Humans as Cooperators
my review of Nichola Raihani, and some older posts
I reviewed The Social Instinct, by Nichola Raihani.
Humans could not just pick the low-hanging fruit. In order to survive in our more difficult ecological niche, we had to evolve skills that other apes did not possess. In The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World, Nichola Raihani dwells on the skill of cooperation.
She argues that human cooperation requires more conscious choice than other species exhibit. I write,
Humans only cooperate sometimes. Often, we are in conflict within a group, and groups themselves sometimes cooperate with one another and sometimes compete with one another. Ants are not applying game theory. Humans are.
…Humans cooperate strategically. We cooperate when we find it in our individual interest to do so, and sometimes we go against the interests of the overall group or society to which we belong.
In order to evolve a trading economy, Raihani argues that we needed to develop a system for tracking reputations.
People seek good reputations, because a good reputation increases the willingness of others to work with us and to assist us. This represents another distinctly human use of our cognitive skills.
… there is scant evidence that any of the other great apes know or care about what others think of them.
… For humans, reputation management involves taking the perspective of another person, and also inferring how their beliefs and impressions of us might be altered under various scenarios. p. 159
Raihani sees this as critical to the development of specialization and trade.
Without systems to track and monitor the reputations of others, it is unlikely that the intricate systems of mutual trade that characterize all human societies would ever have emerged. p. 160
Raihani claims that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, humans had networks of as many as a thousand people well before the era of agriculture. This of course required sophisticated cooperation.
For other articles of mine on cooperation that most of you have not seen, see
Read Arnold's full review of Raihani's book.
1) Re: "For those of us living in modern, industrialized societies, it might come as a surprise to discover that we are cooperative breeders, as we typically have relatively small families, and often stop breeding before the older children can become helpers to younger ones." — Raihani, p. 73
The traditional practice, older children helping younger ones, enables a higher birth-rate. The substitution of formal institutions (day care and schools) for the traditional practice has gone hand in hand with decline in the birth-rate (below replacement level). Darwinian evolution and cultural evolution now seem at odds over reproduction.
2) Re: "Whereas the average male chimpanzee might expect to interact with just twenty other males in his entire lifetime, recent estimates put the average hunter-gatherer’s social universe at about 1,000 individuals." — Raihani, p. 193
Arnold comments: "Still, I do not believe that ancestral societies had the ability to organize social institutions to govern a group larger than the Dunbar number of about 150 people. Instead, I suspect that what emerged was something like Rule of the Clan."
I would like to make a plea for Arnold to write an essay squaring the Dunbar number and clan-governance an order of magnitude greater.
3) The only emotion mentioned in the review (and excerpts) is fear (paranoia). This is surprising because emotions deeply color social life, cooperation, competition, and conflict.
Envy, jealously, shame, guilt, glory, love, gratitude etc etc must be crucial in the workings of 'the social instinct.'
"Raihani claims that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, humans had networks of as many as a thousand people well before the era of agriculture."
Tyler Cowen linked to something last week making a related point, "“They remain mobile so they can participate in large and complex societies.” - https://aeon.co/essays/the-hunter-gatherers-of-the-21st-century-who-live-on-the-move
I am not well read enough on Dunbar to comment extensively, but I have consistently been baffled by the fixation of some on the 150 number. Dunbar himself claims, "Beyond the 150 are at least two further layers (one at 500 and one at 1,500), which correspond to acquaintances (people we have a nodding acquaintance with) and faces we recognize." - https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/07/12/19077/three-questions-for-robin-dunbar/
I don't think either of these are inconsistent with Rule of the Clan, or clans, but it does seem to mean the 1500 number is easier to get to even at an informal level, or a sort of natural state. I don't know whether it was good science, but there is a paper that claims we can recognize up to 5000 faces on average and every single participant fell within 1000 to 10,000 faces. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6191703/
Relatedly on cooperation and ants as well: Joseph Heath gave a lecture at the London School of Economics on cooperation. He references just about everybody referenced on this substack, Joseph Henrich, North, Wallis and Weingast, and Michael Tomasello among others. He also mentions that a certain species of ants in North America engage in farming and animal husbandry. It supposedly took 80 million years for them to get there and there is a not so disputed straightforward evolutionary story to this. Makes me wish I were better read on ants. The part on ants is in the 15:00 to 20:00 minute range. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yrhgKf4XbY