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.'
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
In order to avoid inbreeding (and the fact that children brought up together grow up to be sexually uninterested in each other--human children at least), there has to be movement between groups. My impression is that in most social animals, some just leave and find a place in a different group. Humans are pretty much unique in that people only leave to join a related group and that communication remains open between the old and the new group. The related group speaks the same language and has similar customs. You can lump them together as one "culture" and this gets you up to "about 1,000 individuals".
I'm pretty sure the Dunbar number of 150 comes from being able to track not just acquaintance or a face but to be able to form and hold an opinion on trusting this person, whether through personal experience or the word of others whom one trusts.
"… there is scant evidence that any of the other great apes know or care about what others think of them."
Raihani is certainly wrong about this. At least since Frans de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics (1982), it has been recognized that chimps very much care what others think of them. Among other things, they form coalitions to gain power in the troop or to stay in power.
I am not well read enough to speak to the narrow point and Raihani may be technically wrong, but if you watch from 1:19:00 to 1:24:00 in the Q and A in this video Joseph Heath claims that this doesn't matter so much for cooperation beyond a low level with specific reference to Hume and then other Sociobiologists and Frans de Waal as well as Boyd and Richerson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yrhgKf4XbY
Being that I haven't read de Waal I can't say whether or not Heath is being more dismissive than he should be of de Waal.
Heath says that chimps are good at "dyadic reciprocity" but they can only take it so far--and you can't explain the large scale of human co-operation by an "amplification" of "dyadic reciprocity" or of the "sympathy" people feel for others who are near and like them. He seems to accuse de Waal of thinking that you can.
But he doesn't disagree that chimps care what other chimps think of them.
It is unclear to me whether Raihani is just being too careless in wording or giving too little agency to chimps. I am not sure whether de Waal actually resolves the chimp agency issue. Heath is saying to me, with regard to cooperation, it doesn't matter. And I am unsure if this is not being charitable enough to de Waal. It is unclear to me de Waal or anyone knows what chimps think or care about, only how they behave, but maybe a closer reading would resolve my confusion. Maybe I do not give them enough Agency either.
Seems like another good book, tho not as good as The Goodness Paradox, because of too little emphasis on the negative stick, rather than positive carrot of cooperation.
Where is the Tit for Tat strategy?
What does “cooperation without victims” really mean? If it’s stranded on an island, helping the group is obvious, necessary, and yet always a bit uneven/unequal.
Cooperation works better when all have tasks, know their tasks, and do their tasks. Rules and norms are most effective in helping individuals find their optimal, or at least reasonably good, tasks to do. The highly limited carrots are most efficiently distributed in the way to create the most future carrots—with the much cheaper & more available sticks available to punish those few in the group unwilling to do their tasks for the group.
For the very small family group, mothers specializing in child raising with fathers doing lots of other stuff, seems close to optimal for the larger clan group, as well as for the family.
I now think cooperation under scarcity is optimized quite differently than cooperation with abundance, and many of our current social problems are because of the transition. AND because, under scarcity, survival or not was an externally imposed feedback to hugely restrict optimal choices.
With abundance, there remains plenty for the hard working even with many lazy, plenty for the careful even with many careless, plenty for the norm followers, even with many norm breakers.
How do we achieve more cooperation for better living under abundance, inevitably unequal abundance—tho the inequalities are influenced by the processes of cooperation chosen/ tried & accepted in the culture.
"I now think cooperation under scarcity is optimized quite differently than cooperation with abundance ..." I never had that thought before. Very interesting three paragraphs. Hope it's the beginning of some useful research.
On the "negative stick", you might be interested in Morris B. Hoffman's "The Punisher's Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury", which is actually much broader than the subtitle.
I'm glad you included this sentence. Not only are we uncooperative about as often as cooperative, it's probably more often than either that we are neither. We are just more or less doing our own thing.
Likewise, we aren't always reputation seeking. At work we are often just going through the motions so to speak. Maybe doing just enough not to get fired, maybe doing a bit more, but most people not trying to do the very best they can. Yes, I get that reputation optimization isn't perfectly correlated with doing our very best.
Likewise outside work, most of us spend more time watching TV, on our smart phones, playing video games, going to bed later than we'd like, eating the wrong things, drinking too much, overindulging on drugs or gambling, etc all for little or no good reason. These are not reputation enhancing activities. It's hard to argue they are even reputation neutral.
In physics, "work" doesn't mean a job. It doesn't mean something that is hot and sweaty. Work occurs any time that a force is exerted on an object moving through a distance.
In theorizing about sociality and evolution, "cooperation" generally has a very broad meaning. Someone who walks down the street without robbing the people she meets is cooperating. Someone who sits at home and watches Netflix is cooperating in that he is not hurting anyone. He's not out pissing in the street or randomly throwing rocks through windows. Someone who buys something and pays the marked price is cooperating. Someone who waits in line rather than pushing to the front is cooperating; no chimp will ever do that. If chimps drove cars, "road rage" would quickly turn it all to sh*t. In order to have any sort of civilization, people have to cooperate in most things most of the time.
Part of our superpower as a species is that we are generally happy with obeying the rules of the society. "Doing our own thing" usually doesn't involve breaking them. In fact, it's so part of our make-up that we don't even think of it as explicitly co-operating.
I understand the use of the word work within physics. Surely you understand that isn't the definition I meant and you also know exactly what I meant. Why do you bring up a different definition of work? Am I missing some unstated connection or are you just trying to be a jerk?
If one took the broadest definition of cooperation possible, I suppose all those things are cooperation. But that's s not really what any of today's comments are about. They are about actively working together to accomplish a task(s). Most of what you list does not do that. Regardless, my last post was not about cooperation. It was about reputation enhancing activities. Even less of what you list qualifies as that.
I'm sorry. I did not make the connection that you had used the word "work" in your comment. I was not replying to either of the two paragraphs in which you used it. I was simply trying to make the point that words in an academic discipline often have meanings very different than normal use and that this causes confusion. I really should have used a different example.
The point I was trying to make with the comment is that all the stuff I mentioned really is cooperation, just not explicitly so. It's what we do and other animals pretty much don't. It's why we have, and can use, all the things we do. Making a car requires a lot of explicit cooperation but making it useful requires a not of non-explicit cooperation: driving on the same side as everyone else, driving at a similar speed to everyone else, not speeding down a narrow residential street, stopping at red lights and going at green, and on and on.
"In order to survive in our more difficult ecological niche, we had to evolve skills that other apes did not possess."
Did we have to? Beyond the obvious that every animal has slightly different skills, did we have to become more socual than other apes just to survive rather than succeed wildly.
"in our more difficult ecological niche" may be what makes that a necessity. Perhaps we could have survived as some chimp-like creature if we hadn't evolved these other skills. But then we wouldn't be in our own ecological niche; we'd be in one similar to a chimp's.
What we have done is create our own niche. As in fact, lots of living creatures do. There's even a wikipedia article on "niche creation", and a lot of entries if you do a search.
We are in chicken and egg territory now. I was referring to the niche before we became hyper cooperative and reputation seeking. You seem to be referring to after. Neither is wrong, just different.
Agreed. I think Arnold, the source of the original "In order to survive in our more difficult ecological niche, we had to evolve skills that other apes did not possess", was referring to the after. Kind of like saying "in order to fly, birds had to evolve wings."
Just exactly what developed when in the evolution of human sociality is a great mystery.
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.'
"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."
I second that.
"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
In order to avoid inbreeding (and the fact that children brought up together grow up to be sexually uninterested in each other--human children at least), there has to be movement between groups. My impression is that in most social animals, some just leave and find a place in a different group. Humans are pretty much unique in that people only leave to join a related group and that communication remains open between the old and the new group. The related group speaks the same language and has similar customs. You can lump them together as one "culture" and this gets you up to "about 1,000 individuals".
I'm pretty sure the Dunbar number of 150 comes from being able to track not just acquaintance or a face but to be able to form and hold an opinion on trusting this person, whether through personal experience or the word of others whom one trusts.
"… there is scant evidence that any of the other great apes know or care about what others think of them."
Raihani is certainly wrong about this. At least since Frans de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics (1982), it has been recognized that chimps very much care what others think of them. Among other things, they form coalitions to gain power in the troop or to stay in power.
I am not well read enough to speak to the narrow point and Raihani may be technically wrong, but if you watch from 1:19:00 to 1:24:00 in the Q and A in this video Joseph Heath claims that this doesn't matter so much for cooperation beyond a low level with specific reference to Hume and then other Sociobiologists and Frans de Waal as well as Boyd and Richerson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yrhgKf4XbY
Being that I haven't read de Waal I can't say whether or not Heath is being more dismissive than he should be of de Waal.
Heath says that chimps are good at "dyadic reciprocity" but they can only take it so far--and you can't explain the large scale of human co-operation by an "amplification" of "dyadic reciprocity" or of the "sympathy" people feel for others who are near and like them. He seems to accuse de Waal of thinking that you can.
But he doesn't disagree that chimps care what other chimps think of them.
It is unclear to me whether Raihani is just being too careless in wording or giving too little agency to chimps. I am not sure whether de Waal actually resolves the chimp agency issue. Heath is saying to me, with regard to cooperation, it doesn't matter. And I am unsure if this is not being charitable enough to de Waal. It is unclear to me de Waal or anyone knows what chimps think or care about, only how they behave, but maybe a closer reading would resolve my confusion. Maybe I do not give them enough Agency either.
Seems like another good book, tho not as good as The Goodness Paradox, because of too little emphasis on the negative stick, rather than positive carrot of cooperation.
Where is the Tit for Tat strategy?
What does “cooperation without victims” really mean? If it’s stranded on an island, helping the group is obvious, necessary, and yet always a bit uneven/unequal.
Cooperation works better when all have tasks, know their tasks, and do their tasks. Rules and norms are most effective in helping individuals find their optimal, or at least reasonably good, tasks to do. The highly limited carrots are most efficiently distributed in the way to create the most future carrots—with the much cheaper & more available sticks available to punish those few in the group unwilling to do their tasks for the group.
For the very small family group, mothers specializing in child raising with fathers doing lots of other stuff, seems close to optimal for the larger clan group, as well as for the family.
I now think cooperation under scarcity is optimized quite differently than cooperation with abundance, and many of our current social problems are because of the transition. AND because, under scarcity, survival or not was an externally imposed feedback to hugely restrict optimal choices.
With abundance, there remains plenty for the hard working even with many lazy, plenty for the careful even with many careless, plenty for the norm followers, even with many norm breakers.
How do we achieve more cooperation for better living under abundance, inevitably unequal abundance—tho the inequalities are influenced by the processes of cooperation chosen/ tried & accepted in the culture.
"I now think cooperation under scarcity is optimized quite differently than cooperation with abundance ..." I never had that thought before. Very interesting three paragraphs. Hope it's the beginning of some useful research.
On the "negative stick", you might be interested in Morris B. Hoffman's "The Punisher's Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury", which is actually much broader than the subtitle.
"Humans only cooperate sometimes."
I'm glad you included this sentence. Not only are we uncooperative about as often as cooperative, it's probably more often than either that we are neither. We are just more or less doing our own thing.
Likewise, we aren't always reputation seeking. At work we are often just going through the motions so to speak. Maybe doing just enough not to get fired, maybe doing a bit more, but most people not trying to do the very best they can. Yes, I get that reputation optimization isn't perfectly correlated with doing our very best.
Likewise outside work, most of us spend more time watching TV, on our smart phones, playing video games, going to bed later than we'd like, eating the wrong things, drinking too much, overindulging on drugs or gambling, etc all for little or no good reason. These are not reputation enhancing activities. It's hard to argue they are even reputation neutral.
In physics, "work" doesn't mean a job. It doesn't mean something that is hot and sweaty. Work occurs any time that a force is exerted on an object moving through a distance.
In theorizing about sociality and evolution, "cooperation" generally has a very broad meaning. Someone who walks down the street without robbing the people she meets is cooperating. Someone who sits at home and watches Netflix is cooperating in that he is not hurting anyone. He's not out pissing in the street or randomly throwing rocks through windows. Someone who buys something and pays the marked price is cooperating. Someone who waits in line rather than pushing to the front is cooperating; no chimp will ever do that. If chimps drove cars, "road rage" would quickly turn it all to sh*t. In order to have any sort of civilization, people have to cooperate in most things most of the time.
Part of our superpower as a species is that we are generally happy with obeying the rules of the society. "Doing our own thing" usually doesn't involve breaking them. In fact, it's so part of our make-up that we don't even think of it as explicitly co-operating.
I understand the use of the word work within physics. Surely you understand that isn't the definition I meant and you also know exactly what I meant. Why do you bring up a different definition of work? Am I missing some unstated connection or are you just trying to be a jerk?
If one took the broadest definition of cooperation possible, I suppose all those things are cooperation. But that's s not really what any of today's comments are about. They are about actively working together to accomplish a task(s). Most of what you list does not do that. Regardless, my last post was not about cooperation. It was about reputation enhancing activities. Even less of what you list qualifies as that.
What is your point?
I'm sorry. I did not make the connection that you had used the word "work" in your comment. I was not replying to either of the two paragraphs in which you used it. I was simply trying to make the point that words in an academic discipline often have meanings very different than normal use and that this causes confusion. I really should have used a different example.
The point I was trying to make with the comment is that all the stuff I mentioned really is cooperation, just not explicitly so. It's what we do and other animals pretty much don't. It's why we have, and can use, all the things we do. Making a car requires a lot of explicit cooperation but making it useful requires a not of non-explicit cooperation: driving on the same side as everyone else, driving at a similar speed to everyone else, not speeding down a narrow residential street, stopping at red lights and going at green, and on and on.
"In order to survive in our more difficult ecological niche, we had to evolve skills that other apes did not possess."
Did we have to? Beyond the obvious that every animal has slightly different skills, did we have to become more socual than other apes just to survive rather than succeed wildly.
"in our more difficult ecological niche" may be what makes that a necessity. Perhaps we could have survived as some chimp-like creature if we hadn't evolved these other skills. But then we wouldn't be in our own ecological niche; we'd be in one similar to a chimp's.
What we have done is create our own niche. As in fact, lots of living creatures do. There's even a wikipedia article on "niche creation", and a lot of entries if you do a search.
We are in chicken and egg territory now. I was referring to the niche before we became hyper cooperative and reputation seeking. You seem to be referring to after. Neither is wrong, just different.
Agreed. I think Arnold, the source of the original "In order to survive in our more difficult ecological niche, we had to evolve skills that other apes did not possess", was referring to the after. Kind of like saying "in order to fly, birds had to evolve wings."
Just exactly what developed when in the evolution of human sociality is a great mystery.