Culture war

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war 

Bismarck (left) and the Pope, from the German satirical magazine Kladderadatsch, 1875

A culture war is a cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices. It commonly refers to topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarization in societal values.

The term is commonly used to describe aspects of contemporary politics in the United States, with issues such as abortion, homosexuality, transgender rights, pornography, multiculturalism, racial viewpoints and other cultural conflicts based on values, morality, and lifestyle which are described as the major political cleavage.

Etymology

The term culture war is a loan translation (calque) of the German Kulturkampf ('culture struggle'). In German, Kulturkampf, a term coined by Rudolf Virchow, refers to the clash between cultural and religious groups in the campaign from 1871 to 1878 under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of the German Empire against the influence of the Roman Catholic Church.^[3] The translation was printed in some American newspapers at the time.^[4]

United States

1920s–1980s: Origins

In American usage, "culture war" may imply a conflict between those values considered traditionalist or conservative and those considered progressive or liberal. This usage originated in the 1920s when urban and rural American values came into closer conflict. This followed several decades of immigration to the States by people who earlier European immigrants considered 'alien'. It was also a result of the cultural shifts and modernizing trends of the Roaring '20s, culminating in the presidential campaign of Al Smith in 1928. In subsequent decades during the 20th century, the term was published occasionally in American newspapers.

The expression would join the vocabulary of U.S. politics in 1991 with the publication of Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America by James Davison Hunter, who redefined the American notion of "culture war." Tracing the concept to the 1960s, Hunter perceived a dramatic realignment and polarization that had transformed U.S. politics and culture, including the issues of abortion, federal and state gun laws, immigration, separation of church and state, privacy, recreational drug use, LGBT rights, and censorship. The perceived focus of the American culture war and its definition have taken various forms since then.

1991–2001: Rise in prominence

James Davison Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, introduced the expression again in his 1991 publication, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Hunter described what he saw as a dramatic realignment and polarization that had transformed American politics and culture.

He argued that on an increasing number of "hot-button" defining issues—abortion, gun politics, separation of church and state, privacy, recreational drug use, homosexuality, censorship—there existed two definable polarities. Furthermore, not only were there a number of divisive issues, but society had divided along essentially the same lines on these issues, so as to constitute two warring groups, defined primarily not by nominal religion, ethnicity, social class, or even political affiliation, but rather by ideological world-views.

Hunter characterized this polarity as stemming from opposite impulses, toward what he referred to as Progressivism and as Orthodoxy. Others have adopted the dichotomy with varying labels. For example, Bill O'Reilly, a conservative political commentator and former host of the Fox News talk show The O'Reilly Factor, emphasizes differences between "Secular-Progressives" and "Traditionalists" in his 2006 book Culture Warrior.

Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez attributes the 1990s emergence of culture wars to the end of the Cold War in 1991. She writes that Evangelical Christians viewed a particular Christian masculine gender role as the only defense of America against the threat of communism. When this threat ended upon the close of the Cold War, Evangelical leaders transferred the perceived source of threat from foreign communism to domestic changes in gender roles and sexuality.

Pat Buchanan in 2008

During the 1992 presidential election, commentator Pat Buchanan mounted a campaign for the Republican nomination for president against incumbent George H. W. Bush. In a prime-time slot at the 1992 Republican National Convention, Buchanan gave his speech on the culture war. He argued: "There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself." In addition to criticizing environmentalists and feminism, he portrayed public morality as a defining issue:

The agenda [Bill] Clinton and [Hillary] Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units—that's change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country.

A month later, Buchanan characterized the conflict as about power over society's definition of right and wrong. He named abortion, sexual orientation and popular culture as major fronts—and mentioned other controversies, including clashes over the Confederate flag, Christmas, and taxpayer-funded art. He also said that the negative attention his "culture war" speech received was itself evidence of America's polarization.

The culture war had significant impact on national politics in the 1990s. The rhetoric of the Christian Coalition of America may have weakened president George H. W. Bush's chances for re-election in 1992 and helped his successor, Bill Clinton, win reelection in 1996. On the other hand, the rhetoric of conservative cultural warriors helped Republicans gain control of Congress in 1994.

The culture wars influenced the debate over state-school history curricula in the United States in the 1990s. In particular, debates over the development of national educational standards in 1994 revolved around whether the study of American history should be a "celebratory" or "critical" undertaking and involved such prominent public figures as Lynne Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and historian Gary Nash.

2001–2014: Post-9/11 era

43rd President George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz were prominent neoconservatives of the 2000s.

A political view called neoconservatism shifted the terms of the debate in the early 2000s. Neoconservatives differed from their opponents in that they interpreted problems facing the nation as moral issues rather than economic or political issues. For example, neoconservatives saw the decline of the traditional family structure as a spiritual crisis that required a spiritual response. Critics accused neoconservatives of confusing cause and effect.

During the 2000s, voting for Republicans began to correlate heavily with traditionalist or orthodox religious belief across diverse religious sects. Voting for Democrats became more correlated to liberal or modernist religious belief, and to being nonreligious. Belief in scientific conclusions, such as climate change, also became tightly coupled to political party affiliation in this era, causing climate scholar Andrew Hoffman to observe that climate change had "become enmeshed in the so-called culture wars."

Rally for Proposition 8, an item on the 2008 California ballot to ban same-sex marriage

Topics traditionally associated with culture war were not prominent in media coverage of the 2008 election season, with the exception of coverage of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who drew attention to her conservative religion and created a performative climate change denialism brand for herself. Palin's defeat in the election and subsequent resignation as governor of Alaska caused the Center for American Progress to predict "the coming end of the culture wars," which they attributed to demographic change, particularly high rates of acceptance of same-sex marriage among millennials.

2014–present: Broadening of the culture war

While traditional culture war issues, notably abortion, continue to be a focal point, the issues identified with culture war broadened and intensified in the mid-late 2010s. Journalist Michael Grunwald says that "President Donald Trump has pioneered a new politics of perpetual culture war" and lists the Black Lives Matter movement, U.S. national anthem protests, climate change, education policy, healthcare policy including Obamacare, and infrastructure policy as culture war issues in 2018. The rights of transgender people and the role of religion in lawmaking were identified as "new fronts in the culture war" by political scientist Jeremiah Castle, as the polarization of public opinion on these two topics resemble that of previous culture war issues. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum described opposition to wearing face masks as a "senseless" culture war issue that jeopardizes human safety.

This broader understanding of culture war issues in the mid-late 2010s and 2020s is associated with a political strategy called "owning the libs." Conservative media figures employing this strategy, prominently Ben Shapiro, emphasize and expand upon culture war issues with the goal of upsetting liberal people. According to Nicole Hemmer of Columbia University, this strategy is a substitute for the cohesive conservative ideology that existed during the Cold War. It holds a conservative voting bloc together in the absence of shared policy preferences among the bloc's members.

The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, an alt-right event regarded as a battle of the culture wars.

A number of conflicts about diversity in popular culture occurring in the 2010s, such as the Gamergate controversy, Comicsgate and the Sad Puppies science fiction voting campaign, were identified in the media as being examples of the culture war. Journalist Caitlin Dewey described Gamergate as a "proxy war" for a larger culture war between those who want greater inclusion of women and minorities in cultural institutions versus anti-feminists and traditionalists who do not. The perception that culture war conflict had been demoted from electoral politics to popular culture led writer Jack Meserve to call popular movies, games, and writing the "last front in the culture war" in 2015.

These conflicts about representation in popular culture re-emerged into electoral politics via the alt-right and alt-lite movements. According to media scholar Whitney Phillips, Gamergate "prototyped" strategies of harassment and controversy-stoking that proved useful in political strategy. For example, Republican political strategist Steve Bannon publicized pop-culture conflicts during the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump, encouraging a young audience to "come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump."

Canada

Some observers in Canada have used the term "culture war" to refer to differing values between Western versus Eastern Canada, urban versus rural Canada, as well as conservatism versus liberalism and progressivism.

Nevertheless, Canadian society is generally not dramatically polarized over immigration, gun control, drug legality, sexual morality, or government involvement in healthcare: the main issues at play in the United States. In all of those cases, the majority of Canadians, including Conservatives would support the "progressive" position in the United States. In Canada a different set of issues create a clash of values. Chief among these are language policy in Canada, minority religious rights, pipeline politics, indigenous land rights, climate policy, and federal-provincial disputes.

It is a relatively new phrase in Canadian political commentary. It can still be used to describe historical events in Canada, such as the Rebellions of 1837, Western Alienation, the Quebec sovereignty movement, and any Aboriginal conflicts in Canada; but is more relevant to current events such as the Grand River land dispute and the increasing hostility between conservative and liberal Canadians. The phrase has also been used to describe the Harper government's attitude towards the arts community. Andrew Coyne termed this negative policy towards the arts community as "class warfare."

Australia

Interpretations of Aboriginal history became part of the wider political debate sometimes called the "culture wars" during the tenure of the Liberal–National Coalition government of 1996 to 2007, with the Prime Minister of Australia John Howard publicly championing the views of some of those associated with Quadrant. This debate extended into a controversy over the presentation of history in the National Museum of Australia and in high-school history curricula. It also migrated into the general Australian media, with major broadsheets such as The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age regularly publishing opinion pieces on the topic. Marcia Langton has referred to much of this wider debate as "war porn" and as an "intellectual dead end".

Two Australian Prime Ministers, Paul Keating (in office 1991–1996) and John Howard (in office 1996–2007), became major participants in the "wars". According to Mark McKenna's analysis for the Australian Parliamentary Library, John Howard believed that Paul Keating portrayed Australia pre-Whitlam (Prime Minister from 1972 to 1975) in an unduly negative light; while Keating sought to distance the modern Labor movement from its historical support for the monarchy and for the White Australia policy by arguing that it was the conservative Australian parties which had been barriers to national progress. He accused Britain of having abandoned Australia during the Second World War. Keating staunchly supported a symbolic apology to Australian Aboriginals for their mistreatment at the hands of previous adminsitrations, and outlined his view of the origins and potential solutions to contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage in his Redfern Park Speech of 10 December 1992 (drafted with the assistance of historian Don Watson). In 1999, following the release of the 1998 Bringing Them Home Report, Howard passed a Parliamentary Motion of Reconciliation describing treatment of Aborigines as the "most blemished chapter" in Australian history, but he refused to issue an official apology. Howard saw an apology as inappropriate as it would imply "intergeneration guilt"; he said that "practical" measures were a better response to contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage. Keating has argued for the eradication of remaining symbols linked to colonial origins: including deference for ANZAC Day, for the Australian flag and for the monarchy in Australia, while Howard supported these institutions. Unlike fellow Labor leaders and contemporaries, Bob Hawke (Prime Minister 1983–1991) and Kim Beazley (Labor Party leader 2005–2006), Keating never traveled to Gallipoli for ANZAC Day ceremonies. In 2008 he described those who gathered there as "misguided".

In 2006 John Howard said in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of Quadrant that "Political Correctness" was dead in Australia but: "we should not underestimate the degree to which the soft-left still holds sway, even dominance, especially in Australia's universities". Also in 2006, Sydney Morning Herald political editor Peter Hartcher reported that Opposition foreign-affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd was entering the philosophical debate by arguing in response that "John Howard, is guilty of perpetrating 'a fraud' in his so-called culture wars ... designed not to make real change but to mask the damage inflicted by the Government's economic policies".

The defeat of the Howard government in the Australian Federal election of 2007 and its replacement by the Rudd Labor government altered the dynamic of the debate. Rudd made an official apology to the Aboriginal Stolen Generation with bi-partisan support. Like Keating, Rudd supported an Australian republic, but in contrast to Keating, Rudd declared support for the Australian flag and supported the commemoration of ANZAC Day; he also expressed admiration for Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies.

Subsequent to the 2007 change of government, and prior to the passage, with support from all parties, of the Parliamentary apology to indigenous Australians, Professor of Australian Studies Richard Nile argued: "the culture and history wars are over and with them should also go the adversarial nature of intellectual debate", a view contested by others, including conservative commentator Janet Albrechtsen. The Liberal Party parliamentarian Christopher Pyne indicated an intention to re-engage in the history wars.

Africa

According to political scientist Constance G. Anthony, American culture war perspectives on human sexuality were exported to Africa as a form of neocolonialism. In his view, this began during the AIDS epidemic in Africa, with the United States government first tying HIV/AIDS assistance money to evangelical leadership and the Christian right during the Bush administration, then to LGBTQ tolerance during the administration of Barack Obama. This stoked a culture war that resulted in (among others) the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014.

Europe

Several media outlets have described the Law and Justice party of Poland and Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Aleksandar Vučić of Serbia, and Janez Janša of Slovenia as igniting culture wars in their respective countries by encouraging fights over LGBT rights, legal abortion, and other topics. In the United Kingdom, the Conservative Party have similarly been described as attempting to ignite culture wars in regards to "conservative values" under the tenure of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Criticism and evaluation

Since the time that James Davison Hunter first applied the concept of culture wars to American life, the idea has been subject to questions about whether "culture wars" names a real phenomenon, and if so, whether the phenomenon it describes is a cause of, or merely a result of, membership in groups like political parties and religions. Culture wars have also been subject to the criticism of being artificial, imposed, or asymmetric conflicts, rather than a result of authentic differences between cultures.

Validity

Researchers have differed about the scientific validity of the notion of culture war. Some claim it does not describe real behavior, or that it describes only the behavior of a small political elite. Others claim culture war is real and widespread, and even that it is fundamental to explaining Americans' political behavior and beliefs.

Political scientist Alan Wolfe participated in a series of scholarly debates in the 1990s and 2000s against Hunter, claiming that Hunter's concept of culture wars did not accurately describe the opinions or behavior of Americans, which Wolfe claimed were more united than polarized.

A meta-analysis of opinion data from 1992 to 2012 published in the American Political Science Review concluded that, in contrast to a common belief that political party and religious membership shape opinion on culture war topics, instead opinions on culture war topics lead people to revise their political party and religious orientations. The researchers view culture war attitudes as "foundational elements in the political and religious belief systems of ordinary citizens."

Artificiality or asymmetry

Some writers and scholars have said that culture wars are created or perpetuated by political special interest groups, by reactionary social movements, by dynamics within the Republican party, or by electoral politics as a whole. These authors view culture war not as an unavoidable result of widespread cultural differences, but as a technique used to create in-groups and out-groups for a political purpose.

Political commentator E. J. Dionne has written that culture war is an electoral technique to exploit differences and grievances, remarking that the real cultural division is "between those who want to have a culture war and those who don't."

Sociologist Scott Melzer says that culture wars are created by conservative, reactive organizations and movements. Members of these movements possess a "sense of victimization at the hands of a liberal culture run amok. In their eyes, immigrants, gays, women, the poor, and other groups are (undeservedly) granted special rights and privileges." Melzer writes about the example of the National Rifle Association, which he says intentionally created a culture war in order to unite conservative groups, particularly groups of white men, against a common perceived threat.

Similarly, religion scholar Susan B. Ridgely has written that culture wars were made possible by Focus on the Family. This organization produced conservative Christian "alternative news" that began to bifurcate American media consumption, promoting a particular "traditional family" archetype to one part of the population, particularly conservative religious women. Ridgely says that this tradition was depicted as under liberal attack, seeming to necessitate a culture war to defend the tradition.

Political scientists Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins have written about an asymmetry between the US's two major political parties, saying the Republican party should be understood as an ideological movement built to wage political conflict, and the Democratic party as a coalition of social groups with less ability to impose ideological discipline on members. This encourages Republicans to perpetuate and to draw new issues into culture wars, because Republicans are well equipped to fight such wars.

Evolution of human intelligence

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The evolution of human intelligence is closely tied to the evolution of the human brain and to the origin of language. The timeline of human evolution spans approximately 9 million years, from the separation of the genus Pan until the emergence of behavioral modernity by 50,000 years ago. The first 3 million years of this timeline concern Sahelanthropus, the following 2 million concern Australopithecus and the final 2 million span the history of the genus Homo in the Paleolithic era.

Many traits of human intelligence, such as empathy, theory of mind, mourning, ritual, and the use of symbols and tools, are somewhat apparent in great apes although in much less sophisticated forms than what is found in humans, such as great ape language and not to the same extent.

History

Hominidae

Hominin timeline

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Hominini

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Ardipithecus

Australopithecus

Homo habilis

Homo erectus

H. heidelbergensis

Homo sapiens

Neanderthals

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Earlier apes

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Gorilla split

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Chimpanzee split

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Earliest bipedal

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Stone tools

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Expansion beyond Africa

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Modern humans

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The great apes (hominidae) show some cognitive and empathic abilities. Chimpanzees can make tools and use them to acquire foods and for social displays; they have mildly complex hunting strategies requiring cooperation, influence and rank; they are status conscious, manipulative and capable of deception; they can learn to use symbols and understand aspects of human language including some relational syntax, concepts of number and numerical sequence.

Homininae

Chimpanzee mother and baby

Around 10 million years ago, the Earth's climate entered a cooler and drier phase, which led eventually to the Quaternary glaciation beginning some 2.6 million years ago. One consequence of this was that the north African tropical forest began to retreat, being replaced first by open grasslands and eventually by desert (the modern Sahara). As their environment changed from continuous forest to patches of forest separated by expanses of grassland, some primates adapted to a partly or fully ground-dwelling life. Here they were exposed to predators, such as the big cats, from whom they had previously been safe.

These environmental pressures caused selection to favor bipedalism: walking on hind legs. This gave the Homininae's eyes greater elevation, the ability to see approaching danger further off, and a more efficient means of locomotion. It also freed the arms from the task of walking and made the hands available for tasks such as gathering food. At some point the bipedal primates developed handedness, giving them the ability to pick up sticks, bones and stones and use them as weapons, or as tools for tasks such as killing smaller animals, cracking nuts, or cutting up carcasses. In other words, these primates developed the use of primitive technology. Bipedal tool-using primates from the subtribe Hominina date back to as far as about 5 to 7 million years ago, such as one of the earliest species, Sahelanthropus tchadensis.

From about 5 million years ago, the hominin brain began to develop rapidly in both size and differentiation of function. There has been a gradual increase in brain volume as humans progressed along the timeline of evolution, starting from about 600 cm³ in Homo habilis up to 1500 cm³ in Homo neanderthalensis. Thus, in general there's a correlation between brain volume and intelligence. However, modern Homo sapiens have a brain volume slightly smaller (1250 cm³) than neanderthals, and the Flores hominids (Homo floresiensis), nicknamed hobbits, had a cranial capacity of about 380 cm³ (considered small for a chimpanzee) about a third of that of H. erectus. It is proposed that they evolved from H. erectus as a case of insular dwarfism. With their three times smaller brain the Flores hominids apparently used fire and made tools as sophisticated as those of their ancestor H.erectus.

Homo

Roughly 2.4 million years ago Homo habilis had appeared in East Africa: the first known human species, and the first known to make stone tools, yet the disputed findings of signs of tool use from even earlier ages and from the same vicinity as multiple Australopithecus fossils may put to question how much more intelligent than its predecessors H. habilis was.

The use of tools conferred a crucial evolutionary advantage, and required a larger and more sophisticated brain to co-ordinate the fine hand movements required for this task. Our knowledge of the complexity of behaviour of Homo habilis is not limited to stone culture, they also had habitual therapeutic use of toothpicks. The evolution of a larger brain created a problem for early humans, however. A larger brain requires a larger skull, and thus requires the female to have a wider birth canal for the newborn's larger skull to pass through. But if the female's birth canal grew too wide, her pelvis would be so wide that she would lose the ability to run, which was a necessary skill 2 million years ago.

The solution to this was to give birth at an early stage of fetal development, before the skull grew too large to pass through the birth canal. This adaptation enabled the human brain to continue to grow, but it imposed a new discipline. The need to care for helpless infants for long periods of time forced humans to become less mobile. Human bands increasingly stayed in one place for long periods, so that females could care for infants, while males hunted food and fought with other bands that competed for food sources. As a result, humans became even more dependent on tool-making to compete with other animals and other humans, and relied less on body size and strength.

About 200,000 years ago Europe and the Middle East were colonized by Neanderthal man, extinct by 39,000 years ago following the appearance of modern humans in the region from 40,000 to 45,000 years ago.

Homo sapiens

"The Lion-man", found in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave of Germany's Swabian Alb and dated to 40,000 years ago, is associated with the Aurignacian culture and is the oldest known anthropomorphic animal figurine in the world.

Dates approximate, consult articles for details

(From 2000000 BC till 2013 AD in (partial) exponential notation)

See also: Java Man (−1.75e+06), Yuanmou Man (−1.75e+06 : -0.73e+06),

Lantian Man (−1.7e+06), Nanjing Man (- 0.6e+06), Tautavel Man (- 0.5e+06),

Peking Man (- 0.4e+06), Solo Man (- 0.4e+06), and Peștera cu Oase (- 0.378e+05)

Homo sapiens intelligence

The eldest findings of Homo sapiens in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco date back ca. 300,000 years  Ca. 200,000 year old fossils of Homo sapiens were found in East Africa. It is unclear to what extent these early modern humans had developed language, music, religion, etc.

According to proponents of the Toba catastrophe theory, the climate in non-tropical regions of the earth experienced a sudden freezing about 70,000 years ago, because of a huge explosion of the Toba volcano that filled the atmosphere with volcanic ash for several years. This reduced the human population to less than 10,000 breeding pairs in equatorial Africa, from which all modern humans are descended. Being unprepared for the sudden change in climate, the survivors were those intelligent enough to invent new tools and ways of keeping warm and finding new sources of food (for example, adapting to ocean fishing based on prior fishing skills used in lakes and streams that became frozen).

Around 80,000–100,000 years ago, three main lines of Homo sapiens diverged, bearers of mitochondrial haplogroup L1 (mtDNA) / A (Y-DNA) colonizing Southern Africa (the ancestors of the Khoisan/Capoid peoples), bearers of haplogroup L2 (mtDNA) / B (Y-DNA) settling Central and West Africa (the ancestors of Niger–Congo and Nilo-Saharan speaking peoples), while the bearers of haplogroup L3 remained in East Africa.

The "Great Leap Forward" leading to full behavioral modernity sets in only after this separation. Rapidly increasing sophistication in tool-making and behaviour is apparent from about 80,000 years ago, and the migration out of Africa follows towards the very end of the Middle Paleolithic, some 60,000 years ago. Fully modern behaviour, including figurative art, music, self-ornamentation, trade, burial rites etc. is evident by 30,000 years ago. The oldest unequivocal examples of prehistoric art date to this period, the Aurignacian and the Gravettian periods of prehistoric Europe, such as the Venus figurines and cave painting (Chauvet Cave) and the earliest musical instruments (the bone pipe of Geissenklösterle, Germany, dated to about 36,000 years ago).

The human brain has evolved gradually over the passage of time; a series of incremental changes occurred as a result of external stimuli and conditions. It is crucial to keep in mind that evolution operates within a limited framework at a given point in time. In other words, the adaptations that a species can develop are not infinite and are defined by what has already taken place in the evolutionary timeline of a species. Given the immense anatomical and structural complexity of the brain, its evolution (and the congruent evolution of human intelligence), can only be reorganized in a finite number of ways. The majority of said changes occur either in terms of size or in terms of developmental timeframes.

Motor and sensory areas of the cerebral cortex; dashed areas shown are commonly left hemisphere dominant.

There have been studies that strongly support the idea that the level of intelligence associated with humans is not unique to our species. Scholars suggest that this could have, in part, been caused by convergent evolution. One common characteristic that is present in species of "high degree intelligence" (i.e. dolphins, great apes, and humans - Homo sapiens) is a brain of enlarged size. Along with this, there is a more developed neocortex, a folding of the cerebral cortex, and von Economo neurons. Said neurons are linked to social intelligence and the ability to gauge what another is thinking or feeling and, interestingly, are also present in bottlenose dolphins. The cerebral cortex is divided into four lobes (frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal) each with specific functions. The cerebral cortex is significantly larger in humans than in any other animal and is responsible for higher thought processes such as: reasoning, abstract thinking, and decision making.

Another characteristic that makes humans special and sets them apart from any other species is our ability to produce and understand complex, syntactic language. The cerebral cortex, particularly in the temporal, parietal, and frontal lobes, are populated with neural circuits dedicated to language. There are two main areas of the brain commonly associated with language, namely: Wernicke's area and Broca's area. The former is responsible for the understanding of speech and the latter for the production of speech. Homologous regions have been found in other species (i.e. Area 44 and 45 have been studied in chimpanzees) but they are not as strongly related to or involved in linguistic activities as in humans.

A big portion of the scholarly literature focus on the evolution, and subsequent influence, of culture. This is in part because the leaps human intelligence has taken are far greater than those that would have resulted if our ancestors had simply responded to their environments, inhabiting them as hunter-gatherers. (Richardson 273).

In short, the immense complexity and marvel of superior human intelligence only emerge inside of a specific culture and history. Selection for cooperation aided our ancestors in surviving harsh ecological conditions and did so by creating a specific type of intelligence. An intelligence that, today, is highly variant from individual to individual.

Models

Social brain hypothesis

The social brain hypothesis was proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who argues that human intelligence did not evolve primarily as a means to solve ecological problems, but rather as a means of surviving and reproducing in large and complex social groups. Some of the behaviors associated with living in large groups include reciprocal altruism, deception and coalition formation. These group dynamics relate to Theory of Mind or the ability to understand the thoughts and emotions of others, though Dunbar himself admits in the same book that it is not the flocking itself that causes intelligence to evolve (as shown by ruminants).

Dunbar argues that when the size of a social group increases, the number of different relationships in the group may increase by orders of magnitude. Chimpanzees live in groups of about 50 individuals whereas humans typically have a social circle of about 150 people, which is also the typical size of social communities in small societies and personal social networks; this number is now referred to as Dunbar's number. In addition, there is evidence to suggest that the success of groups is dependent on their size at foundation, with groupings of around 150 being particularly successful, potentially reflecting the fact that communities of this size strike a balance between the minimum size of effective functionality and the maximum size for creating a sense of commitment to the community. According to the social brain hypothesis, when hominids started living in large groups, selection favored greater intelligence. As evidence, Dunbar cites a relationship between neocortex size and group size of various mammals.

Criticism

Phylogenetic studies of brain sizes in primates show that while diet predicts primate brain size, sociality does not predict brain size when corrections are made for cases in which diet affects both brain size and sociality. The exceptions to the predictions of the social intelligence hypothesis, which that hypothesis has no predictive model for, are successfully predicted by diets that are either nutritious but scarce or abundant but poor in nutrients. Researchers have found that frugivores tend to exhibit larger brain size than folivores. One potential explanation for this finding is that frugivory requires 'extractive foraging,' or the process of locating and preparing hard-shelled foods, such as nuts, insects, and fruit. Extractive foraging requires higher cognitive processing, which could help explain larger brain size. However, other researchers argue that extractive foraging was not a catalyst in the evolution of primate brain size, demonstrating that some non primates exhibit advanced foraging techniques. Other explanations for the positive correlation between brain size and frugivory highlight how the high-energy, frugivore diet facilitates fetal brain growth and requires spatial mapping to locate the embedded foods.

Meerkats have far more social relationships than their small brain capacity would suggest. Another hypothesis is that it is actually intelligence that causes social relationships to become more complex, because intelligent individuals are more difficult to learn to know.

There are also studies that show that Dunbar's number is not the upper limit of the number of social relationships in humans either.

The hypothesis that it is brain capacity that sets the upper limit for the number of social relationships is also contradicted by computer simulations that show simple unintelligent reactions to be sufficient to emulate "ape politics" and by the fact that some social insects such as the paper wasp do have hierarchies in which each individual has its place (as opposed to herding without social structure) and maintains their hierarchies in groups of approximately 80 individuals with their brains smaller than that of any mammal.

Insects provide an opportunity to explore this since they exhibit an unparalleled diversity of social forms to permanent colonies containing many individuals working together as a collective organism and have evolved an impressive range of cognitive skills despite their small nervous systems.  Social insects are shaped by ecology, including their social environment. Studies aimed to correlating brain volume to complexity have failed to identify clear correlations between sociality and cognition because of cases like social insects. In humans, societies are usually held together by the ability of individuals to recognize features indicating group membership. Social insects, likewise, often recognize members of their colony allowing them to defend against competitors. Ants do this by comparing odors which require fine discrimination of multicomponent variable cues.  Studies suggest this recognition is achieved through simple cognitive operations that do not involve long term memory but through sensory adaptation or habituation.  In honeybees, their symbolic ‘dance’ is a form of communication that they use to convey information with the rest of their colony. In an even more impressive social use of their dance language, bees indicate suitable nest locations to a swarm in search of a new home. The swarm builds a consensus from multiple ‘opinions’ expressed by scouts with different information, to finally agree on a single destination to which the swarm relocates. 

Reduction in aggression

Another theory that tries to explain the growth of human intelligence is the reduced aggression theory (aka self-domestication theory). According to this strand of thought what led to the evolution of advanced intelligence in Homo sapiens was a drastic reduction of the aggressive drive. This change separated us from other species of monkeys and primates, where this aggressivity is still in plain sight, and eventually lead to the development of quintessential human traits such as empathy, social cognition and culture. This theory has received strong support from studies of animal domestication where selective breeding for tameness has, in only a few generations, led to the emergence of impressive "humanlike" abilities. Tamed foxes, for example, exhibit advanced forms of social communication (following pointing gestures), pedomorphic physical features (childlike faces, floppy ears) and even rudimentary forms of theory of mind (eye contact seeking, gaze following). Evidence also comes from the field of ethology (which is the study of animal behavior, focused on observing species in their natural habitat rather than in controlled laboratory settings) where it has been found that animals with a gentle and relaxed manner of interacting with each other – like for example stumptailed macaques, orangutans and bonobos – have more advanced socio-cognitive abilities than those found among the more aggressive chimpanzees and baboons. It is hypothesized that these abilities derive from a selection against aggression.

On a mechanistic level these changes are believed to be the result of a systemic downregulation of the sympathetic nervous system (the fight-or-flight reflex). Hence, tamed foxes show a reduced adrenal gland size and have an up to fivefold reduction in both basal and stress-induced blood cortisol levels. Similarly, domesticated rats and guinea pigs have both reduced adrenal gland size and reduced blood corticosterone levels. It seems as though the neoteny of domesticated animals significantly prolongs the immaturity of their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system (which is otherwise only immature for a short period when they are pups/kittens) and this opens up a larger "socialization window" during which they can learn to interact with their caretakers in a more relaxed way.

This downregulation of sympathetic nervous system reactivity is also believed to be accompanied by a compensatory increase in a number of opposing organs and systems. Although these are not as well specified various candidates for such "organs" have been proposed: the parasympathetic system as a whole, the septal area over the amygdala, the oxytocin system, the endogenous opioids and various forms of quiescent immobilization which antagonize the fight-or-flight reflex.

Social exchange theory

Each card has a number on one side, and a patch of color on the other. Which card or cards must be turned over to test the idea that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red?

 

Each card has an age on one side, and a drink on the other. Which card or cards must be turned over to test the idea that if someone is drinking alcohol then they must be over 18?

Other studies suggest that social exchange between individuals is a vital adaptation to the human brain, going as far to say that the human mind could be equipped with a neurocognitive system specialized for reasoning about social change. Social Exchange is a vital adaptation that evolved in social species and has become exceptionally specialized in humans. This adaption will develop by natural selection when two parties can make themselves better off than they were before by exchanging things one party values less for things the other party values for more. However, selection will only pressure social exchange when both parties are receiving mutual benefits from their relative situation; if one party cheats the other by receiving a benefit while the other is harmed, then selection will stop. Consequently, the existence of cheaters—those who fail to deliver fair benefits—threatens the evolution of exchange. Using evolutionary game theory, it has been shown that adaptations for social exchange can be favored and stably maintained by natural selection, but only if they include design features that enable them to detect cheaters, and cause them to channel future exchanges to reciprocators and away from cheaters. Thus, humans use social contracts to lay the benefits and losses each party will be receiving (if you accept benefit B from me, then you must satisfy my requirement R). Humans have evolved an advanced cheater detection system, equipped with proprietary problem-solving strategies that evolved to match the recurrent features of their corresponding problem domains. Not only do humans need to determine that the contract was violated, but also if the violation was intentionally done. Therefore, systems are specialized to detect contract violations that imply intentional cheating.

One problem with the hypothesis that specific punishment for intentional deception could coevolve with intelligence is the fact that selective punishment of individuals with certain characteristics selects against the characteristics in question. For example, if only individuals capable of remembering what they had agreed to were punished for breaking agreements, evolution would have selected against the ability to remember what one had agreed to. Though this becomes a superficial argument after considering the balancing positive selection for the ability to successfully 'make ones case'. Intelligence predicts the number of arguments one can make when taking either side of a debate. Humans who could get away with behaviours that exploited within and without-group cooperation, getting more while giving less, would overcome this.

In 2010, Satoshi Kanazawa argued that g correlated only with performance on evolutionarily unfamiliar rather than evolutionarily familiar problems, proposing what he termed the "Savanna-IQ interaction hypothesis". In response, Scott Barry Kaufman, Colin G. DeYoung, Deirdre Reis, and Jeremy R. Gray gave 112 subjects a 70-item computerized version of the Wason selection task (a logic puzzle) in a social relations context as proposed by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby in The Adapted Mind, and found instead that "performance on non-arbitrary, evolutionarily familiar problems is more strongly related to general intelligence than performance on arbitrary, evolutionarily novel problems". Peter Cathcart Wason originally demonstrated that not even 10% of subjects found the correct solution and his finding was replicated. Additionally, psychologists Patricia Cheng, Keith Holyoak, Richard E. Nisbett, and Lindsay M. Oliver demonstrated experimentally that subjects who have completed semester-long college courses in propositional calculus do not perform better on the Wason selection task than subjects who do not complete such college courses.

Tooby and Cosmides originally proposed a social relations context for the Wason selection task as part of a larger computational theory of social exchange after they began reviewing the previous experiments about the task beginning in 1983. Despite other experimenters finding that some contexts elicited more correct subject responses than others, no theoretical explanation for differentiating between them was identified until Tooby and Cosmides proposed that disparities in subjects performance on contextualized versus non-contextualized variations of the task was a by-product of a specialized cheater-detection module, and Tooby and Cosmides later noted that whether there are evolved cognitive mechanisms for the content-blind rules of logical inference is disputed.

Sexual selection

This model, which invokes sexual selection, is proposed by Geoffrey Miller who argues that human intelligence is unnecessarily sophisticated for the needs of hunter-gatherers to survive. He argues that the manifestations of intelligence such as language, music and art did not evolve because of their utilitarian value to the survival of ancient hominids. Rather, intelligence may have been a fitness indicator. Hominids would have been chosen for greater intelligence as an indicator of healthy genes and a Fisherian runaway positive feedback loop of sexual selection would have led to the evolution of human intelligence in a relatively short period.

In many species, only males have impressive secondary sexual characteristics such as ornaments and show-off behavior, but sexual selection is also thought to be able to act on females as well in at least partially monogamous species. With complete monogamy, there is assortative mating for sexually selected traits. This means that less attractive individuals will find other less attractive individuals to mate with. If attractive traits are good fitness indicators, this means that sexual selection increases the genetic load of the offspring of unattractive individuals. Without sexual selection, an unattractive individual might find a superior mate with few deleterious mutations, and have healthy children that are likely to survive. With sexual selection, an unattractive individual is more likely to have access only to an inferior mate who is likely to pass on many deleterious mutations to their joint offspring, who are then less likely to survive.

Sexual selection is often thought to be a likely explanation for other female-specific human traits, for example breasts and buttocks far larger in proportion to total body size than those found in related species of ape. It is often assumed that if breasts and buttocks of such large size were necessary for functions such as suckling infants, they would be found in other species. That human female breasts (typical mammalian breast tissue is small) are found sexually attractive by many men is in agreement with sexual selection acting on human females secondary sexual characteristics.

Sexual selection for intelligence and judging ability can act on indicators of success, such as highly visible displays of wealth. Growing human brains require more nutrition than brains of related species of ape. It is possible that for females to successfully judge male intelligence, they must be intelligent themselves. This could explain why despite the absence of clear differences in intelligence between males and females on average, there are clear differences between male and female propensities to display their intelligence in ostentatious forms.

This absence of difference is now known to exist at the middle of distributions. Average intelligence doesn't differ much between genders, but because female selection is restricted more towards males at the top end of male-male hierarchies or those increasingly above average in physical attractiveness, male trait distributions often have longer tails; that is to say the lowest and highest intelligences (and many more traits) in male populations extend further out into the lowest and highest values of the distribution than for female traits. This is because it paid to be a highly variable male, as average males would have consistently low opportunity, but variable males had a chance of falling on the preferred side of the trait distribution.

Critique

The sexual selection by the disability principle/fitness display model of the evolution of human intelligence is criticized by certain researchers for issues of timing of the costs relative to reproductive age. While sexually selected ornaments such as peacock feathers and moose antlers develop either during or after puberty, timing their costs to a sexually mature age, human brains expend large amounts of nutrients building myelin and other brain mechanisms for efficient communication between the neurons early in life. These costs early in life build facilitators that reduce the cost of neuron firing later in life, and as a result the peaks of the brain's costs and the peak of the brain's performance are timed on opposite sides of puberty with the costs peaking at a sexually immature age while performance peaks at a sexually mature age. Critical researchers argue the above shows that the cost of intelligence is a signal which reduces the chance of surviving to reproductive age, and does not signal fitness of sexually mature individuals. Since the disability principle is about selection from disabilities in sexually immature individuals, which increases the offspring's chance of survival to reproductive age, disabilities would be selected against and not for by the above mechanism. These critics argue that human intelligence evolved by natural selection citing that unlike sexual selection, natural selection have produced many traits that cost the most nutrients before puberty including immune systems and accumulation and modification for increased toxicity of poisons in the body as a protective measure against predators.

Intelligence as a disease-resistance sign

The number of people with severe cognitive impairment caused by childhood viral infections like meningitis, protists like Toxoplasma and Plasmodium, and animal parasites like intestinal worms and schistosomes is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions. Even more people with moderate mental damages, such as inability to complete difficult tasks, that are not classified as 'diseases' by medical standards, may still be considered as inferior mates by potential sexual partners.

Thus, widespread, virulent, and archaic infections are greatly involved in natural selection for cognitive abilities. People infected with parasites may have brain damage and obvious maladaptive behavior in addition to visible signs of disease. Smarter people can more skillfully learn to distinguish safe non-polluted water and food from unsafe kinds and learn to distinguish mosquito infested areas from safe areas. Smarter people can more skillfully find and develop safe food sources and living environments. Given this situation, preference for smarter child-bearing/rearing partners increases the chance that their descendants will inherit the best resistance alleles, not only for immune system resistance to disease, but also smarter brains for learning skills in avoiding disease and selecting nutritious food. When people search for mates based on their success, wealth, reputation, disease-free body appearance, or psychological traits such as benevolence or confidence; the effect is to select for superior intelligence that results in superior disease resistance.^{[citation needed]}

Ecological dominance-social competition model

A predominant model describing the evolution of human intelligence is ecological dominance-social competition (EDSC), explained by Mark V. Flinn, David C. Geary and Carol V. Ward based mainly on work by Richard D. Alexander. According to the model, human intelligence was able to evolve to significant levels because of the combination of increasing domination over habitat and increasing importance of social interactions. As a result, the primary selective pressure for increasing human intelligence shifted from learning to master the natural world to competition for dominance among members or groups of its own species.

As advancement, survival and reproduction within an increasing complex social structure favored ever more advanced social skills, communication of concepts through increasingly complex language patterns ensued. Since competition had shifted bit by bit from controlling "nature" to influencing other humans, it became of relevance to outmaneuver other members of the group seeking leadership or acceptance, by means of more advanced social skills. A more social and communicative person would be more easily selected.

Intelligence dependent on brain size

Human intelligence is developed to an extreme level that is not necessarily adaptive in an evolutionary sense. Firstly, larger-headed babies are more difficult to give birth to and large brains are costly in terms of nutrient and oxygen requirements. Thus the direct adaptive benefit of human intelligence is questionable at least in modern societies, while it is difficult to study in prehistoric societies. Since 2005, scientists have been evaluating genomic data on gene variants thought to influence head size, and have found no evidence that those genes are under strong selective pressure in current human populations. The trait of head size has become generally fixed in modern human beings.

While decreased brain size has strong correlation with lower intelligence in humans, some modern humans have brain sizes as small as Homo Erectus but normal intelligence (based on IQ tests) for modern humans. Increased brain size in humans may allow for greater capacity for specialized expertise.

Expanded cortical regions

The two major perspectives on primate brain evolution are the concerted and mosaic approaches. In the concerted evolution approach, cortical expansions in the brain are considered to be a by-product of a larger brain, rather than adaptive potential. Studies have supported the concerted evolution model by finding cortical expansions between macaques and marmosets are comparable to that of humans and macaques. Researchers attribute this result to the constraints on the evolutionary process of increasing brain size. In the mosaic approach, cortical expansions are attributed to their adaptive advantage for the species. Researchers have attributed hominin evolution to mosaic evolution.

Simian primate brain evolution studies show that specific cortical regions associated with high-level cognition have demonstrated the greatest expansion over primate brain evolution. Sensory and motor regions have showcased limited growth. Three regions associated with complex cognition include the frontal lobe, temporal lobe, and the medial wall of the cortex. Studies demonstrate that the enlargement in these regions is disproportionately centered in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The TPJ is located in the parietal lobe and is associated with morality, theory of mind, and spatial awareness. Additionally, the Wernicke's area is located in the TPJ. Studies have suggested that the region assists in language production, as well as language processing. The LPFC is commonly associated with planning and working memory functions. The Broca's area, the second major region associated with language processing, is also located in the LPFC. The ACC is associated with detecting errors, monitoring conflict, motor control, and emotion. Specifically, researchers have found that the ACC in humans is disproportionately expanded when compared to the ACC in macaques.

Studies on cortical expansions in the brain have been used to examine the evolutionary basis of neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease. For example, researchers associate the expanded TPJ region with Alzheimer's disease. However, other researchers found no correlation between expanded cortical regions in the human brain and the development of Alzheimer's disease.

Cellular, genetic, and circuitry changes

Human brain evolution involves cellular, genetic, and circuitry changes. On a genetic level, humans have a modified FOXP2 gene, which is associated with speech and language development. The human variant of the gene SRGAP2, SRGAP2C, enables greater dendritic spine density which fosters greater neural connections. On a cellular level, studies demonstrate von Economo neurons (VENs) are more prevalent in humans than other primates. Studies show that VENs are associated with empathy, social awareness and self-control. Studies show that the striatum plays a role in understanding reward and pair-bond formation. On a circuitry level, humans exhibit a more complex mirror neuron system, greater connection between the two major language processing areas (Wernicke's area and Broca's area), and a vocal control circuit that connects the motor cortex and brain stem. The mirror neuron system is associated with social cognition, theory of mind, and empathy. Studies have demonstrated the presence of the mirror neuron system in both macaques in humans; However, the mirror neuron system is only activated in macaques when observing transitive movements.

Group selection

Group selection theory contends that organism characteristics that provide benefits to a group (clan, tribe, or larger population) can evolve despite individual disadvantages such as those cited above. The group benefits of intelligence (including language, the ability to communicate between individuals, the ability to teach others, and other cooperative aspects) have apparent utility in increasing the survival potential of a group.

In addition, the theory of group selection is inherently tied to Darwin's theory of natural selection. Specifically, that "group-related adaptations must be attributed to the natural selection of alternative groups of individuals and that the natural selection of alternative alleles within populations will be opposed to this development".

Between-group selection can be used to explain the changes and adaptations that arise within a group of individuals. Group-related adaptations and changes are a byproduct of between-group selection as traits or characteristics that prove to be advantageous in relation to another group will become increasingly popular and disseminated within a group. In the end, increasing its overall chance of surviving a competing group.

However, this explanation cannot be applied to humans (and other species, predominantly other mammals) that live in stable, established social groupings. This is because of the social intelligence that functioning within these groups requires from the individual. Humans, while they are not the only ones, possess the cognitive and mental capacity to form systems of personal relationships and ties that extend well beyond those of the nucleus of family. The continuous process of creating, interacting, and adjusting to other individuals is a key component of many species' ecology.

These concepts can be tied to the social brain hypothesis, mentioned above. This hypothesis posits that human cognitive complexity arose as a result of the higher level of social complexity required from living in enlarged groups. These bigger groups entail a greater amount of social relations and interactions thus leading to an expanded quantity of intelligence in humans. However, this hypothesis has been under academic scrutiny in recent years and has been largely disproven. In fact, the size of a species' brain can be much better predicted by diet instead of measures of sociality as noted by the study conducted by DeCasien et al. They found that ecological factors (such as: folivory/frugivory, environment) explain a primate brain size much better than social factors (such as: group size, mating system).

Nutritional status

Diets deficient in iron, zinc, protein, iodine, B vitamins, omega 3 fatty acids, magnesium and other nutrients can result in lower intelligence either in the mother during pregnancy or in the child during development. While these inputs did not have an effect on the evolution of intelligence they do govern its expression. A higher intelligence could be a signal that an individual comes from and lives in a physical and social environment where nutrition levels are high, whereas a lower intelligence could imply a child, its mother, or both, come from a physical and social environment where nutritional levels are low. Previc emphasizes the contribution of nutritional factors, especially meat and shellfish consumption, to elevations of dopaminergic activity in the brain, which may have been responsible for the evolution of human intelligence since dopamine is crucial to working memory, cognitive shifting, abstract, distant concepts, and other hallmarks of advanced intelligence.