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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (75123)	2/25/2000 7:55:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Don't be getting all literal on me, Joan. I'd originally written "bonobos are everybody's favorite for a reason", but decided to revise in light of the bluenose comment at the end of the Angier article. Anyway, irony is always appropriate when discussing the good gray Times. When I said the bonobos were "everybody's favorite," I of course meant they were favorites of those people who don't want to think that as primates, humans are necessarily programmed for aggression, and who like the idea of having bonobos as their closest relatives. You think if Stanley Kubrick had known about bonobos, the apes in 2001 would have made love, not war? The monolith appears, and an orgy breaks out? Maybe they'd have figured out "marital aides" instead of clubs? Anyway, on a related biological topic, there was an interesting Atlantic article recently about dogs. Unfortunately, Atlantic articles are a lot windier than NYT articles, so it's a bit of a slog, this part comes about halfway through. The Atlantic would do well to hire a few editors from the Times. Even my little excerpt is long, but it gets back to the human evolutionary angle at the end, I promise. Full article at theatlantic.com . That means that mitochondrial DNA can be used as an evolutionary chronometer. Wolves and coyotes differ by about six percent in their mitochondrial DNA, and, according to fossil evidence, separated from a common ancestor about a million years ago. Wolves and dogs differ by about one percent; using the wolf-coyote time scale, this suggests that they parted company about 135,000 years ago -- a lot earlier than the date implied by the first distinctly non-wolflike dog fossil. . . . That it happened at a time when "humans were barely human," as Gregory Acland -- a veterinarian who works with Aguirre at Cornell's Center for Canine Genetics and Reproduction -- puts it, raises an interesting possibility. It suggests that early man may not have sought to domesticate dogs at all. Rather, proto-dog found it in his interest to hang around people, and somehow persuaded them not to throw rocks at him or eat him. That is a teleological statement, of course; if this scenario is correct, there was no conscious intent on the part of the dogs. But there was arguably little or no conscious intent on the part of the people, either. The wonder and beauty of natural selection is that it is creative; it crafts solutions that for all intents and purposes seem to reflect intelligence -- "unthinking" intelligence, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett aptly put it. The evolutionarily correct way to state all this is that human beings, with their campfires and garbage heaps and hunting practices, but above all with their social interactions, represented an ecological niche ripe for exploitation by wolves. Or at least by those wolves that through some chance modification in their genetic makeup were able to exploit that niche and then prospered to pass on those traits to their offspring. Although wolves today are the most widespread wild land mammal in the world -- with a range that extends from North America to Europe to Asia, encompassing everything from semi-desert to tundra to subtropical forest -- their total population probably numbers no more than 150,000. In the United States there are about 50 million owned dogs and millions more unowned -- eloquent evolutionary testimony to the wisdom of mooching off people rather than fighting it out in the wild. Dogs and Determinism WHAT is so exploitable about human society? And how do dogs manage to exploit it? We are, as the animal behaviorist John S. Kennedy called us, "compulsive" anthropomorphizers -- always on the lookout for behaviors that mimic, even superficially, human social phenomena such as loyalty, betrayal, reciprocity. These are useful things to look out for when one is a group-dwelling animal whose survival is threatened less by ravenous wild beasts than by back-stabbing fellow group dwellers. Our cognitive ability to ascribe motives to others is a large part of what makes us human. But it truly is compulsive. Human beings do it so instinctively that they are forever ascribing malignant or benignant motives even to inanimate forces such as the weather, volcanoes, and internal-combustion engines. Our very cleverness is the start of our undoing when we're up against an evolutionary sharpshooter like the dog. We are primed to seize on what are, in truth, fundamental, programmed behaviors in dogs and read into them extravagant tales of love and fidelity. Often dogs need do no more than be their simple selves to amaze and beguile us. Cheers, Dan.