reverse evolution
Since Charles Darwin liberated our understanding of life in terms the ongoing march of evolution, we have wrongly concluded that studying the instinctive social behaviours and characteristics of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzee and bonobo, will explain our own innate temperament. Although we do share 98.7% of their DNA*, we did not evolve directly from them, rather each lineage diverged from a common ancestor around 8 million years ago. Who exactly the chimp/human last common ancestor was (referred to as LCA) is not yet fully established due to limited fossil records. (*We also share 98% of our DNA with pigs.)
Therefore, to suggest that the essence of human nature can be found in that diluted connection, is to overlook the remarkable extent to which we, as the sole surviving member of the classification Homo, have evolved along that distinct 8 million year journey away from bonobos and chimpanzees (and pigs) a journey that brought us onto the scene only 160,000 years ago.
The problem is that we have tried to retrofit our own behaviours – those that we witness in our relatively short ‘civilised’ history – to similar traits and behaviours that we see in some distant primate relatives who are still extant for us to observe. However, what we cannot do directly, but ought to consider, is to compare what our written history describes with that of our recent pre-civilised nomadic Homo sapiens forebears, if we are to properly understand what it means to be human.
What we need to acknowledge is how the rise of civilisation has been a retrograde phenomenon in regards to our species’ survival, in that it has cultivated a much more rudimentary (primitive) version of our recent ancestors, one which is more akin to the chimpanzee; patriarchal, tribal, hierarchical, competitive, and violent. We have jettisoned our sophisticated social adaptions and intellectual potentials, descending into a myopic, selfish, and violent disaster. It is not an evolutionary error, rather a social dysfunction.
Our justification and acceptance for how our societies are organised draws on the misguided assumption that ‘civilisation’ moderates our innate selfish, violent, and greedy disposition, whilst also offering us a far more stable and elevated way of life. This is a completely inaccurate interpretation, as it is our civilised society that deliberately encourages violence, selfishness, and greed, and suppresses the other refined adaptions that our nomadic ancestors benefitted from, those that served them well for hundreds of millennia; generosity, nuanced language, long term planning, compassion, empathy, egalitarianism, reason, altruism. This sophisticated skill set evolved to supersede our primitive, emotional instincts due to the increased complexity of our social interactions and interdependency. These potential adaptions exist when we’re each born, waiting to be ignited. However, society restricts the development of these potentials by focusing on our primitive instinctive response system – the limbic system – by encouraging activities that only necessitate the use of that primitive part of our brain – ego, aggression, competition, sport, hierarchy, violence, greed, and selfishness – denying us the opportunity to learn those essential expressions of reason, compassion, community, care and altruism, (amongst others). It’s akin to undoing evolution, and it’s why we imagine ourselves to be so closely related to the chimpanzee.
There is no archaeological evidence which supports the notion that pre-civilised humans engaged in organised warfare. In fact there is nothing that suggests we participated in any form of conspecific violence, or used weapons against each other prior to us developing agriculture and building permanent settlements.
Civilisation has been around for 5,000 years, and in that short time, we are now facing our own extinction as a direct consequence of the values that define ‘civilised’.
We arrogantly named ourselves Homo sapiens, which literally means ‘wise man’. How ironic, when we deliberately suppress our natural intelligence and wisdom in favour of solving problems with violence and ‘legalised’ warfare. It’s time to reconsider whether we should persist with our imposed ignorance, or become the decent and reasonable people nature intended us to be. Those adaptions would not have evolved (and remained available) if they weren’t advantageous to our survival. Clearly we can’t survive without them, as that experiment has demonstrated.
Feb 2023
