Reading The Human Swarm 2: The importance of scale in social structure

I’ve now gone back to the beginning of The Human Swarm and have been reading chapters in order, from the Introduction up to chapter 5, “Ants and Humans, Apples and Oranges”. I’ve made notes (mostly excerpts) on it all, but I want to concentrate on Ch5. By that time Moffett has established two things to keep in mind:

• Animal life can be organized on two scales, 1) the small band, which is based on recognizing individuals, and 2) what he calls a society, where one only recognizes whether or not an individual is a member. Societies will (may?) consist of a number of small individual-recognition bands.
• One form of social organization is the fission-fusion society, where bands will spend part of their time on their own, but will also conjoin with other bands in the society for joint activities.

Ch5: Ants and Humans, Apples and Oranges

Let’s list some excerpts:

p. 57

We modern humans may be genetically close to the chimp and bonobo, yet ants are the animals we resemble most. The similarities between our species and theirs tell us a lot about complex societies and how they emerge.

p. 58-59

In so much as chimpanzees and bonobos think as we do, the parallels often extend to other animals, too. Both are like us in recognizing themselves in a mirror; then again so do dolphins, elephants, and magpies, and there’s a claim, widely doubted, that ants do, too.

p. 59 Among both bonobos and chimpanzees...

relationships are dictated by strict hierarchies of power, which are tyrannical in the chimp–especially in the males. On maturing, females of both species abandon childhood kith and kin for another community, never to return. The females are sexually receptive only on occasion,...

Here’s the big one, the one this post is about, p. 60:

Scientists investigating animal behavior have too often been narrowly devoted to the evolutionary relationships between species, when many features of societies have more to do with scaling – sheer numbers – rather than pedigree. The societies we have looked at among the nonhuman vertebrates, including the nonhuman apes, contain at most a few dozen individuals. A large leafcutter nest harbors a workforce in the low millions. [He opens the chapter discussing these.]

Once a population grows that large, all types of complexity can emerge – in fact often have to emerge to get jobs done. The coordination seen among hunting groups in a chimp or painted dog society is mercurial enough to amount to wishful thinking compared to the elaborate way some predatory ants organize hunts, with some workers stopping the quarry in its tracks, others applying the death blow, and others dismantling the corpse into slabs of flesh carried off in coordinated teams. Most vertebrates lack the labor force to take on such specific roles; nor must they operate in this way for the members to get the food they need.

The same is true for housing and infrastructure. The burrows of prairie dogs can be intricate; they connect underground with hibernation chambers and dead ends that thwart predators. Yet, contrasted with the monumental architecture of a leafcutter nest or a honeybee hive, the dwellings of these rodents seem a relic of the Animal Stone Age.

YES!

It’s one thing to organize a society with, say, a dozen to 30 or 40 members, the individual-recognition band. This doesn’t require much if any occupational and thus role specialization. It’s another thing when you’re dealing with 10s of thousands or millions or even billions of members in one society. Now specialization is essential. That’s what makes ants so interesting. And that’s why it is important to understand how their societies work.

Group size among humans, some quick observations

From my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001), Ch9: Musicking the World, 200-201:

In a recent synthesis and review of work on human groups Linnda Caporael argues that the band, which she calls a deme, and the group of bands, which she calls a macrodeme, are basic units of organization that appear in all human societies. We see demes and macrodemes in their most basic configuration in hunter-gatherer societies, but they persist even in the most sophisticated. Thus, drawing on David Hull’s work on the social organization of science, Caporael suggests that scientific “in-groups” devoted to certain ideas are demes, while somewhat larger “invisible colleges” are macrodemes that meet with one another at yearly meetings of scientific societies.

Caporael’s analysis extends to smaller groups as well. Many tasks typically fall to groups that are smaller than bands. Courtship, mating, and child-rearing involve intense interaction between pairs—technically referred to as dyads. One obvious characteristic of dyads is that they permit a very high level of coordination between people; consider an infant interacting with her mother, or a courting couple. Other activities require “handfuls,” work groups of a half-dozen or so individuals. Here, coupling is generally looser than in dyads. Thus when a handful of men go out hunting they may agree on the type of game and the general direction of the hunt but otherwise function fairly autonomously, at least until game has been spotted.

Caporael treats these core configurations—dyads, “handfuls,” demes, and macrodemes—as basic units of social organization. I will assume her framework for the rest of this book. For the past ten or fifteen millennia, however, humans have been living in societies larger than thousands of individuals. How do we construct societies larger than the largest core configuration, a macrodeme of some hundreds of indivduals? We need a new mechanism—permanent leadership—and as we will see later on, that mechanism requires musicking for its social construction and maintenance.

Along those lines I can also mention Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action (Harvard 1965, p. 54), where discusses an organization in which “the average size of the ‘action taking’ subgroups was 6.5 members, whereas the average size of the ‘non-action taking’ subgroups was 14 members.” Olson goes on to cite similar numbers for other organizations, including committees in the US Congress. And that makes sense. Taking action, e.g. reporting out a bill for consideration before Congress, requires a higher degree of coordination and assent than simply examining something to, say, issue a report. The smaller group facilities the necessary degree of interaction.

Interaction in musical groups

This is obvious in the structure of musical groups. Small group jazz, which I know very well, gives each musician a great deal of freedom. Such groups typically have between three six or seven members; quartets and quintets are particularly common. Typically, though not always, at any given moment one musician will have the “floor” as a soloist and, as such, is free to play whatever they wish. But the accompanying musicians do not play set parts. Rather, they are expected to vary their accompaniment in response to the soloist.

Larger jazz groups are organized differently, say nine to perhaps twenty or so piece. Now fixed arrangements become necessary. You can’t have a dozen people making it up all the time. Typical arrangements will have sections that feature a soloist, who is free to do as they wish, just like in a small combo. And, like a combo, the rhythm section is some latitude in how they accompany the soloist. But the arrangement may well include set backing figures played by other musicians.

Fountain in the dark with snow [then blue silk]

I took this on December 9, 2017 at 7:33 PM with my Panasonic DMZ-AS7. This is how the photo looked out of the camera:

As you can see, there's not much there to work with. I had to boost the exposure a lot, which made for a very grainy image. I smoothed it and spit out two renderings, one in color and one in black and white. Last night, at 3:15 AM I brought up the color version is boosted the color a bit, but as you can see, there's still not much color there:

And then I did a blue/orange:

Over the last week or so, since the selfies episode, I've taken to doing blue/orange versions of various shots. Why? Why not? I've experimented a lot with these gradients over the years (it's a feature in Photoshop), so I've got a feel for how they work. I like the idea of taking one simple gradient and applying it to a variety of shots, just to see how they look.

Who knows, maybe I've got Mingus on my mind. He wrote a tune entitled, "Orange was the color of her dress, then blue silk."

I did it again, another day without blogging (almost) [regulating the mind] [Ramble 13]

Metadata: I had to hunt around a bit to find the file where I’d written the previous post in this series. Found it in “New Savanna Notes 17.docx” and moved it to “Weekly Ramble.docx”, where I’m writing this.

Back on Thursday, Sept. 26, I’d posted about how I’d taken two days off of blogging, and that photo expeditions had something to do with it. Well, it’s happened again. No blogging yesterday, Saturday, except for three photos, which I’ll get to.

I hadn’t planned it that we, not at all. My blogging to-do list is full, and I’ve got several lines in development: there’s my major post on Matt Jockers’ 3000 node graph in Macroanalysis, I’d planned out a second post in my series about Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm, and there’s this post on Heart of Darkness I’ve been planning for a couple weeks now – that one just gets bigger and bigger. I’d figured that I’d at least post the Moffett, if not the Jockers.

But I’d already made plans to meet my friend Gregg for a little urban exploring in the morning, 10 AM. He wanted to show his aunt what we’d been up to. So he made plans to give her a tour and tapped some of our band of creative miscreants as well. I got up, did a little of this and that and went out for breakfast at the Malibu Diner. Which I like to do. Sit down, drink my coffee, then eat the waffles and bacon, all the while just mulling things over. Which I did. Took a short walk along the shore on the way back to my place, then put on my ‘grunge wear’ – old tattered jeans and Timberlands – for the safari. Got in my car, drove to Jersey City.

And met Greg and his Aunt Jane at the spot at 10 AM, as planned (Greg had gotten there early). Alas, fellow miscreants would not be with us. Off we went. Greg and his aunt talked, I took photos and joined in every once in awhile. Needed the boots, got the jeans dirty, as expected. Met other explorers as well, which was a bit unusual for that particular excursion. Chatted with them for a bit. I recognized one of them, G. from Cool Vines.

We finished up a bit after noon. Greg and Jane went about their business and I went to the photo exhibit by the Jersey City Photo Meetup, of which I am a member, though I didn’t have any photos in the show. Spent 15 or 20 minutes there and then headed back home to Hoboken (about 3 miles). I figured I take a nap – I’ve been a napper since forever – render some photos, and do some blogging.

Nap, check.

Render photos, check.

Write blog post(s). No, though I did post three photos from the day’s safari.

And then ... I don’t quite know what. I went to King’s picked up some soda, OJ, cookies, and my dinner. After dinner I watched the finale of Season One of The Great British Baking Show. Then...Watched a couple episodes of Law & Order SVU and went to bed. Got up at about 1:30, took a quick look online and went back to bed/sleep.

Then I got up at 2, 2:30 and did a bit of work on the Jockers’ post, things I’d thought of earlier in the day. Took a look through some of my photos and did two new renderings which I plan to post after I’ve posted this. And then, after I woke up I made progress on the Heart of Darkness piece, but only in my mind. I haven't written anything down yet.

That’s it.

More later.

Back to basics, graffiti from the nameless place

A quick thought on what happened that academic literary criticism lost its way

Four years ago I quoted Blakey Vermeule as saying:

Theory has taken hold in humanities departments because it is (or was) a branch of theology, not science. Its explanatory aims are finally subordinate to its emotive ones: it gives people energy and the will to do the work. Theory has been more or less overtly driven by a liberationist agenda—and it has developed strong resemblances to religious cults, in which powerful gurus dispense dogma and their disciples disseminate it. Some theory-centered disciplines make this more or less explicit. Take feminist studies. Feminist studies has been driven explicitly by a liberationist agenda but it has signally refused to address—in fact has been entirely contemptuous of—the mounting evidence that there are significant hormonal, neurological, and cognitive differences between the sexes. If you can’t admit the question, you aren’t a discipline.

Vermeule is right, literary criticism has been driven by a liberationist agenda since the late 1960s. I certainly have no problems with human liberation; that doesn’t bother me in itself.

But then there’s that part about developing “strong resemblances to religious cults, in which powerful gurus dispense dogma and their disciples disseminate it.” That’s different, and troubling. That leads, among other things, to star-system excesses like the sad case of Avital Ronell. It also leads to the hectoring tone and superior air of critique.

So here’s my quick and simple thought: the means has become the end. The end WAS liberation and the means was necessarily CRITICISM of the status quo (in one form or another). So now one sets out to critique and needs a plausible target, any halfway plausible target will do. The attack's the important thing. Attack, Attack, Attack!!!

How’d this come about, and why?

* * * * *

See, for example, my working paper, Cultural Logic or Transcendental Interpretation? Golumbia on Chomsky's Computationalism, where I show that Golumbia simply misunderstands Chomsky and so directs his criticism at something that isn’t there. See also my letter to PMLA, On the Demise of Deconstruction, where I make a distinction between having to oppose an intellectual regime and merely learning the oppositional stance from an earlier group of scholars.

Friday fotos: Yellow pagodas

Limits to economic growth?

Christopher F. Jones, The Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth, The New Republic, October 1, 2019.

The fairytale of infinite growth—which so many today accept as unquestioned fact—is relatively recent. Economists have only begun to model never-ending growth over the last 75 years. Before that, they had ignored the topic for a century. And before that, they had believed in limits. If more people saw the idea of infinite growth as a departure from the history of economics rather than a timeless law of nature, perhaps they’d be readier to reimagine the links between the environment and the economy.

In 1950, the economics profession had surprisingly little to say about growth. That year, the American Economic Association (AEA) asked Moses Abramovitz to write a state-of-the-field essay on economic growth. He quickly discovered a problem: There was no field to review.

Yes, John Maynard Keynes had offered a theory of stagnation, demonstrating the need for government spending to stimulate an economy mired in recession, and Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter had studied creative destruction, highlighting the importance of entrepreneurs and innovation. Wesley Mitchell, founder of the National Bureau of Economic Research, had looked at business cycles and others had analyzed monetary forces. But no one had put it all together in a theory of growth. Modern work was “fragmentary” and had “remained on the periphery of economics,” Abramovitz explained to AEA members. Development economist W. Arthur Lewis agreed, noting in 1955 that “no comprehensive treatment of [economic growth] has been published for about a century.”

It was an interesting turn for a field originally quite interested in growth, but convinced it was bounded. The founding fathers of economics—luminaries including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill—shared a belief that growth was finite, and that the reason for limits lay in the natural world.

And then along came Robert Solow:

Solow launched modern growth theory with a pair of pioneering articles written in 1956 and 1957. Still alive today, he has done more to shape growth theory than any other thinker.

Like Abramovitz and Lewis, Solow turned his attention to growth in the 1950s because the topic was “in the air.” Calculations of Gross National Product (GNP) had been pioneered during World War II and were spreading across the globe. Fueled by international competition and the reality of robust economic expansion in many nations, growth had quickly become the catchword of the day in economics departments and government bureaucracies.

Solow advanced these discussions with a new model of growth, one that sought to analyze the relative contributions of capital, labor, and technical progress. Whereas Smith, Ricardo, and Mill had taken for granted that land was one of the three factors of production with labor and capital, Solow assumed that land did not matter. To the extent that land or natural resources merited mention (and they rarely did), they could be seen as a sub-category of capital, interchangeable with money or machines.

Ignoring land meant cutting the natural world out of modern growth theory at its inception. Solow wrote that this seemed the “natural assumption” to make in a theory of growth, though he did not specify why. And since in the 1950s, abundant land and resources appeared available, few would have disagreed. Moreover, Solow was a modeler, and the chief virtue of a good model is that it simplifies. A map of a city that included every detail would be as large as the city itself, of course, and of no real use. With bottomless pools of oil in the Middle East, extensive minerals from developing nations, and swaths of farmland available, why clutter a model by including them?

And then along came the environment movement of the 1960s and the 1972 report, The Limits to Growth, which Solow dismissed. But

...he was a left-of-center thinker committed to government intervention and planetary protection. He wrote about abating pollution and joined a Sierra Club board. And he scoffed at infinite models: The real world is so complex that to predict more than twenty years into the future is foolhardy, he once told a Congressional committee. [...]

The specific blind spot in his model was climate change. When thinking about economic growth, he and other economists focused exclusively on inputs to the production process. Would we have enough coal, oil, iron, and minerals to make new goods? With price signals, substitution, and technological change, Solow and his colleagues were convinced we would. But they did not consider outputs—waste and pollution—to be more than a nuisance. They did not imagine that greenhouse gas emissions could be so consequential as to threaten ecosystem integrity in ways that could affect growth.

Whoops!

H/t 3QD.

Redeveloping economics on a new mathematical foundationi (?)

Mark Buchanan, How ergodicity reimagines economics for the benefit of us all, berfrois, Sept. 28, 2019:

Everyone faces uncertainties all the time, in choosing to take one job rather than another, or deciding how to invest money – in education, travel or a house. The view of expected utility theory is that people should handle it by calculating the expected benefit to come from any possible choice, and choosing the largest. Mathematically, the expected ‘return’ from some choices can be calculated by summing up the possible outcomes, and weighting the benefits they give by the probability of their occurrence.

But there is one odd feature in this framework of expectations – it essentially eliminates time. Yet anyone who faces risky situations over time needs to handle those risks well, on average, over time, with one thing happening after the next. The seductive genius of the concept of probability is that it removes this historical aspect by imagining the world splitting with specific probabilities into parallel universes, one thing happening in each. The expected value doesn’t come from an average calculated over time, but from one calculated over the different possible outcomes considered outside of time. In doing so, it simplifies the problem – but actually solves a problem that is fundamentally different from the real problem of acting wisely through time in an uncertain world.

Expected utility theory has become so familiar to experts in economics, finance and risk-management in general that most see it as the obvious method of reasoning. Many see no alternatives. But that’s a mistake. This inspired LML efforts to rewrite the foundations of economic theory, avoiding the lure of averaging over possible outcomes, and instead averaging over outcomes in time, with one thing happening after another, as in the real world. Many people – including most economists – naively believe that these two ways of thinking should give identical results, but they don’t. And the differences have big consequences, not only for people trying to do their best when facing uncertainty, but for the basic orientation of all of economic theory, and its prescriptions for how economic life might best be organised. [...]

Of particular importance, the approach brings a new perspective to our understanding of cooperation and competition, and the conditions under which beneficial cooperative activity is possible. Standard thinking in economics finds limited scope for cooperation, as individual people or businesses seeking their own self-interest should cooperate only if, by working together, they can do better than by working alone. This is the case, for example, if the different parties have complementary skills or resources. In the absence of possibilities for beneficial exchange, it would make no sense for an agent with more resources to share or pool them together with an agent who has less. The standard economic approach, by nature, tends to come down in favour of splintering society into individuals who see only their own interests, and it suggests that they do better by this approach.

Things change dramatically, however, if one considers how parties do when facing uncertainty and repeatedly undertaking risky activities through time. As Elsberg illustrates in his novel, such conditions greatly expand the scope for pooling and sharing resources to be beneficial to all parties. From a basic point of view, pooling resources provides all parties with a kind of insurance policy protecting them against occasional poor outcomes of the risks they face. If a number of parties face independent risks, it is highly unlikely that all will experience bad outcomes at the same time. By pooling resources, those who do can be aided by others who don’t.

H/t 3QD. On ergoticity, HERE.

Plastic chairs outdoors

A quickie: The linguistic sign & language as a collection of interlinked systems

I’m thinking of language as a phenomenon of cultural evolution. But let’s start with Latour. He distinguishes between intermediaries and mediators as forms of connection between individuals (Assembling the Social, p. 39):

An intermediary, in my vocabulary, is what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs. . . . Mediators, on the other hand . . . transform, translate, distort, and modify meaning of the elements they are supposed to carry.

As a first approximation I take it that the texts themselves, whether written or spoken, are intermediaries while our various explications of the text, from the most casual (as in office chatter about the book you read the night before, or the movie you saw) to the most formal presentation in a professional journal, are mediators. That is – let me be explicit about this – language combines these two kinds of Latorian objects into a single object. It is not one or the other; it is both.

Let me refine that. Sound and syntax are intermediaries while meaning is a mediator. Meaning is always negotiable, but sound and syntax are, in a given instance, transparent.

Now I want to introduce my current terminology for cultural evolution. I use coordinator as the general term for the genetic elements of cultural evolution. Language is thus a system of coordinators. I recognize several kinds of coordinators. A coupler is a kind of coordinator through which the temporal activities of two or more nervous systems are synchronized. The phonological system is thus a system of couplers. Can I extend this to a writing system even though writer and reader are not co-present? Worth a thought.

A designator kind of coordinator that is linked to a neural characterization of some phenomenon. To a first approximation, the content lexemes of language (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) are designators in this sense. In actual speaking and writing, of course, lexemes are ultimately realized as strings of phonemes. A given lexeme will be realized in speech by various strings of phonemes depending on this and that (e.g. number for nouns, tense and so forth for verbs). The lexeme’s meaning, of course, is that neural characterization (of some phenomenon); it is a Saussurian signified. Taken together the lexemes and phonemes are part of the internal structure of language as a Latourian intermediary.

I have also introduced the notion of a target as a kind of coordinator that can serve as the point of comparison for imitation, whether the creation of an artifact that imitates some model, or the imitation an actor’s behavior in a process of whatever kind. In an oral culture would a myth or folktale be a target in this sense? That’s a tricky one.

In general different performances will not be word-for-word alike one another. What’s the same is the story, which is ultimately carried by those neural characterizations the lexemes are linked to. As the story unfolds those component entities result in the cumulative construction of “the story” in its internal neural characterization (trajectory in the sense of dynamical systems theory).

More later.

Issues in Cultural Evolution 1: Cultural Stability in the Mesh

Once again I'm thinking this stuff through. Hence another bump. (Previous bump was on 4.13.17.) As I'm thinking about cultural evolution these days, I thought I'd bump this post to the top. It's from January of 2015.

This is the first of a series of three posts – I hope it’s only three – in which I explore the relationships between my views on cultural evolution and the views of more orthodox thinkers. The number of thinkers is in fact quite large, but I don’t intended to be exhaustive, just indicative. For the most part I’ll be working with reference to two sources:

1.) Alex Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture & Synthesize the Social Sciences, Chicago: 2011.

2.) An online report of a workshop that Daniel Dennett convened at the Santa Fe Institute that included the following evolutionary thinkers: Susan Blackmore, Robert Boyd, Nicolas Claidière, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Joseph Henrich, Olivier Morin, Peter Richerson, Dan Sperber, Kim Sterelny. Note that while most of these thinkers have special interests in cultural evolution, two of them are more generally interested in evolution, Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny.

In this first post I’m concerned with a general framework in which to think about culture and its evolution. In the second post I’ll examine the micro-scale mechanisms of cultural evolution, the cultural analogues to the biological gene and phenotype. In the third post I’ll look at the large-scale dynamics of cultural evolution. And, who knows, maybe there will be a fourth post to put things together. We’ll see.

Stability in the Mesh

Let me start out with a standard distinction, between culture and society. A society is a group of people and culture is the attitudes, ideas, customs, and practices through which they interact. Thus I will not be using the term “culture” to refer to a society, a common usage.

In the simplest societies people lived in relatively small bands of hunter-gatherers and had relatively few material possessions. Whatever they possessed they had to carry with them from one place to another. Everyone knew everyone else and they were, as well, acquainted with those living in neighboring bands. Those people were, after all, their friends and relatives.

When I talk of the mesh I mean those people and their relationships among one another, among and with their material goods, and with the features and creatures of their environment. That is where human culture arose, in that mesh. Culture provides a means of enriching those relationships, both by introducing new entities into the mesh – whether handcrafted objects, new activities, or various abstract entities, and so forth – and by establishing new kinds of relationships among entities in the mesh.

It is only to the extent that these entities and relationships are stable that the group can be said to have a coherent culture. Dawkins makes that point with respect to biology in the second chapter of The Selfish Gene (p. 12):

Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existence at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name, even if any one of them is short-lived. The things that we see around us, and which we think of as needing explanation–rocks, galaxies, ocean waves–are all, to a greater or lesser extent, stable patterns of atoms. Soap bubbles tend to be spherical because this is a stable configuration for thin films filled with gas. In a spacecraft, water is spherical globules, but on earth, where there is gravity, the stable surface for standing water is flat and horizontal. Salt crystals tend to be cubes because this is a stable way of packing sodium and chloride atoms together. In the sun the simplest atoms of all, hydrogen atoms, are fusing to form helium atoms, because in the conditions that prevail there the helium configuration is more stable. Other even more complex atoms are being formed in stars all over the universe, and were formed in the ‘big bang’ which, according to prevailing theory, initiated the universe. This is originally where the elements on our world came from.

Dawkins then goes on to argue that stability in the biological world depends on molecules he will call replicators (p. 15). At first these replicators were free-floaters in the primeval biomolecular soup. In time they became (p. 20) “genes, and we are their survival machines.” I understand that there is some controversy within biology as to whether or not Dawkinsian replicators are in fact the source of stability in the biosphere (see Peter Godfrey-Smith, The Replicator in Retrospect, Biology and Philosophy 15 (2000): 403-423), but that is secondary to my current purpose.

What’s important is Dawkins’s plea for stability as the necessary precursor to meaningful change. That is as important in culture as in biology. Without stability there is no chance of accumulating cultural innovations.

With this in mind, let’s go back in time. Here’s a passage from my review of Steven Mithen’s book on music (“Synch, Song, and Society”, Human Nature Review 5, 2005, pp. 66-85):

Obviously we have no record of these utterances, but the archeological record does have indications of cultural conservatism. The repertoire of stone tools was both limited and unchanged between 1.8 and 0.25 million years ago; Mithen gives particular emphasis to the constant form of hand-axes (164). Mithen suggests that, because their finely wrought form exceeds the practical demands of butchery, wood-working, and cutting plants, these hand-axes may have been fitness indicators in the sort of sexual selection regime Geoffrey Miller has advocated.

Beyond this, I note that Ralph Holloway (1969, 1981) long ago suggested that strongly conserved hand-axe form was an indicator of social norms. Those forms could not be conserved from one generation to the next unless there was a deliberate intention to do so. One has to note the significant features of an existing axe and discipline one’s knapping motions to produce that result. That is considerably more exacting than simply producing an axe with a sharp edge and appropriate heft. The motivation behind such exacting form, then, is not practical. Nor can it be merely aesthetic, which would allow for considerable individual variation. That leaves us with a desire to conform to social norms. Given the importance of such norms, that may in itself be a sufficient motivation for their form, to serve as a visible token of social solidarity. In any event, Holloway’s observation does not contradict Miller’s, and now Mithen’s hypothesis. Norms are norms, regardless of their specific purpose and norms that serve multiple ends are likely to be particularly strong.

My point is a simple one: the oldest evidence we have of specifically human cultural norms is of something that can be seen and therefor copied, those stone axes. Of course, we know little of the lifeways that those creatures lived. The oldest, of course, were not human. Since we cannot observe them we do not know exactly how they made those axes, but archaeologists have experimented and so we know something of the likely techniques.

Whatever those techniques were, exactly, those no particular mystery about how they were passed on from one person to another as the crafting would have been fully observable. As they saying goes, hominid, hominid do. What we don’t know is just what neuro-motor advances made this activity possible, nor why they did it. What we see in the fossil record, however, is stability, norms. That’s what we need to get started.

Sunny spots of greenery

Reading The Human Swarm 1: Hunter-Gatherers and the Plant Trap

I’ve been reading Mark Moffett’s new book:

Mark W. Moffett. The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. Basic Books 2019.

It is at heart a work of natural philosophy, an old term not in much use anymore. Moffett is interested in what constitutes society: our do we differentiate between insiders and outsiders? To do so he surveys the animal world and the follows the distinction in the evolution of human societies from hunter-gatherer groups to the current day.

In this post I offer a few excepts and some occasional comments on them.

Conclusion

As is often the case, I didn’t start at the beginning. I started with the conclusion, from which I offer these excerpts:

357:

Markers are essential components in all societies of more than a few hundred individuals, whether mighty human or mere insect. At a certain point of growth, however, markers alone are insufficient to hold a society of humans together.

359:

As we look to the future, it may be illuminating to reframe the discussion around an idea cherished by people everywhere, and which I have brought up only I passing thus far: their freedom.

362:

Our misfortune has been, and will be always, that societies don’t eliminate discontent; they simply redirect it toward outsiders–which paradoxically can include the ethnic groups within them.

And then it was off to Chapters 8, “Band Societies”, 9, “The Nomadic Life”, and 10, “Settling Down”. I offer some excerpts and a few comments of my own.

Band Societies

103:

There are shelves of articles and books by anthropologists who write about hunter-gatherers based solely on what happened in bands, while ignoring how hunter-gatherer bands identified with a broader society.

Because the members of human band societies, as well as chimpanzee societies, rarely come together, finding out where a society stops and the next starts can be tough, but sharp separation in the memberships of societies are in place just the same. Numerous accounts tell how hunter-gathers of recent centuries felt secure in the presence of their “own kind.”

And I’ve read a few of those books and articles, so this was news to me. I’d thought that they just wandered about all year, spending weeks or perhaps months in one place and then moving on, the same little band. But no it isn’t unusual for a number of bands to gather together and participate in a single activity. Thus a bit latter he’ll mention that “every Autumn in North America, bands of certain tribes gathered to frighten herds of bison over cliffs” (125), something I’d read about when I was young.

This behavior motivates a distinction that is central to the book, that between a group and a society. In this case the group is the band of people who live and travel together year-round. The society, on the other hand, is the large collectivity, consisting of all those groups of individuals who recognize one another as being of the same people. The may not and generally will not know everyone in the society very well, but they recognize rights and obligations with respect to one another that they do not recognize with respect to those outside the society.

106:

Among the Bushmen, bands of the same society occupied contiguous spaces, whereas a no-man’s land lay between different societies. Similar unoccupied gaps separate the societies of other species, too–communities of chimpanzees, packs of wolves, and colonies of fire ants.

109:

For hunter-gatherers the signage of daily existence was understated. Each nuance about the natural world and the people in it filled their senses. Distinctions between their neighbors that to us would be slight would have stood out as plainly as grass blades bent by a passing antelope.

111:

After all, given the low density of most hunter-gatherers in antiquity, people would have encountered an infinitesimal fraction of the outsiders most of us are familiar with today.

And this, I might add, underlines one of the central themes of the book. We now live in societies where we are constantly meeting and interacting with people we do not know. We think nothing of it. And yet, in a broad context, it is very odd. How do we manage to do it?

The Nomadic Life

Moffett likens a hunter-gather band to a small factory. Everyone works, 112: "Few tasks in a band factory demanded multiple players."

113:

The rhythm of expeditions orchestrated by sex added a layer of complexity beyond that of the movements of almost all other animals.

That is, to a first approximation, with allowances from some differences between male and female worlds, every adult in such a society knows everything there is to know. With the exception of a ritual/medical specialist, a medicine man or shaman, there are no occupational specialists. Everyone must make everything they need for daily life and perform every necessary task.

114:

An upside of this factory life was that people weren’t occupied with raising crops or struggling to take in excess food. They ended up with leisure time–a commodity that earned these nomads the moniker “the original affluent society.” [...]

That, and the bare-bones nature of ownership, meant everything about their nomadic way of life pretty much had to fit inside each member’s head, even if peers, and especially the elderly, were useful at reinforcing what was correct. [...]

Otherwise the sole specialized line of work in a band was a medicine man. Even then, Aboriginal healers, whose training in that role could take years, were still expected to carry out life’s mundane tasks themselves.

I find that last very interesting and extraordinarily important. It isn’t hunters or weavers or cooks and so forth who are specialists, but medicine men, who are, in that role, story tellers and ritualists as well. Of course medicine is fundamental – we in the United States devote enormous resources to it ourselves (not always very wisely or effectively either) – but in simple hunter-gather societies the telling of mythic stories and the enactment of ritual was a part, indeed much of, the healing process. The medicine man was, in effect, in charge of the mythic worldview by which the society understands itself in the world.

I’m thus reminded of Shelley’s assertion: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Has it always been thus? Of course the medicine man doesn’t think of themselves as originator of the stories. They’re only passing on the stories as they’ve been handed down to them, ultimately from supernatural creatures.

115:

Still, evincing one’s talents was a delicate matter. Because of the intimacy of life around camps, band societies rarely tolerated a showoff. [...]

So without specialists or jobs, band societies offered opportunities for dexterous toolmakers, dazzling storytellers, skilled mediators of social conflicts, and thoughtful decision makers.

116:

Among other indications that life in the society completely expressed their worldview, the bands didn’t distinguish sacred beliefs (usually relating directly to nature) from other aspects of life. Likewise, rituals, entertainment, and education–all matters except family matters were part and parcel of their relationship to the society as a whole.

121:

In contrast to the rapport afforded by a band, the societies that hunter-gatherers belonged to were about identities–inclusion and exclusion. Even though each band carried out its quotidian chores alone, the society offered a security blanket, supporting reliable market and marriage relations beyond the local fireplace.

Sometimes it's fun to track a small boat as it zips along the Hudson River

Now it passes the Frying Pan. I don't know what kind of boat that is, but it's been there in that same spot as long as I've been photographing the western short of Manhattan. It's one of my landmarks. It's always painted red, though it's only recently (the last year or so?) that the name's been clear. Perhaps it's some kind of restaurant. I don't know what that building with all the windows is, but it is very large, not tall, but wide and I suspect deep.

Now we're in yacht and tour-boat country. I think the clunky ones are tour and/or charter boats (for groups). The sleeker ones are surely private yachts.

Private yachts! Notice the sail boat along the right edge.

Now it's passing the Renzo-Piano-designed Whitney Museum, center left. The construction cranes are for a new park-on-the-shore, largely funded, I believe, by Barry Diller and Dianne von Fürstenberg.

You can just barely see the boat in the center. Notice the small yellow brick structure to its right? That's a ventilation tower for the Holland Tunnel. And I believe that's the Standard Hotel just to its left. Notice the various colors on the facades of the buildings.

Here's some special bonus images, blue/orange versions of two shots:

Zombie ideas alive and well in psychology

Lisa Feldman Barrett, Zombie Ideas, Observer,Ooctober 2019, (APS, Association for Psychological Science):

According to the economist Paul Krugman (2013), a zombie idea is a view that’s been thoroughly refuted by a mountain of empirical evidence but nonetheless refuses to die, being continually reanimated by our deeply held beliefs.

Zombie ideas abound in our culture, nibbling away at the brains of their victims. The mistaken belief that vaccinations cause autism — a celebrated zombie idea — is responsible for rising rates of vaccine-preventable diseases. The belief that a person’s personality type, assessed by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), predicts job performance is another zombie idea that continues to lure otherwise capable managers into making decisions that benefit neither employees nor their companies. [...]

For example, evolutionary psychologists have argued for years that waist-to-hip ratio is a phenotypic cue to reproductive success. [...] there is no evidence that healthy women with larger waist-to-hip ratios are less fecund or fertile than women with smaller ratios (Bovet, 2019). It’s a zombie idea. Ditto for the “body symmetry” hypothesis, which survives despite the empirical evidence (Jennions & Møller, 2002; for cogent analysis, see Prum, 2017). [...]

Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist, nominated “the nature/nurture distinction” as an undead idea that will not expire. “It’s commonplace in both scientific and popular writing to talk about innate human traits, ‘hard-wired’ behaviors or ‘genes for’ everything from alcoholism to intelligence,” writes Gopnik, in an aspirational obituary (Gopnik, 2015). She points to growing evidence, including the research of neurologist Michael Meaney, for the many complex ways that environmental factors govern gene expression and protein construction (i.e., epigenetics). [...]

Joshua Buckholtz, a clinical neuroscientist, nominated the “hydraulic model of self-control,” the idea that within each of us lurks ancient brain circuits that, when triggered, cause us to do stuff that we later regret (more colorfully referred to as the four Fs — fighting, fleeing, feeding, and . . . sex). Our prodigious prefrontal cortex allegedly puts the brakes on our inner beast, protecting us from worst selves, and impaired self-control in psychological disorders is thought to result from a faulty brake. [...]

I believe that one can be traced back to Plato's metaphor of the charioteer trying to control his horses.

The hydraulic model of self-control is a close cousin to another zombie, the triune brain, the idea that evolution laid down brain circuitry like sedimentary rock, with reptilian, limbic, and neurocortical layers. It has been known since the 1970s in evolutionary and developmental neuroscience that this story is a myth (Striedter, 2005). Think about this the next time you read that emotions erupt from neurons in the amygdala and other parts of the fabled limbic system, or that rational thought emerges in the neocortex, with one struggling to regulate the other.

I'm rather fond of that one, though I've never thought of it as any more than a metaphor. I believe I was introduced to it in Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine. He, of course, got it from its originator Paul MacLean. Continuing one with our zombie parade:

Here’s a shocker from APS Fellow Sari van Anders, social neuroendocrinologist: It’s time to bury the idea that “male” and “female” are genetically fixed, nonoverlapping categories (i.e., natural kinds). Evidence from numerous disciplines fundamentally disconfirms this common-sense view (Hyde, Bigler, Joel, Tate, & van Anders, 2019). [...]

Our final example of a dead idea that continues to roam the psychological landscape is that people can read emotions in other people’s faces, because certain configurations of facial movements, commonly called “facial expressions,” reliably and specifically signal a specific emotional state. A team of five senior scientists (including myself) met weekly for over 2 years, reviewing more than 1,000 publications related to this topic. We began with starkly different priors, but nonetheless came to consensus over what the data show, and we published our conclusions in the July 2019 issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Barrett, Adolphs, Marsella, Martinez, & Pollak, 2019).

I've got a number of posts that mention Barrett's work.

H/t Mark Liberman @ Language Log.