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By Root 582 0

access to protein would by itself have produced the three problems our ancestors faced. Increased protein enhances fertility, reduces birth intervals, and increases longevity. It also selects for reduction in the size of the digestive system of animals like us, since it is far easier to extract nutrients from marrow and brain than from vegetable matter. The same forces changed the shape of our molar teeth, the jaw, and jaw muscles needed to grind away at cellulose. Eventually, we ceased to require the ruminant capacities of bovines and other herbivores. No longer needing to build big guts for ruminant digestion released energy to make larger brains. The persistent increase in brain size led to longer childhood dependence. Recall the brain fontanel discussed in Chapter 4. To survive the narrow birth canal, the infant has to postpone most of its brain growth till after birth; whence the long period of childhood dependence.

This package of changes produced the design problem from hell: more mouths to feed over longer periods, but mothers prevented from providing for older offspring by the demands of younger ones; males living longer and so having still more offspring, putting further strains on available resources; and all those offspring needing literally years of protection and nourishment before they could fend for themselves. What a nightmare.

Some obvious solutions to this design problem are not attractive. Reducing maternal and paternal care will solve the resource problem by reducing infant survival. But it will expose lineages, groups, the species to extinction. Besides, it’s not an available option, having been selected against among mammals for hundreds of millions of years. Increasing the birth interval may also have the same population-reducing risk. Besides, it’s difficult to do. The only available method aside from abstinence (fat chance) is nursing the children for longer intervals. Lactation prevents menstruation, but it also puts further pressure on nutrition. Adults dying off earlier and offspring becoming self-supporting earlier are not available options.

Now, add in the presence of those megafauna predators on the savanna. In addition to the design problems already identified, our hominin ancestors also find themselves well down toward the very bottom of the carnivorous food chain. They were prey, not predators.

What could have solved the design problem faced by Homo erectus? Somehow the population explosion has to be put to use to increase resources instead of consuming them. Groups of adults might be able to protect populations against predators or even scare predators away from animal corpses with meat left to scavenge. Females could take turns caring for several offspring of relatives, freeing them to provide for the family group. Besides scaring megafauna away from carcasses, males could even work together to bring game down themselves. Older adults could start learning more about the environment, and with the kids’ extended childhood, the adults would have enough time to teach them the most efficient and productive technologies. Obviously, an ever-increasing brain size was needed for all these things. But something else was needed, too. The minimum size of a group was going to have to increase beyond the nuclear family for any of these strategies to work. Somehow our ancestors had to acquire the social tolerance of other hominins that our primate relatives conspicuously lack.

Once they could actually stay calm in larger groups, the next step was to form some semblance of organization. To do this, somehow our ancestors needed to break out of the straitjacket of selfishness that natural selection had hitherto imposed. People needed to start cooperating big time. They needed to learn to behave according to norms of core morality. They need to slip the leash of “look out for number one” fitness maximization. And somehow they must have done so or we wouldn’t be here to defend scientism. How did it happen?

Darwin tried to deal with this puzzle but failed. He argued that besides operating on lineages