![]() ![]() I'm really interested in looking at the question of human evolution from a behavioral perspective, and I find that working with chimps is provocative because of the evidence that 5 million, 6 million, maybe even 7 million years ago, the ancestor that gave rise to the Australopithecus, the group of apes that came out into the savannahs, was probably very much like a chimpanzee. RICHARD WRANGHAM: I make my living studying chimpanzees and their behavior in Uganda. He is the author, with Dale Peterson, of Demonic Males: Apes, and the Origins Of Human Violence, and Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. His main interest is in the question of human evolution from a behavioral perspective. RICHARD WRANGHAM is a professor of biology and anthropology at Harvard University who studies chimpanzees, and their behavior, in Uganda. men) is almost always unhelpful "Evolutionary anthropology has excessively neglected females." Other themes to his thinking: "We still have much to learn We should not be afraid of biology Dichotomous thinking (e.g. Recognition of the deep contradictions in humanity binds us to our past, and also lights our future." Life is easier if we understand those rules. "For all our self consciousness, we humans continue to follow biological rules. One of Wrangham's central ideas is that we should cherish the parallels between humans and other great apes, because they help us to understand our own behavior. In both cases human behavior echoes the biology of our cousins, though never exactly copying it." Self-domestication, on the other hand, makes us bonobo-like by selecting for a youthful psyche. Cooking makes our behavior partly chimpanzee-like because it intensifies a chimpanzee-like division of labor. "Chimpanzees and bonobos, because in spite of first appearances, we face somewhat similar kinds of problems to each of those species. "We behave like our two closest relatives," Wrangham says. In a burst of evolution around two million years ago, our species developed the family relations that make us such a peculiar kind of animal. Wrangham believes that humanity was launched by an ape learning to cook. "Why we evolved then, and why we are still changing, are problems that shape our souls," he says. Remarkably, our species is still evolving today, faster than ever. It's much better to anticipate these things, recognize the problem, and design in advance to protect.Īccording to Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham, almost two million years ago humans emerged from a stock of pre-human apes. The particular set of emotions that pop out will vary within species, but they will also vary with context, and once you know them better, then you can arrange the context. What the genetic control of behavior means is not that instincts inevitably pop out regardless of circumstances instead, it is that we are created with a series of emotions that are appropriate for a range of circumstances. One of the great thrusts of behavioral biology for the last three or four decades has been that if you change the conditions that an animal is in, then you change the kind of behavior that is elicited. ![]()
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