The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [91]
Now let’s turn to the human case. Here the behavior is even more exquisitely appropriate to the environment. Our behavior is not limited to anything as simple as flicking our tongue at edible insects. We engage in conversation. What could be more exquisitely appropriate to our environments? The appropriateness is, however, only different in degree from the appropriateness of the frog’s tongue flicking. And the neural circuits that produce the behavior differ only in number and in circuit wiring from the neurons in the frog. If the only differences are differences of degree, then whatever information our brain stores, we don’t store it in a way that is different from the way frogs store information; we just store much more information and much different information. The notion that we store it in propositions, statements, thoughts, or ideas about stuff is still just as illusory.
The illusion that a frog’s neural circuitry is about stuff has only one source: the phylogenetic selection of hard wiring that produces the behavior when appropriate. The illusion in the human case has two sources. One source is phylogenetic, the evolutionary biology of our species. The other part is ontogenetic—infant and childhood development and lots of learning. In the human case, each source has another component, absent in the case of other animals. The human illusion that thought is about stuff is also powered by an internal, introspectively driven process that matches up with a process externally driven by other people’s (operant) shaping of our behavior.
The phylogenetic process started with whatever it was that distinguished Homo sapiens’ evolutionary ancestors from other primates—chimpanzees and gorillas. There was one trait we shared in roughly equal measure with other primates: a preexisting hardwired “theory of mind,” the ability to predict at least some of the purposeful-looking behavior of other animals. There was, however, another trait that other primates lacked, but which for some reason we share with other animals like elephants, dolphins, dogs and tamarin monkeys: an incipient inclination to share and help. Among hominins, this inclination started to be selected for on the savanna for reasons we discussed in Chapter 6 (longevity, too many kids too close together, long childhood dependence, and the need for teamwork in scavenging).
Without some really neat adaptations, hominins would not have prospered; we might not have even survived. At least once, if not several times, our ancestors found themselves in an evolutionary bottleneck, with populations driven down to levels that made us an endangered species. We are not very strong or fast or tough compared to the other primates or compared to the megafauna we had to protect ourselves from and eventually hunt. All that megafauna selection pressure made natural selection grab onto the first solution that came along for solving the problems we faced. There had to have been strong selection for cooperation and collaboration to scavenge in larger groups, to hunt, to make and use tools, and to establish divisions of labor that dealt with a large number of offspring and their extended childhood dependence.
Solving these problems resulted in repeated cycles of selection between better solutions and the enhancement of the two traits—theory of mind and inclination to help—over and over again for a million years or so. Between them, a better and better theory of mind and a willingness to share, especially information, produced first the level of collaboration and coordination required for survival, then improvements that eventually produced dominance of the environment and finally made language possible. Just getting minimal coordination on which grunts go with which actions or tools or predators or prey requires a