Reddit mentions of Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are

We have a very good understanding of their intelligence. They are probably some of the most well studied species in terms of behaviour and cognitive abilities on this planet. In ELI5/TLDR* most researchers would characterize their intelligence of being equivalent to a 2-3 year old human child. Just a short list of things that characterize these species:

• They form long-term social bonds and remember individuals
  
  
• They are able to recognize self from other
  
  
• They are able to lie
  
  
• They are able to understand fairness
  
  
• They are able to make, modify and use tools
  
  
• They have culture and tradition
  
  
• They are able to demonstrate empathy
  
  
• They feel the same or similar emotions to humans
  
  
• They have morals
  
  
• They mourn the dead
  
  
• They are able to solve multi-step problems
  
  ...
  
  I suppose another way of looking at this is what do we have that they lack. What makes humans unique?
  
  We know of some factors that contributed to our awareness and unique intelligence as compared to other living species. It is important to know that this is a very active area of study in many different disciplines (psychology, biology, animal behaviour, psychiatry, physiology, anthropology, neurology, linguistics, genetics, archeology...).
  
  
• Traits we inherited from our distant ancestors. Obviously all species are a cumulation of inherited traits. Who we are today is largely due to who "we" were in the distant past. We inherited a strong tendency to be a very social species from our mammalian ancestry. Mammals are social beings, humans included. We inherited opposable thumbs from our early primate ancestors. Humans are not the only species with opposable thumbs so it is not a trait that is unique to our species. However, the inheritance of thumbs enabled us and the other primates to develop fine motor skills like precision grip. This enables us to manipulate objects, and make/modify tools. Humans also inherited an upright bipedal posture from our early ancestors. Humans are not the only bipedal species (after all, all birds are bipedal!) but our upright posture has given us many advantages, namely that it frees our hands to do other tasks.
  
  
• Brain/body size ratio & exceptional brain gyrification is a somewhat useful indicator of how intelligence a species is. The correlation is decent among related mammal species, but it breaks down when applied to distantly related animals. It underestimates intelligence in heavy animals like horses and overestimates small animals like mice and birds. You also have to consider what the animal's brain has evolved for. Bird's typically have very large brains for their body but may not be exceptionally smart. A lot of that large bird brain is used for flight calculations and isn't available for higher level processing. Fruit flies have enormous brains compared to their mass, but that brain is simply too small to have any real thought processes. Humans are highly intelligent because they have an extremely large brain for their normal body mass and that brain has evolved specifically to perform complex thought. Size isn't the only factor, scientists also consider the degree of specialization, complexity of neural connections, and degree of brain gyrification. Humans score high on all these physical qualifiers associated with increased intelligence.
  
  
• Two cognitive traits thought to be unique to humans - shared intentionality and cumulative culture. Shared intentionality goes one step further than being able to solve problems as a group, it involves anticipating the needs of others and the situation in order to solve a common goal. This requires incredible foresight, flexibility, and problem solving skills. It requires an almost hyper-sociality group structure. We couldn't stick 100 chimpanzees on a plane and expect it to land in one piece...but you can stick 100 human strangers and all, for the most part, get along just fine. This level of cooperation is rarely seen among other animals (save for the Eusocial insects, naked mole rats, and perhaps Callitrichid monkeys)...my point is we have a shared intentionality that allows us to be hyper-social and cooperative. Cumulative culture goes beyond the cultures exhibited by other animals. Other animals have culture where [non-essential] traditions are passed on from one generation to the next and can be modified slowly over many generations. Humans also have traditions, but these are past on much more easily between individuals. Moreover, these traditions are quickly modified, almost unlimited times within a generation. We are able to rapidly build upon the ideas of others and modify these ideas to suit new problems. Moreover, our adults, as compared to the adults of other species, are much better at learning and retaining new skills or traditions. Generally speaking, the age old adage "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" applies well to the non-human animal kingdom.
  
  These two traits, shared intentionality and cumulative culture, led to the development of other aspects of our being which are unique (e.g language). Everything else that we can do is just a happy by-product of these two traits: being able to go to the moon, or build a super dam, or create art, or think in the abstract, maths, industrial agriculture...Those things are by-products of our level of cognition. Our uniqueness is derived from shared intentionality and cumulative culture plus a couple of random physical traits that we were lucky enough to inherit from our distant ancestors - a big brain, bipedalism, and opposable thumbs. We are not the only species with a large brain-to-body ratio, we are not the only bipedal species, and we are certainly not the only species with opposable thumbs - these are physical characteristics that we inherited from our distant primate ancestors. These traits built the foundation for what was to come.
  
  Whatever the pressure around 40,000-50,000 years ago we notice a significant shift in the archeological record. All of a sudden humans are making cave art, our hunting tools are changing rapidly, we began to engage in long distant trade, we made jewellery and we even had symbolic figures - perhaps the seeds of language. This is known as the period of behavioural modernity. Not only did these humans look like us, they acted like us too. Its hypothesized that an infant from this time could be raised in a modern context with little to no intellectual deficit...we wouldn't be able to pick them out of a crowd. Humans haven't gotten more intelligent over time. It is hypothesized that a human from 50,000 years ago is anatomically and behaviourally modern.
  
  So, if we aren't any smarter - why do we have cell phones and galaxy print jeggings and people didn't way back then? Increasing complexity - we know more than people in the past because we've built upon what they've learned. Humans have always been smart, and our great benefit is that we build on other people's discoveries. Someone figured out how to domesticate plants, someone figured out how to sew cloth, someone figured out how to weave materials, someone figured out synthetic materials and dyes, someone put it all together in those jeggings. We just build on what other people have found out. This is cumulative culture in action. Humans today are not more intelligent than humans living 50,000 years ago - we both have the same potential. The difference between us and them is we have a wealth of shared knowledge to draw upon, and they did not. Humans 5000 years from now could be asking the very same question..."Why didn't they invent warp travel, its so easy!"...well we don't have the wealth of another 5000 years of experience and scientific study to draw upon. We only have what our ancestors gave us. As more and more knowledge is accumulated we should in theory progress faster and faster.
  
  Some interesting books on the subject:
  
  Age of Empathy
  
  Our inner ape
  
  Moral lives of animals
  
  Affective neuroscience
  
  Mothers and others
  
  

just curious: If you are a Christian who believes in evolution, that means that you believe evolution is the mechanism or means through which God reveals his creation, right? Can you believe that He intervenes in your life personally? or in historical events? Or controls the weather?
Let me ask you this: What does understanding evolution teach you about the Almighty and His plan for your life? Is he a loving, caring 'father' ? Or a cold, uncaring bitch? How could you watch an Attenborough BBC special without experiencing cognitive dissonance. Rape, infanticide, cannibalism - all these things are perfectly 'natural' and happen everyday as part of normal animal behaviors. Are we to believe all animals are under the power of 'sin' in a 'fallen' world controlled by Satan? In a 'perfect' world, would no whale be a killer? Would sharks eat seaweed instead of fish?

Where do we even get these ideas of right and wrong? I used to think that it was God who created this conscience within us. But now i think that these systems of thought, taught to us by our parents and teachers, which condition us to be appalled at such behaviors, evolved naturally long,long ago out of the desires of our ancestors to live peaceful lives.

Dawkins summed it up: we would never want to live in a society founded on 'Darwinian' principles. It would have no tolerance for any weakness; only the winners matter. Think Road Warrior here.

I think the whole of human progression has been a long escape from this harsh and uncaring 'dog eat dog' world where 'survival of the fittest' is the law of the jungle. Life in the trees was short and brutal. Banding together,for protection at first, we moved out onto the plains and have co-evolved for millions of years as social animals, living in communities where weaker members have been able to survive and even reproduce; where coalitions of the less powerful have usually been able to control the ambitions of the 'alpha' and keep the tribe peaceful. A peaceful environment with plenty of food leaves lots of free time for doing things like pondering the mysteries of existence and creating new pieces of culture

Fascinating book: Our Inner Ape

> I believe people do act selflessly everyday but I don’t think I makes rational sense to live this way. Why would I ever serve anyone’s ends other than my own

To put it bluntly, this isn't what the word "rational" means. Rationality is about taking the optimal path to a specified goal. It doesn't say anything about what that goal is. And that goal is always subjective and arbitrary, regardless of whether you are rational about achieving it.

So, in economics, they often talk about the rational, profit-maximizing business strategy. But "rational" and "profit-maximizing" are totally different things - maximizing profit is a subjective goal, and there are less and more rational ways to achieve it. I could just as easily talk about the rational cost-minimizing business strategy, which is a different objective that recommends a different path. Or an irrational profit-maximizing strategy that is clearly inferior for that goal.

So I dismiss your implicit claim that you are being more "rational" than an altruist who gives away all his money to the poor, because that's conflating the objective idea of rational decision-making with a subjective goal.

As a result, there's not really much for us to argue about, because it's not clear exactly how you've gotten to your conclusion, besides a misunderstanding of the word rational.

If you want to get into an empirical argument about humans, I think there's plenty of evidence that can change your view.

• Humans are exceptionally cooperative and selfless among all life on earth. Very few organisms are as gregarious as humans or live in societies as large, and those that do are similarly oriented around "selfless" behaviors like participating in warfare.
  
• humans are exceptionally selfless compared to other primates. Chimpanzees and bonobos live in dominance hierarchies in which the strong regularly appropriate the resources of the weak. As much as you can condemn human parallels like piracy and slavery, our species norm seems to be egalitarian forager groups that look nothing like chimp troops.
  
• in social experiments, humans regularly forgo benefits because they perceive them as "unfair" to someone else. This is true for humans across cultures and across environments, even when taking the pot is clearly the rational "selfish" strategy.
  
• under the right circumstances, humans are reliably willing to sacrifice their lives for non-kin, or even for abstract entities like nations or religions. The last three US Medal of Honor recipients died by literally jumping on hand grenades to save the lives of their fellow soldiers.
  
  It's no good to say people who jump on hand grenades or donate blood are "really" selfish because it makes them feel better or something, because you've essentially defined "selfish" to be "anything people do". If you take a stricter, more commonplace definition of selfish like "consistently chooses one's own material benefits at the expense of others'", then no, humans are exceptionally non-selfish among organisms on our planet.

Np, also I had a bit of a typo in my comment, my pet theory was actually that our higher cognitive function allows us to deviate from primal instinct to some extent but ultimately not enough to where we are perfectly moral, non-animalistic creatures-- we are very much driven by basic need, since that helps us survive and gets propagated throughout generations, the other things our intellect affords us such as awareness of our insignificance in the grand scheme of things or philosophy, art, etc. are just fortunate by-products of our abstraction ability, which was selected due to it's ability to aid us in survival and reproduction, consequently it is subservient to those basic drives.

Some other books I haven't even touched yet (but plan to) but which also have a good reputation:

https://www.amazon.com/Our-Inner-Ape-Primatologist-Explains/dp/1594481962

https://www.amazon.com/Chimpanzee-Politics-Power-among-Apes/dp/0801886562/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=6KQC849RMQDHAHCNND0J

https://www.amazon.com/SEX-AT-DAWN-STRAY-MEANS/dp/B00KEVTNSK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1498547954&sr=1-1&keywords=sex+at+dawn

https://www.amazon.com/What-Do-Women-Want-Adventures/dp/0061906093/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0061906093&pd_rd_r=2RBWQA67MBBA734QWF20&pd_rd_w=B1B9p&pd_rd_wg=HueSP&psc=1&refRID=2RBWQA67MBBA734QWF20

https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0679763996/ref=pd_sim_14_89?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0679763996&pd_rd_r=Q4WSH2CZDEQX8RASGQ0T&pd_rd_w=oCsRh&pd_rd_wg=mKnBF&psc=1&refRID=Q4WSH2CZDEQX8RASGQ0T

Our Inner Ape