Among the relevant psychological characteristics that humans developed in the Pleistocene were our propensities toward tribalism, egalitarianism, and zero-sum thinking. We evolved in small bands composed of 25 to 200 individuals. We all knew and were often related to one another. Everyone knew who contributed to the band’s survival and who shirked his or her responsibilities. Cheaters and free riders were targets of anger and, sometimes, punishment.
…To summarize, the psychology that evolved when our ancestors lived in small hunter-gatherer groups prepared us to cope with a world of personal cooperation and exchange in small communities. It did not prepare us to cope with a world of impersonal cooperation and exchange between millions of people (i.e., a typical advanced economy) or billions of people (i.e., the global economy). In a way, the complexity of the modern economy outran the ability of our Stone Age minds to understand it. Yet it is that transition, from personal simplicity to impersonal complexity, that makes capitalism so effective at producing great wealth. To complicate matters further, the extended marketplace of millions or billions of people enables enterprising individuals with value-creating ideas to amass greater wealth than they would be able to amass while catering to small communities. That resulting wealth inequality rubs against our egalitarian predispositions and zero-sum thinking. Finally, our tribalism helps to explain why, even when we do consent to trade with other nations, we often continue to resent them and suspect them of thriving at our expense.
I have written a lot about this, both in Specialization and Trade and in essays such as Camping Trip economics vs. Woolen Coat economics.
One reason I suspect that people are reverting back to sub-Dunbar thinking is that smart phones have confused the intimate sub-Dunbar world and the remote super-Dunbar world. Corporate CEO’s used to be part of the remote world, and you did not care about them personally. Now they show up on the same screen as your friends. So they have to take positions on social issues in order to remain on your good side.
>relevant psychological characteristics that humans developed in the Pleistocene
What relevant psychological characteristics have humans developed in the past 3000 years of civilization?
I find interesting the notion that some human communities have gone further than others in taming themselves through a sort of “self-domestication.”
It’s in Nicholas’ Wade’s _A troublesome inheritance_. I am trying to recall the exact term.
Doubtless it’s a controversial idea–at this point probably more of a vague hypothesis than an established empirical finding.
I believe both Cochrane and Harpending ( _10,000 year explosion_ ) and Nicholas Wade ( _A troublesome inheritance_ ) have explored the notion. Probably it’s still a provocative hypothesis in need or more testing.
Wikipedia has a general listing under this term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-domestication
= – = – = – = –
Quite possibly as humans become more urban they manage to be less aggressive within their own ever-growing community. The modern urban tradition is to periodically lash out against designated outsiders in international wars, rather than engaging in annual raids on rival hunter-gatherer bands. For example the civilized German people lapse into Nazi adventurism. Beethoven, Hitler, Schiller, Goebbels–quite a contrast.
The question: Is this solely a historical process or cultural process given to policy and religious exhortation, or is there a role for natural selection also.
It’s hard to get honest discussion on the topic–it’s shot through with the “nature vs. nurture” debate, and touches on various taboo topics of race and genetic determination.
If I recall correctly, Greg Cochrane is quoted for saying that “every environment selects for something.”
The wikipedia entry for _10,000 year explosion_ is worth reading, though it contains errors. Methinks Cochrane is trained in physics, not anthropology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10,000_Year_Explosion
“Self-domestication” is the theme of Richard Wrangham’s 2019 The Goodness Paradox. Basically, if you were an asshole to your fellow bandmates, one day you went out with a hunting party and didn’t return and nobody asked any questions. So a selection for non-assholery, and for the ability to carry out extreme measures.
Actually according to Boehm (probably the premier expert on the issue) most of the anthropological research shows that controlling aholes was even easier than this. Since foragers were nomads they tended to just walk away (permanently) from jerks. Violence was used less than 2% of the time to control bad apples, most punishment came from joking, gossip, verbal disagreement and exclusion (foragers get to choose who they do and don’t cooperate with, and if nobody chooses you, you will soon die alone).
It’s as if agriculture never happened. Did evolution just end with hunter-gatherers? Was there no selection over the past 10,000 years? Wouldn’t autonomy, self-sufficiency and propensity for exchange have had time to be evolutionarily adapted into human nature?
Indeed the biggest conflict between modern human nature as of 100 years ago
and capitalism are the ultra-specialization and its accompanying helplessness and dependency, adaptation to hive living conditions, and placid non-autonomous deference to social hierarchies.
Perhaps the most visible evolutionary adaptation and conflict is in modern versus retro-male expression. The standard epicene male of today and the traditional male of the WWII era. The latter is being forced from society and slowly being bred out of the species: autonomous, self sufficient individuals capable of problem solving and independent thought are denied reproductive opportunities which are reserved for those with extremely high levels of conformism.
1) Most people in the field do indeed assume that there hasn’t been much evolution in the last 10,000 years. With a few exceptions like lactase persistence in populations that drink milk into adulthood.
2) Hunter-gatherer bands are small, which makes it hard to get a mate who won’t produce inbred children. People in the field think that there was periodic contact between bands, with trade and mate-finding and who knows what else.
3) I’m not sure how accurate it is to characterize peasant agriculture as an example of autonomy and self-sufficiency.
Although it may not make sense to speak of agriculture in the singular, given that there are at least 10 different places around the world where agriculture was independently developed, and earliest dates of agricultural development continue to be pushed back in time with new archaeological finds, there does seem to be a wealth of evidence that early farmers were self-supporting and farmed in sub-Dunbar number units.
From my scattered reading, I believe early agriculture in the old Stone Age has been archaeologically demonstrated to have consisted of smallholders, usually family units, that were largely self sufficient and relied on themselves to make their own tools, homes, etc. Communal agriculture was largely unknown. Survival was in the smallholders’ own hands. This pattern persisted into the New Stone Age and later. Taxing authorities arose and imposed rules, yet individuals were most frequently taxed, not communities. The evidence that there was a idyllic communistic era prior to capitalism is equivocal at best. The enclosure of the commons was in many ways a return to an earlier pattern of farming. So we see individual grain grinding wheels in individual huts: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-07/bu-rip072215.php
And I may be mistaken, but I believe that the consensus is that human evolution has accelerated in the last 5 – 10 thousand years not stopped:
“The advent of agriculture has played a key role in the evolutionary history of humanity. Early farming communities benefited from new and comparatively stable sources of food, but were also exposed to new and initially devastating diseases such as tuberculosis, measles, and smallpox. Eventually, genetic resistance to such diseases evolved and humans living today are descendants of those who survived the agricultural revolution and reproduced.[59][5] The pioneers of agriculture faced tooth cavities, protein deficiency and more generally malnutrition, resulting in shorter statures.[5] Diseases are one of the strongest forces of evolution acting on Homo sapiens. As this species migrated throughout Africa and began colonizing new lands outside the continent around 100,000 years ago, they came into contact with and helped spread a variety of pathogens with deadly consequences. In addition, the dawn of agriculture led to the rise of major disease outbreaks. Malaria is the oldest known of human contagions, traced to West Africa around 100,000 years ago, before humans began migrating out of the continent. Malarial infections surged around 10,000 years ago, raising the selective pressures upon the affected populations, leading to the evolution of resistance.[12]
A study by anthropologists John Hawks, Henry Harpending, Gregory Cochran, and colleagues suggests that human evolution has sped up significantly since the beginning of the Holocene, at an estimated pace of around 100 times faster than during the Paleolithic, primarily in the farming populations of Eurasia.[60] Thus, humans living in the twenty-first century are more different from their ancestors of 5,000 years ago than their ancestors from that era were to the Neanderthals who went extinct around 30,000 years ago.[1] They tied this effect to new selection pressures arising from new diets, new modes of habitation, and immunological pressures related to the domestication of animals.[60] For example, populations that cultivate rice, wheat, and other grains have gained the ability to digest starch thanks to an enzyme called amylase, found in saliva.[3] In addition, having a larger population means having more mutations, the raw material on which natural selection acts.[61]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution
If that much physical evolution can occur one might guess at least as much psychological evolution could as well.
If that much physical evolution can occur one might guess at least as much psychological evolution could as well.
Yes, that’s the big question. Thanks for the cites.
One piece of evidence that agriculture was not characterized by autonomy and self-sufficiency is all the diseases that the wikipedia article mentions. If a disease hits an isolated farmstead, people either die or recover. After that, the disease perishes for lack of new hosts. To spread, there has to be human contact before those things happen. The more crowded, the more easy it is to spread disease.
Slight correction: I believe it’s Marian, not Marion.