We (animals) pursue survival in order to reproduce. I can imagine that some of the more elaborate mating rituals some animals behave in do not look exactly survival-oriented, but those behaviors appear to be genetically hardwired in most species. A frog, for instance, croaks in order to find a mate but in doing so puts itself at risk for lunch. Yet, it must, because it feels the pressure to procreate, due to genetics. Most behaviors not directly related to procreation are behaviors aimed at getting food and not becoming food. There are oddities, like alligators gaping or magpies thieving, but those kinds of behaviors, again, are hardwired. Dynamic, adaptive behavior is almost always survival-related, one way or the other.
This, I think, is the central point here. It’s what I meant by “basic survival”.
It’s a fair question, and an interesting one. What I meant by “basic survival” I think is pretty much defined above, and, far from arguing for “special creation” for humans, I would submit the opposite: that we’re hardwired much like other primates, but perhaps have a greater propensity to aggression because we have more latitude to make those choices consciously.
Here are a couple of interesting cites on that subject.
This one tells us that animal aggression can be classified as predatory or intraspecific (i.e.- non-predatory intraspecies aggression). The former is so clearly in pursuit of food that biologists generally use the term “aggressive behavior” only to refer to intraspecific aggression. The causes of that aggression are typically fights “over food, shelter, and mates or over territories where these can be found”, which I would argue is equally motivated by survival, just like predation for food.
You will no doubt want to argue that in the large scheme of things humans typically fight over the same sorts of things, and to an extent that’s true but it appears there may be some really important differences. Further in the article it’s noted that “Therefore, in functional terms, it is easy to explain why animals fight: they do so to gain access to valuable resources. A more difficult question to answer is why conflicts are often resolved conventionally, by displays and threats, rather than by out-and-out fighting.” And here we come to the crux. Just how much of this sort of violence is there in the animal kingdom compared to ours, and why? The article notes that animal aggression is “widespread” in the sense of being exhibited across a broad spectrum of species, but that’s not the same as saying that it’s extremely common. And when it does occur, animal aggression can almost always be traced to biological origins related to survival; humans have evolved with presumably much the same traits but don’t necessarily exhibit the same behaviors in our present environment. The article continues:
Current understanding of the functions and evolution of behaviour has been greatly influenced by the economic approach that is central to the discipline of behavioral ecology. In this framework, both the costs and the benefits of particular actions are determined, ultimately in terms of their Darwinian fitness, which is an individual’s genetic contribution to the next generation (through production and rearing of offspring) compared with that of other individuals. The cost-benefit analysis is then used to predict how animals should behave during fights in order to maximize their net fitness gains.
… This is not to suggest that animals make rational calculations about the consequences of their behaviour. Rather, it is assumed that natural selection, acting over thousands of generations, has resulted in the evolution of animals that are able to adjust their behaviour to the circumstances in which fights occur, by mechanisms that may well be unconscious.
There is also evidence that humans have evolved in just the same way. The difference seems to be that we make intentional, conscious choices toward violence, a thesis that is laid out in this article titled Humanlike Violence Is Extremely Rare in Other Animals. While the article itself is essentially an opinion piece, albeit by a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology, it does contain quite a number of authoritative cites. For example:
Consider also what world renowned primatologist Jane Goodall wrote about violence in wild chimpanzees in her landmark book The Chimpanzees of Gombe:
[INDENT]it is easy to get the impression that chimpanzees are more aggressive than they really are. In actuality, peaceful interactions are far more frequent than aggressive ones; mild threatening gestures are more common than vigorous ones; threats per se occur much more often than fights; and serious, wounding fights are very rare compared to brief, relatively mild ones. (p. 357)
And, along these lines, Robert W. Sussman, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues Paul A. Garber and Jim Cheverud, reported in 2005 in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology that for many nonhuman primates, more than 90 percent of their social interactions are affiliative rather than competitive or divisive (see also this book and this essay for an update on what we’re learning about cooperation in other animals).
… An excellent book titled War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views edited by Douglas Fry that deals with many of these issues will be published in early 2013. In this book ethologist Peter Verbeek notes,
we go to war not because we are naturally driven to do so, but because we choose to do so. A choice for war is linked to overcoming fear and empathy, and it is critically important to understand what biological, social-learning, and cultural factors take us there.
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Remember that your claim was that humans are “amazingly peaceable” compared to other animals. This is shaping up to be a hard claim to support.
It cold be said to be a extension or corruption of family.
Hierarchy is not “a natural human condition” in that humans have no wolflike follow-the-pack-leader instinct. However, society is a natural human condition. There was never a time when people typically wandered around alone like deer; our pre-human hominid ancestors lived in bands and tribes, cooperatively. And any society is a petri dish for hierarchy to grow.
There is a theory that about a million years ago the Congo river formed and separated out bonobos from chimps. The chimps (I believe) had to compete against gorillas for food while the bonobos did not. The bonobos evolved to be more pro-social and less aggressive while the chimps are more aggressive due to resource shortages. I have no idea what baboons are such assholes though.
Where is the idea that mutalism is the organizing force? Multicellular life is made of organized single celled life. But there isn’t much cooperation between single celled life or even between multicellular life (outside of social animals, which are the exception).
There are 7 billion people on earth, the vast majority are not at war at any given time. I’d say about 99.5%+ are not currently engaged in armed combat. Many of us in developed nations rarely experience violence in our personal lives.
South Africa gave up nukes. Many ex soviet states gave up their nukes too. Several nations had nuke programs and gave them up.
Globally humanity probably spends about 3% of GDP on military. Most wealthy nations (other than the US) spend closer to 2%. By comparison in wealthy countries most spend about 10-11% of GDP on healthcare, and maybe 6%+ on education. So the average wealthy country spends almost 10x as much money on health care & education as on militaries (and much of the time, militaries are not actively engaged in combat). We humans aren’t terrible.
Does the last sentence not contradict the previous ones?
We may not have precisely the same pack instincts as wolves, but I would posit that any human society, in the sense of any grouping at all, invariably develops a leadership hierarchy. Or perhaps more accurately, a dominance and control hierarchy. This is always my argument against “minimal government” and other libertarian nonsense: there is always going to be a power structure and a dominant power, and the question that has to be asked is what that power structure should be, and whether it should be architected for society’s best interests or just left to the random vagaries of fate.
Why does the natural human condition have to be either scenario? I think the natural human condition is to be fluid to the extent that they can use varying forms of organization to optimize survivability.
Not that I understand game theory, but it is in the rulers best interest to be benevolent and selfless when the people can retaliate. It is in his best interest to be abusive and selfish when they cannot.
When we were hunter gatherers and any alpha male bully could be beaten to death by all the beta males, there was incentive to be benevolent. When agriculture took hold and the leader could obtain a monopoly on violence by controlling the police and military the incentive was to be abusive.
So I guess it depends on how many checks and balances on leadership you have. The fewer you have, the less incentive the leaders have to be egalitarian. Its unrelated, but in the US we are moving away from checks and balances. States secret privilege as an excuse to hide evidence, NSA wiretaps, secret courts, militant police, the breakdown of the rule of law at the higher ends of power, etc. The incentives are moving towards less reason to treat the public with respect as we cannot retaliate against abuse in any meaningful way.
It’s not a question of what “has to be”, but of what “is” – of the power structure that seems to arise in any purposeful assemblage of humans that has ever come together. If it has ever been otherwise in the entire history of civilization, I’m not aware of it.
Well, there are such things as “non-hierarchical organizations.” And many religious movements have been egalitarian communities (though even they tend to have identifiable leaders).
Part of it has to be the genes we inherited from the sloths. Humans are naturally lazy. Thinking is hard. If we can delegate the thinking to the smarter guy, we will tend to trust him and do what he says. That is one way leadership develops. And in smaller groups, becoming the leader is kind of a risky venture, so we happily shake off that as well.
Thanks for the links, I hadn’t looked at the subject recently, here’s an interesting hypothesis from one of your links
Honestly, though, you could say the same thing about humans.
I had a quick look at the link, and it seems to me that it’s talking about management styles, in which “non-hierarchical organizations” doesn’t mean the absence of hierarchy, just a lesser emphasis on it. Or as one of the commenters there put it, “All organizations are hierarchies – it’s that there is a continuum from control to greater engagement.” Exactly.
I know it’s true because I used to work for an organization like that, one that had a management style that could be described as “paternal” and “benevolent” and that was really big on individual empowerment. It was a great place to work, but it was still at its core a conventional corporation. Despite my being very non-political by nature (i.e.- “schmoozing with upper management” would be the last thing I was interested in or capable of doing) I managed to get a lot of great organizational things accomplished just because I was passionate about them and was allowed to do those sorts of things. But it was still a multinational corporation and certainly had a very clear administrative hierarchy overlaid on the whole empowerment concept.
I think hierarchy has a certain efficiency…whether or not it’s “natural,” I don’t know. Apes and chimps seem to have some amount of hierarchy, even if it is just elders in society. In any communal group, some individuals show more propensity to make critical decisions that affect the group; in humans you could say that this propensity is “education,” “wisdom,” or some similar defining characteristic that gives one better clairvoyance over another.
Either way, I think a hierarchical structure has shown to be efficient for decision-making – in terms of empire or warfare.
I believe hierarchical lines can be blurred based on how educated a populace is, and with the advent of the Internet and information sharing; if a populace were educated enough, then news could be written in academic form, people would have more interest/more understanding of legislation, and vote accordingly.
Is it “natural?” I don’t know. But I think hierarchy has been a “natural” extension of expanding civilization and growing populace – in a society of 2, there’s not much room for hierarchy, but in a society of millions, hierarchy is a “natural” byproduct. My two cents.
It’s the other way around - without hierarchy, I don’t think a society of millions can be created in the first place. You need organization to reach such high population levels.
Fair.