[Peace-discuss] A future like ours

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Interesting reflections from someone I knew long ago. It's only in the last 
12,000 years or so -- since the "Neolithic Revolution" -- that humans have lived 
in conditions of natural or artificial scarcity: what we call "civilization." --CGE]

	March 3, 2009
	In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue
	By NATALIE ANGIER

In seeking bipartisan support for his economic policies, President Obama has 
tried every tip on the standard hospitality crib sheet: beer and football, milk 
and cookies, Earth, Wind and Fire.

Maybe the president needs to borrow a new crib sheet — the kind with a genuine 
baby wrapped inside.

A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or overhaul 
the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go, nothing can beat a 
happily babbling baby. A baby is born knowing how to work the crowd. A toothless 
smile here, a musical squeal there, and even hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the 
head and weak in the knees.

In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social 
skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability 
to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many 
others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and 
emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other 
animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax 
one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling 
confines of me, myself and mine.

As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary 
Origins of Mutual Understanding,” which will be published by Harvard University 
Press in April, human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for 
such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the 
great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of 
rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers 
are not.

Human beings evolved as cooperative breeders, says Dr. Hrdy, a reproductive 
strategy in which mothers are assisted by as-if mothers, or “allomothers,” 
individuals of either sex who help care for and feed the young. Most biologists 
would concur that humans have evolved the need for shared child care, but Dr. 
Hrdy takes it a step further, arguing that our status as cooperative breeders, 
rather than our exceptionally complex brains, helps explain many aspects of our 
temperament. Our relative pacifism, for example, or the expectation that we can 
fly from New York to Los Angeles without fear of personal dismemberment. 
Chimpanzees are pretty smart, but were you to board an airplane filled with 
chimpanzees, you “would be lucky to disembark with all 10 fingers and toes still 
attached,” Dr. Hrdy writes.

Our capacity to cooperate in groups, to empathize with others and to wonder what 
others are thinking and feeling — all these traits, Dr. Hrdy argues, probably 
arose in response to the selective pressures of being in a cooperatively 
breeding social group, and the need to trust and rely on others and be deemed 
trustworthy and reliable in turn. Babies became adorable and keen to make 
connections with every passing adult gaze. Mothers became willing to play pass 
the baby. Dr. Hrdy points out that mother chimpanzees and gorillas jealously 
hold on to their infants for the first six months or more of life. Other females 
may express real interest in the newborn, but the mother does not let go: you 
never know when one of those females will turn infanticidal, or be unwilling or 
unable to defend the young ape against an infanticidal male.

By contrast, human mothers in virtually every culture studied allow others to 
hold their babies from birth onward, to a greater or lesser extent depending on 
tradition. Among the !Kung foragers of the Kalahari, babies are held by a 
father, grandmother, older sibling or some other allomother maybe 25 percent of 
the time. Among the Efe foragers of Central Africa, babies spend 60 percent of 
their daylight hours being toted around by somebody other than their mother. In 
87 percent of foraging societies, mothers sometimes suckle each other’s 
children, another remarkable display of social trust.

Dr. Hrdy wrote her book in part to counter what she sees as the reigning dogma 
among evolutionary scholars that humans evolved their extreme sociality and 
cooperative behavior to better compete with other humans. “I’m not comfortable 
accepting this idea that the origins of hypersociality can be found in warfare, 
or that in-group amity arose in the interest of out-group enmity,” she said in a 
telephone interview. Sure, humans have been notably violent and militaristic for 
the last 12,000 or so years, she said, when hunter-gatherers started settling 
down and defending territories, and populations started getting seriously dense. 
But before then? There weren’t enough people around to wage wars. By the latest 
estimates, the average population size during the hundreds of thousands of years 
of human evolution that preceded the Neolithic Age may have been around 2,000 
breeding adults. “What would humans have been fighting over?” Dr. Hrdy said. 
“They were too busy trying to keep themselves and their children alive.”

Dr. Hrdy also argues that our human ancestors became emotionally modern long 
before the human brain had reached its current average volume of 1,300 cubic 
centimeters, which is about three times the size of a chimpanzee brain — in 
other words, that we became the nicest apes before becoming the smartest. You 
don’t need a bulging brain to evolve cooperative breeding. Many species of birds 
breed cooperatively, as do lions, rats, meerkats, wolves and marmosets, among 
others. But to become a cooperatively breeding ape, and to persuade a bunch of 
smart, hot-tempered, suspicious, politically cunning primates to start sharing 
child care and provisionings, now that took a novel evolutionary development, 
the advent of this thing called trust.

To explain the rise of cooperative breeding among our forebears, Dr. Hrdy 
synthesizes an array of new research in anthropology, genetics, infant 
development, comparative biology. She notes that recent research has overturned 
the longstanding insistence that humans are a patrilocal species, that is, with 
women moving away from their birth families to join their husbands. Instead, it 
seems that young mothers in many traditional societies have their own mothers 
and other female relatives close at hand, and who better to trust with baby care 
than your mom or your aunt? New studies have also shown the importance of 
postmenopausal women to gathering roots and tubers, the sort of unsexy foods 
that are difficult to disinter and lack the succulent status of, say, a freshly 
killed oryx, but that just may help feed the kids in hard times. Other 
anthropologists have made the startling discovery that children have 
entertainment value, and that among traditional cultures without television or 
Internet access, a bobble-headed baby is the best show in town.

However cooperative breeding got started, its impact on human evolution was 
profound. With helpers in the nest, women could give birth to offspring with 
ever longer childhoods — the better to build big brains and stout immune systems 
— and, paradoxically, at ever shrinking intervals. The average time between 
births for a chimpanzee mother is about six years; for a human mother, it’s two 
or three years. As a result of our combined braininess and fecundity, humans 
have managed to colonize the planet; exploit, marginalize or exterminate all 
competing forms of life; build a vast military-industrial complex all under the 
auspices of Bernard Madoff and with one yeti of a carbon footprint, and will 
somebody please hand me that baby before it’s too late.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/science/03angi.html?_r=1&emc=eta1