ECOLOGICAL GATEKEEPER HYPOTHESIS
Jim McGinn
addendum the Ideological Ape Hypothesis
This addendum resolves a significant shortcoming that
I had with the larger hypothesis. Strangely enough, it
was only after I had hit upon this addendum that it even
occurred to me that my larger hypothesis had this
shortcoming. (Talk about falling in love with one's own
pet theory.) What was the shortcoming? It has to do
with the transition from the chimpanzee lifestyle (small,
rambling bands) to the more situated, property oriented,
communalism. I had assumed the transition would have
been natural, a direct result of implications associated
with the change in environmental conditions (seasonal
dessication, patchiness of the remaining forested habitat,
etc.).
It turns out I was right. It was natural. But I was wrong
to have assumed that it would have been (or could have
been) just as simple as that. More specifically, I had them
cooperating, communicating, (In the context of a situated
community) and evolving consciousness before they really
had an evolutionary upramp to begin being selected for
such behaviors. With this addendum I think this problem
is solved. Additionally, this addendum provides a better
understanding of why and how bipedalism and manipulative
abilities began to be selected in the earliest years of
hominid evolution. Additionally it seems to explain the
human predisposition for sports fanaticism and the human
tendency to be confrontational to and otherwise controlling
of other species.
Let me begin by showing you two posts that triggered
my thinking:
*******************************************************
From sci.bio.paleontology:
<snip>
. . . about 10mln years ago the Earth entered climatic
roller-coaster, with periods of advancing and retreating
glaciation. <snip>
<snip>
. . . . the very fact that the Earth became a colder and
more inhospitable place to live, led to the creation of
man, so we shouldn't complain too loudly about how
cold it is outside. If the Earth were still warm and wet,
then we'd just have big, dumb, lumbering creatures
who would just eat easy-to-find plants all day long --
doesn't require the development of much intelligence.
<snip>
Yousuf Khan
*******************************************************
From sci.bio.evolution:
I fail to understand why people are sports fans.
They spend a lot of money, and they yell and
scream when their home-town football team wins.
When they move to another town they just as
ardently yell and scream for their new home-town
team, although the new team may have been the
opponent of the previous team.
This behavior seems to defy rational analysis.
Why scream and yell, anyway, just because a
bunch of millionaires beat each other up in a
public arena?
Is this behavior possibly a leftover from eons
ago when it was important (a survival factor)
to look up to tribal leaders, to cheer them on,
and to claim solidarity with them?
It seems to me that, in this day and age,
evolution would favor survival factors in the
intellectual arena, and yet, here are these
masses of people who get excited about
strangers who beat each other up, as in
football..
Can anyone explain the phenomenon?
Walter
*******************************************************
The relevance of this second post will become
obvious once you get into this explanation. The first of
these two posts is the most important. It really jarred
my perspective into considering something I hadn't
considered before: previous to 10mya there was little
or no migration but there has been a lot since then.
(I'm thinking mostly of relatively large mammals here.
Let's say about the size of a housecat and bigger. But
it really includes any and all species that migrate.)
I started to wonder if there might not be more than a
coorelation between the observation that hominids
appeared at or about at the same time that large
mammals started to become migratory. Might it be
causal? In other words, might an environment that is
characterized by migrating species be an environment
that provides selective factors that triggered hominid
evolution?
With this question in mind, I started thinking about
migration in the context of the environmental
assumptions of my hypothesis: seasonal dessication,
spatial polarity of resources (patches of forest that
persist near sources of perrenial water, lakes, ponds,
streams, rivers, areas of high ground water). (For a
more comprehensive description of the environmental
assumptions of this hypothesis see a post I put on this
newsgroup recently entitled: Questions Regarding
Selective . . . ) Then I asked myself what kind of
migrational patterns would I expect given these
assumptions. The answer was obvious. During
periods increasing dessication and resulting scarcity
there would be a tendency for all of the species in this
environment to begin to migrate toward and into these
treed havens, our ancestor's "community sites." And
with the onset of the rainy season they would migrate
back out again.
Then I started thinking about how all of this would
appear from the perspective of our earliest, recently
rainforest dwelling, prehominid ancestors. Every year
their patches of remaining forest, their "community
sites," got overrun with other species. Many of these
species would have competed directly with them for
food and thus would have caused the depletion of
resources at a time when these resources were
increasingly scarce, the dry season. Other herbivores
may not have directly competed with them, but all of
them brought predators with them: lions, tigers, hyenas,
dogs, etc. The negative implications are obvious.
When these inmigrating species had depleted the
resources at these community sites they would simply
migrate over to other less depleted areas (other
community sites). But our tree dwelling ancestors,
being less mobile, had fewer options. They were
now left vulnerable to starvation and/or predation.
Lacking the ability to run fast, they didn't have much
choice but to stay put, wait out the predators, and
hope the rains returned. Surely their population would
often have been decimated as a result.
Among a number of other adaptations, which I will get
to shortly, I predict that territorial based peskiness will
have begun to be selected among our chimpanzee-like
ancestor. This would have been a direct result of the
above described factors associated with migration.
The reason I believe this scenario predicts the relatively
rapid adaptation of territorial based peskiness behaviors
among these still tree dwelling apes is because apes
that have such predisposition will tend to harass any other
animals that it percieves to be trespassing on its territory.
This will act as a deterent to these inmigrating species
who--all other things being equal--will follow the path of
least resistance to their migratory goals. If one patch of
forest is associated with pesky apes--regardless of the
fact that these pesky apes may be mostly harmless to
them--and another patch of forest is relatively free of
pesky apes then the inmigrating individuals would follow
the path of least resistance to the patch that is relatively
free of pesky apes.
More specifically, how and why do I contend that these
above mentioned implications predict the rapid
adaptation of territorial peskiness amongst our earliest
prehominid ancestors? I think the answer to this
question is fairly obvious. The members of community
sites that reduced inmigration, even if only marginally
(let's say, for example, they reduced it by only 10%),
would increase their own community's probability of
surviving through and, at one and the same time, reduce
the probability of survival of those who reside at other,
neighboring, community sites who, lacking territorial
based peskiness behaviors, would now have to deal
with more inmigration and, of course, more of the
negative implications thereof: more depletion of
resources, more predators, and more resulting
decimation.
This comprises a classic group selectionist scenario:
behavior that increases one's own communities survival
decreases the survival of other communities. This is
not to say that the members of these respective
communities would have had the ability to recognize
that they were competing against other communities
on a community vs. community basis. In fact it seems
unlikely--especially in the earliest years of hominid
evolution--that they would have even had the ability to
recognize that they were members of communities.
Regardless of wether they were capable of realizing it,
apes that had whatever behavior and/or morphology
that would enable or cause them to dissuade other
species from migrating into their community site would
have a tremendous selective advantage over those that
lacked such. The more their behavior dissuaded
inmigration the greater the selective advantage to their
own community and the greater the selective
disadvantage to neighboring communities.
It is, of course, normal to be hesitant about asserting
group selective factors such as those that I have
asserted here. But in the context of this scenario this
hesitancy is, I contend, completely unwarranted. This
contention is based on the group selective implications
of the two factors mentions above, 1) the patchiness of
the remaining forested habitat which divided our
ancestors up into "communities" between which gene
flow (interbreeding) was greatly reduced, and 2) the
fact that the grim reaper,seasonal dessication, focussed
on whole communities whose territorial resources at
their community sites had become, for whatever reason,
deplete. So, the selective realities of our ancestors
shifted from those of the chimpanzee lifestyle--focussed
only on being successful individuals and members of
successful breeding groups (bands, extended family
units)--to those of the A'pith lifestyle--focussed on being
successful individuals and members of successful
breeding groups AND on being members of communities
that successfully effect the preservation of resources at
their community sites in the face of the onslaught of
multi-species inmigration to their community sites.
It is also important to point out that there is a positive
feedback aspect associated with inmigration. Specifically
this has to do with the herding or grouping instincts of the
inmigrating species: if one or a few members of an
inmigrating species is able to infiltrate a community site
then the probability is higher that more members of the
same species, and/or members of ecologically related
species, will follow. When this aspect is considered in
conjunction with the fact that this scenario clearly
indicates the community as the group entity that is being
selected, it is apparent, I contend, that the better a
community is at closing the gate of its ecosystem--sealing
its borders--the more likely the members of the community
will survive the grim reaper of this habitat, seasonal
dessication (the dry season).
In the context of these peculiar selective factors, we can
start to ask ourselves what other adaptations, in addition
to territorial peskiness, would we expect to evolve? This
can be more explicitly delineated in the context of what
is mentioned in the above paragraph: what additional
behaviors or morphologies would cause/enable these
chimpanzee-like territorially pesky apes to be better able
and/or more inclined to "close the gate" and effectively
seal the borders of their community sites? I propose the
following:
Cooperation (in the context of mob oriented harassing
behaviors): The tendency to confront and attempt to prevent
inmigrating species collectively rather than just individually.
This would involve collecting into larger groups from
neighboring and other closely situated "properties" (see
below) within a community site and confronting inmigrating
species: throwing rocks, sticks, and generally making a big
racket. As I envision it, this would involve the same kind of
emotion based behaviors that we currently associate with a
mob mentality, including sports fanaticism.
Communicativeness:
The ability to communicate the relative level of threat
associated with potential inmigrating species so that mobs
can form at vulnerable infiltration points quickly and efficiently.
This also involves such behaviors as cheering, booing, and
other behaviors that would tend to draw attention of other
members of a community to such events.
Consciousness:
Awareness of the meaning of emotional outbursts that
they might see or hear in the distance so that one might be
excited into being additive to whatever mob oriented
activities are taking place in one's vicinity. Awareness of the
property of others due to the implications of the, below
mentioned, selective benefits of property oriented communal
territorialism.
Property Oriented Communal Territorialism (rather than
just communally oriented territorialism):
Property oriented communal territorialism involves a
community being comprised of subgroups each of which
has its associated property in the context of the larger
community site. The reason, I contend, that we would
predict property oriented territorialism is because this
would, firstly, cause them--by way of their percieved
incentive--to spread out to the different infiltration points of
the community site so that they will be in position to better
effect the collective sealing of the community sites borders.
Secondly, property oriented territorialism will give them the
percieved incentive to defend "their" property. (Which, as
indicated above, could also include calling out to one's
neighboring property holders for assitance to effect a mob
and/or responding to one's neighbors call for assistance.)
The particular group that I envision as the entity that
maintains ownership of the different intracommunal
"properties" of a community site would be based upon the
band or extended family unit, similar in size and
composition to that of the bands that extant chimpanzees
tend to form.
Gamesmanship:
I think it's possible that the behavior that is
indicated in this hypothesis was to they themselves
little more than a game. Those who were passionate
about the game achieved the survival of themselves
and their whole community (by way of driving off
inmigrating species). (In other words, we're descended
from sports enthusiasts.)
Also, this scenario gives us a sense of how and why we
evolved to be so controlling of other species. It even
suggests how we began to develop our weapon oriented
hunting skills and inclination, not to mention our weapon
oriented and mob oriented approach to intraspecies
conflicts (war). (I can foresee there being "Hunting
Hypothesis," variants of this hypothesis.)
Additionally, this scenario is the perfect setup for the
scenario in my larger hypothesis (which I now realize is
much more dependent upon the pre-existence of a
community), which better explains the evolution of other
hominid traits, such as our political, ideological nature,
our attentiveness to dance, art, storytelling, and other
artistic, our economic predisposition for trade, our
complex and logic oriented languages, and our pursuit
of knowledge and truth. However, the beginning of the
dynamics in my greater hypothesis (the Intraspecies
Capitalism stuff which is very difficult to explain), may
have to be pushed forward in time all the way up to the
transition to homo. But this may be a good thing in that
it better coorelates to the growth of brain capacity in the
homo lineage (which, as you know, is greatly lacking in
the A'pith lineage).
Regard to all,
Jim
Whitedog
wrote:
<selective snipping
>Let me begin by showing you two posts that triggered
>my thinking:
>*******************************************************
I understand "sports fanaticism" to be an extension of the Hs hunting
expression, essentially by proxy.Many of the seemingly inexplicable
activities carried out by modern man can reasonably be attributed to
suppression of instinct in a modern cultural framework.
Regards
Brent Taylor
......
Whitedog: [whitedog...@hotREMOVEBLINKERSmail.com
Philip Deitiker
seem...@notmail.com (Whitedog) wrote:
>>I fail to understand why people are sports fans.
>>They spend a lot of money, and they yell and
>>scream when their home-town football team wins.
>>When they move to another town they just as
>>ardently yell and scream for their new home-town
>>team, although the new team may have been the
>>opponent of the previous team.
Always a Cowboy's fan, to bad they can't extend
Tom Landry's contract. [I know it aint right to
speak of the dead]
>>This behavior seems to defy rational analysis.
>>Why scream and yell, anyway, just because a
>>bunch of millionaires beat each other up in a
>>public arena?
Broken bones, A 300 lb line backer moving 15 miles
per hour hitting a wide reciever 4 feet in the air
and who doesn't see the hit coming. Everybody
secretly wants to know if the spine will crack
when he is slammed into the ground and 15 300 lb
guys jump on top of him and expell every last
molecular of air from his lungs. Then when it
happens we want to remorse about it and cannonize
him. Like racing, remember Dale Earnhart.
>>Is this behavior possibly a leftover from eons
>>ago when it was important (a survival factor)
>>to look up to tribal leaders, to cheer them on,
>>and to claim solidarity with them?
No it stems from a period when you would encourage
the most ruckass nar-do-well in the tribe to strap
on his sword and go grab some of the other guys
land, with the hope that toward the end of the
process the other guys will finish him. On the odd
chance he does not you hope he returns with some
leadership and social skills. That of course would
be the fate of a primative warrior, in the NFL
they leave with a number of debilitating injuries
or get thrown out because acute drug addiction, or
because they murder their chauffer, their ex-wife,
. . . .
Seriously why else do you think fat naked guys
would paint their bodies stand in the freezing
cold with Viking hats on and screeming profanities
at the top of their lungs while drinking alcoholic
bevarages and consuming large amounts of processed
meat of unknown origin that is seasoned with
saturated fats and cholesterol. Obviously they
think their acts of soothsaying will inspire some
sort of bodily harm on the other guys.
>>It seems to me that, in this day and age,
>>evolution would favor survival factors in the
>>intellectual arena, and yet, here are these
>>masses of people who get excited about
>>strangers who beat each other up, as in
>>football..
football and other sports are an emotional
surrogate for war. We need some means of risking
our own emotional state in order to make the other
guys feel bad, that makes us happy and cheerful.
>>Can anyone explain the phenomenon?
>>The relevance of this second post will become
>>obvious once you get into this explanation.
>
>I understand "sports fanaticism" to be an extension of the Hs hunting
>expression, essentially by proxy.Many of the seemingly inexplicable
>activities carried out by modern man can reasonably be attributed to
>suppression of instinct in a modern cultural framework.
Wrong, I've been hunting, I get no satisfaction of
someone else plugging an animal. OTOH taking down
one yourself is alot of fun. Now if I was a lion I
might shoot the other lion and take what he just
shot, see that would be exciting.
Football is more or less like a rodeo, you got a
bunch of folks who want to see whose going to get
most beat up by which bull and you got another
bunch of folks out in the audiance who think torso
protecting vest take all the excitement out of the
sport. The reason the rodeo is clocked at 8
seconds as this is about 1 S.D. deviation past the
mean time required for a raging bull to hurl its
occupant 4 feet in the air, giving bull just
enough time to turn and try to catch him with a
horn on the way down, and if that misses still a
fraction of a second left to stomp him. The whole
sport is not riding the eight seconds [boring] but
will the rider survive the 2 second interval after
he is thrown and before the bull is far enough
away for him to reach him. If they made the
interval 4 seconds who would go?
Why do you think baseball is on the decline, no
risk except the occasional off-course fastball.
People want to see life and death dramas, even if
the death is more or less an ambulance wisking to
the feild every few games.
Philip
[pdeitik at bcm.tmc.edu]
http://home.att.net/~DNAPaleoAnthro
John Cartmell
>I fail to understand why people are sports fans. They spend a lot of
>money, and they yell and scream when their home-town football team wins.
>When they move to another town they just as ardently yell and scream for
>their new home-town team, although the new team may have been the
>opponent of the previous team.
I don't know where the quote originated but it doesn't work here (UK). Real
fans stick with their home team come hell or high water - and moving to the
other end of the country doesn't change that. Home team support lasts a
lifetime and sometimes follows the generations:
my elder daughter was born in my home town and supports that team despite
having moved here age 9 months;
my younger daughter also supports that team even though she's 3 years
younger.
It's not as if our 'home team' was bigger, more famous etc than the team
that's now (for the last 26 years) our local team as we now live just round
the corner from what's probably the most famous football team in the world.
Of course the difference may be that this is real football that I'm talking
about? ;-)
--
John Cartmell
from sunny Manchester host city of the 17th Commonwealth Games
[including free power-showers - and still persisting it down]
Philip Deitiker
<jo...@cartmell.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>the corner from what's probably the most famous football team in the world.
>Of course the difference may be that this is real football that I'm talking
>about? ;-)
I'de like to see your manchestor team on the feild with the
Oakland Raiders, no ball, then we'll see who is the real
football team. I think rugby (the predecessor to football)
began by tossing a human head or skull about the feild,
doesn't that give you a real nostalgic feeling. ;-)
Email account is blocked on return mail
only persons who register with
DNApaleoAnth @ att dot net will be given
access. DNApaleoAnth is for registration only.
John Cartmell
<pde...@worldnet.att.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 02 Aug 2002 00:17:07 +0100, John Cartmell
> <jo...@cartmell.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >the corner from what's probably the most famous football team in the
> >world. Of course the difference may be that this is real football that
> >I'm talking about? ;-)
> I'de like to see your manchestor team on the feild with the Oakland
> Raiders, no ball, then we'll see who is the real football team.
I don't actually support Manchester United but I think there would need to
be a ball present if we're comparing football skills.
> I think rugby (the predecessor to football) began by tossing a human
> head or skull about the feild, doesn't that give you a real nostalgic
> feeling. ;-)
No. Rugby began by picking up a football (by then a regular, very popular
game that my team (not Manchester United) was dominating.
Of course American football is a local bastardised version of Rugby. There
are others such as Gaelic football and Aussie rules and they are all
interesting variations. Intersetingly the Irish manage to play the real
game alongside Gaelic football but Australia struggle to get a good game
together. The USA do surprisingly well (they have a superb goalkeeper!) for
such an otherwise backward nation (we'll try to forget the pissing on the
pitch episode ;-(
[if someone can get this on-topic they desrve a medal! ;-)]
> Email account is blocked on return mail only persons who register with
> DNApaleoAnth @ att dot net will be given access. DNApaleoAnth is for
> registration only.
--
Whitedog
<pde...@bcm.tmc.edu> wrote:
<snip>
>>>Can anyone explain the phenomenon?
>
>>>The relevance of this second post will become
>>>obvious once you get into this explanation.
>>
>>I understand "sports fanaticism" to be an extension of the Hs hunting
>>expression, essentially by proxy.Many of the seemingly inexplicable
>>activities carried out by modern man can reasonably be attributed to
>>suppression of instinct in a modern cultural framework.
>
>Wrong, I've been hunting, I get no satisfaction of
>someone else plugging an animal. OTOH taking down
>one yourself is alot of fun. Now if I was a lion I
>might shoot the other lion and take what he just
>shot, see that would be exciting.
>
When you say you've "been hunting" what do you mean by that?
Hunted on foot in an excited group, stalking and taking the prey down
with limited weapons or none at all? Finishing it off with your bare
hands before enjoying the fruits of your labours?
Watch some footage of chimps before a hunt and the screaming,
aggressive excitement of the aftermath for a clue as to what hunting
may have really meant to us.
Jim McGinn
Evidence?
Many of the seemingly inexplicable
> activities carried out by modern man can reasonably be attributed to
> suppression of instinct in a modern cultural framework.
The questions here is not whether there is some other way to describe
behaviors that are in my hypothesis. I'm sure there's many ways to
supposedly describe this behavior.
The questions here involve the plausibility of the scenario I
indicate:
1)Is the environment I describe evident
2)Are the selective factors I indicate plausible
3)Do these selective factors indicate human/hominid adaptations
I'm not going to waste any time speculating about whether current
theory supposedly answers one or two adaptations. Only a complete
idiot would argue that since their hypothesis addresses one or two
adaptations that therefore it is correct. This is why I consider SAT,
AAT, Mosaic Theory, etc. to be idiotic. Despite the fact that it is
plainly obvious that these simple-minded notions can only marginally
explain the origins of a small subset of hominid/human adaptations
(and this is if we give them the benefit of the doubt) the reality is
that a hypothesis must explain *ALL* adaptations. My hypothesis is
real science. It's not phony science which, unfortunately, is the
status quo in this NG and in all of anthropology.
What's significant about my hypothesis is that it actually answers the
question as to how humans evolved. While everybody else is basically
ignoring the group/social adaptations of our species with scenarios
that start with some simple-minded description of a habitat water,
savanna and then go on to speculate about what would supposedly make
our ancestors stand up and begin using their hands and completely
ignore/assume the existence of social and group behaviors/adaptations,
my hypothesis describes the origin of *all* human
adaptations--including bipedalism and hand usage--and link it to a
selective scenario that clearly indicates human/hominid adaptations.
Whitedog
<jo...@cartmell.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <3d49f75...@netnews.worldnet.att.net>, Philip Deitiker
><pde...@worldnet.att.org> wrote:
>> I think rugby (the predecessor to football) began by tossing a human
>> head or skull about the feild, doesn't that give you a real nostalgic
>> feeling. ;-)
>No. Rugby began by picking up a football (by then a regular, very popular
>game that my team (not Manchester United) was dominating.
>Of course American football is a local bastardised version of Rugby. There
>are others such as Gaelic football and Aussie rules and they are all
>interesting variations. Intersetingly the Irish manage to play the real
>game alongside Gaelic football but Australia struggle to get a good game
>together. The USA do surprisingly well (they have a superb goalkeeper!) for
>such an otherwise backward nation (we'll try to forget the pissing on the
>pitch episode ;-(
>
>[if someone can get this on-topic they desrve a medal! ;-)]
Pissing on the pitch is clearly an instinctive attempt to establish a
territorial boundary, this wouldn't have evolved in water adapted apes
so proves dry ape hypotheses.And as a waste of valuable bodily fluid
is consequently, proof positive of AAT.
Now if it had been water polo....
mikkel...@gmail.com
One key problem with your hypothesis is that it ignores the fact that all other contemporary species had survived the same ecological/environmental changes, without resorting to similar adaptations. Not only is it unlikely that any single situation was esponsible for, or explains, all human adaptations; it is unlikely that there was any sngle cause responsible for any single adaptation. We know this because we can trace historical behavioural adaptations, which are primary drivers for physical adaptations (many physical adaptations are the result of bodies adaptng physically to new behaviours, such as the human skeletal structure having adapted to the behaviour of increased bipedal locomotion, and the loss of the bipedal great toe and pedal dexterity due to predominate land locomotion behaviours).
You have a good, reasonable, start here. Seasonal dessication cycles could very well have contributed to the progressive adaptations. Don't ruin this effort by trying to overgeneralise.
JTEM
> Your hypothesis was somewhat reasonable
I just threw up in my mouth.
-- --
http://jtem.tumblr.com/post/145328459073