Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 216

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society," by Nicolas Christakis.

I first began to think about this issue—of how humans are fundamentally similar—almost twenty-five years ago during my work as a hospice doctor. Death and grief unite us like nothing else. The universality of death and of our responses to it cannot help but impress human similarity upon any observer. I have held the hands of countless dying people from all sorts of backgrounds, and I do not think I have met a single person who didn’t share the exact same aspirations at the end of life: to make amends for mistakes, to be close to loved ones, to tell one’s story to someone who will listen, and to die free of pain. The desire for social connection and interpersonal understanding is so deep that it is with each of us until the end.

An analogy is helpful. If you take a group of carbon atoms and connect them one way, you get graphite, which is soft and dark and perfect for making pencils. But if you take the same carbon atoms and connect them another way, you get diamond, which is hard and clear and great for making jewelry. There are two key ideas here. First, these properties of softness and darkness and hardness and clearness are not properties of the carbon atoms; they are properties of the collection of carbon atoms. Second, the properties depend on how the carbon atoms are connected. It’s the same with social groups. This phenomenon, of wholes having properties not present in the separate parts, is known as emergence, and the properties are known as emergent properties. Connect people in one way, and they are good to one another. Connect them in another way, and they are not.

Human social behaviors have much more in common with early hominids and our primate cousins than with insects, of course. But we have seen that mammals other than primates—such as elephants and whales—have independently evolved similar ways of having friends, for example. If such widely separated species have converged on the same basic way of being social, it demonstrates that this pattern of traits—the social suite—is adaptive and coherent.

The independent evolution of eyes has occurred at least fifty times across different species—as if seeing the light is inevitable. Given these eerie convergences, some scientists speak of “the ghost of teleology looking over their shoulders,” hinting at the question of whether there might be some purpose to evolution or maybe even a designer. Scientifically speaking, evolution unfolds thoughtlessly, simply in response to chance mutations and environmental vagaries. But convergent evolution sheds light on other deep ontological questions, such as why animals have intelligence at all. Paleontologist Simon Conway Morris argues that, once life appears, it will inevitably culminate in intelligence, as it is a necessary solution to any environment. As Morris notes, “Big brains may be, in at least some circumstances, adaptively useful, and are not just fickle blips of happenstance that in due course sink back into the chaotic welter of the evolutionary crucible.” Intelligence—perhaps even consciousness—must eventually arise.

Prum and other ornithologists argue that male bower-building behavior and female choosiness coevolved to prevent sexual coercion. For instance, avenue-type bowers allow the females to come close to males to inspect their thoughtful collages, colorful décor, and elaborate dances without risking a forced copulation, because the female can enter the tunnel from one end and observe the male through the front opening, but the male cannot approach her unless she lets him. If he were to enter the back of the bower, she could simply fly out the front. Male birds might have evolved to construct their bowers this way because females preferred to avoid sexual coercion, physical harassment, and forced copulation. Female choosiness redirected male behavior to create beautiful structures that suited the females better. These evolutionary events resemble the food-provisioning strategy we saw in chapters 5 and 6, in which the males of our species, instead of becoming bigger and more aggressive, might have evolved to use nonviolent acts of love and kindness to attract females.