I'm bringing my thoughts about the social implications of neoteny back over here where it all began.
First, it's not accurate to say that people are either neotenous or not neotenous because we are already highly neotenous - otherwise we would get up and run around on the day we are born.
Something that I never even considered before I started thinking about neoteny, is how extremely cooperative we are – all our utilities, water, sewage, electricity, gas etc, plus food production and distribution and many other features of our lived lives, these are all almost unbelievably durable, large-scale cooperative ventures. Unbelievable because of how we habitually think about “people”, right?
In fact, it's probably much easier to argue for a skew towards cooperative behavior as a survival adaptation generally in nature, than survival-of-the-fittest non-cooperative behavior. There are myriad examples of cooperative relationships both within and between species: Mycilia and tree roots; bacteria and human digestion; social insects; nesting birds; wolf packs; vampire bats; marmots with sentries and warning calls, etc.
But I'm not the first to observe the survival benefits of cooperative behavior:
Anarchists were on to it back in 1902:
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is a book by Peter Kropotkin on the subject of mutual aid, written while he was living in exile in England. It was first published by William Heinemann in London in October 1902. The individual chapters had originally been published in 1890-96 as a series of essays in the British monthly literary magazine, Nineteenth Century.
Written partly in response to Social Darwinism and in particular to Thomas H. Huxley's Nineteenth Century essay, "The Struggle for Existence", Kropotkin's book drew on his experiences in scientific expeditions in Siberia to illustrate the phenomenon of cooperation.
After examining the evidence of cooperation in nonhuman animals, pre-feudal societies, in medieval cities, and in modern times, he concludes that cooperation and mutual aid are the most important factors in the evolution of the species and the ability to survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Ai ... _Evolution
And more recently, behavioral scientists and economists are on to it:
A COOPERATIVE SPECIES:
HUMAN RECIPROCITY AND ITS EVOLUTION
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By Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis
Cooperation was prominent among the suite of behaviors that marked the emergence of behaviorally modern humans in Africa. Those living 75,000--90,000 years ago at the mouth of what is now the Klasies River near Port Elizabeth, South Africa, for example, consumed eland, hippopotamus, and other large game. The rock painting of hunters and their prey on the jacket of this book is from the nearby Drakensberg Mountains. The Klasies River inhabitants, and their contemporaries in other parts of Africa, cooperated in the hunt and shared the prey among the members of their group. Even earlier evidence of trade in exotic obsidians extending over 300 kilometers in East Africa is another unmistakable footprint of early human cooperation. Other primates engage in common projects. Chimpanzees, for example, join boundary patrols and some hunt cooperatively. Many species breed cooperatively, with helpers and baby sitters devoting substantial energetic costs to the feeding, protection and other care of non-kin. Social insects, including many species of bees and termites, maintain high levels of cooperation, often among very large numbers of individuals. But Homo sapiens is exceptional in that in humans cooperation extends beyond close genealogical kin to include even total strangers, and occurs on a much larger scale than other species except for the social insects.
In A Cooperative Species, we show that people cooperate not only for selfish reasons but also because they are genuinely concerned about the well-being of others, try to uphold social norms, and value behaving ethically for its own sake. People punish those who free-ride on the cooperative behavior of others for the same reasons. Most of this evidence comes from behavioral experiments in which individuals have the opportunity to divide up substantial sums of money between themselves and others and also to pay for the opportunity to punish those who act selfishly. We took our experiments out of the lab and into societies of hunters and gatherers in Africa, Asia and Latin America. One of us even hunted with the Hadza people of Tanzania to get some idea of the kinds of lives our ancestors might have led.
We concluded from this research that among economics majors in the lab and hunter-gatherers in the forest, contributing to the success of a joint project for the benefit of one's group, even at a personal cost, evokes feelings of satisfaction and pride. Failing to do so is often a source of shame or guilt. Cooperation thus is sustained by altruistic motivations that induce people to help others when not helping would result in their having higher fitness or other material rewards.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A ... Gintis.php
So if we allow that positive effects of neotenous development include adaptability, creativity, innovation, cooperative behaviour, horizontal orientation (to peers) and increased intelligence and that accelerative development (that's the opposite of neoteny) have positive survival effects too, which include individualism, strength, boldness, competitiveness, aggressiveness, strong in-group bonding, I think that we can start to figure out what's going on with those Bastards, the Sociopatholigarchs.
I imagine that for small populations, less neotenous, more accelerative behaviors favour survival and that in large populations, the reverse is true – ant colony vs wolf pack. So what happens when a large population trends towards accelerative development? Right. Scary. You get the accelerative types seizing control of the fruits of cooperation to aggress against competing out-groups.
So our predicament is not that we are generally too neotenous, it's that we are a mixture of both more neotenous and more accelerative tendencies. Given our very large and very cooperative population, that's a very precarious predicament.
Also accelerative types seem more susceptible to certain types of manipulations, like “priming” and “framing” and tend towards xenophobia- all that oxytocin washing around in their brains:
While oxytocin may enhance positive emotions and pro-sociality with the people we care about, it may also contribute to negative views and behaviors towards people to whom we are not close. Research in social psychology finds that humans simultaneously show favoritism for the people in their social circle (“ingroup”) and derogation of people in social groups that are different from their own (“outgroup”). Although not conclusive, recent findings suggest that administering oxytocin to males not only enhances their in-group favoritism, but in some cases, also increases defensiveness towards outgroup members.
http://brainblogger.com/2011/07/23/a-th ... our-brain/
The emotional responses elicited by the way options are framed often results in lack of logical consistency in human decision making. In this study, we investigated subjects with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using a financial task in which the monetary prospects were presented as either loss or gain. We report both behavioral evidence
that ASD subjects show a reduced susceptibility to the framing effect and psycho-physiological evidence that they fail to incorporate emotional context into the decision-making process. On this basis, we suggest that this insensitivity to contextual frame, although enhancing choice consistency in ASD, may also underpin core deficits in this disorder. These data highlight both benefits and costs arising from multiple decision processes in human cognition.
http://the-mouse-trap.blogspot.com/2008 ... m-and.html
How is that a deficit, again? Bleh.
And in fact, neuroscientists have found that the brains of Liberals and Conservatives are structurally and cognitively different:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_a ... rientationNow, removing judgement or preference, for infants' brains to be able to adjust quickly to the environment that they are born into, whether it's violent and unpredictable or safe, supportive and cooperative, is probably the ne plus ultra evolutionary adaptation. Thus when you are talking to your Conservative associates, you are talking to a brain that functions in a particularly and remarkably adaptive way, one that defaults to fear and aggression as a survival requirement. Your rational arguments and facts are not going to change how those brains function. Making those people feel safe and included might, though: “We are the 99%. Cops are the 99%”
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There are implications relating to Girard's theory of Mimetic Violence here too, that I haven't worked out yet.
Cheers!
[the British] government always kept a kind of standing army of news writers who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented & put into the papers whatever might serve the minister
T Jefferson,
