From killer apes to happy thanksgiving

Darwinian theorists, at least those who think beyond accepted dogma and limited set of data that can acceptably be used to test theories (i.e., surveys done with undergraduate psychology students, cross cultural studies of highly westernized people, and limited amounts of descriptive data drawn from the worst ethnographies of all time), realize that they need to account, at some point, not only for altruism (e.g., the bountiful meal that the Indians fed to the starving and largely ignorant British colonists), particularly if that altruism is not returned in kind (did the British ever return that act of altruism, double fold, to those who fed them? What the theory requires is a quick return, probably among people with regular interactions, that is greater than the original gift), but that they need to account for other human behaviors, including rituals. **

This brings us to the topic of rituals involving gifts, or actually we started with rituals, but I have been trying to get from killer apes to ritualized, bountiful, and generous feeding of the stranger, and this requires meandering a bit through the morass that theory has built around human behavior. Modern Darwinian theorists explain altruism (gifts, generosity?) in several ways. The first is group selection, a theory that is wrong and I will not even bother to discuss it, as some very intelligent people have spent a lot of effort doing so (read their stuff, with skepticism of course). This just means that group x, because it has cooperative folk in it, can beat the pants off group y, because group x can, if nothing else, create killer fighting groups).* The second theory is reciprocal altruism, which can explain some behavior, especially that seen in the modern world (this refers to tit for tat--you give to me, I give to you, as discussed in the first paragraph), and the third is kin selection. In the case of the first thanksgiving, I have dismissed explanation one and two (because the colonists did not quickly and adequately reward their saviors and group selection is wrong), but explanation three, kin selection, obviously does not fit either--unless we go back to the early, early common ancestor of all humans (that killer ape?) these people eating together were not close kin, the co-efficient of relatedness was too low

Further, this limited handful of theories, it seems to me, cannot account for the fact that for several hundred years, that first set of thanksgiving behaviors has been ritualized, handed down, from one generation to the next. Thanksgiving, today, is a family ritual of generosity and sharing. I would argue it was a family ritual the first time it was done, with family defined in that case fictively--metaphorical kin. I argue in my book that a fundamental maternal behavior, which is the foundation of kinship, is generosity and care of the vulnerable. Of course this brings us to the topic of "good" mothers, a topic I will discuss on another day when I want to tweak the militant feminists and their easily aroused ire.

Maternal-child interactions, from very early in human prehistory, were ritualized, involving such things as particular feeding interactions, play activities to keep a child quiet if nothing else. I see as stereotyped behavior. A handshake is a ritual, as is a religious service, which involves a large set of stereotyped behaviors. Predictability in a pretty unpredictable world must have been essential for our ancestors and their survival and reproduction.

However, to end this topic, I must return to that act of generosity and the vulnerable position in which such an act places the generous person. Now, at a time when American Indians are vulnerable and in many cases desperate (unemployment being 50% on many reservations), I see no caravans going out to reservations carrying bountiful amounts of food. When a person is generous, that person uses his/her important resources for the benefit of others, in this case relative strangers. These resources go to promote the survival and reproduction of the stranger. They also put those colonists in a position to reward the generous act, but over and over, generation after generation, quite the opposite has been done.

I am not arguing for nobility of past peoples, so much as I am arguing that we need to focus some of our studies on the altruism seen in traditional peoples. Of course, there will be some quick and slick response (at least in my mind, as no one knows this site exists, except my family and this blog is aimed at explaining my book to them in bits and pieces) on the part of theorists. Without having heard any of the arguments, although they will be predictable, probably drawn from something obscure in history that provides another view of the event (something like a statement saying that the Indians only served the worst looking and lowest in nutrient content foods, and kept the good food for themselves--it is way too tempting to rewrite history, as we often do, to fit our theories, and it begs the question of why serve the stranger anything that was at all edible).

So, happy thanksgiving and think about the fact that you may be here because generations ago someone fed a stranger.

*while it may be true that a cooperative set of individuals, meaning they work together towards an aim, can whip a less cooperative set (who can't get an act together), too many genes were being swapped for group selection to explain this.

**my mother would have hated that sentence as she always said that anything important enough to write should not be lessened by putting it in parentheses.