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The Dance of Innovation
Infrastructure, Social Oscillation, and the Evolution of Societies
Kevin McCaffree
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eBook - ePub
The Dance of Innovation
Infrastructure, Social Oscillation, and the Evolution of Societies
Kevin McCaffree
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About This Book
Few of us, amidst our daily chores and responsibilities, consider how mundane infrastructuresâfrom electrical grids to sewage systemsâhave developed over millennia in ways that enable everything we cherish, from democracy to technological innovation to individual liberty. But what drives the evolution of this infrastructure? And why is infrastructure so critical to human flourishing? In this book, the most innovative and interdisciplinary study of cultural evolution ever produced, new concepts are explored, new histories are brought into contact and new ground-breaking insights are defended. What makes creativity unique in human societies is not only our capacity to generate and modify our diverse individual intuitions about the social and physical world, but also our capacity to form and leave groups fluidly in a dancing rhythm of oscillation across the expanse of history. This book walks the reader carefully through these processes, with clear concepts and an approachable writing style.
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Chapter 1
Humansâ Genetic Unity and Ape Ancestry
DOI: 10.4324/9781003266020-1
At the level of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) base pairs (the molecules that, together, form the DNA double-helix), human beings are about 99.9% identical.1 Granted, even if human beings are 99.9% identical from a genomic standpoint, a rough estimate suggests that in a genome of 3 billion base pairs, this would still leave 3 million that might vary between people. Still, this variance is minimal compared to the sharedness of our genes. This is one reason why, in order to make money, genetic-testing companies such as 23andMe (a reference to the 23 paired chromosomes in the typical human being) strive to present human beings as distinct from one another.
But our distinctness from each other should not be overstated. We cannot ignore the fact that the average genetic difference between people amounts to 0.1%; humans are perhaps more genetically similar to one another than is any other ape species (Barbujani et al., 2013; see also Maryanski 2018).
And this brings me to my second point, which is that human beings are, in fact, great apes. The origin of the primate line dates to around 50 million years ago, and the first primates, which are today called âOld Worldâ monkeys, lived in trees within tropical forests. So-called âNew Worldâ monkeys became reproductively isolated from Old World monkeys after the tectonic plates comprising South America broke off from the plates which now sit beneath Africa. Old World monkeys, who stayed behind in Africa would, over branching evolutionary time, give rise to various species of apes by around 25 million years ago.
These ape species include gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. The ape evolutionary line that would eventually become human beings broke off from the chimpanzee line around 6â8 million years ago. This means that chimpanzees and human beings share a common ancestor that lived around 6â8 million years ago. This is about the time when bipedalism seems to have emerged.
Across the ensuing years, various species of hominins would emerge and disappear, with humans outlasting the rest. For example, the species Homo habilis emerged around 2.5 million years ago but went extinct after about a million years on the planet. Homo rudolfensis was alive a little more than 2 million years ago but went extinct rather quickly. The species Homo erectus also emerged around 2 million years ago, though it too was extinct by around 100,000 years ago. Homo heidelbergensis emerged around 1 million years ago but went extinct around 200,000 years ago. The Homo sapiens lineâusâis typically regarded as emerging sometime around 200,000â300,000 years ago, and, thus far, weâve not yet gone extinct (see Schlebusch et al., 2017 for methods of dating modern human genetic divergence).
All of these species of homo were very highly genetically related, so much so that many human beings alive today contain identifiable Homo neanderthalensis (âNeanderthalâ) genes within them. The entire homo line is so closely related that it makes sense to call all these species âhumans,â though they were not identical to us in terms of brain or body structure. Yet, what is clear is that the homo line of animals that was evolving during this period was struggling to survive, and that all these species, save us, went extinct. This is a mystery worth figuring out, because it takes us to the heart of what makes modern humans human.
1.1 What Facilitates Humanityâs Apparent Uniqueness?
When thinking about interspecies comparisons, we must consider behavioral similarities also, not just genetic similarities. After all, human beings are genetically very similar to chimpanzees, but they are not always behaviorally similar!
Chimpanzees live in dominance hierarchies that contain less variation in strictness/tightness than the hierarchies humans live in, which seem to be relatively less strict and more fluid. Or consider that chimpanzees in the wild appear to share food with known conspecifics, but not with unknown conspecifics (i.e., they share and cooperate with friends or family or acquaintances, not with strangers). Also, for chimpanzees, engagements with unknown conspecifics along community borders seem to more often result in violent clashes than they do in human societies (i.e., male immigrants are almost always treated skeptically and often violently in chimpanzee societies, but less often in human societies). It is true that human hierarchies and group boundaries can become quite strict and quite hierarchicalâbut, critically, if we are looking at the social conditions within which human beings evolved (small groups of foragers), it is undeniable that the hierarchies and boundaries humans formed were more porous, more open to trade, more tolerant, and more symbolically complex than those created by chimpanzees or any other primates (Boehm, 1999; Mitani et al., 2002).
While chimpanzees live in small communities of known others, humans live in what have been variously been called âmacroâ (Machalek, 1992) or âmegaâ (Turner and Machalek, 2018) or âultraâ (Turchin, 2016) societies/colonies composed of millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or more. In this way, human beings are more to ants, bees, or termites than they are to chimpanzees. As Richard Machalek has argued, groups, as such, are not rare in the animal kingdomâweâve all heard about prides of lions, gaggles of geese, parades of elephants, packs of dogs, or schools of fish. What is rare is the ability to associate, even cooperate, with strangers. Only humans and eusocial insects do this on a scale unmatched in the animal kingdom.
And why might this be? Why might human beings be more capable of scaling their population numbers compared to other apes (or, for that matter, other mammals)? Old World monkeys, New World monkeys, apes, and humans all live in hierarchies and all are adept at foraging for food. Yet, only humans live in societies of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and beyond. What makes humans different? Put another way, what is it about humans that enables them to live in massive colonies much more similar in size to insect colonies than to ape communities? Ants, bees, and termites, for example, have features of their societiesâcoordinated divisions of labor, active commodity economies, collective food-sharing and caring for young, distribution chains, and waste disposal systemsâwhose only equivalent is to be found in human societies (Crespi, 2014; Moffett, 2019).
What, then, facilitates humansâ (relatively) more sociable outlook toward strangers and tolerance of difference?
1.1.1 High Genetic Relatedness, Reciprocal Altruism, and Entitativity
As Iâve mentioned, human beings share about 99.9% of their DNA in common with one another; humansâ genetic similarity is higher than we find in any other ape species. This genetic similarity has important implications for social organization. Work in evolutionary biology clearly shows an altruistic tendency among animals when they are related to each otherâthis is perhaps most visible in the care that parents give to their children, but it can also be detected in preferential care for siblings, cousins, and so on. I will argue that, in humans, this kin-concern extends quite a bit further, but that, unlike the genetically hard-wired eusociality of insects, human eusociality has co-evolved with our capacity for symbolic expression and self-identity.
Allow me to explain.
W. D. Hamiltonâs (1964) well-supported theory of kin selection in biology predicts that biological altruism (the sacrificing of oneâs reproductive fitness for purposes of enhancing the reproductive fitness of another) will be most common between parents and offspring (who share, on average, 50% of their genes), and between siblings (who share, on average, 50% of their genes on account of sharing the same parents). The strength, or frequency, of this altruistic behavior would then be followed by care for aunts and uncles (who share around 25% of their genes with their nieces and nephews), cousins (who share on average 12.5% of their genes with one another), great-great-grandparents (who share on average 6% of their genes with their great-great-grandkids), and so on down the line.
Altruistic behavior toward kin is thus said to be âselected forâ across evolutionary history: individuals with a genetic propensity for kin-based altruism preferentially sacrificed themselves for others who were likely to have similar genes, thus increasing the copies of these genes in the next generation. So, during an attack by a predator, an animal is more likely to attempt to save its offspring than its nieces or nephews (though it may attempt to save both), because offspring have more copies of the parentsâ own genes than do nieces or nephews. By the same mathematical logic, the animal would be expected to prefer saving three of its cousins over one of its uncles, because three cousins likely share more of the animalâs own genetic material than does one of its uncles. This âevolutionary logicâ is of course wholly intuitive to animals and not some conscious mathematical calculation. It is simply the case that animals that behaved in these ways, over evolutionary time-scales, were more likely to pass on their genes than other animals, and so the genes producing this altruistic behavioral phenotype spread across populations as well.
The question of why humans appear capable of living in large, cooperative societies thus hinges, in part, on how related humans are genetically to one another. The more genetically similar members of a species are to one another, the greater, in principle, the scope of kin selectionâthat is, the more generalized kin-selective effects will be in a population.
Another interesting parallel between eusocial insects and human beings involves the process of forming an abstract identity. Argentine ants, for example, appear to identify with their entire colony, treating other ants in their midstâeven those they are personally unfamiliar withâas nestmates. These ants do not identify with kin per se, but with any ant in their colony who shares specific chemical/pheromone markers. Humans, as well, seem capable of identifying with the colony (âsociety,â ânation,â âcultureâ) at largeâas Mark Moffett (2019) points out, every time you walk into a coffee shop and order coffee from an unfamiliar person working the cash register, you are interacting with someone you do not know simply on the basis that they share an interpretable worker identity and a colony membership (âcoffee barista in Americaâ) and are therefore expected to cooperate with you. While all mammals seem to form cooperative relationships here and there, only eusocial insectsâand humansâseem capable of forming a colony-wide identity. Doing so enables a scale of cooperation unseen in other animals.
Yet, humans are not eusocial in the same sense that these insects are eusocialâhumans do not have âqueensâ who do all of the reproducing, or genetically determined âworkersâ who are sterile but contribute to the economy. Rather, humans exhibit a capacity for eusocialness because they are, (a) compared to other apes, highly genetically related to one another; and (b) can construe relatedness symbolically with articulated speech and cognitive abstraction, as when two close male friends call each other âbrothersâ (or close female friends call themselves âsistersâ) despite being from different families. The combination of (a) and (b) is a major reason why humans have coffee shops but, despite being quite intelligent, elephants do not.
Regarding (a), humans are not genetic clones as in eusocial insects, but they are highly genetically related, moreso than other primates, making them unusually capable of eusocialness or elevated prosociality. Regarding (b), the construction of fictive kin is likely made easier due to a higher proportion of shared genes, and thus a convergence of phenotypes. Still, humans do not form colony-wide identities only on the basis of identical genomes or chemical/pheromone signatures. Rather, colony identities in humans are more symbolically construed, and thus more porous and flexible than they are in other eusocial animals. As an example of this porousness, consider that human beings frequently trade goods between tribes, ethnic groups, and societies, whereas eusocial insects maintain strict chemical boundaries between colonies. The capacity for intersocietal trade is unique in human beings, and results from a more symbolic, abstract, and therefore flexible eusociality.
Biologists will be frustrated by my use of the term âeusocialnessâ to describe humansâ tendency to cooperate with strangers or unfamiliar others. For biologists, eusociality is typically defined descriptively as what certain species of insect or mammal do in order to reproduce successfully. And, the answer for bees, termites, ants, some wasp species, and naked mole rats is that there are reproductive âcastes,â which are genetically hard-wired and which determine whether or not an individual will be capable of reproduction. There is, in other words, a division of labor at the reproductive level, with some members of the species being born sterile and dedicating their daily energies to taking care of the fertile members of their colony (Wilson, 1971; 1975). For these reasons, many evolutionary biologists would bristle at my use of the term âeusocialnessâ to describe human beings.
I suppose there is, arguably, at least one analog in human society for reproductive âcastesââfemale humans after menopause, who are sterile and thus able to tend to the offspring of their children (and othersâ offspring) without the possibility of reproducing themselves. This is the so-called âgrandmother hypothesisâ of human eusociality (Hawkes, 2014). Indeed, there are other intelligent, social animals, such as whales, who also become sterile after menopause, suggesting that menopause, and its eusocial implications, exists in mammals other than humans (Johnstone and Cant, 2010). Moreover, sterilized castes of humans in early state societiesââeunuchsââwere often employed to tend to young sons and daughters of aristocrats (Betzig, 2014.) And, some psychologists have argued that the tendency toward suicide in human beings (greater than in most other apes and mammals) might represent a pathological expression of a genetically eusocial tendency to sacrifice oneself for the group (Joiner et al., 2016).
Still, the human brain is very flexible and reliant on a significant degree of social learning in order to develop. This leads me to hesitate in overcommitting to a view of human beings as eusocial in the âhard-wired,â genetically determined sense that it seems to be in bees, termites, wasps, ants, and naked mole rats. Evolutionary psychology is ...