In a medium where there is a hyperabundance of quick, shallow amusement, it is the rare person whose thirst for knowledge will devote 2 hrs instead. It's why the movie _Idiocracy_ is more a documentary than a comedy.
This was amazing. As someone who's studied this topic for 30 years, lot of new info for me. In the same class as Fat of the Land by Jessica Thompson, another great early hominin prezo.
👍I watched the whole video. It was full of material that should be better known about human origins. I was also reminded of the vast gaps in our knowledge of human origins. Professor von Hippel was excellent at bringing things to our attention in ways that revealed more questions to be asked. He also sagely bought to our attention the contingencies of chance, violence and kindness that weave the fabric of human history that cloth us everyday in ways we are mostly unaware of.
Extremely informative; it helped me understand how many old cultures believed in mans' duality; as well as, many other interactions and proclivities that humans are prone to.
Just before 47:00 you asserted with certitude that the Australopithecines were ‘killers’. Unless I’ve missed an update, I was taught that they were tertiary meat eaters. By which I mean that the prey animals (savanna food) are first killed and eaten on by primary predators. Then the secondary predators, such as hyenas and vultures. Then, the tertiary predators, like us, who used stone tools to access marrow, brains, and other hard to reach morsels. But, up til now, this presentation has been effing brilliant. I’ve learned much.
Very interesting talk. Mary Leakey (the team leader and one of the discoverers of the Laetoli footprints) was Louis Leakey's second wife, not his daughter (as I thought I heard you say).
Very interesting. I would, however, take issue with the assertion around the 1:10 mark, that inequality naturally arose because some folks just worked harder than others and accumulated more goods. It seems much more likely that social hierarchy arose as a by-product of organized violence, which resulted in both warlords (the first "nobility") and slavery (initially as conquered captives).
Well, here you go: some were better than others at war. But war involves technology, coordination, wisdom, a lot of knowledge... so we are back to square 1.
I think it is saying that we are not evolving (or natural selecting) at the same rate as before the time of the development of agriculture, perhaps an indicator that our developed capacities as a species are a current match for the environments in which we live.
@53:59 doesn’t that just mean that at that point in time, the chimp is smarter than the human child? If you kept testing up with slightly older children each time, wouldn’t you find at some age the children did the exact same as the chimps (emulate vs. imitate)?
The cooperation seems to only extend to a small local group or tribe. It seems highly difficult or impossible for people to cooperate for long in larger groups or between groups..?
As a fellow Buckeye alum and Ohio State fair veteran-thank you SO MUCH for sharing your expertise. Absolutely fascinating. I’m a historian and have had a couple minor articles published in the Ohio Archaeologist quarterly, but your breadth of knowledge is very impressive and your presentation is truly riveting. 👍🏼❤️🫡
45:07 - It's a common horror/sci-fi film trope to depict humans with fully black eyes as being villainous. Check out a list of such at TV Tropes and Idioms, under the page 'Black Eyes of Evil'. Wonder if there are some interesting research possibilities there.
About the concomitant arrival of vertical posture and intelligence.... Knuckle wakers rarely look forward when moving, they normally only look a significant distance away when sitting. As a biped, this adventure of learning seems to be supported by look a long distance away. Could vertical posture have supported looking farther away have supported more value being derived from our emerging intelligence?
Do not forget topography in your calculations. Many primate species evolved in highland/mountain ecosystems in the Horn of Africa where they could see far away into the horizon, whether they are knuckle-walkers or bi-pedals. Trees also provide the same advantage. That modifies your view.
Very interesting lecture - several things I'd never considered before, thanks! One thing that didn't ring true to me was the idea that hierarchies and inequalities didn't exist prior to agriculture - surely there were hunter-gatherer tribal leaders who would have gained their greater status in their group due to their prowess in combat or other individual skills. These leaders would have had access to the highest quality mates, and would have accrued the best quality possessions available. Isn't this the more likely route to the development of a class system?
He talks with an authoritarian air, saying many things that are questionable, improbable, and without evidence....e.g. humans are the only mammals with white or pale sclera in their eyes? Agriculture entails less sharing than gathering? Individual humans became 'leaders' (oppressors?) by working hard and passing on intelligent genes to offspring?!? ...many misconceptions and unacknowledged biases!
Is the Rift Valley where it all happened or is it just where geology exposes the evidence? Great lecture. So fascinating. Seems well supported by evidence. I have little paleontology education. How do I know if the conclusions are corroborated by other scientists and studies? “Planning for a world of unfelt need” Uh I don’t think I’ve evolved that far…. Division of labor-I’ve only known this was part of civilization.
Biological evolution and cultural progress operate differently: the former is driven by reproductive fitness, while the latter is driven by brain-based rewards. The interaction between these two forces shapes human development and change.
The Oldovan tool is for one time use only ? Is there any additional argument for this hypothesis? It requires less braincapacity ?? Are you not arguing towards your chosen outcome ?
They would gather and practice together as play. Since they had no TV this was a good time to share and compete. Doing all this practice would have been a benefit and quite possibly had several Instructors showing the youth how to throw a right of passage. Of corse they used it to kill small creatures and for protection. I can also imagine many worked together to gather various sizes of rocks according to use. Placement of rocks in specific areas where a predator usually walks or prey..
I don’t understand why he thinks our biological changed and created a white scelera to make it easier to cooperate? Couldn’t it have been a mutation in our genes that stuck because it allowed more cooperation? @1:07:00
I agree this lecture is just nice ideas and this is where it ends .... this field of Evo psychology is discredited because the methods used are usually non-scientific and are just theories that sound nice...
@@RoryAbcoe or the mutation just stayed without it even being connected to humans being cooperative… this is not science there is no proof … just speculation
@@Almogit for sure it's way more difficult to traverse scientifically but that doesn't make the whole field discredited or useless. It's called the cooperative eye hypothesis and studies have been done showing humans use eye movements when following the gaze of another while apes use head movement. It's difficult to access these hypotheses but I don't think you should throw away the field as it can have useful insights. Same goes for psychology it isn't scientific in the sense you want it to be but its useful if you're willing to entertain that uncertainty
@@RoryAbcoe show me the study please ? And also psychology is a field of science for many years and the methods used are scientific and evidence based, maybe if there is a research done about the eye movement idea we might be able to know that we can communicate using our eyes although its a very limited tool. but even if the research suggests that it is in fact a way to communicate danger, we cant test if other animals use this same techniques and we can’t prove this was a survival method in early humans. The problem is that he is presenting ideas as if they were truths backed up by science . These are great ideas that seem very probable but its most likely we didn’t evolve to be how we are. It was all just random chance.
What about initiation ceremonies in hunter-gatherer societies? Some people died during them. But is it true that those who lived without passing the tests worked as slaves of those who passed?
I've never heard of anything like this and it doesn't really make sense. Slavery is pretty much useless without significant division of labor and most HG societies have very low rates of division of labor. Once people become either sedentary or pastoralist, the division of labor increases starkly, which incentivizes people to enslave others in order to ease the burden on their ingroup with regards to division of labor. If you have a tribe of 100 and you need 50 of them to be farming all day in order to feed everyone, and you enslave 30 people from a neighboring tribe, you can have a few of your own people be overseers and free up 25 people to do other tasks or partake in more productive labor. Slavery doesn't really have a place in hunter gatherer society just as it doesn't in an industrial society. Capitalism ended slavery in most of the world and you really only see it in places like the Persian Gulf where the economy is essentially entirely based on resource extraction rather than industrial production on consumption of goods and services.
No, starving was not a recurring problem, if it was so, why do all all tropical primates and humans have low body fat to this day? Why are we so dependant on amino acids for most neurotransmitters? How did we evolve if we didn't reach a point of easy metabolic self fulfillment as organism? enough success as a species like easy nourishment and easy reproduction and territory expansion like humans did (not just anatomically modern ones but even if you only count them, it's still the same result) as an evolutionary outcome is impossible and totally opposite to the theory that humans were starving. Multiple species of bipedal hunting primates were often starving for almost 6 million years and grew taller/bigger and have the luxury to develop social cues and ancient weapons? Maybe he doesn't know what starving means? Because not only does it cause high stress and antisocial behaviors, but also result in cannibalism. Cannibalism can't exist as the predominant form of nourishment for over thousands of years and not cause extinction. Can the evolutionary science drop this theory or at least not consider it as the most viable?
Humans have generalized cognitive/computational advantages, however emotional intelligence ids as other matter. You cannot say whether an animal has or has not aesthetic understanding, after all our sense of physical beauty of the human face/form is supposedly based on symmetries signaling fertility fitness, so why not a bird or beast which chooses a location and builds nests have some claim on aesthetic understanding?
Hold on. He jumped straight from cooperative hunting to storytelling leaving out the advent of language, abstract thought, reflective consciousness, but then he's only doing what most people in his field do, pretending that things he doesn't understand don't matter.
Ironically, just as members of the Blank Slate academic tribe cannot examine evolution's role in our behavior without risking being seen as a traitor to their group, it seems to me that evolutionary psychology academic tribe members feel they cannot really examine the role of culture in our behavior without being seen as traitors. Meanwhile, understanding human behavior, in my opinion, requires understanding how our psychology evolved and also understanding the evolutionary role of culture in humans. For example, the role culture plays in creating and enforcing group boundaries both of inclusion and exclusion, how new culture must be innovated when a group schism occurs because there is an inherent "as opposed to" that excludes the people one is splitting off from, how important conformity is, etc. He even fails to mention the work of Robin Dunbar who showed that using culture to bond human groups allowed us to form much larger groups than our ancestors and other primates can form based on kinship and grooming. A larger group size having one primary benefit; allowing us to conquer smaller groups around us.
I was hoping for a talk reflecting the title, but what you provided was more an overview of evolutionary psychology and a mention of culture in passing. Culture in humans is a lot more than simply the ability pass ideas and information to others. Some other species can do that too. You mention story telling several times, but do not explore why story telling is important. In general it is my impression that evolutionary psychology has an aversion to examining culture deeply, probably because the "other" academic tribe ascribes all of human behavior to culture. You skirt around the topic of group level violence against other humans, as in war, do not mention that culture is required to bond groups as large as humans live in (see Robin Dunbar), fail to mention that culture's importance in creating group boundaries means that cultural ideas do not need to be beneficial to the group to be accepted by the group, do not say the word "conformity," when that is central to human culture... I would be interested in hearing a talk by you about evolutionary psychology and culture, but this was not one.
The idea that inequality only applies to material wealth is myopic. Inequality exists in all societies. That you only think of inequality in the domain of material wealth and property is evidence of your cultural bias.
There has always been differences in social status, but "inequality" is generally used to refer to the accumulation of resources amongst certain individuals. Otherwise its just semantics. Its one thing to be revered by your tribe for being the bravest warrior or the wisest elder, and another to own all the farmland that everyone else works on.
Except for clandestine behaviour due to inter-male competition according to cooperation maintenance hypothesis (not peer reviewed) compared to pan paniscus (described as slightly more tolerant compared to secretive chimpanzees) society based on more or less egalitarian female/male coalitions and playful prosociality/sociosexuality for promotion of group stability regardless of age and gender. Not sure about Trobrianders, Kaluli, Sambia people, Piraha, Marind Anim, Batek, !Kung San, Mosuo and all the other extinct undocumented hunter-gatherer societies with different effects on epigenetic expression.
You can't have communism without government. When Bill says we were communist for most of our history, what he's talking about is cooperation and altruism. That's not communism, communism is total government control over all aspects of society. Capitalist is usually cooperative and altruistic as well as meritocratic. Capitalist is free exchange of goods and services without coercion or government involvement. And to think humans haven't always been meritocratic with a tribal hierarchy is also wrong.
Karl Marx’s theory of communism proposes the elimination of the state as we know it. In Marx’s ideal communism, the final result is a transitional “dictatorship of the proletariat,” during which private property and social classes would be abolished. After this transitional phase, society would evolve into a stateless stage where the means of production would be collectively controlled, and people would live in a classless society without the need for a central government. However, it’s important to note that the practical implementation of these ideas has varied in different historical and geographical contexts and has often resulted in forms of centralized government, as seen in the communist regimes of the 20th century.
You're getting hung up on semantics and arguing from an ideologically informed worldview. What he is talking about is what Marx called Primitive Communism, which is different from his proposed dictatorship of the proletariat, socialism and final form of communism. Primitive Communism just means that the economic conditions were insufficiently advanced so that the division of labor was too low to allow for accumulation of wealth and the ownership of private property. Thus society literally functioned as a stateless, classless, moneyless society where things were more or less held in common. This doesn't mean there was no difference in social status, but there wasn't enough distinction between people's relationship to production to really qualify as distinct classes. The advent of agriculture (and pastoralism) led to division of labor, which led to accumulation, which led to classes, which led to states etc. There is a lot to be said about Marx's predictions for the trajectory of political economy. I think it has largely been proven false. However, his analysis of the history of political economy is pretty spot on. Different sets of economic conditions necessitate different forms of social organization. Thats why agriculture birthed slavery, and capitalism destroyed it.
@@BlueBeamProjectionist The idea of private property existed long before humans evolved. My rock, my territory, my nest, my mate, my food, etc.. This can be witnessed across species. There's also parental certainty/uncertainty driving male behavior across species, and this can be seen as a form of privative ownership or property. That's why infanticide is so common among mammals. There has also been dominance hierarchies forever. We can witness a bottleneck in reproduction through mitochondrial DNA that shows for every one man who reproduced 14 women passed on their genes. This implies missive conflict, competition and/or suppression of men. Most, almost all cultures also had slaves, so there were classes. To think we lived in some primitive hippie like commune without possessions or hierarchy/class is naive of history and evolutionary biology.
@@solitudessilentgroove There is a fundamental difference between posessions and Private Property. Private Property is something that is the bases for production IE the means of production. A farm is private property, a broom is not private property. What people mean when they say "private property didn't exist in the Paleolithic" is that nobody owned the means of production as nature was the means of production. There most definitely were something akin to "turfs" that were exploited by tribal groups and defended against intrusion from other tribes, but that really wouldn't be private property, it would be public protection of access to the means of production. And yes, I did mention that there was always social status, but since the breadth of material wealth was so narrow, there really couldn't be classes. I think you just don't understand what a class is and think it is synonomous with differentiation in social status. As for strawmanning Primitive Communism as some sort of hippie commune, idk what to tell you man. Nobody who has read a single page of any book on this subject would characterize these societies that way lol. There is a lot of evidence that Hunter Gatherer societies were extremely violent, significantly more violent than modern societies. This doesn't refute the fact that they literally didn't have the economic technology for private property, classes or money. I think you're just so used to liberal moralizing that it is hard for you to conceive of an analysis that isn't a moral judgement. Im not trying to characterize paleolithic society as virtuous or good or better than what we have now etc. Just explaining how the difference in material circumstances leads to differences in sociopolitical outcomes. I get the same reaction from "left wingers" when I point out that industrial capitalism is what ended slavery in America. They think this is a moral judgement about capitalism or the abolition movement instead of just recognizing the superstructure reacting to the needs of the base.
How did those bones tell you Lucy had whites in her eyes. And why did Dr. Lovejoy have to modify her pelvic blade to get her on her feet; that is her abourial feet.
Just theories and ideas. Comments fill the blanks. There is still more options than results of science. Evidences answer a question but more questiones comes after back. Theories find answers accordingly just to find an answer consequent of evolution. There is still a possibility that the science discover new things and fills the blanks differently. Science happened a kind of religion against religions. By the way, my religion is not against evolution so I am not against evolution or evolution side
If you love the universe the birds will make you mentally ill so you fight with the environment to make it intelligent. Your supposed to make the environment intelligent so no God needed. God has been liberated and he is fully capable of evolving himself without any help. God don't want your worship he just wants to get married. Royal weddings is most watched thing on television. We fixed the video and audio for best experience possible. Cameras are supernatural and all of them captured 3D. The audio loud don't make violence so has depth. Nobody has to buy anything for it to work.
you are the wrong animals like lions and more. in most cases would run away if a small anime was through rock at it accurately and hard. You can get a lion to round from you if you just walk at it with confidence. I think that ancient hominids would have learned how to read lion body language and known how to push it away. Did they get killed yes but I'm saying it was very rare.
other animals such as dogs have a white area in their eyes! we didn't evolve the white spots to be able to recognize where others were looking, it might just evolve randomly and modern humans could use that and connect it to the directions our mate might be looking at as a method that randomly helped our survival! at first sight, this lecture might seem genuine and interesting but evolutionary psychology uses methods that are not scientific, and use theories that sound plausible but are actually just unprovable nonsense.
that's a process of evolution, random mutations that are beneficial for survival and stick around. canine species that hunt in groups are more likely to have white sclera than lone hunters
I think you’re misunderstanding Hippel here. All of evolution that takes place occurs at complete random. From what I can tell I’m pretty sure he understands that perfectly. There is no sentient force or grand entity like Mother Nature that determines what traits would be better for a species’ survival. There is also no force within a species that knows the best way for the next generation to evolve in order to survive. Again, evolutionary is 100% absolute random. Sometimes a species gives birth to some babies that come out a different color, or come out making no noise at all or at least a completely different noise than the rest of the species, or come out with the species’ first set of wings (or at least movable flaps that will eventually evolve into wings), etc…. It’s all random. When a baby in any species is being developed 50% of the mom’s DNA gets copied over to the kid and the other half comes from dad’s DNA. However, in order to copy that DNA over to the newborn, that requires millions upon millions of Letters/Lines of code (in Biology these letters that make up your DNA are actually properly called Bases rather than the more colloquial “Lines of Code”). When these millions upon millions of letters (again, actually called Bases in Biology) are copied over, somewhere along the line there’s bound to be a mess up in the copying of the parents DNA over to the baby. That means the newborn is receiving dNA that’s been partially changed from its original form. The original DNA would be the 50% from your mother and another 50% from your father. That accidental and COMPLETELY RANDOM gene mutation that occurred in the lines of code when copying your dad and moms DNA over to the Newborn may either help the kid survive better and longer than the rest of the species or it could hurt them and ultimately hurt part of their breed and it could die off. It’s all about the Survival of the Fittest. Whichever organisms aren’t well equipped enough to survive in their environment long enough to pass off the genes to the kids and carry on the species will eventually die off. However, some members in a species or environment have gained an advantageous lead over other because they were born with a random genetic mutation but in this case it’s something that helps them survive longer. Example… A shit load of time ago (can’t remember the number for this) all bears in the icy snowy barren frozen environments like modern Antarctica or way up north closer to the North Pole once we’re all Brown colored. There was no such thing at the time as a Polar bear or any bear with white fur. Eventually a momma brown bear had a baby bear that had a random unplanned mutation in its genes that caused its fur to be white. It turns out that white blends in with snow much better than brown therefore allowing the white bear to easily sneak up on its food. It has a better chance of survival than the regular brown bears. So it will grow up and live long enough to produce offspring that will also have white hair. Because they have the advantage of white hair also, those 2 or 3 cubs will live long enough to have sex and have several white bears each that will grow to do the same. Eventually, all the brown bears die off because they are too visible to sneak up and catch food therefore going hungry and not being able to live long enough to have sex and have more brown bear babies to continue the species . So now all your left with is a community of bears that all shared an accidental random genetic mutation several generations ago that helped them out by randomly and accidentally changing the fur color. It’s possible this wasn’t the first color for a genetic mutation. Maybe the first modified bear to come out of the womb was green instead? It’s entirely possible. Green would make things really difficult for a bear to live a long life since they stick out against the ice and snow like a sore thumb. So that green bear dies off and never gets to start a species of Green bears. Over time, eventually, the white fur random mutation was a happy accident and thanks to it we now have a different species of bears called polar bears.
Fascinating lecture. I love it. Compliments to Professor Bill von Hippel and thanks for sharing this pearl of knowledge.
10 months old and only 3.8k views? That is criminal!
This man is a genius 👏
1:38:41 probability quite high? It’s 1!
In a medium where there is a hyperabundance of quick, shallow amusement, it is the rare person whose thirst for knowledge will devote 2 hrs instead.
It's why the movie _Idiocracy_ is more a documentary than a comedy.
To Darwinian Marxists and Fruad disciples
I couldn't agree more.
Accessible science for all!
This was amazing. As someone who's studied this topic for 30 years, lot of new info for me. In the same class as Fat of the Land by Jessica Thompson, another great early hominin prezo.
👍I watched the whole video. It was full of material that should be better known about human origins. I was also reminded of the vast gaps in our knowledge of human origins. Professor von Hippel was excellent at bringing things to our attention in ways that revealed more questions to be asked. He also sagely bought to our attention the contingencies of chance, violence and kindness that weave the fabric of human history that cloth us everyday in ways we are mostly unaware of.
Thank you for sharing such rich information. Excellent book, also. Much appreciated.
I love his speech talent fully.
Great! Now I will read book "Social leap", and hope others materials will be soon available
Extremely informative; it helped me understand how many old cultures believed in mans' duality; as well as, many other interactions and proclivities that humans are prone to.
Excellent! Thank you!
Great video! A really big long story entertainingly told and pitched at an exactly right intellectual level.
Brilliant. Thank you both.
Just before 47:00 you asserted with certitude that the Australopithecines were ‘killers’. Unless I’ve missed an update, I was taught that they were tertiary meat eaters. By which I mean that the prey animals (savanna food) are first killed and eaten on by primary predators. Then the secondary predators, such as hyenas and vultures. Then, the tertiary predators, like us, who used stone tools to access marrow, brains, and other hard to reach morsels. But, up til now, this presentation has been effing brilliant. I’ve learned much.
Super interesting. Thank you.
Fantastic!
If there’s a book, I want to buy it. The nod to material anthropology is another layer for thought.
Very interesting talk. Mary Leakey (the team leader and one of the discoverers of the Laetoli footprints) was Louis Leakey's second wife, not his daughter (as I thought I heard you say).
Very interesting. I would, however, take issue with the assertion around the 1:10 mark, that inequality naturally arose because some folks just worked harder than others and accumulated more goods. It seems much more likely that social hierarchy arose as a by-product of organized violence, which resulted in both warlords (the first "nobility") and slavery (initially as conquered captives).
Well, here you go: some were better than others at war. But war involves technology, coordination, wisdom, a lot of knowledge... so we are back to square 1.
1:02:27 don’t get the description of the graph. Can anyone explain?
I think it is saying that we are not evolving (or natural selecting) at the same rate as before the time of the development of agriculture, perhaps an indicator that our developed capacities as a species are a current match for the environments in which we live.
@53:59 doesn’t that just mean that at that point in time, the chimp is smarter than the human child? If you kept testing up with slightly older children each time, wouldn’t you find at some age the children did the exact same as the chimps (emulate vs. imitate)?
The cooperation seems to only extend to a small local group or tribe. It seems highly difficult or impossible for people to cooperate for long in larger groups or between groups..?
As a fellow Buckeye alum and Ohio State fair veteran-thank you SO MUCH for sharing your expertise. Absolutely fascinating. I’m a historian and have had a couple minor articles published in the Ohio Archaeologist quarterly, but your breadth of knowledge is very impressive and your presentation is truly riveting. 👍🏼❤️🫡
45:07 - It's a common horror/sci-fi film trope to depict humans with fully black eyes as being villainous. Check out a list of such at TV Tropes and Idioms, under the page 'Black Eyes of Evil'. Wonder if there are some interesting research possibilities there.
Brilliant
Great lecture! Gives a comprehensive overview.
Very enjoyable
amazing stuff
He should start a RUclips channel. Podcast, or at least a Facebook page where we can follow him!
Please leave a comment bill on where I can get in touch with you. I would love to help you facilitate this.
yess we want a podcast!!!!! There arent any good psychology podcasts
@@rominavelayati2735 id be happy with a RUclips channel that shows him talking to others
He is a professor! Is lecture is here online available. Why should everyone become podcasters!!
@@saseenkawzally5909 because it’s not enough
About the concomitant arrival of vertical posture and intelligence.... Knuckle wakers rarely look forward when moving, they normally only look a significant distance away when sitting. As a biped, this adventure of learning seems to be supported by look a long distance away. Could vertical posture have supported looking farther away have supported more value being derived from our emerging intelligence?
Do not forget topography in your calculations. Many primate species evolved in highland/mountain ecosystems in the Horn of Africa where they could see far away into the horizon, whether they are knuckle-walkers or bi-pedals. Trees also provide the same advantage. That modifies your view.
Very interesting lecture - several things I'd never considered before, thanks!
One thing that didn't ring true to me was the idea that hierarchies and inequalities didn't exist prior to agriculture - surely there were hunter-gatherer tribal leaders who would have gained their greater status in their group due to their prowess in combat or other individual skills. These leaders would have had access to the highest quality mates, and would have accrued the best quality possessions available. Isn't this the more likely route to the development of a class system?
05
@@jamesdurham7355 I’m not sure what 05 means but I’m just gonna randomly hit you with an 07 because… why the hell not?
ZARDOZ SPEAKS TO YOU!!!
He talks with an authoritarian air, saying many things that are questionable, improbable, and without evidence....e.g. humans are the only mammals with white or pale sclera in their eyes? Agriculture entails less sharing than gathering? Individual humans became 'leaders' (oppressors?) by working hard and passing on intelligent genes to offspring?!? ...many misconceptions and unacknowledged biases!
Good question.
Reminds me of the movie, "The Gods Must Be Crazy".
Great lecture, thank you both!
Is the Rift Valley where it all happened or is it just where geology exposes the evidence? Great lecture. So fascinating. Seems well supported by evidence. I have little paleontology education. How do I know if the conclusions are corroborated by other scientists and studies? “Planning for a world of unfelt need” Uh I don’t think I’ve evolved that far…. Division of labor-I’ve only known this was part of civilization.
Id like to direct viewers to Professor Sam Vaknins channel and his assessment of evolutionary psychology.
Biological evolution and cultural progress operate differently: the former is driven by reproductive fitness, while the latter is driven by brain-based rewards. The interaction between these two forces shapes human development and change.
The Oldovan tool is for one time use only ? Is there any additional argument for this hypothesis? It requires less braincapacity ?? Are you not arguing towards your chosen outcome ?
Thank you for this
Listened to the opening 5 minutes and got the impression of something Stephen Jay Gould might have deemed a "just so" story.
They would gather and practice together as play. Since they had no TV this was a good time to share and compete.
Doing all this practice would have been a benefit and quite possibly had several
Instructors showing the youth how to throw a right of passage.
Of corse they used it to kill small creatures and for protection.
I can also imagine many worked together to gather various sizes of rocks according to use. Placement of rocks in specific areas where a predator usually walks or prey..
I for one have never picked up a mammoths skull but I'll take your word for it that its heavy
I don’t understand why he thinks our biological changed and created a white scelera to make it easier to cooperate? Couldn’t it have been a mutation in our genes that stuck because it allowed more cooperation? @1:07:00
I agree this lecture is just nice ideas and this is where it ends .... this field of Evo psychology is discredited because the methods used are usually non-scientific and are just theories that sound nice...
That's what he means when he says that, the mutation stuck around due to our emerging cooperative nature
@@RoryAbcoe or the mutation just stayed without it even being connected to humans being cooperative… this is not science there is no proof … just speculation
@@Almogit for sure it's way more difficult to traverse scientifically but that doesn't make the whole field discredited or useless. It's called the cooperative eye hypothesis and studies have been done showing humans use eye movements when following the gaze of another while apes use head movement. It's difficult to access these hypotheses but I don't think you should throw away the field as it can have useful insights. Same goes for psychology it isn't scientific in the sense you want it to be but its useful if you're willing to entertain that uncertainty
@@RoryAbcoe show me the study please ? And also psychology is a field of science for many years and the methods used are scientific and evidence based, maybe if there is a research done about the eye movement idea we might be able to know that we can communicate using our eyes although its a very limited tool. but even if the research suggests that it is in fact a way to communicate danger, we cant test if other animals use this same techniques and we can’t prove this was a survival method in early humans. The problem is that he is presenting ideas as if they were truths backed up by science . These are great ideas that seem very probable but its most likely we didn’t evolve to be how we are. It was all just random chance.
What about initiation ceremonies in hunter-gatherer societies? Some people died during them. But is it true that those who lived without passing the tests worked as slaves of those who passed?
I've never heard of anything like this and it doesn't really make sense. Slavery is pretty much useless without significant division of labor and most HG societies have very low rates of division of labor. Once people become either sedentary or pastoralist, the division of labor increases starkly, which incentivizes people to enslave others in order to ease the burden on their ingroup with regards to division of labor. If you have a tribe of 100 and you need 50 of them to be farming all day in order to feed everyone, and you enslave 30 people from a neighboring tribe, you can have a few of your own people be overseers and free up 25 people to do other tasks or partake in more productive labor. Slavery doesn't really have a place in hunter gatherer society just as it doesn't in an industrial society. Capitalism ended slavery in most of the world and you really only see it in places like the Persian Gulf where the economy is essentially entirely based on resource extraction rather than industrial production on consumption of goods and services.
Classes I took in college that some people thought I was wasting my time...
What causes the separation from chips to humans ?
Everytime an artist make something social and intelligent it has artistic integrity. That only possible in a created universe.
No, starving was not a recurring problem, if it was so, why do all all tropical primates and humans have low body fat to this day? Why are we so dependant on amino acids for most neurotransmitters? How did we evolve if we didn't reach a point of easy metabolic self fulfillment as organism? enough success as a species like easy nourishment and easy reproduction and territory expansion like humans did (not just anatomically modern ones but even if you only count them, it's still the same result) as an evolutionary outcome is impossible and totally opposite to the theory that humans were starving. Multiple species of bipedal hunting primates were often starving for almost 6 million years and grew taller/bigger and have the luxury to develop social cues and ancient weapons? Maybe he doesn't know what starving means? Because not only does it cause high stress and antisocial behaviors, but also result in cannibalism. Cannibalism can't exist as the predominant form of nourishment for over thousands of years and not cause extinction.
Can the evolutionary science drop this theory or at least not consider it as the most viable?
You have great questions. I suspect a kind of shallow thinking is going on here. Interesting ideas.
Humans have generalized cognitive/computational advantages, however emotional intelligence ids as other matter. You cannot say whether an animal has or has not aesthetic understanding, after all our sense of physical beauty of the human face/form is supposedly based on symmetries signaling fertility fitness, so why not a bird or beast which chooses a location and builds nests have some claim on aesthetic understanding?
Hold on. He jumped straight from cooperative hunting to storytelling leaving out the advent of language, abstract thought, reflective consciousness, but then he's only doing what most people in his field do, pretending that things he doesn't understand don't matter.
Ironically, just as members of the Blank Slate academic tribe cannot examine evolution's role in our behavior without risking being seen as a traitor to their group, it seems to me that evolutionary psychology academic tribe members feel they cannot really examine the role of culture in our behavior without being seen as traitors. Meanwhile, understanding human behavior, in my opinion, requires understanding how our psychology evolved and also understanding the evolutionary role of culture in humans. For example, the role culture plays in creating and enforcing group boundaries both of inclusion and exclusion, how new culture must be innovated when a group schism occurs because there is an inherent "as opposed to" that excludes the people one is splitting off from, how important conformity is, etc. He even fails to mention the work of Robin Dunbar who showed that using culture to bond human groups allowed us to form much larger groups than our ancestors and other primates can form based on kinship and grooming. A larger group size having one primary benefit; allowing us to conquer smaller groups around us.
I was hoping for a talk reflecting the title, but what you provided was more an overview of evolutionary psychology and a mention of culture in passing. Culture in humans is a lot more than simply the ability pass ideas and information to others. Some other species can do that too. You mention story telling several times, but do not explore why story telling is important.
In general it is my impression that evolutionary psychology has an aversion to examining culture deeply, probably because the "other" academic tribe ascribes all of human behavior to culture. You skirt around the topic of group level violence against other humans, as in war, do not mention that culture is required to bond groups as large as humans live in (see Robin Dunbar), fail to mention that culture's importance in creating group boundaries means that cultural ideas do not need to be beneficial to the group to be accepted by the group, do not say the word "conformity," when that is central to human culture...
I would be interested in hearing a talk by you about evolutionary psychology and culture, but this was not one.
We have a lot of potential to work together, we need to remove the elements in our society that seek to divide us :)
What a speed they talk at, no way is this psychologically viable.
Eureka!
The idea that inequality only applies to material wealth is myopic. Inequality exists in all societies. That you only think of inequality in the domain of material wealth and property is evidence of your cultural bias.
There has always been differences in social status, but "inequality" is generally used to refer to the accumulation of resources amongst certain individuals. Otherwise its just semantics. Its one thing to be revered by your tribe for being the bravest warrior or the wisest elder, and another to own all the farmland that everyone else works on.
Except for clandestine behaviour due to inter-male competition according to cooperation maintenance hypothesis (not peer reviewed) compared to pan paniscus (described as slightly more tolerant compared to secretive chimpanzees) society based on more or less egalitarian female/male coalitions and playful prosociality/sociosexuality for promotion of group stability regardless of age and gender. Not sure about Trobrianders, Kaluli, Sambia people, Piraha, Marind Anim, Batek, !Kung San, Mosuo and all the other extinct undocumented hunter-gatherer societies with different effects on epigenetic expression.
I have heard of chimpanzees hunting as a group. I wasn’t aware it was “inefficient” in comparison to Homo sapiens cooperation.
If universe is social it's certain to produce a God.
Hyenas are not dogs. 🙄
Increased superficial choices, like 45 brands of coffee, causes more stress than happiness.
If you know evolution it just makes you a baby doctor. That is the intelligent design.
Oaths end with so help me God. God does reveal himself to people but only if he can be perfectly moral about it.
Being scientists cannot find the conscious particle, then is mind not a material entity?
I guess the shooting star was a satellite or something. Their entrance is much more impressive.
He's been on Joe Rogan? Pass
By the American - for the American.
You can't have communism without government. When Bill says we were communist for most of our history, what he's talking about is cooperation and altruism. That's not communism, communism is total government control over all aspects of society. Capitalist is usually cooperative and altruistic as well as meritocratic. Capitalist is free exchange of goods and services without coercion or government involvement. And to think humans haven't always been meritocratic with a tribal hierarchy is also wrong.
Wow. You believe that. Do you live on the same planet that I do?
Karl Marx’s theory of communism proposes the elimination of the state as we know it. In Marx’s ideal communism, the final result is a transitional “dictatorship of the proletariat,” during which private property and social classes would be abolished. After this transitional phase, society would evolve into a stateless stage where the means of production would be collectively controlled, and people would live in a classless society without the need for a central government. However, it’s important to note that the practical implementation of these ideas has varied in different historical and geographical contexts and has often resulted in forms of centralized government, as seen in the communist regimes of the 20th century.
You're getting hung up on semantics and arguing from an ideologically informed worldview. What he is talking about is what Marx called Primitive Communism, which is different from his proposed dictatorship of the proletariat, socialism and final form of communism. Primitive Communism just means that the economic conditions were insufficiently advanced so that the division of labor was too low to allow for accumulation of wealth and the ownership of private property. Thus society literally functioned as a stateless, classless, moneyless society where things were more or less held in common. This doesn't mean there was no difference in social status, but there wasn't enough distinction between people's relationship to production to really qualify as distinct classes. The advent of agriculture (and pastoralism) led to division of labor, which led to accumulation, which led to classes, which led to states etc.
There is a lot to be said about Marx's predictions for the trajectory of political economy. I think it has largely been proven false. However, his analysis of the history of political economy is pretty spot on. Different sets of economic conditions necessitate different forms of social organization. Thats why agriculture birthed slavery, and capitalism destroyed it.
@@BlueBeamProjectionist
The idea of private property existed long before humans evolved. My rock, my territory, my nest, my mate, my food, etc.. This can be witnessed across species. There's also parental certainty/uncertainty driving male behavior across species, and this can be seen as a form of privative ownership or property. That's why infanticide is so common among mammals.
There has also been dominance hierarchies forever. We can witness a bottleneck in reproduction through mitochondrial DNA that shows for every one man who reproduced 14 women passed on their genes. This implies missive conflict, competition and/or suppression of men.
Most, almost all cultures also had slaves, so there were classes.
To think we lived in some primitive hippie like commune without possessions or hierarchy/class is naive of history and evolutionary biology.
@@solitudessilentgroove There is a fundamental difference between posessions and Private Property. Private Property is something that is the bases for production IE the means of production. A farm is private property, a broom is not private property. What people mean when they say "private property didn't exist in the Paleolithic" is that nobody owned the means of production as nature was the means of production. There most definitely were something akin to "turfs" that were exploited by tribal groups and defended against intrusion from other tribes, but that really wouldn't be private property, it would be public protection of access to the means of production.
And yes, I did mention that there was always social status, but since the breadth of material wealth was so narrow, there really couldn't be classes. I think you just don't understand what a class is and think it is synonomous with differentiation in social status.
As for strawmanning Primitive Communism as some sort of hippie commune, idk what to tell you man. Nobody who has read a single page of any book on this subject would characterize these societies that way lol. There is a lot of evidence that Hunter Gatherer societies were extremely violent, significantly more violent than modern societies. This doesn't refute the fact that they literally didn't have the economic technology for private property, classes or money.
I think you're just so used to liberal moralizing that it is hard for you to conceive of an analysis that isn't a moral judgement. Im not trying to characterize paleolithic society as virtuous or good or better than what we have now etc. Just explaining how the difference in material circumstances leads to differences in sociopolitical outcomes. I get the same reaction from "left wingers" when I point out that industrial capitalism is what ended slavery in America. They think this is a moral judgement about capitalism or the abolition movement instead of just recognizing the superstructure reacting to the needs of the base.
You want to be the only one in a way that makes you high statues. Tiger had friends.
How did those bones tell you Lucy had whites in her eyes. And why did Dr. Lovejoy have to modify her pelvic blade to get her on her feet; that is her abourial feet.
Did you ever ask a human if they know anything, or do you really think only you understand anything?
Some gorillas and bonobos also have whiter sclera, and some humans have darker sklera.
Just theories and ideas. Comments fill the blanks. There is still more options than results of science. Evidences answer a question but more questiones comes after back. Theories find answers accordingly just to find an answer consequent of evolution. There is still a possibility that the science discover new things and fills the blanks differently. Science happened a kind of religion against religions. By the way, my religion is not against evolution so I am not against evolution or evolution side
If you love the universe the birds will make you mentally ill so you fight with the environment to make it intelligent. Your supposed to make the environment intelligent so no God needed. God has been liberated and he is fully capable of evolving himself without any help. God don't want your worship he just wants to get married. Royal weddings is most watched thing on television. We fixed the video and audio for best experience possible. Cameras are supernatural and all of them captured 3D. The audio loud don't make violence so has depth. Nobody has to buy anything for it to work.
Was interesting on the science side, but clueless* on everything else, especially on happiness.
*as defined by the Philosophy of Broader Survival
Have you meet a squirrel, bee, (...)?
Lopez Dorothy Clark Jennifer Miller Frank
you are the wrong animals like lions and more. in most cases would run away if a small anime was through rock at it accurately and hard. You can get a lion to round from you if you just walk at it with confidence. I think that ancient hominids would have learned how to read lion body language and known how to push it away. Did they get killed yes but I'm saying it was very rare.
You have to be one hell of a poker player to pull that kind of bluff.
Very interesting. But I wonder if he knows what shmuck means.
Terence McKenna thought it was eating magic mushrooms that triggered evolution of brain. Check his talk on it. Interesting. Valid ? I dunno.
other animals such as dogs have a white area in their eyes! we didn't evolve the white spots to be able to recognize where others were looking, it might just evolve randomly and modern humans could use that and connect it to the directions our mate might be looking at as a method that randomly helped our survival! at first sight, this lecture might seem genuine and interesting but evolutionary psychology uses methods that are not scientific, and use theories that sound plausible but are actually just unprovable nonsense.
that's a process of evolution, random mutations that are beneficial for survival and stick around. canine species that hunt in groups are more likely to have white sclera than lone hunters
I think you’re misunderstanding Hippel here. All of evolution that takes place occurs at complete random. From what I can tell I’m pretty sure he understands that perfectly. There is no sentient force or grand entity like Mother Nature that determines what traits would be better for a species’ survival. There is also no force within a species that knows the best way for the next generation to evolve in order to survive. Again, evolutionary is 100% absolute random. Sometimes a species gives birth to some babies that come out a different color, or come out making no noise at all or at least a completely different noise than the rest of the species, or come out with the species’ first set of wings (or at least movable flaps that will eventually evolve into wings), etc…. It’s all random.
When a baby in any species is being developed 50% of the mom’s DNA gets copied over to the kid and the other half comes from dad’s DNA. However, in order to copy that DNA over to the newborn, that requires millions upon millions of Letters/Lines of code (in Biology these letters that make up your DNA are actually properly called Bases rather than the more colloquial “Lines of Code”). When these millions upon millions of letters (again, actually called Bases in Biology) are copied over, somewhere along the line there’s bound to be a mess up in the copying of the parents DNA over to the baby. That means the newborn is receiving dNA that’s been partially changed from its original form. The original DNA would be the 50% from your mother and another 50% from your father. That accidental and COMPLETELY RANDOM gene mutation that occurred in the lines of code when copying your dad and moms DNA over to the Newborn may either help the kid survive better and longer than the rest of the species or it could hurt them and ultimately hurt part of their breed and it could die off.
It’s all about the Survival of the Fittest. Whichever organisms aren’t well equipped enough to survive in their environment long enough to pass off the genes to the kids and carry on the species will eventually die off. However, some members in a species or environment have gained an advantageous lead over other because they were born with a random genetic mutation but in this case it’s something that helps them survive longer.
Example…
A shit load of time ago (can’t remember the number for this) all bears in the icy snowy barren frozen environments like modern Antarctica or way up north closer to the North Pole once we’re all Brown colored. There was no such thing at the time as a Polar bear or any bear with white fur. Eventually a momma brown bear had a baby bear that had a random unplanned mutation in its genes that caused its fur to be white. It turns out that white blends in with snow much better than brown therefore allowing the white bear to easily sneak up on its food. It has a better chance of survival than the regular brown bears. So it will grow up and live long enough to produce offspring that will also have white hair. Because they have the advantage of white hair also, those 2 or 3 cubs will live long enough to have sex and have several white bears each that will grow to do the same. Eventually, all the brown bears die off because they are too visible to sneak up and catch food therefore going hungry and not being able to live long enough to have sex and have more brown bear babies to continue the species . So now all your left with is a community of bears that all shared an accidental random genetic mutation several generations ago that helped them out by randomly and accidentally changing the fur color.
It’s possible this wasn’t the first color for a genetic mutation. Maybe the first modified bear to come out of the womb was green instead? It’s entirely possible. Green would make things really difficult for a bear to live a long life since they stick out against the ice and snow like a sore thumb. So that green bear dies off and never gets to start a species of Green bears. Over time, eventually, the white fur random mutation was a happy accident and thanks to it we now have a different species of bears called polar bears.
…..and why would they wish to do that ?
"Some chimps slack off altogether."
I'm sorry, I get bored easily.
if you would ask me , this professor is not worth his title , a lot of insights on human behaviour is very stereotype and not properly investigated .
What a load of dribble. I could make this crap up too if I had a PHD
🙏🔥💚
No, it would be better to look at primitive humans than chimpanzees for historical socialization clues.
His evolutionary story is enormously wrong. Why are there no fossils of chimpanzees? There are of gorillas, and of orangutans
A white dude telling us about human culture🤦🏻♂️
So what?
And your point is?…
Thank you for this.
Excellent! Thank you!