The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [23]
As we have already seen in chapter 1, the list includes preferences for generally savanna-like habitats that are safe, potentially fruitful or harboring game, and more generally information-rich. But beyond survival natural habitats, each of our ancestors also faced threats and opportunities posed by other human and proto-human groups and individuals: we evolved to accommodate ourselves to each other, both as individuals group and as groups in relations of cooperation or aggression each other. These social realities were in play long before the Pleistocene, developing and presumably changing as humans evolved into large-brained, bipedal creatures we are today. In the Pleistocene lived in social groups featuring male/female pair bonding and paternal investment in children, who remain helpless from birth longer than any other animal. These human and proto-human groups were riven by disputes but strengthened by cooperation and co alitions. By the time the Pleistocene ended, complex social relations had become a hallmark species, as indelibly stamped in it as tool-making or language.
As Joseph Carroll has pointed out in his summary of human nature, one marked result of our developed social nature is that relations between males and females are “not only intense and passionate in their positive affects, but also fraught with suspicion, jealousy, tension, and compromise.” The competing demands of this social and familial world, Carroll says, “guarantee a perpetual drama in which intimacy and opposition, co-operation and conflict, are inextricably bound together.” While Carroll does not reject the account of adaptive faculties and instincts described by Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists, he does expand the extent to which Pleistocene evolution saw the emergence of human beings as an intensely social species. Human evolution is not just story of hunter-gatherers coping with a physical environment but one Homo sapiens cooperating with each other to maximize species survival.
This human sociality can be described in ways that may seem quite specific—or culture-specific—when they are in fact as universal as blinking reflex. Human beings, for example, are curious about their neighbors, like to gossip about them, pity their misfortunes and their successes. People everywhere tell lies, justify and rationalize their own behavior, exaggerate their altruism. Human beings like to expose has its specific universal characteristics: across cultures, and have observed in New Guinea, it is men, and not women, who have tendency to enjoy directing joke insults to each other.) As Carroll us in a claim that is not armchair speculation but has the backing cross-cultural ethnography, “It is human nature to grieve at the loss loved ones, to feel deep chagrin at failure and defeat, to feel shame public humiliation, joy at the triumph over enemies, and pride in solving problems, overcoming obstacles, and achieving goals. It is human nature often to have divided impulses and to be dissatisfied even in the midst success.” Such an account of human nature, oriented more toward and complexity of social life, is a useful adjunct to other evolutionary psychological views that emphasize physical survival.
As much as fighting wild animals or finding suitable environments, our ancient ancestors faced social forces and family conflicts that a part of evolved life. Both of these force-fields acting in concert eventually produced the intensely social, robust, love-making,