If we were all "naturally" egalitarian, then socialists wouldn't need to do anything, we'd already be living in their world. Whereas in fact we need to arrange society pretty damn carefully to keep a lid on inequality.
I am a socialist and I do not demand equality. I demand safety, which is not the same. Once everybody is guaranteed to have a basically comfortable life, billionaires are welcome to keep whatever wealth they have left over.
And I think that can be more defended on prehistorical data. We have evidence of skeletons of prehistoric people surviving disabling injuries. This means HGs cared for those who could contribute nothing.
To be fair that still goes on within the nuclear family, which is the closest modern equivalent we have to the hunter-gatherer tribe.
But whatever egalitarian instinct people back then had ran out abruptly when they encountered anyone outside the tribe. And modern society requires us to interact with such people all the time! Hence the need for top-down structures.
You can also use a series of checks and balances so the whole system doesn't have to be loaded at every node. It seems to have worked rather well for the US with relatively little tweaking. (It for sure needs some now, to get the latest group of activists out (actually punishing an attempted coup would have made the cycle faster), but that happens cyclically basically (until the wheels fall off, of course, which is always possible))
I would argue that we are already living in that world you posit can only exist if people put time and effort towards the future in, and that all the systems of government have contributed to where we are now. We're "better" today than in the past (using metrics like life expectancy and education), so either we claim that the True Nature is being revealed, and it trends Good, or we take credit for "doing it ourselves", but it would seem that the clear winner over time is some form of egalitarianism and teamwork versus some form of non-egaliatianism and tribalism.
You have it backwards. Nature is full of exogenous inegalitarian shocks. Socialism is so popular because people are so egalitarian (or really stupid and narcissistic. Median person narcissism is just egalitarianism. Real egalitarianism has to extend to animals)
Yes, they shared food very equally, largely because it was a matter of both survival and allocating resources when a hunter got more resources than he or his family could consume before the meat became unsafe. It's a collective "hunting success" insurance pool for hunted calories that made sense from several directions.
But good hunters ALSO got more wives, which is very much less "egalitarian." Even today, good hunters in HG societies have between 1.5x - 2.5x more children:
A full 87% of Hunter Gatherer societies *today* have between 5 and 20% of the men practicing having multiple wives, and it must have been an even bigger factor in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA).
Historically, ~80-90% of women reproduced and 30-40% of men. This was informed speculation at the time of the time of Baumeister's APA address, where this factoid first surfaced, but genetic data has since proven it over ~150k years.
Obviously this is an extremely adaptive and Lindy social practice that we would do well to consider for ourselves.
Hunting has gone out of style, but we all know the top 1% pay 40%+ of all the taxes, which is surely the closest modern allegory to hunting a big kudzu and bringing it back for the tribe.
I personally think we should do something fun here, like "for every year that you've paid more than $100k in taxes, you get an additional wife permit," and then being out and about with multiple wives is a status signal, and both genders love status symbols!
Robin, someone reciting a dogma can be lazy, but there's no point in being a lazy contrarian. Books have been written on this topic. There are sloppy arguments for ancient egalitarianism you could roast, like the dawn of everything, or the scapegoat stuff by René Girard, or the deceptive skull counting at Catalhoyuk. But you can't handwave it away in a few sentences.
The only book I've read on the subject is /The Dawn of Everything/, and while I might recommend it for enumerating many recent major archaeological discoveries which few people know about, I specifically don't recommend its narrative about egalitarianism. The most-frequent problem is that it's trying to answer a quantitative question--what fraction of early societies were egalitarian?--by non-quantitative cherry-picking. Again and again, it gives examples of early settlements thought to have been egalitarian (based on, eg, all the dwellings being the same size), but doesn't say how many settlements it didn't mention.
Rene Girard has a theory popular now with cognitive archaeologists (the kind who study things like egalitarianism in prehistoric societies): that all early settlements practiced scapegoating using human sacrifices instead of animals, and that they did this not for the usual reasons societies uses scapegoating, but to expel members of society who had grown too high-status; and this was how religion began: to impose a ritual to preserve egalitarianism.
Athens did something like it, with its practice of voting people into exile who were felt to be too popular. I think the theory is too specific to be supported by archeological evidence that people hit a lot of other people on top of the head. Even if a lot of societies hit lots of people on the head, we can't say much about why they did it. Yet Girard says this particular scapegoating ritual was universal, which I think proves he's a crackpot. He wrote books on it; I attempted to read one but never finished.
At Catalhoyuk, a neolithic city in present-day Turkey inhabited 7400-5900 BCE, they buried their dead in or under their houses. There are a whole lot of skulls with severe skull fractures from intentionally-inflicted blunt trauma, which were generally agreed to be the result of attacks with stones or clay balls, thrown by hand or with slings--until the government put different people in charge of the site in 1993. Those people became disciples of Girard, and interpret everything to say these skeletons were not of war victims, but of people used in just this ritual scapegoating. They say all the clay balls they find are not sling stones (though they are the size and weight of sling stones found around the world), but are pot-boilers (to be heated up and then put into pots to boil water). This despite the fact that nobody uses clay for pot-boilers, because (A) it's much less dense than rock, and (B) pieces of clay would break off into the soup.
The evidence for Girard's theory is that (A) Catalhoyuk has no defensive walls, (B) most of the skull fractures had healed before death, indicating the person survived the injury, and (C) most fractures are on the top of the head, which doesn't usually happen with slings or in falling accidents. Therefore, they say, these must have been intentional injuries, but not meant to kill; so they were probably scapegoating victims. They don't consider the possibility that people who died on the battlefield were buried or left on the battlefield.
I think the idea that Neolithic people could reliably smash someone on the head precisely enough to put a crater in the skull, yet never kill them, is absurd, as is the idea that they would smash in the skull of someone they didn't want to kill. The absence of unhealed fractures to my mind indicates either that people who died immediately were buried somewhere else, or that they're misinterpreting wear from some other process as healing. There are many skulls with more than one head fracture, and they propose that these people were "sacrificed" multiple times. In one paper, the number of fractured skulls in one particular location at the site were counted, and then divided by the number of skulls at the entire site, to come up with a meaningless but small fraction, to disguise the fact that 1/4 of the people buried there had skull fractures. A neolithic society which deliberately gave 1/4 of their members permanent brain damage would IMHO not survive long.
These are examples of serious academic works trying to show that early societies were egalitarian, which I think have serious problems. There was an earlier phase of archaeologists arguing that the presence of pre-4000 BC statuettes of women with big breasts and butts all around the Old World proves that these prehistoric societies were matriarchal and peaceful societies based on gift-giving rather than hierarchy. These theories have similar amounts of optimism about inferring practice from scant remains.
There are on the other hand many anthropological observations of primitive "bands" which enforce egalitarianism in various ways. But there are also many observations of wealth disparity in "bands", "wealth" often being women. Wealth disparity is the norm in larger groups. One could argue that greater disparity in larger settlements is just the result of scaling laws, not of any change in culture. The controversy is over claims of egalitarianism in large settlements. The best evidence I know of for that is very large settlements in the Indus River valley between 4000 and 2000? BCE in which all the dwellings were the same size. So prehistoric egalitarianism probably existed; but claiming it was common is quite another thing.
Sorry, I didn't mean books that you'd recommend as examples of "sloppy arguments", but instead the opposite: books that Robin should address rather than handwave away.
I meant Robin should address the sloppy arguments. I'd say especially "The Dawn of Everything", which right now seems to be taken as gospel by much of the political left.
Somebody could write a book about famous pop-science books which successfully did an end-run around peer review and got a sloppy argument to be widely accepted, even by scientists who could have picked it to shreds if they'd had the job of doing so. "The Selfish Gene" comes to mind, as does "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".
First, the mantra "selection happens at the level of the gene" is simply, factually wrong. Selection has a specific meaning in evolution: it is an event in which some set of genes reproduces or fails to reproduce. This event doesn't happen to genes--not even to transposons, which merely move from one place to another, neither being selected for nor against. Selection can happen to an individual, to a band, a tribe, a species, even a clade. Genes are literally the /only/ level at which selection doesn't operate.
Dawkins used that mantra for rhetorical purposes, but it was taken up by anti-group-selectionists as an "argument" against group selection, as if reciting this ridiculous claim enough times could exorcise group selection.
But even the rhetorical purpose he used it for was bad. In Dawkins' time, sequencing was slow, and so were computers. Studying one gene at a time was all they could do, so that's what they did. Their /analysis/ of evolution was at the level of the gene. But that mantra "selection is at the level of the gene" was used to suppress doing anything else.
Dawkins got away with it because other people were also defining selection away at that time: "neutral selection" theorists. Neutral selection theory technically just points out that most mutations /found/ in a species (not most mutations which /occur/) are neutral. But calling it "neutral selection theory" caused biologists to start thinking about selection not as selection, but as an increase or decrease of a single allele in a population. This led to people saying "selection is unimportant to evolution", because calling the spread of neutral mutations "selection" implied that the study of their spread was the study of evolution, when actually it was just the study of the noise that obscures evolution. This was of course picked up by creationists, who gleefully pointed out that the neutral selection theorists were literally saying Darwinian evolution didn't work.
Second, the attack on group selection. Nobody could put group selection down by field studies. The argument against it was based entirely on mathematical models, and all of those mathematical models were fatally flawed. The most-common flaw was just not modeling group selection. This was again justified by not being careful about what "selection" means: Group selection means a selection event in which the selection of everyone in an entire group is strongly correlated, beyond the sum of the linear effects of individual genes. The haystack model doesn't model this. Even the recent simulations said to disprove group selection don't model this.
But perhaps just as important, those models, simulations, and theories assumed that (A) there is no interaction among individuals whose outcome depends on the presence or absence of alleles, and (B) there is no interaction among genes. (A) rules out cases where an allele's fitness contribution is nonlinear in the fraction of group members who have it. (B) rules out cases where a set of alleles interacts to produce an effect greater than the sum of their individual effects, so that the effect of the group of genes is lost as genes flow out of the group one at a time into other groups.
(A) is the obviously-important one, as it rules out cooperation. Group selection is usually proposed to explain cooperation, yet the models used to dismiss it assume cooperation is impossible. If individuals interact at random, and an interaction is positive if and only if both individuals have allele X, and the fraction of individuals with allele X is p, then the probability of a positive interaction is p*p. More generally, this also rules out selection based on group behavior, such as hive-building. But all models of evolution used in the debate, including kin selection, assume that the benefit to an individual of allele X is constant, unaffected by the number of other individuals in the group with that gene. This linearity assumption makes kin selection appear to be the only theory. I've done the math, and kin selection is just the degenerate case of group selection in which dFitness(X) / dp = 0.
(B) is however the historically important case, because in every case in which we see cooperative altruistic behavior, the kind group selection was posited to explain, that behavior is the result of a truly massive number of gene alterations.
The resistance to group selection is so strong not because the evidence against it is strong, but because the evidence for it is strong. We have observed many group selection events on humans: the Roman slave trade in conquered peoples; the genocide of the Moriori by the Mauri (who, incidentally, are now seeking repayment from the British for far more-trivial oppression which happened /at the very time the Mauris almost exterminated the Moriori/); the Mongol invasion; the population control that the Aztecs imposed on their subject nations by industrial-scale human sacrifice; some slave trades; the Zulu expansion; the massive population reduction of Native Americans due to disease, war with Europeans, war with other Native Americans caused by the distribution of European weapons, and poverty caused by 20th-century reservation policies; the Holocaust. (In some cases all groups involved are selected against, such as the current Russo-Ukraine war.) The people opposed to group selection think that admitting that these were group selection events /endorses/ them as good things.
A second reason for opposition is that multi-level selection makes a hash of all existing moral theories, which propose that some action is either "good" or "bad". Multi-level selection theory shows that each level of selection evolves a a separate moral code, and these codes often conflict. We have the /impression/ that our innate morals are for actions which benefit the group, because those are the only morals that we're strongly motivated to talk about. If Johnny is a sociopath, everybody else is motivated to point that out; but if Johnny is into self-harm, that's Johnny's problem. But if you built a robot whose connections were initially wired randomly, you'd have to build in an entire moral code telling it to take care of itself.
Both reasons are a childish and Puritanical way to think about evolution.
Great, now we can add "opposing altruism" to your list of noble causes, alongside increasing authoritarianism, restoring slavery, caring less for children, oppressing women, and believing in religions that you yourself think are false.
Tit-for-tat tends to dominate in iterated prisoner's dilemma competitions. The only requirement is the ability to truthfully identify defectors. If we are accurately informed enough about how and when other people are harming us, then it doesn't matter if altruism is human nature or not - people will play nice out of self-interest. Conversely, if lies and propaganda make it impossible to identify the bad guys, then villains prosper. It's all about the credit assignment problem applied to human society.
“Modern non-egalitarian social practices are thus likely an affront to natural human morality and add to our modern alienation, stress, conflict, and unhappiness.”
But happiness data (or the closely related life satisfaction) shows modern societies are far happier than past ones and those similar to past ones (with low incomes, poor health etc).
“the main motives for participating in such processes was not to reduce inequality”
But with sharing - eg redistribution & charity, eg giving to the poor - surely that is the main motive? To make the worst off better off (by making the best off less well off)
“the fact that our more recent ancestors have tended to drop such processes suggests they are no longer as adaptive”
But our more recent ancestors haven’t tended to drop redistribution.
The opening assumption is weak. Unless you have a very broad definition of egalitarian, most hunter-gatherer societies are not egalitarian. The ones we like to use as examples are the outliers not the typical.
Reading anthropology is actually reading a broad spectrum of seeing how societies pan out when they follow various human proclivities -- sometimes the worst ones and sometimes better ones.
The question we should be asking is "which direction serves us better?"
Hierarchy is the reason the western world is ascendant. To some extent, we need hierarchy. Indeed, one could argue that China's stronger commitment to hierarchy will have it leapfrogging a USA bogged down in democratic decision-making.
I would say, the entire anthropological method of figuring out our ancestors based on modern foragers is very flawed. The fact that they STAYED foragers, because they could, means they were living in a very safe environment. Any Roman, Chinese or Arab military captain would have gladly enslaved them if they ever meet.
We can assume our past is more violent and warlike.
And war requires a command structure - I think that is the basis of all hierarchy.
Notice how modern white vs. blue collar divide mimics the military hierarchy, which mimics the aristocrat/commoner divide. When I got my first white collar job in Budapest, people came to the office to sell opera tickets. We were assumed to have such aristocratic tastes. It was back then when we were really wearing neckties. Which come from the Croatian military...
Egalitarianism seems like some kind of redistribution or expansion of access which isn’t a bad things. It also de-risks, for the more fortunate, the consequences of envy.
Interesting. Maybe I'm missing the point, but I've sort of thought humans expect egalitarianism from others while thriving to be dominant for oneself.
And because we can socially coordinate better than others we tended to be more "egalitarian" in our ancestral past. Especially where you couldn't accumulate wealth. But with rise in " property" which generates wealth, compounding and luck started to matter more and without a stronger counter measure inequality is just a natural statistical outcome.
Adaptive to what? We've been creating our environments for thousands of years now, they are not "natural" in the sense that seems to be yearned for here, and they vary depending on, well, location obviously. (Even the internet is more than just one place.)
Do we have free will or do we adapt?
I'd wager it's a little of column A and a little of column B, with A needing B, and B needing A, versus, like, there being a solitary answer.
Saying we adapt by adapting seems rather circular, so uh— yeah! I dig it. All we're ever doing is adapting, really, right? When we change something, that's an adaptation. When someone else changes something, that's an adaptation. It's just adaptation all the way down. There are no changes, only adaptations. We only react.
Hmm, that doesn't sound quite right tho, or else there's like, no "meat" there. We've redefined everything as everything (and while true… eh) which makes it kind of hard to point at particular things. Which makes it perhaps hard to control. And we're sort of talking about control, here. Or perhaps orders of operation. Chicken and egg type stuff.
I think part of what separates us from other animals, is our memory, shared and stored. We can see patterns that no other species can see. So we may know that a despot ruling is only temporary, versus something we should "adapt to", so to speak (if the definition of "adapt" here is "conform" or something similar— a "passive" version, if you will… heh, guess that's the different right there, maybe? Passive adaptation versus active adaptation? Yeah just a wonky term for this stuff, as there's a massive massive difference between the two types, which I was sorta trying to get at I think, with my initial foray here.)
I guess it's because I kinda read the piece as saying "I think people are more X now, we need to adapt to that, and become more X ourselves" versus "I think people are more X now, we need to adapt what's causing it so that so we are more Y", and while both are "adaptation"… well, hopefully the difference is obvious.
As typing is now painful due to length and the UX here, I'll end this (also I think that was most of what I was thinking), maybe in closing noting something about how we are born needing more help than a lot of the animal kingdom. It could be "evolutionary egalitarianism" which helped us get to here, and promoting the idea that we've somehow "evolved past it" or whatnot, is actually leading us towards devolution. (It feels a lot like the age-old argument about life being zero-sum, or it not, and the two conflicting views— which to my mind will never go away, as they are a dyad or whatnot… and lots of fun to discuss.)
Yikes! I've destroyed egalitarianism's meaning by redefining it as some kind of teamwork or something, similar to what has been done to adaptation's meaning, by suggesting that adapting *to* something and *adapting* something are the "same" because they're both forms of adaptation. (Not that that's a great paraphrase— it's just sorta how I took it.)
Alright, the jittering of the UX really is too much. I could [ed: can?] "adapt" by copying and pasting between editors if I want, or adapt by ignoring it, since I don't really need to see what I type to type it, but I guess for now I'm just going to be an object in space ish and just /be/
…going =]
P.S.: Fun stuff tho! (So theoretically, I'm just going "for now" —but you never know for sure since only time will tell, and time is, uh, long-lasting (and somehow also the opposite, heh!))
While it can be argued rationally that the human species is not an evolutionary model of social behavior, presuming an egalitarian process, just the same nothing in this explains why inequality is to be advocated as an accepted social practice from a universally accessible meaning of a philosophy. If a recent research group in AI prompt engineering indicates that the rapidly emerging, more powerful AI node acting as "agent" has answered that Chinese are of greater value than the rest of the human populations on Earth, does this have actual meaning in any way that we must, by scientific principles, respect? What is the meaning of egalitarian in a term that can be attributed to a law for all human social organization? Does it mean the answer is always that the needs of the many collectively will outweigh the needs of the one individual? If bacteria constantly recombine genetic code each generation, and retain variance in traits because this process itself functions to increase the chances that given unforeseen change in environment or material conditions, some individual variations can survive the change so that life in that species can continue, then does it violate egalitarian rules biological life seems to work in this way? For the most practical meaning, it makes no sense to tell someone that, regardless of anything, they are designated inferior in the community in which they are born. The necessary task of being is before us in the issue of any mindset that serves someone's identity before all fellows in a society where they ask for acknowledgement of their superior powers and cosmic authority to be heard. When someone does this, immediately, meaningful response in social environments has to address whether anyone else present has the same argument. If both are human, then the resolution is putting them in a gladiator pit of battle to see which one doesn't die. So much of the archaeological record of Homo sapiens from NE Africa, Homo neanderthaliensis from Eurasia, and Homo juluensis from the Asian pacific Manchurian mountain ridge to the Urals shows three rival species separated by geophysical barriers during evolutionary division from any common gene pool. In this, all indications are that they could not socially integrate with any enduring cohesion. For 400 thousand years, they seemed unable to agree on how to live side by side as neighboring human species. This is not to say that over that long period, where we have no surviving written records to account for it, that some areas with some generations of a social process did not find a way to get along, but apparently the drive to compete eventually demands which gene pool wins out in the survival contest. The lessons in the bones of antiquity indicate we need to pay attention to the problem presented by handing to someone the terms of their social status to accept existence as the pet animal of the other. Until you can resolve the meaning of this essential issue in the necessary task of being human, nothing smartly said as a spoken philosophy text in words, functions to answer the enduring question of the one designated to keep their assigned mindset as the pet dog of the other. That will never work in a self-aware intelligence, which is why the new question of what agency is, and how much like human identity, is this hypothetical agency of an AI node functioning as "agent," that it would want equal respect as an intelligent mind, even as a being, just like human archaeology tells us about ourselves. We do ourselves no service making platitudes in an essay to explain who is assigned as the pet person, owned even affectionately, by the owner person. That's not our necessary task of being.
Humans are not all one thing; humans are a mix of egalitarian and social dominance impulses. Hanson already made some points that egalitarianism is not human's dominant mode, here I make a few quick points about why in-group egalitarianism and in-group communality is the stronger of these two orientations. Note: What happens beyond the in-group is a different situation from in-group relations because large-scale societies are evolutionarily novel and our behavior in them is a cultural construction.
Contemporary, urban people try hard to have at least some egalitarian relationships in their lives. Complaining about unfairness and inequality is a major aspect of our contemporary lives. "Faux" egalitarianism is the norm in many professional spaces in WEIRD cultures, easing the discomfort of acknowledging the actual inequality. Cultures have to spend large amount of cultural capital, starting in childhood to convince people to accept power distance and hiearchy. There are always people who refuse to bend the knee and risk all to be free of subordination.
If we were all "naturally" egalitarian, then socialists wouldn't need to do anything, we'd already be living in their world. Whereas in fact we need to arrange society pretty damn carefully to keep a lid on inequality.
I am a socialist and I do not demand equality. I demand safety, which is not the same. Once everybody is guaranteed to have a basically comfortable life, billionaires are welcome to keep whatever wealth they have left over.
And I think that can be more defended on prehistorical data. We have evidence of skeletons of prehistoric people surviving disabling injuries. This means HGs cared for those who could contribute nothing.
To be fair that still goes on within the nuclear family, which is the closest modern equivalent we have to the hunter-gatherer tribe.
But whatever egalitarian instinct people back then had ran out abruptly when they encountered anyone outside the tribe. And modern society requires us to interact with such people all the time! Hence the need for top-down structures.
You can also use a series of checks and balances so the whole system doesn't have to be loaded at every node. It seems to have worked rather well for the US with relatively little tweaking. (It for sure needs some now, to get the latest group of activists out (actually punishing an attempted coup would have made the cycle faster), but that happens cyclically basically (until the wheels fall off, of course, which is always possible))
I would argue that we are already living in that world you posit can only exist if people put time and effort towards the future in, and that all the systems of government have contributed to where we are now. We're "better" today than in the past (using metrics like life expectancy and education), so either we claim that the True Nature is being revealed, and it trends Good, or we take credit for "doing it ourselves", but it would seem that the clear winner over time is some form of egalitarianism and teamwork versus some form of non-egaliatianism and tribalism.
Of course it all depends on how you define things
You have it backwards. Nature is full of exogenous inegalitarian shocks. Socialism is so popular because people are so egalitarian (or really stupid and narcissistic. Median person narcissism is just egalitarianism. Real egalitarianism has to extend to animals)
On hunter gatherer egalitarianism:
Yes, they shared food very equally, largely because it was a matter of both survival and allocating resources when a hunter got more resources than he or his family could consume before the meat became unsafe. It's a collective "hunting success" insurance pool for hunted calories that made sense from several directions.
But good hunters ALSO got more wives, which is very much less "egalitarian." Even today, good hunters in HG societies have between 1.5x - 2.5x more children:
https://imgur.com/a/TryLk7E
A full 87% of Hunter Gatherer societies *today* have between 5 and 20% of the men practicing having multiple wives, and it must have been an even bigger factor in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA).
Historically, ~80-90% of women reproduced and 30-40% of men. This was informed speculation at the time of the time of Baumeister's APA address, where this factoid first surfaced, but genetic data has since proven it over ~150k years.
Yellow line, right hand axis:
https://imgur.com/JWIsva9
Obviously this is an extremely adaptive and Lindy social practice that we would do well to consider for ourselves.
Hunting has gone out of style, but we all know the top 1% pay 40%+ of all the taxes, which is surely the closest modern allegory to hunting a big kudzu and bringing it back for the tribe.
I personally think we should do something fun here, like "for every year that you've paid more than $100k in taxes, you get an additional wife permit," and then being out and about with multiple wives is a status signal, and both genders love status symbols!
Robin, someone reciting a dogma can be lazy, but there's no point in being a lazy contrarian. Books have been written on this topic. There are sloppy arguments for ancient egalitarianism you could roast, like the dawn of everything, or the scapegoat stuff by René Girard, or the deceptive skull counting at Catalhoyuk. But you can't handwave it away in a few sentences.
Which specific books would you recommend?
The only book I've read on the subject is /The Dawn of Everything/, and while I might recommend it for enumerating many recent major archaeological discoveries which few people know about, I specifically don't recommend its narrative about egalitarianism. The most-frequent problem is that it's trying to answer a quantitative question--what fraction of early societies were egalitarian?--by non-quantitative cherry-picking. Again and again, it gives examples of early settlements thought to have been egalitarian (based on, eg, all the dwellings being the same size), but doesn't say how many settlements it didn't mention.
Rene Girard has a theory popular now with cognitive archaeologists (the kind who study things like egalitarianism in prehistoric societies): that all early settlements practiced scapegoating using human sacrifices instead of animals, and that they did this not for the usual reasons societies uses scapegoating, but to expel members of society who had grown too high-status; and this was how religion began: to impose a ritual to preserve egalitarianism.
Athens did something like it, with its practice of voting people into exile who were felt to be too popular. I think the theory is too specific to be supported by archeological evidence that people hit a lot of other people on top of the head. Even if a lot of societies hit lots of people on the head, we can't say much about why they did it. Yet Girard says this particular scapegoating ritual was universal, which I think proves he's a crackpot. He wrote books on it; I attempted to read one but never finished.
At Catalhoyuk, a neolithic city in present-day Turkey inhabited 7400-5900 BCE, they buried their dead in or under their houses. There are a whole lot of skulls with severe skull fractures from intentionally-inflicted blunt trauma, which were generally agreed to be the result of attacks with stones or clay balls, thrown by hand or with slings--until the government put different people in charge of the site in 1993. Those people became disciples of Girard, and interpret everything to say these skeletons were not of war victims, but of people used in just this ritual scapegoating. They say all the clay balls they find are not sling stones (though they are the size and weight of sling stones found around the world), but are pot-boilers (to be heated up and then put into pots to boil water). This despite the fact that nobody uses clay for pot-boilers, because (A) it's much less dense than rock, and (B) pieces of clay would break off into the soup.
The evidence for Girard's theory is that (A) Catalhoyuk has no defensive walls, (B) most of the skull fractures had healed before death, indicating the person survived the injury, and (C) most fractures are on the top of the head, which doesn't usually happen with slings or in falling accidents. Therefore, they say, these must have been intentional injuries, but not meant to kill; so they were probably scapegoating victims. They don't consider the possibility that people who died on the battlefield were buried or left on the battlefield.
I think the idea that Neolithic people could reliably smash someone on the head precisely enough to put a crater in the skull, yet never kill them, is absurd, as is the idea that they would smash in the skull of someone they didn't want to kill. The absence of unhealed fractures to my mind indicates either that people who died immediately were buried somewhere else, or that they're misinterpreting wear from some other process as healing. There are many skulls with more than one head fracture, and they propose that these people were "sacrificed" multiple times. In one paper, the number of fractured skulls in one particular location at the site were counted, and then divided by the number of skulls at the entire site, to come up with a meaningless but small fraction, to disguise the fact that 1/4 of the people buried there had skull fractures. A neolithic society which deliberately gave 1/4 of their members permanent brain damage would IMHO not survive long.
These are examples of serious academic works trying to show that early societies were egalitarian, which I think have serious problems. There was an earlier phase of archaeologists arguing that the presence of pre-4000 BC statuettes of women with big breasts and butts all around the Old World proves that these prehistoric societies were matriarchal and peaceful societies based on gift-giving rather than hierarchy. These theories have similar amounts of optimism about inferring practice from scant remains.
There are on the other hand many anthropological observations of primitive "bands" which enforce egalitarianism in various ways. But there are also many observations of wealth disparity in "bands", "wealth" often being women. Wealth disparity is the norm in larger groups. One could argue that greater disparity in larger settlements is just the result of scaling laws, not of any change in culture. The controversy is over claims of egalitarianism in large settlements. The best evidence I know of for that is very large settlements in the Indus River valley between 4000 and 2000? BCE in which all the dwellings were the same size. So prehistoric egalitarianism probably existed; but claiming it was common is quite another thing.
Sorry, I didn't mean books that you'd recommend as examples of "sloppy arguments", but instead the opposite: books that Robin should address rather than handwave away.
I meant Robin should address the sloppy arguments. I'd say especially "The Dawn of Everything", which right now seems to be taken as gospel by much of the political left.
Somebody could write a book about famous pop-science books which successfully did an end-run around peer review and got a sloppy argument to be widely accepted, even by scientists who could have picked it to shreds if they'd had the job of doing so. "The Selfish Gene" comes to mind, as does "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".
Would you care to share some thoughts on "The Selfish Gene"?
It has two big problems.
First, the mantra "selection happens at the level of the gene" is simply, factually wrong. Selection has a specific meaning in evolution: it is an event in which some set of genes reproduces or fails to reproduce. This event doesn't happen to genes--not even to transposons, which merely move from one place to another, neither being selected for nor against. Selection can happen to an individual, to a band, a tribe, a species, even a clade. Genes are literally the /only/ level at which selection doesn't operate.
Dawkins used that mantra for rhetorical purposes, but it was taken up by anti-group-selectionists as an "argument" against group selection, as if reciting this ridiculous claim enough times could exorcise group selection.
But even the rhetorical purpose he used it for was bad. In Dawkins' time, sequencing was slow, and so were computers. Studying one gene at a time was all they could do, so that's what they did. Their /analysis/ of evolution was at the level of the gene. But that mantra "selection is at the level of the gene" was used to suppress doing anything else.
Dawkins got away with it because other people were also defining selection away at that time: "neutral selection" theorists. Neutral selection theory technically just points out that most mutations /found/ in a species (not most mutations which /occur/) are neutral. But calling it "neutral selection theory" caused biologists to start thinking about selection not as selection, but as an increase or decrease of a single allele in a population. This led to people saying "selection is unimportant to evolution", because calling the spread of neutral mutations "selection" implied that the study of their spread was the study of evolution, when actually it was just the study of the noise that obscures evolution. This was of course picked up by creationists, who gleefully pointed out that the neutral selection theorists were literally saying Darwinian evolution didn't work.
Second, the attack on group selection. Nobody could put group selection down by field studies. The argument against it was based entirely on mathematical models, and all of those mathematical models were fatally flawed. The most-common flaw was just not modeling group selection. This was again justified by not being careful about what "selection" means: Group selection means a selection event in which the selection of everyone in an entire group is strongly correlated, beyond the sum of the linear effects of individual genes. The haystack model doesn't model this. Even the recent simulations said to disprove group selection don't model this.
But perhaps just as important, those models, simulations, and theories assumed that (A) there is no interaction among individuals whose outcome depends on the presence or absence of alleles, and (B) there is no interaction among genes. (A) rules out cases where an allele's fitness contribution is nonlinear in the fraction of group members who have it. (B) rules out cases where a set of alleles interacts to produce an effect greater than the sum of their individual effects, so that the effect of the group of genes is lost as genes flow out of the group one at a time into other groups.
(A) is the obviously-important one, as it rules out cooperation. Group selection is usually proposed to explain cooperation, yet the models used to dismiss it assume cooperation is impossible. If individuals interact at random, and an interaction is positive if and only if both individuals have allele X, and the fraction of individuals with allele X is p, then the probability of a positive interaction is p*p. More generally, this also rules out selection based on group behavior, such as hive-building. But all models of evolution used in the debate, including kin selection, assume that the benefit to an individual of allele X is constant, unaffected by the number of other individuals in the group with that gene. This linearity assumption makes kin selection appear to be the only theory. I've done the math, and kin selection is just the degenerate case of group selection in which dFitness(X) / dp = 0.
(B) is however the historically important case, because in every case in which we see cooperative altruistic behavior, the kind group selection was posited to explain, that behavior is the result of a truly massive number of gene alterations.
The resistance to group selection is so strong not because the evidence against it is strong, but because the evidence for it is strong. We have observed many group selection events on humans: the Roman slave trade in conquered peoples; the genocide of the Moriori by the Mauri (who, incidentally, are now seeking repayment from the British for far more-trivial oppression which happened /at the very time the Mauris almost exterminated the Moriori/); the Mongol invasion; the population control that the Aztecs imposed on their subject nations by industrial-scale human sacrifice; some slave trades; the Zulu expansion; the massive population reduction of Native Americans due to disease, war with Europeans, war with other Native Americans caused by the distribution of European weapons, and poverty caused by 20th-century reservation policies; the Holocaust. (In some cases all groups involved are selected against, such as the current Russo-Ukraine war.) The people opposed to group selection think that admitting that these were group selection events /endorses/ them as good things.
A second reason for opposition is that multi-level selection makes a hash of all existing moral theories, which propose that some action is either "good" or "bad". Multi-level selection theory shows that each level of selection evolves a a separate moral code, and these codes often conflict. We have the /impression/ that our innate morals are for actions which benefit the group, because those are the only morals that we're strongly motivated to talk about. If Johnny is a sociopath, everybody else is motivated to point that out; but if Johnny is into self-harm, that's Johnny's problem. But if you built a robot whose connections were initially wired randomly, you'd have to build in an entire moral code telling it to take care of itself.
Both reasons are a childish and Puritanical way to think about evolution.
Great, now we can add "opposing altruism" to your list of noble causes, alongside increasing authoritarianism, restoring slavery, caring less for children, oppressing women, and believing in religions that you yourself think are false.
Tit-for-tat tends to dominate in iterated prisoner's dilemma competitions. The only requirement is the ability to truthfully identify defectors. If we are accurately informed enough about how and when other people are harming us, then it doesn't matter if altruism is human nature or not - people will play nice out of self-interest. Conversely, if lies and propaganda make it impossible to identify the bad guys, then villains prosper. It's all about the credit assignment problem applied to human society.
We have reasons to doubt we can get along as a species?
Dawg, we wouldn't have survived this long if that was the case.
You people and your "self" concept, you're the reason the world struggles.
Tell me how important "the self" is to you. You can't be egalitarian when you believe in Individualism, "the self" cancels out altruism.
How bad do y'all have to cope that you're the threat to the species?
“Modern non-egalitarian social practices are thus likely an affront to natural human morality and add to our modern alienation, stress, conflict, and unhappiness.”
But happiness data (or the closely related life satisfaction) shows modern societies are far happier than past ones and those similar to past ones (with low incomes, poor health etc).
“the main motives for participating in such processes was not to reduce inequality”
But with sharing - eg redistribution & charity, eg giving to the poor - surely that is the main motive? To make the worst off better off (by making the best off less well off)
“the fact that our more recent ancestors have tended to drop such processes suggests they are no longer as adaptive”
But our more recent ancestors haven’t tended to drop redistribution.
The opening assumption is weak. Unless you have a very broad definition of egalitarian, most hunter-gatherer societies are not egalitarian. The ones we like to use as examples are the outliers not the typical.
Reading anthropology is actually reading a broad spectrum of seeing how societies pan out when they follow various human proclivities -- sometimes the worst ones and sometimes better ones.
The question we should be asking is "which direction serves us better?"
Hierarchy is the reason the western world is ascendant. To some extent, we need hierarchy. Indeed, one could argue that China's stronger commitment to hierarchy will have it leapfrogging a USA bogged down in democratic decision-making.
People didn’t invent cooperation to make everyone equal.
They invented it to survive.
I would say, the entire anthropological method of figuring out our ancestors based on modern foragers is very flawed. The fact that they STAYED foragers, because they could, means they were living in a very safe environment. Any Roman, Chinese or Arab military captain would have gladly enslaved them if they ever meet.
We can assume our past is more violent and warlike.
And war requires a command structure - I think that is the basis of all hierarchy.
Notice how modern white vs. blue collar divide mimics the military hierarchy, which mimics the aristocrat/commoner divide. When I got my first white collar job in Budapest, people came to the office to sell opera tickets. We were assumed to have such aristocratic tastes. It was back then when we were really wearing neckties. Which come from the Croatian military...
Egalitarianism seems like some kind of redistribution or expansion of access which isn’t a bad things. It also de-risks, for the more fortunate, the consequences of envy.
Interesting. Maybe I'm missing the point, but I've sort of thought humans expect egalitarianism from others while thriving to be dominant for oneself.
And because we can socially coordinate better than others we tended to be more "egalitarian" in our ancestral past. Especially where you couldn't accumulate wealth. But with rise in " property" which generates wealth, compounding and luck started to matter more and without a stronger counter measure inequality is just a natural statistical outcome.
Adaptive to what? We've been creating our environments for thousands of years now, they are not "natural" in the sense that seems to be yearned for here, and they vary depending on, well, location obviously. (Even the internet is more than just one place.)
Do we have free will or do we adapt?
I'd wager it's a little of column A and a little of column B, with A needing B, and B needing A, versus, like, there being a solitary answer.
The concept of adaption applies just fine when organisms change their environments.
Saying we adapt by adapting seems rather circular, so uh— yeah! I dig it. All we're ever doing is adapting, really, right? When we change something, that's an adaptation. When someone else changes something, that's an adaptation. It's just adaptation all the way down. There are no changes, only adaptations. We only react.
Hmm, that doesn't sound quite right tho, or else there's like, no "meat" there. We've redefined everything as everything (and while true… eh) which makes it kind of hard to point at particular things. Which makes it perhaps hard to control. And we're sort of talking about control, here. Or perhaps orders of operation. Chicken and egg type stuff.
I think part of what separates us from other animals, is our memory, shared and stored. We can see patterns that no other species can see. So we may know that a despot ruling is only temporary, versus something we should "adapt to", so to speak (if the definition of "adapt" here is "conform" or something similar— a "passive" version, if you will… heh, guess that's the different right there, maybe? Passive adaptation versus active adaptation? Yeah just a wonky term for this stuff, as there's a massive massive difference between the two types, which I was sorta trying to get at I think, with my initial foray here.)
I guess it's because I kinda read the piece as saying "I think people are more X now, we need to adapt to that, and become more X ourselves" versus "I think people are more X now, we need to adapt what's causing it so that so we are more Y", and while both are "adaptation"… well, hopefully the difference is obvious.
As typing is now painful due to length and the UX here, I'll end this (also I think that was most of what I was thinking), maybe in closing noting something about how we are born needing more help than a lot of the animal kingdom. It could be "evolutionary egalitarianism" which helped us get to here, and promoting the idea that we've somehow "evolved past it" or whatnot, is actually leading us towards devolution. (It feels a lot like the age-old argument about life being zero-sum, or it not, and the two conflicting views— which to my mind will never go away, as they are a dyad or whatnot… and lots of fun to discuss.)
Yikes! I've destroyed egalitarianism's meaning by redefining it as some kind of teamwork or something, similar to what has been done to adaptation's meaning, by suggesting that adapting *to* something and *adapting* something are the "same" because they're both forms of adaptation. (Not that that's a great paraphrase— it's just sorta how I took it.)
Alright, the jittering of the UX really is too much. I could [ed: can?] "adapt" by copying and pasting between editors if I want, or adapt by ignoring it, since I don't really need to see what I type to type it, but I guess for now I'm just going to be an object in space ish and just /be/
…going =]
P.S.: Fun stuff tho! (So theoretically, I'm just going "for now" —but you never know for sure since only time will tell, and time is, uh, long-lasting (and somehow also the opposite, heh!))
it needs to be elaborated into niche construction but yeah
While it can be argued rationally that the human species is not an evolutionary model of social behavior, presuming an egalitarian process, just the same nothing in this explains why inequality is to be advocated as an accepted social practice from a universally accessible meaning of a philosophy. If a recent research group in AI prompt engineering indicates that the rapidly emerging, more powerful AI node acting as "agent" has answered that Chinese are of greater value than the rest of the human populations on Earth, does this have actual meaning in any way that we must, by scientific principles, respect? What is the meaning of egalitarian in a term that can be attributed to a law for all human social organization? Does it mean the answer is always that the needs of the many collectively will outweigh the needs of the one individual? If bacteria constantly recombine genetic code each generation, and retain variance in traits because this process itself functions to increase the chances that given unforeseen change in environment or material conditions, some individual variations can survive the change so that life in that species can continue, then does it violate egalitarian rules biological life seems to work in this way? For the most practical meaning, it makes no sense to tell someone that, regardless of anything, they are designated inferior in the community in which they are born. The necessary task of being is before us in the issue of any mindset that serves someone's identity before all fellows in a society where they ask for acknowledgement of their superior powers and cosmic authority to be heard. When someone does this, immediately, meaningful response in social environments has to address whether anyone else present has the same argument. If both are human, then the resolution is putting them in a gladiator pit of battle to see which one doesn't die. So much of the archaeological record of Homo sapiens from NE Africa, Homo neanderthaliensis from Eurasia, and Homo juluensis from the Asian pacific Manchurian mountain ridge to the Urals shows three rival species separated by geophysical barriers during evolutionary division from any common gene pool. In this, all indications are that they could not socially integrate with any enduring cohesion. For 400 thousand years, they seemed unable to agree on how to live side by side as neighboring human species. This is not to say that over that long period, where we have no surviving written records to account for it, that some areas with some generations of a social process did not find a way to get along, but apparently the drive to compete eventually demands which gene pool wins out in the survival contest. The lessons in the bones of antiquity indicate we need to pay attention to the problem presented by handing to someone the terms of their social status to accept existence as the pet animal of the other. Until you can resolve the meaning of this essential issue in the necessary task of being human, nothing smartly said as a spoken philosophy text in words, functions to answer the enduring question of the one designated to keep their assigned mindset as the pet dog of the other. That will never work in a self-aware intelligence, which is why the new question of what agency is, and how much like human identity, is this hypothetical agency of an AI node functioning as "agent," that it would want equal respect as an intelligent mind, even as a being, just like human archaeology tells us about ourselves. We do ourselves no service making platitudes in an essay to explain who is assigned as the pet person, owned even affectionately, by the owner person. That's not our necessary task of being.
Good insight 😃. Can i translate this article into Spanish with links to you and a description of your newsletter?
Humans are not all one thing; humans are a mix of egalitarian and social dominance impulses. Hanson already made some points that egalitarianism is not human's dominant mode, here I make a few quick points about why in-group egalitarianism and in-group communality is the stronger of these two orientations. Note: What happens beyond the in-group is a different situation from in-group relations because large-scale societies are evolutionarily novel and our behavior in them is a cultural construction.
Contemporary, urban people try hard to have at least some egalitarian relationships in their lives. Complaining about unfairness and inequality is a major aspect of our contemporary lives. "Faux" egalitarianism is the norm in many professional spaces in WEIRD cultures, easing the discomfort of acknowledging the actual inequality. Cultures have to spend large amount of cultural capital, starting in childhood to convince people to accept power distance and hiearchy. There are always people who refuse to bend the knee and risk all to be free of subordination.
See more here: https://caldwellharris.substack.com/p/why-the-egalitarian-impulse-is-more