Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Some preliminaries…
In science, care must be taken not only in how one answers, but in how one asks, questions. This thread’s post #1 is, I think, a case in point.

“Is civilization natural?” contains the implied claim of that biologically meaningful distinction can be made using the terms natural and not-natural. Though common in ordinary human language and thinking, I believe these terms are more appropriate in the discipline of moral philosophy than biological science. In biology, “natural” and “nature” are catch-alls for “everything that exists”, much like “universe” is in physics. Therefore, every biological entity or phenomenon is “part of nature”, or “natural”. The term “not-natural”, or “unnatural”, is practically a semantic null, like the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, or “this statement is false”.

“Are humans designed to …” is also a problematic question form, because “designed” implies conscious intentionality. Though it’s often convenient in biology and behavioral science to refer to structures ad phenomena as “designed”, this is normaly just a convenient linguistic shorthand for “selected” or simply “performs a recognized function”. In the past couple of decades, “designed” has become an especially touchy word due to its association with “intelligent design”, an anti-scientific political movement , so much so that it’s a good practice to avoid using the word other than in its strickly correct sense, as in “the Jarvic 7 was designed to replace a human heart”.

Preliminaries complete,

Originally Posted by lemit

Are humans designed to live in large, more or less symbiotic communities?

All zoological evidence suggests that all of the present day great ape species, including humans, are strongly social, with individuals living outside of troops of 10 to 100 for only brief periods, and then only in order to travel and establish themselves in new troops, while paleontology suggests this pattern was the norm for all of our “human-like” ancestor species.

Although at first glance humans appear dramatically different from other great apes in that our “troops” are much larger – hundred, thousands, or more individuals – I think this a mistaken conclusion, due to the confusion of the primatological concept of a “troop” with the human cultural ones of “village”, “town”, “city”, “nation”, etc. Although we humans identify ourselves with towns and nations of thousands or millions of individuals, our ordinary social interaction is rarely involve more than a few tens of people – family members, friends, coworkers, etc. My anecdotal experience suggests to me suggests that, regardless of our social circumstances, our ability to recognize and interact with others as people “familiar” to us is limited to somewhat less than 100 – about the same as the maximum size of a non-human great ape troup.

Even if such an collection is not a true “troop”, that we humans do identify socially with much larger groups (eg: in the cases of national identity, with hundreds of millions), is, I think, very significant. The other great apes don’t appear to do it in the wild, or even be capable of such forming such identification. Thus the idea of an non-human ape nation appears to belong in the realm of pure fiction

Originally Posted by lemit

Is it natural to communicate with each other the way we are right now?

As noted in the preliminaries above, being as we’re part of nature, whatever we do is “natural”. The way we’re communication now, however – via written language – appears to be completely unique among all animal species. And, although other animals – not only primates, but less closely related species, such as birds – are able to some extent to use communicate with vocalizations arguably qualifying as “language”, it’s reasonable, I think, to conclude that spoken language as we humans do it is unique to our species.

Originally Posted by lemit

For that matter, are our communities symbiotic?

As “symbiotic” means, by definition “the living together of different biological species”, no single-species community can be said to by “symbiotic” – though we humans enjoy symbioses with uncounted numbers of other species, from the many species of bacteria that allow our guts to work and cannot survive outside of it, to domesticated elephants

Originally Posted by lemit

Do we live comfortably with each other?

As with the word “natural”, “comfortably” is one more an informal, subjective human cultural than a biological one.

Subjectively, some people appear to feel comfortable around others, while some don’t. I think it’s incontrovertible, however, that hardly any human would be more comfortable, or in most cases even survive long, without the support of a large number of other humans. The rare humans with the desire, psychological disposition, and skills to live truly apart from human society (eg: secretly on a deserted island) are not, in my, nor, I think, the subjective judgment of most, more “comfortable” as a result.

Originally Posted by lemit

Or are we just chimps howling and throwing sticks at authority before we retreat into our individual forests?

But chimps don’t howl or throw sticks (and other things ) at individuals they perceive to be figures of authority. They do it at outsiders they consider threats and competitors – in short, at enemies. I think it’s clear that, in settings from sports spectating to international relations, we humans engage in essentially the same threatenting/warning behavior as other primates – and worse, like other primates, engage in inter-troop warfare and intra-troop intimidation, abuse, and murder. While our use of language does, IMHO, set us apart from Earth’s other animal species, our propensity for threatening display and aggression does not.