Thesis #7: Humans are best adapted to band life
As we saw in the previous thesis, the division between our genus, Homo, and the Australopithecines occurred two million years ago, with *H. habilis* and his freakishly large brain. All primates have brain-to-body mass ratios that are much higher than normal, but the human ratio is remarkable even among primates. According to a study from the University of Liverpool, that disproportionately high brain-to-body mass ratio is determined by the size and complexity of their social groups.
Society has ever been the most powerful strategy that primates employ. We discussed the benefits of risk-sharing in the previous thesis, boiling down essentially to this example, using hunting:
But hunting is never a sure thing. Sometimes you bag yourself a big, juicy kill, and sometimes you come home empty-handed. Skill has a lot to do with it–but so does luck. Among foragers, it’s been calculated that on any given hunt, a hunter only has a 25% chance of making a kill. Yet our ancestors not only derived most of their protein from meat, they derived most of their daily energy from meat, as well. How did they do this, if they only ate one day out of four? While the probability that one hunter will fail on a given day might be 0.75, the probability that four hunters that all go out on the same day will all fail to catch something is 0.316. In other words, if four hunters all agree to share whatever they kill between them, then there is generally a 68% chance that all four of them will eat that day–where alone, their chances drop to 25%.
Sharing amongst a group thus ensures food for everyone. It also helps guarantee safety from predation. Cooperation helped primates increase the food they obtained, and decrease the occurence of *becoming* food themselves.
The shift from scavenging and the occasional opportunistic hunt very likely had a good deal to do with another defining characteristic of our species: egalitarianism. Most social primates are strictly hierarchical, like chimpanzees. But, when troops of young, male chimpanzees go on hunting expeditions, that hierarchy often begins to break down. Hunting is a cooperative effort–trying to maintain hierarchy in that situation simply imperils the hunt. As humans began to look to meat for the bulk of its nutritional needs, cooperation became more important, and hierarchy became a luxury our ancestors could not afford.
Egalitarian societies built on sharing and cooperation and guided by consensus were much more adapted to the niche humans exploited than the hierarchical troops of other primates. This egalitarianism even became part of our very bodies–humans have some of the lowest sexual dimorphism in the entire animal kingdom, on par with penguins. Compare this to, say, the baboon, where males may be up to three times the size of females. In some animals, the genders look like entirely different *species* to the untrained eye. The kind of low sexual dimorphism found in humans is not unheard of in the animal kingdom, but in every case, it points to shared parenting behaviors.
There is an inherent complexity in any social group. Not only must we remember the individuals who make up the group, we must also remember the relationships between them–and while the number of individuals increases arithmetically, the number of relationships grows exponentially. If we have 99 people, and add 1 more, we’ve only added one individual, but 99 new relationships. It seems that it was precisely that complexity that drove the growth of the primate brain. If that is true, then the separation from Australopithecine to *Homo* was likely driven by a *social* evolution. This is the same time we start to see the first stone tools, and possibly the first evidence for hunting, rather than scavenging. Hierarchical troops make social groups less complex, by fitting all members into a strict hierarchy–chimpanzees can get by simply remembering the individuals and their rank. Rhizomatic societies–that is, egalitarian societies–have an exponential number of relationships, as each individual relates to every other individual in new and different ways. As humans became hunter-gatherers, the simple hierarchical model that served so many other primates ceased to suffice. We needed to become egalitarian to survive, and in order to do that, we needed bigger brains relative to our bodies.
The report on the Liverpool study mentioned above, includes Robin Dunbar’s conclusions:
Humans are primates, too – so do they fit into the pattern established for monkeys and apes? This is the key question which Robin Dunbar sought to answer by using the same equations to predict human social group and clique size from neocortex volume. The results were… ~150 for social group size, and ~12 for the more intimate clique size. He subsequently discovered that modern humans operate on a hierarchy of group sizes. “Interestingly”, he says, “the literature suggests that 150 is roughly to the number of people you could ask for a favour and expect to have it granted. Functionally, that’s quite similar to apes’ core social groups.”
Interestingly, forager bands tend to hover around that mark of 12 people (with some significant variance), and the line between tribe-level and chiefdom-level society–the line between egalitarian and hierarchical society–is invariably drawn at 150.
This number of 150 continues to pop up in many different contexts. Malcolm Gladwell discusses Dunbar’s findings and their implications in The Tipping Point. On a much more off-beat note, David Wong references it in “Inside the Monketsphere“:
Yes, the Monkeysphere. That’s the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it’s physically impossible for this to be a number larger than 150. Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood Sanitation Worker. So, we don’t think of him as a person. We think of him The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away.
Here we see the essential problem with any large-scale society: we cannot conceive of so many people. It speaks to the very heart of Stalin’s cold truism: “One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic.” Thus, for any society much larger than 150 people, we become neurologically incapable of maintaining an egalitarian society. Hierarchy becomes necessary, yet the human animal is very much adapted to egalitarianism–and in no way adapted to hierarchy. Cross-culturally, we all have some expectations rooted in that egalitarian heritage. We expect freedom, and we expect to be treated as a human being rather than a stereotype. We all feel some negative feeling of stress when these expectations are not met–as they invariably are not met in any large, hierarchical society.
As Steve Thomas put it:
Well, now you know the details of my social life. What’s the point? That I’m awesome and have a lot of friends. But other than that, if you look closely at the group I’ve described (which is not set up very differently from other social groups, as far as I can tell—except for those dependant upon the shared-workplace or the shared-suburb; i.e., upon hierarchy) you can see that it operates on the basic principles of tribalism. The structure is basically that of the hunter-gatherer band, or the loose network of rhizome, including the fluidity of the individual microbands; the lack of a fixed power structure; and the fission-fusion, congregation-dispersal pattern of group interaction. The economic interaction, too, is tribal: people voluntarily band together to provide one another with a basic human need (in this case, companionship) The only difference is that the traditional band provided the hunter-gatherer with ALL of her/his needs, whereas the vast majority of our needs—particularly the most important, i.e., physical ones—must be provided by hierarchy.
We gravitate towards band-level society whenever we have the option. Our social circles will tend to have a band-like quality to them, as Steve Thomas highlighted. When resources grow thin and the luxury of hierarchy can no longer be afforded, we consistently see people turn to band-level groups. In the wake of Katrina, ”tribes” formed in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Daniel Quinn pointed to cults and gangs as responding to this same impulse towards the small, tightly-knit community–even if they often neglected the essential element of egalitarianism that defines rhizome.
We are well-adapted to such groups. We expect such groups, neurologically, and where they do not exist, we will create them. We *need* such groups. This should hardly surprise us, as our groups have been adapted to us, as well. It is a case of co-evolution between social structure and the animal it serves–just like the co-evolution of pack and wolf, hive and bee, school and fish, so, too, did band and human mutually shape one another.
Let’s take “sharing” as an example. Our culture denigrates sharing. The recent innovations in “intellectual property” especially have tried to make sharing illegal, and induce in us all a feeling of shame when we share with others. Yet we still believe sharing to be a virtue. In our evolution as band-animals, sharing was not simply nice, it was the cornerstone of survival. The Ju/‘Hoansi have no word for “thank you”; to thank someone suggests that their actions were out of the ordinary. Caring for others in band-level society was the expected norm; it was the most selfish act one could come up with. The most effective way to serve oneself was to serve others. Bands very effectively defeated violence, cheating, and other “immorality” not nearly so much by condemning it, as by removing the incentive. Compare this to our own, hierarchical “Cheating Culture.” Our survival does not depend on sharing with our small, close-knit community. Not only do the people around us no longer register as “people,” beyond our 150-person neurological capacity, neither does their survival affect us in any way. In short, there is *great* incentive to steal, cheat, lie or commit any of the other “immoral” acts which small, egalitarian groups need not concern themselves with. As a result, we must impose laws, to create artificial disincentives against what is otherwise a very clear endorsement of “immorality.” Yet this is an artificial disincentive–laws can be gotten around, police eluded, and so forth. There is no disincentive in the act itself; only in being caught.
Most of our problems today can easily be traced to some manner in which we remain maladapted to our present life–to the struggle of a Pleistocene animal, to adapt to the bizarre, Holocene nightmare we have created. Our social structure is one such example. We evolved as band-animals. Our egalitarianism defines us; it is probably the single most defining trait in humanity. We evolved as egalitarian band-animals in the Pleistocene. Egalitarianism is our natural state, and our birthright. It is what we expect, down to our very bones. Yet today, it has become so rare that many humans doubt its very possibility. We have accepted the evils of hierarchy–the trauma of an animal maladapted to its current environment–as inevitable.
Humans are best adapted to small, egalitarian bands, in the same way that wolves are adapted to packs or bees to hives. Humans flourish in such a social structure, providing us not only with our material needs, but also our universal psychological needs of belonging to such a group, of personal freedom, and of acceptance for ourselves as individuals. Hierarchical society is a social structure we left behind when we became human. It may provide for our material needs, but it fails utterly to provide for any of our psychological needs. So, we invent small, band-like societies–social circles, clubs and the like–to compensate for all the failings of hierarchy. In short, egalitarianism is an essential requirement for healthy human life; hierarchy is an utter rejection of everything that makes us human.