Language for group reaction

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I watched on YouTube, Ken LaCorte argue that the Native Americans were warlike, in his “The elephant in the room” series “What they don’t teach you about Native Americans”. The sociologist Lawrence H Keeley, made the same point more generally in his book “War before Civilization: the myth of the peaceful savage”. Jane Goodall was lauded for having faithfully recorded brutal unprovoked raids by chimpanzees on neighbouring chimp chimps.

I discussed with ChatGPT, the connection between a possible warlike tendency in the chimp-related hominins, the abrupt start of hominin brain growth from the time of Homo africanus, and the prospect that encephalization simply reflected the creation of human language over the last 2.5 million years having been driven by an abrupt change in the controlling environment from weapon-using competition with savanna predators in the savanna food chain, to weapon using competition between hominin groups.

It’s not hard to get that AI to agree with one’s argument, but I was struck that in exploring it, ChatGPT used the example of raiders cunningly planning a raid. In other words, it was the aggressors who were under adaptive pressure to develop language, they had agency. But an analogy with termites calls that into question. If we accept language as a group facility, and look for biological equivalents to human language, then termite pheromones come to my mind, maybe just from reading Eugene Marais’s “The soul of the white ant” as a youth. But with termites, the agency is provided by the aardvark digging into the nest, the workers are activated to fix the damage by chemical “commands” In other words, language as organising response.

Mod ETA: I think this is the video mentioned:

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In the book “The Faith Instinct”, Nicolas Wade makes a similar argument; making a case that humans evolved the capacity for religion (abstract concepts like Gods and shared beliefs) because religion was a good way to organize groups for warfare. Wade stops short of claiming this is proven, but heavily reference anthropology literature in support. Language obviously part of this too.

…Ken LaCorte argue that the Native Americans were warlike …

Some Native American tribes were definitely warlike, but not all. Chinese cultures were repeated conquered, and they absorbed their conquerors every time. So yes, language facilitated all sorts of groups activity, including war, but not only war.

I don’t see the need for AI here, except as a way to summarize what we already know.

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One should accept that most human cultures had and still have the capacity to be genocidal, and that pattern is observed to extend to other species. There is the ecological axiom that when two species compete for the same resources, the more dominant species will remove the other. On observance, especially with predator types, this is often seen to be not merely a passive process, but rather an active process of inter-species murder. What happens when wolves and coyotes meet? Or different species of big cats?

One can easily find graphs showing the fossil record of our earlier species thru time. The ape-like Ardipithecines were soon replaced by the Austrolopithecines who had larger brains, and signs of early stone tool use in their later forms. These were in turn replaced by members of our genus Homo, with our larger brains and varieties of stone and other tools and clear signs of rather large populations. What was behind the disappearance of the earlier smaller-brained ancestors? We don’t have a record, but the simplest hypothesis is that the ecological axiom mentioned above would have applied. Since we had the capacity to use a greater range of resources, our populations could grow to a larger size and dominate the use of those resources. That alone predicts that our smaller-brained ancestors would not be around for long. Then there is what we unfortunately see today whenever people with more advanced technology encroach upon people who lack such technologies. That often leads to genocide or at least absorption if those in the other culture if they are lucky. It does not seem a stretch that this murderous logic would apply to our ancestors when they encountered Homo erectus or the Neanderthals.

I am often amused about how the story of our evolution is depicted in science documentaries meant for the general public. For a recent example, there is the rather lovely recent series called Human on PBS. The narrator draws herself into complete contortions trying to dance around what probably happened to Homo erectus and to the Neanderthals when Homo sapiens sapiens came around, given that what usually happens is probably what actually happened to them. Were the hybrids between our sub-species and Neanderthals the result of arranged marriages? Kumbaya peace and love? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t bet on it!

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Thanks for those two interesting replies. I have Wade’s book “The faith instinct” but it didn’t make a strong impression on me. I agree that there is a faith instinct and that instincts are adaptive, but to me it seems that religions “paint the ceiling”, driven by a deep recognition that the human condition is that of living in a hierarchical system. Religions bubble up from a great deep. Other animals might well share that instinctive recognition. When wars erupt they are sometimes explicitly about religious divisions as in the European wars of the Reformation, but always, in secular wars as well, each side feels that God is on their side “Gott mit Uns” can be translated directly into English. And maybe God is at the side of the dying soldier. And the dying antelope.

That’s an interesting point about the capacity of China to absorb its invaders. The same point has been made about India, where the British Raj has been criticised for staying British. In my country, English-speaking colonials were called “sout piel” (salt penis) for straddling South Africa and the overseas “home country”. Can competition morph into symbiosis? That would create a greater “Whole” as Jan Smuts named elements in a hierarchy.

It seems to me that language is a much more biologically significant ability than religion. The Animal kingdom can be divided into us, and the dumb animals. Now its us, AI and the dumb animals. It would be wonderful if we find that using suitable transformative devices, we can have conversations with whales. But the articles on cetacean comms that I get fed, because of some past excursion, are all about the nuts and bolts of intensity, frequency etc

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It seems to me that warfare is more species specific than Mark makes out. War is ORGANISED whereas the “removal” of other species happens piecemeal. Consider army ants that move in a column until they find a food source like a house, when they spread out and devour every living thing that can’t get away. No more cockroaches. Or caged budgies. Come to think of it, only some social insects and social humans make war. If you want to get elephants to bugger off, play a recording of either angry bees or angry humans. A friend told me of a friend of his, a chicory farmer, who had bee hives around the property for pollination, one hive was accidentally knocked over, then all the bees made war, killed all the cattle, hens, and the dogs.

I suppose that was triggered by messaging between the hives, and language is how humans message, getting all worked up together, and the “nation” organis\zes itself to kill. That’s currently a real issue, I can see fever gradually tightening a grip on Europe and America, I go to BBC in the morning to see if the end of the world has happened yet. Atomic war is currently taboo but there are real madmen out there and in power.

About graphs showing human brain growth over time, Google’s AI Overview gave me these two:

A diagram of a graph AI-generated content may be incorrect.
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The graph on the left, that doesn’t have a vertical axis scale, but instead just shows a steepening curve, is sometimes drawn with the skull images embedded in the curve. The one on the right uses actual data. I had to add two “outliers” from discoveries made this century. They really spoil the logarithmic curve, especially the Flores hobbits. Their small brains have been explained in terms of island dwarfism. OK no problem then, science has explained it. But what is the real salient fact here? Is it that the hobbits were found on a small island? Or was it that they were found immediately of the East side of the Wallace line? Like, 35km away? ChatGPT told me that this proved that the hobbits could cross deep water. Suppose one re-frames the question in “clue” form: suppose that time-traveling aliens wanted to teach us about human evolution, and they planted the hobbit fossils to show us – what was their message? Seems to me, back of the class as usual, that the aliens wanted us to see that the small-brained hobbits had tried hard to keep away from competition with the large brained, warlike humans.

A similar explanation jumps out from striking fact that Naledi remains were found “impossibly” deep in a cave. They had discovered a secret, a refuge. Except that when those in the mouth of the Rising Star cave stayed too long, those who were hiding died. Maybe the secret knowledge outlived the hiders, to trap successive victims. A similar tragedy played out thousands of centuries later when a vengeful Boer commando starved out a tribe at “Makapansgat” cave, now officially renamed the “Historic Cave” and where, as you know and incidentally, the remains of 40 Au. africanus skulls have been found.

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Aren’t those the same graphs you tried to pass of the last time you were here?

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Here is a figure that I have showing the increase in cranial capacity of Hominins over time. Note that the different species can overlap, but not for long. The early Australopithicines on the far left are pretty much the same as chimpanzee brain sizes. Source: https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/09/fun-with-homini-1.html

HominCranialVol
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I just finished Suzana Herculano-Houzel’s 2016 book The Human Advantage about human brain growth in evolution. Highly recommended for some mythbusting about human brains (what makes them special etc). Her preferred potential explanation for the explosive growth of cortical neuron numbers is cooking of food, which she sees (echoing others) as basically “predigestion” and which she (echoing others) claims makes far more calories available for building and maintaining the infrastructure of the big brain.

More recently, a PNAS paper (Hominin brain size increase has emerged from within-species encephalization) addresses the very interesting question of how brain expansion happened within a species over time, versus between species. The abstract with my highlighting:

The fact that rapid brain size increase was clearly a key aspect of human evolution has prompted many studies focusing on this phenomenon, and many suggestions as to the underlying evolutionary patterns and processes. No study to date has however separated out the contributions of change through time within vs. between hominin species while simultaneously incorporating effects of body size. Using a phylogenetic approach never applied before to paleoanthropological data, we show that relative brain size increase across ~7 My of hominin evolution arose from increases within individual species which account for an observed overall increase in relative brain size. Variation among species in brain size after accounting for this effect is associated with body mass differences but not time. In addition, our analysis also reveals that the within-species trend escalated in more recent lineages, implying an overall pattern of accelerating relative brain size increase through time.

The paper isn’t about the causes of this but here is a paragraph from their Discussion, citing a few interesting sources:

This means that intraspecific increments in cranial capacity persist over time as result of brain size tracking interspecific changes in body mass. Our results are also consistent with an accelerating within-species increase through time (Model 4), in line with hypotheses that evoke a coevolutionary positive feedback process such as between brain size and sociality, culture, technology, or language (47–51).

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I used to raise Scottish Blackface sheep, and at one point I introduced a black-wooled Leicester ram. The ewes hated the black lambs. They would chase them around the pasture and throw them into the air. This would happen until they birthed their own black lamb, and then there was acceptance. After three years, peace once again reigned.

We are all tribalists at heart. My father worked in First Nations communities here in Canada. As a kid, I assumed they disliked outsiders, especially white people like me. That was until I understood that creatures love what they birth, whether that means family, community, or shared identity. When I made an effort to become part of their community, I was accepted.

I think that the chasm between aboriginal and Western cultures - especially American culture - is that aboriginals are linked to the land; identity is linked to the soil. America was built by third sons, the landless. You never see a community of Algonquin, Cree or Apache diaspora springing up in Dubai. It seems when they are removed from the land, they lose their identity. America was built by those who had no identity. So was Australia. However, both patterns are real evolutionary strategies for survival: rootedness and mobility.

If Italians displaced the Han in China, would it still be China? America could, and has to some degree, become divorced from European ethnic roots and it would still be America. But it cannot become divorced from what birthed America and still remain America.

The only peoples that have escaped this are the Jews. “Next year in Jerusalem!” They were the global black lambs, constantly being chased and thrown into the air, all the while maintaining a link to the land, despite the diaspora. Their persistence looks almost like a cultural immune system, preserving memory through dispersion.

The Inuit are some of the kindest people I have ever lived with. Yet their word Tunit, for the Dorset they displaced, translates as ‘people without spears’, ultimately a commentary on capability, whether it be ‘easy to kill’ or ‘easy to out-compete’. Humans everywhere share a mix of compassion and competition. And don’t think for a moment that our current overwrought maternalism is an aid to aboriginal culture - it a weapon to meant destroy, a government-sized Norma Bates twisting the black lambs into our own image.

Did our tribal instincts emerge from evolution alone, or does the biblical story describe the same reality in different language? Did we “eat the apple” by growing self-aware, by gaining intelligence along with pride and division? Did God work through evolution to bring about beings capable of love, choice, and responsibility, but also capable of rivalry and contempt? Either way, intelligence comes with temptation. I do think that intelligence often gives birth to contempt. We call ourselves a step above the other creatures (and cultures) of the Earth, yet we expect sheep and dogs to learn human, not the other way around. They’re expected to be the intelligent ones by the ones claiming intelligence. We’re still chasing the black lambs and throwing them into the air.

By-the-by, my wife is aboriginal and she prefers my culture and I prefer hers :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: