Found an interesting article on what makes us human, and though there are several interesting candidates (including the ability to throw accurately and our prodigious capacity for shedding heat), this author focuses on our ability to not just cooperate and collaborate, but to do so even without expectation of a personal reward - and the ability to form joint intentionality.

http://nautil.us/issue/1/what-makes-you-so-special/cooperation-is-what-makes-us-human
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'He found a major difference between the two species. By the time a baby begins to point, at about nine months of age, she has already made several sophisticated cognitive leaps. When she points at a puppy and looks at you, she knows that her perspective may be different from yours (you haven’t noticed the pup), and she wants to share her information—doggie!—with you.

'“We naturally inform people of things that are interesting or useful to them,” Tomasello says. “That’s unusual. Other animals don’t do that.” Pointing is an attempt to change your mental state. It is also a request for a joint experience: She wants you to look at the dog with her.

'Chimps, by contrast, do not point things out to each other. Captive chimps will point for humans, but it’s to make a demand rather than to share information: I want that! Open the door! They do not understand informational human pointing, because they do not expect anyone to share information with them. In one of Tomasello’s experiments, food is hidden in one of two buckets. Even if the experimenter points to where it is, the chimp still chooses randomly. “It’s absolutely surprising,” Tomasello says. “They just don’t seem to get it.”'

The researcher studied pre-verbal children in an attempt to find an equal basis to compare humans and chimpanzees:

'Tomasello has discovered that young children, by contrast, find that working together can be a reward all its own. When adults deliberately drop objects in his experiments, babies of 14 months will crawl over to pick them up and hand them back. Toddlers open doors for experimenters whose hands are full. They do it without being asked and without being rewarded. Once they get the idea that they are partnering, they commit to joint intentionality. If a partner is having trouble, they stop and help. They share the spoils equally. “They really understand that we’re doing this together, and we have to divide it together,” Tomasello says.'

Now so far you might be wondering what this has to do with pedophilia, and the role becomes clear when the author begins to discuss self-domestication - which is a process closely correlated to neoteny - which is a retention of juvenile traits in a species which necessarily involves a sexual attraction to juvenile traits (i.e., pedophilia). He introduces this with a discussion of a Russian experiment in domesticating silver foxes that has been discussed here at GirlChat on several occasions:

'The foxes’ ability to read human social cues was now under strong artificial evolutionary pressure, since only the friendliest animals got the chance to breed. With Belyaev calling the shots, the foxes were competing against each other to be more socially perceptive. The outcome, a few dozen generations later, is a fox that understands human pointing. The small change in temperament permitted a big advance in social intelligence.

'Hare and Tomasello suspect our ancestors went through a similar process. Basically, we domesticated ourselves. When collaborating to find food became essential because of changes in the climate or changes in the competition, we became less aggressive and more willing to share. Aggressive individuals, unwilling to cooperate, would starve and die out. Now that our temperaments allowed us to put our minds together, we were able to develop communal inventions like language and culture, and sustain these innovations by teaching and imitating one another. The ability to crystallize knowledge in inventions and traditions, Tomasello says, is what turned the ordinary primate mind into an extraordinary human one.'

Cooperation and collaboration are juvenile traits that have been necessary to establish civilizations and to bring humanity as far as we have already come, but this is just the beginning: as we continue down this path I expect this trend to accelerate and for humanity to develop into something of a hive mind where our capabilities become greater than the sum of our parts. Though the necessary cooperative (neotenous) traits are distributed world-wide we will have to consider to what degree these traits are tied to genetics and how much in the way of non-cooperative traits can be allowed in a future society where every individual will have easy access to incredible amounts of power. Just as wheat and tares are the same species but only wheat bears useful fruit, so we may discover that not all humans bear fruit equally, and some may not bear fruit at all. I would not be a bit surprised if the preference of pedophiles for juvenile traits is closely linked to the proliferation of those traits even within the population of pedophiles ourselves - at least at the population scale - and this suggests that pedophiles will have a significant future in what humanity will become.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny
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http://www.davidbrin.com/neoteny1.html
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