Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [49]
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A cooperating group may consist of from three to, rarely, thirty-five individuals, as in the Chestnut-bellied Starling of Nigeria (Wilkinson 1982). Group members are usually closely related, most commonly offspring of the breeding pair, but outsiders may join the family and help with its chores. The arrangement has advantages for all participants. The parental task of rearing a brood is lightened by the help other group members give in feeding nestlings and fledglings, protecting them, and, in species that sleep in dormitory nests or cavities, putting the youngsters to bed. Parents with helpers may live longer and raise more young than those without them. The nonbreeding helpers benefit by being permitted to reside in relative safety on the parental domain instead of being expelled to confront an unfamiliar and perilous world soon after they can support themselves, as many young birds are. While assisting the breeding pair to rear nestlings that are usually their younger siblings, the helpers gain experience that will be valuable to them when, at the age of about two or more years, they emigrate, mate, and rear families of their ownor, in some species, they may set up housekeeping on the group's territory which then contains several breeding pairs that reciprocally help one another, while receiving more aid from the younger, nonbreeding members of the association.
All who have carefully watched cooperatively breeding birds have commented upon the amity that prevails among group members, the rarity of conflict among them. Moreover, boundary disputes with adjoining groups tend to be settled by vocal and visual displays instead of crude fightingpeace conferences that actually keep the peace! Although probably no animal can exist in this competitive world with no vestige of its secondary nature, in these cooperative birds the armature has been attenuated. Their pacific character might be a direct expression of a primary nature that was never heavily loaded with secondary attributes, or, since many of them are probably descended from ancestors that were less social and pacific, it might be a result of socialization, as is evident in the young of certain cooperative breeders that become more disciplined as they mature in the midst of their families.
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Unhappily, the small cooperative groups in which humans long lived did not settle their differences with neighboring groups by singing and dancing on opposite sides of a territorial boundary but resorted to more violent measures. These people, like many of us today, were laden with such an incredible hodgepodge of primary, secondary, and tertiary attributes that we wonder how they kept their sanity. Nevertheless, developments within these clans had far-reaching consequences for the future of humankind. When our remote ancestors abandoned the trees to live on the ground, they had grasping hands evolved for climbing. As these ancestors became able to walk erect, their hands, no longer needed for locomotion, became the most versatile manipulatory organs in the animal kingdom. The uses to which hands could be put gave to intelligence a survival value beyond what it could attain among animals in which lack of such flexible executive organs severely limits the practical value of whatever bright ideas they might have. Brains grew larger and intelligence increased to make the best use of these facile hands.
Despite much theorizing, the origin of language from the inarticulate cries of animals remains obscure. But, however language began, we can hardly doubt that the need to communicate while planning and executing constructive undertakings that required many hands accelerated its growth. A developed language is intimately related to constructive cooperation by primates equipped with efficient hands. Animals that join in activities no more constructive than running down and tearing prey, like wolves