phylogenetic endowment

And the point of this thread is what?

Is there something you wished to discuss? What kind of clout do you think it has over modern man? Or do you think that our genetic ancestors has given us the clout? Or have we claimed it based off our ancestors?

In short, can you please elaborate?

 

I don't know to be honest. We have a survival instinct. The majority of us have an inherent instinct to ensure the survival of our off-spring at all costs.

It's called progress and in a way, evolution. What you need to consider is whether what is driving that need to progress and invent new things in our lives is driven by the 'inherent primordial instinct'.. to ensure our survival. I don't think the impulses of our ancestors has been rendered obsolete. Quite the contrary. We now know how to recognise it a bit better and make educated guesses about the impulses which guided our ancestors.

There is a book, by Robert Winston called "Human Instinct - How our primeval impulses shape our modern lives".

I think you would find it an interesting read as it deals specifically with this subject.

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What is our 'natural mode of survival'? And how do you think we have deviated from it? Is it because we have embraced technology and industry as we have? Throughout the evolution of man, we have evolved in part because of our ability to adapt to the changing world environment and create better tools to help us adapt. We have developed new ways to ensure our survival and protection. That has been natural..

I don't think I'd say that our role was symbiotic in the world. We took from the world when it suited our needs to ensure our survival and we continue to do so today, only on a much larger scale.

Which inherent instincts? What proper outlets?

It's an open forum. It's everyone's turn.

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Welcome to SciForums. I have written at great length on this topic in other discussions here.

Homo sapiens is a pack-social species by instinct. (I have yet to find a scientific term for this.) Unlike solitary animals, who only associate with each other during mating season and are indifferent or even hostile to each other for the rest of the year, and unlike herd-social animals, who exhibit a certain minimal tolerance and support for each other since their food supply is not scarce and there is strength in numbers, pack-social animals care for and depend on the members of a small extended-family unit whom they have known intimately since birth. This pack behavior enhances their hunting success (the stereotypical pack-social mammals are hunters although horses and elephants are two of the many exceptions). And since hunters require a large territory, the pack regards any rival pack as intruders and treats them with hostility. Even most herbivorous pack-social species, like gorillas, guard their grazing territory zealously.

This is our evolutionary heritage: we are pack-social apes who, over the past couple of million years, evolved from herbivores to predatory carnivores. Our uniquely massive forebrain made this possible, by allowing us to first invent flint blades with which we could scrape the leftover meat off of the bones left behind by other carnivores (scavenging) and finally to invent spears with which we could kill our own prey (predation).

During this time we were textbook-perfect pack-social creatures, regarding other packs with hostility, as competitors for our precious hunting and gathering territory. Indeed, using modern instruments, anthropologists have discovered that the majority of adult Paleolithic humans died at the hands of other humans. More people were killed by other people than by all other causes combined!

However, that uniquely massive forebrain didn't stop inventing technologies when it finished with knives and spears. It kept getting more clever, and about 12,000 years ago it invented the twin technologies of farming (growing our own crops) and animal husbandry (growing our own meat), which collectively comprise agriculture. For the first time in history, there was a food surplus. We no longer had to zealously protect our food from theft, but instead could trade it with other tribes for the clothing, tools, or entertainment they produced.

Moreover, agriculture has a certain economy of scale. A small extended-family unit doesn't make for an ideal farming village. Inviting other tribes to live together would result in a larger variety of crops and more efficient herding.

But we hated those other tribes! Our pack-social instinct made us hate them. Whatever could we do?

We discovered another benefit of our enormous forebrains: We, almost alone among the animals, have the power to override our instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior. We decided that it was in everyone's best interest to make peace and to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with people who were not our pack-mates.

And this, my friend, is the conflict we have been struggling with ever since. Our inner caveman doesn't trust strangers and wants to kill them. But the civilized person with the enormous forebrain likes this rich, comfortable life that peace and tolerance make possible. Most days, most people succeed in keeping their inner caveman from taking control. But sometimes they fail and do uncivilized things. Sometimes even whole nations lose control and make war, attempting to--quite literally--take us back to the Stone Age where they would be more at home.

Although 12,000 years--a mere 600 generations--isn't very much time for mutations, genetic drift and survival of the fittest to make massive changes to the instincts that are coded into our brains by our DNA, anthropologists see signs that we have at least been making some progress. I haven't got any citations handy, but they seem to think that we are slowly becoming a herd-social species, who will eventually have no conflicting instinct to prevent living in harmony and cooperation with anonymous strangers.

I see that. Tears are almost impossible to fake, and I saw Americans weeping when they saw the videos of Neda dying on the street in Tehran--a member of a "pack" that we don't even like very much! She was our sister! A person who up until her death was nothing more than a statistical abstraction to us.

Find the book Man's Presumptuous Brain. It goes into great detail on the subject of cavemen being dragged kicking and screaming into civilization.