The Ascent of Man
There are, as you might imagine, a lot of different theories about how we came to be what we are. The science of evolution has produced several, all seeking to account for the strange and unique characteristics of the human animal. Some of these theories are very interesting, and all of them are the work of very clever people. But there is a problem common to each of them.
Conjecture. Conjecture is fine, conjecture is important, but no matter how clever these theories are, no matter how true they may be, they each rest upon conjecture, and not upon evidence. The conjecture that we began to walk upright and thus kicked off our evolution may contain some truth, but it raises more questions than it answers. All apes alive today can walk upright – if they so choose. Why did such a thing have such a massive effect upon us, and not them? The conjecture that we developed opposable thumbs and thus were able to manipulate or environment more effectively is similar – it raises more questions than it answers also. Apes have opposable thumbs. They're just nowhere near as dexterous as ours. Why did we need such a high level of manual dexterity in the first instance to get our thumbs moving? Why don't chimpanzees develop their thumbs? The same problems are true of tools as well – apes can use tools. Not brilliantly, but they can do it. Why did they not develop that existing skill to a higher level, if it is as amazingly useful as we have clearly found it to be? Another theory postulates an aquatic dimension to our evolution – among other things, the proteins in a fish-based diet would assist the growth of our brains. But many ape species live near water. In fact, all ape species live near water – they all need a water source to drink so that they can survive. Kodiak bears live mainly on a diet of fish, and they can also, if they want to, walk bipedally. They don't write poetry or build skyscrapers.
All the existing theories of human evolution, no matter how sophisticated or how clever, really address two key questions about our origins, just over 3 million years ago.
Why us?
Why then?
This is very significant. It means that as human beings, we have no solid scientific explanation for our own unique nature.
This unique nature is amazing. Whatever the faculties are that make up what we call humanity, they have allowed us to establish ourselves as the apex predator of the entire planet. We are right at the top of the food chain. If you doubt that we are, think of this. The polar bear, the great white shark and the Indian tiger are arguably the top three predators in the world. There may be others that you know of, but those are my top three. They are each extremely dangerous animals.
We have hunted all of them to the brink of extinction. They are all but obliterated as species, and there is no way that I can think of, even in the face of a cataclysmic event which annihilated 90% of humanity, in which these species could ever again become anything like a significant threat to our existence.
And yet not so long ago we were apes, swinging from the trees of an African forest.
How did we get here? Why are we so powerful? Why have we evolved into the forms we have? Why have we got such powerful minds? Why such an exceptional ability to communicate? Why such sophisticated societies?
Why us, and why then?
I
THE INEXPLICABLE APE
‘Why then’ is as good a place as any to start.
The fossil record places the start of our evolution from apes into humans at something like 3 million years ago. The recent discovery of an austrolopithecine fossill dated at 3.3 million years ago sets that date back a little, but not much.
3.3 million years sounds like a long time. In evolutionary terms, it is the space of a heartbeat.
For at least 15 million years prior to that 3.3 million year period, the brain capacity of our ancestors remained roughly static at around 350-500cc, fluctuating occasionally back and forth. For 15 million years, the brain capacity was roughly static.
Within the space of the last 3.3 million years, it has tripled to 1350ccs.
This has never been accounted for.
This is even more amazing when you take into account the actual difference between the brain matter of apes and the brain matter of humans. Our cerebral matter is much more complex. Although I won't talk in depth about the incredible level of neurological rewiring that took place inside our expanding skull during the last 3.3 million years, suffice to say that it makes the tripling of our head size look positively tame in comparison.
Interestingly, the strange, twisted, crinkled shape of the human brain itself is something that is also uniquely human. The crinkling and folding allows us to fit more, much more, into our heads than we otherwise would with a more orderly structure.
The increase in brain cells should therefore be understood as doubly impressive. Over and above the simple issue of size, you need to take into account the alterations going on inside the skull to change an ape brain into the immensely more sophisticated human brain. Why is this so impressive? It’s impressive because what it means is that at a neurological level so many new, highly sophisticated structures were being fashioned by evolution that the skull itself needed to expand rapidly in order to fit them all in.
Richard Dawkins, author of the Selfish Gene and the Blind Watchmaker (arguably the most lucid and respected exponent of Darwinian theory in the world today), has calculated that the rate of expansion of the brain works out to something in the region of one hundredth of a cubic centimetre every single generation.
This expansion is something both dramatic and rapid. Working from Dawkins’ own calculations, if you take the average human generation to be 20 years (which is exceedingly generous for a number of reasons), then what you are saying is that every 20 000 years, the average brain size of our ancestors increased by an entire cubic centimetre.
After 15 million years of stasis, for some reason we are witnessing 1 cubic centimetre of skull expansion every 20 000 years, consistently, for 3.3 million years – right up until brain capacity stabilised somewhere between 100 000 and 50 000 years ago.
That is an incredible rate of expansion which is even more incredible when you consider the rewiring taking place inside the skull. It is even more incredible still when you take into account the impact of predators, ice ages, famine and drought, war, disease and the thousand natural shocks that life is prone to. This has never been coherently explained.
This rate of change can only really be explained by the presence of a large and constant pressure upon the individual’s survival chances over the last 3 million years. And whatever this pressure was, it must have been absent in the preceding 15 million years.
This suggests a number of things.
1) About 3.3 million years ago, something happened.
2) Whatever happened, it introduced a new set of evolutionary priorities.
3) Whatever the new evolutionary priorities were upon us, the pressure of those priorities was incredibly intense.
4) As a result of the intensity of these new priorities, we developed a massively different survival toolset than our ancestors had used, or had needed.
5) The main emphasis of these evolutionary pressures was on our psychology, and not our physiology.
6) This pressure remained consistent through every generation of our 3 million year evolution despite changes in our external environment.
This last point bears expansion.
The changes in our psychology and physiology caused by these changes moved us consistently from a more simian animal, to a more human animal. Why?
The fossil record, patchy as it is, shows a consistent evolution in our ancestors from less ape-like to more human-like traits. Things like standing upright. Like having more dexterous hands, useful for interacting with the environment in increasingly sophisticated ways. Like having bigger heads, and having less body hair. Like having feet more suited to bipedal walking, freeing up our hands and facilitating a more specialised interaction with our environment.
According to Darwinian theory, organisms evolve to fit the evolutionary niche provided for them by their external environment. The long legs and beaks of herons, for instance, have evolved to equip those birds with the necessary tools to exploit the most abundant food source in their environment – fish.
But when you look at the physique of the human animal, it seems to have evolved for no specific, obvious evolutionary purpose. We have little natural weaponry, and we have few natural defences, especially compared to the speed and ferocity of the Cheetah, or the grace and agility of the Gazelle.
Where are our fangs? Our powerful legs? Our claws? Where are our heightened senses? Our razor-sharp reflexes? Our speed?
We don’t have any of these things. All we have is our minds, our collective efforts and our upright physiology, and with those things we’ve taken the world by storm.
What environment could possibly have caused such a change?
We have evolved into an organism that can master any external environment, from icy tundra to scorching desert. To suggest that any particular environment facilitated this change seems to me, in the cold light of day, untenable. Our evolution, for whatever reason, seems to move in one consistent direction. That direction seems to be emphasising traits like nonspecific adaptability at the expense of other, seemingly critical traits like speed and strength.
But evolution does not move in a direction. It does not plan ahead. It works only on the here and the now. This means that the survival pressures working on our ancestors to move them consistently from ape to man did so in external environments that were changing constantly. Even disregarding the diaspora of humanity which saw us people every corner of the globe and even if you argue that we evolved to our final forms in one geographical position, the global climate over the last 3 million years has fluctuated wildly from tropical weather to the frosty chill of recurrent Ice Ages. For the vast bulk of our evolutionary period, each 100 000 years saw a global cooling where the polar ice sheets expanded and climates changed dramatically on a global scale. We did not evolve in a fixed environment.
And whatever else is true, we do not seem to be equipped to deal with any specific environmental circumstance to any great degree.
It seems that evolutionary priorities of our ancestors were something that they carried with them, through time and space. It seems that these pressures remained very intense and universally consistent regardless of whatever point in the last 3 million years you want to look at, and whatever external habitat we found ourselves in. This is very interesting.
The fossil record also shows something else. It shows that the expansion of human brain capacity has now stopped. 3 million years ago, for some reason, it began to accelerate. Recently, within the past few hundred thousand years, it has slowed to a halt. Many evolutionary biologists contend, and I believe correctly, that the reason for this slowing was something internal – a factor not imposed upon us by our environment, but internally, within our physiology. The most popular reason given is that the brain evolved to such a size that its importance for the success of the individual creature reached equilibrium with the risk of the death of mother and child during childbirth – a risk which massively increased as the female needed to force the increasingly large human cranium of the child through her birth c-wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved-.
Interestingly, there is a higher mortality rate among human births for both mother and child than for any other mammal with the potential exception of one species of hyena. This means that the importance of having a large brain was so pivotal that it was worth massively increasing the risk of death for mother and child. All of this goes to illustrate just how intense the evolutionary pressure of these unknown evolutionary priorities were.
There is also another thing to be drawn from this. The reason why we have stopped evolving larger and more sophisticated brains is not that we do not need them. It is not that we have reached a point where further development would be useless. It is because the risk of death for our mothers and ourselves precludes the further expansion of our brains. The reason that our evolution has slowed to a halt is not because the priorities that triggered and sustained that evolution have gone. This leads, interestingly, to the conclusion that whatever the priorities are which have followed us through time and space, they are still here, right now. They are still in all our minds right now, including mine as I write this, and you as you read.
II
SEX AND SURVIVAL
Evolution has two engines. Everyone knows about one, survival. But survival of the fittest is only half the story. Whether or not a creature survives into adulthood determines whether or not that creature will have the opportunity to try to get a mate. But if that creature cannot attract a mate, it can live for a thousand years and will still be a genetic dead end.
Physical survival gets a creature to the stage where it can contend with others for mates. It puts it in the game. If if cannot play the mating game successfully, it will not reproduce. Bluntly put - it needs to pull.
The two engines of evolution are survival selection and sexual selection.
The key aspects of the human animal which make it so successful – an amazingly powerful ability to think abstractly and creatively, an incredibly sophisticated communication system, the faculty of physical versatility developed to a massive degree – these things could not have been driven directly by survival pressure. They give us incredible survival advantages, sure - but they cannot have developed to the level they have through that application of direct survival pressure. Why?
There are three simple reasons for this.
Firstly, they are too good. We have developed these abilities beyond any level you could successfully portray as necessary to our survival. We do not need to be anywhere near as clever as we are in order to survive. The intelligence and creativity you need to make an effective bow and arrow would give us a massive and critical advantage over most large predators. The intelligence and creativity you need to explode a nuclear fission device in Trinity, Nevada simply cannot be explained by recourse to environmental pressure. No natural environment in which our ancestors found themselves required that level of ingenuity.
Secondly, we have actually developed these faculties to a point where they clash directly with our survival chances at an individual level. This clash occurs in profound ways for extended periods of our lives – what we call childhood. This fact puts the fundamental nature of the human animal totally at odds with the theory of natural selection by survival pressure. Survival pressure acts directly on individual organisms. Our prolonged helplessness cannot be due to survival pressure, but seems more -wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved-ogous to the kind of survival problems faced by the male peacock, having to carry its enormous tail around all day.
A quick word about childhood. We emerge from the womb at a much lower developmental age than the apes we are descended from. We take something like a decade to reach the level of competence in the use of our own evolutionary faculties that a deer would achieve after a few days, and two decades to reach full adulthood. Why? Many evolutionary biologists contend, and I believe correctly, that our psychological faculties are so important to us that we have a massively extended developmental stage where we are, effectively, helpless. From the point of view of individual survival, this makes no sense – a decade of helplessness in exchange for the ability to think makes no sense. Surely our ancestors would have faced enormous dangers as children – and all to facilitate the development of a faculty that is much more potent than anything we need in order to survive. The most profoundly human traits that we see in others and recognise in ourselves must have arisen from a completely different kind of selective pressure than survival, and evolution only has two engines.
Thirdly, the fossil record shows that our ancestors seem to have evolved more or less consistently toward more human traits from a simian origin. Whether the pressures were connected to our survival or to our sexuality, they must have been really very intense. For any organism as complex as us to evolve at the awesome rate we did would take a huge degree of selective pressure. At the same time, the type of selective pressure provided by survival selection cannot explain our current form without massive and unfounded leaps of imagination. I’ll explain what I mean by that.
There is only one arbiter of what genes are passed on to the next generation when you’re talking about pure survival selection in evolutionary terms. That is the factor of non-random death. The fact that certain organisms are evolving to tackle specific and non-random threats in their immediate environment is what accounts for the specialisms that these organisms have.
Gazelles are a good example. Cheetahs are not random. They kill in a very specific way. As a result, Gazelles have evolved the highly specific traits of agility and speed.
The survival pressures on human beings are no different. Non-random death produces non-random tools. Interestingly enough, we are incredibly specialised creatures. What we are specialised at, however, seems highly paradoxical when placed in the context of survival pressure.
We are specialised in versatility. And that is very strange. That needs a strong explanation, and an explanation that is unique, because there is no organism that we know of that has specifically evolved the faculty of versatility to anything like as advanced a degree as we have.
If survival pressure was responsible for making us amazingly versatile at such a rapid rate – survival pressure that arose from threats and challenges within our external environment – it would have had to be an extremely strong pressure that was, in fact, random. Only random threats to our survival could have produced versatility as a coping mechanism. This is because if there we had adapted to handle a survival pressure that was non-random, we would have evolved tools to equip us to deal specifically with that non-random threat. And yet we have no specific tools. We have highly effective evolutionary tools for dealing with any conceivable situation that a human being can physically survive in. Only a totally randomised survival pressure of the most extreme kind could have accounted for our amazing degree of specialism in the field of versatility.
But even then, simply postulating an extreme and randomised pressure would not be enough to account for our evolution. This is because whatever pressure drove our evolution must have begun at a level strong enough that we would need to evolve rapidly to cope with it, but not so strong as it would destroy us as a species. Even if some random factor was able to thread this needle, the pressure must then have got steadily more and more intense as we evolved more and more human traits, to account for the continued evolution of those traits to a massive degree.
This sounds almost impossible to account for without directly bringing into the theory the idea of something that could only be called the Hand of God. And even if we did resort to this, it would not be a very nice God. The process I have described would only forge the human mind over a mountain of corpses.
So let’s look for another explanation – one that does not rely on external and environmental pressures to explain our existence.
It seems safe to suggest that what lies at the heart of our evolution is a kind of internal feedback loop, where the specifically human traits of one generation made those same human traits even more important in the next. As we have seen, these traits cannot have developed to the degree they have primarily for their survival value. They must, therefore, have been driven by sexual selection – that is to say, by the issue of how our ancestors chose who to mate with. At the same time, to bring in the element of sexual choice as we understand it with our highly sophisticated minds and courtship behaviours might be somewhat misleading. What triggered this whole thing must have been an issue of some kind of new dynamic of sexual attraction amongst the apes who were our ancestors – for that primal feeling of sexual attraction is what dictated who mated with who in an ape society.
Yet initially, right at the start, it seems that whatever triggered whatever process he sexual selection feedback loop underlying our evolution must have been a survival issue. This is because even in sexual selection, the runaway processes of positive feedback which can give rise to rapid and explosive evolutionary leaps do not simply occur when they feel like it. Feedback only occurs once a system reaches a critical mass. Before that mass is reached, there must be some kind of pressure pushing the system toward that point. And that pressure probably came from our external environment.
The key to understanding human evolution seems to lie in understanding how the contingent survival pressures which were present at the origins of the human species initiated a runaway feedback loop of sexual selection which led to our meteoric rise to our current ecological position as global apex predator.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>ive only read part 1 but its pretty cool
III
SELFLESSNESS
I believe that what happened was this.
About 3 million years ago, for reasons unknown to us, our ancestors were displaced from the forests which were our natural habitat. This is the currently accepted paleontological theory, and is supported by the fossil record. This may have happened due to a destruction of our ancestor's habitat through environmental issues, or perhaps through the encroachment onto our territory of another animal which was either a highly effective predator, or one that exploited the same resources as we did better than we did.
Whatever forced us from the forest and out onto the plains of Africa, rest assured we were forced. We had no choice. En masse, we left behind the environment we were evolved to exploit, and moved to one that was totally different. This is a catastrophic thing to happen to a species. It's not unlike taking a group of waterbirds like Herons, and dropping them off in the desert. They would die. They would all die.
We should have died.
We didn't.
Why?
Well let's think about that for a second. What did we bring with us onto the plains?
It's less than unlikely that we brought anything physical with us. 3 million years ago our simian ancestors were probably less able to use tools than modern chimpanzees, and let's face it, modern chimpanzees aren't exactly creative geniuses with their external environment.
No. What we brought with us were those faculties that our arboreal evolution had fashioned within us – generically useful faculties that could be of use outside of a forest environment.
So what were they?
Our ancestors were intelligent. Not massively clever, but intelligent in the way that apes are intelligent. Apes are very intelligent creatures. If you put an ape in an unfamiliar environment, it will explore that environment and creatively develop new strategies for coping within it. Even within their natural environment, they’re capable of using tools in a basic way. For instance, the zoological world's assumptions of the abilities of wild apes were shaken recently by a videotape of a Gorilla using a stick to gauge the depth of a pool it was wading through.
Our ancestors were physically versatile. Not versatile in the way that we are versatile - but very versatile nevertheless. An ape has hands with digits. It can use these to interact with its environment in a sophisticated way, more sophisticated than for instance, a horse can with its hooves, or a dolphin can with its fins. That Gorilla with the stick serves again as a good example, giving a clear indicator of the ability of apes to interact physically with their environment.
Our ancestors could communicate. Not in the highly sophisticated way that humans can communicate, but they could communicate in the way that apes can communicate. For instance, studies have proven that apes can be taught to communicate simple things in sign language. Even without the input of scientists, a wild ape can communicate anger and happiness, fear and enjoyment, approval and disapproval. It does this in a basic way compared to humans, but in a very sophisticated way compared to pretty much any other animal.
Our ancestors were social creatures. Not highly social in the sophisticated way that we are social, but very social by the common standards of the animal kingdom, and indeed by the standards of mammals themselves. They exist within a complex and shifting social structure, built of relationships of social power and transitory alliance. They are capable of team efforts, of working together in groups to achieve common goals. One particular example would be the fact that Chimpanzees form raiding parties to attack and kill other, rival troupes of Chimpanzees. The way they do this is very different from the way that mammals like wolves hunt in rigidly ordered packs. The formation of a Chimpanzee raiding party is based upon the highly sophisticated relationships between the male apes in the party, and they are extremely effective killers.
Ok. So our ancestors had at least these four faculties when they were displaced onto the Great Plains from the forests. There is no special reason why our ancestors had these traits. They did not prepare themselves, evolutionarily, for a move to the plains. They had these traits because they had evolved them for the contingent realities of an ape's life in an arboreal environment.
Nevertheless, they had them. Intelligence. Physical versatility. Communication. The ability to form ongoing social relationships.
So there they are, on the plains.
Now, ask yourself one question. Try, if you can, to place yourself in the shoes (sic) of one of these apes. From the perspective of any individual ape in that group, what is your most precious natural resource?
Is it the river, from which you get your water? Is it the plants from which you get your nuts? Is it the bushes from which you get your berries? Is it the occasional hole in the ground from which you can hide from predators? Is it the fruit that grows on the forest edge?
Or is it all the other physically versatile, intelligent and sociable apes that surround you?
You are living in a world which you are not equipped to deal with. In fact, the only parts of your environment that you are evolutionarily equipped to deal with are the parts that came with you from the forest. The other apes. As an ape, you would not even need to make a cost/benefit -wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved-ysis about the different natural resources available. You would be unable of interfacing with anything around you to anything like the level you would be capable of interfacing with the other apes in your troupe.
So what then? Hmm. Well, the apes around you are your most potent and accessible natural resource. How do you exploit that resource? Well, the only way to utilise the physical versatility and intelligence of the apes around you would be to get them, somehow, to perform tasks that were to your benefit. There is no other way. As an ape, you have to be able to actualise the potential of your fellows in a way that helps you survive and prosper.
There would only be two potential ways of doing this. Only two.
You could manipulate the apes around you into helping you.
You could form genuine alliances of mutual interest with the apes around you.
There are no other ways available to you to get other apes to help you collect food, to avoid predators, or for you to rise to a position of dominance within that social group. It’s either the one or the other.
If an ape had an idea that would genuinely be of benefit to the other apes in the troupe, he would not need to manipulate them without their wishes. There would be no point. He would simply need to communicate how beneficial his idea was, and the apes would help him, because in helping him they would be helping themselves.
But if the ape wanted to do something that benefited him alone, he would need to be subtle. If the ape wanted to do something that was useless for or harmful to the other apes, but would help him, he would need to be covertly manipulative.
So again, put yourself in the position of one of those apes. All of a sudden, the apes you see around you, are facing the same choice as you are. They might be trying to help you. They might be trying to help themselves at your expense. All of a sudden, they no longer constitute only your greatest natural resource. Each ape is, potentially, your most deadly natural predator. If you assist an ape who is being genuine with you, you benefit. If you assist an ape who is being manipulative with you, you lose out. And losing out in an environment which you have no evolutionary equipment to deal with, more often than not, means that you die.
So all of a sudden, the most important criteria for gauging whether or not you wish to ally yourself with any other ape for any reason, be it as an alliance of trust, time invested in being sociable with that ape, or in having a sexual relationship – becomes incredibly simple. It all boils down to one question.
Can you trust that ape?
If that ape is being genuine with you, it must have your best interests at heart. If an ape is being open, he has nothing to hide. He has nothing to hide because he is sure that what he is planning will help you, and will not anger him. Indeed, if he is being genuine, it necessarily follows that he is not thinking of himself, but of your good, even of the wider good of the troupe. His idea only helps him incidentally. That genuine ape is assisted only incidentally by his plan. He is thinking of the greater good. He is being, for want of a better word, selfless.
If that ape is being manipulative, that ape must necessarily have something to hide from you. If he has something to hide from you, then it follows that whatever he is hiding must be harmful to your interests, otherwise he would not be hiding it. He is hiding something because he believes that what he is planning will harm you, and were you to know his plan in its entirety, you might well leave him alone to die. Indeed, if he is being manipulative, it necessarily follows that he is not thinking of your good, nor the wider good of the troupe. He is thinking primarily of himself. Any benefit that may occur to the wider group is totally incidental. He is being, for want of a better word, selfish.
All of a sudden, for no other reason than all the right species was in the right place at the right time, we can see that these apes would start to face the same moral choices that we do. Interesting.
This moral aspect was probably something that was established to a primitive extent in our ancestors before they even left the trees. What changed was that once out of their natural environment they lost their self-sufficiency as organisms. They needed to rely upon each other in order to survive because could not rely on any of the equipment that evolution had equipped them with to make them individually self-sufficient. All that equipment was calibrated for an entirely different environment.
Thus the key criteria for your social success, as an ape, would become whether or not the other apes believed you to be genuine. And interestingly, as an extension of this, the key criteria for your being sexually selected as a mate would become whether or not your prospective partner believed that you were being genuine.
This concern would supercede all others. It wouldn’t matter how strong an ape was, nor how fast, nor how intelligent, nor how good at hunting, nor gathering, nor anything else. If that ape was being manipulative, that ape was being selfish and was a massive danger to your individual survival.
But if that ape was genuine, all their positive traits would be of huge and decisive importance to your survival.
As a result, all the normal things that made an ape a powerful creature would only make that ape attractive as a sexual partner if that ape was genuine. All the things that made it powerful would make it dangerous if that ape was being manipulative. All the things that made it powerful would make it exceptionally valuable if that ape was being genuine.
This would essentially, as a matter of day-to-day survival, render redundant all the sexually attractive qualities in any ape who was seen to be manipulative. Any ape who was seen as not being genuine, any ape who seemed to be being fake would have all the sexually attractive qualities that they had inherited from their evolutionary legacy instantly nullified. This would not be a matter of evolving genes governing sexual attraction. This would be a matter of survival in the here and now.
So from the point of view of you as an ape, there are three separate and pivotal traits that are suddenly thrust to the top of your list of priorities if you want to survive, mate and successfully rear your offspring.
1) The ability to genuinely forge lasting genuine alliances, based on selflessness among trustworthy apes.
2) The ability to appear genuine when you are in fact being manipulative.
3) The ability to discriminate between the two in the apes around you and to act accordingly, in the interests of your survival and the survival of your offspring.
And on top of these three, there, is something else. As an individual, it is as important to you that you are, in and of yourself, a valuable ally. There are three more things that would become key survival priorities as a result of the new evolutionary geography of alliance and manipulation that you, as one of our ancestral apes, have found yourself in. The things which would make you a valuable ally to have.
These three things are versatility, communication and intelligence.
You are only as useful to your allies as your ideas are, which comes down to your intelligence. You are only as useful to your allies as you are capable of implementing your ideas and the ideas of your allies in the physical world. You are only as useful as an ally as you are at communicating your ideas and clearly understanding the ideas of others.
These three factors, intelligence, physical versatility and communication are intimately linked. Any major advance in one is hampered by stasis in the other two. If you happen to be the chance beneficiary of a genetic mutation that leads to extra intelligence, it’s of little real value to you if you can’t communicate those ideas to the apes around you, or if you cannot put your sophisticated ideas into action yourself. Extra physical versatility is great, but it won’t help you enormously if you are working on exactly the same basic ideas that your basic intelligence and communication skills present you with. An increase in your communication skills is great, but it’s not going to have a massive impact on your chances of survival if you have nothing to communicate that you could not communicate perfectly well in a more basic way, or if your sophisticated communication skills allow you to communicate ideas that totally outstrip the physical abilities of yourself and your fellows.
Interestingly enough though, on the flip side of the coin, any chance mutation that leads to an advance in one of these three things would make any advance in the other two massively beneficial to the ape’s individual success. An increase in any of these three areas would, in all fairness, be an evolutionary advantage in and of itself, albeit a slight one. But an increase in, say, intelligence, would make an increase in communication skills or physical versatility extremely beneficial. The same thing holds true for increases in communication skills, or in physical versatility.
Say you’re slightly more intelligent than the average ape. You mate with another ape who’s slightly more versatile. If your offspring is lucky enough to inherit both traits, that child will have better ideas than it’s fellows, and be equipped to make them a reality. Say you then mate with a different ape, this time one with much better communication skills. The offspring from that union will be better able to communicate better ideas to its fellow apes, making it more valuable as an individual. If, by some strange twist of fate and biology, the versatile ape and the articulate ape produced a child, it would be much more able to understand and actualise the ideas of the other apes around it. Thus it would be more valuable as an individual to the social group – and more likely to survive.
So, interestingly, chance increases in any one of these areas has slight benefit for an individual ape, but also exponentially increases the benefit of increases in the other two areas.
There is also another interesting issue that would become highly important to an ape looking to forge, maintain and deepen an alliance with other apes.
From the perspective of an individual ape it would be enormously useful to develop, to any degree, a sensitivity to the emotional state of other apes. Strangely, it would be less important to have a sensitivity of what the other apes actually needed in an absolute sense, and more a generic ability to accurately gauge what they thought they wanted.
Indeed, what would be even more useful would be a generic sense of what the other apes were feeling in general. If one ape could develop a sensitivity to when another ape was feeling generous, he would be able to maximise how effective he was, as an individual, in gaining real benefit from any alliance. If he could develop a sensitivity to when an allied ape was feeling angry, we would develop a sense of when he shouldn’t be asking for favours.
But more importantly, what a heightened sensitivity to the emotional state of other apes would give you would be the ability to assist that ape in a much more sophisticated way. If an ally was angry, you could assist him in attacking the object of his rage. If an ally was afraid, you could assist him by addressing whatever issue had given rise to his fear. If an ally was happy, you could spend time with that ally in a state of happiness, forging a stronger personal bond.
Resultantly the development of any degree of what, for want of a better word, you could call empathy would be of immense day-to-day value for any individual ape. Even a low degree of empathy would be far more valuable than none at all. A high degree of empathy would be of enormous survival value. Thus any ape who was the beneficiary of a chance mutation that gave him or increased an existing empathic faculty would be far more likely to survive and pass on his genes to the next generation.
An empathic faculty would be, again, probably not something that needed to arise totally unprecedented in the minds of the apes after they moved to the savannah. It makes sense to believe that it was already present in the ape’s psychological makeup anyway, a part of their necessary equipment to deal with the social nature of their forest lives. What changed on the plains was that this faculty became a key survival trait, vital for survival in a way it had not been before, because each individual ape lost its ability to be self-sufficient when the apes left the environment they were evolutionarily calibrated to exploit.
An alliance with another ape is only useful to you if you’re getting something out of it that is of more benefit than what you are putting into it in terms of time, effort and personal sacrifice. There seems to be a problem here. How can apes consistently reap more from their alliances than they sow?
This is a big problem. How can you make an alliance with another ape based on mutual interest if you both need to be getting more out of the alliance than you put in? This seems like a major problem, but on closer examination, there is a very simple solution. If the apes develop the generic ability to learn specialised skills, you can get very easily get two separate apes who specialise in separate things which each complement the other’s survival.
If you can learn a skill in a permanent and lasting way, costs less in terms of effort to use that skill. If you have a genetic mutation that allows you to develop what, for want of a better term, could be called expertise, you can put a minimal amount of effort into the alliances you forge while still adding a high level of value. The better your faculty of expertise, the less effort you need to put in to an alliance, and the more valuable you are as an ally.
You get more, and you get more for less. Both of these things are critically important to your survival. Interestingly enough for those versed in Marxist theory, you can think of this like an evolutionary division of labour. You can actually extend the Marxist metaphor if you want to by saying that you, as an individual ape, have a common ownership in the means of production – if by ‘means of production’ you are talking about the alliance itself.
The only problem with this Marxist metaphor is that the apes would not simply have developed the ability to form selfless alliances. There is another side to the priorities that would have become highly pressing which stands directly at odds with the idea of communal benefit as the only important evolutionary priority for our ancestral apes.
The evolutionary priorities that would emphasise the survival value of intelligence, communication, versatility, expertise and empathy are important in making and keeping profitable, selfless alliances. But selflessness is only one of two evolutionary strategies available to an ape on the savannah.
IV
SELFISHNESS
The act of pure, selfish manipulation may seem like an easy way to move forward quickly in ape society, an easy way to get all the benefits of an alliance without having to do any of the necessary work in return. And it is true, that being selfishly manipulative will get you ahead fast, if you are successful. But in truth, what you are really doing is massively reducing the work you need to put in to an alliance, and massively increasing your risk of death.
In an alliance, an ally will look out for you in any way they can. You are as important to their survival as food and water are, and they will give you every help that they can spare to see you survive and prosper. The more powerful your allies are, the more powerful you become.
Manipulation is an entirely different thing, which gives you an increased short term gain at the cost of an increased risk to your chances of survival. If an ape find out you are playing them for your advantage, they’re going to cut you out of their lives – and out of the lives of their allies. Very soon, perhaps even as the result of one manipulation attempt that was discovered, you will find yourself without any apes around you to ally with or to manipulate. Your chances of survival will then take a rapid and terminal nose dive. Worse still, without any apes willing to connect with you, you will have exactly no chance of finding a mate. Your genetic line ends with you.
Nonetheless, manipulation would still be an important evolutionary strategy. It’s just vital that you get away with it. Evolution acts upon the here and now, and the apes around you would always be, at every stage in their evolutionary arc, of a roughly equal intelligence to you. So the risk of getting caught is something that might well be worth taking – if the potential gain was great enough.
Opportunities for manipulation would arise that would afford you opportunities to gain control of other apes or of other natural resources with much greater speed or efficiency than you could achieve with selfless alliances. Nevertheless, selfish manipulation entails gambling with your own survival. The risk that you are taking is not the risk of losing a few simian friends. It is the risk of losing access to the only natural resource that you have any real evolutionary equipment to deal with, and being expelled from the pool of potential mates to fend for yourself in a hostile environment.
So in manipulation, the vital element is that you are not discovered. This is why the three factors of intelligence, communication and versatility are important from the point of view of selfish apes.
Selfish manipulation doesn’t really rely on the three key attributes that selflessness does. To an extent of course it is true that you need to be intelligent to think up original way of manipulating other apes. You also need the communication skills to manipulate other apes. Physical versatility will give you more opportunities to be profitably manipulative, because you can make yourself useful to other apes, get yourself into alliances and then manipulate those bonds of trust.
At the same time, you are using your intellect and your communication skills in a very different way. Becoming adept at using your intellect and communication skills in these new ways is as useful for your day-to-day survival as the ability to form selfless alliances. Interestingly, these new traits also feed off each other in the same way as an ape’s selfless traits do, but these selfish traits are more sophisticated and less visible because of the more sophisticated and less visible nature of manipulation itself.
Firstly, selfish manipulation necessitates a strong faculty of social -wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved-ysis, which means the ability to -wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved-yze the contingent motivations and values of the apes around you. The better you understand these motivations and values, the better you will be at manipulating other apes to your will by tailoring your presentation of your plan so that it seems to fulfil their desires.
These motivations could be as simple as a male ape’s desire for sex if you are a female ape. They could also be as simple as another ape’s desire to avoid pain if you are a large ape and you’re seeking to manipulate him through the straightforward fear of violence.
But even though they are simpler than human social networks, the social systems of apes are still very complex. When you are gambling you’re your life, and you are when you are being selfish, you need to be aware of all the potential variables. It only takes one failed plot to guarantee your death, and seal your genetic doom. Resultantly, it is of great value to be able to -wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved-yse the social relationships around you, so that you can be aware of how to deploy your resources in order to achieve your desired result.
Secondly, selfish manipulation necessitates the ability to construct a façade of honesty that seems to the onlooker to be genuine. Interestingly enough, there is no reason why you yourself as a lying ape should not also believe that the façade you’ve thrown up is real.
In fact it would be very advantageous for you to do so, for you to believe your own manipulative lies, so as to make their appearance of genuineness as convincing as it can be. If an ape believes that he is, for whatever reason, completely justified in his actions, he will be able to throw all his intellectual and communicative resources into promoting them and defending them without any conscious effort.
As a side effect of this, it would be advantageous to the survival of the individual ape to develop the faculty of what you could call rationalisation. By rationalisation I mean that, for you as an ape, it would be highly useful to be able to restructure your view of the social world around you in terms of your own innocence – and to be totally convinced (as a matter of life or death) that this rationalisation was, is and always will be the truth.
Essentially, it would be massively and immediately useful for an ape to develop the instinctive faculty of being instantly able to rationalise his selfish actions in terms of the assumption of his own selflessness.
This is immensely important in understanding the dynamics of manipulation. The manipulative apes do not have to know themselves that they are being manipulative. It is actually beneficial to them on the level of individual survival to buy into their own lies. It makes their performance all the more convincing. This is because as an ape, your attempts at manipulation are only as successful as they are convincing. If they are unconvincing, they are immediately catastrophic to your evolutionary success.
It is fascinating to recognise that being selfish necessarily ties the selfish ape into the intellectual acceptance of a world view which is necessarily at odds with the social reality he actually inhabits. Being selfish and rationalising that selfishness in terms of your innocence, while a key survival trait, means that selfish apes are building an internal model of the world around a core that is simply not the truth.
They are, therefore, plunging themselves into a simian fantasy land which – although it must correspond with the physical reality they inhabit to allow them to interface with their surroundings – is palpably and fundamentally false. In order to be successfully selfish, an ape necessarily divorces himself from reality. And he needs to do this in order to survive and be successful in his machinations. Anything that can in any way reduce the huge social risk associated with selfish actions is something that will be of very high survival value for any ape.
Now, I am not suggesting that the apes who were our ancestors were capable of building sophisticated internal worlds of thought and meaning to anything like the degree of which humans are capable. What I am suggesting is that there is a linear progression in evolutionary terms where every step of the path that has ended in the dizzyingly effective human ability to rationalise their actions has led to more and more effective manipulative success.
Selfishness is basically gambling. All the traits that have evolved around this survival strategy, such as self-delusion, rationalisation and social -wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved-ysis, have evolved so that you can spot opportunities and minimise risk.
The existence of manipulation as a social dynamic raises potentially catastrophic consequences for those apes who fall victim to the machinations of their fellow apes. In a very real sense, these apes are fast becoming their own worst enemies – in evolutionary terms, their own natural predators. On the one hand it is important that for each ape that they develop the faculties of the manipulator, because they need to be able to compete as a predator of other apes, should a social group descend into anarchy. On the other hand, each ape is effectively being predated by its fellows, and as such, each ape would benefit strongly from developing defensive strategies to cope with the threat. Just as a Gazelle benefits from acceleration and speed because they give it critical defensive edge against the Cheetah, so to would these apes benefit from some kind of evolutionary defence mechanism against their being personally exploited.
V
JUSTICE
The most direct way to do this would be for each ape to develop a kind of ongoing cost/benefit -wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved-ysis which it could apply to its social relationships. If an ape or an ape’s close ally were being exploited, it would certainly benefit from a new or inherited mutation which made it more aware of that fact. Even if these apes were not intentionally being exploited by other apes, any individual would be helped in a large way by some kind of psychological equipment which allowed them to make sure that their survival interests were being served by the alliances that they were cultivating. The fact that each ape would be potential prey to their fellows would serve only to make this faculty even more essential, even more beneficial to the individual.
It makes sense to believe that for our ancestral apes on the savannah, selfless alliances would be a key strategy for survival. At the same time, it’s important to the survival of each individual ape that he is not taken advantage of – either intentionally or unintentionally. If you are putting more into an alliance than you are getting out of it, you are damaging your chances of survival. As we have seen, the development of a faculty that could be called expertise would be of immense benefit to any individual ape, in allowing him to maximise his value as an ally, while reducing the effort he would need to expend in his alliances. At the same time, this would not protect the ape from manipulation. He would benefit from something else. Let’s take a quick look at the mechanics of these alliances for one moment.
If you grant that each ape is bringing something to the alliance, from the point of view of an individual ape his contribution has a certain level of value for all members of the alliance. If you are the only ape who has developed the ability to dig specialised holes in the ground to hide from the predators of the African savannah, your contribution is absolutely vital to the continued survival of your fellows. From your point of view, therefore, you can afford to demand more help from your allies than the effort you are putting in to digging the actual holes. In fact, the effort that you’re putting in to your task isn’t really related at all to what you can demand from your allies for your help. The amount of help that you can demand from your allies is exactly proportional to the absolute value of your contribution to the survival of the group, and not proportional to the effort that you put in to that contribution.
This is absolutely pivotal. Because of this, any ape which evolved a sense of the abstract value of his contribution could afford to barter for more assistance from the alliance. From this point of view, it is easy to see how any individual ape who happened to have a keener awareness of the value of his contributions in absolute terms would be able to maximise his benefit from the alliances he already knows how to form.
Thus the ability to think in absolute terms about the abstract value of your actions is a massive evolutionary benefit to any individual ape that develops this faculty to any degree. Moreover, the higher the degree to which this faculty was developed, the more efficiently an individual ape could optimise his benefit from the alliances in which he was involved.
This sensitivity to the absolute value of contributions would probably manifest itself as a feeling of having been personally slighted when your contributions were disproportionate to your reward. Perhaps the most direct way to make sure that your reward from the alliances was proportionate to your contribution would be to develop some kind of emotional reaction to being, for want of a better term, unfairly treated. Any ape who was the chance beneficiary of a new or inherited mutation which gave it a heightened sensitivity to what it deserved for its work would be in a much stronger position when it came to avoiding exploitation, and would therefore be better able to survive and pass its genes on to the next generation.
As a result of this, over a period of enough generations, it seems likely that these apes would develop a keen sense of what you could call justice, if by justice you are talking about what an individual deserves in absolute terms for what it has done.
There is, however, a more sinister aspect to this development. If you wanted to manipulate another ape with whom you are in an alliance with, perhaps the most straightforward way to do that would be to convince that ape that, in absolute terms, your input was more valuable than the rewards you were receiving. You could, for instance, pretend to be distressed and put pressure on that ape by exploiting its selfless nature. In doing so, you would be using what could be called, for want of a better term, emotional blackmail.
Again, interestingly, there is no need for the ape doing the convincing to actually be aware that he is being selfish or manipulative. Again, manipulation would actually be more effective if the ape was himself convinced that he deserved more from the alliance even if he didn’t, if that ape was attempting to manipulate its fellows. Again, it would be highly useful for that ape to develop a faculty of self-deception, so that his selfish manipulations would be more convincing, and also so that all the intellectual and expressive resources at that apes disposal could be deployed with total conviction toward the completion of his selfish aims.
Thus again we see that the evolutionary strategy of selfish manipulation is massively aided in the individual animal by the faculty of a form of self-deception which allows the ape to rationalise his alliances in terms of his being taken advantage of. All of his efforts to gain more from the alliance would therefore be totally congruent with each other, and would betray none of the inconsistencies that might betray him to his fellows as a selfish ape. As these inconsistencies could lead to his ostracisation and death, this faculty of self-deception is a pivotal part of the survival value of the selfish psychology. Again, interestingly, this would lead the ape into genuinely believing a reinterpretation of the world that was based on a fundamental falsehood.
The only difference is that this time, that falsehood is couched in terms of what is fair and what is unfair, what is right and what is wrong.
But here’s a question. If the apes are basically unaware of when they are being selfish and when they are being selfless, how do they decide between the two?
VI
SELF WORTH
There’s one final piece of the puzzle to look at. Selfishness and selflessness are separate evolutionary strategies. They are two ways of achieving the same goal – to get one of the other apes to help you survive. But how do you choose? How does an ape decide whether to attempt to forge an alliance or to use manipulation to increase its chances of survival? Critically, how do you ‘choose’ at all, when self-deception is a key aspect of being selfish?
Firstly, it is to be noted that selfishness is most effective when there are bonds of trust to exploit. If an ape trusts you, if an ape considers you an ally, it is much easier to manipulate that ape.
Put yourself in the position of one of those apes again. The key issue determining the relative effectiveness of these two strategies for you is the issue of how much the members of the group value you personally as an ally or a potential drain on their resources. If they see you of enormous use, many apes will jump to your assistance if they can. If they see you as of little or no use, it will be very difficult to convince any of them to drop what they’re doing and help you out.
If an ape could develop a kind of sense for his individual value to the social group, he would have instant access to the key information on how much help genuineness will give him and how much help manipulation will get him. That ape can then best decide on the individual strategy to get what he wants – without really having to consciously consider it. That ape would know which would be more effective in the social cut and thrust of his day-to-day life, and he could act accordingly.
If the other apes see you as a valuable ally, they will be happy to ally themselves with you. For you, all the extra effort and risk associated with manipulation would be, in this case, unnecessary. If you can achieve your aims simply by asking other apes for help, it makes evolutionary sense for you to do simply that.
If the apes see you as worthless and without value, it will be very difficult to forge an alliance with any of them. It would make no sense for them to help support the existence of another ape who is of little or no assistance to their own survival. If you have no special expertise, if you are not widely trusted, if you are an introverted ape who finds it difficult to forge relationships, you will find selflessness to be a hard strategy to effectively use. If you start to help others, they may simply take your assistance for granted, and not treat you like an ally of equal importance. You would be putting more into your relationships than you were getting out of them, those relationships would harm your chances of survival. For the sake of your own life, and for the lives of your children, you would need to try something else.
The most straightforward way, therefore, to know which strategy to pursue, is to develop a sense of how valuable you are to the apes around you - some kind of instinctual barometer of your own social worth.
For an individual ape, it would be an asset of great value if, through random or inherited mutation, that ape was able to develop a way of evaluating himself. This sense of self worth would inform him whether or not a selfless strategy or a selfish strategy would be more effective at meeting his immediate survival needs. Any ape who was capable of sensing his own social worth would have a huge evolutionary advantage in being able to predict how the other apes would respond to his strategies, and whether or not the risk associated with being selfish would be greater or less than the effort associated with being selfless.
The higher an ape’s individual worth, the more value there is from alliances for less effort invested. The lower the ape’s social worth, the less social value the ape stands to lose from manipulation even if it fails.
As a result, any ape who has a sense of their self-worth as an individual will stand a much higher chance of survival by choosing the most effective and appropriate survival strategy for the here and now. If an ape feels he has low self worth, it would be appropriate for manipulation to be the first and most obvious port of call. If an ape had a high self worth, it would be appropriate for alliances to be the first and most obvious source of assistance.
As this would help the individual to survive, any ape who can develop a sense of their contingent self-worth would be more likely to pass their genes on to the next generation. Those genes would assist its offspring, and over time become more prevalent in the population.
The deeper and more detailed the sense of self-worth is, the better and more effectively an ape will choose which of the two available strategies are the most appropriate. If an ape has a low self worth, that ape will be better off automatically interacting with other apes in selfish ways, and developing its manipulative faculties to the full. If an ape has a high self worth, that ape will be better off automatically interacting with other apes in selfless ways, and developing its alliances to the full.
As the genes which underpin self-worth increase within the population, any individual ape’s sense of self-worth will become the core of the species’ evolutionary psychology. There are only two evolutionary strategies to choose from, selflessness and selfishness. Self worth tells an ape which one to choose. It is the bridge between the two sides of the moral divide.
Interestingly enough, the self worth of an ape would also have a profound impact on their ability to attract a mate. If an ape had a high sense of self worth, that ape would feel instinctively that it had nothing to hide. It would therefore approach a courtship situation in a naturally genuine way. Conversely, if an ape had a low self-worth, that ape would be instinctually manipulative. This is because you would feel that it was important to hide your weakness from the other apes. Even if you wanted to help out the other apes, a low self-worth would mean that you were constantly trying to hide something – the low self-worth itself – from the apes around you.
As a result, for any ape with low-self worth, it would be completely vital to develop their manipulative qualities, such as their faculties of self-deception and social -wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved-ysis, to a very high personal degree. Self-worth is a vital social tool, but unless you had developed deception (and by extension self-deception) to a very high level, your bleating and ineffectual calls for an alliance with a sexual dimension would hamstring your chances of reproducing.
The only successful apes with low self worth would be the apes who were capable of projecting an image of strength. They would be the only ones capable of forging an alliance, and they would be the only ones capable of attracting a mate. Thus a low self-worth would give rise to evolution of a detailed and convincing self-image. Again, interestingly, it would actually be useful for the survival of the individual for an ape himself to buy into the truth of his own self-image. This would make it more convincing, and how convinced the ape is of his own self-image is directly related to how genuine the other apes believe him to be.
This image of strength, this façade of confidence, is a vital survival tool for any individual ape. With it, an ape can project an image of high worth to the troupe, even if that ape has a low estimation of its absolute value. The benefit for the individual ape to buy into the truth of this façade to any degree, and also to make the façade as detailed and complex as possible, would lead to a statistical increase in the number of genes such an ape was able to pass on to the next generation.
Resultantly there is no reason why, evolutionarily, this survival mechanism would not continue to develop over the generations to an extremely high degree of sophistication. Ultimately, it would probably become so convincing, and be buried so deeply in the psychological makeup of the individual, that it would be superficially indistinguishable from an ape’s genuine self. This is all for the good, from the point of an individual of low self-worth. It would allow them to ally and mate in the same way as an individual of high self-worth, as long as they were able to keep the mask convincing and stop it from slipping under pressure.
A high sense of individual self worth would lead an individual ape’s contingent, day to day survival strategies in exactly the opposite direction.
An ape of high self-worth would have a much greater use of a faculty that you could call, for want of a better word, free expression. Any ape who, for the moment at least, had a high sense of self worth, would benefit greatly from and new or inherited mutations which aided its expressive ability. It would therefore be more likely to pass higher levels of free expression into its offspring. This is because free expression, the open communication of an ape’s genuine ideas and emotions, is the most effective strategy for a worthwhile ape attempting to survive.
In this way then, the self worth of an individual ape, a faculty of great use for day to day survival, would be the point at which the two evolutionary strategies met. Selflessness and selfishness represent the only two viable strategies of survival. Self worth can be understood as the internal signpost directing each ape to one or the other.
But where does self-worth come from? It stands to reason that an ape in isolation could not generate a high self-worth alone. Self-worth is, essentially, an internal barometer of an ape’s unique value to others. Therefore it stands to reason that the only way an ape’s self-worth could effectively and permanently rise is by having its unique value recognised by others, who communicate to that ape that it is a worthwhile and valuable being.
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VII
GENDER DIFFERENCES
Alongside the new priorities for survival on the plains which are applicable to any of the ancestral apes who found themselves in that situation, there were also separate survival pressures unique to each gender.
Both genders have, ultimately, the same evolutionary priority – to survive, mate and see their children become healthy and reproductively successful adults. This is absolutely the key priority for both male and female apes. At the same time, the best ways achieve that aim different, depending on whether or not you are male or female.
Let’s look at those evolutionary priorities for a second, because on closer inspection they are more sophisticated than perhaps we might believe.
If you are male, the actual work involved in successfully creating a viable child is basically the work of attracting a female and getting sex. If you are a female, the actual work of successfully creating a viable child is basically the work of supporting that child through its period of dependence, from conception to adulthood.
At the same time, a male ape cannot be certain that, in this unsure environment of mutual dependency, any child he fathers will ever make it through to adulthood without his direct help. And also, at the same time, a female cannot simply rely on the reproductive importance which is the legacy of her gender to get her a mate who will provide assistance in the child’s upbringing.
Male apes need to support their mates and their children to adulthood in order to ensure their genetic legacy. Female apes need to get a male partner who is simultaneously a good genetic match and also strongly supportive of her during her and her child’s period of increased dependency.
So although it is certainly true that a large part of the sexual priorities of male apes would be to simply have as much sex as possible, such a thing would not guarantee their genetic legacy. It might also lead to great risk to survival, for in a small society of apes, a male ape who abandons his pregnant partner would be instantly rendered a pariah by the relatives and the allies of that female ape. As well as damaging the alliances he has built in order to survive, this would also have the equally catastrophic effect of warning off all the other females in that society from mating with that male ape.
And from the perspective of a female ape, it is also certainly true that it is a highly important priority to be very, very selective with the male apes that she has sex with. Any random mutation which leads to a more selective attitude toward sex in the interests of a partner’s genetic health and genuine interest in her over and above the sex itself will result in a far greater degree of ultimate success in producing offspring which grow to adulthood. Thus any genes which lead to a more selective attitude in a female ape will be reproduced statistically more often in the next generation. This will lead, over time, to the increasing prevalence of these female-specific phenotypes (a phenotype, incidentally, is the outward expression of genetic information carried in the DNA of an organism).
But this is very interesting. The increasing of female standards when it comes to finding a mate would lead to a number of profound changes in the physiology and psychology of both genders.
Firstly, a highly selective approach to mating can be potentially disastrous for female reproductive chances. The only upward limit on how advantageous a highly selective approach can be for a female ape is the point at which she is so selective that she prices herself out of the market. If the female is fairly ambivalent toward sex itself, as many female apes are in comparison to female human beings, an increase in selective standards would lead directly to the female having less sex. This would mean that each individual female is less likely to reproduce, just in general.
What would greatly assist a female ape who has developed a more selective approach to sex is an increased sexual appetite and a more enjoyable sexual experience. Thus any female who’s sexual psychology and physiology gave her increased impetus to desire sex in the first place would increase how active she could afford to be at selecting a male to mate with.
Essentially, if a female had more desire for sex, and more to gain in terms of pleasure from each actual sexual encounter, she would not simply remain passively selective. She would be actively selective. Her selective faculty would remain of as much use to her as it always had as a safeguard against mating with poor quality males, or males who, although of high genetic value, would simply leave her. But her increased desire and pleasure would keep her an active sexual agent, finding and competing for the best males.
Thus any individual female who exhibited the phenotype of a higher sexual appetite and the phenotype of enhanced pleasure from the sexual act itself would be more likely to pass her genes on to the next generation.
The female would also, interestingly enough, benefit from the development of a faculty for a strong drop in sexual appetite in a specific situation. If there were no males around who fitted the criteria of being good genetic material and good child-rearing partners, it would make sense for the female to wait until a male arrived who was a strong enough contender, or until one of the existing males in her life began to exhibit attractive qualities. What this means is that any individual female would benefit evolutionarily from a sharp drop in sexual appetite if her level of attraction for the males around her fell.
Aside from the psychological effects that this would have for the females in the population, in terms of their desire for sex and competitive nature, there might well be physiological reflections of these processes in the changes in the female body.
Male and female apes have different chromosomes. A chromosome is basically a huge databank of genetic information. At the same time, the vast majority of information that goes into the development of our gendered physiologies is shared between us. This means that a male carries in his genes pretty much all the information needed to develop physically as a female. On the flip side, a female would carry with her almost all of the information of a male’s physiology. The reason that the genders are physiologically different is not that they each have different sets of instructions. It is that different parts of the instructions common to them both are expressed in their physical development.
The two most pleasurable physiological phenotypes of the male sexual apparatus are the male orgasm and the glans (or head) of the penis. The information for both of these phenotypes would exist already, in full, in the female DNA. The only thing that would need to mutate for a female ape to begin to exhibit an orgasm or a version of the glans would be if that female ape had a mutation that triggered existing sections of dormant code.
Any female ape who was the fortunate recipient of a mutation which triggered any aspect of the development of either of these two physical traits would enjoy the sexual act more, and thus have more reason to actively select her partners instead of passively selecting from the reproductive opportunities offered her by chance. If she was more actively selective, she could also afford to be more selective in general, which would increase the quality of her choices, and thus the genetic health and survival chances of her offspring. Therefore over a long enough period of time it is highly likely that these two male sexual phenotypes would begin to express themselves physically in the female apes from which we are descended.
Another, much less well known physiological source of male pleasure, is the prostate gland. This gland exists in ape and human males alike. It’s primary purpose is the production of semen. But it also has another purpose.
It is covered in nerve endings which are highly sensitive. When pressure is applied to these nerve endings, the male animal becomes highly aroused. This may seem strange from the point of view of an evolutionary biologist because the male prostate is deep inside the body, and only directly accessible through the rectum. It’s unlikely that these nerve endings developed as a result of the increased pleasure that they can potentially bring to the act of sex itself. A lot of male apes would perhaps be quite distressed if a female were to attempt direct stimulation of the prostate as a matter of course.
So why? Why is the prostate sensitive? What is the evolutionary value of those nerve endings? Why have they not been streamlined out of existence in the name of efficiency, like whatever organ the appendix once was?
If a male ape is not having sex, his prostate still produces semen, which it also stores. Once the semen has built up in the prostate enough to apply pressure to the nerve endings on the prostate wall, the male would be far more aroused than normal, and thus far more likely to place sex right at the top of his to-do list. The prostate is not just a factory for semen. It is a marketing tool for shifting stock.
At the same time, the genetic instructions for those nerve endings are present in every cell of the body of that female ape. If a female ape found herself the fortunate recipient of a mutation which activated the code for the prostate’s nerve endings, she would enjoy sex more, and thus could reproduce more effectively by being more actively selective. She would probably express this phenotype in a physically similar but much more accessible place than it is in the male – perhaps somewhere in the interior of her vagina. About three to four inches in on the front of the vaginal wall, for instance.
It was of massive evolutionary value in terms of genetic survival for our female ancestral apes to pack in to their sexual apparatus every single thing that they biologically could to make sex as pleasurable as possible for the individual female. Whatever these apes evolved into, the females of the stabilised species which was the evolutionary result of all these processes must be very lucky indeed.
Evolution, like electricity, always follows the path of least resistance.
So let’s just recap.
When our ancestors hit the plains, they brought certain faculties with them. These faculties were developed to a strong degree, certainly by the contemporary standards of the animal kingdom. The faculties were intelligence, communication ability, physical versatility and socialisation.
Once out of the forest environment that these apes were specifically evolved to handle, they had to rely on what was to hand. What was to hand was the existing relationships that they had with each other, based on the socialisation that they had developed in the forest. From the point of view of any individual apes, these relationships were potential lifelines if that individual ape could make the other apes act in their interest.
This is because each one of those apes, in their present state, constituted an extremely powerful and flexible tool in surviving the unfamiliar challenges of the new environment. This is because each ape in that existing social group was intelligent, versatile and capable of the communication and understanding of basic ideas.
The challenge then instantly facing each individual member of the species was to somehow get the other apes to work for them. There were only two ways. By offering genuine help in return, or by manipulating the apes to do your will.
Also, from the point of view of the individual ape, it became totally pivotal to the chance of survival to be able to distinguish which apes were which. Which apes were being selfless, and which were being selfish. Survival hinged on the issue of trust.
In this situation, the most useful allies and the most convincing manipulators would be the ones most likely to survive and pass their genes on to the next generation. This would lead to the evolution of characteristics which aided the effectiveness of both strategies to develop over time within the population of apes due to pressures of survival which acted on the apes at an individual level.
The faculties which would develop to aid the individual ape’s value as an ally would be intelligence, communication skills, physical versatility, empathy and specialised expertise.
The faculties which would develop to aid its abilities as a manipulator are more sophisticated, due to the necessarily sophisticated nature of manipulation itself.
The most basic faculty which would be of importance would be the ability of an individual ape to -wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved-yse its fellows, especially for weaknesses to exploit.
Crucially, the value to the individual of successfully being selfish would make selfishness a highly useful opportunistic evolutionary strategy for gaining resources and social status in certain situations. As selfishness entails such a high risk/reward ratio, any strategy which increased how convincing a selfish ape can be (thus reducing the risk), would be of extremely high value to any individual ape which developed it to any degree.
Strangely, an ape being selfish would also benefit hugely from developing the faculties of rationalisation and self-deception. This is because of the catastrophic consequences on an individual level of being ‘outed’ as selfish in a society in which personal success of which is founded on alliances.
The traits of physical versatility, intelligence, empathy, expertise, personal -wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved-ysis, rationalisation, self deception would be the traits most valuable for apes in a situation where they can no longer rely on individual self-sufficiency. This would, over time, be reflected in an ongoing shift in the evolution of the animal to emphasise these traits.
For these already social apes, it is probable that these faculties were already part of their psychological makeup when they left the forest. They were therefore the most immediate tools to use to cope with the survival challenges that were presented by the ape’s loss of self-sufficiency.
The twin strategies for survival, selfishness and selflessness, would present each ape with an ongoing, ever present choice of how to live. This choice would hinge on an assessment of which strategy was most immediately applicable. The importance of this information would lead to evolutionary pressure for the development of a personal, internal sensitivity to how valuable the individual ape was to the group in general. That sense of self-worth would allow the ape to choose the correct evolutionary strategy to follow for its immediate situation. If the ape had a high sense of self-worth, it would seem more effective to forge genuine alliances. If the ape had a low sense of self-worth, it would make more sense to manipulate bonds of trust.
As an ape’s level of self-worth would fluctuate depending on the social situation, both evolutionary strategies, selfishness and selflessness would be of immediate use to each ape. This bridge between the two psychologies would prevent one from achieving dominance over the other in the population, and would mean that the survival pressure on each ape would make both strategies indispensable on a day-to-day basis.
In evolutionary terms, the top survival pressures which would impact upon an ape would no longer be coming from its external environment. They would be coming from its social environment. In a very real sense, it could be argued that the social world of these apes became their habitat. Their social world became their evolutionary niche.
So this is the situation that faced our ancestral apes upon leaving the forest for the open plains. The key change that happened, as far as their evolution went, was that each individual ape lost its ability to be self sufficient. Once that had gone, each apes social abilities became paramount.
As all of the apes were in the same situation, the web of social dynamics was thrown up in which each individual ape would greatly benefit from an increased ability to either bond with others or to successfully manipulate. The ability to discern between the two in other apes would be just as critical to an individual’s survival.
Thus their evolutionary geography was no longer just physical. It was social and psychological too. In time,
1)individual attempts to forge real alliances based on bonds of trust,
2)individual attempts to manipulate fellow apes into unwitting or unwilling alliances
3)Knowing which of these two strategies would be best for each situation
4)the challenge of telling which of them your fellow apes were doing,
became the evolutionary geography that would dictate the individual survival of each ape
And that’s pretty much that for our ancestral apes. The question then becomes, what happened next?
VIII:
SEXUAL SELECTION
Sexual selection is a very interesting mechanism. It’s interesting because it has a hidden aspect to it. This hidden aspect all revolves around the fact that genetic heritage does not simply cover physical characteristics. Genes also govern behaviour and instincts also. The key kind of genetic behaviour, of genetic instinct that we’re looking at is that part of ape psychology that deals with sexual attraction.
What makes an ape sexually attractive to another ape? In the days of our ancestor’s forest lives, the most attractive apes were the most healthy, the most influential. The ones who wielded the most social power. The ones with the most physical resources. And why?
Any ape who inherits genes which make them more attracted to healthy, powerful apes would have a better chance of mating with those apes. If they mate with healthy apes, it is more likely that their offspring would be healthy. If they mate with influential apes, it is more likely that their offspring would be socially protected. If they mate with apes who have a greater command of resources than others, it is likely that those resources will be at their offspring’s disposal.
Essentially, any new or inherited mutations governing sexual attraction which made it more likely that an ape would end up mating with an influential, powerful and healthy partner would result in a higher level of reproductive success. By reproductive success, I mean that it is more likely that the offspring would make it to adulthood and reproduce themselves.
So it is not simply the traits which help you survive which are selected by evolution. The traits governing sexual choice, attraction and desire are also inherited. And they also are massively important for the success of your genetic legacy in real, day-to-day terms. As such, the apes that are most attracted to the apes that are the best at surviving will have more success at passing their genes on to the next generation.
Any large-scale, species-wide shift in survival priorities will not simply give rise to a change in the traits that are selected for the day-to-day survival of each individual organism.
There is another level of change that occurs. Any apes who are more attracted to apes whose traits are more useful to their offspring will statistically pass more of their genes on to generations ahead. This is because their offspring will survive more often. Their offspring will reproduce more often. Their offspring will produce more offspring.
Sexual attraction is an evolved trait. And not simply the level of sexual attraction, but the specifics of what exact characteristics are and are not sexually attractive.
So what were the traits, in a prospective partner, that would increase your offspring’s chances of survival?
Of course, it would still benefit you to reproduce with the healthiest, the most influential apes. The ones who wielded the most social power. The ones with the most physical resources. The ones with the greatest genetic health.
But all of a sudden there is another level of selection that is so important it actually supercedes all of the others.
Whether or not an ape is genuine or manipulative dictates the survival value of your entire relationship with that ape.
If a male ape is being manipulative, fake and selfish, he might have total command of the resources, he might be absolutely at the top of the social ladder, and he might well be the finest physical specimen of ape manliness that has yet walked the earth. None of these things will help you raise any child he gives you if he casts you aside as soon as he’s finished with you.
If a female ape is being manipulative, fake, selfish, she might well have all the connections that you need to get all the resources you could ever want, she might well be absolutely at the top of the social ladder, and she might be the finest physical specimen of ape sexiness that you have ever seen. None of these things will stop her from having sex with other apes behind your back and leaving you to provide for a child that is not yours.
So all the things that were attractive previously, power, influence, health – all these things would remain valuable for an ape’s survival, for the survival of an ape’s offspring, and thus would remain attractive qualities. But they would only be of survival value to the individual looking for a mate if these traits were in the possession of an ape who was looking to make a genuine, long-term alliance with you. Otherwise they would be useless. They might actually be harmful, because a powerful ape would have more opportunities for infidelity, and thus less need of you personally to pass on his or her genes.
So the genetic codes governing sexual attraction which would be passed on from generation to generation would heavily favour sexual relationships with genuine apes – or at least apes who were being genuine with you. Any genetic codes which ignored whether a potential mate was genuine or not, or favoured apes who were fake and selfish would statistically have less chance of being passed on to the next generation. Over enough generations, they would be eliminated from the gene pool. The apes most easily fooled, or the ones who didn't care, would basically be predated out of the gene pool by their fellows.
Essentially, the ability to discern between whether another ape was being selfless or selfish, which is vital for an ape’s day-to-day survival, would be doubly important when it came to mating. Because the apes have lost their ability to be self-sufficient, attempting to raise a child to adulthood is a massively costly task, a task which requires a great deal of investment.
And there’s the key. If you’re investing heavily in another ape to directly assist you in passing on your genes, the most important thing to take into account is whether or not that ape will make good on your investment, or whether that ape will rip you off.
So the most successful genes for sexual attraction, over the long term, would keep an individual attracted to all of the normal things like resources, influence, power and health, but would also, crucially, be filtered through a judgement call on whether or not the ape in question was genuine or fake.
Interestingly, the most successful genes for sexual attraction would be ones which lowered sexual attraction for a powerful, wealthy, healthy partner if that partner was being manipulative. They would also be genes which would heighten sexual attraction for an ape that was less powerful, poorer and less healthy, as long as that ape was being genuine.
The genes which would have been most successful in producing successful offspring on are the genes which magnified the attractive qualities of genuine apes, and minimised the attractive qualities of manipulative apes.
If an ape were extremely unhealthy, totally powerless or destitute, there would be few attractive qualities to magnify. If an ape were incredibly powerful, extremely healthy and had total command of the resources at hand, it would not take a great magnification of those qualities to make that ape seem like an attractive prospect.
But this filter of sexual attraction would nonetheless be of pivotal importance in the genetic survival of an ape’s bloodline. It would stop the ape from mating with others who would take advantage of it. It would make the ape more likely to mate with others who were more deeply motivated to assist in the rearing of the child. That child would be more likely to survive and reproduce successfully.
These critical issues would have led, over time, to the prevalence within the ape population of genes governing sexual attraction which based attraction itself on the key division which was most relevant to individual survival.
The division between genuineness and fakeness.
The higher the prevalence of those specific genes governing attraction were in the ape population, the more important it was to other apes to either appear genuine or to actually be so. Thus the existence of these genes would put direct pressure on the apes to develop more sophisticated ways of expressing genuineness or appearing to be genuine. Any ape who appeared to be fake would be committing genetic suicide – even if they did not actually die, which they well might, they would certainly find it difficult to reproduce with anyone.
More sophisticated ways of expressing genuineness would put pressure on each individual to develop faculties of expression – perhaps even culminating in a highly sophisticated verbal language.
But then of course, more sophisticated ways of appearing to be genuine would put pressure on individuals to develop better ways of discerning true genuine behaviour from fake genuine behaviour. So important would it be to avoid manipulative apes that feelings like revulsion and disgust would aid an ape massively in its day-to-day survival. Over time, such emotions might well become hardwired into the expanding brain circuitry of the apes themselves.
The existence of sophisticated manipulative techniques like self deception would also make it even more vital to be able to discern between the two strategies in others, further feeding the pressures on each individual to develop more human characteristics.
And there you have it. That, my friends, is the beginnings of a feedback loop of sexual selection.
This is a highly specific evolutionary phenomenon that accounts for such seemingly incomprehensible evolutionary developments like the peacock’s tail.
The peacock’s tail has no survival value. It’s just a massive sexual advert which the male peacock uses to entice female peacocks. At some point in the evolutionary history of the peacock, modern evolutionary biologists agree that a sexual selection feedback loop took hold which emphasised tail size as a sexually attractive quality in males. After generation after generation of males being selected for the size of their tails, the tail feathers of the male of the species became massively large and elaborate. Ultimately the size of the tail reached an equilibrium where the advantages for selection that it conferred on the male were offset by the diminished chances of survival involved in carrying around a tail of such size all day.
But what would have happened if, instead of hampering the peacock’s survival, its evolutionary feedback loop had exaggerated a feature that just happened to be of massive incidental value to its chances of day-to-day survival?
That’s probably the easiest way to understand the power of the sexual selection feedback loop that gripped the evolution of our ancestral apes. We became locked into a positive feedback loop of sexual selection which emphasised the development of traits that, incidentally, were of massive value to our survival abilities. Thus the limiting factor which drew a halt to the development of the peacock’s tail would not have existed for our ancestors. The more the feedback loop took hold within the population of our ancestors, the more successful those ancestors would have been at surviving. Soon, their intelligence, physical versatility and ability to coordinate complex actions would have outstripped the day-to-day survival requirements of savannah life.
And the more intelligent, versatile and social our ancestors became, the more pressure there would be on the individuals within that developing population to become even more intelligent, versatile and social.
Because these traits were of such high value to survival, there would be no limiting factor from the external environment which would have curtailed their development. Their development would have, therefore, continued unchecked, until some other factor associated with the survival of the individual organism impacted on the further development of intelligence, versatility and sociability.
Essentially, the evolutionary feedback loop that took hold of our ancestral apes emphasised the development of traits that massively aided their dominance of their external environment. Because of this, the factors that slowed this evolutionary leap to a halt must have been internal reasons associated with their physiology, and not external reasons associated with the environment in which they lived. The feedback loop helped the apes to master their external environment. Resultantly, it could not have been stopped by anything external to them. All that is left to slow it down, to call the evolutionary leap to a close and stabilise the species, are internal factors. The pressure to halt must have come from within their bodies.
At the same time, that halt would be a long time coming. A sexual selection feedback loop that accelerated the development of traits with massive survival value would have no external limit on how much it could change an organism. When the evolutionary priorities on that organism finally stabilised, the resultant species would have developed the traits within that sexual feedback loop to a level that would make the peacock’s tail look like a poorly written lonely hearts ad in the back of a tabloid newspaper.
IX
The Ascent of Man
So what kind of organism would our ancestral apes have evolved into if the evolutionary priorities I have described were the main pressures acting on the apes themselves over an extended period of time?
They would have been highly intelligent, extremely versatile and exceptionally social. They would have developed each of these abilities to a degree which was totally unnecessary for survival in all but the most extreme environments. They would be capable of interfacing with and manipulating the world at large to a degree totally unprecedented in nature. All of the traits which made them unique, however, would basically be massively exaggerated versions of traits that existed in their simian ancestors.
They would have expanded vastly in terms of population because they woud be able to exploit a vast range of food supplies, and they would be able to exploit them more effectively than any other creature. They would have no natural predators. Their rapid evolutionary leap would completely outstrip the evolution of predators who could specialise in hunting them. This is because predators such as cheetahs, lions, wolves and other hunters have evolved to hunt in specific, specialised ways. These apes would have evolved a practical infinity of different defences against predation – defences which could be invented in the space of a day or a year, and not in the millions of years necessary for predators to evolve corresponding weaponry.
They would be physically versatile to an unprecedented degree, allowing them each to develop a high degree of expertise in a limitless range of applications. This expertise would facilitate greater cooperation between them, as experts in different fields would naturally discover that cooperation would produce dividends far greater than any individual could achieve alone. This would lead to a massive increase in the speed and importance of communication and social relationships. It is highly likely that these apes would have developed their skills of communication to an exceptional level of accuracy, allowing them to communicate their feelings and their sophisticated intellectual concepts clearly and with little effort.
They would have developed an exceptional capacity for selfishness and manipulation. They would be able to create personal facades that were so convincing that even the apes themselves would not know when they were lying and when they were not. They would be able to -wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved-yse the shifting networks of power and control that made up the social world in which they lived to an exceptional degree. They would be able to delude themselves with total conviction, brutalise and exploit their fellows for personal gain and use self-delusion as a mask to gain all the benefits of being a genuine individual. This selfish nature would be a part of each one of them. It would always be.
They would be capable of immense acts of kindness and charity. Their capacity for love would be without limit. It would be the foundation of everything that could possibly help them survive. Without love, there would be no alliances. Love would be critical in deepening alliances, in starting alliances, in healing rifts that had developed in alliances. It would be the glue that held together everything the apes had created or ever would create. This love would extend far beyond the immediate family unit, even including strangers, enemies and those who they had never and would never meet. This compassionate nature would be a part of each one of them. It would always be.
They would have a keen sense of self-worth, which would impact upon the way they viewed the world around them in an immediate and profound way. This sense of self-worth would dictate the immediacy and relative merit of the two evolutionary strategies they had developed for gaining assistance from their allies. It would be the emotional lynchpin of what these apes would experience as moral choice.
Their lives would be lived with an ever present moral choice. Although the self-delusion of the selfish could well allow an individual to tell themselves differently, every social situation would present that same, eternal a choice to be selfish or to be selfless. To work toward a closer, genuine alliance, or to cement an artificial position of power and dominance.
They would be capable of great destruction. Their combined efforts, both physically and intellectually, would lead to extreme success in both helpful, selfless endeavours, and harmful, selfish ones. There would be no upward limit to the complexity, sophistication or scale of either. Consequently, these creatures would be each others’ most fearsome natural predators. Working in concert, they could wreak havoc upon their environment and upon each other on a scale never before witnessed by the earth.
They would be capable of enormous acts of compassion. They would be able to organise together in order to achieve great and noble things. There would be no upward limit on how much they could help each other, in exactly the same way as there would be no upward limit on how they could harm each other. Their potential for excellence would have no bounds.
All the myriad environmental pressures experienced by these individuals would have resulted in different kinds of ape – different races. As they moved outward from their point of origin on the African savannah and occupied new environments, they would have faced different kinds of pressure unique to their specific situation. Yet the critical evolutionary pressures working upon them would come from within the species, not from the natural environment. This would mean that no matter how far the apes diverged from each other in terms of geography, they would all be evolving in the same way at much the same rate. Alterations in skin tone, bone density and the shape of certain external aspects of the animal would neither take over from nor slow the central evolutionary pressures which the apes would carry with them wherever they went. This would have resulted in physical changes between different racial groups which, although they might appear superficially dramatic, would be all but cosmetic in terms of the fundamental nature and capabilities of each animal.
The apes, with their massively exaggerated intelligence and versatility might have well developed a level of self-sufficiency which would have put their arboreal ancestors to shame. Nonetheless, they would feel a keen loneliness when isolated from others. This is because their social world would be their own natural habitat. Their fellow creatures would be their own natural environment.
There would be marked physiological and psychological differences between the genders, which would be much greater than when their ancestors left the forest. These differences would, however, centre around certain common fundamental dynamics of moral choice, decency, selfishness, intelligence, sociability and versatility. The differences between the genders would be most marked in the area of their sexuality. This would be the clearest area where an observer could note the differences in physical and mental calibration based on the specific reproductive priorities of each gender. These changes in calibration would allow each gender to retain the fundamental strengths of their species while being best equipped, as individuals, with the tools to compete in the social world around them whether they were approaching it from a male or a female point of view.
The pressures of sexual selection which informed the direction of their evolution would still be with them. The division between someone being genuine and someone being fake would, even once the species had stabilised due to internal factors, remain the critical criteria in an individual’s decision of who to mate with. At the same time, there would be a profound difference in how the genders approached the entire issue of sex.
The female of the species would evolve traits that would make her more selective with her choice of partner. The more actively selective she was, the more successful she would be at counterbalancing the negative sexual connotations of being selective in the first place – that is to say, having less sex. This would result in a highly increased sex drive when faced with a desirable male, and a much decreased sex drive when faced with no viable prospects for mating. It would also probably result in large-scale adaptations of female sex organs to increase female sexual pleasure, in order to make women more actively selective and less passively selective.
The increasingly selective nature of the females toward sex, a phenomenon which proceeds directly and inevitably from the acuteness of the loss of self-sufficiency suffered by females, would have profound and far-reaching effects on the dynamics of courtship itself.
Firstly, the key problem for a male looking to reproduce would be the increasingly knotty task of actually enticing a woman into sex. This would lead to a heavy emphasis in the male psychology toward the pre-sex courtship and would be mirrored by female psychology and physiology to entice the men into committing to the effort and social risk associated with courting them.
A quick word about social risk. In a closed society of only a few hundred members, the risks associated with a failed attempt at seduction would be threefold. Firstly, if a male gets rejected, he might lose the respect of his peers. Secondly, he might lose the respect of the women who do not want to associate themselves with someone previously rejected by one of their female peers. Thirdly, as the females would be a scarce resource, the courtship of a desirable female would almost certainly lead to conflict with other potential male suitors.
Each of these factors could well lead to the social exclusion of the unsuccessful male, and thus the ending of that individual male’s bloodline. To attempt to openly court a female would therefore become a crucible of social value and self worth, in which the females would heavily test the apparent social value and self-worth of the male to see if it was solid. The male would put his social reputation and his self-worth on the line in a major way in front of his male peers, each one of which would be a potential competitor looking for ways to advance themselves socially at his expense. The male would also put his social reputation on the line in a major way in front of the entire female population of his social world, each one of which would be actively -wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved--wordremoved-ysing the males of the social group for signs of weakness.
As if that were not enough, the dominant males within the hierarchy would jealously guard their hard-won positions as sexually desirable mates. Any attempt at the seduction of a highly desirable female would be met with resistance from the social element with the greatest concentration of physical power and least to lose socially by resorting to violence.
Male courtship in a closed society of a few hundred individuals would be a risky business. This would probably lead, over the generations, to the statistical prevalence within the population of genes which made the males wary of approaching unknown females, and of making sexual overtures toward females whose sexual desires were in doubt. It would also probably have another interesting effect that would be more externally obvious.
As the effort and risk of male courtship rose during the evolutionary development of the apes, so too would the need for the females to develop a higher level of external sexual ornamentation to entice the males to take that risk and make that effort. These outward attributes would emphasise the sexual nature of the female, and might include dramatic increases in the size of whatever visible organs were most directly related to childrearing.
The importance of genetic health to females would place a strong evolutionary pressure on the female apes to enhance their physical display of such attributes. Such pressure might well lead to the reduction of hair on the body, as well as an upright posture to display the body in full.
Resultantly, once the evolutionary leap had stabilised through reaching equilibrium between the advantages of further change and the negative consequences of further change, the females of the species would have developed an advanced level of what would be experienced by males as, for want of a better word, beauty.
The genetic health of males would also be an obviously important factor in their selection by females. Thus, physical attractiveness would be a highly beneficial attribute for a male to develop. Nonetheless, these physical traits would be calibrated less toward pure displays of genetic health (important in producing a healthy child), and more toward functionality and effectiveness (in supporting that child to adulthood). Resultantly, it would benefit a male not simply to have a strong musculature, a well-built physique and a facial structure that projected an image of strength, but also to display these things in as clear a manner as possible. This would probably lead to an ongoing reduction in body hair, and a more upright posture, to display the physical characteristics which would make a male an effective provider, as well as a prize specimen of genetic health.
Males would typically focus more on everything leading up to sex, and the act of sex itself. Females would typically focus more on sex itself and everything that happens afterwards.
But all these changes are initially precipitated by the necessary increase in the sexual selectivity of the female. So what are the criteria by which a female would select her mate? What do females want?
Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, a female would be looking for a male who could give her real and tangible help during her prolonged period of increased dependency.
Secondly, a female would be looking for a male who she could count on to stay with her and her children, despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, which the increasing complexity of the social world and the various challenges from his external environment would rain upon him.
Thirdly, she would be looking for a male of strong genetic health, a male who would give her the opportunity to bear strong and healthy children.
In short, real capability, true loyalty and genetic health.
The most direct external indicators of these three things would be a high level of useful expertise, profound feelings of personal affection for the female herself and physical attractiveness. There would be other indicators also. Things like social value and status, personal control of resources and the attention of other females would also be indicators that a particular male would be a strong choice as a potential partner. But these social factors would only be indicators of worth, and not actual worth itself. Actual worth would be gauged by expertise, loyalty, capability and male beauty.
Expertise could be easily judged. How useful, in real terms, is this male or that male? Loyalty would be something more ephemeral, something that would require an advanced degree of insight and intuition on behalf of the female. Male beauty would be apparent to the naked eye. But what of capability?
For these creatures, capability is not simply a matter of physical ability. What of intellectual capability? Emotional capability? Social capability?
The fact is, for these apes, the ability to marshal the forces of their combined fellows is far more important than the physical abilities of the individual. The female would therefore need to find a way to gauge the long-term social value of any prospective mate.
As luck would have it, each ape, both male and female, would carry inside them, always, a barometer of their own long-term social value.
Self-worth had developed in the first place to inform an ape of its value to the social group. It would be important to this ape that its self-worth would be as accurate as possible. There would be no survival advantage in overestimating or underestimating individual self worth. Why?
Were the ape to underestimate its self worth, it would not be able to reap the rewards from its alliances that it potentially could.
Were the ape to overestimate its self worth, it would be in danger of exposing itself to the rejection of its fellows who found that the alliance was too costly.
Of course, if the internal barometer of a male's self-worth had a low reading, the information contained within it would be jealously guarded, and carefully hidden behind a highly convincing façade.
At the same time, if a female could somehow tap in to the internal gauge of self worth of a male, she would have a very clear fix on that ape’s present and future value as a partner, in terms of his social capability.
This would not be a straightforward task. Male apes with low self-worth would be experience a keen and relentless evolutionary pressure to hide their low estimate of their own capabilities and worth from the females of the population. Once more, interestingly, it would aid this concealment if this façade was totally convincing to the individual male itself. This pressure would, over time, favour the survival of the male apes that were capable of constructing a façade of strength in times of internal weakness. This faculty would, necessarily, become developed over the course of the evolution of these apes, to an extremely high degree of sophistication and complexity.
The challenge then, for the female apes, would be to attempt to discern from the various displays of strength and capability that they would be surrounded with, which were genuine and which were fake.
One key way that a female ape could test a male ape for internal strength therefore would be to challenge him. The selection of an appropriate mate would be greatly assisted by a defiant and sometimes combative aspect in the female psyche, which would act as a test to see if the masks of strength that they were presented with would buckle or hold under pressure. This would probably lead, within the population of female apes, to a prevalence of genes which would lead to seemingly irrationally antagonistic and challenging behaviour toward their potential suitors and their actual partners.
From a purely psychological perspective, such behaviour would indeed be irrational inasmuch as it would not be a conscious, rationalised strategy which a female would choose to do or not to do. It would also be something which would necessarily be only an incidental part of a female's feminine nature, as if taken to extremes it would certainly drive away the very partner she needs to keep in order to guarantee her survival and the survival of her children. It would probably exhibit itself as an ongoing emotional volatility. And although from the perspective of the individual female it might at times seem confusing and irrational, from an evolutionary perspective it makes perfect sense.
A female must be able to discern between the outward displays of strength that she is presented with. If she cannot, she and her children may well die. The internal barometer of a male’s self worth will give her the vital information that she needs to make the most important evolutionary decision she will ever make. Testing his façade of strength would be a critical part of her survival strategy. She could not survive without it.
A male’s self-worth would dictate his effectiveness in forging lasting alliances with others. This would govern the strength of the sexual alliance with the female herself and more general social alliances within the wider social group. The strength of these alliances would be vital for the female to gain access to the resources that her offspring would need to survive. For that reason, genuine self-worth demonstrated through real, unshakeable confidence would be the most attractive trait a male could display to the females of this newly evolving species.
Confidence would be king.
X
And the rest, as they say...
So the apes who went out onto the plains 3 million years ago would have faced an entirely new set of evolutionary pressures. These pressures would have centred on the face that these apes would have their ability to be individually self-sufficient. Their versatility, communication skills and intelligence would have meant that their best chances of survival as individuals lay in each other. This would have led to a heavy pressure on each individual to be socially effective in a way they had never been before. It would also have led, after a number of generations, to a feedback loop of sexual selection which would have developed these traits far beyond the survival needs of the apes.
Because this sexual selection loop was increasing the prevalence of traits that were of generic use to survival, no factor in the outside environment would have halted their development. Unlike the peacock’s tail, these exaggerated traits were not a burden, but a massive boon to each individual ape. Resultantly, these traits would not have reached equilibrium with any external environmental pressure. Such pressures, like weather conditions, food supply geography, war, Ice Ages or the existence of predators would have indeed acted as a spur to the development of these traits by increasing the importance of combined social effectiveness for the survival chances of each individual ape.
Intelligence, versatility and communication would have developed to a degree that would be massively higher than what these apes required in order to survive.
The sexual emphasis of their evolution may well have led to the exaggeration in both genders of body parts associated with sex. It may well have led to a reduction in body hair to show off the newly developed sexual ornamentation, and to an upright posture to show off the body.
Moreover, there would be an increase in physiological differences and psychological differences between the genders, which would become especially apparent in their approach to sex itself.
At the same time, the physical changes to the body, though dramatic, would be a mere evolutionary sideshow to the changes in the mind. A whole raft of social skills, emotions and instincts would be magnified and exaggerated by the evolutionary process, and magnified to a massive degree. Alongside intelligence itself, there would be a vast increase in other psychological factors such as emotional depth, the capacity to care, the capacity to form lifelong friendships, the capacity to self-delude, to manipulate, to treat other apes like things with no individual worth. The capacity to seek power at any cost, the capacity to forgive, the capacity for cruelty, for mercy, for hate and for love.
And all these psychological changes would revolve around the key division between selflessness and selfishness. All of the psychological changes that these apes had undergone would have happened solely to equip them with tools to better carry out one of those two strategies for survival.
As a result, the mind of any one of these apes, whether male or female, young or old, would revolve around a moral core.
This moral core, the division between selfishness and selflessness, would be the deepest and most fundamental level of the minds of these creatures.
They would, essentially, be moral apes.
After a while the massive but incidental survival value afforded these apes by their increased social traits would allow them first to dominate and then to transcend their plains environment, becoming the ultimate hunter-gathering omnivore. As the millennia passed, the social integration and effectiveness of these apes became so total as to begin to develop the large-scale manipulation of nature – agriculture – to feed a growing population.
Agriculture would allow the production of increasing amounts of surplus food, and would also make the lifestyle of these apes more static – the social group would be centralised in and around the area where the crops were grown. Over time, as farming became more efficient, food supplies rose and population grew, these gatherings became larger, more permanent, numerous and sophisticated. This would give rise to cities. These mass gatherings initiated an explosion in the development of ideas, the rate of invention and the scale of social complexity.
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