Using evolutionary reasoning (I)

Start from the beginning and read a lot about other societies.

A paper on the evolution of human throwing—we are the champion throwers of the biosphere—defines natural selection nicely:

Natural selection results from nonrandom differential reproduction and has ecological causes and evolutionary consequences.

Two classic criticisms of applying evolutionary reasoning to human behaviour are that evolutionary reasoning is prone to:

1. create just-so stories, and

2. end up justifying whatever is the current social arrangement.

These are reasonable criticisms of what use of evolutionary reasoning needs to avoid.

There is a third criticism, which is that human behaviour is so plastic—evidenced by such behaviour as choosing celibacy—that evolutionary reasoning does not apply.

Yes, we are the blankest slates in the biosphere; cognitive plasticity is the human niche. But that we can display a wide range of behaviour does not mean that our behaviour is not patterned in ways that make sense given our evolutionary history.

We are biologically-embodied strategic actors and that produces identifiable patterns of behaviour. Nor are we blank slates. If, for example, we were not primed to learn, we would not be able to learn as much as we do. We cannot invent emotions, nor basic structures of learning, nor patterns of attention, from scratch.

A way to avoid problem (2) is to read a lot of evolutionary anthropology and social history. Once you have a sense of the sheer breadth of human societies, you are much more likely to grasp the contingency—and especially the path-dependency—of human social arrangements. It also provides a much better basis for working out what are, and are not, genuine human universals.

For instance, courtship marriage—where both bride and groom chose the other—has been a minority form of marriage across human societies. To this day, part of the appeal of Christianity in Africa is precisely that its congregations—and insistence on mutual consent for marriage—provide a refuge from the demands of kin-groups, including about who you will marry, while providing a substitute for kin-group support.

One of the few things that is distinctively human—rather than being an extreme manifestation of patterns also seen in other species—is that Homo sapiens are the only species where it is possible that neither member of a mating (i.e. marriage) pair has chosen the other. There have been plenty of human marriages where bride and groom first met on their wedding day.

So, if you are going to talk about human mating patterns, you better either not just assume the courtship marriage pattern applies or else make it clear when you are specifically talking about courtship marriage.

As for problem (1), the trick is to start from the beginning and work up carefully, using multiple lines of evidence. So, here are a series of propositions about human evolution and the social consequences thereof.

Only humans can touch the little finger with the thumb. Wikimedia Commons.

Some propositions

1. We were a technological (i.e. tool-using) species before we were human. Our Australopithecus ancestors picked up rocks and split open skulls and bones of the remains of kills left by predators to get at the highly nutritious—mainly fat, mainly saturated fat—marrow and brains inside.

2. This set us down the path of developing the cognitive capacity to make and use tools. Skills and knowledge (human capital) have been as basic to our subsistence strategy—and to all economic development since—as physical capital (tools). Indeed, creating and using physical capital requires human capital.

3. Our bipedal pelvises limited the size of infant skulls. Human childbirth is unusually risky, showing there was strong selection pressure for brain size.

4. This skull size limitation at birth meant—as we became more and more dependent on learnt skills—more and more brain growth occurred after birth. This led to incredibly helpless babies, who had to learn even to walk, but whose brains were structured to learn.

5. So, we ended up with the most biologically expensive offspring in the biosphere. By the time we became biologically modern humans, it took almost 20 years to train a forager (i.e. hunter-gatherer) child to be a subsistence adult—that is, to be able to forage as much nutrition as they consumed.

6. Humans became the best throwers in the biosphere, with shoulders that evolved to throw—an eight year old Homo sapien can throw better than any member of any other species.

7. We also became one of the better long-distance running species [while being unremarkable sprinters].

8. Both these adaptations—along with skin with hair rather than fur designed [structured] to release and manage heat via sweat—are clearly selections for a tool-using species to be an effective predator by running down exhausted prey in the middle of the day, when other predators were napping.

9. Throwing meant killing at a distance. We are the only species who can kill fellow members of our own species at a distance. That made it easier to build coalitions able to punish at acceptable risk those who defect from cooperation.

10. Collaboration v competition, connection v transaction are not the basic choices for social cooperation. Cooperation v defection is the key choice. You can collaborate to defect. You can compete to cooperate. The better the mechanisms for punishing defection from cooperation, the higher the levels of cooperation we can manage.

11. Lacking tearing teeth or rending claws, so relying on making and using tools, while having increasingly biologically expensive children, and being able to punish defectors, led us to develop highly cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies.

12. The basic pattern became the transferring of risks away from child-rearing and the transfer of resources to child-rearing, including for their training.

13. Among foraging cultures, men typically do such hunting or gathering that is too risky to do with bubs in tow, women typically do such hunting or gathering that can be done with bubs in tow.

14. So, men generally hunt large animals and gather honey. Women generally gather plants, lizards, shellfish. In forager societies, this tends to be a pragmatic pattern rather than rigid social roles.

15. This pattern—of women doing those activities which can be done with bubs in tow, men do everything else—has dominated the patterns of human sex-roles until the massive, on going, expansion in access to, and use of, energy (aka the industrial revolution) systematically moved production of goods and services out of households,¹ including the advent of mass schooling moving child-minding during work hours out of the household.

16. When women hunt animals other than lizards and other small creatures, it has usually been by women who either do not have children; their children are adults; or someone else is looking after the children.

17. Until the development of mass schooling, these continuing constraints greatly restricted which women could work outside the household or do work that required considerable concentration (e.g. being writer).

18. This generally being about what worked, there were still female warriors in low-density societies where the men might be away (e.g. the steppes).

19. Cooperative, tool-based hunting encourages greater male focus on things. Emotion-based social connections to assist with the rolling multi-child—given high rates of infant and child mortality—project of human child-rearing encourages greater female focus on people.

20. The larger the animals being hunted, the more team work among (overwhelmingly male) hunters was nutritionally productive—and productive of other resources (skins, fur, horn)—and so selected for.

21. Having such biologically expensive children—so requiring more and more male investment in children—meant that human foragers could not be a harem species and maintain a successful reproductive strategy. Human males—despite their systematically greater strength over human females—are not nearly large enough to dominate a group of human females on their own, as a male Gorilla dominates Gorilla females half his size. They certainly could not successfully provide for them as well as cooperative, pair-bonding males could.

22. Given the increasing level of male investment in offspring, nor could human males share human females as a group of male Chimpanzees sexually share female Chimpanzees: human testes are not nearly large enough to produce Chimpanzee and Bonobo levels of semen to squirt out the sperm of the previous male. Human males are structured towards pair-bonding.

23. As foragers, we evolved to be a very mildly polygynous species, since human children took so much care and resources that only relatively robust pair-bonding within a—usually fairly fluid—foraging band could hope to be a successful reproductive strategy.

24. Hence, human societies have perennially supported the long-term mating of the Dad strategy (care for offspring via the social relationship of fatherhood) and the Sticker strategy (staying with husband) against the short-term mating of the sex-without-commitment Cad (spread the sperm) and Slicker (spread the sexual connections) strategies.

25. If a society does not recognise, or often dispenses with, the social relationship of fatherhood, the male provision-and-protection role has been typically replaced by uncles, by a mother’s brothers.

26. Even in societies with strong roles for fathers, a mother’s brother—the adult male you were sure to be biologically related to—was often a particularly important relative, especially for his sister’s sons.

27. Children raised by both biological parents have statistically better outcomes than those who have been adopted, have a step-parent, or are raised by a sole parent. Human societies perennially produce tales (e.g. Cinderella) that warn about step-parents.

28. Because in polygynous households, the wives and concubines compete for prospects for their children, single-spouse partnership marriages raise the status of elite women in particular, as they regularly run things when their husband is away: not a safe option in polygynous households.

29. Steppe societies were an exception to this, as the men were often away, women being armed raised their status, the women owned the dwellings—including a separate dwelling for each wife—and so the senior wife was regularly deputised in the absence of their husband.

30. Especially for human females, sexual strategies not based on pair-bonding commitment tend to be based on signs of “good genes”. (Sometimes described as the “cheat with the alpha, bond with the beta” strategy.) The evidence is that this is very much a minority strategy, though how much varies between human societies.

31. Due to sperm being cheap to produce, men are more sexually oriented to the physicality of human reproduction, to signs of fertility. Though the biological expense of human children has still oriented human males to far greater rates of male investment in their offspring than any other species (even than those bird species where the males nurse the eggs).

32. Due to bearing the costs of pregnancy and nursing infants, women are more sexually oriented to emotional connections and signs of commitment, even though “good genes” and “good protector” signals can also be powerful.

33. Dating apps, designed by men, and based on “slivers” of people rather than interacting with the whole person, are poor at generating emotional connection and commitment signals.

34. As physicality is a weaker sexual trigger for women than men, only a minority of men “pass”. In the absence of signals of emotional connection and commitment, the dating apps massively encourage female hypergamy—aiming for men high in physical attractiveness, status and resources.

35. The length of human child-rearing led to human mothers in foraging societies surviving around 15 years after menopause, maximising the chance of surviving long enough for their last child to make it to subsistence adulthood. We became the longest-lived ape.

36. Women had to have the fat reserves to support at least one other nutrition-hungry human brain. This led to adult human males having twice the upper body lean body mass as adult human females who—on average—have only 52 per cent of the upper body strength of adult human males. We are lot more strength and shape dimorphic than we are size dimorphic.

37. Hence human males dominate physical aggression among adults, being an overwhelming majority of perpetrators of physical violence and (usually) a solid majority of victims of physical violence, as the greatest physical threat to an adult male is another adult male.

38. That this male dominance of violence among human adults is, to a significant degree, a strategic pattern—due to humans being physically-embodied strategic actors and adult human males being systematically stronger than adult human females—is shown by when adult human females deal with a systematically physically weaker set of Homo sapiens—children—they are as likely to use physical aggression against them as are adult human males.

39. Despite the riskiness of human childbirth, and the general principle that the sex taking more risks in reproduction chooses—so physical ornamentalism is higher in the chosen sex (e.g. male peacocks and their visually-spectacular tails being chosen by drab peahens)—the need to attract and hold the support of a human male for the rolling, almost 20-year, projects that is successful human reproduction led to considerable physical ornamentalism in human females: protuberant breasts that signalled fertility, being more neotenous and gracile, so more emotionally expressive, facial features.

40. Humans are more shape-dimorphic than any of our ape relatives because our children involve such high biological investment.

41. Physical ornamentalism in human males includes regular features, height, wide shoulders and large penis. Such male physical ornamentalism indicates mutual choosing between sexes, whether directly or via kin selection of marriage partners. Height helps male teams to sort out hierarchies relatively quickly, which is very useful for effective team work.

42. The more uncertain success in foraging a source of nutrients is, the greater the nutritional return has to be, and the more likely it is to be shared. Such sharing of animal kills helps insulate hunters against failure, injury or sickness. It also provides young male hunters with the opportunity to advertise what good provider-mates they would be. All this reinforces cooperative subsistence strategies.

Part II will cover norms, language and murdering our way to niceness.

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1. Households are the creation of dwellings, which arise among sedentary foragers, farmers and nomadic pastoralists. Households operate as both production and consumption units, replacing more fluid foraging bands.