After the Dinosaurs dissapeared, another specie ruled the world, the Mammals. Although they were generally weaker, they had a distinct advantage: They were built to learn. That means they could adapt their behaviour to the changing enviroment. This ability of learning from each other and teach the young is the one that creates the power of the mammalian enterprise. In the mammalian brain, evolution had produced one of the the nature's most powerfull survival tools: MATERNAL LOVE.
Under the watchful caring eyes of the mammalian mother, a child can learn; this is and advantage so critical to survival that the emotions that bond the mother to their child are one of the strongest in nature. The most fundamental behaviour that everybody recognizes in the mammalian is motherhood. The mother is attached to the child and they communicate with each other through emotional expression; in fact the child learns everything from the mother's face and analices her face constantly in order to learn wether things are safe or dangerous. This relationship between mother and child is necessary because it takes the child a long time to learn about everything. Mother's give us love and nurturance but they also provide us guidance, literally keeping our noses out of trouble and showing us when we are mistaken.
This is a very nice and good example of maternal guidance:
"Young dolphins start to get out of line and they are brought back to line. Let's say a boat is going by and a young dolphin starts swimming up to that boat, and probably in 'dolpheneese' it's been told "don't go near boats, they have something that will hurt you" and... It wasn't listening. What is it's mother going to do? Well, she will swim up to the baby dolphin and drag it back down, push it into the sand, beat it and when it is back to line, she will send high- pitched sonar pulses right through the baby's body to deliver a pearsing and memorable reprimend. But once the message is received, she tenderly strokes it's flipper with her's. That is the dolphin equivalent of holding hands, which means that she's saying: "Ok, you were wrong, now you've been scolded.. But it's ok, I still love you, don't do it again, all right?" (Mike deGruy, 2010)
To conclude, I think that mothers are the best example of emotional intelligence because in the end as humans, we are mammals too, the most successful animals on Earth, but innitially we are virtually helpless, and without our mothers we would never be more than that. Mammals are not preprogrammed, we must learn about the world, we learn extraordinarily quickly and amazingly well because our mothers make us. That's why mothers were invented.
If you want to get to know more about animal's emotional intelligence, visit:
www.animalmosaic.org; this page has a lot of information about it, and I got the dolphin's example from this page.
Even thought people says that mammals have a maternal instinct, I believe, just as you, that it goes beyond that, it is deeper, it is a bond that links mother's and their babies for a lifetime. Great job, and thank you for the link!
ResponderEliminarI think that is awesome when a mother face the dangers just to protect their offspring. The link is so strong that for me that is the reason why some females animals are bigger and strong than males. An example is the grizzly bear female.
ResponderEliminar