I find the sentimentality towards dead bodies difficult to relate to. I would be fine with my body being left and would not want someone else to die attempting to retrieve it. I suppose my friends and family might not feel the same.
http://www.meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human-evolution/
That link is a blog length summary of a book, but the ultra-short version is: if local predators get a taste for human flesh from a corpse, they'll come after the living and humans singing and dancing in unision can give the appearance of one large animal to scare off predators.
Why do grandparents love their grandchildren? Something noble about human nature and love? Or is it evolutionary advantageous?
Because old cave-people aren't as good at hunting and gathering, and can be better used as child-care cavepeople.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/58/64/15/586415bb9...
Basically intelligence + long distance running = ability to track prey.
Actually everything in this thread is a just-so story. It's pretty silly to pick out one specific rare behavior as even relevant to evolutionary fitness. How would any of this be tested?
> Having the bodies would help the families grieve, and would also help to prevent lengthy delays to insurance and inheritance settlements.
Risking lives to recover dead bodies does not sound logical and yet it's the norm on underwater accidents. One of the multiple examples of a recovery gone wrong is the case of David Shaw [1], particularly famous because there's footage of the recovery accident.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shaw_(diver)#Last_dive
You're a green-blooded, heartless monster, Mr. Spock ...
- Something related to body identification and insurance.
- Human life is cheaper than ROVs.
- There are tasks that ROVs can't accomplish.
The downside of still systems is that any silt you stir up can kill the visibility for hours / days, which would cause problems for light-based beacons.
I really do get why people cave dive and do dangerous things. It's a lot of fun. But really, at the end of the day, they did this because it was a rush. There's no other rational reason to do something to risk your life doing someone your friends just died doing for no other reason than it was exciting.
lol, go ahead and downvote. I do a lot of adrenaline rush type activities, but I've never tried to pretend it was anything other than just dumb, life risking adrenaline pumping distraction from life.
Also I think that these sport are about more than just adrenalin. There is joy in mastering the difficulty without getting a rush.
Diving isn't really compatible with "a rush", especially not cave or other technical diving. You have to be focused, methodical and patient. It's more meditative than anything, you can't even breath too quickly without risk. While still having to keep track of a lot of things. In "rush" type of activities it's the sensation of almost losing control that is fulfilling, while in technical activities like this it's rather the sensation of being in control.
For cave divers, I am convinced that the other divers would quickly dispose of a team member who looks like he (or she) is not acting super calm.
sorry for my bad english and for feeding a troll.
I say this as someone who 100% agree with the first part of your comment.
I no longer skydive. I switched because I find the joy in exploring the underwater, a place that most people never get to see. And exploring caves is something that VERY few people ever see, and that is a truly amazing experience.
Finland was unusual in the context of WWII that all bodies of dead soldiers were retrieved if at all possible, and sent back home, not just buried at a local military graveyard. This diving thing (Finnish divers in a Norwegian cave) has echoes of the same.
You can just chalk it up to culture, but there is also a logic to it that is every bit as logical as the "leave my meat where it falls" crowd: if you have a culture of retrieving the bodies of the fallen, no matter the difficulty, then that means that you won't leave behind the wounded to save your own skin. This, in turn, makes it easier to trust and to risk your life for your comrades -- they'll take care of you in turn, living or dead.
I always assumed the "no man left behind" spoke more about the excessive abilities of the group. (We are so powerful that we can even overcome our enemy to retrieve our fallen men.)
In fact, when for instance Taliban or Daesh look at things, the enemy bodies are not plentiful at all. I think it is extremely rare for an American, British or NATO partner soldier's body to fall in their hands. The Western losses in those wars are very small by historical standards, almost negligible, and evacuation is extremely efficient.
For instance, take the current Afghanistan war. Wikipedia: "As of October 1, 2015, there have been 2,326 U.S. military deaths in the War in Afghanistan. 1,856 of these deaths have been the result of hostile action."
1,856 casualties from enemy action in about 15 years. That is about the same number of casualties as Omaha Beach took in a single day. It's half of what my father's brigade inflicted in a single day against one single Russian infantry regiment in February 1942. It is one thousandth of what German Feldheer suffered in all of WWII, and one five-thousandth of what the Soviet army suffered in their "great patriotic war" during four years.
Casualty numbers in modern wars where Western troops attend are very small, when compared to historical wars.
The current Syrian civil war is then another matter. Its casualty numbers are not big when compared to WWII, but they are much bigger than Afghan or Iraq wars.
It's basically "we are all in the same boat", which is true (sometimes literally) when you're engaged in high-risk activities. Note that high-risk in this case doesn't mean that you might get killed, but that there is a low margin for error leading to catastrophic failure. Special operations are not about being a fair fight, it's about using your advantage and once you loose that you're often in big trouble.
Say you're doing recon on enemy territory and calling in airstrikes. You're a small mobile force that is hard to find having disproportionate impact on the battle, which is good. Then someone drop a glove or breaks his leg or anything else that compromises the mission and now you're just a small force soon to be a disproportionate loss, which is bad.
'No man left behind' is practical, both for the propaganda reason above and unit morale, not about showing off. But like most things in military life I never heard anyone ever bombast about 'no man left behind' like they do in the movies.
1) Speed up post-death admin (insurance etc) 2) Unblock the route for future use, they did not want to see the system closed.
The dead body allows for death, in all its unknown shock, to be visualized and thus integrated into human experience. A link from the living to the gone, that allows grieving to heal the social wound of a death.
I think that's the main idea at issue here: Are they still those people? Or are they just, to oversimplify a little, just some old meat?
It's kind of a dumb philosophical argument though. We all know what's really going on, so it's pointless to argue over words.
Still, though, I've got strong opinions about how I want to be "disposed of" when I die. Burial evokes strong emotions for me, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Even in games like Fallout, I try not to leave corpses just lying in a river or in a shrub or something, even if it was somebody who was just trying to knife-murder me. I accept that it isn't a person anymore, like I said in my previous comment, but I still have a sentimental attachment to the... husk.
How can you explaing phenomena like this withouth group selection? From selfish gene point of view, a brain that is even capable to think about risking life to fetch dead body of friend* should be strongly selected against.
* (and therefore some individuals might act on it very occasionally)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Group_selectio...
>Since the 1990s, group selection models have seen a resurgence.