(Roughly) Daily

The estimable Brad DeLong ponders the Discovery Channel series Naked and Afraid, concluding that “the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz had a greatly exaggerated view of what he would have been able to do if he only had a brain”…

There is a shlock TV show, on the Discovery Channel, called “Naked & Afraid”.

In it, two humans are dropped into a wilderness somewhere, naked, with one and only one piece of technology each (usually something like a knife, a fire starter, or a fishing line). All around them are other mammals doing their mammal thing: living their lives, reproducing their populations, evolving to fit whatever niche they have found where they are. But the two humans dropped by themselves (well, they are surrounded by cameramen, sound technician, drivers, logistical support, and such who do not help and who stay out of the field of view) do not. Instead, the humans proceed, not too slowly, to start starving to death.

I am not being figurative or metaphorical…

[DeLong details the altogether dire deterioration and resulting ailments of two recent “contestents”…]

… Perhaps you just shrug your shoulders and say: “humans are relatively inept”… The other mammals out in the Amazon have been equipped by Darwin’s Daemon with teeth, claws, instincts, and brains that allow them to get into daily caloric balance. We don’t have much in the way of teeth and claws. We do have opposable thumbs. We do have big brains. They are supposed to compensate. But perhaps you shrug your shoulders and say: “they do not compensate very well”. For, out in the wilderness, Melissa Miller’s brain and thumbs failed at the one job for which Darwin’s Daemon gave them to us, for which other mammals’ teeth, claws, instincts, sprinting speed, dodging quickness, and much smaller and thus less energetically expensive brains largely suffice.

The rule: a smart, knowledgeable human (or two) in the wilderness naked should be afraid: they are highly likely to start starving to death.

And yet: Somehow we are here. We have not all yet been eaten. We have been evolved evolved. Our ancestors survived, and reproduced.

Our ancestors started to come down from the trees about seven million years ago. That was when we left the ancestors of our chimpanzee cousins still up in the forest canopy.

By five million years ago, the ardipitheci were walking upright when they had to, with much smaller and less sexually-dimorphic canines, but as of them with no signs of fire or stone‑tool use or indeed of semi-systematic butchery. Their brain cases were only 350cc, only 350 cubic centimeters. By 3.5 million years ago, the autralopitheci afarenses were habitually walking on two legs with their 450cc brain-cases. By 2.5 million years ago, the homines habiles with their Oldowan stone toolkit and 650cc brain-cases were around. And paleontologists judge they deserve our genus name: homo. By 1.8 million years ago, there were the homines erecti spreading out across the world, with their Acheulean handaxes, their endurance walking/running, and their 950cc brain-cases. When we look back 600,000 years ago, the world was then populated by the likes of the homines heidelbergenses: widely-controlled fire; complex hunting with tools like spears.

These people were not yet us: Their brain-cases were only 3/4 of the size of our brain-cases of 1350cc. They did not have organized big‑game hunting with spears, complex prepared‑core toolmaking techniques, long‑distance mobility, or evidence of our sustained and cumulative symbolic culture—cave art and engravings, personal ornaments, ritual burials, complex language‑supported planning, long‑distance exchange networks, composite tools made with adhesives, tailored clothing, or shelters. They did not have the final brain expansion, the globular skull, the reduced brow, or the chin.

And between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago there emerged people we definitely call us: homines sapientes, albeit “archaic”, with our brain-case size of 1350cc, but without the fully globular skull, the reduced brow, or the chin.

From a chimpanzee-sized brain one-quarter the size of ours five million years ago to our current state, our ancestors and then we have been evolved. And now we are here. So how can there have been so much selection pressure for larger brains when, even today, out in the wilderness they are insufficient to keep us, when naked individuals, from being hungry and afraid?

You know where I am going here. The answer of course, is simple: What is smart—what the brain is good for—is not each of our brains, but all of our brains thinking together. And the tools that we, and those who came before us, have made—tools that no one individual could make in a lifetime, and that embody all of that thinking-together one. Melissa Miller is an expert on knives, how to use them, and what to use them for. She could not make one from scratch.

From long-ago Acheulean handaxes to contemporary hunger in the Amazon, the throughline is simple: selection favored group knowledge and group production by a pecialized division of labor, not solo genius. Our edge not only was and is not claws or speed, it was and is not the ability to think up clever solutions to problems on the fly. Instead, it was pooled memory and anthology thinking-power, plus the division of labor that allows us to carve tools that contain the results of that collective thinking-power…

“Does Each of Us Have a Big Enough Brain to Compensate for Our Lack of Fangs, Claws, Sprinting Speed, & Dodging Quickness?” from @delong.social.

* “the Scarecrow” in The Wizard of Oz

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As we band together, we might recall that it was on this date in 1926 the Winnie-the-Pooh was first published…

The origin of the name of the bear that was stuffed with fluff began years before the book Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne [here] was published on this day in 1926. During the first World War, Canadian Lieutenant Harry Colebourn caught a bear and named her “Winnie” after his adopted hometown in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She was the brought to the London Zoo where Milne’s son, Christopher Robin would visit. [See also here.]

Christopher re-named his own teddy bear, Edward Bear, to Winnie-the-Pooh. His father named the characters in his book after Christopher’s stuffed animals including Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger. (Mr. Milne added Owl and Rabbit).

In 1961, Walt Disney Productions bought the rights to the stories to create a series of cartoon shorts beginning with Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree which debuted in 1966. The last full-length animated movie from Disney, simply titled Winnie the Pooh, came out in theaters in 2011; the live action movie about the inspiration of the stories, Goodbye Christopher Robin by Fox Searchlight Pictures arrived in theaters in October of 2017 and Disney followed up with a live action/CGI about an adult Christopher Robin returning to the 100 Acre Wood in 2018.

– source