August 13, 2018--The Nature of Human Nature

In the never-ending effort to understand what it means to be human is there a "nature" that is hard-baked into all of us that helps define our distinctive "humanness"? Assuming there is a distinctiveness. 

Are we human (separate from all other animals, including from the Great Apes to whom we are close relatives) because, as it used to be felt, we (Homo habilis) uniquely have the ability to make and use tools? Subsequently, we have learned that a number of other animals also make tools) or because we are self-aware (some other mammals appear to be as well) or because we alone were made in God's image (you're on your own with this one).

Raging still is the debate as to what constitutes that aspect of humanness that is largely the result of our capacity to respond to and develop because of our ability to be shaped by the effects of nurture and culture.

In this then, how much is nurture and how much nature? Some who study these matters claim it might be as much as 50-50.

Darwin obviously had much to say about this. Though he was skeptical about what we today refer to as "cultural evolution"--he would say we and all other species pass along to progeny such things as eye color and various instincts--among thousand of other adaptions the in-born mammalian ability to suckle. 

On the other hand, in contrast to the social evolutionists, he claims we do not genetically pass along our propensity to be, say, self-sacrificing. In fact, doesn't our propensity to be self-sacrificing go against the notion that our development over millennia contradicts the basic Darwinian insight that our nature is the result of adapting to numerous mutations that were selected because they contributed to our ability to survive? His survival of the fittest.

But if in this regard, since there is considerable evidence that self-sacrifice, including a willingness or even instinct to give up one's life for the sake of the survival of other humans, is there, as some researchers claim, a "benevolence" gene?

While we are at it, is there a universal "God" gene? Or if you prefer, a "belief" gene? If there has never been an example of any human society without its own origin story, it's own larger belief system isn't this propensity to believe a part of what it means to be human? If so, is this, again, culturally or genetically imprinted? 

And then, what about art? Is is more a pleasure than an instinct? A debate about this also rages.

If this latter debate interests you, as I recently did, pick up and read neuroscientist Anjan Chatterjee's The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved Beauty and Enjoy Art.

Though he comes down on the side that claims the appeal of what human's consider beauty is not instinctive, not hard-wired in our DNA, he comes close to making that case.

No more persuasive to the genetic side of the argument, though, are the early human artifacts he cites that archeologists have been unearthing during the past two centuries, including some hundreds of thousands of years old.

Here is a sampling--

First, from as many as 30,000 years ago, from the Paleolithic Period, the Old Stone Age, are the Venus figures, mother goddesses, that most now consider part of a fertility cult. The best known is the 4.4 inch Venus Of Willendorf, named for the village in Lower Austria where it was found. It now resides in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna. 

Thirty-five years ago I made a pilgrimage to see it in an obscure corner of the museum. Being alone with it, spending an hour in its presence fired a lifetime interest in evolution and human nature.

From the Golan Heights, found at the Berekhat Ram dig in the early 1980s, is another seeming Venus figure. Just 1.4 inches, it appears to be a "pebble" that was shaped and incised by an early human (Homo erectus). It is again a fertility figure or mother goddess. It is on view in Jerusalem at the Israel Museum. Some considerate it to be the oldest existing work of human art.

Then there is the much older, 400,000 year-old Tan-Tan figure that was discovered in Morocco in 1999. As many claim it was shaped by an archaic human hand as others who say it was formed by natural, geological processes such as erosion. Take a look and come to your own concusion. 

It would not surprise me if it turned out to be another Venus figure as I come down on the side of those who contend there is an aesthetic gene. 

There is too much "art" in the world, found among all peoples in all places across too many millennia for there not to be. The usual Darwinian resistance to this view is not sufficiently persuasive for me to agree it is a simple pleasure without sufficient human survival adaptive purposes. Among so many, I would not want to live in an artless world. Thus, the extraordinary proliferation of art alone suggests it is adaptive enough!