The
Evolution Of Groupishness
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Introduction
What is a group?
It can range from an assortment of objects with a spatial
relationship to each other (some pebbles on a table) to a
large nation with 150 million citizens. Who would be brave
enough to say that Indonesians do not form a group?
In this work,
the word 'group' is mostly used to define a collection of
people, each of whom can say, we XyXyXy-ers . . . They belong
to the XyXyXy group.
Evidently, this
excludes animals, in the sense that a dog cannot say (and
may or may not be able to think): 'We dogs like bones'. Actually
there is some evidence that dogs can have 'shared intentionality'.
This is not to
deny the existence of groups among non-human organisms; they
clearly exist, and were necessary precursors of the human
group as it finally emerged. Groups pre-existed humans, and
the early stages of the development of the human group took
place among earlier types of organism.
A group in the
human sense is a mental concept; it is something that a person
feels that she belongs to, or, equally important, does not
belong to. It isn't possible to talk about groups without
accepting their exclusiveness alongside their inclusiveness.
This feature of groups is an essential clue to their origins,
and also arose among precursor species.
It is of the
essence of groupedness, or groupishness, that members of a
group are aware of their membership of the group, and are
aware of the existence of other members of the group as such
(not necessarily all of them or even most of them). This,
too, is true of most or perhaps all precursor species. An
ant knows another ant when it sees one, and knows that the
other ant (which is genetically identical or very similar)
comes from the same colony. In humans, this knowledge may
be held at an unconscious or conscious level, or indeed both.
In the case of
humans, it is possible to be a member of different groups
at the same time, and this is something that is mostly carried
on unconsciously. The brain produces the right behaviours
for the group you happen to be in at a particular moment,
although when membership of two groups is incompatible, we
call it a 'conflict of interest' and it has to be dealt with
consciously. It's possible that the capacity for multiple
group membership arose when the hunter-gatherer group arose
alongside the kin-group.
The capacity
for multiple group membership, like a lot of other groupish
characteristics which evolved in humans, is 'hard-wired'.
This essay is focused on such genetically determined, evolved
characteristics, rather than on later, culturally-determined
developments in the form and function of the group, which
are dealt with in Groups In
Modern Society.
This essay will
take the evolution of groupishness to the stage at which biological
evolution had produced anatomically modern man, homo sapiens,
approximately 50-100,000 years ago. There has not been time
since then for man's genetic endowment to undergo radical
alternation, so it must be assumed that groupishness in a
genetic sense has also not materially changed since then,
although there have been massive cultural developments which
have profoundly affected the expression of groupishness in
society.
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Groups
As Social Building Blocks
It is hardly
possible to imagine the development (evolution) of social
activity among animals without admitting the simultaneous
existence of something that must be called a group, in the
pre-human sense.
Animals group
together for many purposes, including defence, attack, warmth,
and to mate. At what point physical contiguity turns into
something recognisably social is hard to know. If 'social'
means 'involving interaction with a communal purpose' or something
similar, then the prerequisite for social behaviour is that
a number of individuals should have similar or identical behaviours
and an ability to communicate those behaviours or the promise
of them to other individuals. So the evolution of social behaviour
necessarily involved the evolution of shared behaviour and
motivation sets, along with some form of communication (grunts,
eye movements, touching, signs, dances, smell are just some
of the mechanisms that can be employed).
Examples of animal
social groups include ants' nests, bee colonies, herds of
antelopes, packs of dogs, flocks of birds, schools of fishes.
Not all of these animals are commonly labelled 'social', but
perhaps they should be. They share a propensity to 'group',
and their groupedness is a substantial - sometimes essential
- aid to individual survival.
Up to this point
of development (before the arrival of primates) the characteristics
of groupedness included, as described above, awareness of
species identity and species not-identity, ability to communicate
on a group level, and behaviours which are constant and predictable
among members of the group. The jury is out on whether groupedness
at this level would have included shared intentionality, but
it probably didn't include reciprocity or altruism.
(**)
There is also
much uncertainty about when consciousness as such emerged
in animal psyches; this is a rather important point in terms
of group membership, because some types of social activity
are hard to imagine without the existence of consciousness.
The subject of consciousness in relation to groups is explored
at The Role Of Consciousness
In Society, but in this essay the general assumption is
that consciousness arose in association with intentionality,
ie the awareness of others, but was much expanded when group
members needed to behave collectively.
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Primate
Groups
Primates display
a level of groupedness which is intermediate between the 'animal'
and 'human' versions.
Researchers are
continually pushing back the first occurrence of group characteristics
to earlier and earlier stages of evolution, so it's rather
dangerous to pinpoint the first occurrence of particular behaviours;
but with that proviso, the current state of knowledge would
indicate that primates introduced complex social hierarchies,
sets of behaviours such as grooming, deception and reciprocal
altruism which were used as tools in managing social relationships,
and had the ability to distinguish individuals and remember
their behaviour, and behave back accordingly. However, with
some rare exceptions, the individual at this stage had not
developed more than an extremely primitive theory of mind
(an understanding of the 'otherness' of others) and did not
display intentionality to any marked extent.
(**)
Variation in
social behaviour has utility only in more sophisticated types
of group, and presumably only when other individuals can perceive,
remember and respond to it. In more primitive types of group,
it even has a disadvantage: one bird in a flock of birds needs
to do what the rest are doing, and if it doesn't, it not only
disadvantages itself, but can disadvantage the group. 'Division
of labour' is something rather different, as evidenced in
ants, for example, and later in hunter-gatherer groups. It
has benefits among all types and sizes of group. Variable
individual social behaviour is a type of competition and has
utility in mating, but perhaps even more in hierarchical terms.
Certainly it's
true that as one tracks groups of organisms 'up' the scale,
they display increasingly complex hierarchical structures.
The utility of this has to be that a hierarchy can behave
in a more subtle and flexible way than a 'flat' organisation
(at least up to a point!). Hierarchies, like other social
constructs, also sharpen competition, so that between two
otherwise similar populations, it will be the one that has
the more competitive (hierarchical) environment which will
be the stronger.
Countless studies
have shown that the more complex social behaviour of primates,
and later of humans, is strongly associated with increasing
brain size, and by now it is a commonplace that the extra
brain is needed for an expanded communication repertoire and
for remembering multiple other individuals and their behaviours.
Increasing brain
size, equated to increasing social complexity, is also statistically
linked to increasing group size.
On the cultural
level, there is evidence that some learned (as distinct from
instinctive or genetic) social (group) behaviours can be transmitted
between primate generations. The method of transmission is
of course by copying and by passing on from mother to child
(difficult to know whether to call it teaching or not).
(**)
The appearance
of deception as an inter-personal, social technique is possibly
associated with the beginnings of a theory of mind and an
understanding of intentionality. Deception is described among
a very wide range of animal species, and certainly existed
as an adaptive technique long before the emergence of social
groupings of animals, but individual behaviour intended to
deceive one or more conspecifics emerges only as part of 'groupish'
behaviour (eg among some primates), and seems to require at
least a primitive ability to think of the other as different
from oneself.
(**)
At this stage
of development of the group, the use of deception doesn't
seem to have adverse consequences for the social position
of the individual.
(**)
Thus, the arrival
of primates added to the basic animal 'group' tool-kit, a
capacity for observing, using and communicating individual
social behaviour, and a primitive level of transmissible social
development. However, the primate group, while a more complex
organism than the previous animal group, remained incapable
of intentional group action other than on a very basic level.
The new cognitive tools allowed the individuals within the
group to be collectively more successful; but it remained
for humans to develop the group into something 'with a life
of its own'. It's also likely that primates have only a very
primitive a theory of mind, although recent research has demonstrated
that chimpanzees are sometimes capable of attributing intentionality
to other chimpanzees.
(**)
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The Archetype
In The Development Of Groups
In the transition
from animal groups as described so far, to human groups capable
of communal self-knowledge and action, the key agent of change
was the expansion of the ability to communicate, strongly
associated with (and probably impossible without) increases
in brain size and cognitive capacity.
While it is tempting
to seize upon language as being the bed-rock of human communication,
commentators are nearly unanimous in thinking that language
could only have evolved from proto-languages such as signing,
visual representations or signals, and indeed vocal sounds.
In all of these the human mimetic capacity was crucial. In
order to be more than a collection of interacting individuals,
however, the group needed not only a means of communication,
but also to develop concepts, not least that of itself, of
the idea of leadership, the idea of rules (laws), and many
other conceptual ingredients of the brew we call 'society'.
In thinking about
the more or less simultaneous emergence of language, 'groupishness',
and these early social concepts, myth played a large part,
and myth itself was strongly linked to (and employed) visual
images.
In trying to
imagine how this set of advanced behaviours might have evolved,
one of the greatest difficulties is their seeming inter-dependence.
How could they all have evolved (more or less) together if
each one depends on all the others so intimately?
While there is
certainly no agreed-upon answer to this question, and there
may never be, because brain tissue, unlike skeletons, doesn't
survive for millions of years, it yet did happen; and archetypes
are an important component of the puzzle.
The archetype,
a word used in this context initially by Jung, and very much
elaborated by his follower Ernest Neumann, is a numinous (potent,
powerful) unconscious psychic content. In itself it is not
to be thought of as having a specific form - it exists in
a very deep layer of the brain - but it gives rise to images
in the visual cortex which partially represent it.
(**)
Many concepts
which are essential components of human (and group) thought
originated as archetypes; later on, both in time and in terms
of cognitive activity, they put on the clothes of visual imagery
and verbal identity. But they began in the limbic (?) brain
as archetypes.
Such is the theory.
It is not an unavoidable part of explaining the evolution
of thought, language, society etc, but it is certainly very
helpful, and there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence
for the existence of and the role played by archetypes.
While a partial
treatment of the general importance of archetypes is given
here, because it is a relatively unfamiliar aspect of human
evolution, they are dealt with at greater length separately
in Archetypes. Here
the concentration is on the importance of the archetype in
the development of the group.
(**)
The group itself
began in some sense as an archetype, since the individual
members of a group would not be able to understand themselves
as such unless they shared a collective (and of course unconscious)
understanding of the concept of a group. Some writers suppose
that the group has a psychic structure similar to that of
an individual human, that is to say with a more or less conscious
level and an underlying unconscious level of content.
(**)
It's possible
therefore to conceive the 'dark' behaviour of some groups
(Nazis naturally spring to mind) as being parallel to the
regression of an individual personality into 'dark' behaviour
as a result of an intolerable psychic situation.
(**)
A much more speculative
idea is that the psychic structure of the individual in fact
began as the psychic structure of the group, and that the
conscious / unconscious division of the human mind as we know
it is nothing but a group phenomenon copied into the members
of the group. The problem of the evolution of individual consciousness
has no adequate answers at this point, but it's easy to see
how consciousness of being a member of a group would naturally
evolve along with the psychic fact of the group. Well, it's
just speculation!
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The Components
Of Groupedness
Leaving aside
for the moment speculation about the mechanism through which
the group acquired its characteristics, this section focuses
on the characteristics themselves, and especially those which
allowed the emergence of the group as an actor in some sense
distinct from its individual members.
Archetypes (or
some equivalent mechanism) are necessary as the basis of psychic
concepts.
Members of a
human group definitely have 'shared intentionality'; that
is to say, they are capable of behaving jointly with other
members of the group to achieve a goal which is in the interests
of the group. Not only that; the human members of a group
can use language to affirm groupedness. It's possible that
language is essential to the existence of a human group, and
may be the defining characteristic of human groups as distinct
from animal groups in general.
Language is necessary
as an efficient means of communication; in addition, a 'social
calculus' incorporating a theory of mind and a capacity to
handle multiple levels of intentionality is necessary for
each member of a group to function among the others; myth
is necessary as the basis of transmissible rules of behaviour;
and, not least, the concept of the group among groups (in
competition or cooperation or both with them) is necessary
for the group to have meaningful existence in the real world.
The archetypal
concept of 'The Fathers', as the fount of accumulated group
wisdom and the source of law needs to be accepted as at least
partially genetic in nature; later on, with the development
of conceptual language, much of the controlling and law-giving
apparatus surrounding 'The Fathers' came to be culturally
transmitted, but in the early stages at least there was a
major genetic component.
It will be seen
that each of these is dependent on the existence of appropriate
archetypes - for where else would the relevant concepts come
from?
Archetypes have
been discussed, if briefly; now each of the other components
will be treated separately, always with a focus on 'groupish'
aspects.
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Language
Language is widely
understood to have been an evolutionary adaptation to increasing
group size, which brought with it the need for more efficient
(faster, more precise) communication than could be achieved
with proto-languages and with grooming, which were adequate
in smaller, less sophisticated groups; or at the minimum,
language and large groups evolved in tandem, each pushing
the other.
(**)
The physiological
facilitation of language by the 'dropped glottis' and larger
acoustic vocal cavity (both resulting from or maybe just accompanying
bi-pedalism) is also seen as linked to the emergence of larger
group sizes which became possible and necessary as hominids
developed. There are competing explanations as to why this
development took place: the transition from forest to plain
dwelling is one; the change to a nomadic way of life is another;
and a third is the development of competition between human
groups.
The development
of a larger brain and greater cognitive capacity permitted
the additional storage required by a lexicon (dictionary)
and the greater processing power needed to handle syntax and
the conceptual aspects of language.
(**)
Language and
larger group sizes are in fact inseparable; it's chicken and
egg to try to say which came first. This is highly relevant
to an understanding of how the individual psyche develops
and operates in society, since almost all of the individual's
interactions with the group and its members take place through
language.
(**)
It may not be
too extreme to say that individuality is itself a phenomenon
of the group environment; and as will be seen there is plenty
of support for this view, although it will outrage many in
its apparent denial of free will.
(**)
One of the main
results of the use of complex linguistic interaction among
group members, certainly including a major use of gossip (one
of the evolved uses of language), is reputation, which gives
access to sexual favours and to the various social goods that
the group can provide, or in the case of a bad reputation,
denies them.
(**)
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Social
Calculus
That's to say,
the set of social techniques used by members of the group
to interact with each other. Obviously, it begins with the
techniques already in use by the primate group, including
mimicry, physical grooming, deception, reciprocal altruism,
and the ability to distinguish individuals and remember their
behaviour, and behave back accordingly.
A theory of mind
(an understanding of the 'otherness' of others) is a pronounced
feature of human groups, as is the use of intentionality and
the sharing of it in collective action. Empathy (a consequence
of a theory of mind), laughter, tears and other emotive displays
are highly characteristic of human groups.
(**)
Emotions are
not just something felt by the individual (one of their purposes,
indeed) but are also displayed by the individual for the evident
purpose of communicating with or influencing other members
of the group.
(**)
Musical ability
and the propensity to dance clearly arose during the early
development of the social group, are definitely genetically
rooted, and are frequently described in groupish terms.
(**)
Leadership can
appear in human groups, but is not inevitable. Gossip (as
a successor to grooming) and other linguistic social exchanges
are used for reputation management; as reputation gains ground
as an indicator of group position, deception ceases to be
an acceptable technique and is seen as aberrant behaviour.
Once the group starts to have internal organisation, and individuals
have knowledge of each other's characteristics (roughly coeval
with the use of language and the increase in brain size that
led to the emergence of homo sapiens) then deception, if practised
in the group, is rapidly noticed and punished by expulsion
or withdrawal of group benefits (grooming, access to females,
inclusion in trade).
This is not to
say that deception disappears from the range of human behaviours
because of groups; of course not. What changes is that reputation
acquires a positive value, and it can be lost by aberrant
behaviour (aberrant from group norms). Deception becomes a
crime of sorts, and sanctions are applied to those who practice
it. As the group becomes larger, deception becomes easier
to practice again, because you can't know everybody in a settled
community of 3,000 individuals, with the difference that it
has become established as wrong - because it is hurtful to
the group. The groupish instinct or nature of the individual
has many dimensions, and the wrongness of deception is one
of them.
(**)
It will be said
that some of these social tools are on display in primate
groups; but if that is so, and there is much doubt about it,
they are very pale shadows of the highly effective techniques
they become in human groups.
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Myth
The scanty evidence
that is available to us about the ethical basis of early societies,
and the characteristics of modern survivals of primitive ways
of life in Africa, Australia and South America, together suggest
that myth played a large role in controlling the behaviour
of social groups from a very early stage.
Myth has all
the appearance of being a universal feature of human social
life, strongly associated with archetypes. Just as, in the
case of archetypes, the visual or conceptual instantiation
of the archetype may vary across cultures, but the underlying
archetype is invariable (genetically hard-wired), so with
myth: the forms that myths take vary widely, but the meaning
of the myths, their social and psychological purpose, remains
constant.
(**)
For example,
all primitive societies seem to have had witches, and they
almost always fly. A witch is a mythical creature, based on
an archetype, and figures prominently in the mythical life
of early societies. A witch is an anti-group figure; but that
doesn't mean the group didn't invent witches - external threats
are helpful in binding groups together.
(**)
As with music,
it is arguable that myth might not have been necessary as
a means of creating a kind of ethical skeleton for early societies
had conceptual language developed to the point at which a
body of laws and religion could be expressed and understood
by group members. Be that as it may, myth is alive and well
in modern society, in artistic monuments such as Wagner's
Ring Cycle, in 'folk' influences on writing and the arts,
in religion itself, and in countless other ways. Myths are
hard-wired into the human unconscious.
(**)
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The Concept
of the Group Among Groups
Whatever the
nature of the original human group, and there seems to be
a fair measure of agreement that it began as a kin-group which
spawned or morphed into a hunter-gatherer group, and later
still into a territorial group, its external relations must
have been a matter of evolutionary adaptation from the beginning
just as much as its internal relations. External relations
at this stage is still understood to mean external relations
as in the mind of one of the group's members, and still as
an evolved genetic trait; only later on did the group develop
culturally transmitted characteristics which indeed would
have included its external character and behaviour.
In the early
group, the concept of individuality did not yet exist, and
the individual group member had only the haziest idea of himself
as a separate entity; mostly he thought of himself as identical
with the tribe.
(**)
In amongst the
process of formation of 'group identity' in the individual
comes the question of consciousness, and one possible explanation
of consciousness, or one possible use of it, if you believe
that consciouness predates humans, is as a repository of the
knowledge of group identity.
(**)
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The Fathers
Although the
inter-personal emotional and ethical structure of the group
can be constant in different environments, conflicts can arise
and external circumstances can vary considerably, so that
there is a need for a mechanism which can deliver experience-based
guidance to group members, making use of the accumulated life-wisdom
of the group - this before cultural transmission became possible,
probably meaning before the emergence of conceptual language.
Hence the evolution of 'The Fathers, being a tendency in individuals
to look up to and respect the wisdom of elders. A group which
makes full use of the wisdom available from its members is
adaptively fitter than one that does not.
Later on, when
conceptual language became available, The Fathers were the
natural originators, guardians and transmittors of the law,
and they became leaders, priests, educators, lawyers etc;
but initially they merely represented a guidance principle.
'The Fathers'
are always men, even in a matriarchal society, which is a
sure sign that they stem from an archetypal original.
(**)
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The Human
Groupish Endowment
We can now make
a list, no doubt only partial, of the main features of human
groupishness as it emerged from the evolutionary process.
Every human being has these characteristics hard-wired into
his genetic makeup. They are overlain in many group situations
by culturally transmitted aspects of the group which have
developed in society over the last 50,000 years; but these
latter can at least in theory be reversed by social engineering
or education. Not so with the genetic components of groupishness,
which could only be changed by hundreds of thousands of years
of further evolution.
For anyone wishing
to improve the social behaviour of mankind, it's absolutely
necessary to accept for better or for worse that there is
nothing to be done about groupishness as it exists as a result
of biological evolution.
The list:
A propensity
to affiliate
Ability to belong
to multiple groups simultaneously
Awareness of
one's membership of groups and of the others who belong to
them
Ability to communicate
on a group level, and to display behaviours which are constant
and predictable among members of a group
Ability to function
in a complex social hierarchy
Use of grooming,
deception, gossip and reputation management techniques
The ability to
distinguish individuals and remember their behaviour, and
behave back accordingly.
Shared intentionality,
and a theory of mind
Reciprocal altruism;
a tendency to help other members of groups to which the individual
belongs
Xenophobia; a
tendency to fight and mistrust members of groups other than
one's own
The possession
of a shared (collective) unconscious among all humans which
contains archetypes and myths spanning a very wide range of
aspects of human life
The possession
of a shared (collective) unconscious which contains information
about the characteristics of groups to which the individual
belongs
The ability to
feel and express a wide range of emotions, including fear,
joy, pride, rage, happiness, misery, shame
The ability to
empathize
The ability to
learn and use language of various types (mimetic, visual,
conceptual and spoken)
Musical ability
and the propensity to dance
Consciousness
of group memberships and the capacity to submit to group demands
at the expense of individual desires
A tendency to
accept guidance from qualified 'elder' members of a group
to which an individual belongs
A propensity
to trade - not quite sure yet if it's genetic. I think so;
without it we would have all killed each other!
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