mgorny-nyan (he) :autism:🙀🚂🐧 on Nostr: Ants have already cropped up in our story. Adoption of an antlike form of subsistence ...
Ants have already cropped up in our story. Adoption of an antlike form of subsistence — the scavenging of carcasses far larger than ourselves — seems likelier than any other proximate cause to have given rise to the birth of language. But as we developed, more and more aspects of our existence came to resemble those of ants.
[…]
There was a time when ants too were free-roving organisms. It happened to them; why can't it happen to us? The degree of social control under which we already labor would have been both incomprehensible and intolerable to our hunting-and-gathering ancestors. Why is it, do you suppose, that when a hunter-gatherer group is sucked into the vortex of "civilization," so many of its members seem to undergo a kind of spiritual death, quickly falling victim to drugs, alcohol, irrational violence, or suicidal despair? Think about it.
And think about this: for ten thousand years, ever since cities and government began, we have been selecting against the most independent, individualistic members of our species. Rebels, revolutionaries, heretics, criminals, martyrs — all those opposed to the current norms of society — have been systematically imprisoned, exiled, murdered, or executed throughout the last hundred centuries. Since the vast majority died young or spent their procreative years in monosexual jails, their contribution to the human gene pool has been negligible. But the passive, the compliant, the loyal, the obedient — they prospered like the green bay tree, spreading their seed far and wide. Has this really had no effect on human nature?
[…]
Already there have been signs and portents. During the past couple of thousand years, caste systems — systems like those of ants, where an individual's occupation and fate are predestined at birth — have come into existence in many parts of the world, most strikingly in India. To most of us, caste systems are just quaint and rather repellent aberrations, quirks of history swamped now in a rising world tide of democracy. I'm inclined to suspect that this view may be dangerously optimistic. They may instead be better seen as trial runs, premature precursors of what is to come once the last few kicks in our ape nature have been eliminated.
"""
(Derek Bickerton, Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans)
[…]
There was a time when ants too were free-roving organisms. It happened to them; why can't it happen to us? The degree of social control under which we already labor would have been both incomprehensible and intolerable to our hunting-and-gathering ancestors. Why is it, do you suppose, that when a hunter-gatherer group is sucked into the vortex of "civilization," so many of its members seem to undergo a kind of spiritual death, quickly falling victim to drugs, alcohol, irrational violence, or suicidal despair? Think about it.
And think about this: for ten thousand years, ever since cities and government began, we have been selecting against the most independent, individualistic members of our species. Rebels, revolutionaries, heretics, criminals, martyrs — all those opposed to the current norms of society — have been systematically imprisoned, exiled, murdered, or executed throughout the last hundred centuries. Since the vast majority died young or spent their procreative years in monosexual jails, their contribution to the human gene pool has been negligible. But the passive, the compliant, the loyal, the obedient — they prospered like the green bay tree, spreading their seed far and wide. Has this really had no effect on human nature?
[…]
Already there have been signs and portents. During the past couple of thousand years, caste systems — systems like those of ants, where an individual's occupation and fate are predestined at birth — have come into existence in many parts of the world, most strikingly in India. To most of us, caste systems are just quaint and rather repellent aberrations, quirks of history swamped now in a rising world tide of democracy. I'm inclined to suspect that this view may be dangerously optimistic. They may instead be better seen as trial runs, premature precursors of what is to come once the last few kicks in our ape nature have been eliminated.
"""
(Derek Bickerton, Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans)