This is a big book that seeks to reveal the underpinnings of human society across time and space. Christakis is a practicing physician, as well as a Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale. His goal, in this book, is to explicate commonalities between all human societies. He terms this the social suite of eight characteristics- “1) The capacity to have and recognize individual identity 2) Love for partners and offspring 3) Friendship 4) Social networks 5) Cooperation 6) Preference for one’s own group (that is, “in group bias”) 7) Mild hierarchy (that is, egalitarianism) 8) Social learning and teaching” Christakis’ claim is not that every single human has always exhibited these characteristics, but, rather that these are generally universal traits, which humans naturally exhibit. More importantly, these traits are what has allowed humanity, as a species, to evolve into social beings with accumulated cultural advancements.
Christakis begins historically, by detailing small-scale human societies begun ex-novo. He recounts tribal foragers and hunter gatherers, 19th century shipped-wreck sailors, 20th century egalitarian communes, and scientists isolated on Antartica. His case is that, despite vast cultural differences, the general outlines of a successful social structure are remarkably the same. “Given the chance, isolated small-scale communities do not invent wholly new sorts of effective social order.” This structure, for Christakis, has biological underpinnings. “Humans have evolved to be social in a particular way precisely because they have been social in the past. The social systems our ancestors created became a force of natural selection. And once our species started down the path of living socially, humans set into motion a feedback loop that continues to shape how we live with one another today.”
Christakis stresses the importance of leadership in setting the parameters of society. “Groups have both instrumental leaders, those focused on practical objectives or tasks, and expressive leaders, people who work to build solidarity in the group…. Effective leaders have to help minimize group conflict, deal with troublesome individuals before they compromise group harmony, keep work on schedule, make rational decisions in emergencies, deal fairly with conflict, and facilitate communication.” Perhaps more importantly, however, Christakis reveals that, even given the same population of individuals, the form of the social structure can be conducive to success or failure as a society. Christakis has tested various social forms extensively, as part of his lab experiments at Yale. “The tendency to be altruistic or exploitative may depend heavily on how the social world is organized. So if we look at the same population of people and assigned them to one social world, we could make them really generous to one another, and if we put them in another sort of world, we could make them really mean or indifferent to one another…. Cooperation depends on the rules governing the formation of friendship ties…. The biggest threat to humans, more than predators or any environmental exigencies, is other humans.”
Christakis makes the case that monogamy evolved eventually amongst most successful human societies. “Cultural monogamy spread in part because it offered an advantage in competition between groups. Men lacking spouses resorted to violence within their own group or went on raids of other groups, provoking conflict. Political entities, nations, and religions that adopted monogamy had a reduced rate of this sort of violence and could deploy their resources more productively, internally and externally…. Providing an opportunity for every man to have a spouse meant that low-status males could become more risk-averse and future-oriented, less violent within their group, and more focused on providing for their children. High-status males, instead of seeking additional wives, could make long-term investments directed at acquiring wealth and caring for their offspring.” Pair bonding of mates also led to more equal care of their offspring between the sexes. “Evolutionarily speaking, that means that women provide men with paternity certainty in order to receive food and support. In the evolutionary tool kit, pair-bonded monogamy and female love may have served as authentic signals to increase confidence of males that offspring were their own, thus fostering parental investment in children.”
After sexual love, Christakis tackles friendship ties. He paraphrases anthropologist Daniel Hruschka, that friendship “may have evolved as a system of social relationships that encouraged cooperation and mutual aid even in situations fraught with uncertainty and in environments characterized by variability. In the relative absence of formal institutions, friendship is a kind of insurance against unexpected setbacks.” Christakis continues, “The ability of friendship to be useful during times of reversals, when an even exchange is not possible, is precisely what makes friendship so valuable as an adaption to our species…. The fact that you are irreplaceable to your friends even though you are unremarkable to strangers suggests there is a deep connection between individuality—another key part of the social suite—and friendship.” Friends serve as an alternative to kin, who can be more direct competitors for resources and might possess too similar genes and, therefore, too similar a skillset to be useful as insurance. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides add, “A person who values the same things you do will continually be acting to transform the local world into a form that benefits you, as a by-product of their acting to make the world suitable for themselves.” A related notion is in-group bias. “Our ancestors lived in environments in which occasional competition for scarce resources favored groups that had brave and self-sacrificing members. It was useful to have in-group altruism in the service of out-group conflict…. In order to be kind to others, it seems, we must make distinctions between us and them.”
Christakis briefly notes the other characteristics of the social suite that have made humans uniquely social creatures. “The ability to have an individual identity and recognize the identity of other individuals (especially beyond one’s mate or offspring) is uncommon in the animal world…. Facial recognition is a key part of human social and sexual interactions.” The ability of large groups of humans to cooperate successfully evolved through the notion of reciprocity. “Direct reciprocity…. has to do with repeated interactions across time…. The best strategy is to start out cooperating with someone and thereafter copy whatever that person responds with…. Indirect reciprocity assumes that interactions are observed by some people in the group who then inform other members of the group. In other words, people gossip.” Gossip serves as a form of reward and punishment that spreads throughout society, not just amongst those an individual comes into direct contact with. At its extreme, it can lead to banishment from the society entirely. Another aspect of the social suite is learning and teaching. “Social learning is likely to be more effective than solitary learning when the costs of acquiring information are high and when peers are sources of reliable information.” This leads to cumulative knowledge. “There is a clustering of behaviors within the communities whereby techniques are uniform within given communities but vary between communities.”
Finally, Christakis takes on how genes have affected human’s social structures. He begins with the idea of exophenotypes, “the nonincidental, genetically guided changes that an organism makes to its surroundings in order to improve its prospects for reproduction and survival.” He considers the dams beavers make and the escape tunnels in mouse burrows as prime examples. Christakis then explains social epistasis, the idea that “the impact of genes in one individual may be affected by the genes of another individual.” Network effects may also be important in gene survival. “Genes may even require the presence of particular genes in other organisms in order to be useful and in order for natural selection to favor them.” He suggests that the genes that modified the human larynx to make speech easier were not as useful until there were others to communicate reciprocally with.
Christakis posits a dual-inheritance theory- “a reference to our capacity to inherit both genetic and cultural information from our ancestors…. Our capacity to create culture is itself an adaptation shaped by natural selection…. We are a long-lived, group-living organism that has generational overlap…. Culture itself can evolve over time…. Superior ideas can outperform weaker ones—and be selected for…. Lateral transmission (of ideas or practices) between individuals within the same generation [speeds up cultural evolution]…. Cultural evolution can be explicitly directed…. This cultural system of inheritance itself becomes a feature of our species’ evolutionary landscape.” Humans have adapted a unique psychology prone to absorb culture, “including a tendency to conform to what others are doing, to develop and obey local norms, to privilege high-status or older people who could be potential teachers, and to pay attention to the people whom others are paying attention to.” In fact, today, prestige more than dominance confers status in human societies. “Subordinates in prestige hierarchies are attracted to their superiors and try to get near them—to befriend, observe, copy, and otherwise benefit from them.” Population size and specialization have also facilitated the ever-greater pace of cultural evolution and accumulated knowledge. In fact, Christakis notes that cultural evolution might be retarding genetic evolution, uniquely within humans. “The power of culture may mean that our species retains genetic problems that might otherwise have disappeared.”
The interplay between culture and genes has a ratcheting effect on human behavior. Christakis makes the case that it is antiquated to think in binary terms such as nature versus nurture. Humans have been shaped by both in a manner that is impossible to untangle. “As humans came increasingly to rely on the knowledge of others, they became even friendlier and kinder so that they could interact reasonably peacefully within groups and so that they could take full advantage of culture in order to survive…. Culture is an emergent property of human groups, a new property of the whole not manifested in the parts themselves…. Human culture also cumulates.” Humans are social beings. We have evolved over time so that we could not survive absent our societal underpinnings. “Like snails carrying their physical environment with them on their backs, we carry our social environment of friends and groups with us wherever we go. And surrounded by this protective social shell, we can survive an incredibly broad range of circumstances.”
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