Human origins - and evolution. Patterns of cooperation and competition

I'm avoiding politics once again this time, in order to dive into the endlessly fascinating topic of human origins. And hence first, for your holiday shopping.... 

... a while back I suggested the perfect gift for that anthropologist or paleo-historian you know (either professional or amateur!) Or else your role-playing aficionado. My way-fun role-playing game TRIBES simulates life in the stone age! 

Can you hunt and gather and woo and connive to have the most offspring successfully reach adulthood? Only be careful competing! You only win if the the tribe survives!

Alas, folks reported interest last time... but no way to actually order the game!

Well, Steve Jackson has fixed the glitch. You can now order and play this fun diversion that's also highly pertinent to today's topic! 

== News about human origins and evolution ==

Scientists are advancing with synthetic evolution: At 493 genes, the minimal genome of M. mycoides JCVI-syn3B is the smallest known free-living organism, artificially culled-down to the absolutely minimum number that’s viable by folks at the Craig Venter Institute. In comparison, many animal and plant genomes contain more than 20,000 genes. So far, the simplest organism would have no functional redundancies or useless spacers. Note that it requires the researchers to supply food and ideal conditions. Which leads to their next step… altering conditions to see if evolution takes place.

Spoiler alert. It does.

At the opposite end of the scale... Neanderthal genes! Was there a penalty for promiscuity around 50,000 BCE?  People with roots outside Africa tend to have about 2% Neanderthal (or else Denisovan) DNA in their genome. So statistically, by random chance, you would expect Neanderthal DNA to collectively account for around 2% of the genetic risk of disease. Not in all cases, it seems: "But here we find that 8.4% is explained by Neanderthal gene flow," much more than is expected by chance alone.”  

It is so tiresome when sci journalists flub their reporting. Take these reports that the human ancestral line almost died out due to low populations about 800,000 years ago.  Yes “bottlenecks” are very interesting! A recently discovered ‘y-chromosome bottleneck’ around the time of early farming towns, has huge implications! As for these news stories: yes, there was likely a time when Homo Heidelbergensis & Antecessor (ancestor of Homo Saps and Neanderthals) were a small, isolated population, and surviving that isolation helped them to thereupon differentiate and speed our evolution. 

But, this was not about ‘the human line almost dying out’! These articles ignore the fact that very close cousins to Heidelbergensis - Homo Erectus - were everywhere in the Old World with no bottleneck. An isolation bottleneck was likely HOW we surged ahead of Erectus – evolution flourishes on such cycles. But Erectus was still around and would likely have spun off another isolated population. And maybe super-brain sapiens might NOT have happened!  See my speculations in Existence. Still, flawed reporting.

Human origins were definitely in Africa, stretching back to Australopithecus – “Lucy’ and her upright-walking kin. But further back to the ancestors of ALL apes? It appears that earlier hominids not only evolved in western and central Europe but spent over 5 million years evolving there and spreading to the eastern Mediterranean before eventually dispersing into Africa. Recent findings establish Anadoluvius turkae as a branch of the part of the evolutionary tree that gave rise to chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and humans.

 But sure, long after that, human genetic diversity in non-African populations appeared to have been shaped primarily by an out-of-Africa dispersal 50 or so thousand yr ago (kya). (As I describe in Existence.) With a major shift in reprogramming-by-culture. But somewhere around 7000ya there was another huge effect. Arrival of agriculture, towns and kings led to a Y-Chromosome bottleneck when only a small fraction of males got to breed. Then, rather quickly, actual cities got larger, law happened, and the great culling of males appears to have stopped... though not feudalism, dominating 99% of our ancestors.

We can do - and have done - better than that failed social norm.

See my neoteny article: Neoteny and Two-Way Sexual Selection in Human Evolution. 

== Did we evolve all the things that make us what we are? ==

I want to just drop in here a few thoughts about Richard Dawkins (famed author of The Selfish Gene , The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion). Down in the comments community here at "Contrary Brin" (the very best such community online!), some opined a while back about Dawkins's belief that humans have no behaviors that did not arise from evolution. And I also must demur. What Dawkins etc. (and nearly all others) ignore is the emergent effects that occur when one layer of activity creates a new, ‘higher” layer.

Cells are vast communities of sub-cellular entities that do their various tasks & business in a manner that is generally at least as much competitive as cooperative, making and ‘selling’ chemicals and structures to each other, much like an economy. Yet the cell seems from the outside to be a consistent, self-cooperative entity.

In Earth I describe how this same effect happens at the next layer between cells in a macro organism, especially during fetal development, when proto-neurons compete with each other savagely, over growth factors, resulting in whole ecosystem structures – jungles and forests and deserts, across the developing infant brain: structures that combine into vastly better mental processes, wherein many next-layer personality drives and components continue to compete across life… yet, the thing that emerges - an individually identifiable human being - portrays with some verisimilitude a unitary organism, actively and effectively pursuing goals…

…goals that change as the organism satisfies ever-higher layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. All the way to abstractions that the cellular and mammal and ape and caveman brains that dwell inside our cortex could never begin to perceive, let alone understand.

And sure, often these higher ‘value’ goals (e.g. religion) can often be just surface justifications for more brutal, lower drives like vengeance, jealously, fear and avarice. And yet… 50,000 years ago (I believe, and argue in Existence), there came a new layering as humans became able to re-program their thinking modes completely via culture, leading to many subsequent major, 'renaissance' shifts in our tools, societies and things we can perceive/contemplate.

And of course this progression continues, as human individuals group themselves in cooperative - but also competitive - associations like families, tribes, communities, towns and nations. And civilizations, which aren't entirely the same thing. 

The crux: Dawkins is completely off-base if he thinks he can ascribe the emergent outcomes from those new and vividly unpredictable layers entirely to earlier evolved selection.  

Every phase and every level reveals the truth that nether cooperation nor competition can explain this, alone. Each is entangled in layer after layer of complexity.

== Where our evolved natures collide with policy? And with AI? ==

Our evolved natures interact fretfully with new technologies. Take recent cries that new generative AI systems may decipher and interpret our personal DNA!  Yes, that could be worrisome! A tool for criminals and oppressors and bigots. As illustrated in the excellent film Gattaca – that DNA is already everywhere. You shed it in flakes of skin wherever you go. 

But that's the point! As shown in that flick, collection and decipherment of our DNA will be trivial and banning all that is a mug's game. What matters - a point I’ve been pushing since the 1990s, in The Transparent Society and elsewhere - is that hiding will neither preserve privacy nor prevent your data being used against you. 

But what matters is not blinding others; it is preventing others from using your information to harm you. There is a possible solution, then. Not by hiding, but by aggressively ripping the veils away from malefactors who might do that sort of thing!