Brains for Coupling and Governance
by Michael G. Heller
Published in Social Science Files, June 23, 2025
The Intelligence by Rene Magritte, 1946 Brussels, Belgium
Early humans communicated using gestures1, pantomime and elementary language. When they came together as couples or as groups to deliberate over joint decisions, the critical variables for reaching agreement and making effective selections were cognitive ability and personality profile. Individuals had to communicate smart ideas and persuade their companions that one option for action was — for whatever rational and legitimate reasons — preferable to another. I am exploring this basic process through the lens of male-female coupling because I treat the coupling process as the evolutionary antecedent of group governance.2 Comparative cognitive competencies and the personality profiles of men and women are relevant to purposes of coupling in two ways. We need to know whether men and women a) were commensurably competent to negotiate their division of labour, which I claim was the main reason for coupling, and b) were possessed of intrinsic sex-based cognitive strengths and weaknesses, which made them better suited to some activities than others.
In these contexts, routine actions of ‘labour’ and ‘decision making’ included war, shelter-finding, shelter-construction, hunting and gathering, processing of foods and hides and other materials, toolmaking, water and firewood collection and processing, health and safety (e.g. hygiene, injuries3), seasonal mobility (planning and execution), and the provision of care for persons of value who could not fully care for themselves.
During the prime of their lives, in the lifetime settings of couples and groups, able-bodied human adults and older children were engaged in ‘labour’ and the acquisition and instruction of skills for the majority of their waking hours.4 Divisions of labour between a coupling man and woman required calculations of available time, the nature of risk and danger inherent in activities, and the comparative advantages of male-female physique in each of the core survival activities. If I am right in arguing that decisions about divisions of labour were the initial reasons for male-female coupling, then their intelligence and personality will have been as important to these decisions as their male-female physical characteristics and biological-reproductive functions.
In the context of these divisions of labour during incipient coupling I will discuss
intelligence and its cultivation in general terms,
differential male-female intelligence premiums, and
differential personality premiums (and their cultivation).
These topics are essential components of a theory of governance in the individualistic T1 society (differentiated by age, sex, physique, personality, cleverness). They prepare the ground, also, for a theorisation of T2 communalistic and T3 coordinated societies, when female intelligence and personality in fact became more marginal to governance.
[1] General Intelligence
This is a convoluted disputatious topic with a long history.5 I cannot cover it fully. Instead, I have selected some well-founded observations relevant to Stone Age experimentation with activities that a) required cognitive competence, b) cultivated intelligence, and c) presuppose the existence of anatomically modern humans with fully evolved large brains. We begin with the observation that the primate ancestors of these humans were very clever animals.6 A recent survey of the literature emphasises an impressive capacity for rational reasoning about causality among non-human primates.7 This ability depends largely on their utilisation of memory. For example, in natural environments some primates are able to remember the location and ripening schedules of their prime vegetable food sources. They even calculate the travel routes that will lead them optimally through a series of progressive ripening zones.
There is also a large body of evidence of non-human primate cognitive abilities that involve transfers of information between individuals. Typically these relate to learned functional techniques, such as desirable skills in social interaction, in tool use, and in foraging. Understanding of causality seems to be especially accomplished in situations that require cooperation, organisation, and the switching of roles in means-end action scenarios. Though they have no language, mental activity among great apes can be transferred and internalised by others using combinations of silent or tactile gestures. Great apes also seem well able to understand that the intentions and beliefs of others may differ from their own intentions and beliefs. They cannot actually know these intentions and beliefs (impossible even for humans). But they can make a guess.
The last common ancestor … was equipped with several cognitive aptitudes that form the bedrock of later, distinctively human adaptations. These apes were already large-brained and able to keep track of extensive and complex social relationships; quick to learn and able to exploit other individuals in complex ways; able to understand how actions change objects in the world, and how their own and others’ actions can be organised … to achieve novel goals; and that other individuals sometimes have knowledge and goals different from their own. Animals like this would be able to see the purpose of true communication, in which speaker and hearer try to model the other’s knowledge, and would be able to build up hierarchically embedded structures of action, so crucial to human language.8
All this confirms the fact that humans living between 200k-20k BCE during the emergence of (mobile, not yet sedentary) T1 individualistic, T2 communalistic, and T3 coordinated societies were already far in advance of the cognitive competencies of non-human primates. There are many ways of approaching the study of cognitive evolution in the early human context. Some legitimately project backwards from knowledge of modern human intelligence and contemporary hunter gatherers.
However, there is one approach that is especially useful as the basis for an analogy with the processes through which couples divided up their labour and groups divided up their responsibilities for leadership and governance. It is a complex theory about the evolution of tool making, with layers of analysis that need not concern us. What I will extract from it is a single insight — the way in which a differentiation of ‘parts’ in tool use and manufacture generated a new level of cognition for decision making.
Before the use of tools, most mammals could only break up foodstuffs by tearing them apart with paws, hands, or teeth. In this case, minds and the neural mechanisms underlying perception and the control of action really did not need to do that much to determine exactly how to act in any given set of circumstances when handling “stuff ” of any particular kind. Their decision space was small.
Following the emergence of tools, that decision space expanded. Foodstuffs of different types could be broken into pieces by pounding, and parcels of meat could be separated from bone or sinews or formed into different shapes and sizes by slicing. With tools, one could also cut or divide up all kinds of soft and hard materials in many different ways. … With tool use, minds and brains needed to make many more distinctions in perception and the control of actions, be they skeletally enacted, vocally expressed, or just thought about. These extra distinctions necessitated, in one form or another, more mental and neural capacity. Such differentiation across behaviours [is] argued to be a prerequisite for specific concepts and deeper abstractions such as ‘partition’ to emerge.9
Among early humans the development of multipart tools (e.g. hafts and spears) and the potential for these tools to ‘partition’ an unlimited range of downstream materials had a catalytic ratchet effect upon social evolution. It increased cognitive awareness of the potential for manipulating unrelated but nevertheless functionally equivalent differentiations between elements that previously lay dormant within aggregates. By making it possible to ‘break things apart’, tools created potential for exploration and diversification that had not previously existed. Deliberate utilitarian differentiation by means of tool usage and partitioning is unique to Sapience. As Barnard suggests,
… differentiation created the necessary conditions for deeper semantic abstractions to emerge.10
I see an analogous process at work in divisions of labour and governance that might have resulted from these differentiated abstractions and distinctions in perception that expanded the ‘decision space’. It is possible that human consciousness of the ‘labour’ of survival in adverse environments was transformed by an awareness of the potential to subdivide all aggregates, and then, in doing so, to take control of the parts and manipulate the parts. Having been based in the first instance on tool usage, this new insight was certainly relevant to all the factors of production and consumption.
Tool usage was perhaps the first major behavioural breakthrough for homo sapiens, later to be followed by language. In my view the third breakthrough — after tools and language but in exactly the same logical lineage of cognitive evolution — was the ‘governance’ of couples and then groups. I think Barnard’s insight can be applied to the expansion of decision making processes. These were channeled into arrangements for agreements within man-woman partnerships. Subsequently the process expanded to the group level where decisions are likely to be ‘partitioned’ by type and process.
Every simple division of labour is an organised and causally-conscious ‘partitioning’ of tasks and roles. It breaks a large single labour process into smaller discrete parts, enabling specialisation and organisation explicitly in order to utilise capacity and time efficiently. Group-level assembly discussion similarly breaks up the range of interests and perspectives that concern multiple persons into multiple topics and forms or levels of expertise, capability, responsibility, time, creativity, and disposition.
The result, in Barnard’s words, is “more capacity to make distinctions about what to do”.11 In a binary context of coupling and division of labour, the relevant insight would be that a combination of male and female specialisations in a single unit was possible to conceive cognitively only by it being made apparent that the differences of the two parts had independent existence as a male or female comparative advantage. I examine the mechanics and the contexts of this process in an upcoming publication.
In conformity with the law of evolution, every aggregate tends to integrate, and to differentiate while it integrates. (Herbert Spencer)
Thus far we have looked at examples of primate cognitive competence and the cognitive breakthroughs facilitated by early human discovery of the partitioning effects flowing from tool usage. Before homing in on the relatively slight male-female cognitive differentials that may nevertheless have been acutely appreciable in the process of male-female ‘dickering’ over kids and labour, we need a brief summary of contemporary knowledge about (‘g’) general intelligence and the heritability effect.
Definitions of general intelligence vary. One strand of recent research concerns ‘rationality’ and is especially relevant to the way I reimagine the evolution of traditional societies. Although recent research shows that tests of intelligence quotients do not and perhaps cannot accurately measure human rationality, it is nevertheless clear that intelligence is similar to rationality.12 Intelligence includes the inherently differential abilities among individuals to calculate optimal means to an end in multiple problem-solving. Intelligence-as-rationality is my starting point.
In addition, I will combine two recent and carefully worded definitions of ‘general intelligence’. These will be useful and appropriate in the context of my reconstruction of Stone Age human interactions as they relate to ‘labour’ and ‘governance’.
The core of intelligence is the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience.13
General intelligence is composed of the ability to focus attention on the matter at hand and to use working memory resources to reason and problem solve.14
The concept of ‘fluid intelligence’ is also pertinent in a Stone Age context:
Fluid intelligence [is] the ease of learning novel information [and] is typically understood in terms of learning in evolutionarily novel domains, such as reading and arithmetic, but also is important for devising strategies to cope with ecological change (e.g., seasonal change in weather) and with variation and change in social dynamics.15
Three brief provisos will suffice to place these definitions in perspective.
The first proviso is that although genetic heritability accounts for about 50% of the differences found in tests of intelligence, intelligence is not stable over a person’s lifetime. Genetics sets the high or low baseline capacity for intelligence in every person. But the effects of these genes changes over time. It seems that a person’s environment may determine whether and when the genes amplify or ‘come online’.16 Cognitive development may therefore be stimulated, for example, by how much one reads or what one reads. [Read ‘Social Science Files’ to get your genes online!]
A second proviso is that the genetic effect upon one person tends to be generalised across all of that person’s cognitive competencies. Presumably this means that if one is good at rational reasoning one will probably also be good at understanding complex ideas, focusing, and remembering.17
The final proviso is that intelligence is most acutely perceptible in decision making. Hereditary intelligence can be either deliberately or unconsciously optimised by learning heuristic decision processes that collate information and rules, and which — through repeat application and experience — may become intuitive. People become better at reasoning while making their reasoning more intuitional once they possess a ‘toolbox of heuristics’.18 Heuristic strategies enable ever more intelligent decisions.
Through experience, feedback and training for survival, Stone Age individuals will have enhanced their minds, accumulating toolboxes of heuristics that maximised their inherited quantum of intelligence. The lessons of experience came more quickly to mind, and the optimal responses became more unconscious and rapid. Some aspects of unconscious intelligence become intuitive ‘embodied’ heuristics — “[A] dynamic adaptive heuristic enables animals and humans to make rapid decisions with the help of a highly automatised system superior to conscious reasoning”.19 In turn, lessons and abilities transferred as knowledge and techniques over generations. Either way, early humans amplified their intelligence. Unfortunately, the evolution of heuristic tools did not leave ‘sticks and stones’ archeological traces. But, we can infer them.
FOOTNOTES
See two materials detailing fascinating new research on chimp ‘gestures’ —https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Benjamin_Norton5/publication/379569422_The_Art_of_Chimpanzee_Diplomacy_Unraveling_the_Secrets_of_Successful_Negotiations/links/660f3df6390c214cfd36083d/The-Art-of-Chimpanzee-Diplomacy-Unraveling-the-Secrets-of-Successful-Negotiations … and … Norton, B., Zamansky, A., Florkiewicz, B., & Lazebnik, T. (2025). The art of chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) diplomacy: Unraveling the secrets of successful negotiations using machine learning. Journal of Comparative Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/com0000411
Group governance was the foundation of the first three societies — T1 individualistic, T2 communalistic, and T3 coordinated.
“Evidence of survival following injury implies not just care but also the likely use of material to stem blood flow and protect from infection.” Philip J. Barnard, ‘Sticks, Stones, and the Origins of Sapience’ in Karenleigh A. Overmann and Frederick L. Coolidge, Squeezing Minds from Stones: Cognitive Archaeology and the Evolution of the Human Mind, Oxford University Press 2019:118
I will examine the allocations of labour in more detail in an upcoming publication.
Some of the most useful accounts of ‘intelligence’ focus on male-female differentiations. Gerd Gigerenzer provides an excellent introduction to the disputatious history of the topic in his Chapter 2, which examines general debates about intelligence from Aristotle through Immanuel Kant and onward to the present day. Gerd Gigerenzer, The Intelligence of Intuition, Cambridge University Press 2023
I have covered the topic of ape intelligence extensively in Social Science Files. I add an observation in a meta study: “The great apes … show high rates of deception, highly complex manipulation, population-wide tool use in the wild, and robust mirror self-recognition” — Deaner, R. O., van Schaik, C. P., & Johnson, V. (2006) ‘Do some taxa have better domain-general cognition than others? A meta-analysis of nonhuman primate studies. Evolutionary Psychology, 4:179
Lucy A. Bates and Richard W. Byrne ‘The Evolution of Intelligence’, in Robert J. Sternberg (ed.) The Cambridge Handbook Of Intelligence, Cambridge University Press 2020
ibid: 442
Philip J. Barnard, ‘Sticks, Stones, and the Origins of Sapience’ in Karenleigh A. Overmann and Frederick L. Coolidge, Squeezing Minds from Stones: Cognitive Archaeology and the Evolution of the Human Mind, Oxford University Press 2019:103-4.
See also: Philip J. Barnard, Iain Davidson, and Richard W. Byrne, ‘Toward a Richer Theoretical Scaffolding for Interpreting Archaeological Evidence Concerning Cognitive Evolution’ in Frederick Lawrence Coolidge and Thomas Grant Wynn, Cognitive Models In Palaeolithic Archaeology, Oxford University Press 2017
Philip J. Barnard, ‘Sticks, Stones, and the Origins of Sapience’ in Karenleigh A. Overmann and Frederick L. Coolidge, Squeezing Minds from Stones: Cognitive Archaeology and the Evolution of the Human Mind, Oxford University Press 2019:103
ibid: 104
Keith Stanovich, Richard West, and Maggie E. Toplak, The Rationality Quotient: Toward A Test of Rational Thinking, MIT Press 2016
Robert Plomin, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, MIT Press & Penguin 2018:53
David C. Geary, Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences (3rd edition), American Psychological Association 2021:423
ibid: 268
This time lag is identified Robert Plomin (2018:56) and must surely pose a problem for us (upcoming) given that so many studies of male-female intelligence differences rely on research with children or adolescents and their school attainment (Geary 2021:423-425).
Robert Plomin, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, MIT Press & Penguin 2018:56, 68
The full expert explanation of applied intelligence as cognitive processes that improves the quality of decision making by means of the employment of heuristic strategies can be found in Gerd Gigerenzer, The Intelligence of Intuition, Cambridge University Press 2023
ibid: 2-7, 123-124