I fully believe that we share that common ancestor with lobsters, though I will point out that the time in figuring out the closeness of characteristics we share with our fellow descendents, the lobsters, has to be multiplied by 2, about a billion years, because the line that produced lobsters has been developing and changing and losing common traits with that common ancestor for exactly the same length of time that we have. And that the unknown, unknowable generations separating us from then also has to include all of the generations in both lines of descent. And I will also point out that in order to have a social hierarchy of the type that Peterson promotes requires that a species lives as a social animal. We have far far more closely measured commonalities with solitary mammals than we do with lobsters. And Peterson's argument, when used to explain his or his cultists preferred claims about the divergence of women and men, whose common ancestry is identical, ignores the diversity of sexual relationships in other mammals and, let me point out, anthropoid species such as the black widow spider and preying mantis in which females regularly kill and eat males who not only try but fail to mate with them, ending up as a meal, instead, but even those who were the ones who successfully mated with them before ending up as food. Those creatures share exactly the same common ancestor with us that Peterson uses in his argument.
Our closest animal cousins, everything from baboons, bonobos, gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, etc. are different from each other, (individually different from even members of their species) and us, I'd argue radically so. The idea that you could possibly tease out a meaningful commonality between human societies and lobster "social organization" is more likely to tell you MORE ABOUT THE PERSON claiming that then it will life among the lobsters or, especially, their entirely unobservable experience and motivations.
The status of serotonin as a biologically active substance and the effect it has on organisms is hardly as Peterson claims in regard to human beings and lobsters.
It is true that serotonin is present in crustaceans (like the lobster) and that it is highly connected to dominance and aggressive social behaviour. When free moving lobsters are given injections of serotonin they adopt aggressive postures similar to the ones displayed by dominant animals when they approach subordinates. However, the structures serotonin can act on are much more varied in vertebrates with highly complex and stratified brains like reptiles, birds and mammals – including humans.
If nervous systems were computer games, arthropods like lobsters would be “Snake” on a first-generation mobile phone and vertebrates would be an augmented reality (AR) game. What AR allows us to do and feel are incomparable to Snake, and the mechanisms behind it are a lot more complex. For example, one of the most relevant brain structures for dominant social behaviour is the amygdala, located in the temporal lobe of primates including humans. Arthropods don’t have an amygdala (lobsters don’t even have a brain, just an aglomerate of nerve endings called ganglia).
There are more than 50 molecules that function as neurotransmitters in the nervous system including dopamine, noradrenaline, adrenaline, serotonin and oxytocin. These molecules, however, exist all over nature. Plants have serotonin. In animals (including humans), most of the serotonin is produced and used in the intestine to help digestion. It’s the structure where it acts that determines its effect.
The same neurotransmitter can have contrasting effects in different organisms. While lower levels of serotonin are associated with decreased levels of aggression in vertebrates like the lobster, the opposite is true in humans. This happens because low levels of serotonin in the brain make communication between the amygdala and the frontal lobes weaker, making it more difficult to control emotional responses to anger.
In the same article, Leonor Gonçalves )Research Associate in Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology, UCL) points out:
There are more than 50 molecules that function as neurotransmitters in the nervous system including dopamine, noradrenaline, adrenaline, serotonin and oxytocin. These molecules, however, exist all over nature. Plants have serotonin. In animals (including humans), most of the serotonin is produced and used in the intestine to help digestion. It’s the structure where it acts that determines its effect.
I haven't thought or read about it but I would point out that one of my favorite chemicals in that system, caffeine, will kill some of our closer cousins, in passing.
I'd go back and ask if even scientific descriptions of hierarchies in even animals closely related to us genetically are realistically defined in terms of human societies, human hierarchies, human legal treatment of different "ranks" of human beings, which are hardly a uniform or consistent phenomenon in human history. The often successful use of Darwinist claims about the efficacy of natural selection, mixed with naive (though at the time orthodox) assumptions about genetics, the ability of science to determine "natural" superiority or fitness and, so, inferiority and unfitness, have a now long history of rising, having malignant, even genocidal effect in some of the most scientifically sophisticated countries on Earth. Germany was certainly among the most scientifically sophisticated countries in the world, its elite, in universities, in the professions, in the professional military political and legal clases when it mixed 19th century nationalistic claims drawn from linguistic theory and Darwinism to create first proto-Nazism and then Nazism. To some extent the same can be said about the history of eugenics wherever that arose among academic and legal elites in service to the existing elites in politics and finance.
This is always going to be done as long as a naive view of evolution including natural selection and a naive simplification of genetic inheritance is claimed to enlighten our politics and laws. It is a fact that it produces oppression and death on an industrial scale.
"Just this week... I came into contact with the claims of the Toronto University Psych
ReplyDeleteprof... Jordan Peterson and his claims that the stories of ethologists about lobsters and researchers who have
serotonin injected into them tell you a lot about human hierarchies and
how they are biologically inevitable...I fully believe that we share that common ancestor with lobsters"
You may be right, and I love lobster, but I wouldn't eat you for dinner even if you were slathered in drawn butter, I'll tell you that for free.
Also "I came into contact with the claims of...Jordan Peterson and his claims" is kinda from the Department of Redundancy Department.
Simps, I was tempted to say something about your obviously twisted sex life but, really.
DeleteAnyone who reads what I said - with the part you left out - would see using the word "claims" wasn't redundant at all. Of course that leaves out the Eschatots who, no doubt, your audience is.
You are an idiot.
Get back to the world when you've learned how to write remotely coherently.
ReplyDelete"how to write remotely coherently"
DeleteYou mean like that?
What -- you found that hard to understand?
ReplyDeleteLet me rephrase -- get back to the world when you've learned how to write, period.
It wasn't hard, it was just not very well put. And you a professional. And by that I mean someone who got paid to write, not someone who got paid because they write well or about anything important. What Frank Zappa said.
DeleteOh, Frank would have just LOVED you.
ReplyDelete:-)
I imagine we'd have been able to talk music, he wasn't stupid though I don't have much use for his music. He did have generally good taste in other peoples' music. And he made fun of the Mop Heads. We're Only In It For The Money is the only one of his albums I ever bought, though I heard most of them up through the mid-70s. I lived next to one of his big fans.
DeleteYou'd have been able to tell him all about yourself.