Reddit mentions of Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe: Human Evolution, Behavior, History, and Your Future

Was this class taught by professor Bingham?

In military science terms, humans were the first species to take advantage of Lanchester's square law. Consequently, the coercive power of early Homo increased superlinearly with group size.

In all other species, the best strategy to defend your self-interest against conspecific competitors is to increase your personal individual "strength" relative to the species mean. In early humans, the best strategy was, for the first time on Earth, to align yourself with the largest coalition, thereby utilizing the Lanchester's advantage.

This shift in strategy for self-defense gave rise to the first animal with democratic instincts (since any strong man attempting to usurp the coalition would be militarily disadvantaged against the group, influence on the group had to be approached democratically).

Bingham wrote a book exploring the evolutionary ramifications of expert throwing that I strongly recommend to anyone who finds this topic interesting.

Death from a distance and the birth of a human universe, by Paul Bingham and Diane Souza

Check out my post on an alternative theory of history based off of the book "Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Human Universe"
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Distance-Birth-Humane-Universe/dp/1439254125

https://www.reddit.com/r/HelloInternet/comments/43jwyq/theory_of_history_social_development_is_tied_to/

>That's a rather simplistic, and incorrect, view of both animals - who can behave in a manner where they "only care about themselves", but can also live in a much more cooperative setting, depending on the species, and humans; pre-agricultural humans weren't busy "defending property".

Again you are completely misunderstanding what I am stating here. Human beings had to work with non-kin to become "human". That's in fact what separates us from animals and made us capable of becoming greater. So that's really the birth of human species. Read this book if you actually want to learn it. It is well researched and makes the detailed argument for it. I am not going to be able to simplify and say whats in it with a paragraph, because there is a lot you need to know about human beings to understand why that is and how that came to be. It is not "selfishness" as in caring for themselves (although Western societies are leaning to that even worse extreme), but rather the idea of only caring for kinship. Seriously do look into the kin selection and Hamilton's rule on wiki. These are not ideas that I am just making up, but actually ideas that are well supported and studied in biology.

>http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7269/full/nature08366.html http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7786.full.pdf

Quote from your first source that supposedly refutes my claims, but doesn't:
>Firm evidence of reciprocity in animal societies is rare and many examples of cooperation between non-kin probably represent cases of intra-specific mutualism or manipulation.

The second study you shared is more interesting. However, the reason why it is that way, is different from what you think.

>Although rhesus macaque and baboon females bias their behavior significantly more to their paternal sisters than to nonrelatives, such biases are not nearly as strong as those displayed toward
maternal sisters (21–24)

The primates tend to only have stronger kinship bias towards maternal brothers, over paternal brothers. This is because they are not good at identifying them:
>This point, our finding that male
chimpanzees do not preferentially interact with their paternal
brothers, and the lack of a reliable paternal sibling identification
mechanism in primates suggest that paternal kin effects may
arise as a byproduct of individuals maximizing their own fitness
by cooperating with age mates, who only sometimes happen to
be paternal siblings. [...] A second potential explanation is that male chimpanzees do not preferentially cooperate with their paternal brothers because they cannot reliably recognize them.

So now the test they did to support the idea that they are equally likely to cooperate with kin and non-kin, is based on the paternal brothers, rather than maternal brothers. Because they already know that primates prefer to care for maternal brothers as they are able to recognize them due to kinship.
>To determine the extent to which indirect and direct benefits
influence patterns of affiliation and cooperation among male
chimpanzees, we examined the number of related and unrelated
pairs that engaged in each of the six social behaviors more than
expected by chance. [...] Because chimpanzees can presumably readily identify
their maternal siblings (13), we excluded the 12 maternal sibling
dyads from this analysis.

That being said, I am a supporter of evolution. So if primates show rare signs of behavior that helped make human species great, then that's not surprising. In fact that is to be expected and only supports the theory of evolution, and my explanation of history.

I do appreciate you using science to debate back though.

>No, I'm posting a reference to a very long, very detailed, very well-researched book from an anthropologist that says that the "conventional wisdom" story told by historians that money replaced barter has no supporting evidence, while there is a lot of evidence to support his counter-claim.

So you are supposedly making the claim that "conventional wisdom" story told my historians has no supporting evidence? You do know that we are living in the 21st century and that we do take history more seriously than just believe some story with no supporting evidence as one of the main historical foundations of civilization right? This is just not a strong argument frankly. You can't say that historians are all completely wrong, because this guy selling this book, says otherwise. That's 1 guy against a whole field. To claim that that field doesn't care about evidence in making up their stories, is just a ridiculous claim and I think any historian would be appalled by that accusation.

He showed a video of chimps throwing rocks and sticks and they were really bad at it. He had tons of support for his stuff man. We only became able to throw well after we became bipedal, developed opposable thumbs and our hips changed. Chimps are knuckle-walkers.

He actually released a book recently. Its kinda pricey, but if money is not an issue then check it out:

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Distance-Birth-Humane-Universe/dp/1439254125/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265069239&sr=8-1

And this is what we had to do for his class besides attending lectures:

http://rothmanmedia.com/tbobh.html

these are actually taped lectures and in them he uses videos and fossil records and tons of other stuff to provide support for what he's saying. There are also supplementary texts in this edu-pack. Don't remember how much it is though, or if you'd be able to get it in the first place since youre not a student at my uni.

excellent observation but these fellows only hunt, they don't fight one another this way (water shots in water don't go very far). thus do not cause cooperation as the amazon! look inside view suggests .