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María Martinón-Torres: "The weakest is not the frail or the sick, but the one who is alone"

2022-05-09T04:05:34.456Z


The paleoanthropologist explains that one of our most useful weapons of sapiens is empathy: "Individualism has a very short journey in this species"


María Martinón-Torres says that her book

Homo imperfectus

(Destiny) reflects the “chaotic” way in which her head works.

Because in its pages it constantly alternates the scientific details that make humans imperfect with literary references that serve as ideal metaphors to explain those crooked lines of evolution.

Paleoanthropologist Martinón-Torres, a 48-year-old from Ourense, directs the National Center for Research on Human Evolution in Burgos, although her training in Medicine allows her to see the diseases we suffer as episodes of a fable, which explains how sapiens are today .

Question

.

The book seems like the culinary deconstruction of the human being, a journey through the ingredients of our evolution until we find the dish we are now.

Answer

.

I try to identify what ingredients we are made of and how they are mixed.

We are a dish in which it is very difficult to separate the ingredients.

Here it gives you a taste, like an evolutionary advantage, but here it gives you other textures, like another stage of your life or a disease.

I like to describe it from the point of view of imperfection, which has always been reviled.

We have to be a perfect creature and the reality is that we are full of imperfections that are the richness of the species that we are.

P.

That diversity made us indestructible.

A.

Exactly.

The law of nature does not prioritize the individual, but the collective.

Individually we have to deal with many problems and vulnerabilities, but these personal sufferings do not interfere with our success.

And therein lies the key.

Natural selection is not concerned with happiness, health, or well-being.

Those are human issues.

Natural selection is concerned with survival and humans are concerned with living well.

The history of our species is collective and social and therefore we have to pay for individual suffering.

The key to the success of our species is to have room for crooked lines

Q.

Is the pursuit of happiness never going to be an evolutionary advantage?

R.

Natural selection is a relentless filter.

When there is an important change in the environment in which we are or a crisis, it will favor those varieties that are better adapted to prosper or have more children.

Spot.

Where will you make the cut?

In those traits that can harm our reproductive success.

Everything that happens after playback is our business.

Cancer, which usually manifests itself in advanced ages, is a real drama, but it has no impact on reproduction.

And happiness?

Well, happiness, the same.

And wellness, too.

If we are capable of generating environments of greater happiness, that contributes to prosociality and that does matter to us.

Although happiness is not really a characteristic that is going to be favored by natural selection,

yes, it is obtained when we put into action the prosocial characteristics that have been positively selected throughout evolution.

Our strength is not individual, it is always as a group.

This allows us to welcome and compensate and protect individual weaknesses or frailties.

The weakest is not the physically frail or the sick, but the one who is alone.

Natural selection is favoring many characteristics that favor that connection.

For example, longevity: we live longer not to have children, but to take care of others.

Natural selection favors us being a long-lived species to take care of highly dependent individuals, who need others from very early and until very late.

Far from being a handicap or a weakness,

Martinón-Torres works with a skull.CENIEH

Q.

Are we programmed to protect the vulnerable?

R.

This is our hallmark and our particularity as a hypersocial species.

The consequence of one of our most useful weapons to get ahead, which is empathy.

Our brain allows us something as incredible as living our life and imagining that of others.

Something that gives us great advantages in our survival, because that way we can recognize friends and anticipate enemies.

This is reflected, for example, in the care of the vulnerable.

Most of our characteristics, even the negative ones, are always leading us to seek acceptance by the group.

Being part of a family, a group, a club, a tribe, is really where we feel more protected and more fulfilled.

I believe that this portrait of the human being as ruthless, opportunistic, selfish, is not the reality of our nature.

Natural selection favors altruistic and prosocial behaviors for our success.

And they are the ones who are pulling the chestnuts out of the fire.

We have to get rid of that cliché that human beings are bad, selfish.

Individualism has a very short run in this species.

P.

And other disappeared species, such as Neanderthals or Denisovans, did they fail due to lack of empathy?

R.

In the case of the Neanderthals, I don't think it would have been that, because they were a compassionate social group, they buried their dead, they had symbolic thought, they also had a sophisticated behavioral capacity, they controlled hunting, they knew their environment.

In the case of the Neanderthals it has been a demographic issue.

They were much less in such a harsh and arid environment to live in as the Europe of the ice.

It had great capacities, it was well adapted, but very isolated and it was declining.

Instead, we were at a peak moment, fully developing our capabilities, and we entered Europe when they were already in the doldrums precisely because of something that is fundamental to the human species: diversity.

Neanderthals, being a group that was isolated, was probably also a very homogeneous group genetically.

They have less to throw at when new threats such as infections appear.

Sapiens, however, were more diverse.

The diversity and flexibility of behavior is the key to the strength of a species, because you have a greater repertoire with which to face a greater number of dangers.

P.

In the book you mention that 90% of the people who have lived have had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, is it decisive?

A.

When we look back at the evolutionary history of

Homo sapiens

, since it appeared on Earth 200,000, almost 300,000 years ago, we see that it has been living as a hunter-gatherer species much longer than in cities and towns like now.

It's a novelty.

Our biology has been shaped over hundreds of thousands of years to adapt to a lifestyle that has suddenly, in this last tweak of the last 10,000 years, been radically changed.

But biology has other rates of change and a mismatch occurs because our adaptation is much slower than the speed at which we are capable of transforming the world.

We have created a completely new world, of routines, of diet, of interactions, of sexual relationships, of exposure to new toxins that have nothing to do with what has happened in 90% of our history as a species.

Cover of the book 'Homo imperfectus', by María Martinón-Torres.

P.

Do we make interested readings of our past?

R.

There has always been a lot of bias.

For example, I always say that we do not give the Neanderthal version of events.

When we study the brain of Sapiens and Neanderthals, we immediately think of what things we can do that Neanderthals did not have.

These poor Neanderthals went extinct because they had less working memory than Homo sapiens, we say.

And I say, if they had the same brain size, there will be something that they did have more developed than us and we don't know what it is for.

Maybe they were much sharper visually, maybe they were more empathic, more expressive.

Perhaps they communicated with greater nuance and with greater expression.

We have a hard time imagining what they could have that we didn't have.

One of the great biases is to put ourselves as a prototype of the perfect species that has things that others do not have.

We always tell our story in terms of success.

Natural selection favors altruistic and prosocial behaviors for our success

Q.

We read evolution as if our destiny was to become the kings of creation.

A.

Natural selection is humbling: the same rules of evolution apply to us, to cauliflower, to pine trees, and to viruses.

I don't think we are better adapted than tulips in Holland or an eagle flying in the sky.

They are different types of adaptations to different worlds.

We're not doing badly, but there are still many adjustments and illnesses are a reflection that there are still many nuts to tighten throughout evolution.

Q.

Have we learned many new things from sapiens?

R.

In recent years, the image we had of ourselves as a uniform drawer, a perfect lineage that triumphantly advanced and colonized the world, has changed.

And now we see that the key to the success of our species is to have room for exceptions, for crooked lines, for asterisks.

This has allowed him to adapt to such different environments.

We have not come forward as a uniform species, quite the contrary.

And that includes our mix with other species.

Q.

So, going back to the sapiens recipe, we are more like croquettes that have been made with food from here and there.

R.

Well yes, and that is very nice at an evolutionary level.

Discover that we are a mixture and that this mixture has given us advantages.

Most of the genes that have been positively selected from our mix with Neanderthals have to do with the immune system.

We are a croquette with a lot of ancestry, but also with a lot of flavor and a lot of history, really.

But that's not why she's

parched

.

[laughs]

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-05-09

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