{"id":2090,"date":"2010-09-26T17:03:22","date_gmt":"2010-09-26T22:03:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=2090"},"modified":"2010-09-27T07:00:59","modified_gmt":"2010-09-27T12:00:59","slug":"lycopethicus-and-carveth-read-the-genesis-of-the-hunting-hypothesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2010\/09\/26\/morality\/lycopethicus-and-carveth-read-the-genesis-of-the-hunting-hypothesis\/","title":{"rendered":"Lycopithecus and Carveth Read: The Genesis of the Hunting Hypothesis"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to the\u00a0Hunting Hypothesis<\/a>, the evolutionary transition from ape to man, including\u00a0the emergence of the physical, mental, and behavioral traits that characterize our species,\u00a0was driven by the adoption of hunting as a significant food source.\u00a0 Whether it is true or not is a matter of great interest in its own right, but perhaps of even greater interest and significance\u00a0has been the intellectual reaction to the idea.\u00a0\u00a0For several decades after it was first proposed, the\u00a0hypothesis contradicted the\u00a0ideology embraced by many intellectuals, including the community of experts in the behavioral sciences.\u00a0 This ideology, amounting to a secular religion, required the perfectibility of mankind so that he could play his assigned role in the utopias the zealots of the new religion were concocting for him.\u00a0 For this to happen, it was essential that human behavior be subject to complete control and manipulation by environment and learning, as noted by Steven Pinker<\/a> in “The Blank Slate<\/a>.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

The existence of innate human behavioral traits contradicted\u00a0this essential dogma of the faith, and became anathema.\u00a0 Any suggestion that such traits existed was resisted with all the spite and venom that the zealots of earlier religions reserved for their own heresies.\u00a0 The result was a spectacular collapse of the behavioral sciences stretching over a period of\u00a0many decades.\u00a0 An entire community of experts managed to bamboozle itself into believing\u00a0behaviorist dogmas that any teenager with a modicum of common sense could have told them were ridiculous after observing her own behavior in a crowd for a\u00a0few hours.\u00a0 It demonstrated that scientific progress is anything but inevitable in these supposedly enlightened times, and that ideological certitudes are as capable of trumping rational thought as they were in the heyday of the holy inquisition.<\/p>\n

As for the Hunting Hypothesis, an interesting explanation of human evolution that was very plausible given our history and our easily observable behavioral characteristics, it was stillborn, although it has experienced a resurrection of sorts in recent years.\u00a0 Arch-heresy that it was, any rational\u00a0examination of\u00a0it according to the scientific\u00a0method was out of the question.\u00a0 Its proponents were vilified, their work bowdlerized, and eventually many of them became scientific unpersons, their names no longer mentioned in the halls of the elect.\u00a0 Perhaps the first to come up with a coherent\u00a0theory of the hunting transition was Carveth Read, a professor of logic and the mind at the University College London.\u00a0 His Wikipedia entry<\/a>\u00a0amounts to\u00a0just two\u00a0brief sentences.\u00a0 Experts in human behavior would have done well to pay more attention to him.\u00a0 Today they are “discovering” things he wrote about more than 90 years ago in a little book entitled, “The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions<\/a>.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read made an unhappy choice for the name of his hunting ape; Lycopithecus<\/em>, or “wolf ape.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It enabled his detractors to evoke strawman\u00a0images of werewolves and violently aggressive, bloodthirsty beasts right out of Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw<\/a>.”\u00a0 What Read actually meant by his choice of names is entirely different.\u00a0 As he put it,<\/p>\n

Moreover, when our ape first pursued game, especially big game (not being by ancient adaptation in structure and instinct a carnivore), he may have been, and probably was, incapable of killing enough prey single-handed; and, if so, he will have profited by becoming both social and cooperative as a hunter, like the wolves and dogs – in short, a sort of wolf-ape (Lycopithecus<\/em>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, the name was suggested, not by the viciousness or aggressiveness of wolves, but by their cooperative behavior.\u00a0\u00a0Read went on to\u00a0suggest that mankind’s erect gait evolved after, or concurrently with the increasing importance of meat in our diet:<\/p>\n

…the less our ancestor in his new career trusted to trees the better for him. Such simple strategy (hunting from trees) could not make him a dominant animal throughout the world; nothing could do this but the gradual attainment of erect gait adapted to running down his prey.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What had seemed obvious to Read was quickly dismissed and forgotten, until, in recent years, it was “discovered,” in the guise of persistence hunting<\/a>, suggested as the hunting strategy of Homo erectus<\/a>.\u00a0 Read the article and you’ll notice that, according to the current paradigm, a hunting lifestyle “suddenly” burst on the scene with the emergence of Homo erectus<\/em>, a species that appeared on the scene about 1.8 million years ago, but that the earlier Australopithecines were still “scavengers.”\u00a0 It’s amusing, really.\u00a0 The proponents of the bankrupt “scavenger” theories still can’t bring themselves to admit that Raymond Dart<\/a> was right about his early research into cave taphonomy, and Australopithecines were hunters too.\u00a0 Somewhere a chimpanzee must be smiling smugly as he munches on a piece of colobus monkey<\/a>.\u00a0 Read had no such delusions.\u00a0 As he puts it,<\/p>\n

In course of time they brought cudgels and stones to the encounter (little did he realize that chimpanzees do just that), and after many ages began to alter such means of offence into weapons that might be called artifacts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Remarkably, it seems that Read was somehow aware that chimpanzees occasionally eat meat, although the “experts” assured us through the middle decades of the 20th century that they were vegetarian.\u00a0 In his words,<\/p>\n

We must remember that, on the one hand, the chimpanzee is not exclusively frugivorous, and that, on the other hand, it is not likely that Man has been at any time exclusively carnivorous… Primates are known to seize and devour birds, lizards and even small mammals when chance offers an easy opportunity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One wonders when and how this “knowledge of the ancients” about the eating habits of our nearest ape relatives was lost.\u00a0 Read’s book includes interesting speculation on how the transition might originally have occurred:<\/p>\n

It is generally admitted that our ancestor was a large anthropoid – possibly more gregarious than others, possibly more apt to live upon the ground; but neither of these suppositions is requisite. He was adapted to his life, as the chimpanzee and gorilla are to theirs: in which, probably, they have gone on with little change for ages. But into his life a disturbing factor entered – the impulse to attack, hunt and eat animals, which extensively replaced his former peaceable, frugivorous habit. The cause of this change may have been a failure in the supply of his usual diet, or an “accidental variation” of appetite. Not a great number need have shared in the hunting impulse; it is enough that a few should have felt it, or even one… Is it not likely to have occurred often, and with many failures? Similarly, of the resulting changes: the differentiation of our hands and feet is only an advance upon what you see in the gorilla; as for our ground-life, can the adult male gorilla be fairly called arboreal? Several primates use unwrought weapons; most of them lead a gregarious life, to which our own is a return; they are cooperative at least in defence; like many other animals, they communicate by gestures and inarticulate vocal cries. Cooperative hunting, indeed seems to be new in our order; but since wolves and dogs, or their ancestors, fell in with it some time or other, why should it be beyond the capacity of apes?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Apparently primates’ use of unwrought weapons was another bit of “ancient knowledge” that was somehow lost in the decades after Read published his book.\u00a0 How much more plausible does his hypothesis now seem with what we have learned (or, perhaps, “rediscovered”) about cooperative hunting and\u00a0the use of weapons in chimpanzees?<\/p>\n

Read did not share the collective delusion of the blank slate, already in full career in his day;<\/p>\n

That hunting came first is a true intuition: and, to understand the development of human nature, we need only refer the hunting-life back to the very origin of the human stock… So I point our (a) that man, in character, is more like a wolf or dog than he is like any other animal; and (b) that for the forming of a pack there was a clear ground in the advantage to be obtained by cooperative hunting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and<\/p>\n

To civilisation we are, for the most part, merely accommodated by experience, education, tradition and social pressure. A few people seem to be adapted to civilized life from their birth, and others to the slavish life; but all inherit, more or less manifestly, the nature of the hunter and warrior. This is a necessary basis of general and social psychology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to the high priests of the blank slate, wolves could no more have had a “character” than man.\u00a0 For recent research that not only they, but many other animals have a “character,” including traits analogous to moral behavior in human beings, see, for example, “Wild Justice<\/a>; the Moral Lives of Animals,” by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce.<\/p>\n

Far from entertaining the crude, “nature red in tooth and claw” ideas attributed to him, Read suggested that the transition to the hunting lifestyle was responsible for many of the traits we associate with moral behavior;<\/p>\n

We are left to speculate about the earliest growth of magnanimity, friendliness, compassion, general benevolence and other virtues… Several further considerations may be offered to account for the growth of what we call humanity… Friendliness and the disposition to mutual aid are so useful to a hunting-pack that is not merely seasonal but permanent (as I take ours to have been), both to individuals and to the pack as a whole,… that we may suppose natural selection to have favored the growth of effective sympathy… But since in individuals our complex nature varies in all directions, and amongst the rest in the direction of benevolence; and since any organ or quality that varies is apt to continue to do so, and may go on varying even beyond the limits of biological utility; why in human life may not this happen with benevolence?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In retrospect, Read’s hypotheses about Lycopithecus<\/em> seem a great deal more plausible than the infantile dogmas of the behaviorists.\u00a0 It is interesting to note that, writing as a logician, he also had some surprisingly modern ideas about what we now call “confirmation bias”:<\/p>\n

Every desire fixes attention upon beliefs favorable to it, and upon any evidence favorable to them, and diverts attention from conflicting beliefs and considerations. Thus every desire readily forms about itself a relatively isolated mass of beliefs, which resists comparison and, therefore…, does not recognize the principle of contradiction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Such were the thoughts of a man now forgotten, who wrote just before the lights finally flickered out and died in the behavioral sciences.\u00a0 His career and ideas are a cautionary tale to anyone who believes in the inevitability of scientific progress.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the dogmatists haven’t gone anywhere.\u00a0 They’ve merely been forced out of one of their favorite redoubts.\u00a0 Their busy redefining reality even as we speak.\u00a0 It may no longer be anathema to speak of innate human behavior, but, according to the new paradigm now emerging, our behavioral traits can still be manipulated to create a world of universal goodness,\u00a0in accordance with the most up-to-date definitions of “good,” ushering in a future of “human flourishing.”\u00a0\u00a0Anyone who objects that this rosy vision might not be entirely plausible in view of what we know about the innate in human behavior is dismissed as a “reductionist,” a pejorative term that has been introduced to replace its cruder precursors such as “racist” or “fascist.”\u00a0 Those who don’t necessarily fancy “flourishing”\u00a0as defined by today’s crop of leftist ideologues would do well to remember Carveth Read.\u00a0 Secular religions\u00a0can be\u00a0quite as effective as their more traditional cousins at suppressing the truth.\u00a0 They did it in the recent past, and they can easily do\u00a0it again.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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According to the\u00a0Hunting Hypothesis, the evolutionary transition from ape to man, including\u00a0the emergence of the physical, mental, and behavioral traits that characterize our species,\u00a0was driven by the adoption of hunting as a significant food source.\u00a0 Whether it is true or not is a matter of great interest in its own right, but perhaps of even … Continue reading “Lycopithecus and Carveth Read: The Genesis of the Hunting Hypothesis”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[48,6,28,5,66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-good-and-evil","category-human-nature","category-morality","category-psychology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-xI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2090"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2098,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2090\/revisions\/2098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}