Märckelbach: Ch. 10

Our story

This Chapter

Up from old psychology
What you don't know can hurt you
Bizarre gossip and junk food
Social stratification
Evolutionary psychology
"Mind is what brain does"
Behavioral modernity
Cultural evolution
From chip to chip
The almighty symbol

Bibliography
As time goes by
Footnotes

From Merkelbeek to Märckelbach:
A Social History with Deep Roots

being cobbled together by Henry K van Eyken
for Elisabeth H., Marc, Elisabeth G., Eric, Adriana, & whomever may come ...
in memory of Adriaan Märckelbach (1896-1965)

'Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill,
But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense ...
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1709) 0A

We are all ignorant, but on different subjects
Will Rogers 0B

February 3, 2015
Chapter 10. Heart of darkness 2

Beneath new culture is old psychology. This the title of a piece by evolutionary psychologist Jerome Barkow published way back in 1992; more than 20 years ago. In this day and age of fresh scientific insights ever rapidly coming about, this is a long span of time and it takes experts of having any chance of keeping up to scratch. So, I better be mindful of Pope's adage: fools rush in where angels fear to tread! 3

Old psychology has come about in evolutionary stages, from animals to people, up to our latest version, Homo sapiens sapiens, who evolved about 100,000 years ago, maybe much earlier. For some detail, see the appended As time goes by 4

Barkow's contribution has a subtitle: Gossip and social stratification. Although much of today's society publicly frowns upon gossip, we nevertheless listen to it, and for good treason. If no one tells you the gossip, you are an outsider, and what you don't know can hurt you. It is through gossip that we adhere closely to social norms. Other people's casual conversation affects our relative standing and acceptability as mate and as a partner in all sorts of social interactions, getting a job for one. 5

Gossip as TV entertainment. (Source.) 6

But gossip, Barkow wrote, has acquired something quite bizarre about it. Gossip is no longer solely about real people, people we know personally or know about from others we do know. Much gossip is now about people we don't know at all and are not likely to ever meet; even about people who do not exist. Our "knowledge" about them may have been deliberately spread or fabricated by people who made it their business to do so: journalists, authors of biographies and fiction, actors of stage and television, people seeking jobs, political propagandists, folk working in advertising and public relations. Since time immemorial, gossip has become the stuff of entertainment. 7

There is little doubt that our old psychology includes the ability to predict, to discriminate, to influence the behavior of others: in particular relatives, rivals, mates, offspring, friends and acquaintances, those up and down from us on the social ladder. We should be especially interested in those of their activities most likely to affect our own wellbeing as member of society. Our ancestors, and probably most of us today, were and are quite interested in the sexual exploits of others. In terms of adapted behaviour, we don't give a hoot about how soundly someone sleeps—knowledge hardly relevant to our social fitness—but many of us are keenly interested in hearing the gossip about who he or she is sleeping with. 8

Why is it that we do gossip about total strangers and fictitional characters? A possible answer, Barkow suggested, is that this more bizarre kind of gossip came about as a kind of byproduct in the evolutionary created essential part, the part that makes us fit to strive among humans. The media, he suggested, may mimic the psychological cues that would have been triggered by the environment way back some 100,000 or more years ago. Our unconscious selves may mistake such strangers as seen on our television screens as important fellow members in everyday society, or, as did our ancestors way back, as members of some band to which they used to belong. Taking things a step further, a comparison of the junk-food industry with mass media suggests that our evolved strong preferences for salt, sugar and fat—items only scarcely available to our ancestors way-back and therefore appearing valuable—provided an opportunity to influence our buying behavior, to fatten junk-food purveyors' bottom lines by fattening the bottoms of their loyal clientele. 9

On to Barkow's other topic: social stratification. Meant hereby is, in the language of a social scientist, unequal access to the basic resources that sustain life. Well, we are seeing much of that today. A recent prediction is that in the foreseeable future one percent of all people will own half the world's entire wealth. 10

Social stratification appears to have come about pretty late in the 100,000-year existence of Homo sapiens sapiens. Needed for that to come about is a sufficiently large-scale society to produce a surplus to support craftsman, military, rulers and their bureaucrats. Agrculture and the capability to hold food in long-term storage provide that. That'is why social stratification strongly developed around rivers that made lands fertile: the Yangtse and Yellow rivers in China (where agriculture has been practiced since roughly 7500 B.C.), the Euphrates and Tigris in Mesopotamia (roughly 7000 B.C.), the Nile in Egypt (roughly 5500 B.C.), the Indus in Pakistan/India (3300 B.C. about). Wrote our Greek "father of history," Herodotus, in the fifth century B.C., "Egypt is a land won by the Egyptians and given them by the Nile." It is the craftsmen then who made superior tools for agriculture; it is the military that defended agricultural settlements against invaders on the prowl for booty; it is the ruling class to organize it all in a workable whole, notably by having work done on irrigation canals, but also extracting a heavy toll for themselves and their entourage—and readily using the military to maintain or expand their dominance. 11

Gorillas fighting for dominance. (Source.) 12

The psychological traits underneath social stratification include the pursuit of high social rank (control, power), nepotism, and superior persuave skills. The pursuit of controlling power began even before man first evolved some 2.5 million years ago. We know this because it is also found among human beings' evolutionary companions, the great apes, in the selection of mates. Favoring one's kind, too, is not unique to humans. Although nepotism is frowned upon in modern Western society not favoring one's kin is considered highly unethical elsewhere. (But then again, Western mores and law support the inheritance of parental wealth by offspring—yes after taxes.) 13

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) proposed that humans have social instincts that evolved by natural selection. Today we may refer to those as the root of evolutionary psychology, a term popularized by Jerome Barkow and others in their 1992 book The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. This book, much criticised at first, has since gained in overall acceptance. Evolutionary psychologists argue that our our biological makeup has a major influence over the way we think. They think of the mind as being a composite of specialized processes, each dedicated to a specific type of behavior, such as gossiping. It has been argued that our gossiping is akin to grooming among the great apes, that, in fact, it developed from it along with our mother tongue, learned from those who nurtured us and we grew up among. 14

The modular brain. (Source.) 15

Those specialized processes have their own subprocesses. For example, details of our social interactions might have a module for detecting cheating, a module for remembering experiences we have with somebody else, etc., etc. I imagine that those subprocesses have their own subsubprocesses as well, and so on. The book raises a problem when two processes lead to conflicting conclusions. How then will we behave? As an example, the cheating detection module concludes someone is cheating on us whereas the history module holds that we have an excellent experience with that same person. If the cheating module erred, we are about to break a beautiful friendship; if the history module erred, we need face all sorts of eventualities. One stopgap is for the history module to just keep silent for at least the time being, i.o.w. to repress the output of the cheating detection module. Again, this insight is more than two decades old, but it is the kind of puzzle cognitive scientists have been chipping away at, fortunately with help from the neuroscientists and their miraculous brain-scanning tools. They, too, describe the brain as a collection of modules, but modules of the cortical brain being quite plastic, meaning modules that may help out where more specialized modules have failed for some reason. 16

Students of the mind and students of the brain have come together and thus we see, in short, that mind is what brain does. Actually, mind is considered more than just that, but never mind.* Let's instead move on from psychology to archeology and see what that discipline has brought to light. Archeologists try to draw conclusions from what they have dug up from the earth, bones and manufactured objects, things that can be seen, touched, subjected to physical and chemical analyses in the laboratory, and compared with one another. From that they try to fathom the workings of the minds that left all this stuff. In the section Time flies we find some background of how humans have been classified by species as evidenced by the bones dug up. In the following paragraphs we consider things found and conclusions drawn from them. 17

The first kind of manufactured items were stone tools, especially for hunting. Those have been associated with humans who existed already millions of years before Homon sapiens sapiens saw the light, and the way they were made did not change appreciably for a long, long time; not even among those early humans who were anatomically very much alike us. Then things were found indicating that some 40,000 years ago, people became capable of producing higher qualities of stone tools, of fishing, of moving stuff over long distances, of making ornaments for themselves, of creating various forms of art from carvings on bone to making figurines and even music, of playing games, of cooking, of burying their dead. People began to behave in ways much like we do. In other words, they were using their brains in more advanced ways and it is from what they left for archeologists to study came insights in mental changes that happened. The term behavioral modernity is used to tell apart such capable people from those living before them. Behavioral modernity became the stuff from which scientists gathered insights about thought before written records were made and in recent times have been found, studied, deciphered. The body of knowledge thus gained by scientists is the main subject of what is now labelled prehistory of mind. It is in the history of mind where the roots for why we think and behave we do are to be found. That is why our story of the Merckelbachs needed to step back hundreds of thousands of years before there was a Reinard Huyn van Anstenrade who changed his name to Reinard van Merkelbeek. 18