Handling reality: vaccination (credit: Andrew McGalliard, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Some ways of thinking enhance our chances of finding health and survival. Tribes are always 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. In modern terms, values "inform" our thinking. Since reality is always changing, our values must evolve also, though as I said above, it is sometimes only by the pain of famine, plague, or war that we make values changes. 

So let’s 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 or sever 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" - tribes thrived best and multiplied.

A hunter needed far too many behaviors 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 taught about their target/prey animal’s habits. 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), then skill and courage (in the doing stage). At the most general level, successful hunting tribes needed to teach the values that we 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.

   

                            drawings in Magura cave, Bulgaria (credit: Nk, via Wikimedia Commons)