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Items to fit into your overhead compartment |
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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| The article that popped up today is from aeon, and fairly long. But the headline irked me, and I might have a couple of comments on the text, too. The commitment to collaborate  Though natural selection favours self-interest, humans are extraordinarily good at cooperating with one another. Why? "Why?" Well, because "natural selection" doesn't favor "self-interest." That's a pernicious falsehood perpetrated by social Darwinists and Libertarians, in support of an individualist agenda. No, the driving force in humans and many other species isn't competition, but cooperation. I know I've said this before. Even some things that look like competition still involve cooperation, like a chess match or a sportsball game: at the very least, you agree to follow the same set of rules, and if you don't, you get called out for cheating. Competition is also a factor, of course, but cooperation builds societies, which offer mutual protection. Anyway, the article, or at least some selected excerpts from it. The evolution of cooperation has been of interest to biologists, philosophers and anthropologists for centuries. If natural selection favours self-interest, why would we cooperate at an apparent cost to ourselves? Like I said, questionable premise, but still a reasonable question worthy of study. If I can reduce the cost of cooperating by deception – pretending to pull my weight in the group project or in the rescue mission – and still reap the benefits, why would I not do so? I don't think that's such a profound conundrum. Lots of people do employ deception to reap benefits. Hell, some nonhuman animals do, too (my cats, for example). If they're caught, though, those benefits tend to disappear. The article proceeds to get into an evolutionary muddle, which, well, I don't even know where to start picking it apart. Maybe I'll just note that at least part of the discussion rests on the old "men hunt / women forage" trope, which has been at least partially debunked. There's a lot more to it, and I fear a large part of it is pure speculation. I have spelled out a coevolutionary link between human cooperation and commitment. No, you haven't. You have made a hypothesis, and supported it to some extent. But the author does acknowledge a thing I've been saying about evolutionary hypothesizing: But how can we tell if my account is true or not? One might think that this kind of explanation is rather speculative and unconstrained – it is storytelling. An evolutionary explanation of this sort generally begins with a description of the ancestral state and a purported end state that we want to explain. Here, the end state is modern human cooperation. The explanation given takes a narrative form – the aim is to provide a synthesised description of an evolutionary process by appealing to incremental changes we could have made in response to social or ecological pressures in our environment. All these "we do x today because our ancestors needed to learn to do it to survive" narratives strike me as just-so stories. Unless there's evidence, we can narrate all we want, and it'll just be a story. To back it up, we need more than just guesswork. Just asserting things like "men hunt / women forage" is an attempt to justify current social roles with an evolutionary narrative, but many of these guesses fall apart on examination. My hypothesis is that this relationship between expanding cooperation and new forms of commitments is a uniquely human phenomenon and helps to explain the evolution of distinctively human prosociality. And I'll give credit to the author here: the "hypothesis" aspect is acknowledged. I just didn't want people walking away thinking this was the One Truth about human cooperation. What we know is that cooperation and collaboration is what got us into space, for example—though there was certainly a bit of competition involved, too. |
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