The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [8]
There are a few other species whose behavior shows that they have at least an incipient, basic theory of mind. Elephants, dolphins, and of course other primates treat one another in ways that strongly suggest that some device in their heads enables them to figure out and predict the behavior of others. It’s a trait that goes along with large brain size and great intelligence. In our hominin ancestors, the ability to predict the behavior of others got better and better over the evolutionary time scale.
A theory of mind is part of nature’s quick and dirty solution to a huge challenge for our species’ survival—a “design problem” that faced our hominin ancestors over the last few million years. Given our puny size, our conspicuous lack of speed or strength, we would have been easy pickings for African megafauna (lions and tigers and bears, oh my). The only way we were going to survive was through cooperation, coordination, and collaboration: warning each other and ganging up to protect ourselves or chase the predators away so we could scavenge their kills. That requires the sort of rudimentary ability to predict other people’s behavior that a theory of mind provides. It turns out that having a theory of mind is not having a set of thoughts about other organisms’ beliefs and wants and how they shape their behavior. It’s having a set of abilities as a result of the evolution and development of certain neural circuits. As the ability got more refined and enhanced by natural selection, our ancestors moved up the carnivore food chain until they had become the top predators everywhere.
When our ancestors lived in small family groups, predicting what family members were going to do made the difference between life and death and eventually between feast and famine. Later, when populations became large enough so that you were meeting strangers, there had to be further selection for the ability to predict behavior. In the evolutionary past, if other people could pose a threat, then you needed to know what they wanted to do to you so that you could prevent them from doing it. If other people could do something nice for you, you needed to figure out how to motivate them to do it. Predicting other people’s actions is no easy matter. We’re probably not much better at it than our late Pleistocene ancestors.
Long ago, these facts about the benefits and threats people pose to each other put further selective pressure on refining the theory of mind into a practice of plotting out other people’s actions, to figure out their motives, their desires and goals, and their beliefs about how to realize them. There was, in effect, selection pressure on our ancestors that resulted in their telling themselves “whodunit” stories.
Natural selection uses carrots along with sticks to get its way. So, sooner or later, it started to reward the tactic of working out other people’s motives by watching their actions. Doing so began to produce a pleasurable feeling of relief from curiosity or even from anxiety. That very special “aha!” feeling.
How did Mother Nature manage to match up good guesses about why people act the way they do with the satisfying experience of curiosity allayed? Roughly the same way it got us to think about sex all the time—by natural selection. Among our distant ancestors, some were hardwired to feel nothing when they had sex, some to feel a little pleasure, some to feel a lot. Some may have even felt some pain. Such variation is the way of the world. No prize for guessing which of these creatures had more offspring and which went extinct. After long enough, the only mammals left were the ones hardwired the way most of us are—to have orgasms during intercourse. The same