Part 8:5D To deny the importance of nurturing, the Social Intelligence Hypothesis was invented

Since humans are primates, the obvious area of research that has the most potential to shed light on our origins is the field of primatology, but it is in this most enlightening of subjects that some of the most dishonest thinking about the origins of our species’ moral sense has been taking place. Despite John Fiske having presented the nurturing explanation for our moral nature way back in 1874, the great majority of primatologists have been so fearful of the truth of nurturing that they have been completely dishonest in their interpretations of primate behaviour. This is particularly apparent if we compare their studies with the work of the rare few honest primatologists who have dared to recognise the role nurturing is playing in primate society.

For instance, the obviousness—if you’re not practicing denial—of the nurturing, love-indoctrination process, and how extremely confronting a truth it is, is apparent in Dian Fossey’s study of gorillas. As described in the Part 8:4G, Fossey was an extraordinarily strong-willed woman for whom the universal practice of denial in mechanistic science held no sway. Few, if any, however, have been able to cope with the honesty of Fossey’s studies, and, as a result, she has been misrepresented as merely a fanatical gorilla conservationist—such as in the 1988 film of her life, Gorillas in the Mist. A read, however, of her wonderfully insightful treatise on gorilla behaviour—the 1983 book Gorillas in the Mist upon which the film was unfaithfully based—shows just how courageous a scientist Fossey was. She watched the lives of troops of gorillas over many generations and gave a denial-free, honest account of what she saw, which was the whole love-indoctrination process at work. Fearlessly, she wrote that ‘Like human mothers, gorilla mothers show a great variation in the treatment of their offspring…Flossie was very casual in the handling, grooming, and support of both of her infants, whereas Old Goat was an exemplary parent’. Old Goat’s offspring, the ‘exemplary parent[ed]’ ‘Tiger’, ‘was taking his place in Group 4’s growing cohesiveness. By the age of five, Tiger was surrounded by playmates his own age, a loving mother, and a protective group leader. He was a contented and well-adjusted individual whose zest for living was almost contagious for the other animals of his group…[However,] The immigrant…​menace…​Beetsme…​developed an unruly desire to dominate…I found myself strongly disliking Beetsme as I watched his discord destroy…[the group’s] cohesiveness’. On reading this, one can appreciate why the whole nurturing, love-indoctrination process has been so determinedly denied—Old Goat was an ‘exemplary parent’ who created a ‘well-adjusted’ offspring with a wonderful ‘zest for living’, while the ‘menac[ing]’, ‘unruly’, ‘discord’-creating, ‘cohesiveness’-‘destroy[ing]’, non-‘loving’, and by inference unloved, Beetsme was ‘dislik[able]’; the implication for humans being that if you don’t love your child you’re a bad person, and, as has been stated, humans ‘would rather admit to being an axe-murderer to being a bad father or mother’.

In his 1989 book, Peacemaking Among Primates, the primatologist Frans de Waal recounts a meeting that was held between an unnamed psychiatrist and Harry F. Harlow, a psychologist who, in the 1950s, studied the extremely damaging effect isolation and touch deprivation had on rhesus monkey infants; their discussion shows just how unbearable and confronting both the concept and the importance of nurturing love has been for those studying primates, and just how fearless Fossey was in her honesty: ‘For some scientists it was hard to accept that monkeys may have feelings. In [the 1979 book] The Human Model…[authors Harry F.] Harlow and [Clara E.] Mears describe the following strained meeting: “Harlow used the term ‘love’, at which the psychiatrist present countered with the word ‘proximity’. Harlow then shifted to the word ‘affection’, with the psychiatrist again countering with ‘proximity’. Harlow started to simmer, but relented when he realized that the closest the psychiatrist had probably ever come to love was proximity”’ (pp.13-14 of 294). Yes, humans’ present human-condition-afflicted, unloved and unloving lives—where the ‘closest’ the immensely upset human race has ‘probably ever come to love’ is ‘proximity’—has meant that our ability to even acknowledge the existence of love, which is what nurturing essentially is, has been nigh impossible. No wonder mechanistic science practices the extreme dishonesty that Allot described in his aforementioned 1992 paper, when he reported that ‘Love has been described as a taboo subject, not serious, not appropriate for scientific study’—this despite, as Montagu acknowledged, ‘love’ being ‘One of the most frequently used words in our vocabulary’!

It follows then that the bonobos—whose extraordinarily maternal, nurturing, loving treatment of their infants and the resulting remarkable integrative, loving behaviour they exhibit as adults was described at length in Part 8:4F—have been extremely exposing, confronting and condemning of the unloved and unloving human race. As I mentioned in Part 8:4F, the biologist, psychologist and bonobo authority Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has bravely admitted that nurturing is the focus of bonobo society; like Fossey, she has let the truth out of the bag that the cooperative behaviour of bonobos is a product of the infant-focused, nurturing of love, love-indoctrination process—writing, with the assistance of her co-author, the writer Roger Lewin, that ‘Bonobo life is centered around the offspring. Unlike what happens among common chimps, all members of the bonobo social group help with infant care and share food with infants. If you are a bonobo infant, you can do no wrong…​Bonobo females and their infants form the core of the group.’ But also like Fossey, Savage-Rumbaugh’s honesty appears to have made her the target of the human-condition-avoiding, nurturing-denying, mechanistic scientific establishment, because in 2012 a campaign was launched to discredit and marginalise her ground-breaking work with bonobos. I have been told by a scientist whom I respect and who knows Savage-Rumbaugh personally that she has become somewhat erratic, but if that is the case I strongly suspect the genesis of such instability would be years of unfair criticism from the mechanistic establishment.

So the question now is, how was denial of the obvious role nurturing plays in the lives of more developed/​integrated/​social mammals, especially primates, and most especially bonobos—which the studies of Fossey and Savage-Rumbaugh bear witness to, and which provide such powerful evidence for how we acquired our cooperative, unconditionally selfless, moral instincts—achieved? Clearly, such a denial wasn’t going to be easy, but looking an obvious truth in the face and finding a way to deny it—such as finding a way to deny the extremely obvious truths of Integrative Meaning and of our corrupted human condition—is something we humans are masters at!

So yes, how did mechanistic science manage to look the obvious truth of the importance of nurturing in the face and deny it? There have been two ways. The first was to portray maternalism as nothing more than a mother providing her dependent offspring with food and protection. As was explained in Part 8:4B, the truth is that mothers’ maternal instincts to nourish and protect their offspring did provide the base from which the love-indoctrination process was able to develop, however, in love-indoctrination, maternalism became about much more than a mother looking after her infant—it became a case of actively loving that infant. Significantly, we speak of ‘motherly love’, not ‘motherly protection’. The problem, however, with this method of denying the nurturing, loving significance of maternalism is that in the case of the extremely exposing-of-the-truth, infant-focused, maternal bonobo society, their environment has historically been food-rich and competitor-and-predator-free, so it doesn’t make sense to argue that their exceptionally maternal behaviour has been driven by the need to either source food or provide protection.

The second method used to deny the significance of nurturing in bonobo life, and, by inference, its significance in the lives of our ape ancestors, is the one Leakey referred to—that the extended infancies in primates is due to the infant’s need for ‘prolonged learning’ about their ‘environment’. A more complete rendition of this alleged explanation for the need for the nurturing that we see in the society of more developed mammals, particularly in bonobos and humans, is that ‘The more sophisticated species also exhibit longer infant and juvenile stages, which are probably related to the time required for their more advanced mental development and their integration into complex social systems’ (Encyclopedia Britannica, cited on <https://pages.uoregon.edu/jschombe/​glossary/primate.html>, accessed Feb. 2013). As will be explained in more detail in Part 8:7B, this so-called ‘Social Intelligence Hypothesis’ (sometimes referred to as the ‘Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis’), and its more sophisticated version, the Ecological Dominance-Social Competition (EDSC) Model, essentially maintain that the long mother-infant association is needed to ensure the infant learns the skills necessary to manage ‘complex social’ situations, and that it was this need that also led to ‘more advanced mental development’, ultimately the fully conscious, intelligent mind in humans. For example, as was mentioned in Part 8:4C, E.O. Wilson says in The Social Conquest of Earth that, ‘to feel empathy for others, to measure the emotions of friends and enemy alike, to judge the intentions of all of them, and to plan a strategy for personal social interactions…the human brain became…highly intelligent’ (2012, p.17 of 330).

However, as will be described in Part 8:7B when the truthful explanation of the origins of consciousness is presented, even human-condition-avoiding mechanistic scientists have raised serious concerns over the viability of both the Social/​Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis (S/MIH) and the EDSC Model, but from the human-condition-confronting, truthful view of biology, some very obvious flaws with both models can be pointed out immediately—particularly in regard to their core argument that our fully conscious intelligent mind emerged as a result of having to learn to manage complex social situations, a process that supposedly required and explained the long infancy.

Social problem-solving is, of course, an obvious benefit of being conscious, but all activities that animals have to manage would benefit enormously from conscious intelligence—from the ability to reason how cause and effect are related, to understand change, to make sense of experience, to be insightful—so it is completely illogical to suggest that it wasn’t until the need arose to manage complex social situations that consciousness developed. No, any sensible analysis of how and when consciousness emerged must be based on the question of ‘what has prevented its development in other animals?’ A lack of social situations doesn’t explain why the fully conscious mind hasn’t appeared in non-human species because there was ample need for a conscious mind prior to the appearance of complex social situations.

No, as was briefly explained in Parts 3:11 and 8:4C and will be fully explained in Part 8:7B, the only accountable explanation for the emergence of the fully conscious mind in humans and for what is blocking its emergence in other species is the nurturing, love-indoctrination explanation—which, to recap very briefly, states that the nurturing of selflessness liberated the fully conscious, intelligent mind from the block that exists in non-human species’ minds against thinking selflessly and thus truthfully and thus effectively.

Another obvious flaw with both the S/MIH and the EDSC Model is that if it wasn’t for the psychologically upset state of the human condition there would be no need to learn, and become intelligent enough to master, the art of managing ‘complex social systems’. Through the process of love-indoctrination, we humans became so instinctively integrated that there was no disharmony/​conflict/​discord/​‘complex[ity]’ to have to manage. We lived instinctively as one organism. What did the Greek poet Hesiod say? ‘Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind, free from the toils and anguish of our kind…They with abundant goods ’midst quiet lands, all willing shared the gathering of their hands.’ The pre-human-condition-afflicted, integrated, cooperative, social, Specie Individual state, such as that which largely exists in bonobo society today, simply wasn’t a situation that called for infants to be skilled in social management techniques.

And the even more blatant flaw with the two arguments used to dismiss the important role nurturing played in the lives of our forebears, and continues to play in the development/​integration/​socialisation of other mammals, especially other primates, and most especially bonobos, is that they suggest nurturing is nothing more than a mother providing her dependent infant with food and protection, and that the long mother-infant association is needed only to allow the time to impart social skills. But, as stated earlier, humans can’t have developed such powerful instincts to nurture our offspring with love, or such powerful expectations of being unconditionally loved as children, if nurturing hadn’t played a fundamental role in the history of our species’ development—as I said, such instincts and expectations do not appear out of thin air. The response to this statement, however, from advocates of the S/MIH and the EDSC Model would be that mothers simply don’t have powerful instincts to nurture their offspring with love, and children simply don’t have expectations of being loved; rather mothers have powerful instincts to teach their offspring how to manage ‘integration into complex social systems’, and children have instinctual expectations of being taught such skills. In other words, it is not a case of instincts to love and be loved ‘coming out of thin air’, but a case of such instincts never existing in the first place. But that is absurd; indeed, it is offensively dishonest, because everyone actually does know that what Schreiner and Montagu wrote about infants’ need for love is true. Yes, what an infant needs from its parents—and from its mother in particular—is unconditional love, not training in the management of complex social situations! Certainly, when the need for denial is critical any excuse will do, and the art of denial is to then stick to that excuse like glue, but that does not mean we are so unaware we are practicing denial that we are unable to recognise and admit the truth when that denial is no longer needed—which, with the human condition now explained, it no longer is.

We all do actually know that to achieve the ‘loving order in the world’ that Montagu recognised, the cold, ruthlessly selfish, competitive, must-reproduce-your-genes ‘animal condition’ had to be overcome, and the only means by which that could be achieved was through the mother-infant, nurturing-of-love situation: the love-indoctrination process. As was emphasised in Part 8:4, the difficulty is that love-indoctrination is an extremely difficult process to develop and maintain to the point where the fierce competition to reproduce your genes is contained and integration achieved. Only our ape ancestors managed to develop love-indoctrination to the point where competition amongst males especially was contained and unconditional love and integration developed, something the fossil record is now confirming, as was described in Part 8:4E. Bonobos are well on their way, but all the other relatively developed/​integrated/​social mammals are still battling to develop love-indoctrination to the point where it has overcome selfish competition amongst males to reproduce their genes. But they are trying to do so, they are trying to indoctrinate their infants with love to the degree their circumstances allow. Reports from anyone who has worked with the relatively developed/​integrated/​social mammals and who is not under the control of the thought police—the truth-denying, mechanistic scientific constabulary—give accounts of the development of love through nurturing, such as this of the nurturing, loving behaviour of elephants: ‘After years of research and scientific observation it has been shown that elephant’s social structure and familial bonds are similar, if not deeper, than the bonds developed among [present immensely psychologically upset] human beings. There are deeply stirring accounts, by such scientists as Joyce Poole, Cynthia Moss and Dr. Dame Daphne Sheldrick, of elephants weeping and expressing grief at the loss of their calves…and other herd members. There are recorded behaviors of near spiritual proportion…​Calves frequently die of heartbreak from the loss of their mothers and abuse by human beings…​There are also great displays of affection and mutual respect rarely viewed in the social structure of humans. Joyce Poole, internationally known expert on elephants, states, “I have never seen (wild) calves ‘disciplined’. Protected, comforted, cooed over, reassured and rescued, yes, but punished, no. Elephants are raised in an incredibly positive and loving environment”’ (‘The Heart of Africa’, accessed Feb. 2013: see <www.wtmsources.com/102>). Note that Poole’s comment that elephant calves are never ‘disciplined’ echoes Savage-Rumbaugh’s observation that bonobo infants ‘can do no wrong’. Revealingly, like elephant orphans, orphaned ‘Gorillas and bonobos…just die. They see their mothers killed and they give up’ (Vanessa Woods, Bonobo Handshake, 2010, p.67 of 278)—because, as stated above, they suffer ‘heartbreak’; their emotional desire for, their instinctive expectation of receiving, and their attachment to, a loving true (Integrative-Meaning-compliant) world is so great they literally cannot survive without it. In Part 8:4F, a quote from Savage-Rumbaugh was included that described the rapturous joy expressed by the bonobos Matata and her adopted son Kanzi at their loving reunion. When the Friends of Bonobos charity designed their fundraising ‘A Bonobo Mother’s Love T-shirt’ to have a picture of a mother bonobo cradling her infant, they weren’t ‘anthropomorphising’ or inappropriately humanising bonobos, as the mechanistic thought police would argue, they were unwittingly conveying the simple truth. Bonobo mothers aren’t merely giving infants training in how to manage ‘integration into complex social systems’, that is an absurd suggestion—they are giving them ‘love’. But, again, when the need for denial is desperate, any excuse will do. The truth is that in the relatively developed/​integrated/​social species of mammals, nurturing has moved beyond the primitive ‘must nourish and protect’ maternal situation to the ‘must love’ maternal situation—they are attempting to develop love-indoctrination.