Why do humans pack bond with so many species/things
In: Biology
Among mammals at least, humans are the most prosocial species we’ve ever discovered. No other mammal lives in groups as large as us, and maintains relationships with as many unique individuals as us. Furthermore no other mammal practices sharing and cooperative behavior on as significant a scale as us. We evolved to be so cooperative with one another that we developed spoken language as a way to negotiate ever more complex forms of cooperation and organization with one another. Imagine how difficult it would be to try to live with other people (in a house, in a neighborhood, in a city, in a country) if all you could do to communicate was grunt, cry, growl, whine, and make simple hand gestures at them. That’s what other mammals’ lives are like.
So eager are we to enter into cooperative arrangements that we sometimes extend past our own species and seek to cooperate with animals. Cats to catch our pests, cattle to give us milk, dogs to, well, be dogs.
As for *why*? Who knows. Evolutionary biologists and evolutionary *psychologists* will argue about this endlessly, and there’s scant evidence to support any of it. For whatever reason, humans evolved to be unusually pro-social and willing to cooperate. We evolved the most acute senses to detect intentions from other humans (and indeed from other animals). Our very strategy for survival is so intimately tied up in cooperating with others that we had no option but to evolve these senses. Humans virtually never live alone in the wild, completely isolated and totally fending for themselves. It’s nearly impossible to do. We *need* other humans in a way that few animals do. Many animals are capable of living alone in the wild, and do all the time, even ones that typically live in groups. Lone individuals can and do leave the group all the time and go off to live a solitary lifestyle. For humans, this means almost certain death.
And because we’re so prone to trying to read other people’s intentions, we sometimes get over-eager. Sometimes we detect intentionality that isn’t actually there, for example in inanimate objects. Lots of animals do this to some extent, it’s smarter to be *too* suspicious than insufficiently suspicious. If you’re suspicious of something and you’re wrong and it turns out to be harmless, then you’re fine, no big deal. But if you’re *not* suspicious of something and you’re wrong and it turns out to be dangerous, you’re fucked. Humans just do it a lot. Because of this, sometimes we read intentions even into objects or things, and develop “cooperative” relationships even with things that aren’t animals.
TL;DR: Humans are so eager to bond with each other that we developed the capacity to bond with non-humans as well.
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