Human Nature – the bad and the good

Every day I read the newspaper and watch the TV news and there are conflicts raging often between different ethnic groups or involving different religions, including this ISIS group who seem to think that chopping people’s heads off is going to persuade the rest of us to convert! Then there are reports of domestic violence – a man kills his female partner and baby after discovering that her baby is not his; then yet another gang-rape! Or another politician’s career is brought to an end because of sexual scandal; and violence breaks out between fans of opposing sports teams.

Then, when I’m about to throw up, there is an uplifting report of someone who spends a lot of her spare time reading to people in an old-folks home; or someone donating a kidney to save a life, or dives into dangerous waters to save someone drowning.  What is it about us humans that we are composed of this troubling mix of violence and sexual aggression, and yet have the capacity for extraordinary levels of love and caring? Can a look at our ancient background give us some pointers? I believe so.

In my last blog (Aug. 10^th) I wrote about our close relationship to apes. This is fairly commonly accepted now.  What similarities and differences to do with these tendencies do we find in our cousins the other apes? Two books amongst several that I’ve found helpful in this regard are: “The Naked Ape” by Desmond Morris (1967), and “The Story of the Human Body” by Daniel Lieberman (2013). Three things amongst several that obviously separate us from other apes are: our nakedness; our fully upright position and bipedalism; and of course our intelligence, and with that our language abilities, that puts us in a different league to all other creatures so that many still think that therefore we must be a separate and very special creation. 

When changes occur rapidly in evolution they occur because of special evolutionary pressures, or to put it more bluntly –when the death rate is high. What were the evolutionary pressures that have made us so different in a relatively short (seven million years at most) evolutionary period of time. In a word - climate change; not the man-made one we’re beginning to experience now but a natural one that brought ice over much of Europe and led to dramatic changes in the vegetation in East Africa where our ancestors were living, so that the tropical forest collapsed and turned into savannah. We were forced out of the trees and soon found that we needed to walk on our hind legs to get around big distances on the ground looking for food. Constant starvation with a high death rate would have been one of those evolutionary pressures forcing us to find new things to eat compared to our largely fruit-eating ancestors. We had no choice but to become hunters. 

Those that survived learned to hunt in groups. We became killers bonded into groups of mutual trust and communication, developing remarkable skills in making projectiles and accurately throwing them. Language developed probably first as a means for the hunting group to communicate strategy. Our brains grew, doubling in size every 1.5 million years.  Our cousin chimps have brains around 300 cc in volume. We know-it-alls have a brain volume of approximately 1,300 cc.  This in turn led to difficulties in childbirth – the infant head became too big – and so babies had to be born prematurely so that for some months afterwards they were (and are) highly dependent on their mothers. The men hunted, the women stayed near the camp. For some reason not as yet understood, menstruation became heavier. Women tended therefore to become anemic and needed a constant source of iron, and red meat was the best source. Mutually dependent bonds became much more important between males and females. The discovery of fire and then cooking was an important step as well. Cooked food releases more nutrients, especially with meat. Richard Wrangham in “Catching Fire: How cooking made us human” (2009) suggests that marriage or strong pair-bonding, not so clear in other apes, began not exclusively with sex in mind but with the female need for red meat. “Bring me some meat and you can have some sex.” And later, after the discovery of fire: “And I’ll cook it for you too”.  And when early hominins started standing upright it meant that the male sex organ and the female’s breasts were now much more in your face so to speak, and became big factors in sexual attraction. With all these things coming together you have the makings of strong pair-bonding and the creation of the human family unit involving genuine love and care. Beyond the immediate family there would have to be strong ties of loyalty and mutual support within the encampment group. But then fear and aggression if a group of strangers appeared on the horizon. Here were all the makings of early humans as sexy, violent and discriminatory. 

Richard Wrangham points out that we are closer genetically to chimps than chimps are to their other nearest ape relative gorillas. And you guessed it – chimpanzees are the most sexually active of all non-human apes. The lesser ape the Gibbon only has sex about once a year. Chimps – every day. 

But it’s the violence that really worries me. An early acquaintance of mine – David Bygot, working with Jane Goodall in Tanzania, was the first anthropologist to observe a chimpanzee murder another chimpanzee. Chimps also engage in group hunts of monkeys tearing them to pieces once caught to eat the meat. Despite the gorilla’s large size and the dominant male enforcing his dominance, gorillas are not so violent. Nor do they eat meat unless you count the small part of their diet that includes insects and snails. 

What I’m saying therefore is that our violence (including red meat hunting) and our sexual eagerness can be traced to our nearest ape cousins. But then, on top of that, the environmental circumstances in East Africa about six million years ago accentuated those trends, in particular the ‘us versus them’ mentality. Fast forward to our modern world and for me - that innate background explains the newspaper headlines I encounter every day.  

Is the situation hopeless then? Absolutely not! As I described in one of my first blogs, I worked for forty years for an international organization whose declared aim was the ‘changing of human nature’. I always thought that this was a little too simply and definitively declared, but I am still a strong believer that our natures can be and are modified for the better. We wear clothes in public to avoid unnecessary titillation and temptation. We have state laws and religious teachings that make most of us pause when perhaps tempted to strike out in anger at someone. Some of us have temptations towards unhelpful behavior in one direction or another more than others. My wife’s grandfather was one of those in the 1930s involved in the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. Their success rate is around 30%. Sadly low you might say, but think of the millions around the world whose lives have been saved through this program of mutual caring and support under a ‘higher power’.  

When I was younger there was apartheid in South Africa where people of color were treated as less than human; and in America things were not a lot better with segregation and even lynchings. I wept tears of joy when first Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa, and again when Barack Obama was elected President of the USA – an inspiration and healing for many.  There is still a long way to go but progress is being made. Yes, we humans have violent and discriminatory tendencies in us, but, it is also true, as the song from ‘South Pacific’ goes, that ‘you’ve got to be taught to hate and fear ….

You've got to be taught
From year to year,….

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

That is – those deep tendencies can either be fed and drawn to the surface, or new and better ways can be encouraged, and loves learned and enjoyed and passed on to others. We do not have to be run by our base natures, or the way some of our forebears behaved.

In “The Better Angels of our Nature” (2011) psychologist Steven Pinker gives evidence of how, despite our modern headlines, violence has steadily decreased over the millennia. It is easy to forget the terrible carnage during the Thirty Years War in Europe from 1618-1648. And studies of skeletal remains from when about 20,000 years ago we were all hunter gatherers shows that approximately 15% of people died a violent death in those days. Pinker says that, despite today’s depressing headlines, humanity is indeed making progress, and the steady integration of modern society is a major contribution. America for all its faults (and I could write another several pages about them) is playing an important role here. Despite the current tragedy of Ferguson, Mo, America is the melting pot of the world. Nearly twenty years ago my kids’ high school hung over seventy national flags in the school gym, representing the origin of the students then at the high school. Maybe that was a factor in my daughter Dr. Rebecca Hamlin publishing her first book last week entitled “Let me be a refugee”, published by Oxford University Press, and available on Amazon :-)