www.kithrup.com/brin/neotenyarticle1.html -> www.davidbrin.com/neotenyarticle1.html
Hear a recent speech (from NPR) about 11 TECHNOLOGICAL NIGHTMARES, by renowned futurist economist Paul Streetn. Streetn offers exceptionally wise perspectives about future threats and opportunities. Tolkien's epic fantasy, 14 Lord of the Rings, and how that famous trilogy has played an important role in the long struggle of romanticism against the modern world. This lavish 144 page graphic novel vividly extends one of my classic novellas into a full-length saga -- a dark but ultimately uplifting tale about an alternate world, offering chillingly plausible insight to what the Nazis might have really been up to, during World War II. DC/Wildstorm calls Life Eaters 'the biggest thing to happen in the graphic novels since Watchmen or The Dark Knight'! Now 17 available in bookstores, 18 Contacting Aliens: An Illustrated Guide To David Brin's Uplift Universe is a fun tour of the many alien races people enjoyed in books like 19 Startide Rising and 20 The Uplift War. More than a dozen organizations, spanning a wide spectrum of interest, have lately engaged me for my specialty -- questioning deep-seated assumptions. Much progress has been made in tracing the story of human origins, yet mysteries still shroud how we acquired such unique traits as bipedalism, concealed ovulation, and our prodigious brains. Paleo-anthropology suffers from both a dearth of hard data and a surfeit of enthusiastic opinions -- for example, drawing detailed conclusions about evolution from peculiar patterns of fat deposits in male and female anatomies. Or consider the question of why humans have lost nearly all their hair. It has been suggested that this adaptation enabled our ancestors to fill a niche unavailable to other predators -- keeping cool while chasing game under the noonday sun. Especially in the area of human sociobiology, where evidence is scant and emotions can run high, hypotheses should be offered with good-natured humility. In that spirit I will focus on the trait of neoteny -- or the retention of childlike characteristics in mature members of a species. This process appears so amplified in humanity that we have been called the neotenous clan of apes. Furthermore, even aged humans often retain a plasticity of behavior that is typically found among animals only in the young. Human emphasis on learned, rather than inherited, behavior, has been widely accepted as a chief driver of this trend, requiring our minds to remain supple and receptive for ever-longer spans. This range of physical and mental traits may have a variety of unrelated causes and/or mechanisms, nevertheless they fall under the same overall theme of retention of childlike characteristics. More formally, William Calvin (1991) identifies paedomorphosis ("becoming child-shaped") as juvenilization of the appearance of the end-product, without implications about the mechanism by which it came about. Neoteny has been taken by many authors to mean the slowing of some or all aspects of somatic development. Rather than discussing the general neotenization of our species over the last few million years, I wish to concentrate on how neoteny may have become enmeshed as part of a powerful selective cycle, going far beyond its original causes. A complex cycle of sexual selection that may have proved crucial in making human beings unique among animal species. Although evolutionary biology has lately been defended from a feminist perspective by Patricia Adair Gowaty (1992) and others, caution remains essential when stepping into this arena, hence I will at times seem to belabor the obvious. Let me also emphasize that Homo sapiens appears less riven by sexual dimorphism than most species, and exceptions exist to nearly every generalization. Nevertheless, it seems clear that past and present human dimorphisms are legitimate topics for careful discussion. Although they mature at an earlier age, women do not go on to acquire the toughened skin, coarse body hair, thyroid cartilage, bony eye ridges, or deepened voices which are the common inheritance of most adult hominoids and other primates. Jones and Hill (1993) have shown that this generalization remains valid across racial, ethnic and cultural boundaries. Difference in degree of paedomorphism is one of the few truly decisive human sexual-dichotomies, used by most of us in visually distinguishing women from men. In exploring one possible explanation, we may come to see the heritage of human beings as stranger and more poignant than previously thought. Often, the hardest step in speculative paleo-anthropology lies in overcoming assumptions. So let us back up and begin by asking a very basic question: Why is it that a human female generally has to compete with other women to get a mate? In one contemporary society, the United States, nearly all of the most popular magazines for women trumpet articles advising their readers how to stay competitive in what is portrayed as a desperate struggle to find and keep a mate. American women spend many times more each year on cosmetics than the nation appropriates for space research. Still, no one can reasonably dispute that female humans often do engage in zero-sum contention over an apparently limited supply of suitable males. Except for some spermatophore-donating insects, and a few fish and birds, competition between males for sexual opportunity seems almost universal. Also nearly universal is the far calmer mate-selection process engaged in by females of most species, either accepting the victor in male-male struggles or actively choosing among candidates. This is not to say that females don't compete in nature! The struggle to raise successful offspring is deadly serious. Ethologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (1981) has shown that, among our primate cousins, inter-female competition for status and access to resources may seem quieter than the flashy violence of males, but it is also generally more relentless and complex. And in this narrow area Darwin retains his original authority. Nature's story is nearly always about two sexes with markedly different agendas. Once engaged in gestation, her reproductive success is unaffected by copulations taking place nearby. A leading hypothesis holds that humans became paragons of adaptability by emphasizing general, species-wide behavioral and mental neoteny. Further, our offspring are born nearly unformed, or altricial, replacing reflex instinct with lessons drawn from experience and the accumulated wisdom of the tribe, channeled by only the most general of innate predispositions. This process takes a long time, during which our children are helpless as no others in the history of life on Earth. The presumption goes that human mothers need long-term, dependable partnership to help them carry big-brained, dependent children across the hazardous, exhausting stretch from embryo to maturity. And while some human societies have used brother-sister alliances to fill this need, or communal role-sharing, the majority have left mothers primarily dependent on continued loyalty and aid from the fathers of their children. To put this in perspective with nature at large, consider the extreme case of the elephant seal. During each annual mating season, females congregate onshore. If food is plentiful and the beach roomy enough, there is small cause for struggle between females, so most behaviorists used to be drawn to the noisy, extravagant displays of competing males. Known as a "beach master," each bull elephant seal outweighs any female many times over. By threat, bluster, and frequent bloody fights, he drives off all male interlopers to secure a local monopoly over insemination. Indeed, should the bull be away at the far end of his territory, and a rogue male attempt mating on the sly, females will often squall for the beach master to come drive the invader out. Why do female elephant seals prefer to share one male rather than get individual attention? Turn the question around and consider -- what does the female really need from a male? Female elephant seals, like those of most species, are generally capable of rearing their pups alone. So choice of a mate is determined solely by factors w...
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