Homo Dulcis
Human Puppies?
We humans have been churning out evolutionary theories for many decades (centuries). We want to explain why we are so smart.
My proposal is: “Homo Dulcis”
Dulcis is Latin for “sweet”.
The idea is that as human settlements grew larger and larger there was more pressure to be able to resolve differences and get along with each other. Think about puppies and kittens. Are you more likely to fight with an angry dog or a cute puppy?
Which leads to better survival? Aggressive fighting? Or charming socialization?
The Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman, coined the term “Homo puppy”.
A study was conducted in Siberia to transform naturally aggressive silver foxes into friendly animals. In just a few generations of breeding it was successful. American Brian Hare, thought about this and realized that the friendlier animals were also more intelligent!
If you want to breed intelligent animals, you don’t select for intelligence, you select for friendliness! The same neurotransmitters associated with friendliness, serotonin (the “happy hormone”) and oxytocin (the “love hormone”) also are what drive growth of the hippocampus.
Part of the theory is that as human settlements grew there was pressure to get along with each other and this would have also resulting in mating pressure. Imagine the people who were most aggressive and unfriendly being ostracized and having fewer opportunities to mate.
This has been observable in my own life. Many men, this is guys around forty years old, have said “I want to be you when I grow up.” Nice guys don’t “finish last”, nice guys find plenty of women that are attracted to them.
The common myth that women are attracted to “bad boys” is misleading. What women are really attracted to are good guys that can generate excitement.
Individual mileage may vary. 😇
We can reflect on this and be worried that “phones” are reducing (friendly) socialization and this may dumb down the population. A grim future for humanity unless we can reverse this trend. Take off the masks, don’t social distance, let’s be “Homo Dulcis”. Let your sweetness shine!
I'm a little skeptical of this one.
People love puppies, but we wouldn't have kept dogs in our lives if they hadn't grown up to become adult dogs that were useful in many other ways. If they'd remained puppies, we might keep them for food just as we keep cows and goats for food. They wouldn't be our close companions. The initial value of dogs to human society was that they became socialized as part of a human pack. As members of the pack, they barked to warn us of intruders in our territory and would attack those intruders if those intruders were seen as a threat. We developed breeds to do certain tasks that are not dependent on their being lovable. The dogs that protected our herds of sheep didn't need to be loving companions. They just needed to keep the sheep from wandering too far from the flock and they needed to keep predators from attacking the flock. They didn't do either of these things by being lovable. Instead, they scared the sheep into staying into one flock and scared or attacked predators that threatened the sheep.
Plenty of species have survived millions of years without being lovable. Sharks are a vastly old species, but they are not lovable or friendly. They are not particularly sociable within their own species. They found a niche that fits their personality, and they have filled that niche for a long time. People haven't established that we can fill any niche for a similarly long time.
The Siberian fox experiment wasn't just an experiment to try to tame the foxes. The scientist was studying them in general and decided to try breeding the more human-friendly foxes to other human-friendly foxes. This strategy produced more and more friendly generations of foxes. This approach also led to changes in the foxes' physical characteristics. The resultant foxes were not really better suited for survival in wild Siberia. They were just better adapted to captivity.
We sometimes see similar behavior with other animals. Certain reptile species will have individuals who don't seem to have much natural defensiveness towards people. They aren't tame according to the definitions that many people use, but they are fairly easy to handle. As breeders produce more generations that have been around people their entire lives and have come to see people as sources of food, they are more tame in their behavior. Their brains don't allow them to adapt as much and become as obviously domesticated as dogs are, but they are different. If one wants a reptile as a nice pet, getting one that has been in captivity for five or six generations from a breeder is much easier than picking up one under a rock and trying to tame it. That doesn't mean that the fifth-generation pet is better adapted to anything except captivity.
I've had nothing but bad luck in my relationships with women. People tell me that I'm a very nice guy. Plenty of women have liked me as a friend, but few women who have other choices have ever wanted me for romantic or sexual relationships. The idea that "nice guys" will do just fine is not true for every nice guy.
My conclusion after decades of watching relationships from the outside is that men are attracted to physical beauty and women are attracted to self-confidence. Some people make a good argument that physical beauty is just a proxy for fertility. The "ologists" (psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, etc.) will say that woman are attracted to power because they want a man who can ensure that their children grow up with advantages. I believe that power might be the underlying quality, but the proxy trait is self-confidence.
In both men and women, the proxy trait has more emotional power than the underlying trait. Men at a party with a hot forty-year-old and a frumpy, dumpy twenty-year-old will be influenced by the hot forty-year-old. Even if they engage in the contrarian behavior of going out of their way to talk to the unattractive twenty-year-old, they are being driven and influenced by the beauty of the forty-year-old. They behave this way even though they know at some level that if producing a bunch of offspring is the goal, the ugly young woman is a better choice than the beautiful forty-year-old at the end of her reproductive years.
I've seen guys who are complete losers but still have relationships with beautiful women because they have self-confidence. They are sometimes nice guys and sometimes the opposite of nice guys. They don't have any real power. They don't have jobs that give them power. They haven't risen to political positions that would give them power. They aren't physically strong. They aren't gifted in some area of production or entertainment. They are losers, but they draw women because they have self-confidence. Their relationships may fail, but they find other relationships because they have that self-confidence that grabs a woman's emotions in a way that nothing else does.
We mistake the success of these self-confident losers for a general success of "bad boys." Among all of the losers, we notice them because their self-confidence gives them success with attractive women. The other losers are largely invisible to us because they have nothing we want. The success of these guys causes nice guys who don't have self-confidence to think that women are attracted to the "bad boys." To the extent that some level of self-confidence is necessary to reject certain norms of regular life, the "bad boys" might have an advantage because their being "bad boys" suggests that self-confidence.
For both men and women, there are also counterfeits to the proxy traits. Sometimes, ugly women can give an illusion of being more attractive by dressing in the right kind of provocative way. If their legs are attractive enough, they can just wear short skirts to create the illusion of being attractive overall. Other times, they can wear a longer skirt with a very high slit on the side. The slit will stay closed enough of the time that men don't easily see that the woman's legs aren't attractive, but the slit creates a line that gives the illusion of long, well-shaped legs. For guys, volume and bravado can provide the illusion of self-confidence. Most men would rather avoid fights because anything can happen and even a victory can lead to consequences in civil or criminal court. Even if a man wins the case, the case takes resources from other parts of a good man's life. Because of this, losers can make themselves look more self-confident by being loud even if they have no ability to back up their words in a fight. They know that good men don't want the fight at all, so they can posture and pose to make themselves look more self-confident. Many wise women can see through this act, but most foolish women and even some wise women don't see through the act. The result is that losers without self-confidence can put on an act and create enough illusion to get an attractive woman for at least a little while. If they get hurt from putting on an act, they can still sometimes parlay their injuries into a civil suit that brings them money when the other guy settles just to get back to his life.
In general, I think that being a nice person is the right thing to do. That alone should be enough to be nice most of the time. I'm just not certain that niceness is a real evolutionary advantage.
Interesting! I always wonder about the "bad boy" claim. I only like/date/marry really nice guys.