Elaine Meinel Supkis
Human evolution has two faces: successful mother/daughter ability to raise intelligent children coupled with the love/hate factor: humans are very dangerous and deadly and we not only kill any and all living things, plant and animal, we wish, we also kill each other. Understanding why we do this and understanding how this is at work today all over the planet as the struggle for survival leads to the deaths of so many children and their mothers. War is hell and we are addicted to it because many humans are psychopaths.
Evolutionary biologists such as the University of Texas' David Buss have widely documented this preference among men worldwide for younger women as mates. Youthful looks, goes the scientific argument, signal that younger women are more fertile than ones approaching menopause. A hard-wired evolutionary attraction explains Playboy bunnies, trophy wives and the curious popularity of Paris Hilton.Not so in our close primate cousins.
"Although it's easy to imagine that male chimps would like to mate with whatever female is available, it turns out they really have strong preferences" for the older females, says anthropologist Martin Muller of Boston University, lead author of the Current Biology study. "We've seen them just ignoring younger females who are all over them."
In the study, Muller and colleagues analyzed eight years of mating observations of the Kanyawara. chimpanzee troop in Uganda's Kibale National Park. Chimpanzees pursue a promiscuous lifestyle, and "male courtship signals" are not very suave ones ("branch shaking" is the most polite.)
In the study, the research team split the chimp troop's females into three categories: pubescent, mothers under age 30, and mothers over age 30. And then they compared the data.
Male chimps at Kibale, it turns out, more often made courtship signals, clustered near ovulating females, fought over mates and saw alpha males initiate mating, with the oldest females. In fact, the male chimps were just about as likely to choose a less-fertile pubescent female as mothers in the under-30 crowd. "Male chimpanzees do not merely disdain young females, but actively prefer older mothers to younger mothers," says the study.
Older mothers are more successful at raising the young. In human communities, when a young female has a baby, the first thing she tries to do is get help from her own mother. And in 'uncivilized' communities, that is who steps in to take charge of the grandchildren. If it is a paternalist society, the mother-in-law or older female sisters or aunts step in. In other words, a human female can raise a child alone but the ones who raise children in large family clusters tend to thrive and have more progeny. The fact that this information is hard wired into the brains of chimpanzees, it not being a 'learned' attitude, is interesting.
Chimp females don't have menopause but human females do. This means they can focus on the larger family unit for a third of their lives. Since childbearing in humans is also very dangerous and stressful, this also means a lifetime of collecting information, experience, wisdom and knowledge of how to do complex things like make pottery or fish hooks, isn't lost in childbirth. Because transmission of vital cultural information is so important, the sex stuff was relegated to the younger females while the nurturing of the community lay in the laps of the elder, wise women.
Young men, for example, don't listen to their wives in many cultures but you can bet, they all listen to MOTHER. The older woman has truly big powers over the family and usually rules that roost even in paternalist societies. In many modern, Western societies, the bond is strongest with the mother/daughter relations. Woe betide a husband who doesn't understand that!
UNITED NATIONS - The conflict in Darfur has spread to two neighboring countries and is now in "free fall" with six million people facing the prospect of going without food or protection, the outgoing U.N. humanitarian chief said Tuesday.Jan Egeland, who steps down on Dec. 12, told The Associated Press in an interview that one of the most difficult problems he has faced was convincing countries of the dire situation in the western region of Sudan.
"I think some of the Arab countries and Asian countries have not really understood we're in a free fall. It's not a steady deterioration. It's a free fall and it includes Darfur, eastern Chad, northern Central African Republic," he said.
I predicted, 40 years ago, when the UN dug all those wells in Africa, the overpopulation of herds would lead to desertfication and the various UN development programs will mostly produce lots of children which will become a hazard, not a blessing, and if the climate goes sour, the massive excess population will crash. As we are now seeing.
The birthrate in the Middle East is soaring, too, and violence is growing. Saudi Arabia has a very high birthrate, for example. China has taken tremendous measures to prevent this, the one child policy being the most famous. Young women lose value if there is overpopulation or derth of resources. The need for more children drops and the need to cannibalize grows.
I see no way to 'fix' the Darfur disaster short of relocating most of the refugee population. Maybe they can all come to Europe and America? Indeed.
We depopulated Africa in the past...as slaves. Now, we want nothing of any of them.
And the ability to enslave or cannibalize is deep within our brain structure. This is why we are able to tame and control wild species. And thanks to the violent past of humans, we have a significant population that is psychopathic. Namely, capable of brutally killing without mercy or any feelings.
Criminal psychopaths are people with aggressive and anti-social personalities who lack emotional empathy.They can commit hideous crimes, such as rape or murder, yet show no signs of remorse or guilt.
It has been suggested that people with psychopathic disorders lack empathy because they have defects in processing facial and vocal expressions of distress, such as fear and sadness, in others.
Professor Declan Murphy and colleagues set out to test this using a scan that shows up brain activity.
They showed six psychopaths and nine healthy volunteers pictures of faces showing different emotions.
Both groups had increased activity in brain areas involved in processing facial expressions in response to happy faces compared with neutral faces, but this increase was smaller among the psychopaths.
By contrast, when processing fearful faces compared with neutral faces, the healthy volunteers showed increased activation and the psychopaths decreased activation in these brain regions.
The researchers said: "These results suggest that the neural pathways for processing facial expressions of happiness are functionally intact in people with psychopathic disorder, although less responsive.
"In contrast, fear is processed in a very different way."
In nature, when one animal shows fear in a herd or group, all others feel fear and respond the same way. But humans have evolved fighting not only other animals but each other. And clans always needed at least 20% of the population to be immune to the genetic command, 'if you see a fearful face, feel fearful too' because the ones lacking this would not run from danger but confront it. They also often were killed so the genes couldn't dominate the population. Just enough of them survived to keep it as part of the genetic heritage.
If this gene is expressed in a human that is coddled and protected we get Bush: a coward who is a bully and who cannot fathom the fear he inspires, he sees only hate and responds violently, himself, via proxies, if possible.
These sort of psychopaths are very dangerous. They can and have killed millions and millions of humans. And not shed a single tear or responded to any cries of pain. And times of ecological stress are when these sorts become powerful. The ability to coldly kill is very human just as the ability to understand pain in even other species is also very human.
I find life an exciting business,The point is succinctness of expression.
Posted by: muska supra | September 29, 2011 at 03:42 AM