Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Prehistoric social skills

There's a new article up on the International Herald Tribune website today. Natalie Angier reveals some very intriguing suppositions about where our social skills--our skills of interpersonal relations, the skills that let us communicate our selves to others--come from, and when they developed--much earlier than we've previously thought!

Angier writes:

A baby may look helpless. It can't walk, talk, think symbolically or overhaul the nation's banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go, nothing can beat a happily babbling baby. A baby is born knowing how to work the crowd. A toothless smile here, a musical squeal there, and even hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the head and weak in the knees.

In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one's guard, uncurl one's lip and widen one's pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine.

For the full article, click here.

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