CapitalistImperialistPig

Man is the Only Animal that blushes. Or needs to.......................Mark Twain, Following the Equator . Mark Twain's witticism poses a fundamental question for evolutionary biology: What was the circumstance that impelled and produced this unique adaptation? Darwin himself thought deeply about it, and wrote letters to naturalists around the world to ask if people everywhere did in fact blush - they do. Humans are also unique in their extra-familial generosity, or altruism. Christopher Boehm draws a straight line between these behaviors, and believes that they connect directly with our ability to cooperate in large groups. The evolutionary pressure against altruistic behavior, whether it involves giving money to support some child in a different country or going to war to defend your country, are huge. Free riders: cheaters, draft dodgers, etc.,(the Dick Cheneys, George W. Bushes, et. al.) get a big advantage out their free ride. Without active suppression of free riding, ...

Christopher Boehm talks about a cave painting from the early Holocene: What we see in one is a cluster of ten male archers who seem to be rejoicing in something they have just done as they expressively wave their bows in the air. Lying on the ground some yards away is an inert human male figure who looks almost like a porcupine,62 with exactly ten arrows sticking in him. That’s all we know for sure, but some speculation is possible. First, ten archers suggests a band of perhaps forty, which would be a bit larger than average today, but well within the central tendencies already discussed. Elsewhere in Spain, two similar depictions show three and six archers, respectively, so the overall average would be about six, which seems to be right at the average for contemporary foragers—even though with such a small sample size, this is merely suggestive. Second, with the killings done unanimously and at short range, this would appear to be an instance of execution within the band, rather ...

A week ago or so Lee asked the following question: So just for fun, do you care to speculate about what the evolutionary basis for strongly held beliefs in humans may be? Social coherence? It doesn't seem to me that strongly held beliefs need to reflect some sort of underlying reality in order to accomplish whatever their evolutionary role is. This question has been percolating in my head, and I have communed with Boehm's Moral Origins , and I'm now ready to speculate. Hunter-gatherer communities, the essential proto-human societies spend a lot of time and energy in social talk, talk devoted to discussing and propagating how people are behaving and should behave. This talk performs the central function of defining and enforcing moral communities - the shared systems of belief and behavior that make possible the extraordinary human capabilities for cooperating in large groups. A good case can be made that the existence of these moral communities is the fundamental diff...

Am I my brother's keeper? ............... Genesis 4:9 Socialism has been a big failure as a modern economic system. From a Darwinian point of view, the reason is obvious: free riding. Without the discipline of the marketplace, the system is entirely too vulnerable to those who would take without contributing. Perhaps even more important is the non-Darwinian fact that socialism does not seem to create incentives for innovation and efficiency. In fact only capitalism seems to be good at that. Despite these facts, certain socialistic notions are very appealing to the human psyche, and most modern governments, including those of the most successful states, incorporate a lot of socialized elements. As the epigraph from Genesis suggests, such elements are fundamental to a number of religions. Christopher Boehm suggests that a socialized sharing of large kills developed early in human culture, probably between 250,000 BP and 45,000 BP, and that that practice was responsible for t...

The economic systems of our close relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos involve a very limited type of sharing. Meat is prized but hard to come by, and kills are typically appropriated by the most alpha male present. Typically he will share a portion with a few cronies - probably just enough of them to deter a mass attack by those without. There is evidence that a quite different system had evolved among humans as early as 200,000 years ago, in which large kills were systematically shared by all members of a band, just as they are by extant and recent hunter gatherer bands. Christopher Boehm thinks that this socialized distribution of major game, combined with severe punishment of would be bullies who would take more than their share, was the basis of the development of human morality. The sharing, by the way, only applies to big game, with each family on its own with respect to smaller scale gathering hauls. The sharing pattern is probably necessary for big game hunting to be ...

Christopher Boehm believes that social communities getting together to punish deviance had a lot to do with the development of conscience and the human moral sense - a sense seemingly lacking even in our closest animal relatives. Hunter-gatherers (HG) are good at that, and modern humans have carried that over into small towns, churches, and other groups. Mostly our HG ancestors have been concerned with behaviors that directly threaten the group survival: bullying, psychopathy, excessive murder, can rate the death penalty, but lesser crimes are first dealt with by shaming and threats of exclusion. More modern societies extend the list of condemnable behaviors considerably, often in the form of various religious prohibitions and shibboleths. I'm thinking here of everything from tatoos to dietary restrictions to rules about who can marry whom. What sociobiological function, if any, do such prohibitions and rules perform? My guess is that the central function is to weld the membe...

Decades ago, in Darwinism and Human Affairs, biologist Richard D. Alexander defined the evolutionary conscience as being more than an inhibitor of antisocial behavior. He called it the “still small voice that tells us how far we can go in serving our own interests without incurring intolerable risks.”15 Boehm, Christopher (2012-05-01). Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame (p. 30). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

I've been reading more of Christopher Boehm's books on hierarchy, egalitarianism, and the origins of our moral instincts (Hierarchy in the Forest and Moral Origins). It seems that the human race's political modes have followed a sort of U shaped trajectory. Our close ape relatives are all highly hierarchical, and quite likely we all had some sort of hierarchical society back before the divergence of our species. Modern human hunter-gatherer societies are the closest proxies we have for the way humans lived before the invention of agriculture, and it seems likely that for most of human history, or rather, the prehistory of our current species, we lived very much like them. These modern and recent counterparts seem invariably to be quite egalitarian in the sense that adult males of a band lack regular hierarchies. Since the delopment civilizations, however, we have all been stuck in relatively hierarchical societies. Even our most egalitarian democracies are pretty hier...

Christopher Boehm, in Hierarchy in the Forest , has a cautionary message on egalitarianism, perhaps even a manifesto: If tendencies to hierarchy are to remain decisively reversed, both hunter-gatherers and people living in modern democracies must consciously create, and carefully enforce, egalitarian plans or blueprints. We so-called moderns may formulate these blueprints via constitutions or bills of rights, while hunter-gatherers or tribesmen may operate more informally, but in either case my theory is that egalitarianism cannot last long without insightful guidance and manipulation.

Is the price of freedom, says the saying. The same is evidently true of an egalitarian societies. Hunter gatherer bands are more or less universally egalitarian, but this egalitarian structure is not maintained without a struggle. Stronger, smarter, or otherwise advantaged individuals are continually attempting to gain dominance over the others. This tendency is balanced by the ability of the weaker members to form coalitions and deploy the weapons of social coercion against the would be dictator: gossip, other social sanctions, and if truly necessary, banishment or homicide. The intellectual tools we have developed seem to work quite well in suppressing dictators at the level of the band or small tribe. They don't seem to have been adequate once people became settled agriculturalists and started living in much larger groups. That development set the world on a path of extreme hierarchy and despotism which has dominated our history for the past several thousand years. If, as...

In a sense, evolutionary psychology begins with a paradox, first recognized by Darwin. Darwin's theory of natural selection is, in essence, an extremely selfish theory. Any behavior that enhances the chances that someone else's genes will survive over yours will tend to be selected out. It's long been recognized that close relatives are a special case, so for purposes of this discussion we will restrict the word "altruism" to acts which enhance the fitness of an unrelated individual at some cost to one's own fitness. Risking one's life for a stranger is a classic if extreme case. In a sense, the central problem of evolutionary psychology is "How can altruism exist?" Of course this is only a problem for those who want scientific and naturalistic explanations. Religious hocus-pocus can find as many explanations as you like. There are plenty of clues around. For one thing, altruism is almost always restricted in scope. We are more generous t...

When I wrote about reading Christopher Boehm's Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior , Lee mentioned that he had read his later book, Moral Origins:The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame . Well, I couldn't resist and now am reading it also. I have to say that Moral Origins is far more accessible in style, and that it is written with exceptional clarity and elegance. The issues and arguments (so far, I'm a slow reader) are very well presented, as are remaining controversies. Here is a sample I liked a lot: What Darwin did about this last problem was quite remarkable. He initiated the first systematic research across cultures by writing to colonial administrators and missionaries all over the world to ask them whether indigenous people in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere blushed with shame. Having one’s face “color” for social reasons is unique to humans, and Darwin was interested in knowing whether morally based, shameful blushing was merely som...

Various struggles for equal rights have been a prominent feature of our times. So what does history have to say about the subject? Our closest primate relatives, the three species of great apes of Africa, are notably hierarchical says Christopher Boehm . He notes also that the last 5000 years of human history have been dominated by societies that are highly hierarchical. But hierarchy is far from the universal rule. The last several hundred years have seen powerful anti-hierarchical movements, originating mainly in Western Europe. Moreover, it seems that before 12,000 years ago, all humans lived in hunter-gatherer bands which, like their contemporary counterparts, were quite egalitarian, at least among adult males. In short, the history of hierarchy among humans is decidedly mixed. It would easy to dismiss the egalitarian episodes as abberations, but the fact that so much of our history appears egalitarian as well as the strong feelings that so often arise in its favor argue for t...