Ableism, derived from “able” plus “-ism”, is a term for discriminating against people based on disability. Just like racism and sexism, ableism is a form of discrimination. Discrimination is bad when it targets irrelevant traits in disqualifying a person for performance of a job. But how can it be wrong to discriminate against a person for being unable to perform the job? If the disability in question is relevant to job performance, then ableism is not that different from meritocracy.
In an odd form of gaslighting, termed by Kate Gladstone as “information scapegoating” some people on the autism spectrum have been discriminated against as being too able — or possessing knowledge that the average person does not have.
Meanwhile, current autism advocates insist that autism is only a disability, and that if a person on the spectrum does not need special accommodations, that person cannot be entitled to an autism diagnosis. The idea that autism is a super power that enables autistics to perform at a higher level than neurotypicals is soundly denied.
Clearly the DSM–V is a diagnostic and statistical manual that is intended to allot government interventions and funding based on a series of criteria. As long the government is involved in the diagnosis and allotment of special privileges, the autism diagnosis will be used to thwart meritocracy and to promote disability over ability.
In the early two thousands, at the turn of the millenium, we saw a sharp upswing in autism diagnosis. Was it because there was a greater awareness of the phenomenon, or could it have been that the greater awareness was a result of a real epidemic of global proportions? It might have been a little of both. As more and more very young children were receiving an autism diagnosis, more and more parents were researching the subject, and many of them discovered that they themselves had a milder version of their children’s condition: they had high functioning autism, known as Asperger’s Syndrome.
In 2001 I moved with my two year old daughter to a remote location in rural Missouri, in preparation for an ape language experiment. I was planning to adopt a baby chimpanzee and to bring it up with my daughter, in a cross-fostering environment calculated to allow the chimpanzee to pick up human language naturally, in an environment of total immersion.
Before we arrived in Missouri, my daughter and I had been living in Taiwan. My daughter had had a nanny who spoke to her in Mandarin Chinese, and I spoke to my daughter in Hebrew. It was only when she started going to preschool in the United States that my daughter picked up English.
The language experiment with Bow, the chimpanzee that I adopted, originally used lexigrams in Mandarin, Hebrew and English.
At the time when I adopted Bow, it was believed by many that chimpanzees lacked a theory of mind, and that in that sense they were like autistic individuals. (This is not actually true. Chimpanzees have an excellent theory of mind, much better than that of most neurotypical human beings.) Because of this belief, I started researching therapies for autistic children, and I came across Stanley Greenspan‘s Floortime DIR.
Floortime required caretakers of a child to get down on the floor on the same level as the child and to try to see the child’s point of view, while gently enticing the child to join the caretaker in as many circles of communication as the child was able. Instead of coercing behaviors that were desired by a rough system of punishment and reward, as was done in the competing treatment system called ABA, Floortime used lighthearted play sessions and enticement. ABA used operant conditioning to brainwash a subject into behaving as the caretaker desired. Floortime did not use coercion. It fostered genuine, spontaneous communication between the caretaker and the child.
Floortime worked with Bow. He did learn to communicate with us, and because of this, Bow is able to continue to live in my home to this very day, when he is 22 years old, going on 23.
In the meanwhile, as I was learning about autism, it did occur to me, based on an analysis of my life history, that I may have been on the spectrum. I never got a diagnosis, nor did I ever seek special accommodations. It was just somewhat satisfying to think that many misunderstandings in the past may have stemmed from clashes with neurotypicals, who viewed life through a hypersocial lens, believing that one can negotiate a shared reality through enforced social consensus. I likened the neurotypicals to Ayn Rand’s social metaphysicians, who could not determine truth or falsity of propositions except by reference to a social yardstick. Neurotypicals were altruists, in that they let others think for them, while autistics were autoists, individuals who thought for themselves.
And then one day, Asperger’s was cancelled! The diagnosis entirely disappeared from the DSM. Why? The initial response is that it was because Hans Asperger was a Nazi. However, this response is highly unsatisfactory, because to the extent that Asperger was a Nazi, he had always been a Nazi. Nothing about his Nazi affiliation changed in the new millenium. Why were we told Asperger’s syndrome was a diagnosis in the year 1994? Why did it become a non-diagnosis in 2013?
Hans Asperger was an Austrian psychiatrist who collaborated with the Nazis when they took over his country after the Anschluss. By creating a special category of autistics who were high functioning — Asperger’s Syndrome — he saved many children from certain death. However, he did not save all the children. Those who were nonverbal and low functioning ended up at another clinic where many were “euthenized.”
Is Asperger evil because he did not save all the children from the Nazis? Or was it good that he was at least able to save some of them? And if he discovered a real psychiatric phenomenon, does it matter whether Asperger was good or evil? Are we going to change the name of every diagnosis based on fluctuating views about the personality of the scientist who discovered it?
The Left is constantly looking to level real differences between individuals, while co-opting every label to serve their own collectivist agenda. Today on social media we see many so-called autistic influencers who are very social, well groomed and manipulative. They assert that autism is a disability, and anyone who does not need accommodations need not apply for a diagnosis. The diagnosis is merely a ticket to another form of identity politics, allowing for government funding and differential treatment of individuals.
Something that was once a doorway to self-understanding by individuals with unusual levels of autonomy from social pressure has now turned into another weapon of mass manipulation. It is not surprising, under these circumstances, that the government funds the oppressive ABA therapies and entirely ignores Floortime DIR.
There has been a lot in the nutritional literature lately about milk. Some have suggested that children should never be given milk. Others have said that children should never be given soy as a substitute for milk. Some have stated that we can all do without milk, since there are other sources of calcium and other sources of fat. I have provided links to many of these articles, so you can read them for yourself.
I am not much of a milk drinker myself. The story goes that when my mother weaned me of her breast milk, she offered me the bottle, instead. I don’t like substitutes. I am very suspicious when someone tries to pass off one thing as something else. I rejected the bottle as a poor substitute for my mother’s breast. I also pretty much rejected milk as a beverage. I use milk in my cereal as a sort of condiment, though I don’t drink what’s leftover in the bowl after the cereal is gone. I like cheese, and the only reason I don’t eat butter is that I’ve stopped eating bread. Milk, in and of itself, is not a big factor in my diet. However, I am not anti-milk, and the current nutritional trend of completely rejecting milk has me curious.
What is behind such a strong reaction, by the same people who used to tout milk as the most nutritious of substances only a couple of decades ago? Why do Americans, in particular, have such strong feelings for or against milk? And why are there suddenly so many people who are lactose intolerant? How did that come about? Twenty years ago, I never even heard of such a thing. There were people who liked milk and people who didn’t, but intolerance?That’s a pretty strong word.
And what’s more, did you know that people are now saying that milk is bad for cats? Have the cats heard about this?
Determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, I decided to do some research.
“Milk and honey are the only articles of diet whose sole function in nature is food. It is not surprising, therefore, that the nutritional value of milk is high.” This is a quote from the article on milk consumption whose link is provided to the right. When we say that the nutritional value of milk is high, we mean a number of different things: (1) milk is a calorie dense food, so just a little of it provides enough to eat, as opposed to a food like lettuce or garden greens. (2) Milk contains most of the types of nutrients that we need to live: fat, protein and carbohydrates, as well as calcium and vitamins A, D, E and K. (3) If you had only milk to consume, you would not starve. This is not true of most foods.
Having said that, I don’t know of any human being above the age of five who would want to live only on milk. Most people enjoy variety in their diet. While someone living only on milk would not starve, he might still experience some serious nutritional deficits. For instance, there’s not any vitamin C in milk, and in order to live healthy lives, we need that nutrient as well.
It’s nice to have options. Milk and dairy products are good choices, but they are not the only choices we have, and it is also very easy to get all the nutrients found in milk by eating a variety of other foods. There are people for whom milk is not an option, and they manage to get by just fine without it.
Lactose
Image Credit: The Wikipedia
Lactose Intolerance
According to the wikipedia article whose link appears above the picture of the Holstein cows, milk is an emulsion of fat globules in a water-based liquid.So basically, it’s fat floating in water. Only unlike most fat and water mixes, it stays even.Each fat globule is surrounded by a protein membrane that keeps it from breaking up. Inside the fluid part of the milk are casein protein “micelles”: groups of several thousand protein molecules that are bound together by calcium phosphate strands.About forty percent of the calories in milk come from the carbohydrate lactose. Lactose is made up of two simple sugars, glucose and galactose.
People who are said to be “lactose intolerant” are unable to digest lactose. They don’t have enough of the enzyme lactase which is found in small intestine and helps to break up lactose into its component sugars, glucose and galactose.
Common symptoms of lactose intolerance are nausea, cramping, bloating, gas and diarrhea occurring within thirty minutes to two hours of milk consumption.
Healthy normal infants start out with reasonable amounts of lactase at birth. Lactase production diminishes after age two, but most people don’t notice any deficiency until they are much older, if ever. A primary lactase deficiency is one unaccompanied by other disease. There is also such a thing as secondary lactase deficiency, which come about as a result of injury to the GI tract or through disease. Secondary lactase deficiency is a symptom of certain gastro-intestinal diseases, like celiac disease, IBD, and Crohn’s disease.
There are genetic factors in the predisposition for developing a primary lactase deficiency. Scientists speculate that lactose tolerance is the innovation and that intolerance is the natural state of humans prior to the domestication of milk producing ruminants about 10,000 years ago. I will get back to this point later.
In addition to lactose intolerance, there is also a rare form of milk allergy due to the inability to process casein.
Casein Free Diet for Some Autistics
Diet and Autism: Myths and miracles Autism Spectrum Disorder is a broad spectrum of disorders, hence the use of the word “spectrum” in its title. Autism is becoming more understood nowadays by the public, due in part to publicity by celebrities…
The Casein Free Diet
Some infants and children who suffer from low-functioning autism have been cured simply by removing gluten and casein from their diets. A gluten free/casein free diet is one that totally eliminates milk, due to the protein casein. In those individuals, the inability ot properly metabolize either gluten or casein produces a morphine like substance that sedates them and inhibits normal cognitive development. Such children, once on the diet, suddenly gain the ability to interact normally with others and to have normal language development.
For these children and their families, the elimination of milk from the diet (as well as all other foods with either gluten or casein in them) is a very small price to pay for a complete cure.
However, most forms of autism have nothing to do with casein, and a milk free diet does nothing to help most people with an autistic spectrum disorder. This is because autism is a syndrome whose similar symptoms can be brought about by a wide range of causes.
Genetic Research on the Causes of Lactose Tolerance
Lactose intolerance seems to be on the rise, and it has recently become quite common to find the cause for this under discussion. For some reason this has led to widespread condemnation of milk in general. The most popular form of this trend takes the following line of attack: milk is a product intended by nature to be consumed by helpless infants. Mammals produce milk for their own young. Milk is not intended for the young of another animal or for adult members of the species.
Extreme versions of this position maintain that nobody over the age of two should drink milk, and no animal, including humans, should drink the milk of another animal. To support this position, advocates point out that no animal in the wild drinks any milk other than that produced by its own mother, and even that only when it is an infant.
Okay, so that means that Romulus and Remus were probably in mortal danger of dying of lactose intolerance when that She-Wolf suckled them!
But, seriously, what is the scientific evidence? Researchers theorize that “lasctase persistence”, meaning the presence of the enzyme lactase in the gut after a child is weaned, is a relatively new trait in adult humans.
In an article by Edward Hollox, in The European Journal of Human Genetics “Genetics of Lactase persistence; fresh lessons in the history of milk drinking(2005) 13, 267-269, the following rationale is given: “In humans, epidemiological analysis has shown that the cultural development of dairying preceded selection for lactase persistence.” In other words, first we started drinking milk, and only later we began to tolerate it. How realistic a scenario is that?
Now if he had said that first we began to herd ruminants for meat, and later we gradually started drinking their milk, then it might have made a certain amount of sense that there would have been a selective advantage to being able to tolerate milk as well as eat meat. But, according to Hollox, the development of dairying came first, and then there was a genetic selection for lactase persistence. This would mean that generations of humans would have milked goats and cattle and other milk givers, drinking the milk and getting sick for hundreds and maybe thousands of years, before finally some of their descendants could stomach it? Why would they keep drinking it, if it made them sick? Isn’t it more likely that people discovered that milk was good to drink, and then they developed dairying? In which case, lactase persistence must have preceded dairying.
According to Hollox, a genetic mutation accounting for persistence of the enzyme lactase in adult Europeans has been identified, and another, separate genetic mutation allowing for lactase persistence is found among Africans.
Asians are not mentioned. But it was in Asia, in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, where wide-scale agriculture was developed about 10,000 years ago. At that time, Europeans were still savages.
Canaan is described in the Old Testament as the land of milk and honey. This was supposed to be a good thing. In ancient writings milk is always spoken of highly. It was a calorie dense food, and the ancients appreciated it as such.
In the book of Judges, the general of the Canaanite army, Sisra, fleeing from the onslought of Barak, found shelter in the tent of Ya’el, the wife of Hever the Kenite. She offered him milk and a place to sleep. Later, she drove a stake through his skull. I suppose we could argue that giving him milk was part of Ya’el’s overall plan to kill Sisra. However, that’s not how it was intended. He asked for water. She gave him milk. She is praised for her generosity. She was a good hostess, up until the point when she rammed a tent stake through his skull. (Judges 4:19-21).
This story is told twice in succeeding chapters of the Book of Judges: once in prose and a second time in poetry. In the poetic version, she also offered him butter. (Judges :25).
In the Baghavad Gita, ghi, or clarified butter, is seen as the utmost in luxury foods, fit for the gods, but undoubtedly consumed by men, too.
Did any of these people suffer from the inability to digest milk or dairy products? There is no indication that they did.
Leprosy and epilepsy are mentioned in the Bible. Lactose intolerance is not.
We probably all have experiences from our own life, or stories from our grandparents’ era, that bely some of the current claims about milk. For instance, it’s suggested that we become lactose intolerant over time, but that we come into the world as infants completely able to digest milk. However, we all know that you can’t give a newborn kitten or a newborn human baby straight cow’s milk. They can’t digest it. That’s why baby formula had to be carefully developed. Prior to its invention, goat’s milk was used for infants who had no mother to suckle them, if a wet nurse could not be found.
A baby kitten will die if fed on cow’s milk, but an adult cat can drink it. A human newborn can’t be given cow’s milk, but an older child or adult can. The problem with cow’s milk thoughout history was not that the enzyme lactase was present in infancy and disappeared as we matured. The problem was that babies couldn’t tolerate cow’s milk, but as soon as they were able to transition to solids, all animals, including humans, could drink cow’s milk in addition to eating other foods. When dairying was first introduced into our culture, it was not in order to feed babies. It was for adults.
Then there is the argument that all other animals besides humans don’t drink milk beyond infancy. That’s not true. My dog Teyman drinks milk. Bow, my chimpanzee son, drinks milk. If lactase persistence were a genetic innovation selected for by a dairy culture that has lasted 10,000 years, how would you account for that?
Why don’t other adult mammals drink milk in the wild? It’s not because of the inability to digest it. It’s because other animals haven’t domesticated cows! If you give them milk, they will drink it.
In India, today, many people still believe that snakes drink milk. Snake charmers claim that this is what they feed their snakes. I’ve also seen the argument confidently made that this can’t possibly be true, because snakes are reptiles, and only mammals drink milk.
I don’t know whether snakes drink milk. I do know that the argument that they could not drink milk because they are not mammals is completely unconvincing. We are not insects, and yet we eat honey!
The Evolution of the Mammary Gland
All flesh is kin. All animals on this planet are related. Life emerged only once. The building blocks of life are the same, regardless of the multitude of differences between and among different organisms. The common fruitfly has a very similar genetic structure to our own. Many different animals can subsist on the same foods, because we all use the same basic nutrients: fats, proteins and carbohydrates.
The milk-producing gland in mammals developed from non-mammalian sources. According to the wikipedia, the immediate ancestors of modern mammals were similar to monotremes like the platypus. They produced a milk-like substance from glands on the surface of their skin (but with no nipple) for their young to drink after hatching from eggs. The idea that only mammals drink milk is unfounded.
Milk became the food of infant mammals because the non-mammalian ancestors of mammals were already secreting milk.
So do snakes drink milk? Who knows. It depends on who you believe, the snake charmers or the nutritionists. Neither group is known for complete truthfulness. If I had to bet, my money would be on the snake charmers, because at least they know something about snakes.
Modern Production and Preparation of Milk
There is such a thing as lactose intolerance, and some people do suffer from it. To find out if you are one of those people, there is a medical test that you can take. However, the claim that tolerance of lactose is a relatively new trait in humans is not particularly convincing. All the evidence points to the idea that we were able to drink milk long before we began keeping cows. It seems more likely that lactose intolerance is a disease of recent origin.
Also, not everybody who experiences indigestion after drinking milk is lactose intolerant. In many cases, lactose has nothing to do with it. You could be reacting to the processing that modern milk undergoes before it is marketed at the grocery store.
Milk is pasteurized before it is marketed. Pasteurization destroys harmful microbes in perishable food products using heat, without destroying the food itself. In addition to pasteurization, milk undergoes homogenization in order to keep fat from separating out. These processes destroy some of the nutrients present in milk. Some vitamins are then artficially re-introduced into the milk we drink, sometimes in higher quantities than what was there to begin with. For some people, these artificial vitamin additives are highly irritating. This can account for some of the difficulty that modern man has digesting milk. These are problems that we don’t experience with raw milk, straight from the cow.
Conclusion
As I mentioned before, I don’t drink a lot of milk, because it doesn’t taste that good to me. My daughter likes milk, and sometimes, when I forget to offer it to her, she asks for milk. It always surprises me when she prefers milk to lemonade. However, I honor her preference and I let her have as much milk as she wants.
I don’t force anybody to drink milk. I think that our own appetites are a good indication of how much we should have. I never supply Bow with milk as a matter of course, because milk is not a normal part of the chimp diet. However, when he specifically asks for milk, I let him drink it. He never experiences any problem digesting the milk that he drinks. He also doesn’t ask for it as often as my daughter does.
While all animals have the same general use for all nutrients, there are also significant differences from one person to the next. We should honor those differences and understand that what is an adequate amount of milk for one person may be inadequate for another or excessive for a third individual.
I know that at one time in America children were forced to drink a great deal more milk than they wanted to, because their parents believed it was good for them. This caused a lot of damage, including obesity and anti-milk sentiment in the following generation of adults. Forcing a child to consume a food he doesn’t like usually backfires.
How much milk and dairy products you choose to consume is up to you. If you don’t like milk, then by all means don’t drink it. If it makes you feel sick, don’t drink it. It’s possible to get all your nutritional needs met without consuming dairy. However, we don’t have to declare milk as a dangerous substance or forget the entire course of history concerning milk consumption by humans and other animals in order to make that choice.
Milk is good food. We as humans have a long history with milk consumption. It is one of the many foods that we are capable of consuming to good effect. We don’t have to have it every day, but it’s good to keep that option open.
If birth rates continue to fall at the current trajectory, most industrialized nations will face population collapse within five generations. Pronatalism is a movement that aims to lessen the effect of this imminent collapse by fostering reproductive rates that are well above replacement levels. According to Simone and Malcolm Collins, of Pronatalism.org, falling fertility rates do not have an “organic floor.” This means that population collapse will not create a course correction on its own. Populations headed toward extinction face a turning point past which there may be no return.
The first of two interviews with Malcolm Collins
Rather than offering coercive measures to prevent the imminent population collapse, the Pronatalist movement seeks to encourage anyone who genuinely wants to have children to do so, with creative solutions for child care, education and intellectual tools to resist the “urban monoculture”, whose goal seems to be to render all who join it infertile. The Pronatalist movement welcomes ethnic and cultural diversity and wants to foster a pluralistic society.
Using the most modern reproductive methods available, including genetic screening and IVF, the Collinses try to ensure a selective process that minimizes disease and disability. Since the current culture selects against higher education and intellectual ability — fertility is highest in those portions of the population without a college education — there is an expectation that within seventy-five years the IQ of the urbanized population may drop by one standard deviation. Natural selection is operating against intellectual ability in the general population, while the pronatalists use genetic screening to optimize health and intelligence in their own offspring.
Following the example of groups most resistant to the urban monoculture, like the Amish and Hasidic Jews, the Collinses are creating a culture and religion that will help their children resist the pressures that are bringing down fertility rates in most industrialized countries. However, instead of turning their back on technology, like the Amish, the Pronatalists are embracing the latest technology and even hope to propel their descendants into outer space, to colonize the universe and escape the limitations of our home planet.
Much of this sounds like science fiction. However, today’s technological reality is yesterday’s science fiction. It will be interesting to see what the Pronatalists may achieve.
How doth the little busy Bee Improve each shining Hour, And gather Honey all the day From every opening Flower!
How skilfully she builds her Cell! How neat she spreads the Wax! And labours hard to store it well With the sweet Food she makes.
How doth the little busy Bee Improve each shining Hour, And gather Honey all the day From every opening Flower!
How doth the little honey bee In self-defense excel! She gives her life for one small sting Yet hath she spent it well!
Children in the 18th and 19th centuries were expected to memorize the poem Against Idleness and Mischief by Isaac Watts and to emulate the selflessness of the honey bee. The cloying sweetness of the self-sacrificing worker bee was irritating to Lewis Carroll, who wrote this parody concerning a more predatory and self-interested species:
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale.
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
and welcomes little fishies in
With gently smiling jaws.
Of course, the Lewis Caroll poem misses the point. The crocodile in his parody is exploiting other animals — not crocodiles. It is the altruism of the honey bee in her attitude to her fellow bees that inspires humans to long for a brotherhood of man — a spirit of all for one and one for all similar to the creed of the three musqueteers and a sharing of resources sometimes known as socialism.
Individual bee collecting pollen on behalf of the entire hive
Image Credit: Wikipedia
Against Idleness and Mischief — last two stanzas
In Works of Labour or of Skill I would be busy too: For Satan finds some Mischief still For idle Hands to do.
In Books, or Work, or healthful Play Let my first Years be past, That I may give for every Day Some good account at last.
Throughout recorded history, rulers, theologians, philosophers and teachers have tried to instill the unselfishness of the honey bee into human populations. If we all behaved like bees, it has been argued, then we could pool our resources and no one need ever be hungry. The strong would protect the weak, and the young would shelter the aged. However, true unselfishness, as manifest in the apiary, does not actually work this way. Truly unselfish living means not overstaying your welcome:
each honey bee lives only so long as it is useful to the hive and is discarded as soon as it no longer serves.
honey bees are expected to commit suicide in the service of the hive by stinging any perceived threat and dying in the process
shirkers — or anyone too sick or weak to keep working — are promptly executed by enforcer honey bees
Why aren’t honey bees more selfish? Why do individual bees not consider their own survival as more important than the survival of the hive?
The answer is simple: there is no mechanism of natural selection to favor the reproductive success of selfish bees within the hive. (There is, however, a mechanism that allows rogue bees to leave the hive and become independent — more on that below.)
Individual honey bees within the hive do not produce and rear their own young. Reproduction is a collective undertaking. If a honey bee behaves in a more selfish way — eating more honey than it produces when doing so jeopardizes the success of the hive, the hive may perish because of it, and the genetic traits that might have led to this behavior are not going to be replicated. If a bee behaves in a way that serves the purposes of the hive, then the hive is more likely to prosper, and more bees of this sort will be produced in the future.
Honey bees behave like collective entities, because they reproduce and rear young collectively. Nature brings selective pressure to bear on organisms based on reproductive success. That is why natural selection operates upon the hive as a whole, and not on individual bees.
This is also why honey bees are not individuals in the more colloquial sense of that word.
Honey bees have complex social organization and they are even able to share information with one another about the location of good sources of pollen. Despite this, there is no reason to believe that bees are self-aware.
One of the little understood aspects of communication is that it is not necessary to understand the difference between “self” and “other” in order to transfer information from one being to another. We do not need a theory of mind in order to decode or encode information.
While a theory of mind is useful if you are planning to deceive another individual, it is of no use whatever when all are working cooperatively at predetermined tasks and when the motivation for completing the task is completely internal.
Honey bees are motivated to work by an internal compulsion. A bee that does not have this compulsion is defective and is discarded by the hive. Sometimes the bees who are responsible for killing a defective worker are called “Enforcers”, but their job is not to motivate workers by fear of punishment. Defective workers are eliminated in the same way that a defective part is replaced in a machine.
The Mighty Bugs Since basically, everyone living in Florida, outside of those smack dab on the beach, are all walking on the skeletons of swampland — which means many things, but most of all — its all about how we are…
Most animals carry any surplus they have acquired on their person in the form of fat, to be consumed later during leaner times. Bees produce a tangible surplus outside their person — honey — and this makes them easy prey to other species who would enslave them.
When humans domesticated honey bees, they exploited the social organization of the bee to serve their own ends. If bees were not already in the habit of deferring gratification and creating a surplus, they would not be such easy targets for exploitation by humans.
However, even exploiters have got to take into consideration the basic needs of the population they are enslaving. A bee keeper who takes all the honey and leaves none for the hive to winter on will find that he has no bees come spring.
Most insects are not eusocial, and in fact, not all bees are! An example of a non-social bee sub-species is the “cuckoo bumble bee”. This particular sub-type of bumblebee has lost the ability to gather pollen. All female cuckoo bumblebees reproduce their own young, and there are no specialized roles among the cuckoo bumblebees.The alkali bee (Nomia melanderi Cockerell) is a non-social ground-nesting bee that has been extensively used to pollinate alfalfa. Large populations of such bees can exist side by side and yet not work cooperatively. Each has its own nest, gathers its own pollen, and produces its own young.
It seems that just as eusocial insects depend on a surplus, specialized roles and collective reproduction, those who give up the creation of a large surplus also discard specialized roles and collective breeding.
Why is it that when we think of bees, we automatically tend to think of the eusocial ones? The answer is obvious: because of the surplus! We crave honey. Individualist bees are good pollinators, but they don’t make much honey. Therefore, they are less likely to be exploited and enslaved.
Individualist bees are not enslaved by humans precisely because they do not allow other bees to enslave them. This is something to keep in mind when thinking about our own social organization.
So, which came first, solitary bees or eusocial ones? This is the sort of chicken and egg question that will be answered differently depending on your context.
If read in a broad context, the answer will be “solitary insects came first, so a pre-bee would have been asocial.” Read in a finer context, the answer may be: “eusocial bees are the precursors of solitary bees, because the first actual bees were eusocial. Pre-bees don’t count.”
If we want to see the big picture, though, the answer is: it comes in cycles.
A difference in social organization precedes genetic differentiation between groups of bees. First they behave differently and only later, with time, do genetic differences between different populations begin to appear.
Genetically identical bees have been found living side by side in the same physical environment, with one group engaged in egalitarian communal living (each female producing her own young, but sharing chores with other females) and the other living under a strict eusocial regime with a full caste system under the rule of a single fertile queen.
We see a lot of eusocial bees becoming solitary, but we seldom see this pattern of egalitarian communal living. Richards, von Wettburg and Rutgers discuss the reason for this in their article entitled Anovel social polymorphism in a primitively eusocial bee: “Why then is the cooccurrence of communal and eusocial behavior in halictine bees so rare, especially given the large number of halictine reversions from eusocial to solitary behavior? A communal transition between solitary to eusocial colony cycles is likely to be unstable and should disappear rapidly. As in any type of society based on mutualism, communal societies are open to cheating by nonegalitarian members. If dominance hierarchies associated with reproductive skew are formed, the colony ceases to be communal. This means that attempts by some individuals to dominate reproduction will tend to promote either the evolution of caste-based societies (eusocial or semisocial) or the founding of solitary colonies in which females can simply avoid cheaters, so communal, casteless societies would tend to be transient.”
Throughout nature the choice of social arrangement is dependent on a myriad of factors, but some rules hold firm. No animal has a society that can operate at a deficit. If the bee hive is not sufficiently productive to support the bees, then the colony collapses. Individual bees may or may not survive, but those who do survive make alternate social arrangements. Communal living pays off only so long as individual members of the commune are well served by the communal arrangement. Situations that encourage pilfering are replaced by situations where pilfering is deterred. Unstable arrangements are transient. Stable arrangements tend to last.
Some animals are social and others are solitary. Some animals care for their young until maturity, and some do not. Many insects, fish, and reptiles tend to lay eggs and then disappear, leaving their young to fend to themselves. Most birds and mammals take responsibility for young, providing them with food and shelter until they are mature. In some species, males and females form partnerships for the rearing of young. In other species, care for offspring falls primarily on one of the sexes and not the other. Many social animals live in groups and have dominance hierarchies.
Most forms of communal living found in nature revolve around reproductive and rearing strategies, and partnerships between and among members are dissolved if they do not serve this purpose well.
Some species of squirrels live communally and others do not. Factors that help to determine whether resources are pooled or kept separate may include the size of the habitat, the availability of food, and overall population density.
The Size of Prairie Vole Social Units is dependent on population density — not food supply
Chimpanzees are our closest relatives. They are self-aware and highly intelligent. They use tools to harvest ants and to break nuts open. They live in social groups, and they have dominance hierarchies that determine status within the group. However, chimpanzees maintain no food surplus, and hence they have no well-defined caste system, specialized roles or forced labor. For this reason, it is also impossible to enslave a chimpanzee. Chimpanzees can cooperate with humans, but only if they choose to, (It is impossible to force a chimpanzee to do something he does not wish to do over the long run.) The same is not true of human beings.
No matter how low the status of a chimpanzee within the group, he never gives in! He may submit to a more dominant male to avoid a physical beating, but he never agrees that this dominant individual is his true superior. His head is bloodied, but unbowed! When the Alpha is too busy to notice, lesser males mate with females they have been forbidden to touch.
Because of the resilience of each individual chimpanzee and the resistance that they offer to any long term domination, the dominance hierarchies never become a eusocial caste system. For this very same reason, no surplus can ever be accumulated by a group of chimpanzees. “Saving some for later” is not part of their psychology or their mode of life.
In the literature on chimpanzees, the word “surplus” does appear, but it’s not used to mean creating food stocks now for a later use. It’s more like the present disposition of “food that is too much for one person to eat”. Females who break nuts will provision their children with excess nuts. Occasionally, all the males go and hunt together, and some of the meat is shared with females in return for sexual favors. But these instances of social cooperation are occasional rather than habitual. By and large, every chimpanzee picks his own fruit and eats it. Those higher in rank get to pick more and better fruit, but no adult chimpanzee picks fruit for any other adult chimpanzee. Each individual is responsible for supporting himself.
Mothers and Hunter-gatherers
Our Mothers’ Backs My daughter and I are watching Moribito, a Japanese animated series about a woman warrior charged with protecting a prince of the royal blood from the Mikado’s assassins. Balsa, the warrior, and Chagum, the…
Human beings who live in hunter gatherer groups enjoy a similar freedom to that of the chimpanzee. Hunter gatherers must carry their own weight, and that of their dependent children, and hence the accumulation of a surplus, whether in the form of worldly goods or even just body fat, is highly curtailed. Each hunter-gatherer adult is responsible for himself, and women must carry their small children on their backs. While there is a spirit of benevolence, and women sometimes help to care for other women’s children, this type of mutual help is occasional and not habitual,and every child has a special attachment to its own mother.
Because there is no surplus in hunter-gatherer societies, there isn’t any social stratification. Yes, there are leaders, but these leaders rule by personal charisma alone, and nobody is required to follow. Each individual can make decisions about his own food gathering and live with the consequences. If he chooses to follow a leader, it is only because he believes the leader is right in that particular instance.
Agriculture and Social Stratification
Bread: The First Fast Food What is a fast food? It is one that tastes good, can be prepared easily, is readily accessible to all, and that has a considerable shelf life. What is a fast food? It is a shortcut to acquiring nutrition. It…
With the invention of agriculture, humanity underwent a very big social upheaval. Food could now be stockpiled, and this surplus led directly to extreme social stratification. A caste system arose in almost every pocket of early civilization:
farmers/laborers
merchants/scholars
warriors
kings
Social pyramids that were wide at the bottom and met at a single point at the top were the rule throughout early history in most “civilized” places across the globe.
The “middle class” that everybody is clamoring to belong to today is the second social stratum that I listed above. Clearly, not everybody can be middle class, and still have it be the “middle class”!
We can see that the socially stratified civilization that sprang up with the discovery of agriculture shares some of the features of the social organization of honey bees:
creation of a surplus
specialized roles or castes
Notably absent is the feature of collective reproduction. (Yes, there were eunuchs and harems, but that trend never really took off!)
Because the reproductive function of “civilized” humans is not all that different from the reproductive function of chimpanzees and hunter-gatherers, human beings never lost their individualist streak completely.
However, religion and philosophy attempted to make up for this by creating moralities that condemned indviduals who rebelled against the system. We were told not to be “selfish”, and the hope was that we would internalize this commandment. The text of Isaac Watts’ poem “Against Idleness and Mischief” is just one of many examples of indoctrination in eusocial ideals.
Explanation of How the Size of the Group Protected is Balanced against Resources
Liberty and Justice: Why, How and for Whom? The following essay was not written by me. I am merely giving it a new place to appear and a new readership. This is an essay that my father wrote and published in 1989. It helps explain why some people…
Just as the evolution of the social behavior of bees goes through cycles, human social organization also cycles. Free market ideals that found their way into practice in 18th century America allowed many Americans to revert to a way of life more like that of the hunter-gatherer without giving up their surplus. Small farms and shops were run by individuals and families and balanced their books separately from others. The founding fathers chose a loose confederacy of states over a centralized government, and everything was based on the idea that each individual had a choice as to how to spend his time and how to invest in the future.
(Yes, there was slavery and Native Americans were dispossessed in the process of settling the wilderness. I am not condoning these practices. However, for those people in the “in-group” — many of whom had been peasants and serfs in Europe — this was an opportunity to stop being a worker bee and become a solitary bee, instead.)
Social trends in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have brought everything back toward collectivization and the ideals of Isaac Watt. The cycle looks something like this:
individual effort ==> surplus/castes ==> individually held surplus ==>redistribution
No doubt the cycling isn’t over, and after the current fling with collectivization, survivors will move toward more individualized social structures. In the meanwhile, many are really baffled by the connection between the conditions that bring about the rise of collectivization and the reasons people suffer when eusocial ideals are the norm.
Whenever a particular socialist regime is held up as an example of the failure of socialism, proponents of socialism will reply that their ideals were violated by the regime, so it doesn’t really count. National Socialism in Germany? That was a fascist regime, and fascism isn’t socialism. Soviet Russia? That was communism, and communism isn’t really socialism.
If you ask what the difference is between an actual instantiation of socialist ideals and the historical examples that we have, you will be told that true socialism is egalitarian. In other words, true socialism is like a commune where everybody works, and everybody is a full partner.
Communes are inherently unstable, but some have survived and prospered despite the odds. In order to thrive, communes require strict control over membership. Various religious orders, and not a few collective farms and kibbutzim have managed to function successfully, by retaining the right to expel unproductive members and by allowing disgruntled members to leave freely, along with their share upon dissolution. These mechanisms of self-selection and forcible ejection can sometimes work in a small group to keep a commune on track.
These are not mechanisms that can easily be put into effect when an entire country becomes socialist. When a citizen leaves, he can’t take his share of the country with him. Forcible ejection of people who disagree with the current regime is not an option practiced by democratic societies. When a country goes socialist, none of the mechanisms for keeping a commune economically viable are available.
It then follows that strict central government, together with a caste system, are always put into effect. It is not the fault of the particular regime that this is done. It’s the nature of reality.
Often in discussions of the most suitable social organization, arguments against socialism are made by reliance on the failings that come from our very humanity. It’s human nature, we tend to think, that prevents all the communitarian utopian experiments to fail. As it turns out, the reason egalitarian communes are short-lived is not a matter of human nature, or bee nature, or the nature of any particular organism. It’s just nature. Period.
It doesn’t matter whether the organisms in question are self-aware mammals or the most primitive of insects. It’s got nothing to do with intelligence or self-denial.
Large communes where not all members know one another intimately are unstable, because they are too susceptible to cheating. In order to enforce any rules concerning sharing of resources, or maintaining standards of productivity, it is necessary for each commune member to have a veto in the acceptance of new members as partners. It is also necessary for each partner to be able to dissolve the union and take away his own share, in the event that being in the commune no longer serves his long term goals. When a commune is small, all of this is possible, and the knowledge that it can be done keeps all partners in check. But in a commune so large that most members do not know most other members, it is not practical to give each member a veto. A hierarchical organization with strong central control is required.
For this reason, solitary bees can prosper and eusocial bees can prosper, but communal bees who pool resources but do not have a queen or a caste system, tend to be only a transient phenomenon. For the same reason, monarchies and dictatorships, and Spartan city states can prosper, and nations with citizens who each balance their own books can prosper, but communes that are a great deal larger than a family have been remarkably short-lived.
If you have the ability to use language, does this mean you have a LAD hardwired in your brain
When I started Project Bow, one of the purposes of showing that chimpanzees could learn language was to explore the question of the so-called language acquisition device. If a chimpanzee uses human language effectively to communicate, does this imply that there is a shared LAD between humans and chimpanzees? Or, alternatively, does it mean that neither chimpanzees nor humans have language hardwired in the brain. In the video below, I share two articles that address this issue.
There are 22 letters in the Hebreew alphabet — It is Finite
Last night I gave a presentation on Project Bow, an ape language research project, and what issues concerning rigorous proof were presented by spontaneous and non-replicable results.
My Presentation on Project Bow and the Issues of Proof
Modern scientific research, especially in the social sciences, relies on aggregated data which shows replicable, statistically significant results. Many of the researchers in the social sciences don’t actually understand statistics and use programs that do all the calculations for them. However, they are convinced that without statistics, nothing can be proven. They forget the rules of simple logic and finite mathematics. They deny that a single example can falsify a rule, or that an outcome that is greater than chance under probability might be enough to prove a point
When it comes to linguistic data, once we are able to agree on a phonemic inventory for a language, the data is finite. There is a finite number of combinations of the phonemes that are possible. If the data is written, calculating the probabilty of any given form being chosen should be very easy, and it does not require higher order statistics. If the likelihood of the choice is far greater than chance, replication may not be necessary. This way, we can judge that someone speaks our language after a limited exchange, rather than by requiring constant repetition.
The findings of the Neogrammarians about the relatedness of the IndoEuropean languages were based on the idea that the similarities in the roots of these languages could not be due to chance. No statistics were necessary to establish that proof.
This begs the question: why use statistics when probability will do?
How can you tell if something is good? In the case of poetry, aren’t all standards of evaluation strictly subjective? Don’t we all tend to think that what we write is good? Isn’t it all a matter of taste?
In the case of much of modern poetry that is not metrical, this may be true. However, metrical poetry involves both a technical and an artistic component, and while we may sometimes disagree concerning artistic evaluation, the technical part is fairly straightforward.
In this hub, I will explain what we at the Inverted-A Horn look for in poetry submissions. In the process we will discuss the idea of objective merit versus subjective preferences in the selection of poetry.
Objectivity
Having objective standards in a field of endeavor is something that usually elevates the prestige of the field and ensures competitive earnings for those who excel. Some areas in which it is relatively easy to establish objective standards of evaluation include: athletics, mathematics and music.
Objective standards are present when people are able to judge for themselves that others are considerably better than they are at a particular skill. For instance, I can’t stay deluded about my relative strength as a sprinter for very long. All I have to do is measure a course and clock my run to know that I am not in the running for any world record. This does not mean I can’t enjoy running, but it does mean that when someone other than me gets a gold medal, I will know that he deserves it, and that it was not all a matter of politics.
The same is true for mathematics. Since the rules of the game are well defined, we usually can tell for ourselves that someone else has solved a problem that we were not able to solve. (Except for a few cranks, mentioned in the link, most people have fairly realistic notions concerning their own mathematical abilities.)
In classical music, too, there is a certain level of objectivity. Many more people can intuitively appreciate good music than are able to produce it. Simply by judging their own output against that of someone who is more proficient, they can tell when they have been outclassed.
The state of objectivity in poetic evaluation was never as rigorously defined as are excellence in athletics, mathematics and music. However, there was a time when people enjoyed poetry recitation even though they were not poets themselves.They were able to judge the merit of a poem by the effect that it had on them when recited. There were even competitions to determine who had greater skill at recitation.
Just as with music, the effect of the meter and the substance of the poem were felt by its audience, and people could readily enjoy the experience of hearing a poem well recited, when they realized that they themselves were not capable of writing such a poem or even of reciting it to the same effect.
In those days, poets had the prestige of composers and reciters were given the same respect as musicians. Those days are long past. Here at The Inverted-A Horn, we are hoping for a revival.
What is meter?
Meter is composed of units called feet. In a metrical line, there will typically be a fixed number of feet and each foot will be composed of specific patterns formed by the arrangement of weak and strong syllables.
What makes a syllable weak or strong? This varies from language to language. Some languages are stress-based languages, like Modern English. In Modern English a stressed syllable is considered strong, and an unstressed syllable is considered weak. In Latin, which was a time-based language, the contrast was between long and short syllables. For the purposes of meter in Latin, a strong syllable was a long syllable. A weak syllable was a short syllable.
Each language has its own way of determining which syllable is weak or strong. The important thing in understanding meter is to note that there are two things that contrast with each other: a dot and a dash, a ying and a yang. It doesn’t matter so much what they are. Without the contrast, there could be no meter.
Independently of the definition of weak and strong syllables, which varies from language to language, we can define specific meters in the following way, using x to stand for a strong syllable and o to stand for a weak one.
In any specific meter, you will see recurring patterns of x and o, as in the following examples:
1) oox/oox/oox/
Read it out loud: “Dot dot dash/dot dot dash/ dot dot dash.” Or instead you could say: “duh duh dah!” for each three syllables.
2) ox/ox/ox Read it aloud: “Dot dash/ dot dash/ dot dash.” Or alternatively: “Duh dah“, for each two syllables. You can beat the meter out on the table as if it were a rhythm.
3) oxo/oxo/oxo/ Read it out loud: “dot dash dot/ dot dash dot/ dot dash dot.” This time the one in the middle is the strong one.
4) xo/xo/xo Now the strong syllable come first, followed by a weak one. “Dash dot/ dash dot/ dash dot.”
The different types of metrical feet have traditional names:
1) ox (or a weak followed by a strong syllable) is an iamb, and when used as adjective is calle iambic.
2) oox (or two weak syllables followed by one strong) is an anapest, or an anapestic foot.
3) oxo (or strong syllable sandwiched between two weak ones) is called an amphibrach or amphibrachus.
4) xo (or a strong syllable followed by a weak one) is called a trochee, or trochaic foot.
5) xoo (or a strong syllable followed by two weak ones) is called a dactyl, or dactylic foot.
There are a few others that the books mention, such as spondee, which consists of two strong syllables together or a tribrach, which consists of three weak syllables in a row. When submitting poetry to us, avoid those kinds of feet. They tend to break up the meter.
Regular meter usually avoids two strong syllables side by side, nor does it tolerate having more than two weak syllables side by side before a strong one appears. Why? Because put two strong things together, and one of them will turn out to be stronger than the other. Put three weak ones together, and one of them will turn out to be not as weak, It’s human nature not to be able to tolerate that much uniformity. If you do manage it, then it will end up sounding like prose.
What does prose sound like? It is unmelodious. It violates the easiest flow of syllables. Prose does this, because there is a tension between metrical rules imposed in a word and metrical rules imposed on a phrase. In a multisyllabic word, two strong syllables will never be found side by side. In a multisyllabic word, more than two weak syllables will not go together. In a sentence or phrase, this does sometimes happen, because, for instance, a word ending in a strong syllable can be followed by a word starting with a strong syllable.The difference between poetry and prose is that prose has irregular meter. Prose doesn’t scan.
We at Inverted-A don’t have a preference for any particular meter. As long as it is regular, any meter will do. Different poems can include regular combinations of specific numbers of particular feet in each line. For instance, we all have heard of iambic pentameter, which consists of five iambs per line.
Do you need to to know the name of your meter in order to submit poetry to Inverted-A? Absolutely not. Do you need to sit around counting weak versus strong syllables? Again, the answer is no. If you write metrical poetry instinctively, all that will take care of itself.
Why do I mention it then? If you submit a poem with perfect meter, there will be no scansion problem. (Your poem may still get rejected, because of content issues, but that’s a different story.) The only time we may end up talking about the meter is if there’s something wrong with it. In which case, it’s nice to have a vocabulary for discussing it.
Assigning Stress to Syllables in a Line of Modern English
The trick to metrical poetry is that it selects patterns that a language naturally has plenty of, but it just makes them a little more regular. Listening to poetry is like listening to someone talking — only more so! It’s an idealization of a regular pattern that is natural in a language.
In the case of monosyllabic words in English, here is a rule of thumb: in the average phrase or sentence the content words will get the stresses, while the grammatical words will not be stressed:
1) The man was not at home.
2) His phone was off the hook.
3) It’s good to feed the dog.
These are all simple sentences in Modern English that just naturally fall into iambic feet. There are many more such sentences, and this is why writing poetry in iambic feet is easy in English.
Words consisting of more than one syllable in English have a stress assigned to them on a word by word basis. That is, you have to be familiar with the word, to know where the stresses go. What makes things even more complicated, if you bother to notice, is that some English words are so long that a single stress in not enough. According to some theorists, these words have both a primary and a secondary stress. In addition to this, some words have syllables that are not only unstressed, they are actually reduced. For purposes of metrical poetry, though, there are only two kinds of syllables: weak and strong. A syllable with a stress, primary or secondary, is a stressed syllable, and therefore, strong. A syllable that is unstressed is weak. A reduced syllable is weak.
Here I will show you the meter of specific multisyllabic English words:
1) con-sti-tu-tion x-o-x-o
2) spin-ach x-o
3) re-port o-x
4) un-for-tu-nate-ly o-x-o-o-x
When stringing words together in a sentence or phrase, their internal metrical structure rarely gives way to the metrical demands of the phrase. That’s why choosing the right word to suit your meter — or the right meter to suit your word – is important.
In the following line from E. Shaun Russell’s poem, “State of the Union”, which appears in Inverted-A Horn# 28, the word “constitution” fits neatly into an iambic meter, as follows:
“In-voke/ your con/-sti-tu/-tion and/ feel proud“
Most of the meter in this line flows naturally and there is no other way to read it except as a series of iambic feet. Can you identify the one foot where a metrical reading does not necessarily coincide with a natural one? It’s the one where the word “and” bears the stress. Because the meter in the rest of the line is so strong, it’s not hard for us to follow the stress pattern and stress “and”. Words like “and” do occasionally get stressed because of the context.(Example: “Do you want the water or the juice? I want the water and the juice.”)
Your metrical poem is most successful when the natural reading and the metrical reading coincide.
The Process of Selection
What happens when we start evaluating a poem at the Inverted-A Horn? The first thing we do is read it out loud, to see if it scans. It doesn’t matter what it looks like on the page. What matters is how it sounds.
Take this paragraph, for instance, which was written by Roy Moore and published as part of “The Ranchman” in Inverted-A Horn #13: “…The mountains rise purple with far off horizons. The sky overhead is blue, silver, and chrome. The valley is tranquil in sunlight and shadow. This is my heaven, this place I call home.”
Was that paragraph prose? No, because it scanned. You can tell something is a poem with your eyes closed. You’re not going to fool us into thinking a prose submission belongs in our poetry section by cutting it up into short lines. (We do publish prose, too!) Some of us are not looking at the paper. We’re listening to somebody else read it. We can tell if it scans.
Must a poem rhyme? No. We like rhymes, but they are optional, like the icing on a cake. We will not accept something that rhymes but doesn’t scan. We will accept it if it scans and doesn’t rhyme. But it has to be good!
Of course, what “good” is has its subjective side. That’s where personal taste comes in. About half the poems we get are rejected because they don’t scan at all. That decision is easy, because it’s completely objective. We then proceed to divide the rest of the poetry submissions into three piles:
1) Those that simply don’t move us, even if they do scan.
2) Those that move us but scan imperfectly.
3) Those that move us and also scan perfectly.
Here’s what happens: We reject the poems in the first group on substantive rather than formal grounds. We offer suggestions to correct the scansion of the poems in the second group. We accept without reservation the poems in the third group.
So what tends to move us? We like romantic/heroic poems. We don’t like to think of humanity as helpless and without redeeming value. We want to see beauty, but we’re not looking for trite sentiments. A poem can be sad and yet good. It can be lyrical, narrative or philosophical. We accept many different subjects.
If you want to get a better idea, send off for a sample issue of The Horn.
This past Friday, I reviewed the YouTube Channel called “Thinking-Ape.” In doing so, I dredged up a few of my old articles on Neoteny, Dominance and Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey.
My Review of Thinking Ape
My Old Neoteny Article
Developmental Delay as the Primary Cause of the Unusual Material Culture Among Humans
What makes human beings unique among all the creatures of the earth? It sounds like almost a biblical question. But did you know that many in the scientific community are still asking that question? This query has built into it a very big assumption: that we are somehow more “special” than any other animal. Are we? What are they basing that on?
We are not the only animal that builds things. We are not the only animal that uses tools, or even that uses other tools to make tools. We are not the only animal with a communication system. We are not the only animal to compose music. We are not the only animal that thinks.
When it comes right down to it, there is nothing that anybody can point to to suggest that we are all that different from other animals, besides the all-prevasive material culture that humans are known for.
So why is it that, even though we are not the only animal on the planet to build and make things, we do seem to be the only one to build and make things that are not easily biodegradable and that therefore outlast not just the individuals who built them, but the entire civilizations from which they arose? This, I think, is a question worth addressing.
Neoteny in non-humans and in humans: A Permanent Developmental Delay
What is developmental delay and why do I think it is responsible for our unusual fixation on the permanence of material objects that we have made? Isn’t the term “developmental delay” just a new phrase to replace the politically incorrect “mental retardation”? Isn’t someone who is developmentally delayed essentially a moron?
Well, no! But thanks for asking. The word “moron” is a technical term to describe a person with an unusually low IQ. “Mental retardation”, when the term was first introduced, was meant to refer not to a person’s absolute intelligence, but to the relative degree to which their mental abilities are behind the average developmental level for their age group. So a “mentally retarded” person at three years of age may just be behind others in that age group, and may later catch up with and even surpass others.
Unlike mental retardation, “developmental delay” refers to all kinds of abilities and skills, not merely what we narrowly term intelligence. It can include motor skills, balance, the ability to stand on our own two feet, to survey the scene and draw conclusions about a situation and to respond non-verbally to social cues and any number of other skills not measured in an IQ test.
The fact of the matter is that all human beings, even the most “normal”, are developmentally delayed at birth compared to most other mammals of the same age. Not only that, but if you really look closely, most of us never catch up. We are never as graceful as a gazelle, and we are never as self-sufficient as a wolf, and even the most wily politician among us does not have the innate social skills of the average chimpanzee for forming coalitions in a peer group. We are slow to learn and slow to automate the skills that we have learned.
Humans suffer from extreme neoteny. This means that even when we are adults, we look and behave much like juveniles. We never really grow up, and as a result we continue to learn throughout life, and we continue to play with toys long after that stage of development is outgrown in other species.
Mammalian Developmental Delay: The Invention of Childhood
In order not to single humans out unduly, let’s keep in mind that mammals and birds are already somewhat developmentally delayed compared to most fish, reptiles and amphibians. While reptiles and fish and the other life forms that resemble them are not usually involved in caring for young, birds and mammals dedicate a portion of their life to provisioning helpless, underdeveloped and developmentally delayed offspring.
The downside of this arrangement is that adults are burdened with the care of parasitic young. The upside is that since the young are not prewired to know everything they need to know at birth, there is room for learning from experience, and birds and mammals have the opportunity to develop their intelligence throughout their childhood.
The prototypical mamalian child has a big head and a small body, engages in activities that serve no useful purpose (otherwise known as play), and is full of curiosity about the world and how it works.
By the time a typical mammal arrives at adulthood, there is much less play, and a serious interest in staying alive, getting food, procreating and caring for young pushes aside the pastimes of infancy and childhood.
In order to survive, an adult has to live in the moment and to consider those things that threaten survival. Anything beyond is a luxury reserved to growing children.
Comparison between Chimpanzees and Humans
Humans and chimpanzees are very closely related. The retarded maturation in both species is quite pronounced compared to that of many other mammals. Chimpanzee young, like the children of hunter-gatherer humans, are carried about by their mothers and suckled for the first three years of life, and are often still being carried until they are five years of age. They do not enter puberty until sometime between eight and ten years of age, and even then they are not fully mature and do not become adults until their late teens. In the wild, a chimpanzee lives to be about forty, which is similar to the human survival under natural conditions without modern comforts. In captivitiy chimpanzees can live to be seventy-five or older.
However, despite these similarities, development in humans is even more delayed than in chimpanzees. A chimpanzee can support its full weight at birth. Carried by the mother, it clings with its strong arms to her hair. Social awareness and sense of balance develop months sooner in a chimpanzee than in a human.
Compared to a chimpanzee, a human child, even the most normally developing one, appears a little bit autistic. Physical coordination as well as social development are considerably delayed in humans, behind the normal timetable for chimpanzee maturation.
If you have raised both a chimpanzee and a human child, as I have, then you notice also that while both like to play, the human child becomes interested in putting things together and building things, and saving things for later, while the chimpanzee child enjoys taking things apart, playing with them roughly until they are entirely consumed and no longer exist, and using found objects as projectiles and weapons.
Of course, that might also be the difference between a girl and a boy. I have such a small sampling, it’s hard to draw definitive conclusions.
In any event, from what we have seen chimpanzees do in the wild, while they can and do use objects as tools, create new tools, and do any number of very inventive things, what they do not seem to do is to keep the same material objects in good condition over a considerable period of time. They build nests and they abandon them. They adorn themselves momentarily, but they throw the object away. They make tools and they do not keep them.
Ownership is not a big thing. Material goods, besides comestibles, are not valued or prized. Interest in any object is of short duration, for its usefulness, but not as a keepsake. Why?
Some people say chimpanzees don’t have material culture because they don’t have language. I don’t believe that for two reasons: there is no evidence that they don’t have a language of their own. When we teach them one of our languages, they learn it. They can spell. They can speak grammatically. But they still destroy material objects and cannot be bribed with money or toys.
Even if you don’t believe the claims that chimpanzees and bonobos can use language, let’s look at it from the opposite direction. We know that all human population groups have a language. But do all humans have a rich material culture? Do all humans engage in commerce? Do all humans even know how to count?
It’s hard to get a chimp not to break a chopstick, even though it means he’ll have one chopstick less
The Pirahã people are indigenous to Brazil. They are a hunter-gatherer people, and in their language there are no numbers. There are no ordinal numbers, and there are no cardinal numbers. And when researchers asked adult members of the Pirahã people to participate in a study on numerosity (the ability to estimate numbers) they were not able, even by writing lines on a piece of paper, to tell the researchers how many objects were placed before them.
Some researchers have claimed that the Pirahã people are incapable of counting. I tend to agree with Professor Daniel L. Everett when he says that they are cognitively capable of counting, but have no interest in doing so.
In a New Yorker article by John Colapinto, an eleven year old Pirahã boy is described making a model airplane out of balsa in response to the arrival of an airplane, but the model is soon broken and discarded. It’s not that the Pirahã can’t make things or that they are not intelligent, it’s just that they do not value the things they make, and so they don’t accumulate material goods and they do not build a material culture.
The Pirahã adults are fully adult in the same sense that a black she-bear caring for her cubs is an adult. They know what matters is the present and the immediate future, and they can’t be bothered expending much energy on flights of fancy.
Yes, there are many animals in the jungle, many fish in the river, many stars in the sky. Possibly there is some way to quantify that, but why bother?
Developmental Delay as a Cultural Artefact
Some forms of developmental delay are induced by environment. For instance, the middle class child is intentionally delayed in maturation by being kept in school and not allowed to learn a trade. The lower class child, in societies that still permit a lower class to exist, on the other hand, is allowed to mature sooner, and begins to earn his keep earlier. Neoteny takes makes many forms, and not every one of them is genetic.
Tell a child that reading is more important than going fishing, and the child will delay his maturation as a fisherman. Teach an infant that letters are more important than social contact, and he may grow to be hyperlexic. Compliment someone on his intellectual skills and ignore his social growth and it will eventually have some sort of effect. Between the natural selection in favor of certain traits that our culture promotes in the mating game, and the fostering of behaviors within the family and society, it is all heading in one direction.
In industrialized societies today, many more children are experiencing developmental delay of an extreme form that has been labeled autism. We don’t know the cause, but one thing is obvious: it’s a continuation of the same trajectory that separates mammals from reptiles, human beings from the other great apes, and industrialized humans from their hunter-gatherer contemporaries.
So, the next time someone asks: why do we have a material culture, whereas they don’t, you might answer: maybe it’s because they don’t want one. Maybe they just don’t think it serves any useful purpose..
Facts about Homo Sapiens that You May Not Already Know Perhaps you are considering adding another human being to your household. Or maybe you have no experience at all with human beings, and this will be the first one you encounter. This hub will give you some…
There’s been a lot of talk about dominance on Hubpages lately. Some people say that it behooves a married woman to allow her husband to be dominant. This strikes me as odd, because if he is dominant, why does he need anyone to allow him to do anything? If he’s not dominant, then how in the world can somebody else make him dominant?
What it comes down to is a very strange usage of the word dominance. I propose that before we get into a heated argument about who necessarily needs to be dominant in any given relationship, we should first of all agree on what dominance actually means.
Who is dominant in this picture?
The baby rides the mother’s back, but the mother decides where they go. | Source
Definition of Dominance
Dominance is having control, power or governance over a situation. When individuals are together in a relationship, the ones who cast the decisive vote as to what should happen among them are the more dominant parties. Dominance is not about exchanging material goods. It is about decision making powers.
For instance, in the mother/infant relationship, the mother is normally dominant, until the child attains independence. Even though the mother serves the infant, and more goods and services flow from the mother to the infant than from the infant to the mother, the mother gets to decide what happens between them. The infant starts out as virtually helpless.
Dominance is not about who gets more. Dominance is not about what happens between people. It is about who decides what will happen.
Dominance versus Deference
Bonobo males show deference to females. But who is dominant? | Source
Dominance and Chivalry Among Bonobos
If you are confused about this issue, don’t feel bad about it. Many primatologists are equally confused. For instance, there have been reports that in bonobo society females are dominant. These claims were in part based on observations of food sharing behavior. When bonobos were provisioned with sugar cane, the females and their young were seen taking their share first, and then, only when they had finished, did the males go in to take what was left.
The primatologists observing this at first assumed that taking food was what everyone wanted to do, and that if the males had to wait till the females finished, the females must be dominant. But then it was observed that it was the older males who enforced this rule among the younger, less powerful males. Young, inexperienced males were castigated by older, more powerful males for trying to cut in before the females had finished.
What the primatologists had witnessed was an example of chivalry. The males were dominant, and they used their dominance to protect and show deference to the females and their young. They understood that if the males took everything they could, there would be none left for the females and their young.
Joan of Arc at the coronation of Charles VII
Sometimes it takes a strong woman to crown a weak man as king | Source
Queen Elizabeth I with her Rod and Scepter
Sometimes queens only reign. Sometimes they also rule! | Source
Social Rank and Individual Dominance Are Not Always the Same
In human societies, explicit formal ranking sometimes replaces actual dominance. This means that a person is placed in charge of a situation, even though another person on the scene is more intrinsically dominant. Sometimes a commanding officer is less charismatic or brave or strategically brilliant than one of the soldiers he commands. Sometimes a student knows more than a teacher. Sometimes one party is the nominal head of the family, while another family member really dominates the scene.
So it happens that even though someone is younger, less experienced than another, or less educated, the better person for the job comes to dominate the situation naturally, based on personal characteristics. What should the naturally dominant person do, when he is outranked formally?
This depends. In times of peace, when nothing much is at stake, showing deference to a less able commanding officer may be the right thing to do. However, in the thick of battle, it might really matter what decision is made, and at times the naturally dominant person will have to stand up to the one who outranks him, for the sake of everybody.
All things being equal, adults usually outrank children, better educated people outrank those with less education, and men tend to be better warriors and hunters than women. However, real dominance is not a matter of statistics. It is about what happens when individuals meet and interact. Sometimes quite unexpectedly, a person with lesser social rank can come to be dominant. An unlettered peasant woman can lead an army. A little child can out-think his masters. And a queen can not merely reign, but rule.
Sometimes it is not completely obvious who dominates
Because truly dominant individuals tend to show deference to those whom they dominate, it is not always easy to tell at first glance who is dominant in any given situation. Watch the clip I’ve embedded above of the scene from Meet John Doe. In this scene, Barbara Stanwyck plays a very strong and determined woman who socially outranks the character played by Gary Cooper. But who is really dominant? If you have any thoughts about this, leave me a note in the comment section!
I work and live with an eight and a half year old male chimpanzee named Bow. I am his adoptive mother, and I socially outrank him. However, he gets his way an amazing percentage of the time. When I want him to do something, I have to ask nicely, or it doesn’t get done. Do I dominate Bow or does he dominate me? I’m not sure. It’s a close call.
Who is dominant?
Who is dominant in this picture? | SourceTheir gravestones are side by side. They lived and died together. But nobody ever called her Mrs. O’Connor. They called him Mr. Ayn Rand. | Source
Dominance in Marriage
What about dominance in marriage? I can’t say from personal experience, but from observing other people’s marriages, I would say that it varies. It depends on the individuals involved. Is he a stronger person? Is she? The dynamic can even vary between different stages of the same marriage.
But what is ideal? Well, ideal is whichever way you like it! But even here, dominance is not something the parties can agree upon. It’s something that happens based on who they are as individuals. Like love, dominance can’t be faked.
Ayn Rand very much wanted to be in a relationship with a man who would play the dominant role both in the bedroom and elsewhere. However, she was a very strong woman, and all the men she met were weaker. She married Frank O’Connor, and she tried very hard to play the submissive wife, but it didn’t work, because nobody can give another person dominance. You either have it or you don’t.
A woman can pretend all she wants that her husband is dominant, but it’s really not up to her. The most she can do is to show deference. That’s all anybody can do.
(c) 2010 Aya Katz
Here is the link to the article on Women’s Suffrage:
