Is Human Nature Social or Selfish ?

original post :


http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish-i.html

Is Human Nature Social or Selfish ? by Charles D. Brown

I recently had a chance to teach anthropology for the first time, after a school career with two anthropology degrees. One student asked "what does anthropology matter ? what difference does it make ?". Good , mature questions for a high school student.

One way that anthropology might help us in the here and now is to bring scientific and biological paleontological evidence, from the Stone Age 100,000's of years ago, to bear on the question of what is human nature today ? Is it human nature to be greedy and selfish like Wall Street billionaires ? Or is it human nature to share and "love thy neighbor as thyself" ?

_Sapiens_" means "wise" In Latin.

Homo sapiens (Latin: "wise man"(sic) ) is the scientific name for the human species. Homo is the human genus, which also includes Neanderthals and many other extinct species of hominin. H. sapiens is the only surviving species of the genus Homo. Modern humans are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, which differentiates us from Homo sapiens Neanderthal

What is humans' unique nature ? What are language/culture ?

For anthropology, language/ culture are the unique species characteristic of _homo sapiens_. In a sense, "culture" is another word for "wisdom", from the notion that humans are the species _homo wise_. It is humans socially learned practices, customs, language, traditions, beliefs, religion, spirituality that make us "wise" in so many ways, certainly clever and winners _as a species_ ( not just as a few "fit" Individuals) in the struggles and snuggles to survive as a species. Since the advent of civilization, sometimes it's not so clear how wise our culture makes us. Therein lies the central drama of the history of the human species. Nonetheless, clearly in the Stone Age, our having culture was a highly adaptive advantage over species that did not have culture , stone tools made through culture, etc, raising our species fitness. This is evidenced by _homo sapiens_ expanding in population and therefore migrating to an expanded area of living space across the earth , out of what is now Africa to the other continents. Stone Age foraging and kinship organized societies were the mode of life for the vast majority of time of human species 'existence, 99% or more.

The first human societies had an extraordinarily high survival need to be able to rely on each other at levels of solidarity that we cannot even imagine. The intensity of the network of social connections of a band of 25 to 150 ( maybe a bit more) people living in the ecological food chain location would almost constitute a new level of organic organization and integrity above individual bodies; ancient kinship/culture systems were super-organic bodies; the human social group was a substantially harmonious , multi-individual Body, organism ( pace Hobbes). The Individual human bodies, all of the Some Bodies , were very frail and weak relative to the field of predators they were escaping. Bi-pedal/ Up-right posture made them slower sprint runners than quadrupeds , too ! The dominance of the food chain that humans ultimately reached even in the Stone Age could be reached only by super-social , super internally-cooperative, super-intra-species harmony, because they had _frail_ individual bodies relative to their predators , and needed each other's support. It is clear to me that natural selection picked hominin groups with policies of "love thy neighbor as thyself " and "charity" over those that might have derived principles of "selfishness and greed", if there were any in the Stone Age before Civilization. Institutionalized war would have been selected against through the whole Stone Age. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq0XJCJ1Srw