At some point we weren't
linguistic creatures at all, right. We separated from the common ancestors between us and chimpanzees about 6 million years ago.
Sometime during that 6 million year process
we started to be able to imitate
ourselves first and then represent ourselves in image and action
and then only after that to start to articulate ourselves.
So, a lot of the knowledge that we have is grounded in our embodiment
but also in the shaping of that embodiment across
extraordinarily long periods of time:
So, like, there's an implicit way of being in your
form, in your embodied form. But, more importantly there's an implicit way of being that's a consequence of
the fact that we've existed within
hierarchical social structures for far longer than we were even sharing a common, ancestor say with great apes.
So that's for maybe hundreds of millions of years with regards to being embedded in a hierarchy.
So then the question is something like:
If we're embedded in a hierarchy and we have been forever, that's about 350 million years by the way, is
there a set of attributes that tends reliably to move you up the hierarchy?
Because if there is, you see, being/going up the hierarchy
increases the probability of reproductive success.
So there's actually nothing more important to determine over the course of 350 million years
inside a hierarchy, than how it is that you ratchet yourself up the hierarchy
reliably. And you can think about that in some sense as the source of ideals. Well ...
here's a kind of a concrete way of thinking about that. You know if you get a hundred men together
they're going to, they're going to organize themselves into a
hierarchical structure. They have to or they're going to stay chaotic and fight that that's the other alternative. And so
but the way that
that the people who are going to rise to the top they might rise to the top because of their sheer physical prowess and power.
But they also might rise to the top because they're very competent at certain things.
And it's as if all the men are going to get together and vote (and maybe that would actually happen)
to determine who best embodies the spirit of group and who should be granted leadership? And in an evolutionary
context, by the way, that would also help ensure that that person would propagate their genes into the next generation.
And, it's not a trivial effect. Especially among men. It's a big effect. Because, roughly speaking, half of all men are are not
reproductively successful. So, there's a wicked culling, let's say, among men.
Well, you can see this among Chimpanzees as well.
They have dominance hierarchies. Some sort of chimps rise to the top. You might think, well, that's the like Caveman chimp
who's best at pounding out all the all the rivals.
But it turns out that that's not exactly the case. And, Frans de Waal has
done a very good job of detailing this with his work on Chimpanzees in particular.
And he's found that the power-hungry tyrant sort of chimp can rule for a while,
but he tends to have a very unstable kingdom. And the reason for that is is he's not very good at mutually grooming.
He's not good at socially connecting with other males. And, he isn't popular among the females and doesn't attend to the young. Essentially.
And so what happens is, even if he's like the meanest toughest guy on the block
two subordinate chimps team up, they make friends, they groom each other and they have each other's backs. And then one day
he's having an off-day because he ate too many fermented bananas the night before. And they just tear them into pieces.
And chimps are unbelievably strong and
unbelievably brutal. They seem to have absolutely no internal
regulation whatsoever of their aggression that all seems to be
manifested outside in terms of dominance hierarchy control. And we know that because they go on raiding parties into other chimp territories
and when they find chimps that aren't part of their hierarchy they just
rip them into pieces. And so, that's a scary thing if you think about our
similarity with Chimpanzees. Because we like to think we have internal controls over our aggression,
but it's not so bloody obvious, I can tell you that. Anyways, what de Waal found was that it's actually chimps that are more,
you might say, humane. Although, "Chimpane"? I don't know what the equivalent is.
Let's say humane, that managed to produce
hierarchies that are more stable and actually manage to stay alive on top of them for much longer periods of time
And he thinks about that is the emergence of an implicit morality. Right? So morality that's acted out.
So then you think well there there are different ways of climbing up a hierarchy.
There are worse and better ways. The better ways allow you to live longer in a more stable
hierarchy. And the evolutionary payoff for that is that you leave more descendants.
And so the hierarchy itself becomes a very powerful
shaping mechanism that determines how it is that people are going to adapt because it's the primary method of selection.
So there's an ethic in there. There's an ethic that emerges from the social interactions, but that's rapidly transformed into a biological
selection device. And so we're selected. And that's especially true among human beings because
with chimps
the females are indiscriminate maters.
Which is to say that a female chimp in heat will mate with any male chimp.
Now, the dominant males chase the subordinate males away. So, they're still more likely to leave offspring than the subordinates,
but it's not because of the females. But human females are different. Human females exert
choice and quite brutal choice, you might put it that way. They're very choosy.
And it's one of the things that seems to have distinguished us from Chimpanzees.
And, what roughly seems to happen is that the male dominance hierarchy elects men to the higher
say rungs of the Hierarchy and then the females peel from the top. And
so that means, that, what you can say is that human beings are the consequence of
intense male dominance competition. It's not necessarily dominance, but it's competition for the upper rungs of the hierarchy
mediated by female selection.