User:Scythe33/sandbox/essays

What human evolution is not
>The roots of this division are sadly rooted in humanity’s pre-history. On the plains of our ancestors, male hunters roamed the savannah, chasing down prey, while women remained home to nurture families and gather berries.

We didn't evolve in plains, we evolved in hills, near lakes and springs and forests. The oldest known human remains were found in Ethiopia. This is a topographical representation of Ethiopia -- the red dot shows where the Omo remains were found:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omo_National_Park

and neighboring Kenya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Kenya

Note that most development in Kenya is located in the hills -- not for the hills, but near sources of fresh water. Similarly the oldest continuously occupied city, Jericho, is located near large freshwater springs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho#Geography

Human beings are apex predators that live in high population density environments and so have always preferred areas where lots of food energy is to be found. Life flourishes to the greatest degree near sources of fresh water, and that has driven human development over millions of years.

But more importantly: the world was colonized *repeatedly* by *Homo* species leaving Africa which were all *decimated* by *Homo sapiens sapiens*. *H. erectus*, *H. heidelbergensis*, and *H. neanderthalensis* each covered Eurasia, and the evolution of *H. sapiens sapiens* was therefore heavily influenced by a world containing lots of humans -- not one in which we were rare predators eking out a diet of leftover antelopes on the savannah. Human societies carried out hunting and fishing opportunistically, but even nomadic tribes were always highly social and exhibited a large variety of roles and behaviors, see for instance the WEIRD paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7302/abs/466029a.html

The species that *H. sapiens sapiens* drove to extinction were not by any measure mere brutes. Ancient *Homo* species demonstrated tool use, socialization, and language to a degree far exceeding that of modern chimpanzees. They constructed dwellings and weapons and mastered fire 1.5 million years ago, which means hominids have been using fire for seven times as long as true humans have existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans

All of this means that we didn't develop as endurance hunters on the savannah, we developed as hominids in East Africa who were cleverer and better organized than other hominids in East Africa at a time when the world was full of hominids and we ultimately outcompeted them all on a global scale.

Of course there's a point: *this popular conception of human evolution needs to die*, it paints an inaccurate picture of the selective pressure on the human animal, and the poor reasoning of the caveman-picture leads to poor reasoning about human behavior.

Human behavior is measured and catalogued on an *empirical* basis, and the use of sophist "what if" tactics to argue that a behavior is evolutionarily favorable and thus represents natural human behavior is not a scientific way of deriving facts from observations. Actual studies of real human behavior are required to determine how humans behave.

Real studies of actual people do not reproduce the claimed effects of pop-evopsych. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence#Mathematics


 * "It would be good to conclude by recommending a short book, What Is Science?, that does things the right way. It takes a robustly objective view of the relation of evidence to conclusion, explains what laws of nature are, briefly shows how measurement, data, statistics, and mathematical models work in science, states which parts of science are well-established and which not, illustrates with engaging episodes in the history of science, and ends with some colorful rudenesses on postmodernist solecisms concerning science. Unfortunately, it does not exist."*

~James Franklin, "Thomas Kuhn’s Irrationalism", *The New Criterion*