Hey Darwin! What's So Funny?

Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin Of The Species’ opened our eyes to the biological processes that have given rise to the human race.

Darwin’s work enabled us to understand how physical attributes and gathered information passed on through genes and mimicry led to the human animal being the dominant species on planet earth.

By looking at animals in the wild we can observe animals making evolutionary decisions on a daily basis. A female lion mating with a male that has just fought and beaten its main rivals, for instance. Or a young chimpanzee watching its mother catch termites by poking a twig into the hole of a tree and then copying her to achieve the same affect.

Just as our actions and physiological attributes lend to our physical evolution, our emotional interaction and development will lend to our neurological evolution.

For example we couldn’t have formed such complex societies on planetary wide scales without the emotional concepts of good and evil forming in our minds.

Imagine if human males behaved like male lions. When taking on a new mate, if the female already has cubs the male will kill them in order to insure that it is his genes that are propagated and not those of his rival.

The female will mourn briefly and then shortly after have the urge to breed; it is easy to see why this wouldn’t work in human society.

So where then is humour’s place on the evolutionary chart?

There are many theories and many scientists since Darwin himself have pondered the mystery of humour, which in itself does not appear to have any function in human evolution.

Being able to tell a good joke would hardly have been necessary for the average caveman, making weapons and being able to tell whether or not someone was angry with you would have been.

It is probably reasonable to theorise that more complex emotions such as humour didn’t evolve in human beings until our needs became more complex. In the small communities of the hunter gatherer days emotions like fear, anger and lust would have been primary emotions.

However as civilisation grew and language developed our control over our environment also grew, with trading and the invention of money new skills had to be learned.

In a short space of time humans had overturned the evolutionary norm that big muscles always won the day, suddenly an emphasis on brain power was the drive behind human evolution.

With the evolutionary shift came the increase in size of our communities, whilst we remained fractious we still learned to bond with our immediate neighbours or people we deemed to be most similar to ourselves.

Humour would probably have played a big part in this; if someone you meet tells you an awful joke - be it offensive or just plain bad - on first meeting them, you’re far less likely to become that person’s friend.

Indeed if you continually tell someone jokes which they never laugh at, then you probably work with that person. Because when we choose our relationships, similar humour is a big factor.

When you think about it the mystery of humour, isn’t actually that much of a mystery at all, a good joke has helped the human race identify a friend or a foe for thousands of years.

The mystery probably stems from the fact that it has been humourless people trying to work out the function of humour!

"Wishing to teach his donkey not to eat, a pedant did not offer him any food.

When the donkey died of hunger, he said "I've had a great loss. Just when he had learned not to eat, he died."

Author Unknown - circa 500 BCE

I WROTE THIS ARTICLE A WHILE AGO, BACK IN THE MYSPACE DAYS AND HAVE SINCE DISCOVERED SOME NEW THINGS ABOUT HUMOUR. HOWEVER I STILL BELIEVE WHAT I WROTE IS RELEVANT AND I'M INTERESTED TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK.

WHY DO WE HAVE HUMOUR? IS IT AN INEVITABLE PATH THAT ALL SOPHISTICATED SPECIES MUST TAKE? OR ARE THERE HUMOURLESS ALIENS OUT THERE SOMEWHERE?

AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!

Title image: Dan Cook on Unsplash

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