The Ten Types of Human
by Dexter Dias
(London: Windmill Books, 2017)
Both nature and nurture are important. Our behaviour is not biology or environment genetic inheritance or social learning, but both - and our social learning mechanisms are in any event probably shaped by evolution.
Page xv.
Evolution is a fact, not a value. Therefore the book aims to lend itself to the project luminously articulated by philosopher Peter Singer: the reclamation of the penetrating explanatory power of Darwin’s thought for progressives.
Page xv.
Truth in a courtroom is only part of human truth.
Page xxi.
Instead of a computer, the brain instead may be better understood as a series of highly specialised ‘modules’ - assemblages of banks of neurons and neurotransmitters and the connective pathways between them - each developed in response to specific adaptive problems or evolutionary goals. In other words, to help cope with certain key, recurring problems in human life. This is the concept of ‘modularity’.
Page xxiii.
Our brain is not immune to evolution. How it works today tells us as much about our ancestral past as the collections of bones of early humans scattered around the museums of the world.
Page xxiii.
The modules that were relied upon for survival in millennia past still shape our lives in important ways.
Page xxiii.
We are unashamedly social beings. Our behaviour is influenced by where we are, what we are taught, what we learn, what we experience. Nurture matters. But so does biology.
Page xxiv.
In order to challenge harmful power and its abuse, we must unveil its presence in the workings of our minds. This is the most essential mission of this book.
Page xxxii.
This book does not seek to prove evolution. It examines its implications for the human mind.
Page 7.
We infer some qualities of the mind from how our physical bodies have been built and developed over time by genes.
Page 8.
Natural selection is simply the process regulating what gets through to the next generation, who gets through - ultimately, what works in a particular environmental setting.
Page 9.
While at Cambridge, Darwin read The Wealth of Nations. Then when Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of the market became the silent and insensible workings of the ‘hand of time’ and natural selection.
Page 11.
Modularity is a theory that helps to explain some of the mysteries of human behaviour.
Page 14.
Subversion is justified - it is necessary - when it is countering superstition, bigotry, prejudice or just simple but damaging error.
Page 29.
Nurture can help smooth some of the rougher edges of nature.
Page 30.
As the social distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’ increases, the likelihood of intervention goes down.
Page 32.
When we ignore the suffering of others that we intellectually know must be going on, when we act as though it does not exist, is it also somehow being processed out?
Page 49.
It is likely that, for all the flowery pronouncements of greeting cards and greatly followed spiritual and moral leaders, our ability to show genuine compassion is limited. It’s limited because we do not have the cognitive equipment to process it.
Page 58.
At its core, the human brain is dark.
Page 58.
Thinking does not come free. It costs. It costs in calories. Although our brain accounts, typically, for 2 to 3 per cent of our body mass, it uses up about 20 per cent of our calorific intake. It is very high maintenance matter.
Page 58.
Despite appearances, despite what some believe about the mass of empty-headed people around them, we all do an awful lot of thinking. The thing about human thinking is that it is thinking of a very particular kind.
Page 61.
It is this deft trick, to begin to divine the thoughts and motivations of others, that is strongly correlated with the size of the social groups we live in. more neocortical power, more complex social groups - and there are none more complex than those of Homo sapiens.
Page 62.
For all our thousands of Facebook friends or Twitter followers, the effective limit of our social circle is 150.
Page 62.
Thinking of others comes at a price. It has a cognitive cost. And that affects how we view and treat other people.
Page 63.
Once we start worrying, caring, or just plain thinking of other people outside our family and familiar circles, we begin to load up our system.
Page 63.
It’s just that in an important but critical sense we just cannot keep caring indefinitely.
Page 63.
The positive surge of feelings we project towards another person in distress may result in the flow back of positive feeling form the reward centres in our own brain.
Page 73.
The persistent problem of other people’s pain is one that evolution has not resolved. It is evolutionarily adaptive, in other words valuable to our general survival and propagation, To understand what those around us are feeling. On the other hand, projecting ourselves too much - feeling too much - can be debilitating and dangerous.
Page 75.
With compassion comes the analgesic of reward. We get the glow.
Page 76.
Our lives are full of concentric circles. Circles of serendipity; circles of disaster.
Page 80.
We have evolved an inconceivable range of emotions but aren’t very well equipped to do emotion at long range.
Page 83.
Evolution has not equipped us with a limitless capacity for empathy. That is because feeling other people’s pain comes at a cognitive cost.
Page 84.
There are certainly contests for supremacy. But social animals tend to form themselves into relatively stable societies of functioning communal groups over time.
Page 100.
Ostracism … functions as a form of threat management on two levels. Firstly, it protects the dominant. Secondly, and at the same time, it promotes and prolongs the viability of the group. It is a deft combination of punishment and cooperation.
Page 103.
To be evicted from a group, any group, involves a kind of social death.
Page 107.
For many species, humans included, it’s hard to live within a group but almost impossible to live without it. Wherever group living has been found, various modes of ostracism have often been found to follow.
Pages 107-108.
One must be careful before concluding definitively that because non-human animals socially exclude conspecifics (members of same species), they do so for the same reasons that humans do.
Page 108.
The human inclination towards living in groups of other humans derived from a stark evolutionary fact: lone individuals were likely to die; left alone, the solitary human being was, on average, more likely to be doomed to disaster and death.
Pages 108-109.
The vulnerability and slow development of the human child also crated a need for group living.
Page 109.
Living with other human beings, as well as being the solution, is also a significant survival problem: the perennial problem of other people.
Page 109.
Prisons are a form of ostracism.
Page 118.
Pain is a method of social control.
Page 124.
Ostracism threatens our need to feel we belong, that we are worthy of attention - are not invisible.
Page 126.
To repair the pain of invisibility … we may provoke other people into paying attention to us, to force others to recognise our existence. Ostracism is a thread that weaves through case after case after case of school violence.
Page 127.
People may become aggressive in response to social rejection.
Page 127.
Group members who loyally hold onto the pervasive group norm avoid individuals who depart from or transgress it in a similar way to that in which they avoid disease-beaers. As such, ostracism amounts to a social isolation which can be viewed as a kind of quarantine, with the ultimate sanction being total group exclusion.
Page 129.
Broadly, we want to be around other humans - at least some of the time.
Page 130.
We have evolved as social animals, and it’s important for the survival of a social animal to maintain a connection with others. So we are wired to detect hints that we could lose it.
Pages 130-131.
Ostracism or its threat operates as a form of social control, the enforcement of norm conformity - even if that order is not fair or equitable, even if it is pathological and harmful. The power of ostracism derives form its targeting of our vulnerabilities and insecurities: the fear of not belonging - ultimately, of being alone.
Page 131.
Social pain feels like real pain. It is real.
Page 134.
Given the sheer implausibility of our own existence, how glorious is it to be alive? Better: how transcendentally glorious to be alive and know it.
Page 149.
In the Upper Palaeolithic period, perhaps 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens started leaving trinkets and food with their dead.
Page 149.
Unlike other living things, we have the capacity for abstract thought. … And with this exceptional power, we can project ourselves into the future. For looming ahead is the one certainty, the one thing we glumly know: life, for whatever else it is or has in store for us, will end.
Page 160.
Death and its prospect affect our behaviour like nothing else.
Page 170.
Being unconsciously primed about death makes us less enthusiastic about pampering and pedicure as we become averse to pour physicality.
Page 174.
Our culture - the rules and values we construct to give life meaning - is a defence against potentially paralysing terror, against Hamlet’s dread. It is our buffer against the catastrophe of non-existence. When we are reminded of our mortality, we rally round. We more vehemently denounce aliens, we forcefully deprecate opponents.
Page 180.
There is something unique about what death does to us. It skews our thoughts and our judgement like nothing else.
Page 180.
We are no just seekers of meaning but makers of it.
Page 205.
We infer character from face, infer the entire human being. It is a heuristic, a tool. It’s also a trap.
Page 220.
The human animal extracts an inordinate amount of valuable information from the faces of other people.
Page 220.
For better or for worse, what you look like matters greatly.
Page 221.
Evolutionarily, the early onset of accurate and reliable facial re cognition is an indispensable survival tool: identifying kin and caregivers, being alert to strangers and thus being aware of possible threat.
Page 225.
I want to believe we are the authors of our lives.
Page 250.
It is easy … to mock post-colonial excess and extravagance in Africa and forget the deep scars of decades and centuries of colonial exploitation and enforced servitude.
Page 279.
The human being itself is the greatest piece of war technology, but at the same time the human mind is the greatest impediment to war.
Page 281.
When we kill there is a consequence for the inflictor of harm, an implication for the sense of self, the understanding of who we are.
Page 296.
The infliction of violence can become not just normal and acceptable, but fascinating. It can become arousing.
Page 341.
Being deprived of a parent can create very distinct changes in the anatomy of the brain and that then affects behaviour.
Page 348.
Aggression is an adaptation. It is part of survival behaviour.
Page 376.
The ability to be aggressive on occasion has unquestionable survival benefit: to protect one’s young, to defend against a potentially lethal attack. But the fact hat we can be aggressive does not make us constitutionally aggressive. We have other qualities. There is sympathy; there is sacrifice.
Page 378.
Noise is information. Evolutionarily, eavesdropping has a function. It can be adaptive, provide marginal but meaningful survival advantage.
Page 389.
Reaching back in evolutionary time, race would have been more or less irrelevant as our ancestors would not have encountered other ‘races’. The world was just to sparsely populated and the human population too scattered.
The tribes our forebears met would have been very like their own tribe, genetically and visually.
Page 406.
When was anything important ever easy?
Page 421.
In-group favouritism, along with out-group indifferency (even hostility), exists everywhere.
Page 422.
In-group assignment leads to our preferential treatment of our fellow group members. We tend to give more resources and ‘goods’ to those we view as ‘one of us’; we tend to judge their behaviour more leniently.
Page 423.
In-group preference almost immediately materialises, even though the groups have ‘minimal social content’ and effectively are baseless, meaningless or previously unheard of … this rapid, often irrational, tendency to form groups appears to be generated by part of our neurocomputational kit, part of our mental make-up.
Page 423.
It rarely takes long for the lines to be drawn.
Page 423.
We show remarkable loyalty to our tribes.
Page 424.
Race can be overwritten because it is one of a number of proxies for group membership. It is a recent historical thing.
Page 425.
It seems that in a bewilderingly complex world, we are looking for shortcuts. Ways for us to break down and understand the social space around us, to make reliable predictions about the likely behaviour of others. To do this rapidly in social interactions, we seek observable cues. We use markers, identifiers, codes, cultural passwords … In the modern multicultural world, one of the obvious ones, aside from age and sex, is race.
Page 425.
Our coalition computation machinery, in order to make rapid assessments, uses race as a shortcut to infer social outcomes and behaviours.
Page 425.
We may see the world in ‘tribes’, but our tribes are not necessarily what we think. We have a need for something the tribe tantalisingly dangles in front of us - belonging.
Page 426.
Maybe we change the world, maybe it changes us.
Page 496.
If the fundamental Darwinian drivers are survival and reproduction, then it should not surprise us if there is an executive system directed at the latter - a mating module. But what is of surprise is the sheer extent of bizarre behaviour that the Romancer will engage in.
Page 508.
A growing body of evidence indicates that in public men tend to act more generously towards strangers than do women, whether in charitable donations or when intervening to help people in the street.
Page 509.
Males from most primate species do not contribute much of the food that is consumed by females and their young. Human beings, however, have evolved differently. Where in hunter-gatherer societies protein in the form of meat is vital, two features are commonly found. First, the hunting activity is principally conducted by men. Secondly, the sharing of the hunted animal becomes part of an elaborate public display by the successful male hunter.
Page 518.
Public displays by humans, including and notably acts of public generosity by males in hunter-gatherer societies, are linked to the acquisition f status and prestige which, crucially, may be translated into success of a very particular kind - reproductive success.
Page 519.
The public display of generosity by males is another form of demonstrating one’s resource-richness.
Page 530.
We are here for a short time and then are gone.
Page 550.
We are social mammals. We respond to verbal grooming.
Page 561.
When we appear to at in the interests of others, we are at the same time, within the inner recesses of ourselves, being motivated by our own ultimate self-interest: the maximisation of our pleasure.
Page 568.
What does it take for us to help other people - to be prepared to sacrifice our interests for the interests of someone else?
Page 569.
Rescue behaviour, one animal risking itself for another, is the exception in the animal world. … Genuine reports of rescue behaviour in the animal kingdom are vanishingly thin.
Page 579.
The importance of all this is that the domestication of animals was a very significant stepping stone in human evolution. From that time dogs and humans co-evolved in parallel. … Through dogs, and for the first time, we formed a close cooperative relationship with an unrelated other creature. We helped them; they helped us.
Page 599.
There is evidence dating from over 10,000 years ago of human beings buried with their dogs.
Page 599.
From the time that hunter-gatherer groups expanded beyond narrow kinship clusters, having to cooperate with non-kin conspecifics is likely to have been one of the major puzzles our ancestors have had to solve.
Page 665.
Giving up something valuable to oneself to help someone else actually makes us feel good.
Page 665.
Part of the impulse to help is to relieve the distress we feel at the prospect of witnessing the suffering of another human being.
Page 666.
Cheating will be selected against if the costs of cheating have adverse consequences for the defector that outweigh the cost of taking the benefit and not repaying.
Page 667.
We are suspicious of people who appear too good. We inevitably believe they are too good to be true.
Page 668.
An impulse within us wants to relieve the suffering of others.
Page 670.
We are social beings; we can show compassion; we can sacrifice ourselves for others.
Page 670.
It is generally agreed that there are more slaves in the world than at any time in history. … Part of this is our burgeoning population. But also trafficking in persons is a highly lucrative, relatively low-cost, low-risk alternative to other illegal activities for crime organisations. It feeds on social instability, economic turbulence, chaos.
Page 671.
To rescue is not necessarily to be heroic. It is to be, in an overlooked and underappreciated way, human.
Pages 672-673.
In environments that are intrinsically harsh, excruciating life choices habitually have to be made by parents.
Page 689.
One of the distinguishing features of our species - what in part makes us human - is the sheer intensity and duration of our parent-child relationships. … Human beings have evolved along with a few other species to have an extended, deeply involved connection between parent and child.
Page 721.
We are a consequence of both our anatomy and our neuroanatomy - and how they interact with the anatomies and neuroanatomies of others.
Page 740.
An awareness of our rich evolutionarily assembled mental machinery can help us understand otherwise mystifying behaviour. It can help us understand others; it can help make sense of ourselves. We can be more tolerant of others; we can be more lenient with ourselves.
Page 743.
We must combine empathy and compassion with reason.
Page 743.
Human beings find cooperating with other human beings rewarding in itself - even if there’s no material advantage, even if there is a cost.
Page 744.
The sophisticated equipment we have inherited by the process of natural selection not only attunes us to the social suffering around us, but equips us with the means to find solutions for it. If we want to.
Page 745.
It is an outrageously presumptuous ambition to try to change the world. … Some things in the world need changing.
Page 745.
We need to draw a distinction between how we do treat other people and how we should. The first is an empirical question.
Page 747.
When we perceive the pain of others, we perceive something about ourselves: we are not alone, not trapped in the skin we’re in.
Page 747.
Ostracism can be used to preserve power; it is ultimately a form of social control. So standing out, speaking up is difficult: the Ostraciser targets our deep insecurity, our fear of not belonging, of being alone.
Page 748.
Taming the terror can … consist of loving life.
Page 749.
Almost all of us have an aversion to inflicting harm on other human beings.
Page 750.
Aggression, properly viewed, is just one of the things we can do. We have other qualities. We have sympathy; we sacrifice.
Page 750.
Our survival and success as a species has been connected to the remarkably social nature of our brain. … One of our most characteristic behaviours is group formation.
Page 751.
We are acutely aware of sameness and difference. We are classifying creatures.
Page 752.
We live in a world of risk. The more risk-laden our environment, the more need there is for mutual help.
Page 754.
The bonds with our closest genetic relatives are among our most fulfilling relationships, yet are filled, simultaneously, with contention, heartache, trauma and pain.
Page 755.
It is the nature of human nature that these twin processes - the dispiriting and the dignifying - seem to go hand in hand.
Page 767.