There was something interesting in some scientific magazine a long while back [don’t remember the name of the magazine, or the name of the article], regarding certain evolutionary characteristics/behaviour patterns in humans. Whatever your personal views on evolution, sorry that’s beside the point; this is simply to understand theoretical evolutionary patterns of behaviour in humans. For example, one of the things the article mentioned is that when human beings gather in a large group to eat - try to observe this for yourself the next time you are in a uni cafeteria or restaurant or wherever. At fairly regular intervals, people will always tend to look up and around at their surroundings while they are eating; in a way (according to the article), they are subconsciously scanning their environment as their ancestors [supposedly] did tens of thousands of years ago.
i thought that was kindof interesting. If you observe it, you really notice that it’s true. People will eat, and then every few minutes or so, they look up and ‘scan’ their environment… Of course today, we don’t call it scanning and we definitely don’t consciously realize that we are ‘scanning’ our environment for potential predators :o But it could be argued that is a result of our cultural training and a result of our very ‘modernized’ environments. From an evolutionary perspective, there is some credibility to this argument. What other types of human behaviour could be said to be similar to this one - relics from our ancient past?
Yeah it’s a stupid topic - i have so much studying to do, i just wanted to open up this thread. Don’t make fun of me
Maybe staring into meat and two veg isn't stimulating enough on its own and people look around for other stimuli.
Besides when you're sat in a group I don't think many people look around much, just at the person they're engaged in a conversation with.
If its smelly lonely sad sacks you're talking about, then yes they look around in the hope of attracting someone’s attention and making friends, it’s best to avoid such people they’re the real predators out to ruin your lunch.
Nadia if you travel to Newcastle in the UK you can see many other traits left over from yesteryear, like the flea grooming ceremony and mating dances, these are still very much practiced in these parts and half the population still walk on all fours.
i give you about 10,000 years… should be perfectly evolved by then. i didn’t find the original article reference for the example i quoted above, but this is a somewhat related website from the University of California. i guess they have different names for it - behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology, etc.
not that I have something against evolution. but a lot of the theoretical sciences, that are based on other than emperical, substantiated data, often rationalise their findings on whatever is the fashionable scientific movement of that age.
a lot of what we do has no evolutionary basis. why pick and choose things you can possibly fit and find in animals? ah, as time went by, we evolved out of a lot of our the traits we needed before.
so i guess its rational for one to expect a polar bear to knock the fried chicken out of one's mouth and proceed to have lunch himself, while continually scanning for predators.
i didn’t find the original article reference for the example i quoted above, but