Humans as part of nature

1. HUMAN NATURE
HISTORY OF NATURE
Ape in Mirror (self portrait), photo by Andy Buscemi

2. HUMAN NATURE
“I KNOW THAT I KNOW NOTHING”
Doesn’t mean I don’t have an (informed) opinion, or biases….

3. HUMAN NATURE
HUMAN EVOLUTION AND HUMAN NATURE
▸ Involves nearly all aspects of human existence or the human condition:
▸ Nature vs. Nurture – genetics or environment (both!)
▸ Aggression
▸ Love
▸ Sexuality
▸ Personality and malleability
▸ Gender roles
▸ Egoism vs. altruism
▸ Freedom and free will
▸ Morality
▸ Responsibility
▸ Therefore…Controversies! Just a few….

4. HUMAN NATURE
THE FALLACIES OF HUMAN
NATURE
▸ David Hume (1711–1776) – Is/Ought
▸ G.E. Moore (1873–1958) – Naturalistic fallacy
▸ Something is natural…therefore it is good.
▸ Genetic fallacy
▸ The origin of something gives its value

5. HUMAN NATURE
ORIGINS AND HUMAN NATURE
▸ Three in
fl
uential origin myths in the Western
Tradition:
▸ The Golden Age – Hesiod, etc. (Theogony), 8thC
BCE
▸ Genesis and the Fall from Grace (The Bible), c
6thC BCE to 5thC BCE
▸ Lucretius (On the Nature of Things), 1stC BCE
(Epicurus, 4th to 3rdC BCE)

6. HUMAN NATURE
HESIOD’S GOLDEN AGE

7. HUMAN NATURE
FALL FROM GRACE
And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and
now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from
whence he was taken., Genesis 3:22-3, King JamesVersion.

8. HUMAN NATURE
LUCRETIUS – ON THE NATURE OF THINGS
▸Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (1st century BCE)
“Yet the human race was hardier then by far
No wonder, for the earth was hard that formed them…
For many revolutions of the sun
They led the life of the pack, like beasts that roam.
There was no ruddy farmer to steady the plough;
Unknown were iron tools to till the
fi
eld, How to plant
out new shoots…
They had no foundry skill, no use for
fi
re;
They didn’t know how to clothe themselves with skins
But lived in the wild woods and the mountain caves…

9. HUMAN NATURE
VITRUVIUS’ TEN BOOKS OF ARCHITECTURE
Men, in the old way, were born like
animals in forests and caves and
woods, and passed their life
feeding on the food of the
fi
elds. […] Therefore, because of
the discovery of
fi
re, there arose at
the beginning, concourse among
men, deliberation and a life in
common.
[Bk 2, §1–2]
DOI: 10.4159/DLCL.vitruvius-architecture.1931

10. HUMAN NATURE
Figures 16 and 17, Rivius, Vitruvius Teutsch edition 1548

11. HUMAN NATURE
THE WILD MAN AND
THE STATE OF NATURE
“I live according to what Nature has
taught me –
Free from worry, always joyously…
I do not delight in fancy food
Or in strong drink.
I live upon fresh fruit alone….”
▸ Ballad accompanying the 15th century
illustration by Jean Bourdichon, L’Homme
sauvage ou l’Etat de nature.

12. HUMAN NATURE
ORIGINS AND MORALITY
▸ There is an often explicit aspect of morality in these origin myths
and philosophical conceptions
▸ Man is ‘fallen’ and sinful, but strives for salvation (Genesis)
▸ Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas identi
fi
ed ‘hard’ and ‘soft’
Primitivism (Lovejoy and Boas, 1935) often associated with
Hobbes and Rousseau.
▸ Humans were innocent and have been corrupted by civilization
▸ Civilization has ‘civilized’ humanities ‘brutish’ (animal) instincts
▸ Where does morality come from? Imposed by God and/or the
State? Or does it come from within?

13. HUMAN NATURE
THINGS CHANGE WITH DARWIN
▸(But not entirely…)
▸The devil is, of course, in the details.

14. HUMAN NATURE
DARWIN’S ‘PROPHECY’ IN 1859
http://darwin-online.org.uk/Variorum/1859/1859-488-dns.html

15. HUMAN NATURE
IMPLICATIONS OF EVOLUTION
▸ We are animals (mammals)
▸ We are great apes
▸ We share a common ancestor with the great apes
▸ Features and behavior that we share in common with our
‘cousins’ were likely shared by this common ancestor
▸ Our evolutionary history has shaped our bodies and our brains/
minds
▸ By studying our evolutionary past, we can learn something of
ourselves (human nature)
▸ By studying the great apes, we can learn something about our
evolutionary past

16. HUMAN NATURE
WHAT MAKES US HUMAN?
▸ Physical/anatomical traits are relatively easy
▸ Bipedal
▸ Nimble hands with opposing thumbs
▸ Large brains
▸ Odd pelage (hair)
▸ Etc.
▸ Things get a lot harder when we start looking at our mental
and social lives.
▸ What Makes Us Human? Answers from Evolutionary Biology
(2012)

17. HUMAN NATURE
THE DEVIL OF COURSE, IS IN THE DETAILS
▸ Can evolution explain everything about human beings?
▸ Morality
▸ Religion and Spirituality
▸ Love
▸ Violence
▸ Sel
fi
shness and cooperation
▸ Where does culture
fi
t in? How does culture evolve?
▸ What do we mean by explain?

18. HUMAN NATURE
THE PROBLEM OF MORALITY
▸ If we are animals, what about morality?
▸ Does accepting evolution mean inevitable moral decay (atheism,
etc)?
▸ Old questions, is morality imposed on us by God and/ or society
against our nature?
▸ Is it imposed by a divine being(s)?
▸ Does it re
fl
ect the ‘natural order’
▸ Is morality universal?
▸ In Christian terms, is belief in an eternal soul which is rewarded or
punished in the afterlife necessary for morality?

19. HUMAN NATURE
THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY?
▸ Do codes of social behavior have a basis in our evolutionary
history?
▸ In other words, are human moral codes based on unwritten
rules that evolved as part of our social nature?
▸ What about animals? Can we see ‘moral’ behavior (or its
precursors) in animals?
▸ Franz de Waal, “Are Animals Moral? Let us simply conclude
that they occupy several
fl
oors of the tower of morality.” – in
Good Natured (1996)

20. HUMAN NATURE
THE SHORT ANSWER
▸ From a Darwinian perspective, morality can be viewed:
▸ As codi
fi
ed pro-social behaviour
▸ In other words, we are social animals with an evolutionary
history, and behave accordingly.
▸ Morality is just the unspoken, evolved rules of our social life
peculiar to us our species
▸ We see echoes of this morality in the behaviour of our
cousins the chimpanzees and bonobos for example.

21. COMPETITION AND
COOPERATION
HISTORY OF NATURE
Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

22. HUMAN NATURE
DARWIN ON SYMPATHY AND MORALITY
▸ Taking his cure from Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Darwin
believed that sympathy (or empathy) lay at the root of human morality and was a
primary driver of human behavior.
“Social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its
fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform
various services for them.” -Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (1871: 240)
“With mankind, sel
fi
shness, experience, and imitation, probably add…
to the power of sympathy; for we are led by the hope of receiving good
in return to perform acts of sympathetic kindness to others; and
sympathy is much strengthened by habit. In however complex a manner
this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all
those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been
increased through natural selection; for those communities, which
included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would
fl
ourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring. (1871: 256)”

23. HUMAN NATURE
THOMAS HUXLEY
▸ Darwin’s “Bulldog”
▸ Compared life to gladiators
fi
ght, “whereby the
strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to
fi
ght another day (1888).”
▸ Saw evolution as Hobbesian
▸ This is the view referred to as “nature red in tooth
and claw,” from the poem In Memoriam by Alfred
Lord Tennyson
▸ A view also associated with Herber Spencer, who
coined the term “survival of the
fi
ttest” (advocate of
what would later be called Social Darwinism)

24. HUMAN NATURE
PRINCE KROPOTKIN
▸ Born an Aristocrat
▸ Anarchist, Geographer and Naturalist
▸ Emphasized the important role that cooperation, or ‘mutual
aid’ plays both in human and animal communities
▸ He witnessed this ‘mutual aid’
fi
rst hand on expeditions in
Siberia
▸ Disagreed with “the popularisers of Darwin, who ignore in
him all he did not borrow from Malthus”
▸ Like Darwin, thinks sympathy (empathy) exists both in man
and in social animals

25. HUMAN NATURE
MUTUAL AID, KROPOTKIN (1902)
“If we... ask Nature: ‘who are the
fi
ttest: those
who are continually at war with each other, or
those who support one another?’ we at once see
that those animals which acquire habits of mutual
aid are undoubtedly the
fi
ttest.”

26. HUMAN NATURE
[According to Hobbes] “…the so-called “state of nature” was
nothing but a permanent
fi
ght between individuals,
accidentally huddled together by the mere caprice of their
bestial existence. True, that science has made some progress
since Hobbes’s time, and that we have safer ground to stand
upon than the speculations of Hobbes or Rousseau. But the
Hobbesian philosophy has plenty of admirers still; and we have
had of late quite a school of writers who, taking possession of
Darwin’s terminology rather than of his leading ideas, made of
it an argument in favour of Hobbes’s views upon primitive man,
and even succeeded in giving them a scienti
fi
c appearance.
Huxley, as is known, took the lead of that school, and in a
paper written in 1888 he represented primitive men as a sort of
tigers or lions, deprived of all ethical conceptions,
fi
ghting out
the struggle for existence to its bitter end.”
Kropotkin, 1902

27. HUMAN NATURE
THEORIES OF MIND
▸ The ability to ‘read minds’
▸ To understand what other people are thinking, to anticipate their
intentions and to communicated what we are thinking through
language and non-verbal cues
▸ Some apes and dogs may have this, but much more advanced in
human beings
▸ May be the foundation of cooperation and communication in
humans
▸ Without it language and culture probably impossible
▸ Develops very early in humans, around 3 or 4 years old

28. HUMAN NATURE
▸ In modern evolutionary, biology
explanations of how some animals,
including humans, have come to live
in cooperative social groups has
featured a remarkable synthesis of
ideas from genetics, game theory and
mathematical economics.

29. HUMAN NATURE
RECIPROCAL ALTRUISM
▸ Robert Trivers “Recriprocal Altruism” (1971)
▸ His work inspired both Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson,
and others.
▸ Reciprocal altruism is an act which bene
fi
ts an unrelated
individual while incurring a cost (or potential cost) to the
actor.
▸ “One human being leaping into water, at some
danger to himself, to save another distantly related
human from drowning may be said to display
altruistic behavior.” (Trivers, 1971)

30. HUMAN NATURE
“Regarding human reciprocal altruism, it is shown that
the details of the psychological system that regulates
this altruism can be explained by the model. Speci
fi
cally,
friendship, dislike, moralistic aggression, gratitude,
sympathy, trust, suspicion, trustworthiness, aspects of
guilt, and some forms of dishonesty and hypocrisy can
be explained as important adaptations to regulate the
altruistic system. Each individual human is seen as
possessing altruistic and cheating tendencies …”
(Trivers, 1971)

31. HUMAN NATURE
THE ENVIRONMENT OF EVOLUTIONARY
ADAPTEDNESS
▸ Hunter-Gatherer (or forager) lifestyle and habitats
where humans spent the vast majority of our
evolutionary history

32. HUMAN NATURE
MAN THE HUNTER,
WOMAN THE GATHERER?
▸ The “Foraging Hypothesis”
▸ Spatial adaptations for plant foraging: women excel
and calories count. Joshua New, Max M Krasnow,
Danielle Truxaw, Steven J.C Gaulin. Proc Roy Soc Lond
(2007) link
▸ Ray Mears Wild Foods (2007) doco on Youtube.

33. HUMAN NATURE
‣ How we think about Human Origins intimately linked to how
we think about human nature.
‣ Many different evolutionary scenarios of human origins and
how we became what we are.
‣ These scenarios often tell us as much about the zeitgeist of
the proponent as about human evolution.

34. HUMAN NATURE
HUMAN ORIGINS, NAÏVE ANTHROPOLOGY
AND PREHISTORIC MORALITY PLAYS
▸ Scenarios of Human Origins are not neutral and
unproblematic:
▸ They tell us:
▸ Not just how things were (facts need to be interpreted)
▸ But also (often):
▸ How things are (today)
▸ How we think things ought to be

35. HUMAN NATURE
THE KILLER APE HYPOTHESIS

36. HUMAN NATURE
THE KILLER APE
▸ Raymond Dart “The Predatory Transition from
Man to Ape” (1953)
▸ Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (1966)
Raymond Dart, originator of the “killer
ape” theory of human evolution, holds
the skull of the Taung Child, the
fi
rst
australopithecine ever discovered.
Photograph by David L. Brill, National Geographic Creative

37. HUMAN NATURE
LATER VERSIONS OF THE KILLER APE

38. HUMAN NATURE
PBS NOVA’S BECOMING HUMAN (2011)

39. HUMAN NATURE
PBS NOVA’S BECOMING HUMAN (2011)

40. HUMAN NATURE
WHAT MAKES US HUMAN?

41. HUMAN NATURE
WHAT MAKES US HUMAN?
▸ That we can even pose this question at all…?