One of my favourite books as a kid was Sara Stein's The Evolution Book. I think that's where I read about this concept the first time: that two opposite behaviours can exist in a community at the same time, and that itself is a survival advantage for the community.
One example was of prairie dog mothers, some of whom are very affectionate with their adult offspring and encourage them to live nearby, and some of whom are cold or indifferent towards adult offspring and will run them off so that they go to live far away.
Another was of Japanese macaques, who learned to wash the grain that they were eating. The inventor of the technique was a young female, who taught it to her group; some of them followed her lead, and others just continued to eat grain the old fashioned way, getting sand in their teeth.
The idea put forward was that if either behaviour turned out to be a great disadvantage over the other, there would still be individuals who survived more successfully because they did things a different way.
I'm guessing in this context that some humans are hardwired to be suspicious and mistrustful of difference, and others to be accepting and tolerant. At any given time, one of those could be advantageous over the other. And I also wonder if our nature as social animals and our ability to love our family and neighbors is exactly what makes us so willing to defend against 'strangers'.
Now that we're animals with really big brains and can think about this stuff in depth, it would be nice if more of us would use that capability, instead of just following whatever we're genetically programmed for.
Erm... the point of all that was that I'm thinking it's a bit of a political oversimplification to say that one behaviour or the other is 'natural' and that the other is 'unnatural'. Any behaviour that we have ingrained so deeply must have been useful at one time or another, and therefore became 'natural'. (The other example of that that I'm familiar with is meat-eating; we may have initially evolved from herbivore stock, but we wouldn't have become as versatile as we are if we hadn't learned to eat other animals. And maybe today we have to unlearn it, or at least lessen our dependence on it, for the sake of resource sharing and species survival. But that's another kettle of soybeans.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-08-05 10:50 pm (UTC)One example was of prairie dog mothers, some of whom are very affectionate with their adult offspring and encourage them to live nearby, and some of whom are cold or indifferent towards adult offspring and will run them off so that they go to live far away.
Another was of Japanese macaques, who learned to wash the grain that they were eating. The inventor of the technique was a young female, who taught it to her group; some of them followed her lead, and others just continued to eat grain the old fashioned way, getting sand in their teeth.
The idea put forward was that if either behaviour turned out to be a great disadvantage over the other, there would still be individuals who survived more successfully because they did things a different way.
I'm guessing in this context that some humans are hardwired to be suspicious and mistrustful of difference, and others to be accepting and tolerant. At any given time, one of those could be advantageous over the other. And I also wonder if our nature as social animals and our ability to love our family and neighbors is exactly what makes us so willing to defend against 'strangers'.
Now that we're animals with really big brains and can think about this stuff in depth, it would be nice if more of us would use that capability, instead of just following whatever we're genetically programmed for.
Erm... the point of all that was that I'm thinking it's a bit of a political oversimplification to say that one behaviour or the other is 'natural' and that the other is 'unnatural'. Any behaviour that we have ingrained so deeply must have been useful at one time or another, and therefore became 'natural'. (The other example of that that I'm familiar with is meat-eating; we may have initially evolved from herbivore stock, but we wouldn't have become as versatile as we are if we hadn't learned to eat other animals. And maybe today we have to unlearn it, or at least lessen our dependence on it, for the sake of resource sharing and species survival. But that's another kettle of soybeans.)