Humanity's Worst Invention

I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday. It occurred to me that hate was a somewhat unique attribute to humans. Significant parts of the emotional pallet are palpable in intelligent mammals but hatred and anger do not feature in the same way in the non-humans as they do with the humans. It is hard enough explaining ones own emotions so trying to explain how a dog or cat feels differently will not be a seamless process!

The widest gap between humans and other mammals is of course languange. This allows us to create a much more real mental construct for past and future. Most mammals have a "two dimensional" emotional pallet where all the shades are rooted in the present. Humans manage to have warped their emotions over a three dimensional canvass where by things can be past, present or future. While you may get nervous dogs as much as you do nervous people you will not find a dog worrying in the absence of a thing to worry about. A dog will learn not to walk in front of a car as a result of its memory from previously getting run over and loosing a leg. It will not however spend its days regretting getting run over in the first place or indeed worrying about the next car that is going to hit it. Dogs are aware of past and present, cause and effect but they do not house their emotions. Emotions relating to experiences with cars are almost entirely confined to situations containing cars in this example. The dog does not carry those things with it in quite the same way people are inclined too.

Fight or flight is a practical survival mechanism when faced with danger. The issue is that past and future dangers still elicit bastardizations of fight or flight emotions in humans. You can't run from something that has happened, nor can you fight it. All their is to do is accept it and learn from it but that is not often how humans behave as a result of past fight or flight moments. I think that it is the structuring of time aspects within our emotional range that has resulted in hate and anger being such significant emotions in the human range.

Anger and hate are not practical or useful emotions. They are a damaging side product of an emotional construct that hasn't caught up with our intellectual capacities (or indeed our modern way of life). I have always felt like emotions where a blend of things, like mixing paint. You have your general positive paints and your negative ones. Then you have your personal paints that relate to feelings about yourself and ones that relate outwards to things, other people and so forth. Mix a positive paint with another persons paint and you have affection, mix the positive paint with your own and you have pride. There is another set of shades/tints or whatever you want to consider them as in your own analogous understanding of things. That is more the context of the thing or being. Each different mix results in a new colour of emotion. While humans many have the broadest range of possible emotional colours they can mix it seems as if many of them are redundant or even counterproductive. Their are shades and gaps on our large three dimensional canvass that have no productive value but none the less need filling in.

The purpose of emotions from an evolutionary perspective is simply a way of quickly aiding an animal in decision making. For simple creatures with simple lives it is a pretty good system. It allows creatures with fairly little understanding of their environment or the mechanisms by which things work to function very effectively within those systems. Humans have broken out of this blissful bubble of ignorance enjoyed by the rest of the living world. We shouldn't need emotion to guide us in our day to day as we understand how things function. We can plan, organize and arrange things. We can consider potential different outcomes and prevent bad ones occurring. While all this extra knowledge of our environment is fantastic for technology and science it poses problems for our poor sensibilities!

When we come across something we dislike in the world we generate the fight or flight emotional paint mixer. When that thing is far away in time or space there is no action to be taken. You are left with this nasty shade of hate that directs you to act but has no proper outlet. As such it lingers, like a heavy metal trapped in the body. There are lots of people out there who are building up unhealthy levels of hate for which there is no proper outlet or useful way to enact.

If you mistreat and beat a dog it will dislike you. Depending on the dog in question it will either cower in fear when it thinks it sees you or it will try and attack you. What the dog will not do is brood on that fear and grow it out of proportion. It will not machinate in the absence of your presence ways to hurt you back or eradicate your potential threat. Revenge is entirely a human trait. It is something we like to think of as an outlet for our buildup of hate. Animals don't do revenge because it is a completely stupid endeavor. It is a risk and a waste of time and resources. If animals bothered with revenge they would not fare so well in the big game of evolution!

I think there is this misconception that evolution is perfect and that emotions are a pure and righteous natural response to things. People don't perceive hate and anger as pernicious problems as they imagine we have them for a good reason. I propose the reason we have such things is the evolutionary equivalent of growing pains. When your bones grow too fast for your tendons and they hurt! Our intelligence has outpaced our emotions and as a species we are hurting. Anger and hate are the toxic appendix we could really do with finding a good way to remove. By all means, dislike something. Have preferences and opinions. Just don't let those things turn into anger and hate. Fantastic advice in theory but all too akin to me suggesting you simply stop some other natural bodily function like digestion.

Normally I like to propose solutions when I highlight problems. I am not exactly sure what a sensible solution is for this one. Evolution won't now fix it for us so we can't just wait and hope it will solve itself. I am not sure that a medical, genetic or technological solution is a good idea either. It sounds like it would touch on some serious moral issues and would likely have some scary unpredicted side effects at least in the development stage. Probably the best route to easing the tensions caused by hate and anger in society is cultural change. If people are made more aware of the issue and if the viewpoint shifted from emotions all being pure and natural then it would certainly be a big step in the right direction.

Evolutionary Selective Breeding

I have a theory regarding evolution. It makes some sense logically but as ever I only have anecdotal evidence and have no plan to obtain any scientific evidence on the matter. My first premise is that members within a species, or a not insignificant proportion of those members, have a predisposition to being attracted to similar features to those they have themselves. While I have seen this plenty enough with people it was actually the occurrence of it in dogs that was the real tip off. Cultural effects could very easily be the driving force in humans pairing off but that seems like it would be a much weaker force in dogs. When out and about with a pack of assorted dogs and we come across another dog it is always those closest in breeds to it that get most excited. The Labradors want to get frisky with the other Labs, the Terriers prefer the Terriers and so on and so forth. It is clearly just a trend as well, it is like a filter that applies to a more abstract notion of attractiveness. There are lots of big handsome dogs that all the bitches have the eye for regardless of their breed. The overall attractiveness of a dog is modified by the closeness in breed to the bitch evaluating him. A medium looking Lab looks better to another Lab on average than it does to a Schnauzer. They say there is no accounting for taste however I propose that there is some accounting for taste, certainly statistically when it comes to what we find attractive.

They say opposites attract, that is also true to a degree but I don't think it is the predominant factor. For one, differences stand out more than similarities in a pair. Couples are more alike than they are different although the areas in which they are different typically are very polar. These polar attributes in human couples are more to do with character and skills than they are with looks but there are some trends there too. Now, this is all conjecture but it would make good evolutionary sense in the way that good science involves controls. If you are predisposed to traits that are either similar or opposite in regards finding a mate and producing offspring then that will have the best and quickest results overall for your species. You still get good genetic variation by encouraging both opposite and like attributes however you focus your results so to speak. A bad trait will become more localized and have more chance of failing to reproduce in further generations, it will be removed from the gene pool more rapidly. Equally a good trait will be adopted more rapidly. If you purely mix genetic material at random evolution will be slow. If you are able to focus on a mix of more of the same genetic material with fewer yet more extreme differences then your species will evolve quicker and more suitably. It is like selective breeding but done with sensible logic and maths as nature loves to do rather than by design as we humans understand and practice it.

That is basically it, a theory on how we select mates based on how it would best advance the evolution of a species on the whole. I assume this occurs quite a long way down the tree of life among species that reproduce sexually. So this is good for evolution in the wilds of nature but what does it mean for humans?

The spread of human traits should be increasing and it seems like it is. Humans are the second (first? pretty sure dogs is first) most diverse species on the planet. With dogs it is down to the selective breeding we have imposed on them. With humans it is for a different reason. Our technology and society is the main thing aiding us in our capacity to survive. Being short or tall, fat or thin, stupid or smart, now has very little baring on your ability to reproduce compared to really any point in our history, it being increasingly important the further you go back in time. Most health issues now affect people later in life. Without nature ruthlessly plucking off any imperfect design humanity has become incredibly diverse. Technology has given the design space of humans a lot of wiggle room. Our predisposition towards mates with some significant number of similar physical attributes combined with this large wiggle room has lead to a very diverse species in what seems like a pretty short space of time on the evolutionary time scale. There are both pros and cons to an increasingly diverse population and discussion of that seems like like it would be best left for another time.