Face Centric

 One thing that seems very obvious to me is that humans are just apes with an inflated sense of worth. In part, that's because I currently live with a baby and am struggling to see how anyone could have doubted the monkey nature of the species. At around 17 months, the baby is pure monkey, right down to the noises she makes and how she tries to sit. That won't surprise any modern parents, but as a childless (by choice) person it came as quite a revelation to me. Beyond that - well, I find myself baffled by the refutation of Darwin's theories around evolution and can only assume that Christian doctrine was deeply ingrained and that the people who disputed it either didn't know very much about children, or very much about monkeys. Frankly, both those options seem quite likely. 

It made me think about human consciousness and the way our intelligence works, which seems to me to be intrinsically tied to our troupe nature and our dependence on being part of a group. Even today, we are troupe primates, with an upper limit on the number of people we can interact with before we start to become uncomfortable. This tends to range from 80 to 200 individuals, and there's no doubt that we're nicer about policing our troupe sizes than most of our closest relations in the animal kingdom. Groups of chimpanzees and baboons have rigid group sizes, and operate on a frequently violent one in one out regime. Coupled with the fact that social status, or face, is very important to them, it's obvious that for our kind of mammal, harmony with others, and adapting to fit into a society is of prime importance. So, it would follow that our intelligence is more focused on empathy and understanding emotions than it is perhaps for solving problems. It may also account for our tendency to mimick others - its a survival trait that has also allowed us to pick up tricks from across the animal kingdom. 

For example, we have evidence of crows learning to raise the level of water from square one.

How likely is it that our ancestors saw that, or at least something very similar, and copied it? I don't say that to suggest we aren't clever as fuck as a species - we clearly are or the world wouldn't be in the mess it currently is - but that our nature is tied to others and their actions and emotions. This being said, our brains have three discrete parts, and there are definitely times when those clash, and we're nowhere as rational as we claim. If our ancestors hadn't developed ways to preserve knowledge, I suspect we wouldn't be far off the starting point we see with crows. At the same time, we can see the difficulty a lot of humans have in absorbing information from books, preferring to learn from other people. 

A human face is frequently a shortcut to bypass our logic and reason. It's so important, in face, that a university test found that people are more likely to donate money to charity if there's a picture of a face behind the collection tin than if there are flowers. The idea of being seen, and judged for our actions, influences our behaviour profoundly. Small wonder advertisers use popular celebrities to sell products, while the CEOs behind the world's biggest companies are frequently almost anonymous. I firmly believe the Panama and Paradise Papers news stories in part sank without trace because there weren't many faces we could attach to them. In a similar way, I think we have in part been so slow to react to the climate crisis because hitherto there haven't been many faces we can attach to them, and those that we could have been compromised by other narratives as the different levels of our brains have clashed. 

More tellingly, I think that this is the origin of gods - a belief that a bigger version of us somehow created the world and set things in motion, and bigger human who could be appealed to when things were difficult and were sometimes kind. As we're so focused on others it makes sense that we would create something to fill that role.