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HUMAN EVOLUTION.   Term Paper ID:19957 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Examines theories on development of civilization in context of increasing complexity of life, technology, urban pressures, progress, aggression.... More...

11 Pages / 2475 Words 7 sources, 16 Citations, TURABIAN Format $44.00 Return to List of Papers

Paper Abstract: Examines theories on development of civilization in context of increasing complexity of life, technology, urban pressures, progress, aggression. Paper Introduction: In the eighteenth century, several social philosophers, notably John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, considered the issue of the social contract and the way in which people shifted from a primitive state of nature to a society. These philosophers believed that this was a voluntary act undertaken to protect certain interests, and they also believed that there had to be compelling interests involved to entice people to make this sort of commitment and to give up the absolute freedom they enjoyed in nature. Today, we have become accustomed to living in a social setting and to making the necessary adjustments to the social contract. We have developed laws and public institutions to see to it that our rights and the rights of others are protected. However, society has become much more complex. What started out as a series of small villages has grown into a Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. Pfeiffer couldthen write, "There will be a future if man can avoid nuclear warfare forthat long."[11] At the height of the Cold War, as humankind contemplated thepossibility of its own extinction through nuclear war, the views of Ardrey,Lorenz, and the others seemed particularly vital for what they might sayabout human aggression and about the inner forces that needed to becontrolled, given the immense destructive power at our fingertips. Third, people tend to do what they are told to do and as aresult avoid the cost of exploring new ideas. San Francisco: W. Desmond Morris is also cited for his view of the human being,and Renolds at least finds Morris's account more acceptable than those ofArdrey or Lorenz. Now almost everyone in the industrializedWestern world can grow up to have children."[15] If anything, this should lead to evolution in the wrong direction ascharacteristics and traits that once would have been weeded out of thehuman population are now perpetuated and transmitted to new generations.Natural selection is thus still at work, and Christopher Wills points outthat the idea that evolution has stopped is based on the false notion thatevolution must always result in improvement. However, he does believe that we can alter the way we interact witheach other and with our environment and that, if we do not do so, evolutionmay drive us into a dead end. New York: Bantam Books, 198 .Johnson, Roger N. The question now facing us iswhether urban living has become so far removed from the natural state ofhumankind that our biological evolution has been outstripped by the realityof our circumstances. . However, society has become much morecomplex. Skinner says there are five concepts that can explain how damagingcivilization has been to the human beings who created it. Our brain capacity wasfar beyond that simple stage, or we would never have been able to createthe society that we now face and that we have to decide whether we cansurvive. Konrad Lorenz asks whether it is not possible that human evolutionwill lead to a dead end and whether it is possible that there will be aworld in the future without humankind. [15]Christopher Wills, "Has Human Evolution Ended?" Discover, August1992, 22. [11]Ibid. Jones recently asked the provocativequestion as to whether the human species has stopped evolving, and hebelieves that there will be an end to human evolution. . Morris introduces the idea of neoteny, or prolongedinfancy, finding that the human being has remained an exploratory creatureright into adult life.[8] Renolds finds that there are certainconsequences to these views and in particular believes that Ardrey and theothers are promoting a sense of social inequality that should be resisted:"He isn't after the good life for all, but the good life for a few andsurvival for all."[9] The view of the human ancestor as a hunter and predator raisesquestions about the place of the human being in the world today, a worldvery different from the one facing our ancestors: The question arises now after some fifteen million years of evolution in the hominid line, after the transformation of a clever ape into a creature with unprecedented and increasing powers to create and to destroy. We need toevolve socially as well as physically, and our mental evolution may enableus to do this merely by making better use of what we already possess. Humankind. The Emergence of Man. Ardreyand others emphasize the aggression they find exhibited by human beings andother animals in primitive situations. Scientists have tended tofocus on aggression as a behavioral process, but many of the most popularnotions about aggression are fundamentally myths without any scientificfoundation. In the era of theCold War, tensions were always at a point where nuclear war was seen as areal possibility, ranging form a background fear of a possibility to a realand direct threat, as in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Today, we have become accustomed to living in a social setting andto making the necessary adjustments to the social contract. In the 196 s, a number of ethnologistsanalyzed our biological thinking about humankind and human social life, andKonrad Lorenz is cited in particular: "There was, we were told, a basicbiological individual, man; he was compounded of the same sort ofingredients as other forms of life; drives, behavioral tendencies and soon."[1] The mind was seen as essentially a rationalizing organ that gavemeaning to what was otherwise a meaningless biological existence. [9]Ibid., 14. That is unquestionably true. This shows how we have lostthe incentive to be independent and autonomous. Renolds sees Lorenz, Ardrey, andMorris as theorists standing at a point in the history of ideas thatrepresents something of an extreme biological watershed, following otherwriters who were preoccupied with the utility of biological thinking in thequest for an ethic. Renolds, The Biology of Human Action (San Francisco: W. Nuclear weaponrymight bring about our destruction more abruptly, but pollution and thedestruction of protective environmental elements have the potential to bejust as destructive, even if more slowly. There are many dangers in theworld, some human-made and some not, and this account of dangers leads to aquestion of whether they will overwhelm humankind or be controlled by it:"There remains only the hope that man will understand in time that counter-measures must be found that are morally justifiable on the one hand and onthe other effective enough to save the world."[4] Lorenz sees the humanbeing as more than an animal, though he also believes that the human beinghas much in common with other animals: Man is without a doubt something special. [14]P. Second,people who are helped by others when they can help themselves lose thereinforcement to help themselves and in essence forget how to beindependent. Saunders, 1972.Lorenz, Konrad. [12]Ibid., 5 4. These philosophers believed that this was a voluntaryact undertaken to protect certain interests, and they also believed thatthere had to be compelling interests involved to entice people to make thissort of commitment and to give up the absolute freedom they enjoyed innature. [16]Ibid., 24.----------------------- 1 Johnson, Aggression in Man and Animals (Philadelphia: W.B.Saunders, 1972), 3. Martin's Press, 199 .Pfeiffer, J.B. Conscience is alwaysharnessed to the maintenance and survival of the group and it thus is anact of conscience to prevent any harm from coming to members of one's owngroup and to hate and if need be to kill members of other groups. Pfeiffer believed that the human being was very adaptable and thatthe new era of technology he saw from his vantage point in the late 196 swould offer a means for solving many of our problems. Perhaps evolution for thehuman race is simply in the direction of the ability to make better use ofthe capacity we already possess. "Scientist Wonders: Are We in a Deep Rut?" Toronto Star, September 1985, n.p.----------------------- [1]V. In spite of our efforts to the contrary,Wills believes that we will never control evolutionary change. B.F. H.Freeman, 1976), 3. Different biological theorists have answered these questionsaccording to their view of human evolution and of how that is reflected inhuman culture. In our ancestral past, the keyelement was that we had direct and perilous problems to overcome. Martin's Press,199 ), 161. We are still faced with thequestion of human adaptability, the issue of human nature and possibletendencies toward aggression and self-destruction, and with the myriadproblems facing people today, problems which also have the potential todestroy human and animal life if they are not controlled. In the 196 s, though, the word"ethic" had an ancient ring to it, so, instead of focusing on what ought tohappen, theorists concentrated instead on what actually did happen. H. Assumefor the moment that the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which has endedthe Cold War, also means that nuclear weaponry is no longer the threat thatit was in the 196 s. Thisis what Ardrey, Lorenz, and Morris did, and they set forth certain ideasabout the rightful place of the human being in the scheme of things andtried to show how society had inhibited certain natural tendencies throughthe ages.[2] Their studies related to the issue of human aggression and showed howpeople had originally been predators in the wild. [5]Ibid., 163-164. Freeman, 1976.Wills, Christopher. Human evolution is a process that is ongoing but that is onlydimly understood either in terms of past evolution or present evolution.It is such a slow process, in fact, that discussing present evolution ishighly speculative. [1 ]J.B. When we escaped the extremes of ourenvironment and of exhausting work, we also escaped from the source of ourmotivation to solve problems and to change. We havedeveloped laws and public institutions to see to it that our rights and therights of others are protected. Those who areconcerned with our ability to survive seem to believe that we have simplyforgotten how to adapt and that we have become victims of our own successat creating comforts. Finally, hesays that Western culture suffers from an abundance of immediatereinforcements, which serve to weaken the amount of work expended.[13] Skinner's views indicate the possibility that humankind'sachievements in themselves may be humankind's greatest challenge now. ForArdrey, the fact that the stage prior to Homo sapiens in human evolutionwas the first hunting primate on the plains of eastern and southern Africawas especially significant and contributed to his view of the human beingas a predator, a killer: "From the idea that this, our immediate ancestor,may have been selected for his killing prowess over several million years,Ardrey deduced that there had come into existence, in man, a 'killingimperative."[6] For Ardrey, this was the one central fact of human nature,embodying as it did an obsession with weapons and a distinctive ability andeven necessity to kill: "This instinct in due course was overlaid, when thehominid brain expanded to more than twice its Australopithecine size, bycognitive control mechanisms."[7] Ardrey's view is rejected by many scientists, and Renolds finds thatthere is no evidence that our primate ancestors killed their own kind.Renolds also cites the discussion of aggression by Konrad Lorenz which alsofinds an aggressive force in the human being related to ancestralbehaviors. The Biology of Human Action. [6]Renolds, 5. [13]Terry Young, "Scientist Wonders: Are We in a Deep Rut?" TorontoStar, September 1985, n.p. For Skinner, the discomforts of life are whatspur us on to achieve and to create. Some theorists believe that thelevel of civilization we have attained has made us soft in some basic senseand thus unprepared to cope with the changes we ourselves are bringingabout. Skinner emphasizes that the humanbeing is different from the animals in that the human is able to cope withchallenges and to create solutions. The ideathat our brains were developed to the degree that they clearly are simplyso that we could be hunter-gatherers is ludicrous. [7]Ibid. To this extent, he would agree withSkinner that the comforts of civilization have robbed us of incentives thatwe need in order to change: "Natural selection once ensured that only thefittest survived and reproduced. Wehave created a comfortable environment that has left us ill-prepared forproblems that may develop or for the tensions created by the urbanenvironment itself. Philadelphia: W.B. Skinner seems to thinkthat fewer rules would mean fewer constrictions on innovation. It is known that we donot use the full capacity of the brains we have. P. Urban living creates tensions that are quite different from thoseencountered in the state of nature, but the fact that they are different inkind does not necessarily mean they are different in degree. Aggression in Man and Animals. We basically still have peasant or hunger-gatherer brains in ahigh-tech world."[16] In truth, though, this statement is nearly meaningless. What started out as a series of small villages has grown into asociety with giant metropolises, some encompassing many smallercommunities, drawing them in and making them part of an urban environmentthat can be hostile, violent, and dangerous. In the eighteenth century, several social philosophers, notably JohnLocke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, considered the issue of the socialcontract and the way in which people shifted from a primitive state ofnature to a society. Yet, we have always been able to draw on hiddenresources when forced to do so, and we may be able to do this withreference to the social problems we have ourselves created. For one thing, hesays that there are no evolutionary pressures for us to develop much beyondwhat we have already accomplished. [2]Ibid., 3-4. He found that themarriage of human and computer would increase the effectiveness of humanadaptation and that this would take place in a changed environment: The brain evolved in times of great physical danger and little social change, but must now cope with times of little physical danger and great social change . That would provide us with such a massiverise in brainpower that we should be able to handle a much more complexsociety than we already have. Farb could write, "Humankind today writes the crestof the evolutionary wave . . "Has Human Evolution Ended?" Discover, August 1992, 22-24.Young, Terry. Fourth, the laws and rulesof society may have been useful and necessary, but they are given validitybecause obeying them keeps people out of trouble. [3]Roger N. The first ofthese is that people work for wages and not for the product of their work.They are thus one step removed from the real reason for work. Twenty years later, we are deep into the computerrevolution and are finding that the pace of change may be more than ourmuch vaunted adaptability can handle. However, to say that man is only a mammal from the family of primates is blasphemy. Evolution has had its dead ends in the past as specieshave come into being and then disappeared, and there is no reason tobelieve it could not happen again. Other theorists of the time considered the human being more as ananimal than as something not animal, with the one major distinction betweenthe human and the animal being a larger brain and all that went with it.For Robert Ardrey, what went with it was not just reason but also what hecalled conscience, an essentially antirational power. Earlier writers had argued that biology can and doesprovide an ethic, in terms of a definition of good based on the enhancementof the quality of life for individuals. British geneticist J.S. Our brains have not evolved much beyondthose of our hunter-gatherer ancestors in spite of the industrialization ofthe planet, and Wills offers a reason for this: "The rate at which we arechanging our environment now has outstripped even the fastest biologicalevolution. At the same time, Wills finds thatnatural selection does work to improve the species as good mutations areretained and bad ones removed. . More recent theories, including those of Ardrey and Lorenz,have been mixtures of science and social philosophy, and these theoristsrely heavily on extrapolations from animals: "These writers popularizedthe view that aggression is a kind of inherited 'instinct' found in man aswell as in other animals which has to be released."[3] Many in thescientific community have since rejected their ideas, but they areimportant in any case for what they imply about biological evolution. It is not clear that this is in fact aprocess that has not already been taking place and that we use a largercapacity of the brain than did the hunter-gatherers who were our ancestors. Pfeiffer, The Emergence of Man (New York: Harper and Row,1969), 499. [4]Konrad Lorenz, On Life and Living (New York: St. Even if we were to eliminateinternational aggression entirely, we would still be faced with theviolence of our inner cities and with the issue of whether our urbanstructures have not become too complex for us to handle. BibliographyFarb, P. Skinner takes this view and finds that civilization hasdamaged us, though he does not say that we cannot overcome our problemsgiven the proper incentives. This is the idea that thereis some purpose in evolution, some guiding intelligence to it, which is notthe case at all. Farb, Humankind (New York: Bantam Books, 198 ), 11. The crisis man faces is the first of its kind on earth, the first involving the entire species.[1 ] The issue of nuclear war was long the one issue where many could see apossible end to human life and indeed to all life on earth if we humanbeings did not gain control of our emotions and our follies in order tocontrol these weapons and if possible to dismantle them. This is a challenge to the welfare systems we have developedin society. It is not clear that this is the case or that someother source of aggression will not rear its head in the next few years,but assume for the moment that this is so. New York: St. On Life and Living. [8]Ibid., 9. Can we adjust to and cope with our new culturalenvironment, or do the new demands placed on us exceed the limits or ourphenotypic adjustability? Much of what they have to say begins with a considerationof the past, of how humankind has evolved to date and of what we know aboutthe origins of human culture. In terms of the issue of brain evolution specifically,it would be even more difficult to isolate and to decide whether suchevolution is taking place and in what direction. the pace of contemporary developments suggests that the ability to unlearn swiftly is becoming at least as important as the ability to learn swiftly.[12] Pfeiffer believed that the computer would be a vital ally in thiseffort and would help people overcome the inertia that tended to keep themfrom changing. Of course, man always needs structure, and one can say that Homo sapiens are mammals from the family of primates. Above all, humans are assuredly the onlyanimals who try to discover just what sort of animal they are."[14] Thisis what all of the theorists discussed here have done--they have tried todiscover just what sort of animal the human being is, and as they have doneso they have also considered what sort of animal the human being maybecome. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.Renolds, V. Homo sapiens are that which is peculiar to them, something different form mammals, something much more clever, namely, man.[5] For Lorenz, this is proof that the disappearance of humankind from theearth would be a tragedy, and he wants to warn those among his colleagueswho believe that nothing can happen to humankind that they are mistaken andthat there are dangers which have to be considered. Societyand the institutions of society were not the cause so much as the outcomeof interactions between individuals. In recent years, there has been moreattention given to these questions. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.