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You Think Like a Caveman
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Wednesday, September 26, 2007
9:24:00 AM EDT
Hearing Starman -- Culture Club
There's not that much difference between the way you see the world and the way your cave-living ancestors did:
Research, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals that humans today are hard-wired to pay attention to other people and animals much more so than non-living things, even if inanimate objects are the primary hazards for modern, urbanized folks.
The researchers say the finding supports the idea that natural selection molded mechanisms into our ancestors' brains that were specialized for paying attention to humans and other animals. These adaptive traits were then passed on to us.
"We're assuming that natural selection takes a long time to build anything anew and that's why this is left over from our past," said study team member Leda Cosmides, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
What really gets me from this article is the idea that this sort of wiring is incredibly outdated, which is kind of nonsense. Up to just a couple hundred years ago, most humans lived rather more connected to nature (and all the things that could, you know, eat them or at least hurt them) than they are at the moment. And it's not to say that we might not eventually have a need for those skill again, if everything goes Mad Max on us.
Evolutionarily speaking, we're living in a blip; it'd be like saying that just because you found 10 dollars lying on a sidewalk just before lunch, you'd never have to worry about being hungry again. I'm not going to be the one to call these hardwired skills outdated, basically.
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9:24:00 AM EDT
Hearing Starman -- Culture Club
You Think Like a Caveman
There's not that much difference between the way you see the world and the way your cave-living ancestors did:
Research, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals that humans today are hard-wired to pay attention to other people and animals much more so than non-living things, even if inanimate objects are the primary hazards for modern, urbanized folks.
The researchers say the finding supports the idea that natural selection molded mechanisms into our ancestors' brains that were specialized for paying attention to humans and other animals. These adaptive traits were then passed on to us.
"We're assuming that natural selection takes a long time to build anything anew and that's why this is left over from our past," said study team member Leda Cosmides, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
What really gets me from this article is the idea that this sort of wiring is incredibly outdated, which is kind of nonsense. Up to just a couple hundred years ago, most humans lived rather more connected to nature (and all the things that could, you know, eat them or at least hurt them) than they are at the moment. And it's not to say that we might not eventually have a need for those skill again, if everything goes Mad Max on us.
Evolutionarily speaking, we're living in a blip; it'd be like saying that just because you found 10 dollars lying on a sidewalk just before lunch, you'd never have to worry about being hungry again. I'm not going to be the one to call these hardwired skills outdated, basically.
Written by johnmscalzi Blog about this entry |
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This entry has 2 comments: (Add your own)
-
Oh. Don't worry. I watch Bear Grylls, so I know how to survive... So, when the apocalypse hits, so long as I have a team of helpers and a nearby Best Western, I'm aces, dude.
(By the way, I think you meant "wiring" instead of "writing." You make the same typos as I. Get out of my head man. Get out!)
-Dan
http://thewisdomofadistractedmind.blogspot.com/
9/26/07 9:48 AM