ECOLOGICAL GATEKEEPER HYPOTHESIS
- From: "mclark" <biteme@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 23:27:34 GMT
Jimmy is always refering to the document below. This
ought to make it alot easier to find...
This post was "found" by spiznet and posted on SAP
June 3, 2005, Subject line: Re: Gould Evolution big book
Jim McGinn Jan 13 2003, 11:55?pm show options
Newsgroups: sci.anthropology.paleo
From: jimmcg...@xxxxxxxxx (Jim McGinn) - Find messages by this author
Date: 13 Jan 2003 20:55:02 -0800
Local: Mon,Jan 13 2003 11:55pm
Subject: Lorenzo's Challenge: a poll
Now, is there any doubt left in anyone's mind? This man
is posting from the janitor's closet in the basement of some
locked institution --or should be.
====================================
ECOLOGICAL GATEKEEPER HYPOTHESIS: an
addendum the Ideological Ape Hypothesis
This addendum resolves a significant shortcoming that
I had with the larger hypothesis. Strangely enough, it
was only after I had hit upon this addendum that it even
occurred to me that my larger hypothesis had this
shortcoming. (Talk about falling in love with one's own
pet theory.) What was the shortcoming? It has to do
with the transition from the chimpanzee lifestyle (small,
rambling bands) to the more situated, property oriented,
communalism. I had assumed the transition would have
been natural, a direct result of implications associated
with the change in environmental conditions (seasonal
dessication, patchiness of the remaining forested habitat,
etc.).
It turns out I was right. It was natural. But I was wrong
to have assumed that it would have been (or could have
been) just as simple as that. More specifically, I had them
cooperating, communicating, (In the context of a situated
community) and evolving consciousness before they really
had an evolutionary upramp to begin being selected for
such behaviors. With this addendum I think this problem
is solved. Additionally, this addendum provides a better
understanding of why and how bipedalism and manipulative
abilities began to be selected in the earliest years of
hominid evolution. Additionally it seems to explain the
human predisposition for sports fanaticism and the human
tendency to be confrontational to and otherwise controlling
of other species.
Let me begin by showing you two posts that triggered
my thinking:
****************************** *************************
>>From sci.bio.paleontology:
<snip>
.. . . about 10mln years ago the Earth entered climatic
roller-coaster, with periods of advancing and retreating
glaciation. <snip>
<snip>
.. . . . the very fact that the Earth became a colder and
more inhospitable place to live, led to the creation of
man, so we shouldn't complain too loudly about how
cold it is outside. If the Earth were still warm and wet,
then we'd just have big, dumb, lumbering creatures
who would just eat easy-to-find plants all day long --
doesn't require the development of much intelligence.
<snip>
Yousuf Khan
****************************** *************************
>>From sci.bio.evolution:
I fail to understand why people are sports fans.
They spend a lot of money, and they yell and
scream when their home-town football team wins.
When they move to another town they just as
ardently yell and scream for their new home-town
team, although the new team may have been the
opponent of the previous team.
This behavior seems to defy rational analysis.
Why scream and yell, anyway, just because a
bunch of millionaires beat each other up in a
public arena?
Is this behavior possibly a leftover from eons
ago when it was important (a survival factor)
to look up to tribal leaders, to cheer them on,
and to claim solidarity with them?
It seems to me that, in this day and age,
evolution would favor survival factors in the
intellectual arena, and yet, here are these
masses of people who get excited about
strangers who beat each other up, as in
football..
Can anyone explain the phenomenon?
Walter
****************************** *************************
The relevance of this second post will become
obvious once you get into this explanation. The first of
these two posts is the most important. It really jarred
my perspective into considering something I hadn't
considered before: previous to 10mya there was little
or no migration but there has been a lot since then.
(I'm thinking mostly of relatively large mammals here.
Let's say about the size of a housecat and bigger. But
it really includes any and all species that migrate.)
I started to wonder if there might not be more than a
coorelation between the observation that hominids
appeared at or about at the same time that large
mammals started to become migratory. Might it be
causal? In other words, might an environment that is
characterized by migrating species be an environment
that provides selective factors that triggered hominid
evolution?
With this question in mind, I started thinking about
migration in the context of the environmental
assumptions of my hypothesis: seasonal dessication,
spatial polarity of resources (patches of forest that
persist near sources of perrenial water, lakes, ponds,
streams, rivers, areas of high ground water). (For a
more comprehensive description of the environmental
assumptions of this hypothesis see a post I put on this
newsgroup recently entitled: Questions Regarding
Selective . . . ) Then I asked myself what kind of
migrational patterns would I expect given these
assumptions. The answer was obvious. During
periods [of] increasing dessication and resulting scarcity
there would be a tendency for all of the species in this
environment to begin to migrate toward and into these
treed havens, our ancestor's "community sites." And
with the onset of the rainy season they would migrate
back out again.
Then I started thinking about how all of this would
appear from the perspective of our earliest, recently
rainforest dwelling, prehominid ancestors. Every year
their patches of remaining forest, their "community
sites," got overrun with other species. Many of these
species would have competed directly with them for
food and thus would have caused the depletion of
resources at a time when these resources were
increasingly scarce, the dry season. Other herbivores
may not have directly competed with them, but all of
them brought predators with them: lions, tigers, hyenas,
dogs, etc. The negative implications are obvious.
When these inmigrating species had depleted the
resources at these community sites they would simply
migrate over to other less depleted areas (other
community sites). But our tree dwelling ancestors,
being less mobile, had fewer options. They were
now left vulnerable to starvation and/or predation.
Lacking the ability to run fast, they didn't have much
choice but to stay put, wait out the predators, and
hope the rains returned. Surely their population would
often have been decimated as a result.
Among a number of other adaptations, which I will get
to shortly, I predict that territorial based peskiness will
have begun to be selected among our chimpanzee-like
ancestor. This would have been a direct result of the
above described factors associated with migration.
The reason I believe this scenario predicts the relatively
rapid adaptation of territorial based peskiness behaviors
among these still tree dwelling apes is because apes
that have such predisposition will tend to harass any other
animals that it percieves to be trespassing on its territory.
This will act as a deterent to these inmigrating species
who--all other things being equal--will follow the path of
least resistance to their migratory goals. If one patch of
forest is associated with pesky apes--regardless of the
fact that these pesky apes may be mostly harmless to
them--and another patch of forest is relatively free of
pesky apes then the inmigrating individuals would follow
the path of least resistance to the patch that is relatively
free of pesky apes.
More specifically, how and why do I contend that these
above mentioned implications predict the rapid
adaptation of territorial peskiness amongst our earliest
prehominid ancestors? I think the answer to this
question is fairly obvious. The members of community
sites that reduced inmigration, even if only marginally
(let's say, for example, they reduced it by only 10%),
would increase their own community's probability of
surviving through and, at one and the same time, reduce
the probability of survival of those who reside at other,
neighboring, community sites who, lacking territorial
based peskiness behaviors, would now have to deal
with more inmigration and, of course, more of the
negative implications thereof: more depletion of
resources, more predators, and more resulting
decimation.
This comprises a classic group selectionist scenario:
behavior that increases one's own communities survival
decreases the survival of other communities. This is
not to say that the members of these respective
communities would have had the ability to recognize
that they were competing against other communities
on a community vs. community basis. In fact it seems
unlikely--especially in the earliest years of hominid
evolution--that they would have even had the ability to
recognize that they were members of communities.
Regardless of wether they were capable of realizing it,
apes that had whatever behavior and/or morphology
that would enable or cause them to dissuade other
species from migrating into their community site would
have a tremendous selective advantage over those that
lacked such. The more their behavior dissuaded
inmigration the greater the selective advantage to their
own community and the greater the selective
disadvantage to neighboring communities.
It is, of course, normal to be hesitant about asserting
group selective factors such as those that I have
asserted here. But in the context of this scenario this
hesitancy is, I contend, completely unwarranted. ?This
contention is based on the group selective implications
of the two factors mentions above, 1) the patchiness of
the remaining forested habitat which divided our
ancestors up into "communities" between which gene
flow (interbreeding) was greatly reduced, and 2) the
fact that the grim reaper,seasonal dessication, focussed
on whole communities whose territorial resources at
their community sites had become, for whatever reason,
deplete. So, the selective realities of our ancestors
shifted from those of the chimpanzee lifestyle--focussed
only on being successful individuals and members of
successful breeding groups (bands, extended family
units)--to those of the A'pith lifestyle--focussed on being
successful individuals and members of successful
breeding groups AND on being members of communities
that successfully effect the preservation of resources at
their community sites in the face of the onslaught of
multi-species inmigration to their community sites.
It is also important to point out that there is a positive
feedback aspect associated with inmigration. Specifically
this has to do with the herding or grouping instincts of the
inmigrating species: if one or a few members of an
inmigrating species is able to infiltrate a community site
then the probability is higher that more members of the
same species, and/or members of ecologically related
species, will follow. When this aspect is considered in
conjunction with the fact that this scenario clearly
indicates the community as the group entity that is being
selected, it is apparent, I contend, that the better a
community is at closing the gate of its ecosystem--sealing
its borders--the more likely the members of the community
will survive the grim reaper of this habitat, seasonal
dessication (the dry season).
In the context of these peculiar selective factors, we can
start to ask ourselves what other adaptations, in addition
to territorial peskiness, would we expect to evolve? This
can be more explicitly delineated in the context of what
is mentioned in the above paragraph: what additional
behaviors or morphologies would cause/enable these
chimpanzee-like territorially pesky apes to be better able
and/or more inclined to "close the gate" and effectively
seal the borders of their community sites? I propose the
following:
Cooperation (in the context of mob oriented harassing
behaviors):
The tendency to confront and attempt to prevent
inmigrating species collectively rather than just individually.
This would involve collecting into larger groups from
neighboring and other closely situated "properties" (see
below) within a community site and confronting inmigrating
species: throwing rocks, sticks, and generally making a big
racket. As I envision it, this would involve the same kind of
emotion based behaviors that we currently associate with a
mob mentality, including sports fanaticism.
Communicativeness:
The ability to communicate the relative level of threat
associated with potential inmigrating species so that mobs
can form at vulnerable infiltration points quickly and efficiently.
This also involves such behaviors as cheering, booing, and
other behaviors that would tend to draw attention of other
members of a community to such events.
Consciousness:
Awareness of the meaning of emotional outbursts that
they might see or hear in the distance so that one might be
excited into being additive to whatever mob oriented
activities are taking place in one's vicinity. Awareness of the
property of others due to the implications of the, below
mentioned, selective benefits of property oriented communal
territorialism.
Property Oriented Communal Territorialism (rather than
just communally oriented territorialism):
Property oriented communal territorialism involves a
community being comprised of subgroups each of which
has its associated property in the context of the larger
community site. The reason, I contend, that we would
predict property oriented territorialism is because this
would, firstly, cause them--by way of their percieved
incentive--to spread out to the different infiltration points of
the community site so that they will be in position to better
effect the collective sealing of the community sites borders.
Secondly, property oriented territorialism will give them the
percieved incentive to defend "their" property. (Which, as
indicated above, could also include calling out to one's
neighboring property holders for assitance to effect a mob
and/or responding to one's neighbors call for assistance.)
The particular group that I envision as the entity that
maintains ownership of the different intracommunal
"properties" of a community site would be based upon the
band or extended family unit, similar in size and
composition to that of the bands that extant chimpanzees
tend to form.
Gamesmanship:
I think it's possible that the behavior that is
indicated in this hypothesis was to they themselves
little more than a game. ?Those who were passionate
about the game achieved the survival of themselves
and their whole community (by way of driving off
inmigrating species). (In other words, we're descended
from sports enthusiasts.)
Also, this scenario gives us a sense of how and why we
evolved to be so controlling of other species. It even
suggests how we began to develop our weapon oriented
hunting skills and inclination, not to mention our weapon
oriented and mob oriented approach to intraspecies
conflicts (war). (I can foresee there being "Hunting
Hypothesis," variants of this hypothesis.)
Additionally, this scenario is the perfect setup for the
scenario in my larger hypothesis (which I now realize is
much more dependent upon the pre-existence of a
community), which better explains the evolution of other
hominid traits, such as our political, ideological nature,
our attentiveness to dance, art, storytelling, and other
artistic, our economic predisposition for trade, our
complex and logic oriented languages, and our pursuit
of knowledge and truth. However, the beginning of the
dynamics in my greater hypothesis (the Intraspecies
Capitalism stuff which is very difficult to explain), may
have to be pushed forward in time all the way up to the
transition to homo. But this may be a good thing in that
it better coorelates to the growth of brain capacity in the
homo lineage (which, as you know, is greatly lacking in
the A'pith lineage).
Regards to all,
Jim
--
"You don't build hypotheses on the
basis of unsupported conjecture."
--Jim McGinn
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