The Most Important Development in the Evolution of Humans

First an excerpt from Thinking Big, a book about how our brains evolved to adapt to social realities. A key point here is this matter of thinking in terms of relationships and not just rationally.

Food was certainly of vital importance and obtaining it efficiently and securely must have dominated much of their [early hominins’] lives. The archaeologist Rhys Jones, who lived with Aborigines in Northern Australia, once said to us that these hunters and gatherers were always 24 hours away from hunger.But for us the keys to understanding food lie in the implications for social cooperation. This takes two forms. First are the tactical demands, of getting working parties together to hunt or gather safely and with greater chance of success. This covers defence against predators as well as obtaining those foods that were needed to fuel expanding brains. Second is the strategic matter of planning for bad times. This is achieved by looking for help beyond your immediate community. Instead of restricting access to resources by defending them against all-comers, it is better to allow other people in. By linking individuals and their communities over very large geographical areas a form of ecological insurance is produced. [highlighted added]Archaeologists refer to this as social storage: tokens exchanged for food in bad times, and vice versa in good. In other words, if conditions deteriorate where you happen to be ranging, then we will allow your community to come over to our range and use our resources for a while. Later, the reverse will be the case, and you can pay us back. Such a system works well, but it requires that the community has a territory large enough to cover a wide range of habitats. It won’t work so well if community territories are small and consist of essentially the same kind of habitat.
…..Rather than concentrating on what may be rational explanations of why they hunted bison rather than reindeer or chose not to eat fish, as the isolated Tasmanians famously did 6000 years ago, we need to shift the perspective and see the role of food and other materials in creating relationships rather than simply meeting calorific goals. Archaeological explanations for the human story need to be relational (being social) as well as rational (being economic). Social life is not based on calories alone but on the relationships that emerge when things are made, exchanged, used, and kept.pp. 86-7 of Clive Gamble, John Gowlett, and Robin Dunbar’s Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind, Thames & Hudson, London, 2014, paperback version 2018.

Put more simply, as humanity evolved it faced two choices.
1. Defend your limited resources from others.
2. Expand your limited resources by sharing with others.

Archaeologists think that Neanderthals adopted the first strategy and early humans adopted the second. Neanderthals went extinct. We've become the dominant species.

As it turns out, the second strategy of strengthening relationships rather than walls has a host of advantages. Not only do you have more insurance against bad times but this strategy requires you to cooperate with larger groups of others, which enables all sorts of advances. This means opportunities for wider array of mates, the exchange of ideas, and the "outsourcing" of or cooperation on explanations, research and development, and cultural and technological innovations that eventually dwarfed the diversification of food sources in importance.

The choice to cooperate to share more rather than compete to protect less may be the single most important choice early humans ever made.

Adam Smith on What Disturbs the Peace of Society

The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires.
- Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

[from Antonio Garcia Martinez's Chaos Monkeys.]

Bernard on Civilization as the Burden of Consciousness

Bernard didn’t waste anytime with small talk. Something had been keeping him up and the words spilled out even before I could read my menu.


“Civilization is the burden of consciousness. Our brains are big enough that it takes an enormous amount of complexity and work just to occupy them.”

“What?” I said, disoriented.

“We created all this society stuff to keep up with the development of our brains.”

I paused. I was irritated. Bernard knew that I rarely ordered the same thing twice and I needed to look at the menu each time. He wasn’t giving me time to do that. “So you’re saying that the Egyptian slaves built the pyramids because they were bored?”

“No. They had to create an outside world as complex as the one in their head.”

“Because?”

“Because otherwise they’d be bored.”

“Slaves?”

“Don’t be willfully obtuse,” Bernard sighed. “Communities do this. I has been a joint effort. Consciousness is like a vacuum that sucks civilization after it, inventing games, social constructs and technologies to occupy us.” He didn’t really need me to listen. He just kept on talking.

“But now the problem is that we Americans don’t really accept any rituals. It used to be that social complexity had to keep up with the complexity of consciousness, but now it’s reversed. We’ve made it too hard, made the construction of civilization and meaning a burden that we foist onto the individual.” Bernard did not even pause as the waitress came to take my order. I realized that he was again drinking espresso.

“We are a nation founded by Puritans who thought that rituals were a corruption of something pure. We threw away mass and art in church buildings. We reject rituals and social constructs and yet still there is a need for ceremonies, for some sacrament to mark milestones in life. But not many people have communion, or Bar Mitzvahs or whatever it is that ancient cultures have. We’ve been purified of rituals and still have a need for them so … we create them – rather poorly – on our own. What used to be a community tradition has become individual choice or responsibility.”

“So you are saying that it is not just that civilization is the burden of consciousness. You are saying that this burden is now personal?”

“Yes. And it’s an impossible task. By the time you realize what ritual is needed to become an adult or to leave home, you are a generation or two beyond that. The person immersed in the experience can’t be expected to also construct a way to commemorate, or symbolize it.”

“So I’m lost. You’re saying that we’ve purged our culture of rituals or that we just make them up ourselves? Civilization is the burden on consciousness or the burden created by consciousness?”

“I’m saying two things. One, civilization is a side effect of consciousness. Two, rituals are now left to the individual to choose or create. Now that everyone has to customize his own personal civilization – his own private culture – civilization has now become a burden to consciousness.”

“So we’ve gone full circle?”

“Everything living does.”

“So what is the prognosis?”

Bernard began to laugh. “Consciousness will become more complex. It has to, just to keep up.”

“Poof! Just like that? We’ll evolve more intelligence.”

“More social intelligence, yes. We already are.”

“We are?”

“Sure. What do you think the Internet is? Social sites like Facebook? We’re laying the foundation for new social inventions that can be shared. And we have huge networks to tap into.”

“Bernard,” I said laughing. ‘You’ve joined facebook?”

Bernard shifted uncomfortably. “Er. Yes. I have.”

I could not help but chuckle. “Bernard, I thought that was for college kids. No?”

“Not anymore,” Bernard said. “Everyone needs help constructing a life in a do-it-yourself culture. Not just kids.”

I'll Take the de-scrambled eggs - Separating Self and Society

It is a wonderful thing that we’re unable to predict. If we could, it would suggest a lack of control over events, a lack of autonomy for the human race. Prediction suggests determinism; unpredictability suggests freedom.

I’ve previously made the distinction between social and technological innovation. The more I try to make this distinction operational, the more it seems to me that dissecting the two is like trying to put a wedge between heads and tails.

A car is clearly a technological innovation. It has moving parts and relies on inventions as diverse as rubber tires and steel ball bearings.

Of course, a car is also clearly a social innovation. It changes the range a person can travel in a day and greatly multiplies the number of people who can be grouped daily to work on tasks like building cars. It creates a huge separation between work and home.

Any successful social innovation introduces some new technology – even if it is as silly as the dance moves in the Macarena. Any successful technological innovation moves with or drives social innovation. If 150 million people had not agreed to turn over their network of friends to Facebook, the software (the technological innovation) would have been a curiosity. If people never dared to climb into a car (social innovation), the horseless carriage would have been an historical footnote of less importance than any given outbreak of influenza.

Progress depends on the play between these two. An innovation has to enable people to do something – has to have a technological component. To matter, it has to change behavior – has to have a social component.

One of the things that I don’t know about this is how the dance works. Is technology gradually changing to allow us to express our true selves? Or is humanity - human nature itself - changing, led in new and unpredictable directions by technology? And even if it is true that the technology and humanity are now co-evolving, which is the lead in this strange dance? Does this question even make sense in a world where we’re now engaged in genetic engineering?

Has the question of human nature always been bound up in questions of culture and technology? Or are those merely manifestations of human nature? Are technology and society as intrinsic to being human as fingernails and sleep cycles?

Is it not just that it is not possible to drive a distinction between social and technological progress. Perhaps it is not even possible to drive a wedge between self and society.

Just wondering.