Cooperation and Intelligence

BBC featured an article reporting a new brain imaging study by James Rilling at Emory University in Atlanta, which suggests that mutual cooperation is neurologically a rewarding experience.

Other researchers, including Robert Sussman of Washington University in St. Louis, and Agustin Fuentes at Notre Dame promptly used the results to support their theory that human intelligence developed partly as a response to predation -- that is, as a defence mechanism. Being victims of predation forced early humans to develop intelligence and cooperation.

This smells of propaganda to me. Quoting from the article:

The idea of "Man the Hunter" is the generally accepted paradigm of human evolution, says Sussman.

"It developed from a basic Judeo-Christian ideology of man being inherently evil, aggressive and a natural killer," Sussman told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St. Louis. "In fact, when you really examine the fossil and living non-human primate evidence, that is just not the case."

Sussman falls into the trap of Judeo-Christian ideology while simultaneously denying it. He says "no, man isn't the nasty aggressive natural killer that Judeo-Christian ideology says he is". But the very idea of aggressiveness being bad comes from Judeo-Christian ideology (Blessed are the meek ...).

If you remove the emotional and religious overtones, the bare facts are -- yes, humans can be aggressive, this was an evolutionary advantage for them. There is nothing inherently wrong or evil about it, it is a matter of context. If you are hungry and you are hunting to feed yourself and your family, you had better be aggressive and a "natural killer" or your genes are consigned to the dead-end bin of evolution. Aggressiveness untempered by intelligence and reason is bad, but then, anything is. Even Judeo-Christian belief doesn't say it's wrong to hunt to feed yourself, and how can one expect to hunt successfully if he's not aggressive?

It is stupid to treat "aggressiveness" as some primal urge that is devoid of context and must sooner or later manifest in the wholesale slaughter of his own kind. If you make this a biological claim, you are over-reaching yourself, and science. Biology and evolution make no such claim. In fact, if aggressiveness was such an urge, humans would have wiped themselves out hundreds of thousands of years ago. If you make this a philosophical claim, you have admitted to the Judeo-Christian ideology of viewing man as inherently evil.

The mistake is in the definition. It is not necessary to deny the Judeo-Christian ideology by denying aggressiveness altogether, and pretending that man evolved as a meek, defenceless critter, hard-wired to be nice to each other, who managed to survive the predators only by developing intelligence and cooperation in the face of peril. This is not science; it is rubbish.

For the most part most people manage to retain both aggressiveness and reason, using each when it is needed. Why should it have been any different in the past? Proto-humans didn't have as much intelligence or self-control as we do, but does that mean they had no sense at all? Animals like lions make a business of being aggressive, but even they don't fight each other constantly to extinction.

Returning to the science ...

Yes, there are imaging studies that seem to show that cooperation can be a pleasant experience for humans, but cooperation is needed just as much for hunting large animals (as primitive humans undoubtedly did) as it is to avoid being hunted by other predators.

Humans are social, so it should come as no surprise that they can cooperate with each other, or if indeed there are brain circuits that reward or facilitate such behavior. If this were not so, humans would live solitary lives like tigers do, instead of living in groups or packs as we did.

But what this says about the evolution of intelligence is harder to pin down. People can cooperate in aggression, such as armies do today, or a group of hunters taking down a mammoth or large deer have done in the past. They may cooperate in defense or other survival activities. They may cooperate in simply living together as a group without killing each other. They may co-operate in actively exchanging goods and services with each other. Sussman seems to think that cooperation in defense is more important than any other kind. Why, I don't know. He offers no evidence for it.

Many animals show these kinds of "cooperation" without evolving intelligence as humans did. I don't know of any evidence to suggest that the threat of predation was unique to humans. The authors make some reference to Australopithecus Afarensis as an "edge species" living in trees and on the ground, and say that edge species are typically prey rather than predators. This sounds simplistic to me.

The beginnings of human intelligence pre-date the building of predator-proof dwellings or the control of fire. Huddling together in the dark or climbing a tree aren't very effective ways to counter a hungry cat. In fact, the beginnings of intelligence and the appearance of Homo coincide with the development of tools, many of which are hunting and skinning tools. It seems far more likely to me that humans learned to cooperate by hunting large prey together, and success in this endeavor gave them confidence to ward off attacks by predators.

It is near impossible to say without further evidence what specifically the tools were used for first. Were they first used at night by groups of humans to defend themselves against an intruding predator, as the article suggests? Or were they first used to hunt down prey, with cooperative hunting evolving as a necessary step to hunting larger game?

The article mentions that chimpanzees typically do not help each other when one of them is in danger. Humans very often do. How this difference evolved is really a matter of speculation, until some better evidence comes in. Their view seems to be that cooperation is hard-wired into the brain and we can't help ourselves, we just have to help other humans in danger. Speaking for myself, I feel no such imperative. Whatever desire I do have to help others comes from my education and beliefs, things I have learned rather than was born with.

But if we are speculating, it seems unlikely to me that the urge to cooperate manifested some dark night when a saber-tooth crept into a cave occupied by humans. More likely, the instinct for self-preservation took over and it was each Homo for himself.

On the other hand, a group of proto-humans who had built tools for hunting, learned to hunt together as a group and take down large prey which was too powerful for any single individual, would be just what was needed that dark night to overcome their instinct to run, and say "hey, we can take this kitty". In other words, cooperation in defense probably came after cooperation in offense.

But this is all speculation and I have proved no more than the authors of the article did.

The only thing we know for sure is that some ape like critters learned to walk on their hind feet, freeing their hands. Those hands had opposable thumbs and were good for working with. These critters learned to make tools. They were smarter than other apes, but they were not men.

For hundreds of thousands of years, they pretty much stayed that way. Then, various "evolutionary pressures" such as climate and the availability of food persuaded them to start walking, and they spread over much of the world. In time, some of them developed into modern humans. There is no evidence I am aware of that this change was triggered by any new type of predation. There is plenty of evidence that bigger brains accompanied a high-meat diet, which came mostly from hunting.

Social living promoted the development of language, culture and similar things that are learned. But there is no evidence that hunter-gatherer groups were any different in composition 40,000 years ago among Homo Sapiens than 1.5 million years ago, among Homo Habilis. So I can't imagine that it was social living and cooperation alone that was responsible for the growth of the brain and intelligence.

Brain imaging research is often used as a tool by people with an agenda to support their own pet hypotheses. It carries a heavy weight of religious and social implications. Nevertheless, it is annoying to see scientists jump on to the bandwagon and subvert science to their own political viewpoints.