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.
Although
humans are aware of aspects of their membership of one or
more groups, it does not necessarily follow that they have
a clear understanding of the nature or origins of the groups
to which they belong. Pascal Boyer in Religion Explained
emphasizes the extent to which the group is an entity which
somehow transcends its individual members: 'It appears to
everyone that these groups were not created by their current
members, nor will they disappear with them . . . . People
often say that all members of a village or a clan "have
the same bones", that they share some essence that is
the eternal life of the social group'.
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.
In
Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural
Cognition (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne and Moll,
the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) in
BBS, 2004, the authors conclude that the crucial difference
between human cognition and that of other species is the 'ability
to participate with others in collaborative activities with
shared goals and intentions'.
As
the author watches a group of ants carrying off a dead fly
(building materials? food? war trophy?), this conclusion seems
intuitively weak; and when a dog at Battersea Dogs Home in
London is reported to have unlocked the cages of his friends
in order to group-plunder the Home's larder, the author wonders
even more.
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.
Derek
Bickerton in The Evolutionary Emergence of Language
(Chapter 16: How Protolanguage became Language) discusses
reciprocal altruism in the context of the development of syntax,
and says: 'Reciprocal altruism is widespread among apes and
not uncommon in monkey species'. He thinks that the complexity
of the social calculus involved in keeping track of behaviours
over a long time period is such that the ape brain would not
have been able to synthesize the elements of inter-personal
behaviour into an overall assessment of other individuals,
but that data would have been stored separately in different
categories, such as food-sharing, grooming, etc. However,
the categories had to exist for all individuals in the group,
or interaction wouldn't be possible or accurate. In terms
of syntax, the mental process of Agent - Theme (ie category)
- Goal (eg I groom you) and its inversion (You groom me) is
seen as being a probable precursor of sentence structure.
For
Robin Dunbar (Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language)
primate groups owe their origin to kin groups, and have defence
against predation as their primary function. Group social
interactions are seen as being about mating tactics.
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.
It
is therefore tempting to ascribe a modern 'top-down' model
of hierarchical control to prehistoric societies, with the
inbuilt assumption that there was a chief with over-arching
power, but few writers go along with this, and evidence such
as it is from contemporary primitive societies does not support
such a view. Evans-Pritchard, for instance, in The Nuer,
describes the 'chief' of the tribe as one who has ritual and
negotiating roles, but no secular power at all.
Hierarchies
in the modern sense of the term may not have played a dominating
role in human groups until a relatively late stage. Early
human kin groups and the hunting groups which are supposed
to have developed from them, on the evidence of their primitive
counterparts in modern times, were far more cooperative than
competitive. Michael Chance, in A
Socio-Mental Bimodality, Chapter 16 of The Archeology
of Human Ancestry, describes two social modes, 'agonic'
and 'hedonic', both having evolved among earlier primate social
groupings. While the two modes co-exist in great ape social
groupings, he sees the hedonic mode (relaxed, flexible and
cooperative) as more prevalent, and likely to have been the
dominant condition in hunter-gatherer societies. Indeed, cooperative
models formed the basis of village life and trading communities
until very recently in human development.
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.
Aiello
and Dunbar attempted with some success to derive a predictive
model for fitting expected average groups sizes to hominid
fossils on the basis of their brain size, reported in Current
Anthropology, 1993.
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).
Reported
in Nature, June 1999, Andrew Whitten, University
of St Andrews and Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, described non-genetic
behavioural patterns in chimpanzee groups which are transmitted
across generations, remaining distinct from similar patterns
in other groups, and not linked to particular sub-species.
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.
Reported
in Scientific American, April, 2006, Carel van Schaik,
director of the Anthropological Institute at Zurich University,
describes groupings of orang-utans in Sumatra in which social
learning of tool-making and inter-personal skills is taking
place, leading to the transmission across generations of cultural
patterns. He hypothesizes that this behaviour will give an
evolutionary advantage over time, and that it should be associated
with the process by which advanced primates acquired larger
brains, leading to the development of humans.
Barkow,
Cosmides and Tooby (The Adapted Mind), describe deception
and self-deception as two sides of the same coin (one deceives
another better if one deceives oneself at the same time),
linking this in some respects to the evolutionary need for
the subsconscious. They quote Dawkins (1982) and Trivers (1985)
for evidence that deception is well-established as an adaptive
technique among animals. They suggest that the 'arms race'
between the ability to deceive and the ability to perceive
deception is responsible for some of the complexity of the
evolving brain. During a discussion of anosognosia, Ramachandran
and Blakeslee (Phantoms in the Brain) link self-deception
to the existence of two hemispheres in the brain, without
going so far as to suggest any causative mechanism.
Dr
Tim Crow, of the Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital,
Oxford, (British Journal of Psychiatry) followed
by Dr Nabeel Affara, of the Department of Pathology, Cambridge,
however, show that functional bi-lateralisation of the brain
followed the evolution of hominids, and can be attributed
to a mutated protein involved in early development of the
embryo. This development took place at generally the same
time that the set of group behaviours emerged (about 3 - 4
million years ago, based on DNA evidence).
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.
In
Reintroducing Group Selection to the Human Behavioural Sciences
by David Sloan Wilson (Biological and Brain Sciences) retribution
for free-loading behaviour is shown to have evolved as part
of more sophisticated group strategies; there is no evidence
that it exists among primate groups.
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 theory of mind, although recent research
has demonstrated that chimpanzees are sometimes capable of
attributing intentionality to other chimpanzees.
Research
conducted in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, by Robert Seyfarth
and Dorothy Cheney, professors in the Penn department of Psychology
in Philadelphia, and reported in Science (November
14, 2003), showed a sophisticated level of understanding of
kinship status and social rank in a baboon's reactions towards
other baboons; but the researchers were doubtful about the
complexity of the social models that might exist in the baboons'
minds. And they found no evidence that the baboons have a
theory of mind (ie that they can attribute mind to other baboons).
Brian
Hare of the Anthropology Department at Harvard told the 2004
annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science about research which proved that dogs' ability
to interpret human social clues in a hunt for food was acquired
genetically by proximity to humans, and is lost again if the
dogs are away from humans for a genetically significant period.
Chimpanzees (which have never been domesticated) are more
or less hopeless at equivalent tasks.
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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.
The
case for the evolution of groupish archetypes is well put
by Richard M Gray in Archetypal Explorations:
'A
mechanism for . . . inheritance of culturally determined patterns
has been identified by Lumsden and Wilson in Genes, Mind
and Culture: The Co-Evolutionary Process (1981). Lumsden
and Wilson have hypothesized that it takes something on the
order of 1,000 years for a cultural element, or a propensity
to express a culturally defined trait, to become established
in the gene pool as an inherited trait. That is, during 1,000
years of selection for a specific tendency towards culture
or the manipulation of cultural artifacts, a group will result
that exhibits an increased propensity for displaying that
trait or being able to use that artifact. This is strongly
suggestive of Jung's observations that the archetypes represent
the accretion of endless repetitions of typical patterns of
behaviour (Jung 1959/1968a, para 99).'
Gray
also describes archetypes as nodes of concentrated psychic
content in the collective unconscious (an archetype is useless
unless it is collective); that's not a bad way of describing
groups, as well. You can never quite separate an archetype;
you can never quite separate a group either.
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.
Matt
Ridley in The Origins of Virtue illustrates the importance
of archetypes in cultural development without using the word
'archetype': 'It would be as odd to find a tribe in New Guinea
to whom the words dance, myth or ceremony (suitably translated)
meant nothing at all as it would be to find one that did not
know the meaning of hunger, love or family. Ritual is universal;
but its details are particular.' In this quote, 'tribe' =
'group', and dance, myth and ceremony are expressions of universal
archetypes. He continues: 'I am about to argue that one way
to understand ritual is as a means of reinforcing cultural
conformity in a species dominated by groupishness and competition
between groups.'
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.
Gray
(ibid p 215): 'It is possible from Jung's writings
to understand large groups as being possessed of a structure
that parallels the structure of an individual psyche.' He
quotes Piaget in support of this idea.
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.
Gray
(ibid), in the context of the Jungian 'Hero's Journey':
'Although the classical application of the pattern of the
descent of libido is to individual psyches, there may be reason
to believe that a similar pattern applies in larger groups.'
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 could naturally evolve along with the psychic fact
of the group.
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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.
Robin
Dunbar (Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language)
charts the growth in group size as primates gave way to early
hominids, and calculates the percentage of time that would
have been required to maintain social contacts through grooming
until the point comes when language would have been required;
that point is about 250,000 - 400,000 years ago, when homo
sapiens appeared, and optimum social group size reached its
expected modern level of about 150. Although 'language' here
means something close to modern speech and Dunbar describes
a succession of intermediate phases between physical grooming
and spoken language, an increasing number of writers doubt
the contribution of genetic as opposed to cultural evolution
to the evolution of modern speech.
Barkow,
Cosmides and Tooby (The Adapted Mind), quoting Brandon
& Hornstein, 1986, and Tooby & DeVore, 1987, describe
the advantages that can be gained within the group through
the ability to share information gained over the lifetime
of individuals: 'there is an obvious advantage in being able
to acquire such information about the world second-hand'.
Barkow,
Cosmides and Tooby (ibid) quote Isaac (1983) and
Konner (1982) in support of the importance of linguistic interactions
in the social group, emphasizing the complexity of the linguistic
apparatus already presumed in use at an early stage of development
(homo habilis, 2 million years ago), and concluding: 'In a
group of communicators competing for attention and sympathies
there is a premium on the ability to engage, interest and
persuade listeners'. For 'listeners' perhaps understand 'watchers'
during the mimetic phases of development of language.
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.
Knight,
Studdert-Kennedy and Hurford give a thorough review of the
evidence for the development of language as a Darwinian adaptation
to the needs of social (ie group) interchange, in The
Evolutionary Emergence of Language, based on Nettle,
1999a, Pinker & Bloom, 1990, Bickerton, 1981 and 1990,
and Dunbar, 1993, among others. Although they agree that language
developed from as long ago as 2 to 4 million years in response
to the growing complexity of social life, language at that
time does not have to mean speech, which from the fossil record
was probably not anatomically possible until as recently as
400,000 years ago, but was based on mimetic signing, primitive
vocalisation and visual communication. Still, they agree that
syntax would have emerged long before speech, and that language
would not have been adaptive in the absence of mechanisms
to limit (ie punish) deception.
Deacon,
1997, in The Symbolic Species, argues that language
emerged concurrently with the development of social contracts,
which as non-physical concepts cannot be represented by mimetic
techniques. He gives a list of reasons for the development
of language, each of which is strongly tied to the existence
or ongoing development of the group: organizing hunts; sharing
food; communicating about distributed food sources; planning
warfare and defence; passing on toolmaking skills; sharing
important past experiences; establishing social bonds between
individuals; manipulating potential sexual competitors or
mates; caring for and training young.
For
Deacon, it is the ability to communicate (and think) symbolically
that marks off human beings from their predecessors, and he
takes this ability to arise and to be transmitted through
some mixture of genetic and cultural processes, with the group
having central importance in those processes. 'All symbolizing
hominids are linked by a common pool of symbolic information,
one that is as inaccessible to other species as are human
genes. We are all heirs of symbolic forms that were passed
from one generation to to the next and from one group
to another (author's emphasis), forming a single unbroken
tradition.' Deacon's symbols likely have a strong connection
with archetypes, and must have played a key role in the evolution
of pre-linguistic communication.
Jaynes,
in The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bi-Cameral Mind, describes the enormous variety of communication
techniques developed within the primate and later the human
social group, emphasizing that these were almost all related
to interaction within the group, and had little to do with
describing the external physical world: 'tactile communication
ranging from mouting and grooming to various kinds of embracing,
nuzzling and fingering; sounds ranging from assorted grunts,
braks, screeching, and yakking, all grading into each other;
non-vocal signals such as grinding teeth or beating branches;
visual signals in a variety of facial expressions, the threatening,
direct eye-to-eye gaze, eyelid fluttering in baboons in which
the brows are raised and the lids are lowered to expose their
pale colour against the darker background of the face, together
with a yawn that bares the teeth aggressively; various postural
signals such as lunging, head-jerking, feinting with the hands,
and all these in various constellations.'
Steele,
in On The Evolution Of Temperament And Dominance Style
In Hominid Groups, notes characteristics of language
which suit it to being a means of communication in a group
environment: 'a number of aspects of human conversational
exchanges (cyclicity, repetition, turn-taking routines, mutual
adaptation of parameters such as voice pitch and amplitude)
have properties which tend to reinforce the affiliative quality
of a relationship.'
Jason
Noble, in Cooperation, Competition and the Evolution of
Prelinguistic Communication (in Knight, Studdert-Kennedy
and Hurford, ibid) addresses the issue of deception
(why give away information?), giving various possible explanations;
it is interesting that they all depend on the existence of
the group.
Michael
Studdert-Kennedy in The Emergence of Phonetic Structure
(Knight, Studdert-Kennedy and Hurford, ibid) describes
a mathematical simulation of language development which shows
that language is very unlikely to develop as a means of communication
except in a close-knit community of individuals (a group).
Bickerton
in How Protolanguage Became Language (in Knight,
Studdart-Kennedy and Hurford, ibid) concludes that
the requirement for a high degree of signal coherence (accuracy)
over time in linguistic interaction would have been a major
factor in the need for increased brain size in hominids.
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.
Social
Identifications (Michael Hogg and Dominic Abrams, 1988)
contains an extended analysis of language as a component of
social groupedness, and the extent to which language contains
social 'markers' and other social information.
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.
A
R Radcliffe-Brown, quoted in Kinship, extracted from
The Social Organization of Australian Tribes, Oceania
Vol 1, pp 426-56, describes how the individuality of a person
arriving into a primitive kin group is established by using
complex (linguistic) kin terminology to describe the relationship
of the new individual to each and every member of the group.
'As soon as he knows his relation to a given individual he
knows how to behave towards him, what his duties are and what
his rights.'
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.
Barkow,
Cosmides and Tooby (ibid): 'Gossip from an anthropological
perspective is a means of social control, a sanction that
forces one to adhere more closely to social norms than one
would otherwise be inclined. Reputation is determined by gossip,
and the casual conversations of others affect one's relative
standing and one's acceptability as a mate or as a partner
in social exchange.'
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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.
Stephen
Pinker in How The Mind Works, states the Darwinian
case for the evolution of 'social' emotions in the group:
'Every psychologist who has written about the function of
the social emotions has talked about their benefit to the
group'. However he insists that the evolution takes place
at the level of the individual, not at the level of the group,
adducing Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. It
must be true that the genetically embedded groupish characteristics
evolved at the individual level, although that evolution may
have been sharpened by group pressures, partly explaining
why evolution seems to have speeded up during the later stages
of human development; however there comes a point at which
social development takes off on its own account (see below).
Matt
Ridley in The Origins of Virtue quotes Robert Frank's
theory of the origin of the emotions (he was, interestingly,
an economist) first given in Passions Within Reason.
Ridley says: 'Moral sentiments, as Frank (and Adam Smith before
him) calls the emotions, are problem-solving devices desgined
to make highly social creatures effective at using social
relations to their genes' long term advantage.' Ridley (p
136) also quotes Robert Trivers on reciprocal altruism (The
Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism): 'Trivers noticed that
moralistic aggression serves to police fairness in reciprocal
exchanges' (think of queueing).
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.
Merlin
Donald in Origins of the Modern Mind notes that Darwin
believed facial expression to be a very efficient device for
the communication of emotion in small groups, and that the
continued use of facial expressions by modern humans is a
vestige of this early adaptation of humans.
The
Anatomy of Human Expression, written and illustrated
by Sir Charles Bell (1806) has a detailed exposition of the
anatomical basis of facial expression.
Recent
research has given a firmer basis to the idea that many aspects
of facial expressiveness are genetically transmitted. Peleg,
in The Hereditary Family Signature Of Facial Expression,
describes a study
showing that
blind volunteers had facial expressions almost identical to
their relatives’ expressions.
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.
Matt
Ridley in The Origins of Virtue says 'The evolutionary
benefit of letting the emotions be stirred by music may well
be to synchronize and harmonize the emotional mood of a group
of individuals at a time when they are called upon to act
in the interests of the group.'
Merlin
Donald in Origins of the Modern Mind points out that
Darwin thought that song would not have developed if symbolic
language had already been in place. Song is indeed usually
associated with emotional states, and both presumably developed
before conceptual language.
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.
Chris
Knight in The Evolution of Cooperative Communication
(Knight, Studdert-Kennedy and Hurford) summarizes the treatment
by Desalles later in the same volume of'Language and Hominid
Politics. Why, asks Knight, is it that within human coalitions
staus is earned through the efforts of the individual to display
and acquire information, whereas in ape society it may be
earned more effectively by manipulation or concealment of
relevant information? For Lasalle, the answer is that in the
human group ownership of information has replaced physical
strength as the most important currency. In an ape troop you
hardly need a reputation for strength; you are strong or you
are not. In a human group, there is no physical attribute
that says you are wealthy in information, hence the need for
reputation.
Trivers,
in Natural Selection and Social Theory, points out
that individuals can move between groups as a result of social
factors, for instance an individual engaging in much deception
can be expelled, or a cooperator can choose to leave a group
which permits too much deception. Trivers quotes Lee and DeVore,
1968, for evidence that such movement does take place between
contemporary hunter-gatherer groups. Evidently, this would
be a mechanism that would favour the development of 'cooperator'
rather than 'deceiver' groups; this argues against a 'group
selection' mechanism for social evolution, but highlights
how the requirements of the group can drive rapid evolution
at an individual level.
Robin
Dunbar (Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language)
examining the uses of language, quotes Nick Emler from A
Social Psychology of Reputations (1990) as arguing that
much of our daily use of language is in fact concerned with
reputation management.
For
Frank, in Passions Within Reason, humans have a propensity
towards the development of moral sentiments, although those
sentiments are not directly expressed in through any genetic
mechanism: 'Definitions of honesty, notions of fairness, even
the conditions that trigger anger, all differ widely from
culture to culture. If people inherit anything at all, it
is a receptiveness to training about the attitudes that are
likely to serve them in life.'
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.
Ernest
Neumann, discussing archetypal feminine experiences in Amor
and Psyche says: 'Myth is always the unconscious representation
of such crucial life situations, and one of the reasons why
myths are so significant for us is that we can read the true
experiences of mankind in these confessions unobscured by
consciousness'.
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.
Bronislaw
Malinowski, discussing flying witches among the south sea
islanders in Argonauts of the Western Pacific says:
'But it can never be sufficiently emphasized that all these
(mythic) beliefs cannot be treated as consistent pieces of
knowledge; they flow into one another, and even the same native
probably holds several views rationally inconsistent with
one another.' Later (p 300), when discussing magic: 'Myth
has crystallized into magical formulae, and magic in its turn
bears testimony to the authenticity of myth. Often, the main
function of myth is to serve as a foundation for a system
of magic, and, wherever magic forms the backbone of an institution,
a myth is also to be found at the base of it.'
Richard
M Gray in Archetypal Explorations describes myth
as being at once the source and the legitimation of group
behaviours: 'From the perspective of sociology, myth generally
takes the form of legitimations for the current system of
group function. But from the archetypal perspective they begin
not so much as the rationale as the source of the behaviours
themselves.' He gives examples from Chinese cultural history.
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.
For
Merlin Donald in Origins of the Modern Mind myth
is inseparable from the development of language, and had a
strongly integrative function: 'The scattered, concrete repertoire
of mimetic culture came under the governance of integrative
myth. And again: 'Mythic integration was contingent on symbolic
invention and on the deployment of a more efficient symbol-making
apparatus'. He means language; but archetypes are a 'symbol-making
apparatus' and came long before language. It's likely that
individual myths developed long before conceptual language
allowed the erection of an integrated mythic world picture;
in fact it's evident from other parts of the book that Donald
is talking here more about the culturally-transmitted narrative
myth which could only come into being on the basis of fairly
advanced, spoken linguistic achievement, rather than the archetype-driven
mythical components used by the early human group to construct
its ethical framework.
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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.
Kropotkin
in Mutual Aid says: 'The primitive man . . . identifies
his own existence with that of his tribe; and without that
quality mankind never would have attained the level it has
attained now.'
Matt
Ridley in The Origins of Virtue describes inter-group
violence as more or less the normal condition of early human
groups: 'All human pre-literate societies, and all modern
ones as well, tend to have an 'enemy', a concept of them and
us.' It's important to understand that the enemy is not a
personal enemy, it's a group enemy. Ridley observes that the
types of group that fight tend to be the male-dominated ones;
female-dominated groups (as in the original, matrilineal kin-group)
are much more peaceable.
Margaret
Mead, writing in Sex and Temperament about the marital
arrangements in the Arapesh tribe, says: 'The small girls
. . . do not regard the shift of their betrothal as a very
serious matter. On the whole, they are wedded in feeling to
a group of people, not merely to one man.'
De
Jouvenal, in On Power, emphasizes the pre-eminence
of the group in human affairs: 'So far, then, from from man
having given willing adherence to the group, his very existence
is only in and by the group; for this reason the severest
punishment on him is banishment, which casts him out defenceless
from his brothers to th emercy of men and beasts.'
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.
Erich
Neumann, in The Child, describing the emergence of
consciousness in the human child, says: 'The development of
the stages of consciousness and the concomitant development
of the ego are a process which is normally so dependent on
the collectivity that we find rituals in almost all human
groups. They make possible and facilitate the transition from
one phase to another, for by identifying himself with the
traditions, myths, rites and religion of the group the individual
achieves an understanding of his existence and of his function
in the collective.'
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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.
Malinowski,
quoted from Sex and Repression in Savage Society in
Kinship (ed Goody), notes that in many matriarchal societies
the less tender aspects of fathership, including male authority,
dealing with tribal ambition, coercive measures etc are performed
by the maternal uncle.
Adam
Kuper, in Anthropology and Anthropologists - The New British
School, describing social arrangements among the Nuer,
writes: 'Any feud within the tribe could be settled by mediation
and the payment of blood-wealth. This mediation was usually
through the good offices of a 'leopard-skin' chief, a member
of a hereditary group of mediators, respected but effectively
powerless.' Equivalent arrangements are described in very
many tribal societies.
De
Juvenal, in On Power comments on the early Roman
republic, in which the Senate was the 'assembly of the fathers'.
Until
extremely recent times, religions have universally preserved
the male-dominated model of hierarchy which they inherited
in a more or less unbroken line from the societies of pre-history,
and even now it is only really the Protestant Church which
has admitted women to positions of ritual and organisational
authority. Sects such as the Amish may reflect a more original
model of social organisation: in Not By Genes Alone, authors
Richerson and Boyd describe the very non-authoritarian and
cooperative strcture of the Amish. 'The emphasis is on preventing
men from competing for office and preventing successful candidates
from feeling too proud or mighty.'
Lionel
Tiger, in Men In Groups, gives an extensive account
of the tendency of male to form groups of their own, and for
these to be secretive. The Masons can stand as a perfect example.
Tiger is not convinced of the utility of such groups from
the point of view of wider society; but it is at least clear
that they demonstrate the continuing potency of 'the Fathers'
as a concept in the unconscious.
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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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