Using evolutionary reasoning (II)

Norms, language, prestige, propriety, social aggression, diet, and murdering our way to niceness.

The first post in the series discussed the pitfalls of evolutionary reasoning and advanced 42 propositions about the development of human tool use, cooperation and mating patterns. This post advances a further 78 propositions on norms, language, prestige, propriety, social aggression, diet and murdering our way to niceness.

Photographer Ayla Meinberg, Unsplash.

1. Deliberate control of fire enabled us to socialise at night, develop better tools and, via cooking, partly externalise our digestion, thereby requiring less biological investment in internal digestion and temperature management while enabling (and requiring) more investment in cognition.

2. Control of fire thus greatly expanded our ability to gain nutrition from our environment and the range of environments we could survive in.

3. The interactive combination of being able to punish non-cooperators by throwing stones or weapons to kill or drive them away at a distance (so at lower risk) with mastery of fire may have been the basis of us becoming human.

4. The pay-off from tool-using cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies was so great, that we developed language and the self-consciousness required to assess, assemble, and communicate packages of information.

5. The development of language greatly increased the range and possibilities of cooperation, and so social connections, including the information advantages of both.

6. This enabled beta males to combine to kill alpha males, using proactive—intended, including coordinated—aggression and our ability to kill at a distance.

7. This selected against reactive aggression that alpha males were high in, as proactive and reactive aggression use different brain circuits.

8. Such killing of alpha males systematically selected against dominance behaviour as a status strategy.

9. We remain the most proactively-aggressive primate—along with Pan troglodytes, Chimpanzees—but are the least reactively-aggressive primate.

10. We are the species that murdered its way to niceness, in a form of self-domestication, though the level of selection against reactive aggression has differed between human populations.

11. As dominance as a status-and-resource strategy got in the way of cooperation, its suppression further increased our ability to cooperate.

12. The selection against reactive aggression and the selection for cooperative behaviour tend to work in tandem.

13. This selection against dominance by systematically killing alpha males is a case of how important tail effects can be. Human traits are generally distributed along “Bell” curves and male and female “Bell” curves of traits strongly overlap. Male “Bell” curves tend to be flatter and have different averages than female “Bell” curves of traits.

14. A tiny fraction of (overwhelmingly male) perpetrators—typically high in physical robustness and lower in executive functions, so show less patience and more tendency towards reactive aggression—dominate violent crime.

15. Similarly, the tail of very smart, and highly disagreeable, obsessives—who tend to dominate human hierarchies—is larger among men than women.

16. Given that we are the most gracile (delicate featured) form of Homo—so our facial features are not structured to ward off blows but are structured to express emotions—our greater capacity to cooperate at scale in both aggression and subsistence is likely why we are the only surviving form of Homo.

17. The more gracile a human population, the smaller is its—overwhelmingly male—“tail” of highly reactively-aggressive individuals. The less gracile, the larger that “tail”.

18. This has no effect on propensity for proactive aggression. Thus, highly gracile East Asians have low rates of violent crime, but a history of horrifying levels of mass violence. The low rates of reactive violence enable, and the mass violence represents, high capacity for cooperation.

19. We also developed normative capacity, as that enabled better cooperation from more robust and congruent mutual expectations via shared norms.

20. With such cooperative subsistence and selection strategies, magnified by the development of language, managing social connections (social capital) became increasingly important. Thus, the common feature of all marriage systems is that marriage creates in-laws, kin connections by marriage.

21. Social connections and acquiring shared cognitive framings—notably culture—precede transacting in human life-cycles. Moreover, transactions are embedded in patterns of connections and cognitive framings.

22. Humans became adept at calculating both individual action and social interactions. Where one is impossible, or inapposite, we give primacy to the other.

23. If individual calculations of loss and gain are not possible, or are repressed, we display strong flocking/herd behaviour using social calculation: seeking safety in the group—in particular, not losing status by doing significantly worse than anyone else—and trying to “piggy-back” on whoever gets information first. You can see this, for example, in how asset markets deal with uncertainty—i.e., insufficient information to calculate probabilities—with the direction of the flocking/herding effect varying depending on whether the uncertainty is read positively (as in tech booms) or negatively (as in financial crises).

24. Part of human social selection is via people and lineages leaving less successful groups and joining more successful groups. The permeability of human groups selects for groupishness rather than there being strong selection at a group level.

25. With the greater ability to manipulate symbols and engage in rituals, cooperation could extend well beyond the foraging band. Both dance and rituals operate as group-connecting-and-binding behaviour that also set group boundaries. The bonding effect of shared rhythmic action was later mobilised by military drill.

26. Rituals in particular mobilise all forms of knowledge—propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory: knowledge that, how, of and in—to provide emotionally and socially binding immersive and cathartic experiences. Ritual centres were regularly the first large-scale human constructions in a region.

27. Non-kin cooperation is the Homo sapien advantage. Societies that maximise non-kin cooperation have generally been advantaged.

28. Human societies include conflicts, but are dominated by cooperative mechanisms, otherwise they would not be able to scale up so dramatically.

29. Theories that claim conflicts dominate human societies are false. When implemented, they are generally hostile to human flourishing, as, in their conflict focus, they destroy or degrade cooperative mechanisms.

30. In suppressing dominance, we developed two other forms of status as currencies of cooperation.

31. One was prestige—status through conspicuous competence. Folk were rewarded for doing things that had benefits to third parties—what economists call positive externalities. Part of the reward was people are more willing to associate with you, including improving mating opportunities. It also provided positively-biased examples for others to copy.

32. Prestige has been disproportionately male, as males can take more risks, and be more obsessive, through not having bubs in tow. Indeed, prestige provides further support for the transfer of risks away from child-rearing.

33. The existence of prestige is why there are no matriarchal human societies. (Matriarchal families exist.) You cannot have authority be presumptively female when there is a male-dominated form of status.

34. Much of the social status of men in human societies comes from prestige and its social utility. This encourages competition between men and sorts men quite strongly. So, much of the social status of men has been conditional on accruing prestige. Young men in particular often operate as the “disposable” sex in the search for prestige.

35. The other form of status is propriety—status through conforming to the local norms. It particularly involves stigma—loss of status, to the extent of shaming, shunning or worse, from going against those norms.

36. Stigmatisation punishes people for engaging in activity harmful to others or group cohesion—what economists call negative externalities.

37. Stigmatisation helps to solve the free-rider problem in the enforcement of norms through reinforcing effects on one’s self-image and social standing without requiring violence. It provides negatively-biased examples for others to avoid.

38. Shaming and shunning could be mobilised against dominance and other uncooperative behaviour.

39. Norms, prestige and propriety all use and reinforce other-regarding emotions, including empathy and admiration. They enabled the development of internalised, potentially emotionally powerful, barriers against social defection from cooperation.

40. Propriety—and especially stigma—tend to be female-dominated, as the physically weaker sex with bubs in tow, reliant on the transfer of resources to child-rearing, is particularly invested in the social connections that allow all that to happen and are more likely to see negative emotions—particularly from physically stronger men—as a threat. The November 2014 fuss over a rocket scientist’s shirt shows male prestige—doing the very scientifically clever of landing a probe on a comet—being trumped by female propriety via public stigmatisation enabled by social media.

41. Emotional or relational aggression that attacks people’s social connections via stigmatisation—but can be passed off as just moral or social concern, as concern for propriety—is safer than physical aggression for the physically weaker sex with bubs in tow, for it can be paraded as not being aggression.

42. This is not only safer, such moralisation of aggression is more likely to be effective. If the person engaging in the aggression believe that they are just showing moral or social concern, that imposes much less of a cognitive load than lying, so presenting their social aggression to themselves as moral or social concern is less likely to give off the cues of deceit and more likely to be taken at face value.

43. As only a fraction of our cognition is conscious, such self-deceit is surprisingly easy to do. Indeed, being a social and a normative species, we have developed strong capacities to moralise and rationalise our self-interest, particularly when operating via networks of the like-minded.

44. Having emotional or relational aggression habitually cast as moral or social concern also meant that women in particular—but anyone using such aggression—can both be blind to that they are engaging in aggression and not have a good sense of when to stop.

45. As such aggression can undermine trust and social cohesion, most human societies have mechanisms to reign in the nag, the scold and the malicious gossip.

46. If women have relatively high status in society, such mechanisms will tend to be overt, public, even legal, procedures (e.g. the ducking stool or the scold’s bridle). Otherwise, the most common mechanism is to hit the the nag or scold until they stop: to use physical aggression to block emotional/relational aggression. (Islam authorises but regulates such use of physical aggression.)

47. Social media reduces the risks of engaging in social/reputational aggression, and makes it far easier to do so, while—because one is interacting with online slivers of people, not the whole person—increasing the salience of what people focus on (words) and reducing the salience of the consequences for the person being attacked.

48. We can see a massive uptick in the use of moral abuse terms in media and academic articles from 2014 onwards because that both reflected, and enabled, the use of social media for the moralised social/reputational aggression that social media has made so much cheaper and safer to do.

49. Due to the need to have emotional and social support mechanisms, women have tended to be more concerned with the internal operation of the social group. This includes women having advantages in networking.

50. Due to greater strength, not having bubs in tow, and team-focus, men have tended to be more concerned with interactions with external groups.

51. Compared to masculine alternatives, feminised institutions and discourse can be expected to be worse at emotionally-costly enforcement of boundaries (including standards) while also enforcing emotionally-protective conformities. The latter will tend to block inconvenient feedback.

52. Failure to enforce standards is likely to undermine social cohesion, which relies on punishing defections from cooperation and reinforcing the normative pressure to cooperate.

53. Same-sex spaces can compensate men for women tending to be better at networking. They can also operate as team-building venues.

54. In pre-state, small-scale societies, male-only spaces allowed men to plan violence against external groups without “marrying in” wives warning male relatives in rival groups.

55. As men are far less likely to find women threatening than women are to find men threatening, and men focus more on things and performance of roles, women show far higher rates of social preference for other women than men do other men. This aids the feminisation of organisations.

56. Men thus tend to be more socially inclusive, both across the sexes and across social levels, than do women.

57. This has led to female-dominated organisations to be much worse at catering to what interests and engages men than male-dominated organisations have been a catering to what interests and engages women. We can see this in how female-dominating publishing has largely lost male readers of fiction; female-dominated Hollywood writers’ rooms have regularly lost male watchers of cinema and television; and female-dominated schooling and education has been catering worse and worse for male students.

58. Similarly, increasing domination of discourse (including media) and management by highly educated women—people who can now go from zero to outrage in 280 characters—coincided with the British state’s effective abandonment of working class boys in education and working class girls to so-called “grooming” gangs. The contrast with the public horror of Victorian Britain over the forced prostitution of poor girls is stark. This lack of social inclusiveness likely helps explain why a 2015 survey found only 9 per cent of British women identified as feminist, given that feminism mainly operates as a coordinating mechanism for highly educated career women.

59. Religion operates via a realm of divine authority not subject to contradictory information, plus socially-ordering structures of the sacred against which trade-offs were not permitted: at least from outside the realm of the sacred.

60. Socialising at night around the fire, surrounded by the threatening dark, created an ideal environment for developing both mythic and spirit-world/religious narratives.

61. Rituals provide both a reinforcing mechanism for divine authority and senses of the sacred as well as a way of expressing (and judging) commitment to the shared sense of divine authority and the sacred.

62. Religion can also provide reinforcement of binding norms and generates devoted agents—those committed to the patterns of the sacred that helped to bind the community.

63. Religion leads to the development of beliefs that are not literally true but adherence to which is adaptive—i.e. is advantageous to a lineage. This is the literally false but metaphorically true phenomenon.

64. Via these mechanisms—the divine as the realm of authority; the sacred as the realm against which trade-offs are not accepted; rituals to mobilise a shared sense of community; supporting belief structures that are advantageous to lineages, including by making norms more robust—religion helps us to deal with being self-conscious beings and with social and environmental complexity.

65. As there is no information from the future, so it provides no contradictory information, politics based on the authority of the imagined future of social transformation—that is social salvation—can pour the spiritual into the social and create secular religions based on social salvation politics. These can also be very effective at coordinating and motivating behaviour, including creating devoted agents aka zealots.

66. Self-consciousness thus generates a concern for meaning and purpose that can be very effective at mobilising shared action, for good and ill.

67. Our (evolved) ability to assess truth and consequences is much better for things we immediately experience than for more removed abstractions. This has proved to be particularly an issue for complex societies, especially when it comes to mobilising a sense of purpose and meaning, hence the role of religion in dealing with complexity.

68. The development of productive assets—fishing runs, arable fields, animal herds—enabled more hierarchical societies.

69. Dwellings—whether via sedentary foragers or farmers or the wagons/tents/yurts/gurs of nomadic pastoralists—led to the creation of households operating as both production and consumption units, replacing more fluid foraging bands.

70. Sufficiently large congregation of dwellings creates peer groups among children as a potential rival source of authority to parents.

71. Farming was almost certainly developed by women, as plant-gathering women interacted with plants much more systematically than did animal-hunting men.

72. Planting food crops also meant women did not have to move around so much with the children; that children became more productive more quickly than forager children; and so women could feed more children, so were less likely to have to abandon/kill an “excess” child.

73. An indicator of this female origin for farming is that farming deities strongly tend to be female.

74. Farming required both plant domestication and further human self-domestication, as it operated on very different attitudes to time and space than foraging. (The modern shifting of production back out of households has led to more “forager” social patterns.)

75. Farming diets were also metabolically unhealthy but this operationally mattered less than farming’s ability to support human niches smaller in key dimensions (land, skills, risks) while also generating (much) more numerous human niches. Hence, for millennia, farmers and farming have been displacing foragers and foraging around the planet.

76. Farmers versus foragers and farmers versus pastoralists have been the two great lines of social conflict across that time, down to the present day.

77. Conflicts with forager groups—whether with other foragers or with farmers—are more likely to be genocidal as foragers have low population numbers and it is relatively easy to knock a forager population below the level it can sustain its physical technology and social cohesion. Examples include the Inuit replacing the Dorset people as the dominant Arctic foragers and the incoming Aegean-origin farmers replacing the Mesolithic foragers of the British Isles. Though those Aegean-origin farmers—who built Stonehenge and Newgrange—seem to have been largely replaced in turn by folk with a high level of steppe ancestry.

78. Various populations have adapted to farming diets; however, those adaptations tend to weaken as we age.

The third post in the series will examine the role of niches in human societies and history.

References

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