Homo Sapiens is an Operating System with Responsibilities, Not a Chunk of Insensately Competing Genetic Material
June 26, 2021
This is the reprise I mentioned earlier of the previously written Grundvilk material.
Well, what I’ve been circling around and around and over and over again is that homo sapiens got this far in time and space by paying close attention to 1) its environment, 2) its fellows, and 3) the findings and institutions established and practiced by its forebears. The first two objects of everyday attention are not unique to humans, but are also closely followed by all the rest of the great apes/hominids.
Lack of attendance to, and utilization of the third (social and cultural) category is evidently what separates the other great apes from homo sapiens, however. In contrast to humans, Tomasello observes that the other apes fail to:
1) Deliberately teach and learn;
2) Closely (over)imitate others;
3) Use physical or verbal pointing;
4) See things from alternative perspectives;
5) Intuit or otherwise anticipate the likely thinking of others;
6) Employ third-party punishment or other negative reinforcement;
7) Intentionally communicate with others to build and support a commonly utilizable understanding of things;
8) Develop a feeling of interdependence and belonging; and,
9) Through the agency of all of the above, accumulate and employ an increasing and useful culture (Tomasello’s “cultural ratchet effect”).
These behavioral and cognitive lacks in the other great apes give them no alternative but to live competitively and individually, rather than cooperatively and collectively (Tomasello 2014). 1
There is a very distinct, large lack of genetic diversity in humans compared to the rest of the hominids.2 A major working hypothesis in modern academic thinking therefore is that gorilla, chimpanzee, and orangutan populations largely rely on the ‘hardware’ of their high level of native genetic variability to cope with the vagaries of natural selection pressure, while homo sapiens, on the other hand, employs the ephemeral ‘operating system’ of its accumulated culture to otherwise consciously, constantly, and laboriously compensate for its basic lack of genetic diversity.
If this working hypothesis is indeed true, it indicates that any adult human failure (individual or otherwise) to maintain and/or practice the notably human-only behaviors listed above will immediately diminish the actual existence and identity of the species. I’ve mentioned some of these apparent failures in earlier posts.
Tomasello, Michael, 2014, A Natural History of Human Thinking: Harvard University Press.