Actually, it started raining when the earth started cooling from molten into solid rock, and the vapor in the atmosphere started condensing into water. It rained long enough to fill the oceans. Not sure on the math, but many millennia, and life didn’t form right away.
A lot of research has been done since 1984. You asked specifically about the population explosion over the last 12,000 years. That question is simple. Hunter-gatherer societies live off the natural produce of the land, and whether the land in question is jungle or savannah or coastline, the human population is limited by the amount of food the environment produces. Once the earth was “filled,” so to speak, population growth was stagnant until the invention of agriculture.
On cooperation, it reaches much farther back than 12,000 years ago. Religion is a latecomer too. Both language and morality require advanced forms of cooperation, and the roots of those things stretch back to H. erectus at least. Sarah Hrdy, in Mothers and Others, traces the roots of cooperation to cooperative parenting, well more than a million years ago.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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That’s exactly what made it happen. The odds.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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As I said Jay, in geological time it might as well be simultaneous.
Yes, I’m picking nits and not bothering to look up dates, but life began in the oceans, whatever the mechanism and chemistry. In geological time, we might as well have skipped straight from Australopithecus to sapiens. That’s a big scale.
Actually, @Dale is right. Odds don’t make things happen. Odds said that Barcelona and Real Madrid wouldn’t lose on the same day, but they did. The game still must be played. Odds are that the odds will prove right, but not every time. Perhaps the odds were against life, but it formed anyway?
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Not at all, it’s all statistically inevitable. Cooperation wins in game theory, operational research, so it does in reality. Life is intrinsically cooperative. A winning game.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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The latter, in the last minute. Water was present 4.1 gya, life 4. 20 minutes. In the last 24 hours. Two and a half percent. Have you seen the best film ever made?
Yep. Looks like you answered your own question. Of course the development of language with the coding and representational abilities even surpassing that of DNA was a big part of what made this possible.
I think it is intrinsic to the very process of life.
On the contrary, it has always been the most successful evolutionary strategy, especially early on in evolution. That is when you got real advances in evolutionary development.
Not only will you find symbiotic relationships in the earliest of ecosystems but the cooperation implicit in multicellular organisms was a key step in evolution. Any close examination of the human body reveals that we are literally built of cooperative symbiotic relationships. There are also hints that eukaryotic cells evolved from prokaryotic in a similar way by symbiosis and cooperation. And when you go to prebiotic evolution I think the cooperation of different chemical cycles was a key part of the formation of life itself.
NOW consider the implications of this. The old social Darwinist idea about society’s protection of its weaker members being an obstacle to evolution is revealed to be pure nonsense. Evolution is not even driven by natural selection as they supposed, but by variation. And society’s protection of its weaker members increases variation. We don’t all have to be Daniel Boones surviving on our own in the wilderness. We now take thousands of different roles in cooperative efforts which enrich everyone’s life. Thus instead of halting evolution this has greatly accelerated it, which is pretty obvious to anyone looking at how fast things are changing in the world.
But doesn’t more evolution mean humans changing into something else? Not necessarily. Eukaryotic cells evolved 2.7 billion years ago and they have not changed much in all that time. The evolution of all the different plants and animals all evolved with those same basic cells. Of course we do see a variety of cells in the body as they have adapted to their special roles and I suppose we might see some of that also, not by the evolution of new species any more than those different cells are different species but changes brought about by the abilities of the developmental relationships which we might call technology.
Yes in what I quoted he is not asking a question He is making an informed comment and giving some of his reasons more detailed reasoning can be found if you explore his other writings.
I must say Klax that I do not understand where you are coming from.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Maybe it does? If cooperation keeps evolving exponentially until everyone puts the interests of others and care of the planet ahead of their own interests, maybe together we become One. The Body of Christ (Paul), the Bride of the Lamb (Revelations)
Er, probably not. Sounds like you’ve been reading too many science-fiction comics. Wake me up when scientists test their theories by producing a living organism from inanimate matter … zzzzzzzz.
Really? How do the laws of biology explain the sudden appearance of fully-formed vertebrate fossils in the Lower Cambrian, with no evidence of evolutionary antecedents?
I integrate Hrdy into a bigger picture on my podcast/blog. I just finished revising and expanding these thoughts for an article in the peer-reviewed Canadian-American Theological Journal, but Adam’s Evolutionary Journey Pts. 1-3 are up your alley. You can listen to the podcast version or scroll down to read. The footnotes should give you plenty of follow-up on Hrdy, especially Zlatev’s paper.
Not always. I’m not talking about symbiosis. (Never mind parasitism.) Cooperation on the human scale isn’t inevitable. Here’s a fun article on the evolution of cooperation.
In game theory involving various Theories of Mind, the agent with ToM1 (comparable to chimps and human toddlers) “does not have a direct competitive advantage” over a an agent with a “zero” theory of mind (most other animals). “Instead, the ToM1 agent suffers the cost for achieving a cooperative solution, which leaves the ToM0 agent with the larger piece of pie.”
The game must still be played.
The only one that come to mind involving game theory is A Beautiful Mind. Is that the reference?
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Nice one Jay. Aye, there’s co-operation and co-operation. Trying to co-operate with a non-co-operator and you lose. So play to win and then be kind? Like dealing with psychopaths.
Here’s a piece I did on Theory of Mind, culture, and mimesis that you might enjoy. It also explains in a round-about way how masks became politicized and a negative role model can affect even adults. Hit play to listen or scroll down to read.