Sunil Mohan Adapa’s Blog

This is my third week in the weekly Human Values course discussions that happen at IIIT, Hyderabad every Saturday. There are more than 10 groups and our group mentor was out of station yesterday and I had the opportunity to moderate the discussion.

Last week, we discussed on the differences between animals and humans. I kept this topic as the underlying theme. Some of the factors that were brought up during the discussion last week as distinguishing humans and animals were communication, common sense, IQ, needs, learning, social organisation and clothing. I however, argued that these are not very significant: many higher mammals such as whales, dolphins, chimpanzees and also insects are known to communicate. Dogs can learn if trained. Dolphins show amazing grace in public performances after learning. Ants have a complex social life with queens, workers, soldiers, engineers, farming, aphid milking etc. Lions, elephants, dolphins etc. live as families or hunting packs. Animals display behaviour such as fear of heights which can perhaps be classified as common sense. Lionesses display intimate knowledge of their prey’s anatomy when hunting which can perhaps be classified as knowledge. Although at a different scale, animals seem comparable to humans in needs. Most species have acquired all of this through a complex and lengthly evolutionary process.

In summary, many of the characteristics that have come up during discussion as differences between humans and animals are not very significant differences. Only the scale of things seems different. Humans seem to do things a bit more and a bit better than the rest of the species.

I reasoned that there is at least one factor that truly sets humans apart. Lions move in packs because all lions (or whatever predecessor species in evolutionary chain) which didn’t move in packs were less successful and died out. The mutation that lead to pack behaviour in lions survived. Similarly, an elephant ‘knows’ that it should not move beyond a cliff or else it will die. Hunger and urge to mate are also instincts that are thus acquired by all species. Humans have also acquired a lot of these instincts from the evolutionary process. The characteristic that significantly sets humans apart from other species is their ability to ‘override’ these instincts through rational thought process when the instincts are not good, or harmful, or suboptimal.

I took an example: consider the instinct to eat fatty foods. This is an instinct that we have acquired over a lengthy evolutionary cycle. For millions of years, humans/pre-humans hunted for food. Food was not so abundant as it is today. Fats are a way to store energy that is to be used when food is not available. So, affinity for fatty foods was acquired by humans through the evolutionary process and helped us survive better. However, very recently, about 10,000 years ago, people discovered farming and food suddenly became abundant. We, comparatively, live in a times of cornucopia of food. This also happens to be the primary reason for explosion of human population in recent times. Now, we have so much food that excess food is a problem. We continue to like fatty foods and that gets us into trouble by leading us to heart diseases which is one of the top 10 reasons for human fatalities every year. Using our reasoning skills and knowledge, we can conclude that too much of fatty foods should be avoided. However, we succumb to our evolution instinct and eat anyway. Some people take strongest of the resolutions but fail to implement them. Evolutionary instincts are too strong and win over logic and thought. But it is entirely possible, as some people show, to get control of that instinct and refrain from eating fatty food.

There are lot more such instincts that ‘guide’ us every day than we can guess at first glance. There is an even worse part to these ‘outdated evolutionary instincts’. When one eats fried chips even after resolving not to, one would say “I felt like eating it, so I ate it”. Seldom do they realise that it is their evolutionary instinct that has forced them to eat and not their rational thought process. The distinction is very blurred. I expressed my belief that understanding the distinction might help us have better self control.

I thus set the topic of discussion as trying to establish this distinction. I have asked each one of participants to think of at least one common behaviour pattern in humans that is because of evolutionary instinct that is not so relevant for us today (like the example I took about fatty food). I have also asked them to think about whether we have successfully overcome the instinct or fail regularly trying to overcome it. I had intended to send all the above in an email a week before the discussion and ask the participants to come to the discussion having thought about the topic. Unfortunately, the email didn’t reach them in time. So, I set aside 15 mins. for the discussion time for the participants to think about the topic.

Some didn’t know what evolutionary instincts are and how to identify them. I told them to proceed on the basis of whatever they perceived vaguely as an evolutionary instinct based on my earlier example. I also said that if something stood in contrast to their rational thought process, it is likely to be an evolutionary instinct. As a pleasant surprise, the participants indicated various possibilities. They were not sure if indeed those possibilities were as a result of an evolutionary conflict. Neither did I. However, we tried to reason out how indeed if they were evolutionary instincts, they might have come to be.

Our resistance against morning exercise, tendency to postpone non-urgent things, lack of discipline, getting up late were among the first possibilities indicated. I had recollected what one my friends told me the previous night about how every biological system is based on a system of reward and punishment. All evolutionary instincts are implemented in the organisms through this system. If an evolutionary instinct is followed and the organism does something ‘right’, it is rewarded with a feedback of pleasure and when the organism does something against the evolutionary instinct, it is punished with the feedback of pain. All organisms are thus lead to follow the path of pleasure. Resistance to doing exercise can perhaps be because the body loses valuable energy which is not a good thing when food is scarce. Hence, exercise is a pain phenomenon and not a pleasure giving one. I have also noted that in the current world, we can easily observe that food is abundantly available, energy conservation is not necessary, excessive laziness is causing various health and fitness issues and conclude rationally that exercise is a good practice. Similarly, we tend to ignore things that are not of any immediate urgency. Lack of discipline is a manifestation of this behaviour. When we don’t get up from bed in the morning, we feel the pleasure of resting. However, if we rest past the afternoon time, we feel hunger which is another evolutionary instinct. Hunger overcomes that pleasure and soon we like to get up to avoid the pain. One of the participants also said that some people do a lot of exercises and build muscles possibly because of evolutionary instincts. We didn’t discuss further on this but I felt that there is a strong possibility that a person builds body because of evolutionary instincts such as competition, maintaining confidence and good self image, trying to prove oneself to be better than the rest of the pack, attracting mating partners etc.

One of the participants said that love towards family members and selfness towards everyone else is possibly because of an evolutionary instinct. I asserted that this is indeed true and mentioned that this is one of the most important instincts to understand. I then recommended the famous book The Selfish Gene by a well known evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. This books explains many of the family relationships between mother-child, among siblings, etc. from a evolutionary point of view. It also says that humans are inherently born selfish in order to maximize the propagation of their genes but humans have to understand this aspect and be more caring and helping towards others.

Another participant said that crying, feeling sad, worrying about a failure for a long time to the extent of even skipping meals etc. could also be because of an evolutionary instinct. I took a guess that this could because of a strategy to attract attention of the organism towards a failure and make the organism think and understand the failure that has occurred. This also helps in preparing and better avoiding future failures. As to what kind of events are classified as failures, I guessed that they could be related to our survival from an evolutionary point of view. For example, if a member of a hunting pack or family dies, it effects the chances of the pack to hunt better or acquire food by other means. As this effects the survival of an organism, the organism is better off having an evolutionary instinct that when a related member dies, the organism feels pain. It then tries better to protect the members of the pack and avoid losing them. There are also a more direct reason of sharing genes that could lead to such an instinct. I have also explained the simulation concept from Dawkins’ book here. Organisms create simulation of the world around them and run the simulation to predict the future possibilities. Having attention on particular event for some time can help construct better simulation models and better reaction scenarios.

After we discussed the above points, I had some of my own points to mention. These were partly based on a discussion in a private mailing list of friends with similar interests.

To start with smaller issues, I brought up fear of heights as an evolutionary instinct. Even though we have a fear of heights, when we build and live in multi-story buildings, we overcome that fear. This happens with reasoning that we are safe and also with some learning.

Anger could also be an evolutionary instinct that would make an organism react to situations such as a challenge. Many people after some analysis of a past situation come to conclusion that anger has not served them well because the reaction that they have produced was not the best fit for the situation. However, many fail to react in a better thought of manner in situations that come later on even after thorough analysis.

I have asked the participants to understand why humans are not very bothered about the environmental destruction. If the predictions about global warming are true, we are on a path to certain self destruction. Even if there is a 10% (or even much less) probability for the predictions to come out true, considering what is at stake, there is urgent need for us to change our course of action. However, this does not seem to be happening. A typical individual, in the process of competing with others and trying to look for selfish needs, is not able to grasp the larger effect of his/her tiny individual actions. Selfishness and competition as evolutionary instincts are possibly and at least partly responsible here.

I brought up the point about clothing that one of the participants has made last week when trying to list the differences between animals and humans. We have an evolutionary instinct to mate when we see a member of the opposite sex. This urge is stronger when we see the opposite sex without any clothing. Also, as with many other species, we perhaps feel no restriction on how many mating partners we may have. In the current society, the current level of complex interactions and mutual dependency may not be possible if people fight with each other for mating partners. We have a (mostly successful) system of social bonding in which we encourage and enforce on everyone to have only a single mating partner (at least at a given point of time). We also try to reduce evocation of urge to mate in others by not allowing public nudity, etc. This has probably come up because of the realisation to avoid people challenging each other, with potentially dire consequences, in order to find a mate for reproduction.

Competition being one of the fundamental evolutionary instincts was also discussed. We seem to compete with our fellows in almost everything even though what is to be won from the competition is of seemingly no significance. We compete in education and learning even in situations where many believe should be done through cooperation. We seem to enjoy the pleasure of competing and winning in sports, video games and even in conversations and other everyday routine activities. Understanding this may help us promote better co-operation in most of the activities that we perform.

On the overall, I was happy that the participation was good and the participants started to think and analyse human behaviour in a new way. During the mentors’ meet that followed up, I explained what was discussed. The attendance in mentors meet, however, was unusually thin.

I believe that although many of the things that have been discussed are speculations about evolutionary instincts, this thought exercise in trying to understand the behaviour of one self will surely make significant strides in better self control.