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RepleteDivide t1_j83t6j1 wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in What are some of the mechanisms behind why long term physical inactivity and social isolation leads to chronic health diseases? by [deleted]

And just in case it isn't common knowledge, the ultimate cause of those physiological processes is the evolution of a social species. Pre-human apes became highly social as fruit-eating tree-dwelling creatures, and then as they came out of the trees and evolved over the generations as upright-standing apes, the social systems remained, and when H. sapiens evolved, the social system was still there. We need human connection because of that evolution that created our bodies, and that is where the cortisol and psychological distress vs joy comes into play.

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BizWax t1_j8416my wrote

It's inaccurate to say that the social systems "remained", as that suggests they're the same throughout our evolutionary history since first acquiring them. Our sociality has evolved along with us, and is different from that of our non-human ancestors and from the extinct species of our genus. The only thing that's the same is the bare fact of being a social species.

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Boring_Ad_3065 t1_j848s2e wrote

I mean…

Chimps get money, invent prostitution

Engaged in a 4 year tribal war

Like much of evolution, it repurposes and adds on, it doesn’t often reinvent. There’s debate around Dunbar’s number, but some agreement that a lot of us can manage about 50 active personal connections (albeit with high variability). The fact that we added in religion, culture, nations are more meta-evolutions of society (largely enabled by language and written language), not necessarily saying we’ve adapted our brains significantly from 10,000 years ago, but that social structures enabling mass cooperation were generally advantageous for production and competition.

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BizWax t1_j84qv9l wrote

You're conflating cultural evolution and biological evolution. They're qualitatively very different, and operate on entirely different time scales. 10k years ago? The first modern humans appeared 300k years ago, and we were talking about ancestors before that. Sure, you could posit that our biological evolution hasn't adapted to recent cultural evolution, but it has no bearing whatsoever on what I said.

As for your comparison to chimps: just because similarities exist, does not mean they are the same. All the similarities between chimpanzee and human sociality in the world don't erase facts like that a same/similar expression like smiling has very different meanings among chimps compared to humans. Human and chimp sociality are definitely not the same.

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RepleteDivide t1_j8729ii wrote

It's as accurate as saying that fingers remained. But the fingers are different. Yes, they are different; if anyone thought that I was saying otherwise, then... my goodness. Hopefully they speak up to voice that confusion!

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Westbrook_Level t1_j84gmzz wrote

And we seem to be trying to replace it with online socialization, to disastrous effect.

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MC_Queen t1_j847lqd wrote

At some point in history pro-social behaviors helped individuals survive and procreate. So it follows that the ones in the species who developed pro- social behaviors were the ones having babies who survived, and those behaviors passed down. Everyone alive today had ancestors who survived long enough to procreate.

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