The word principle is a term for patterns that are common in even larger groups of things or events. Terms like danger and edible name very general principles that a tribe has spotted in many real life experiences of many tribe members. Terms for principles are harder to learn than ones like tiger or nuts, but also very useful in real life. The term danger enables one tribe member to tell another to get away from something quickly and stay away. It covers tigers, snakes, bears, crocodiles, unstable cliff faces, avalanche zones, poisonous plants, and so on. It’s an efficient term and one worth learning and keeping. 

The term edible covers nuts, berries, maggots, eggs, frogs, fish, lizards, and many more things an individual may come upon within the tribe’s environment. It enables one tribe member to tell another that the substance they’re looking at is worth gathering because it can be safely eaten, even if sometimes it doesn’t smell or taste very nice.

The world's tribes gradually learned that general terms are very useful as they help us to formulate guidelines for the design of patterns of behavior that will be effective in every tribe’s struggle to survive. 

Finally, we come to values, the most general of principles; they apply to huge patterns in our memories of sense data. We care about defining good because, deep down, we need to know what good is in order to survive in increasing numbers over the long run.

Terms for values name meta-behaviors, programs that are called up and run within the confines of the human skull. Using values terms learned from our elders, we continually form judgments about what we are seeing. Note, however, that most of the time we don’t take any action when an experience is evoking one of our values. Sometimes we recognize a thing or an experience is harmless so we cease to think about it. Being constantly aware of, and wary of, the details in our surroundings does not always mean we’ll take action, even though we are always contemplating whole sets of possible actions. Thinking, even thinking about our ways of thinking and which of them have been getting good results lately, is 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.

   

                          Handling reality: vaccination in Somalia (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Some ways of thinking enhance our chances of finding health and survival. Tribes are constantly seeking those ways. The ways of thinking that seem to work most effectively over generations are the ones we keep and teach to our kids. Conversely, people who live by principles and values that don’t work in reality don’t survive and, therefore, don’t have children. In short, principles and values can be understood as proven techniques for sorting sense data and responding to real life. Values help us to organize our sense data and our memories of sense data. Over generations, they help tribe members, individually and jointly, 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 methods of killing 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 the droppings are still steaming, the animal is 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 tribes thrived best and multiplied.

A hunter needed far too many behaviours in his repertoire for those behaviors to be learned or called up one at a time, so hunting principles were invented. In nearly all cases, hunters found it useful to recall general rules about what they’d seen and been told of their target’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 terrain. The hunters would then prepare 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 that they would need to act with intelligence (in the planning stage) and skill and courage (in the implementation stage). At the most general level, successful hunting tribes needed 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 discussed here is not a genetic one but a sociocultural, behavioral one, and it requires conceptual thinking.