AIDS aid: Mothers and Babies lose out, Evolution's Object Lesson. Fri 1st Dec

Today, World Aids Day, I heard on the World Service that mothers and babies, especially in respect of preventing the transmission of the infection to the newborn at birth, are seriously losing out in the allocation of funding for assistance and treatment. (In addition far less is being spent on treating child sufferers than assisting adults.) My first thought on hearing this was how clearly it proves that there is no inherent impulse in men to care for mothers and infants. If there was such an instinct in our hominin psyche, acquired because it was necessary for the survival of the species (as male baboons instinctively defend their females and infants) it would provoke in the sapiens psyches of the men allocating the funding the sort of thinking that would recognise how essential it is that babies survive to provide the indispensable next generation. I've made this point before in relation to the poverty inflicted on a majority of women worldwide. But having yesterday posted a short comment on the topic I must expand on the issue.

But the question "are we still evolving" is also given a demonstrable yes by the AIDS pandemic. The sapiens psyche is perfectly capable of producing, and indeed has produced, solutions to the problem, but these have been predictably ineffective on a large scale because the Hominin Psyche rules OK. So the rich Western countries through the activities both of commercial firms and governments can provide self-righteous rationalisations for restricting access to life-saving medication and these restrictions are most effectively breached when there is again a self-serving, that is survival, imperative in action. So I heard a representative of Barclays bank explaining the care they take of their staff in relation to AIDS -- well a bank with no staff doesn't pull in much profit.

The underlying evolutionary issue can be understood through James Lovelock's Gaia theory, that our planet has a self regulating biosphere. It is clear to most thinking people that Homo sapiens has expanded its numbers to exceed the capacity of the earth to support it. The plagues and pandemics that have increasingly manifested in the more crowded regions can be understood as part of the self regulating mechanism. We accept that bird flu will eventually lead to the worst pandemic so far, in spite of all the efforts being made, partly because we are actually making very little effort to tackle the root causes of the problem. We recognise that education must be a major weapon in the battle against disease but fail to recognise that it is powerless when ranged against the working of the hominin psyche whose agenda is personal survival. Wars, floods, mudslides like the ones in the news today in the Philippines, are all part of the same process. There is for example quite enough surplus wealth in the world as a whole to take action to prevent such disasters as today's headline, but the hominin psyches, not just of politicians and other influential figures in the affluent world, but of all of us who have more than we actually need, will see to it that such really effective action will not be taken.

I have suggested two mechanisms in our evolved psyche that are at once the problem and its solution: impressed behaviour patterns and mutuality, based on the anti-libidinal factor, in the mother/infant dyad. Let me give an example --

The Chinese invented gunpowder but China did not conquer the world; Europeans took over gunpowder and more or less did. Reading Armstrong's book the Great Transformation clarified for me how the Chinese had developed a reasonably non-violent civilisation, not perfect, but sufficiently adequate to remove pressures for change and so eliminate most of the surplus of violent impressed behaviours and allow the benefits of early mutuality to infuse the population. So gunpowder led to firecrackers. Quite the opposite was the situation in Europe and so Europeans, thanks to the natural workings of evolution, became dominant: the natural result of survival of the fittest and survival of the luckiest, which is not at all the survival of the most intelligent or of the most aggressive. Evolutionists of course do not talk about luck they talk about chance, but that covers not only such things as genetic drift but also the environmental circumstances in which some representatives of a species happen to find themselves. In the end I think it was not lucky for the portion of our species that remained in Africa, the environment in which we first evolved, to suffer fewer pressures, created by dissonance with the environment that would produce stronger more resistant cultures.

To back up my argument I will cite the strikingly different social response to total disaster witnessed in New Orleans on the one hand and in the Far East following the tsunami. The inhabitants of the city in the most "civilised" nation showed dramatically uncivilised behavioural responses as well as more acceptable, but not dramatically so, reactions. It was the Easterners, I think, who demonstrated the benefits to be derived from a first year of a life lived closer to its evolved optimum.

The solution that I referred to above would be to consciously redesign our culture to allow a first year of life in harmony with our evolved nature. This is not in fact a mother and baby at home on maternity leave where the infant receives no impressions of working life as it is lived in our society, and where it can receive the false impression that its wants come first; but rather a mother and baby in the workplace together, where the baby can learn to operate its anti-libidinal capacity as nature intended. From such a foundation more adults would arise capable of making or at least supporting the essential self- sacrificing decisions necessary to deal with the disasters and pandemics that we bring upon ourselves. We cannot produce a better world by willpower but only by nurturing the mutuality evolution has built into us.