as a result of competition.
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Claiming genetic bases for various specific human behaviors has a long history of being discredited again and again when examined scientifically without bias. The scientific evidence supports the idea that human behavior is a very fluid thing, responding to shaping by upbringing, social norms, and also by self-direction and visualization. We don't have to play out the scripts we are given, which is the most awesome thing about being human.
There has been an awful lot of pop-anthropology that comes up with just-so stories which seem plausible on the surface, and then with no data or experimental evidence whatsoever, declares them to be factual. Desmond Morris is one of the worst of these, but there are many. Aggression and competition are natural things, since they occur throughout nature, but this doesn't mean they're inevitable things. There are many species that aren't aggressive, for instance Bonobo chimps, as well as nonagressive human societies, like certain Pacific islanders.
I also want to point out how cooperation is at least as important as competition to survival and possibly moreso, but that's for another post.
posted
I have trouble imagining an aquatic civilization. Maybe I put too much emphasis on tool use, but....
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quote:Originally posted by WntrMute: Once a species would achieve sapience, evolution is no longer a matter of natural selection, but brings about a certain degree of artificial selection.
There's something slightly wrong with this, at least in my mind. Even before sapience, there is something more than just natural selection going on. There is sexual selection, which quite a few times doesn't favor what you would expect to be favored in nature. I'd say this sexual selection is sort of like an artificial selection. A trait is being selected for which may or may not be the most beneficial to the species.
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posted
I think Tatiana is right about the difficulties inherent in trying to tease out nature from nurture (and vice versa) when discussing human behavior.
On aggression being related to competition, so is fright/flight. We've replayed a sad scenario throughout the history of discovery and colonization (or even cultural contact) in island chains around the world. These virtually closed environments often ended up with no major predators and the endemic species had no instinctive flight response. The result upon introduction of man or certain domestic Western species has been annihilation of the less competitive or wary native species. The dodo never learned to run or even defend itself because it was never faced with a predator big enough to harm it. Until hunters arrived.
Also, it's worth noting that many of these non-aggresive species have very low reproductive rates. The thinking is that without competition for resources, their reproductive strategy had to change or they would overrun their own habitat and die out from, essentially, cyclic boom and bust population numbers.
Back to the original question, if I were to guess, I'd say that you and not your friend has the closer sense of what would happen and what is possible, though.
One of the essential tenets of evolution is that natural selection will favor the plants and animals that are better at exploiting their environment. If there are other similar animals around, they are also in competition. That does include members of their own species, by the way. As resources become scarce, that can become a serious selection pressure.
Other selection pressures are a play, however, and should not be ignored. If an exploitable resource is available but going unused, there is a selection pressure favoring life forms that could use it. If there are predators around, there are selection pressures to develop offensive and defensive capabilities (running, camoflage, endogenous poisons, throwaway body parts, etc.)
All sorts of selective pressures combine to "define" what the most adaptive species would be in any given environment
AND, the environment (and thus those selective pressures) change.
What we see as species today are the ones that are currently the best fit for the pressures that have shaped their species IN THE PAST. That means, of course, that it's entirely possible to see completely maladaptive behaviors in current species and still have that explainable by evolutionary processes. I submit that man's aggression is, at least in part, such a thing. I wouldn't go so far as to say that human aggression is a fully genetically determined behavior. In fact, we know there's a range of aggressive tendencies and some of them are genetically based, but others are trained. And we know that a certain amount of aggression is adaptive, otherwise people with a "competitive streak" would not succeed in our world. Yet they do.
The part I think is maladaptive is the tendency to use violence as one of the primary expressions of our aggression or inter-species competition. Others would disagree with me. E.O. Wilson, for example, would probably point to the same set of facts and say that violence is one of the ways we compensate for having a too-high birth rate as a species -- he'd be talking about "species-level" selection, not selection that works at the individual level.
Sorry to ramble. I love this topic. Thanks for starting the thread!
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I find it fascinating too. I've been reading some Richard Dawkins recently and and I'm engrossed by the topic. I find myself working it into conversations on a regular basis. I don't even try to...it just always comes up somehow!
quote:I think the fact that we are intelligent means we don't have to be as fast/large/whatever to survive, so didn't evolve to be.
oh, Boon, were you just saying that the selection pressure's for becoming intelligent aren't the same kind of selection pressures for becoming large?
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posted
Natural selection doesn't disappear with sapience; in a certain way of thinking about it, any selection is natural selection. It refers to any selection component that influences genetic perpetuation. "Natural" means that external influence is not scientifically necessary for its continuance -- and human activity is most definitely internal to the system, we're as much animals as the rest.
One of the most fascinating areas of evolutionary research is with cultural behaviors (not just in humans) as evolutionary advantages: the perpetuation of the group, rather than the individual; of the related genetics, rather than your own.
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Aggression and competition are natural things, since they occur throughout nature, but this doesn't mean they're inevitable things. There are many species that aren't aggressive, for instance Bonobo chimps, as well as nonagressive human societies, like certain Pacific islanders.
