Let Humans Be Human

Orgel’s Second Rule is “Evolution is smarter than you are.”

 

(Picture from here.)

 

I first heard this rule (unattributed at the time. Attributed by Francis Crick to Leslie Orgel) back when I was an undergraduate zoology major. It does not attribute intelligence to evolutionary design. It simply states that the solutions natural selection, spontaneous variation, and deep time create appear ingenious to mere humans. 

 

Humans have the irritating trait of either elevating humans to a divine pedestal or degrading them to an undistinguished member of homogenous animals. It is a character flaw we share as a species. 

 

Every species is selected to excel in their particular niche. The front leg of a horse is magnificently built to run on its middle finger. A human is magnificently built to model the world within its neocortex. That limb design did not evolve to pull a cart. Nor did the human neocortex evolve to build skyscrapers. Yet, both manage to do so.

 

This particular set of issues came out of a Thanksgiving conversation as to what was, and was not, more the purview of humans as opposed to other animals. To continue the skyscraper analogy, I’ve heard conversations saying something like “humans are superior because they build skyscrapers” responded to with “well, termites build complex mounds.” Both are true and neither prove the point of the conversant.

 

This particular conversation centered around music. All human cultures have some common qualities. They have stories. They have rules about reproduction and rearing. They have rules regarding community behavior. They have music. The implementations of these can be vastly different but, I think, the fact of their presence is inarguable. I would tend to suggest that qualities that appear in all cultures are likely to have a biologic component. 

 

Yes. I know that all of these cultures invest in the rearing of their children so that we can’t really say there’s a biological underpinning to these qualities—they could just be an artifact of the rearing process. The old nature vs nurture argument. Things might be different if a human were reared in isolation. My only response to that is a human reared in isolation would be barely human. Stories of feral children suggest this. If we have to be around humans to be human, that suggests the biological underpinnings of humanity are a combination of learning and heredity. Therefore, I don’t think it’s such a stretch to think that qualities shared by all of humanity would be any different.

 

I think both of these approaches—that the human species is singular or the human species is one with other animals—are problematic. Continuing to use music as a concept here, if we look at our closest relatives, chimpanzees, they do not have music as we know it. There is evidence of rhythm and spontaneous drumming that begins to approach what humans can do—see here—but we’re back to boiling down a behavior to such a low common denominator that I think the comparison becomes meaningless.

 

There are animals that can recognize melodies—elephants, for example—but do they recognize them as music as we do. Elephants, whales, wolves, and birds recognize and communicate with complex acoustic patterns. Some repeat them. Some repeat them with innovation. Some use them for identification. But I don’t think we should use the word “music” for them unless we’re willing to redefine music to something that is not useful in human discourse.

 

In the case of elephants, birds, and whales, these sounds can be used for individual identification—more akin to names than music. Do animals spontaneously burst into song as an expression of joy to the world? The problem is we don’t know. If a whale sings by itself in the Arctic Sea, is it singing at all? Or is it calling out to find someone else? To extend its community? To attract a mate? 

 

For a long time, ethologists were extremely limited in determining the inner state of an animal. If you have an animal respond to a treat, all you can really say about it is that it responds to a treat under these circumstances. Complex behaviors can be taught by the right training regimen but the internal mental state of the animal could only be inferred from the animal’s behavior. It could not be proven. 

 

The mammalian brain has many similarities between different species. Both humans and dogs, for example, have a neocortex, brain stem, thalamus, etc.—all the same parts but different in size and organization. Dogs, for example, have an enormous olfactory center in the brain compared to a human’s. As technology has improved, the internal state of animals can be sort of demonstrated by using fMRIs on brain activity. I mean “sort of” because there is an underlying assumption that if a given region of the brain demonstrably used in the human for a determined purpose is shown to activate in similar circumstances that the activation is common between the two species.

 

In 2020 a paper was published in PubMed that tested dogs shown images while in an fMRI machine. The dogs were shown facial images of strangers, the primary caregiver, and familiar people while the MRI tracked brain activity. It was shown that the region in humans involved in attachment and emotion were more activated when the images of the caregiver were shown than the other two images. Other studies have shown similar results reflecting oxytocin levels.

 

When this came out, it was suggested that dogs love their humans in the same way humans love their dogs. The studies do not show this at all. To do that, we’d have to know what both humans and dogs feel when they feel love. What it suggests to me is that one of the fundamental mammalian interactions might well be common between two species. (Of course, we will ignore the thousands of generations of dogs being bred to accept human authority. I.e., did we select them for this or is it a happy accident? Until we do the same test with a wolf or an elephant, we’ll never know, will we?)

 

This is further complicated with animals whose brain organization separated long before we had such things as neocortices—birds, for example. Mammals and the line the led to birds (via dinosaurs) split before there was anything resembling a mammal. The term “neocortex” means “new brain” and evolved in mammals after that split.

 

But going back to music. 

 

I am not saying music is the divine nature of human beings, arising de novo in the human species. In evolution, nothing arises de novo. Natural selection always works with what it has, not what it should have. So, for humans to evolve something music, some protomusic had to be there first. Something had to be present to be selected upon. I am saying that we evolved with it to the point that attributing “music” to non-humans can only be done by trivializing what it means to human beings.

 

It’s always been my thought we sang before we spoke. Music evokes emotion and the mechanism of emotion are primitive indeed. They were in the mammalian repertoire long before there were primates, much less human beings. Did we share calls like howler monkeys? Did we practice a cappella harmony out there on the prairie to find each other and console each other when the only thing we had was each other?

 

I think so.