https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Kyu0ip4RAn0
At some point we weren’t linguistic creatures at all, right? We separated from the common ancestors between us and chimpanzees about six million years ago. Sometime during that six million year process we started to be able to imitate ourselves first, and then represent ourselves in image and action, and then only after that to start to articulate ourselves. And so a lot of the knowledge that we have is grounded in our embodiment, but also in the shaping of that embodiment across extraordinarily long periods of time. So, like, there’s an implicit way of being in your form, in your embodied form, but more importantly there’s an implicit way of being that’s a consequence of the fact that we’ve existed within hierarchical social structures for far longer than we were even sharing a common ancestor, say, with great apes. So that’s for maybe hundreds of millions of years with regards to being embedded in a hierarchy. So then the question is something like, well, if we’re embedded in a hierarchy, and we have been forever, that’s about 350 million years, by the way, is there a set of attributes that tends reliably to move you up the hierarchy? Because if there is, you see, going up the hierarchy increases the probability of reproductive success. So there’s actually nothing more important to determine over the course of 350 million years inside a hierarchy than how it is that you ratchet yourself up the hierarchy reliably. And you could think about that in some sense as the source of ideals. Well, here’s a kind of a concrete way of thinking about that. You know, if you get a hundred men together, they’re going to organize themselves into a hierarchical structure. They have to, or they’re going to stay chaotic and fight. That’s the other alternative. But the way that the people who are going to rise to the top, they might rise to the top because of their sheer physical prowess and power, but they also might rise to the top because they’re very competent at certain things. And it’s as if all the men are going to get together and vote, and maybe that would actually happen, to determine who best embodies the spirit of the group and who should be granted leadership. And in an evolutionary context, by the way, that would also help ensure that that person would propagate their genes into the next generation. And it’s not a trivial effect, especially among men. It’s a big effect. Because roughly speaking, half of all men are not reproductively successful. So there’s a wicked culling, let’s say, among men. Well, you can see this among chimpanzees as well. They have dominance hierarchies. Some sort of chimps rise to the top. And you might think, well, that’s the caveman chimp who’s best at pounding out all the rivals. But it turns out that that’s not exactly the case. And Franz De Waal has done a very good job of detailing this with his work on chimpanzees in particular. And he’s found that the power-hungry tyrant sort of chimp can rule for a while, but he tends to have a very unstable kingdom. And the reason for that is he’s not very good at mutually grooming. He’s not good at socially connecting with other males. And he isn’t popular among the females and doesn’t attend to the young, essentially. And so what happens is even if he’s like the meanest, toughest guy on the block, two subordinate chimps team up. They make friends. They groom each other. And they have each other’s backs. And one day he’s having an off day because he ate too many fermented bananas the night before. Like they just tear him into pieces. And chimps are unbelievably strong and unbelievably brutal. They seem to have absolutely no internal regulation whatsoever of their aggression. That all seems to be manifested outside in terms of dominance hierarchy control. And we know that because they go on raiding parties into other chimp territories. And when they find chimps that aren’t part of their hierarchy, they just rip them into pieces. And so that’s a scary thing if you think about our similarity with chimpanzees. Because we like to think we have internal controls over our aggression. But it’s not so bloody obvious. I can tell you that. Anyways, what DeWall found was that it’s actually chimps that are more, you might say humane. Although chim-pane? I don’t know what the equivalent is. Let’s say humane that manage to produce hierarchies that are more stable. And actually manage to stay alive on top of them for much longer periods of time. And he thinks about that as the emergence of an implicit morality. Right? It’s a morality that’s acted out. So then you think, well there are different ways of climbing up a hierarchy. There are worse and better ways. The better ways allow you to live longer in a more stable hierarchy. And the evolutionary payoff for that is that you leave more descendants. And so the hierarchy itself becomes a very powerful shaping mechanism that determines how it is that people are going to adapt. Because it’s the primary method of selection. So there’s an ethic in there. There’s an ethic that emerges from the social interactions. But that’s rapidly transformed into a biological selection device. And so we’re selected. And that’s especially true among human beings. Because with chimps, the females are indiscriminate maters. Which is to say that a female chimp in heat will mate with any male chimp. Now, the dominant males chase the subordinate males away. So they’re still more likely to leave offspring than the subordinates. But it’s not because of the females. But human females are different. Human females exert choice. And quite brutal choice, you might put it that way. They’re very choosy. And it’s one of the things that seems to have distinguished us from chimpanzees. And what roughly seems to happen is that the male dominance hierarchy elects men to the higher rungs of the hierarchy. And then the females peel from the top. And so that means that what you can say is that human beings are the consequence of intense male dominance competition. It’s not necessarily dominance, but it’s competition for the upper rungs of the hierarchy mediated by female selection.