Social Success, Part 1: Prehistory
Primitive social evolution, the sacrifice of truth, and groupish groups
To understand ourselves at present, we first need to understand where we came from and how we got here.
In my previous post, I introduced the theory of multi-level selection, which highlighted the interesting clash that occurs between what benefits the individual and what benefits the group. This three-part series will explore the social evolution of humans and some of the methods that groups developed to moderate anti-social across three periods of time. We'll start off by studying pre-agricultural tribes, move on to the civilizations that sprouted soon after the agricultural revolution, and finish off the series by using these historical findings to help make sense of modern society and where it may be heading.
In Part 1, we’re going back to the hunter gatherer days. This is an important period to cover, since this is where hominin evolution in a group context had the longest time to ferment. Expect to learn why fire was so crucial to our social development, whether hunter-gatherer tribes were actually egalitarian, why we’re willing to sacrifice truth in exchange for comfort, and why human groups evolved to be groupish1.
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Our exploration begins at the crackling glow of the campfire. When our ancestors, Homo erectus, managed to control fire, so marked a critical pre-condition to the social flourishing of humans. Control of fire was such a crucial step in our social evolution because it brought us together. Fire offered refuge to those who sustained it, providing warmth on cold nights, warding off predators, and allowing for increased meat consumption which in turn increased caloric intake. Fireside campsites thus arose to provide the required attention and care to sustain a persistent fire. Fire became the nucleus of social groups, and individuals now found themselves in close proximity to other individuals, some of whom were non-kin, on a regular basis.
Keep in mind that group living certainly existed before fire, as evidenced by our ape relatives, but campsites made it possible for humans to approach what is known as eusociality. Eusocial species are those who occupy the throne of sociality, characterized by overlapping generations of adults, self-organized division of labor, and cooperative caring of offspring. Examples of eusocial species include ants, bees, wasps, and termites. Groups of the Homo genus are different from eusocial insects in that they aren't all siblings (most eusocial insect colonies share a common mother), which can make adopting pro-social behaviors a little more complicated. Nevertheless, campsites became nesting sites for humans, akin to beehives for bees.
Campfire fueled nesting sites provided enough benefits to our ancestors such that it became genetically advantageous for some adolescents to remain within the group and contribute to the campsite system, rather than deserting the group in search for resources and mates. Of course, some degree of inter-group contact was still required to avoid incest; but this could be settled via trade, which allowed groups and their respective nests to remain intact. And what did these nests eventually lead to? An increased and sustained group population (up to what was allowable by the resources available), which yielded overlapping generations of adults, division of labor, and the cooperative caring of offspring.
Hominins were on their way to eusociality.
Small Societies
Now forced to collaborate with one another, those who were better able to navigate the ensuing complex social landscape were more likely to see reproductive success. A selection pressure was thus placed on social intelligence; being able to empathize with others and keep score within a complex network of relationships became valuable traits. These adaptations saw corresponding developments in the brain, the organ tasked with consolidating and processing all of this additional sensory information. For example, in our brain we have what are called mirror neurons that activate upon observing the movements of other people, and they activate in similar fashion to as if we were performing the movements ourselves2. These mirror neurons provide us with the ability to simulate and anticipate the actions of others and are thought to form the neural basis for empathy.
Prior to the agricultural revolution over ten thousand years ago, group size was constrained by demography and economics. Groups were necessarily small due to nutritional limitations. Prior to agriculture, groups would settle, gather food as required, and strategically relocate when local food and water sources were exhausted. Food at this time was mostly perishable and sparsely distributed, which removed the possibility of amassing a significant energy surplus, and hence the possibility of complex stratified societies.
Small group sizes made it difficult for selfish behavior to go unnoticed. For instance, a man taking more than his fair share of the hunt would be reprimanded by others in the group, and a woman treading too closely to the mate of another woman would risk becoming the subject of heated gossip. This is not to say that tribes were purely egalitarian. Skillful hunters within the Ache hunter-gatherers of South America, for example, do share their food accordingly with the rest of the tribe, but their children get special treatment, they enjoy more extramarital affairs, and they produce more illegitimate children.
Likewise, as religious experts in hunter-gatherer tribes, shamans often effectively converted the power associated with their role into material gain. A shaman of the arctic Indigenous might receive sleds and harnesses, or even on occasion the loan of a satisfied customer’s wife or daughter. The gain need not only be material; Ojibwa shamans tended to work for prestige instead of pay, because that increase in status unlocked easier access to material and sexual resources.
This and That
Shamans capitalized on the human tendency to be uncomfortable with uncertainty. There's an allure to someone that can confidently tell us why something happened, regardless of whether the explanation is accurate. Humans are notorious for falling prey to this allure because certainty is much more comforting than uncertainty. Shamans thus present a useful example that highlights the adaptive advantage of social intelligence. Charisma and deception—and self-deception, it's easier to convince others of a lie if you yourself believe it—evolved as adaptive traits that brought success to individuals in the early social development of our species.
We’ve been talking about shamans in the context of inegalitarianism, which tends to highlight their unflattering qualities. To paint a fairer picture, it’s important to acknowledge that, as a whole, shamans were wise, well-respected, and deeply caring towards their respective tribes. Shamans were not clueless; many of their methods had merit, built upon generations of accumulated tribal wisdom. Regardless of the legitimacy of some of their methods and some questionable requests of compensation, the services they provided were generally well-intentioned attempts to alleviate the woes of fellow group-members.
As an aside, the aforementioned human discomfort that is associated with uncertainty and complexity heavily influences the way we think. Humans have the tendency to reify things, that is, to group together ideas and complex phenomena into simpler concepts. In a world of overwhelming detail, reification is a quick and effective way for us to make sense of it without having to process everything, much of which may contain irrelevant information anyways. However, this process necessarily glosses over the finer details and can lead to misrepresentations of reality—in fact, it always leads to misrepresentations of reality, simply because we don't have the ability to capture and process absolutely everything.
In the field of physics, a "reification" process is generally required to simulate moving fluids. If we were to try and model fluids from the entire micro-to-macroscopic scale (say, 1 micron to 1 meter), well, it would require a lot of memory and computing power! So, instead of computing the physical equations at the micro-scale, we tend to aggregate the small scales and assume some general fluid behavior within that aggregation (which inevitably introduces errors), while accurately modeling behavior at the macro-scale with the proper physical equations. Finer details are glossed over, but these models work well enough to capture general fluid behavior, and have consequently helped guide the aerodynamic design of the cars you drive in, the trains you ride in, and the planes you fly in.
In my writings, I am, and will be, guilty of reifying things. In our evolutionary principled discussions, I apply a broad brush of evolutionary theory to get a general understanding of human behavior and development, which undoubtedly paints over some of the precious peculiarities of life. But, like how we can use aggregate models to better understand physical behavior, a broadly applied evolutionary model should work well enough to help us get a better general understanding of human behavior.
One last note about reification. Us humans possess what is known as a dyadic instinct, that is, a proneness to divide reified classifications into two parts. The divisions of in-group vs. out-group, child vs. adult, kin vs. non-kin, single vs. married, life vs. death, sacred vs. profane, and good vs. evil are all examples of this instinct in action. Remember, uncertainty is uncomfortable; so, if we can classify things that (in reality) occupy a continuum into instead "this" or "that", we don't have to spend time mulling over the uncomfortable possibility that it could be both.
Human cultures around the world reinforce the boundaries between these binary divisions with ritual. This includes marriage rituals that emphasize the transition from single to married; funerals that emphasize the transition from life to death; and coming of age rituals, such as Spanish quinceañeras or Jewish bat mitzvahs, which emphasize the transition from childhood to adulthood.
The dyadic instinct also helps to explain why groups need easily recognizable symbols. We need to be certain of who's on our team, and who's not; or, put a little more cynically, who's worthy of our love, and who's worthy of our hatred.
Pleasure and Pain
Let's return to the Stone Age. Hominin hunter-gatherer societies likely had over a million years, dating back to the discovery of controlled fire and the consequent nesting sites that spawned, for natural selection to work its magic at both the individual level and the newly bolstered group level.
Conflict or collaboration occurred between groups depending on environmental circumstances. In times of resource abundance, groups would be more likely to trade material and sexual resources, which had the potential of benefitting multiple groups and strengthening alliances. In times of resource scarcity, however, there just wasn't enough to go around and groups would inevitably clash. Throughout the Stone Age, the groups that prevailed in these clashes were not only those better geographically positioned and technologically equipped, but also those who worked together the most effectively.
So, how did our forebearers and their foregroups manage to keep it together?
While groups were clashing with one another, so were the traits that benefited the individual versus the group. Our genes started reinforcing behaviors that led to group success, since genes that did otherwise eventually perished at the hands of more successful groups. And our genes reinforced good social behavior by strategically rewarding us with pleasure and punishing us with pain.
Charity, kindness, and altruism were accompanied by good feelings since they cultivated stronger bonds of kinship and friendship, which improved the odds of survival and reproduction. Conversely, guilt and shame developed as unpleasant feelings to discourage anti-social behavior. It may feel good in the moment to take more than one's fair share of something, as dictated by the forces of individual selection; however, feelings of guilt and regret can surface upon reflection of the selfish act, as dictated by the forces of group selection.
This stage in human development also co-aligned with an increase in technological development, which began to generate environmental changes at a rate that increasingly outpaced the adaptations that genetic evolution could provide. Genetic evolution was just too slow; therefore, other means of transferring knowledge3 evolved to pick up the slack. One of these methods was the development of local fables, which attempted to transfer knowledge to younger generations through the use of story. Predictably, a common theme shared by these stories is that pro-social behaviors lead to positive outcomes, and anti-social behaviors lead to negative outcomes. Storytelling in part developed as a group-level (i.e., cultural) adaptation to socialize developing group members.
A small percentage of the population have been able to skirt by without strong negative feelings accompanying anti-social behavior, commonly known as psychopaths. Historically, psychopaths have been necessarily uncommon, since those who were genetically predisposed towards psychopathic traits would have an increased likelihood of causing strife within the group and would be correspondingly expelled. Yet, psychopathy still exists to this day at too large a frequency to be explained by genetic mutation alone, suggesting that the possession of a small number of psychopaths may prove adaptive for groups. Psychopaths can be a useful tool to have during a battle with another group, granted that their ruthlessness can be directed at the opposing group.
These days, this same principle manifests on both the military and economic fronts. Armies certainly still attract their fair share of soldiers with socially ruthless tendencies; but, so do the upper echelons of the corporate world, a setting where ruthlessness can be leveraged. Some estimate that psychopathic prevalence is ten times greater in CEOs (~10%) than in the general population (~1%). Psychopathic CEOs are useful tools, both to their respective companies and the nations to which they belong, in the global competition over the acquisition of scarce resources.
Groupishness
Individual organisms evolved to be genetically selfish. While it wouldn't be uncommon to find a male tiger willing to share his meal with his direct kin, it also wouldn't be uncommon to find a male tiger who would consider non-kin cubs as a tasty appetizer. This strategy works for tigers because they're solitary: their genetic success doesn't depend on collaboration with non-kin. For humans, it is easy to see why this "barbaric" and "cold-hearted" individuated behavior is incompatible with group living. Of course, a tiger's behavior only seems barbaric and cold-hearted from the perspective of a social species. If we were a solitary species, we'd be no different.
Instead, groups of humans evolved to be groupish. In the tiger example, swap tiger with group, meal with resources, and kin/non-kin with in-group/out-group, and you can start to get a sense of the similarities. The same biological forces are at play, just scaffolded up to the group level. By observing groups under this lens, we can start to make sense of the ironically bizarre, yet commonly found, occurrence of groups preaching compassion within their group, but exhibiting animosity towards those outside of their group.
Passionate love for the in-group, paired with vehement hatred for the out-group, motivated our ancestral warriors to put their lives on the line for their respective groups. A group lacking in within-group love would propel less warriors to the point of risking their lives for the group and would see its fate to more passionate groups; likewise, a group lacking in out-group hatred could find more warriors resistant to harming the out-group and would see its fate to less compassionate groups.
Lack of out-group hatred also introduces uncertainty within a group, which consequently degrades trust. If a tribe-member must wonder if their neighbor is really on their team or not, well, that’s uncomfortable, and leads to the tribe-member wondering “Can I really trust this person when push comes to shove?” So, shared hatred of the out-group brings the added benefit of alleviating that uncertainty and bolstering in-group trust.
A common enemy brings people together and strengthens bonds4, which should come as no surprise to anyone who's attended a high stakes sporting event. The sports industry profits from the glorious feelings that arise from in-group love (and out-group hatred—especially during playoffs). Sporting events are an example of an event that brings communities together to generate collective effervescence, a phenomenon that harmoniously exhilarates participants and leads to overall group unification. It feels wonderful to rally together, so wonderful that we're willing to incur substantial financial costs to experience it5.
So far, we've discussed pre-agricultural societies, who had populations on the order a few dozen to a few hundred people. In a hunter-gatherer setting groups were small, so humans had the capacity to put a name to the face of most in their group. Suppressing selfish instincts came a little easier; people knew personally those who their selfish actions would harm, and they were more likely to get caught. Alongside the agricultural evolution came a newfound capacity to support ever-increasing populations. Rather suddenly, relative to human evolutionary timescales, it was now possible for someone to encounter hundreds of people to whom they weren't personally familiar with.
How did civilizations resist collapse in the wake of selfish free-for-alls? How did they manage to unite constituents that were, for the most part, unfamiliar with one another?
Selfish with respect to other groups (to borrow the term from Jonathan Haidt).
When you wince when seeing others get hurt, you’re wincing because your brain is simulating yourself going through the same motions as whomever you’re observing—and if pain comes as a result of those motions, you’ll feel it too to some degree. That’s empathy baby!
Knowledge transfer is essentially what genes are trying to do. Genes encode the information that helped previous generations survive and reproduce.
Whether we like it or not.
Calling them "groupish" sounds like a bizarre name but it actually makes perfect sense.
I still can't say Homo Erectus without cracking a smile.