The Brockporter Thought For The Day - Why do humans have such big brains and smarter than other primates?

From the Spring, 2012 issue of YES! magazine

It turns out that cooperating and co-creating explain our evolutionary success just as much as competition does. No wonder neuroscientists using fMRI scans discovered that when human beings cooperate, our brains’ pleasure centers are as stimulated as when we eat chocolate!
And what were the ­evolutionary pressures that turned us into cooper­ators?

Human beings are creatures of meaning, seeking ways to give our days value beyond ensuring our own survival.

 

In her 2009 book Mothers and ­Others, University of California, Davis, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy challenged the accepted belief that our penchant for cooperation emerged through bonding to fight our neighbors. No, she says. Over most of the 200,000 years we’ve been around, there were simply too few of us to warrant fighting over territory. Instead, our capacity for cooperation evolved in response to our unique breeding culture.

While other primates generally don’t trust others to care for their infants, humans have long turned to aunties, grandmas, and friends to help care for their babies from birth. With these “helpers,” children have the “luxury of growing up slowly, building stronger bodies, better immune systems, and in some cases bigger brains,” Hrdy surmises.

It is this capacity for cooperation, honed through shared child rearing, that most distinguishes Homo sapiens, claims Hrdy.

Editor's note: The idea that it takes a whole Village to raise a child is not just psycho-babble but actually turns out to be a practice which has assured the survival of the species of homo sapiens. Some families and communities and societies do, and have done, a better job of supporting the growth and development of its future generations than the United States which has high rates of infant mortality, child poverty, and school failure compared to other first world countries. Here in the United States, policies around children and youth are much harsher than in other first world countries. It might give Americans pause in considering its future and reflecting on what kind of a society we want to become.