Chapter 9.                             Part G 

Principles and values name meta-behaviors, programs that are called up and run within the confines of the human skull. By using principles and values that we have learned from our elders, we form judgments about what we are seeing all of the time. Note, however, that we don't always, or even most of the time, take any action when an experience is evoking one of our principles. Sometimes we just see something pop into our locale, and we recognize that it's harmless so we cease to think about it. Being aware of, and wary of, the details in our surroundings all of the time does not always mean that we are going to be taking action, even though we are always contemplating whole sets of possible actions. Thinking, even thinking about our ways of thinking and which ways have been getting good results lately, is a kind of internal behavior. Often, what shows on the outside – to the frustration of the behaviorists who want to study only what is objectively observable – is nothing at all.

                                    vaccination of infants: a complex survival skill 

  Some ways of thinking enhance our chances of finding health and survival. Those are the ways that tribes are seeking, constantly. The ways of thinking that seem to work most effectively over generations are the ones that we keep and then teach to our kids. On the other hand, people who live by concepts and principles that don’t work in reality don’t survive and, therefore, don’t have kids themselves. In short, principles and values can be understood as tested and proven general reference guides for sorting other thinking techniques. They help us to organize our sense data, our memories of sense data, our categories of sense data, and all of the known responses to them. Over generations, they enable a whole tribe to formulate effective plans of action in timely ways.

            So let us now consider the ways in which early humans probably formed and used early principles. Early hunting and gathering tribes, for example, taught their young people ways to kill elk, fish, birds, mammoths, and so on. Crush the spine, right where it enters the skull. Or pierce the heart. Or cut the throat. Study the tracks and droppings. If the tracks are in new snow, or if the droppings are still steaming, the animal is very close by. There were many species to hunt and many ways to stalk and kill each of them. Over time, the thoughtful (thought-full), resourceful hunting tribes thrived best and multiplied.

             
                                        artist's conception of Neolithic mammoth hunters

            Far too many behaviors needed to be in a hunter’s repertoire for those behaviors to be learned or called up one at a time so hunting principles were invented. In nearly all cases, the hunters found it useful to recall general rules about what they’d seen, and what they'd been told, of the game in question’s habits in past encounters. Using these more general principles, the hunters would try to anticipate what the animal would do in the upcoming encounter, on this particular day and in this particular terrain. Then, the hunters would prepare themselves, psychologically, for violent, team-coordinated, physical action, if the hunt was to be a successful one.

            The exact process by which each kill would be made could not be known in advance, but the hunters knew, at the highest levels of generalization, that probably they would need to act with intelligence (in the planning stage) and skill and courage (in the implementation stage). Successful hunting tribes needed, at the most general level, to teach the values that we today call "courage" and "wisdom" to their young in order for their young to have better chances of surviving, reproducing, and passing the same values on to their children. Again it is worth noting that the mechanism of human evolution being implied here is not a genetic one but a socio-behavioral-cultural one, and it requires conceptual thinking.