“Puppies know who has treats. Dogs know how to befriend and not just bedevil.”
And yet: You as a human being can manage a truly sociable social network of only around 150 people – 15 or fewer you know and love as family, with the rest being those people about whom you can speak in loving detail of recent memories. As new close relationships are added, older, more-distant ones drop away, since 150 or so is all you mind can handle.
But consider: This is also true of your dog: He knows and trusts dozens of people – and other dogs – but it’s only family he treats as furniture. If you watch your dog interacting with people he knows, you will see graduated expectations based on past experience – for instance, who shares food while eating and who only afterward? That is: A database of memories of past interactions with particular people.
Evolution gave us the need for the thinking brain – too many freakishly difficult survival problems all at once – but the Greeks wrote the manual. But they – and we – are blinded by our own brilliance: We refuse to see what we had to have seen first, in order to have seen anything at all: All mammals are amazing adaptations with astounding brain power. They can’t connect dots, but they never, ever have their postulated ducks out of alignment.
It seems obvious to me that dogs and people manage personal relationships in about the same way because they are doing it with the same hardware: The mammal brain. Do recall, all other mammals are solving their own social problems without the thinking brain; unlike proto-humanity’s survival crises, the need pre-existed the hardware upgrade. This is very alien to the Greek way of thinking, where “dumb” animals are regarded as animate rocks, surprisingly variable deterministic robots.
It is the Greek way to make fine distinctions, so I will tell you the difference between their way of thinking and mine: I am much less interested in differences than I am in similarities. Mammals – and dogs – and Miss Chioux and all the mammals we have loved – they are already so much what we are – and they are there in weeks, not years, of development. What makes us different makes us gods – especially to them, even if catastrophically to us. But what makes us human was in them all along – and they lack the means to betray it.
In other news:
CNBC: Mortgage demand falls as rates rise to highest level since July.
Housing Wire: US home prices hit record level (again).
Joel Kotkin: Never Going Back: What if they opened the office and nobody came?
Jeffrey Tucker: The Purges Have Begun.
