Survival skills, inheritance, hierarchy, justice, community, boundaries, & more ...
J. H. Turner 2021 on Biology and Sociology of Evolution [Final]
“This is the best book yet written on social evolution.” Randall Collins
“Sociology is now being integrated with the findings of evolutionary biology, with Jonathan Turner in the lead.” Christopher Boehm
Jonathan H. Turner wrote:
[Final extracts from Chapters 5, 6, 11]
[Frequent abbreviation — Last common ancestor (LCA)]
CHAPTER FIVE
Interpersonal Skills for Species Survival
Without bioprogrammers directing individuals to specify particular forms of social organization, except for the larger community home range, how were selection pressures for increased organization at the level of the group to be realized? As already emphasized, enhancing emotions was the breakthrough; and with more emotions, the hominin descendants of the LCAs of great apes developed stronger ties and, eventually, the necessary structures—nuclear families and bands engaged in hunting and gathering economic activity—that would allow hominins on the human clade to survive for hundreds of thousands of years in increasingly diverse habitats.
Emotions alone would not be enough to create more stable group structures because the majority of primary emotions and variants and elaboration of these emotions are negative in the sense that they do not promote social solidarity. Most mammals have bioprogrammers directing organization that can override negative emotions and periodic episodes of conflict among group members, preventing conflict from breaking up the groupings necessary for survival. But for a weak-tie animal like the hominin, descendants of the ancestors of the great apes, increasing the number of positive emotions and charging these up also meant charging up the negative emotions that could disrupt solidarities and thus destroy necessary kin and group structures of evolving hominins …
… If great apes had not been so interpersonally skilled, then humans would probably have never evolved, and instead, their bones would be buried as fossils in open-country habitats in Africa with no one to dig them up. This chapter provides a review of the inherited interpersonal capacities that constitute a most important part of humans’ basic nature.
[MGH: There follow sections on Early Imitation of Facial Gestures, Reading of Face and Eyes, Capacities for Role-Taking and Empathizing, Rhythmic Synchronization of Interaction, Collective Emotional Effervescence; only the last two are exhibited.]
Rhythmic Synchronization of Interaction
The discovery, initially with monkeys, of mirror neurons led to a search for such neurons in great apes and humans. A neurological basis for role-taking, empathy, and mimicry is clearly evident in the type of neuron that mirrors the neurons in others and generates particular patterns of gesturing. Great apes do not, however, have the same levels of rhythmic synchronization of talk, body movements, and nonverbal gesturing as humans, most likely because they have fewer bundles of mirror neurons. Yet, mirror neurons and the capacities that they allowed among the LCAs of great apes and hominins meant that natural selection had something to select on—tails of bell curves of those hominins with larger numbers of mirror neurons—and, in so doing, directional selection could enhance role-taking and empathizing in ways that would promote emotional solidarity.
Many sociologists have documented that human interactions fall into patterns of synchronization of talk and body movements, generating a kind of back-and-forth rhythm. In fact, when interactions lack this synchronization, interactions fall “out of rhythm” and, as a result, are difficult to sustain. Indeed, rhythm is critical to sustaining the flow of positive emotions, and when rhythm is disrupted, negative emotions are aroused in an interaction.
Great apes do not reveal quite this level of, nor even this human dependence on, rhythmic synchronization, although young great apes in their play activities reveal considerable rhythm and synchronization of responses back and forth. Among adults there is not as much synchronization, although arousal of emotions will lead to mimicry of the emotions, which creates a kind of mutual rhythm back and forth. Part of the explanation for this difference among apes compared to humans probably resides in a fewer number of mirror neurons and, perhaps more importantly, in their inability to engage in finely tuned articulated speech, which, among humans, drives much synchronization in what ethnomethodologists in sociology describe as “turn-taking” in conversations … Moreover, when turn-taking is converted to chants or to poetic and musical hymns, talk generates even more rhythmic synchronization of bodies and emotional states … Thus, spoken language may be necessary for the enhanced levels of rhythmic synchronization that humans display over chimpanzees. Still, the basic capacity and propensity were there to select on during hominin evolution, although the long evolution from a language of emotions to one based on speech may have been as important as any direct selection on distributions of mirror neurons.
Collective Emotional Effervescence
… [Humans] clearly inherited a behavioral propensity to engage in collective carnivals where emotions are charged up and, as a result, generate an intense sense of solidarity …
… Jane Goodall, who has spent more than five decades studying chimpanzees, describes what she terms an emotional rainfall dance where chimpanzees stand near a roaring waterfall, seeming transfixed by its power and beauty, swaying in rhythmic movements and displaying a very humanlike wonder. Thus, in this kind of quiet rhythmic synchronization where lower-key emotions are aroused, it is apparent that chimpanzees can engage arousals of emotions that seem almost like “religious worship”.
More contemporary theorists have documented that every day, normal interactions among humans can have this sense of effervescence, but at lower levels of intensity, that build social bonds and solidarity. Interactions that fall into a rhythmic flow and synchronization can thus generate less intense emotions; and as these lower-key episodes of emotional animation are repeated over time in subsequent encounters, they cause a growing sense of collective solidarity. Thus, the mechanism for charging up emotions, in both high-key and low-key modes, was part of our inheritance from the ancestors of great apes, certainly the LCA of chimpanzees and humans. Once the range of humans’ emotions expanded, this mechanism could be used not just in big collective gatherings but in almost all kinds of interaction where ritualized greetings, synchronization of talk, and emotional arousal at many different levels of intensity occur. Thus, in expanding the emotional repertoire of hominins, a bioprogrammer for what Durkheim terms collective effervescence during episodes of co-presence and interaction could be used to charge up emotions and, later, when culture began to evolve, to charge up the emotions attached to turn-taking, synchronizing of speech, and the cultural symbols and codes generated by the ability to speak …
Reciprocity and Calculations of Justice
Exchange and Reciprocity
Higher primates, including monkeys, appear to be hardwired for reciprocity—that is, individuals needing to give back to those who have bestowed benefits on them …
Exchange and reciprocity … work to strengthen bonds, even among monkeys who are already hardwired to form strong kinship and group bonds. For a weak-tie, lower-sociality, less-prone-to-group-formation animal like a great ape, the lack of strong bonding and grouping bio-programmers places a greater burden on reciprocation of exchanges of resources while adding additional levels of positive emotions to reciprocated exchanges. A sense of self increases this sense that reciprocation must occur because conceptions of self and identities can be on the line. As culture enshrines in codes the morality of reciprocation, exchanges become a central mechanism for forming and sustaining bonds and solidarities …
[Without] powerful bioprogrammers for strong social ties … selection on human neuroanatomy operates almost like direct bioprogrammers on exchange relationships … [and the] only direct programmer is the apparent higher mammalian need to reciprocate, which, among humans, is intensified by emotions, self, and cultural rules that demand reciprocation, thus ratcheting up positive emotions and achieving what was necessary during the evolution of hominins: increasing strength of social ties and group solidarities.
Calculations of Justice
Both monkeys and apes, as well as many other mammals, calculate justice and the perceived fairness of exchange relations [capuchin monkeys]… Rather complicated calculations are involved in this behavior, including an assessment of the level of rewards to one monkey in relation to other monkeys in the same exchange relationship, perhaps a negative emotional reaction to differences in the rate of ex-change from caregivers, and then a refusal to exchange any further until rates of exchange of behaviors for treats are equal. This too seems to be hardwired, and if there was ever a hardwiring for morality in general, this apparent emotional sense of “injustice” is certainly one source …
Chimpanzees do much the same thing …
… Yet, moral codes could also subvert the bioprogrammers. Studies of exchange where it is not entirely clear who has made the most contribution to a collective task have found that a norm of equity is invoked: distributing the rewards equally among all members. Even at times when there is clarity about respective contributions, these considerations are ignored so that equality in distributions can promote solidarity without differentiating who is more deserving. The apparent reason for this kind of norm is that equity reduces negative emotions, at least among a larger number of members, and thus sustains the solidarity of the group. Haggling over who did what and who deserves what is, among humans, almost always a process laden with negative emotions; and thus, a general cultural norm can be established to distribute equally to avoid disagreement about distributions. For weak-tie animals like humans, who at their genetic core are still a great ape, this norm of equity has probably proven useful in avoiding conflict that would easily destroy solidarity …
… [Among chimpanzees and humans] The arousal of negative emotions over perceived “injustices” is thus the other side of “justice” and reciprocity; yet, for hominins to become more strongly bonded and group oriented, it was probably necessary for justice calculations to be normatively regulated so that ambiguities over respective contributions and distributions of rewards would invoke a default norm: distribute equally when unsure about how to avoid the negative emotions aroused over perceived injustices. Such would be particularly likely in animals with few bioprogrammers for forming social bonds but with supercharged emotional capacities.
The Capacity to Make Attributions
Related to self and calculations of justice is another behavioral capacity evident among chimpanzees and, hence, humans’ hominin ancestor: the ability to make causal attributions about the “causes” or sources of experiences … Attributions by humans can be either related to the actions of self (that is, the person caused a particular outcome to self) or externalized to other objects in the environment: others, the local situation, or more remote structures (corporate units, categoric units, or whole society) …
… Because [the] imperative for greater social solidarity among members of a group or even members of a society would require external attributions to the group, society or some intervening structure had to evolve if hunting and gathering bands and then groups in more complex sociocultural formations were to remain relatively stable and cohesive. Society could not possibly survive if humans were only a bunch of selfish egoists …
[effects on organization]
[P]roductive exchanges, where individuals are coordinating their efforts to realize a goal but, at the same time, cannot fully assess their respective contributions, are the most likely to lead to external attributions to the group regardless of whether they are fully successful in realizing their goals …[Increased] commitments to the group, even when goals were not realized … [is] what probably occurred in early hunting and gathering societies where coordinated divisions of labor between men and women, and some coordination among men in hunting and women in gathering, was a productive exchange in the band. It also suggests a productive exchange in the nuclear family unit as females brought home what they gathered and males brought home their share (as often determined by their contribution) of a collective kill. At both structural levels—nuclear family and band—failure to secure enough food did not lead to blaming others but, instead, to sharing during times of shortages and, moreover, to reaffirming commitments to coordinate activities to secure more favorable outcomes in the future.
So the process of beginning to organize into groupings—say the early horde—did not lead to mutual finger-pointing as others were blamed for failures but, instead, commitments to do better next time … Thus, under the conditions of organization that were evolving as hominins ventured into open-country habitats, initial groupings increased external attributions to the group rather than to self or specific others and, in so doing, increased commitments to the group. This hardwired propensity to make attributions thus work favorably to push for group formation and productive exchange within family and band in ways that enhanced fitness …
… Productive exchanges revolving around a division of labor between females and males also has some basis in great ape biology. Chimpanzee males often coordinate hunting for meat in the forests, signaling with subtle nonvocal gestures that are difficult for humans to detect … Somewhat like hunter-gathering human populations … males primarily hunt … while females gather plant life and, as a result, eat much less meat than males. Because males hunt so frequently and eat so much more meat than females, evidence from measure of isotopes can distinguish males from females. This division of labor may not be wholly genetically driven but, instead, arises from convenience because males cannot nurse the young and thus are more likely to be free to engage in coordinated open-country hunting, especially since hunting and gathering mothers prolong breastfeeding (as a form of birth control) and infancy of their young. Such was probably also the case for the first hordes as they evolved into the hunting and gathering band, but still, it is likely that there is probably some biological push for this form of division of labor. As such, it can be seen as either a preadaptation or behavioral propensity when collecting food in dangerous habitats. Furthermore, this ability to hunt and thereby gain more protein can also be seen as a preadaptation or behavioral propensity for brain growth. Natural selection would not need to create this division of labor that appears to be a default pattern of organization when chimpanzees hunt. The only change required of human hunters would be for men to increase the share of meat with females, which may have come from expanded positive emotions emanating from their centers for sexual pleasure, like the septum. Once the conjugal partners were pair-bonded, more by emotions than genetic bioprogrammers, and once both parents were emotionally attached to offspring in a nuclear family (by bioprogrammers for females and emotions for males), sharing of meat would have increased in the emerging nuclear family among late hominins.
[separating, and mixing, biology and culture]
Once hominins spent more time in open-country food collection, the coordination of productive activities involved a male-female division of labor and a pooling of gathered plants and shares of hunts (in accordance with justice propensities) in the nuclear family. Emotions were probably the principal force here, but the division of labor that appears to emerge in chimpanzees certainly facilitated coordinated production and distribution of resources, which is the condition that leads to external attributions to the group, whether successful or unsuccessful, that work to increase emotional commitments to the group. Thus, an escalating or self-reinforcing cycle of initial hunting and gathering in the open country leads to some coordination, external attributions to the group, and commitments to the group, all of which lead to more coordination in the division of labor, external attributions, and commitment to more cohesive groups, and so on. There is clearly some biology here, arising from the related bioprogrammers for exchange, calculations of justice in resource distributions, and attributions for group success or failure leading to group commitments. Enhanced emotionality, growth of the brain, emergence of language, use of cultural codes to coordinate productive activity and to distribute resources, and commitments to groups are thus intertwined. Once put into motion, these mingled forces allowed late hominin groups to survive in highly diverse and often difficult habitats.
Fluid and Episodic Hierarchies
Species of monkeys form linear hierarchies of dominance among males and, at times, among females in matrilines of related kin. Hierarchies and matrilines are thus the building blocks of group structures organizing populations of monkeys. In contrast, the LCAs of present-day great apes probably did not reveal hierarchies of power. Yet, contemporary gorillas and, to a lesser extent, chimpanzees reveal some degree of hierarchy. Other apes … reveal equality between the sexes in what looks like nuclear family units of mother, father, and offspring; it was this ability to create the nuclear family that led to the success of gibbons and other non-great apes like siamangs. Again, organization was the key to survival, but the ancestors of great apes did not possess bioprogrammers for much of this needed property.
So, why did gorillas and chimpanzees develop elements of hierarchy? … Among gorillas, the lead silverback is the center of rather fluid groupings composed of males and females typically with offspring. Females stay if the lead silverback is providing services, such as protection and babysitting, but will leave to another group if she is, apparently, dissatisfied with the services provided by the lead silverback. The lead silverback has power in the group, but it is a power that cannot be pushed too far because any member of the group can leave at any time, and indeed, males and females often wander in and then leave the group. So, a hierarchy provides a center around which fluid comings and goings occur, and thus some degree of group organization continuity. It is not a hierarchy … that involves high degrees of control beyond the requirement to follow the lead silverback around, if they decide to remain in the lead silverback’s group.
Among chimpanzees, males sometimes compete for dominance. For example, brothers may support each other for some degree of dominance, but again, the problem is, Whom do they dominate? Highly mobile chimpanzees can leave situations where there is too much dominance. Therefore, dominance does not lead to stable groups, although the patrols of community boundaries may be an occasion when dominance has some utility in defending the boundaries of the community from outside males. So, again, some degree of structure is created by dominance, but it is a weak and often only episodic dominance. Most importantly, it does not ensure continuity of the groups that might temporarily form in some chimpanzee societies.
[power]
Since hunting and gathering populations typically revealed a powerful norm against anyone claiming power or prestige, it is likely that this norm was created because bands where individuals tried to appear “above others” dissolved due to conflict that would break simple hunting and gathering societies apart. So, this weak propensity to hierarchy probably evolved from the LCAs of the ancestors of gorillas (8–9 mya) and chimpanzees (5–6 mya), but the stability of the band among hominin hunter-gatherers apparently required that it be repressed. One consequence of these tendencies … was to increase hominin sensitivity to status differences—whether honor and prestige given to accomplished individuals or power given to individuals to control the actions of others for short periods of time. Just as all great apes can role-take and read each other’s minds and dispositions to act, they can also status-take and determine status differences. This ability would be important as human societies became more complex and when, as a result, power and prestige were bestowed on some individuals as part of a system of social control, beginning with Big Men among settled hunter-gatherers … where populations grew significantly and required some form of authority to coordinate the larger population. In these early manifestations of consolidated power, the Big Man often “owned” everything but … was required to redistribute it to members of the settled community—thereby gaining prestige to go along with his power … Much like the lead silverback among gorillas, power incurred obligations to others … that would later in societal evolution be transmuted into a means to exploit members of a society and increase inequalities and stratification. Still, human societies would eventually create complex status systems within and between corporate units in larger and more complex societies, and this ability to reckon status and live with status differences indicates a preadaptation and a behavioral capacity for developing diverse types and fluid hierarchies in societies. When the hierarchies became too rigid, they would, over the long run, generate internal conflict—as can be seen just about everywhere in the world today.
Some people assert that hierarchy and dominance are programmed into humans, whether the argument is extreme like [the] view of warfare among hunter-gatherers as the driving force of societal evolution or more constrained like Christopher Boehm’s arguments about hierarchy in the forests. In Boehm’s argument about the chimpanzee of Gombe, and also in early work by de Waal in the colony of chimpanzees in the Arnhem zoo, more hierarchy is “observed” than actually occurs in chimpanzee communities in their natural habitat. In Boehm’s case, competition for dominance ensued when the caretakers … began feeding members of the community, with the consequence that they began to concentrate at feeding locations and, then, to fight over the distribution of food … In de Waal’s work, he studied chimpanzees in zoos, which would be much like studying the nature of humans in prisons, where hierarchy and conflict rule to a greater degree than outside prison walls. One response to scarce resources among humans is to fight over them and become dominant so as to control access to resources, but this does not necessarily mean that humans are driven by some diffuse and overbearing need to dominate. It may be the case, but my view is that humans did not survive by dominance; just the opposite, they survived by imposing equality among individuals and by norms against dominance.
It is only later when power was needed to control larger populations that we see hierarchies form in human societies, which are more the result of sociocultural selection pressures for consolidating power for control and for coordinating actions among members of much larger and settled populations than of some primal drive for individual power. The case for or against a biology-based “need for power or dominance” is still ambiguous, but the drive for domination appears to be a weak one …
Conclusion
This chapter completes the review of what can be derived from a cladistic analysis of humans’ closest relatives: the great apes. With the assembled data from cladistics, we have now reviewed (1) preadaptations and (2) behavioral capacities and propensities that were available for natural selection to work on. We know the direction natural selection took: to increase the strength of social ties and group solidarities by, eventually, increasing the strength of emotional social ties between mating adult males and females and between this conjugal pair and their offspring to form the nuclear family. Then, with some stability in the nuclear family, the hunting and gathering band composed of a number of nuclear families could evolve.
… It is still difficult to establish what is biological from what is cultural, but we are at least starting with a clear picture of humans’ biological heritage. Inevitably though, the fact that natural selection pushed for enlargement of the hominin brain, first subcortically and later neocortically, which in turn led to spoken language and the capacity to form symbolic culture, still makes it difficult to disentangle biological from sociocultural. Moreover, enlarging the brain also changed the biology of those preadaptations and behavioral capacities/propensities that we now know to have a biology basis. …
CHAPTER SIX
Humans’ Inherited Nature
[culture]
… The real challenge for natural selection was to convert weak-tie, non-group-organizing primates into stronger-tie animals capable of forming more permanent groups with higher levels of solidarity than is evident among great apes today …
Brain Growth, Speech, and Culture as an “Elaboration Machine”
Brain growth in subcortical areas of the hominin brain began early in hominin evolution under increasing selection pressures for hominins to become better organized at the group level as they were forced to adapt to terrestrial and open-country habitats—first the ground under the forest canopy, then secondary wooded forests, bushlands, more open-country habitats in Africa (e.g., the savanna), and then migrations by Homo erectus or Homo ergaster to Eurasia. The brain initially grew at the subcortical level because it provided the easiest route to creating stronger social ties and group solidarities among low-sociality and non-permanent-group-forming hominins. Community was the “natural” (hardwired) organizational unit of hominins, but they were increasingly thrust into an environment that required more permanent groups …
… Thus, selection pressures for more permanent and more cohesive groups started the evolution leading to humans. Once the emotional palette increased to a sufficient threshold, selection on growth of the neocortex would be fitness enhancing because a more intelligent animal in predator-riddled open-country habitats is more likely to survive [and] organize for food collection and defense in more tight-knit and stable groups. Human nature, then, is related to selection as it worked to make weak-tie and non-group-forming hominins more emotional so that they could use emotions to increase the strength of social ties and group solidarities. The sociological imperative to get organized or die led selection to blindly discover this route to increased strength of social ties and the stability and cohesiveness of groups among rather individualistic apelike animals oriented more to larger communities than to local groupings.
Selection to create the neurology for language, was unnecessary because this basic capacity already existed among the LCAs, as is evident by the ability of all great apes to understand spoken language from humans and to communicate back to humans …
… Speech … allows for all dimensions of self, thinking, emoting, behaving, and organizing in diverse environments to be represented symbolically. It thus becomes possible to create common culture … idiosyncratic and shared memories, private and public beliefs, shared normative expectations, shared worldviews, codified knowledge that can be passed down across generations, and other cultural products that shape forms of social organization. With the ability to experience emotions such as shame and guilt, cultural prohibitions could evolve, making social control by negative sanctions from others into self-control by each individual …
… Growth in the subcortex arising from selection to increase social ties and group solidarities allows for the growth of the neocortex because more emotions mean that more complex cognitions can be tagged by more diverse emotions. There may also be some direct selection pressure when enhancement of emotions puts pressure on the neocortex to grow in order to utilize the power of emotions to expand cognitive capacities. As the neocortex grows, a positive reverse causal effect … is caused by cognitive development to push for new variants and combinations of emotions to tag the increasing development and storage of cognitions. Similarly, an expanding neocortex not only allows for speech but also pushes selection toward speech because it is only through speech that cognitions, particularly cognitions revolving around collectively held meanings among members of a population, can grow in ways that can increase fitness. Once this cycle of selection is initiated, it continues to ratchet up neocortical growth …
Spoken language, coupled with a larger neocortex, allows for cultural meanings to be developed and stored as memories that can enhance fitness. Such an elaboration of culture allows for increased memories, eventually written down, among individuals and collectivities without having to increase the size of the human brain. Speech probably pushes for culture because … speech links symbols denoting facets of the external environment, interpersonal relations, and intrapersonal cognitions and emotions. Speech also allows for the designation of new emotional states by individuals, both separately and collectively. The development of cultural meanings puts selection pressure on the neocortex (and prefrontal cortex) to expand to store and retrieve shared cultural meanings that can be passed down to subsequent generations. This expansion of the neocortex under pressure to store ever more culture also intensifies the reverse causal effect of a growing neocortex on the growth of the subcortex to produce a greater variety of emotions to tag the increasing volume and diversity of cultural meaning that needs to be stored. Speech, as it makes the formation of symbolic culture possible, increases fitness without enlarging the brain any further at around an average range of 1,250 to 1,350 cc because, eventually, humans acquired the capacity to store culture as myths, poems, and speech enhancers for expanding memories that can be passed down across generations. The invention of writing and printing dramatically expands, outside of the neurology of the human brain, large amounts of information, history, and knowledge in texts and … computer-assisted systems of memory …
There is, then, a limit to how far these self-escalating causal and selection effects can continue because there is an upper limit of how big the brain can become, given the structure of female anatomy. Great functional intelligence can be created without growing the actual brain but, instead, giving it the key—speech—to allow for the accumulation of symbolic culture that would lead to external extensions of the brain by technologies for storing, retrieving, disseminating, and using information to make decisions or confront adaptive problems. …
Visualizing the Evolved Nature of Humans
… Violence does not appear to be persistent among hominins and human hunter-gatherer populations. Humans, under certain conditions, can be violent, as is obvious, but most of the conditions fostering this violence are sociocultural in nature. Negative emotions of humans are always present for activation under extreme sociocultural conditions, yet it is doubtful that this violence, even high degrees of aggressiveness, is a central part of humans’ biologically driven nature … Although hunter-gatherers had powerful norms against inequality—probably because of the dangers of social hierarchies in generating conflict—this normative constraint does not mean that hunter-gatherers were trying to “tame their violent nature”.
The fact that human societies became more hierarchical once leaving hunting and gathering as a societal form does not mean an aggressive trait in human nature was waiting to suddenly “break through”. Rather, consolidation of power and authority became necessary for organizing larger, settled populations, with selection for hierarchy being more sociocultural than biological. As human societies evolved rather dramatically over the last 10,000 years, following several hundred thousand years of remaining relatively static, the structure and culture of these more recent sociocultural formations do not mean that they are manifestations of humans’ violent nature … Indeed, I would argue … the opposite—societies reveal how flexible humans are in their ability to adapt to larger, more complex social structures that are not compatible with their nature.
One particularly important point in the understanding of human societies is that “kin selection” as conceptualized by biologists does not represent a powerful argument about human nature. Humans’ ancestors were not kin oriented beyond females’ bonding with their young off-spring (a virtual universal among all mammals). Kinship is a cultural invention for humans and, as I think the cladistic analysis underscores, the LCAs to humans and great apes were not kin oriented. Indeed, if hominins had not been able to invent kinship by building the first nuclear family units, humans would never have come into existence. Overcoming the lack of a drive to form kinship groups was the big obstacle that natural selection had to overcome, which it did indirectly by enhancing emotions that strengthened social bonds and group solidarities and allowed for the invention of the nuclear family. Once humans brains could generate a larger variety of emotions, the neocortex also began to grow, eventually allowing for speech and cultural production that, over the last thousand years, led to the mega societies of the present. …
… Humans are remarkably adaptable to rather grim social conditions— even poverty, crowding, exploitation, inequalities, discrimination and other maladies of societies—and yet we continue to reproduce, which, in a biological sense, means that we are “fit” …
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Evolved Community Complex
Community as the Basic Organizational Units of Great Apes and Hominins
The last common ancestors (LCAs) of great apes and hominins evidenced a unique pattern of social organization when compared to most mammals who are kin- and group-oriented. Great apes evolved in the terminal areas of the forest canopy and thus could not form permanent groups. The only stable unit of organization was a sense of community or home range that could be quite large, as much as 15–30 square miles, as is the case with come common chimpanzees today. Even as some great apes and hominins began to live in more terrestrial habitats and to form limited group ties, the more inclusive community was still the structural backbone of each population. With their comparatively large neocortex, great apes and hominins could cognitively map the ecological boundaries of the community as well as the demography of who belonged and who did not belong in the community. Given that these [large] communities … members would wander around their home range and not see each other for weeks, even months, and yet could engage in greeting rituals when meeting up and proceed to role-take with each other and, it can be presumed, see themselves from the perspective of others. Unlike most other mammals, this kind of community orientation was sustained by weak social ties … beyond mother and young …
… The interaction complex and community complex are related in that they allow humans to interact with relative “strangers” and to sustain weak ties across larger territories … Only the social insects, such as ants and termites, can build such large societies revealing divisions of labor …
Inherited Traits and Effects of the “Elaboration Machine”
The inherited traits of LCAs subject to selection and then enhancement … during late hominin and early human evolution are listed on the left side of Figure 11.1 [below]. Subject to [these] powerful forces … the capacities to reckon community, to “know” its boundaries and its demography of inhabitants, to see self in relation to community, to engage in relaxed weak-tie interactions with community members, to be mobile and sometimes alone in movements through the community, to be able to mobilize emotions in quasi celebrations of the community when larger numbers of its members came into co-presence, and to defend the boundaries of the community with temporary groupings in patrols along the community’s boundaries became the basis for humans’ capacity to form new layers of social structure and, eventually, their cultures, which would lead to the large industrial and postindustrial societies of today. Early on, the sense of community among hominins could have been expanded to the territory of the nomadic hunting and gathering band. There may have even been a larger territory for all bands sharing the same language and cultural traditions, extending the territories to be conceptualized by many more square miles and requiring new kinds of more “diplomatic” interaction with members of other bands in this extended “home range” of sets of bands.
When humans finally began to periodically settle down from their more nomadic hunting and gathering, perhaps for only part of the year, these territories may have been defended, as is the case with chimpanzees today. By 10,000 years ago, as the human population began to grow, early Big Man systems of hunter-gatherers settled near sources of water, and fish began to be supplemented by horticultural communities (gardening without the plow or animal power) that were linked together because of unilineal kinship ties that began to be superimposed over communities. Similarly, pastoralists who were more mobile also began to use unilineal kinship as a means to organize nuclear families across ever more extended territories and to organize trade relations among subpopulations in a territory. As more advanced horticultural societies evolved, some were organized around communities connected to a dominant larger city housing political and religious elites that were beginning to operate as an early “state” … Others were based on more extended trade networks among cities and more rural areas, typically accompanied by political domination by a “capital city” and its control over larger territories or region … [As] agrarian societies evolved … often generating a central capital … and a large territory of conquered peoples … and patterns of feudalism and smaller state-like structures … the community system had greatly expanded … by many new layers of social structure: capital cities and various kinds of specialized rural and urban formations … devoted to trade and market activities; new institutional systems increasingly organized into bureaucratic-like structures in highly differentiated political, religious, economic domains, and eventually including education, science, and arts; and stratification systems composed of different strata or classes of individuals categorized by their prestige and perceived worth. At the same time, the structural base of earlier large societies—provided by linking nuclear families into lineages, clans and subclans, moieties, and other features of unilineal descent systems—was making its gradual retreat back to the more isolated nuclear family of modern societies (and, of course, the first human societies of hunter- gatherers) …
… Humans had been able to endure the highly stratified societies that emerged after hunting and gathering through agrarianism because they had the cognitive capacities to understand the necessarily restrictive nature of structures limiting their option. As a result, individuals sought fulfillment in meeting needs in local kin units and the community. Still, the societies between hunting-gathering and postindustrialism were stages of societal evolution that were not well suited to humans’ evolved nature because of the crushing constraints of stratification, the use of authority and coercion, and the limited individual freedoms; they were inherently unstable in the longer run, even as they tightly controlled their larger, stratified populations. Urban centers and markets in feudal agrarianism and then with early industrialism and the increasing expansion of labor markets offered some opportunities for mobility and individualism …
The cognitive mapping abilities of humans increased during societal evolution to the point where it was possible to conceive of the boundaries of geographically large societies and even systems of societies organizing distinctive populations and revealing a wide diversity of cultural traits. Yet … the social universe of humans remained highly local … The evolution of ever more complex societies was only possible because individuals could see beyond community and see themselves and others in relation to other types of sociocultural formations … Humans’ sense of self was oriented to identities lodged in categoric units, in corporate units making up communities and organizations, and in key roles in the divisions of labor of corporate units lodged inside of society-wide institutional systems (e.g., economy, education, polity, religion).
For the first time in human history, identities could begin to include societal-level identities as nationalism mobilized emotions about self in relation to “homelands” and their cultures. Mobility was now possible across the larger expanse of any given society or between societies. Interaction with strangers, non-kin, non-community, and even non-societal members was relatively easy for this evolved great ape with enhanced interpersonal skills and a large neocortex.
The features of this expanded scale and the scope of the community complex were no longer focused just on the local community. A capacity to cognitively perceive layers upon layers of differentiated social structures emerged. Nuclear families and local residential community remained a central anchor and focus of attention, but increasingly, humans could not only visualize but develop diverse emotional attachments to differentiated groups, communities, and organizations within institutional systems making up a society. They could see themselves and develop identities associated with not only categories in the stratification systems but virtually any of the differentiated groups, organizations, communities, and societies of the new social universe…
… Even though elephants, members of the dolphin family, whales, and perhaps some species of highly intelligent birds can be mobile and interact in complex fission-fusion arrangements, no other animal can conceptualize the planet and all the sociocultural formations … nor can they move about populations of strangers both inside their own communities and virtually every other social structure organizing their lives in a society or the lives of others in different societies. Humans are able to do this because of their great ape ancestry, allowing for weak ties, individualism, mobility, and cognitions focused on social structures beyond local groupings or kin units … creating [mega] societies that … are more compatible with human nature than any other societal form …
Conclusion: The Elaborated Community Complex
The critical difference between most mammals and the ancestors of great apes and hominins is that hominins are not naturally programmed to reckon the local group and kin units in the same way as most other mammals … The orientation to community was a critical preadaptation for macro societies for humans’ eventual capacity to conceptualize such societies, feel comfortable in them, interact in them, meet needs in them, and derive positive emotions from them …
… With … cognitive and emotional growth came the capacity to extend the perspective of late hominins and early humans even further out, beyond what had been a large home range… organized in a complex and layered systems of groups, organizations, communities, institutional domains, and stratification … The cognitive capacities of humans had sufficiently expanded, as had their emotional and interpersonal capacities; and while these were not needed for reckoning the small world of hunter-gatherers, they represented a preadaptation for the more macro societies …
These elaborations converted original mapping of community as the most stable social structure organizing hominin groupings into what is really no longer a community complex but a “societal complex”—an ability to see the larger social structure, even from the vantage point of a local grouping. Humans have the capacity to “look up” from the group to organization to community to institutional domain to society and now even to intersocietal system and “see” the outlines of the larger sociocultural formation organizing their lives and activities, just as chimpanzees can … It is only possible with the original wiring to reckon beyond the group, coupled to a brain that is three times as large as the brain of the LCAs of early hominins. Because emotional enhancement preceded cognitive growth in the neocortex, the ability to look beyond the group to ever more layers of social structure and their cultures was always accompanied by emotions that allowed humans to develop attachments to meso and macro social structures and their cultures and, if need be, to mobilize negative emotions to those structures constraining human nature. …
Humans have … the need to develop identities attached to particular levels of social structure and culture: corporate units, categoric units, and, at times, such macro corporate units as a whole society or system of societies … or a category across societies … Indeed, it is the ability to derive positive emotions from others’ verifications of these senses of identity that allows humans to meet their most fundamental needs in different levels of social structures … [and] whole societies … when such identities are not easily verified, individuals experience negative emotions …
… With these evolved complexes, humans can do what all great apes do: move about as individuals inside a more inclusive social structure—for chimpanzees, the community or home range and, for humans, the whole world of social structures organizing virtually all people on earth … [The] “language of emotions” based, in part, on universal sequences of emotional expressions is often enough to enable individuals to meet needs in distant lands. We are programmed by our community complex to understand the parameters and boundaries of our … environment, and … to function within the ever-shifting parameters of differentiated sociocultural systems …
… Figure 11.1 summarizes the elaborated and evolved community complex. The inputs from our inherited nature are listed on the left side of the elaboration machine, and as they enter this elaboration machine, they are transformed and, indeed, elaborated into a societal complex or capacity to see both the immediate and larger sociocultural world in which we find ourselves. Only animals like humans can do so; and it is ever more remarkable for a large animal like humans to be able to organize mega societies without the instinctive programming evident among social insects …
The Source:
Jonathan H. Turner, On Human Nature The Biology and Sociology of What Made Us Human, Taylor & Francis Routledge 2021
[MGH: As usual, references have been omitted. Readers should note the book has received outstanding reviews, which can be viewed on the publisher’s webpage.]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.