Free The Puzzle of Left-Handedness by Rik Smits Page A

all seem to display an instinctive aversion to fellow creatures who patently have something wrong with them, however slight, whether they are sick individuals you’d do well to avoid or corpses, to which it’s always best to give a wide berth. However obvious this may seem, the precise nature of the phenomenon was for a long time unclear. Was it the product of a biological trait, moulded by evolution? Or was it simply a matter of poorly understood cultural conventions?
    In September 2009 researchers at Princeton University at long last produced powerful evidence that the uncanny valley phenomenon is indeed a biologically determined characteristic. They showed that it exists in the Java macaque, an animal often used in laboratory experiments. When the apes were presented with pictures that bore a poor resemblance to other monkeys of the same species they responded with mild interest, and they also coped perfectly happily with good-quality photographs, but when they were shown distorted images of their fellow macaques they looked away nervously. They didn’t like the look of those freaks at all. The experiment ruled out the possibility of a cultural origin for the uncanny valley; in fact, the scientists concluded it must have existed for aeons, since we know the ancestors of human beings and those of the macaque family diverged at least thirty million years ago.
    All things considered, it looks very much as if the uncanny valley phenomenon is crucial to the way we determine whether or not a person is ‘one of us’. Creatures that are clearly different from humans have little to fear. We accept them as belonging to a different species. Other animals respond in exactly the same way; nature is a great drama in which everyone tries to ignore everyone else as far as possible. Animals pay attention to other species only if their own interests are at stake. Predators watch out for suitable prey – if they’re hungry, that is, and not otherwise. Ducks quarrel, as do coots, but a coot will rarely bother a duck or vice versa, even though the two species live in close company with each other.
    Creatures that look like us and behave the same way, that sound and smell like we do, are members of our own species and therefore ‘one of us’. But that’s not to say we’re all alike. As in George Orwell’s Animal Farm , ‘all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’. First of all, we distinguish between our own group and the rest. Fellow group members have a right to our support and loyalty, to friendship and assistance where appropriate. All others are theoretically competitors, who must stay outside what we regard as our territory. From an evolutionary point of view our own group is composed of all our direct blood relatives, but in the real world human groups take many forms: family, friends, club members, neighbours, fellow villagers, the sports team, everyone who works for the same company – and so on and so forth, depending on what suits us best.
    Sometimes this has sublime, noble consequences, such as when a whole group stands up in support of members who are subject to an external threat. One famous example in the case of the Netherlands comes from the early months of 1941, a bitterly cold winter in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. The first round-ups of Amsterdam Jews led to what soon became known as the February Strike, the most significant act of protest in the Netherlands during the Second World War.
    The story goes that shortly before the strike was broken, a slogan appeared on a wall somewhere in the city: ‘Filthy Krauts, keep your filthy hands off our filthy Jews’. If the story is true, then whoever wrote that slogan was displaying, besides a sense of irony, an unusually profound insight into human relationships. It demonstrates how the dis tinc tion between members of the same species can either arouse protective instincts or provoke ruthless exclusion. Dutch Jews were and remained ‘filthy