Bunches of monkeys

Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! The devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.

Charles Darwin, Noteboook M

Maimoun angushti shaitan ast.

(A monkey is the devil’s fingers.)

Tajik proverb

Monkeys and apes are not only exceptionally brainy, but also distinctively social. Most mammals are solitary (apart from mothers and their juvenile offspring of course). Among a minority of mammals, adult males and females set up pairbonds. And some mammals form larger groups. In most cases, however, these are relatively unstructured aggregations: a herd of buffalo is more like a crowd of people than a human community. A handful of mammals – elephants, cetaceans, and the majority of monkeys and apes – form more structured groups, enduring and internally differentiated.

Social evolution is path dependent: primate social organization is affected by ecology, but also has a strong phylogenetic component.  This makes it possible to offer a tentative reconstruction of the stepwise evolution of stable sociality in primates. Here’s an evolutionary tree, showing inferred transitions between solitary living, and multimale/multifemale, unimale/multifemale, and pairbonded groups:

A diagram of the possible evolutionary dynamics looks like this:

And the accompanying story goes like this: about 52 million years ago, the solitary nocturnal ancestor of monkeys and apes switched to being diurnal. This allowed for the exploitation of a whole range of new foods, but it also exposed the ancestor to new forms of predation. The first step in the evolution of monkey and ape sociality, then, was aggregation in multimale/multifemale groups to cut predation risk. At first these groups would have been loosely structured and unstable, but eventually they would have evolved into something like what we see today among most Old World monkeys: stable (sometimes lifelong) networks of relatives and friends, dominants and subordinates, nested within enduring communities.

A later development, going back to 20 million years ago or less, was a shift, among some of these social primates, to unimale/multifemale groups, or pair-living family groups.

The inferred development of structured social groups in primates bears a remote similarity to the evolution of eusociality among social insects. According to current theories, the starting point for eusociality is the development of a defended nest site where females lay eggs and raise offspring. Sometimes an established nest site is so valuable that it’s adaptive for the next generation of offspring to stay on when they mature rather trying to found new nests. The eventual result may be the evolution of a highly structured society, with strong reproductive skew: some nest members specialize in reproduction, others in foraging or defending the nest. The latter may evolve into an obligately sterile caste.

Primates too have developed an intensified, structured sociality as a response to obligate group living. But the parallels with eusocial insects go only so far. The great majority of primates give birth to one offspring at a time. There are no queen bee baboons whelping one vast litter after another and pushing subaltern kin into caring for them. This goes for humans as well. Our species matches the social insects in the scale of cooperation, but we manage this through a complicated dance of coalition-building and reputation management. For a primate, building a honey-bee style superorganism has to be an aspiration rather than a reality.

Dead baby monkeys

There’s a dark side to being a primate. A few years back a review article summarized data on rates of lethal aggression in non-human animals. The figure below shows some of the results. Several clusters of especially violent species stand out in the figure, including primates (redder is more violent). Bats are pretty nice, though (too bad about all the viruses).

Much of the lethal aggression in primates involves infanticide. Sarah Hrdy demonstrated back in the 1970s that infanticide occurs regularly in Hanuman langurs, monkeys in India. A male who takes over a group of females will systematically kill offspring sired by the previous male. If you think evolution is about the survival of the species, this is hard to explain. But it makes sense given the logic of the selfish gene. Females who lose an infant return more quickly to breeding again, and the father of the next infant is likely to be the killer of the previous one.

Primates may be particularly vulnerable to this grim logic, because they spend a long time as infants. Among primates, commonly,

           L/G>1

That is to say that the time, L, a female spends lactating for an infant (during which she is unlikely to conceive), is usually greater than the time, G, she spends gestating an infant. This puts particular pressure on males to hurry things along by eliminating nursing infants fathered by other males.

Death of Astyanax

As a result, infanticide is relatively common among primates, and females under particularly strong pressure to find ways to avoid it. Hanuman langurs live in one-male units, where a female has little choice about who she mates with. In other species, by contrast (most baboons, chimpanzees), multiple males reside with multiple females. In these species females are often sexually promiscuous, sometimes actively soliciting multiple males for sex. This is probably mostly a matter of confusing paternity sufficiently to suppress the threat of infanticide. There’s a general lesson here: females are not always monogamously inclined, but female promiscuity generally has different evolutionary roots than male promiscuity.

Slime had they for mortar

“And slime had they for mortar” Genesis 11:3

The last blog post was about a major transition in evolution, the origin of social insect colonies, in which individual ants and bees work together to make up something like a superorganism. Around the same time that this was happening we find evidence for another venture in higher-level evolution, the slime molds. (The evidence is in the form of a recently discovered 100 million year old fossil, although slime molds were probably around long before this.)

John Tyler Bonner, who died in 2019, spent 70 years of a very long life studying cellular slime molds. Here are some weirdly beautiful movies he made. Cellular slime molds switch between being single cell organisms and multicellular organisms. Most of the time they live alone, looking and acting much like non-social amoebae. But when times get tough, and local food resources are exhausted, the cells start sending out chemical signals indicating they are ready to shift to another state. Individual cells aggregate to form a mass, which is capable of moving around, seeking out new food sources, even learning. (In cellular slime molds, cells retain their identity as separate cells. In plasmodial slime molds, the cells merge to form one super cell.) The mass may raise up a fruiting body atop a stem. The spores in the fruiting body may blow away, perhaps being carried some distance to a better home, where the survivors disperse and feast as the cycle begins again. There is an interesting sociobiological puzzle here: the cells forming the stalk are sacrificing themselves for the sake of the spore cells. This is probably an instance of kin selection.

Both social insects and slime molds may carry lessons for human social life, which, on a large scale, is radically different from the social life of our primate near relations. Both social insects and humans commonly build enormous social organizations with high levels of cooperation. These organizations are too large for their members to recognize one another as individuals. Instead they rely on signals to show others that they are the right sort. With social insects, these are mostly chemical signals. With humans these are the various insignia – letters of commission, uniforms, shibboleths, etc. – that mark the bearer as the occupant of a particular social role, independently of his personal character. (“You salute the uniform, not the man.”) For more on this topic, check out Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall.

And, as with slime molds, humans seem to go through characteristic alternations in their social lives, on a time scale of multiple generations. With slime molds there is an alternation between solitary and social phases. With humans there is an alternation between phases of lesser and greater social solidarity (asabiya). Borrowing from Max Weber, we might call this an alternation between routine and charisma. In phases of routine, people learn the rules of their society, and do their best to get ahead by following the rules, or working around them. But in times of crisis, the old ways no longer serve. While slime molds secrete pheromones to instigate aggregation in hard times, humans secrete cosmologies. Prophets arise, with visions of a new order, taking their cues from divine visions, or the Book of Daniel or Revelations, or theories of political economy or race science. The great majority of such projects are stillborn, but occasionally one succeeds, subduing doubters and infidels, overthrowing the established order or leading a chosen people to a new land. The world we live in – the civilizational landscape of Eurasia, the cultural geography of the United States (I write this in Salt Lake City, Utah) – is in some degree the legacy of such projects.

The quotation above from Genesis 11:3 was used by Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, published in the early years of the Cold War, still worth reading today.

Related, here’s me on the sociobiology of “ethnic group selection.”

Consider her ways

99.9 – 95.6 million years ago.

Here is my obituary for Ed Wilson (1929 – 2021) and below some thoughts about ants.

There are some pieces of paleontology that really stand out in the popular imagination. Dinosaurs are so cool that even if they hadn’t existed we would have invented them. (Maybe we did, in the form of dragons. And look ahead (or back) to early April for the dinosaur-griffin connection.) Also, as I suggested in a previous post, transitions from one form of locomotion to another – flightless dinosaurs to birds, fish to tetrapods, land mammals to whales – really grab the imagination (and annoy creationists) because the largest and most distinctive named folk categories of animals (snakes, fish, birds) are built around modes of locomotion.

Evolutionary biologists tend to see things differently. Turning fins into legs, legs into wings, and legs back into flippers is pretty impressive. But the really major evolutionary transitions involve the evolution of whole new levels of organization: the origin of the eukaryotic cell, for example, and the origin of multicellular life. From this perspective, the really huge change in the Mesozoic – sometimes called the Age of Dinosaurs – is the origin of eusociality among insects like ants and bees. An ant nest or a bee hive is something like a single superorganism, with most of its members sterile workers striving – even committing suicide — for the colony’s reproduction, not their own. (100 million years ago – corresponding to March 28 in Logarithmic History — is when we find the first bee and ant fossils, but the transition must have been underway before that time.)

Certainly the statistics on social insects today are impressive.

The twenty thousand known species of eusocial insects, mostly ants, bees, wasps and termites, account for only 2 percent of the approximately one million known species of insects. Yet this tiny minority of species dominate the rest of the insects in their numbers, their weight, and their impact on the environment. As humans are to vertebrate animals, the eusocial insects are to the far vaster world of invertebrate animals. … In one Amazon site, two German researchers … found that ants and termites together compose almost two-thirds of the weight of all the insects. Eusocial bees and wasps added another tenth. Ants alone weighed four times more than all the terrestrial vertebrates – that is, mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians combined. E. O. Wilson pp 110-113

E. O. Wilson, world’s foremost authority on ants, and one of the founders of sociobiology, thinks that the origin of insect eusociality might have lessons for another major evolutionary transition, the origin of humans (and of human language, technology, culture, and complex social organization). In his book The Social Conquest of Earth he argues that a key step in both sets of transitions was the development of a valuable and defensible home – in the case of humans, a hearth site. Wilson returns to this argument in his recent book Genesis: The Deep Origin of Human Societies. On the same topic, Mark Moffett’s book The Human Swarm: How Human Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall,  asks how it is that we somehow rival the social insects in our scale of organization.

One trait found in both ants and humans is large-scale warfare. Wilson gives an idea of the nature of ant warfare in fictional form in his novel Anthill. It’s an interesting experiment, but also disorienting. Because individual recognition is not important for ants, his story of the destruction of an ant colony reads like the Iliad with all the personal names taken out. But Homer’s heroes fought for “aphthiton kleos,” undying fame (and got some measure of it in Homer’s poem). The moral economy of reputation puts human cooperation in war and peace on a very different footing from insect eusociality. (Here’s my take on “ethnic group selection,” which depends on social enforcement, perhaps via reputation.)

“Consider her ways” is the title of a short story by John Wyndham, about a woman from the present trapped in a future ant-like all-female dystopia. It was made into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The title is from Proverbs 6:6, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.”

Other science fiction authors have taken a cheerier view of a world without men.

Big in Japan

Japan with its purely feudal organization of landed property and its developed petite culture gives a much purer picture of the European Middle Ages than all our history books.

Karl Marx. Capital

A subject peasantry; widespread use of the service tenement … instead of a salary …; the supremacy of a class of specialized warriors; ties of obedience and protection which bind man to man and … assume the distinctive form called vassalage; fragmentation of authority; and in the midst of all this, the survival of other forms of association, family and State … seem to be the fundamental features of European feudalism … [But] feudalism was not an event which happened once in the world. Like Europe – though with inevitable and deep-seated differences – Japan went through this phase.

Marc Bloch. Feudal Society

After centuries of relative isolation, Japan was forcibly opened to the modern world with Commodore Perry’s visits in 1853 and 1854.

Japan is an interesting case for those who think there are laws of human history – that history is more than just a collection of narratives – because of the similarities between European and Japanese social structure, in spite of wildly divergent high culture. Here are some theories (not necessarily incompatible) about the convergent social evolution of Europe and Japan.

Marxism. According to Marx, there is a limited number of “modes of production” – slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and so on – defined by how the ruling class squeezes a surplus out of the exploited. There are quasi-scholastic arguments among Marxists about how many modes there are, and which society belongs to what mode. Some Marxists define feudalism so broadly that it covers most complex societies before capitalism. Others however (and probably Marx himself) would apply a more limited definition that confines feudalism to Europe (maybe just Western Europe) and Japan. On this view, all feudal societies, even if they are not historically related, will show some generic similarities. Thus (so the story goes) it is no accident that Japan is the one non-Western society to make a relatively rapid and easy transition to capitalism. Even if you don’t buy the whole Marxist package, Perry Anderson’s two volumes, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State (from which I got the Marx quote above) are well worth reading.

Cliodynamics. According to some theories, state formation takes place along “meta-ethnic frontiers,” where very different cultures and ways of life abut. In Eastern Europe and most of Asia, the mother of all meta-ethnic frontiers is the one dividing settled farmers from pastoral nomads. The vast majority of really huge empires in history have formed on one side or other of this frontier, or straddling it. In Western Europe and Japan, however, history played out differently. There was less pressure to corral everyone into one monster state, or to overcome the fragmentation of authority by consolidating Church and State, or Emperor and Shogun. (Although consultation and consent between king and vassal didn’t develop in Japan as it did in Medieval Europe.)

To be continued …

Homo hierarchicus

1159 – 1206

The Rajatrangini (River of Kings) is a history of Kashmir, dating to about 1150. A striking thing about it is that it is pretty much the only work in Sanskrit that clearly qualifies as history. Other material about the past in traditional Hindu India is heavily mythological, or limited to genealogies and chronicles, and contains virtually no dates. The paucity of historical works in pre-Muslim India is striking, given that the country has an impressive intellectual tradition, with important achievements in mathematics, linguistics, literature, and literary theory. Hindu India is very different in this respect from China, where there is a rich historical record and where the study of history, and the lessons of history, has been a major intellectual concern for millennia.

Donald Brown is an anthropologist who has worked in Southeast Asia. He became curious about why some Southeast Asian societies seem to have been more interested than others in developing an accurate understanding of the past. His eventual conclusion, after reviewing evidence from many societies, is that historical consciousness is underdeveloped in societies with closed, hereditary systems of stratification. India of course is famously a caste society. True, there are scholars who argue that Indian caste-consciousness has been exaggerated by Western Orientalists bent on making the place seem exotic. But recent DNA evidence shows that high levels of caste endogamy have been characteristic of India for at least 1500 years. And in economist Gregory Clark’s recent analyses of surnames and social stratification in a number of societies, India is an outlier, with exceptionally enduring associations between surnames and social class, reflecting the caste system. (Kashmir may have been an atypical part of India in this regard.)

In societies with hereditary ruling elites and caste-like social stratification, according to Brown, history is an inconvenience. The preference (at least out in public – people may talk differently in private) is for mythological accounts of caste origins that link caste hierarchy to the order of the cosmos. There are other differences as well associated closed versus open hierarchies. Individual personality receives less attention in societies with closed hierarchies; behavior is explained by role, office, and social category. The art of biography is less developed. Closed societies are less interested in divination (presumably you don’t need a fortune teller to know what your future holds). The differences extend even to visual art: closed societies show less interest in realistic portraiture; artists depict types rather than individuals. In sum, there is a real difference, Brown argues, between historical knowledge and ideology, and caste-like societies generate more of the latter.

In addition to India vs. China, other closed vs. open pairs of societies in Brown’s review include Egypt vs. Mesopotamia+Israel, Sparta vs. Athens, Early vs. Imperial Rome, Medieval West vs. Islam+Byzantium, and Venice vs. Florence.

Donald Brown also wrote Human Universals, a book that argues, against a strong tradition of cultural relativism in anthropology, that there is a wide assortment of cultural universals.

And Donald Brown is also co-author of The Penis Inserts of Southeast Asia, a short book about the penis inserts of Southeast Asia.

Empires and barbarians

The fall of Rome involved the disintegration of the Roman state; the collapse of long-distance trade; the disappearance of mass-produced pottery, coinage, and monumental architecture over large areas; declining literacy among commoners and elites; great insecurity of life and property, and demographic collapse. The process was drawn out and played out differently in different regions. In the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, central government supported by taxation continued; in the West it largely disappeared. The nadir in the West was perhaps the tenth century. We might set the turning point at the battle of Lechfeld (955): a last set of invaders off the steppes, the Magyars, was defeated by the Emperor Otto, and then adopted Christianity, gave up nomadic marauding, and settled down as feudal lords in Hungary.

The fall of Rome illustrates a general lesson. The overall trend of history is for more complex societies to replace less complex. (Important note: “more complex” is not the same as “nicer.”) But the process is an uneven one, in part because military effectiveness is only loosely coupled with social complexity. Tribal peoples with states next door often react by developing states of their own, partly to defend against their civilized neighbors, partly to prey on them. The resulting societies – no longer tribal, not really civilized, but barbarian – have sometimes been more than a match militarily for their more complex neighbors. In Europe, the result over nearly a millennium was a great leveling process. Rome declined under barbarian assault, while state organization, class stratification, and Christianity spread eventually as far as the Slavic East and the Scandinavian North. (See Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians.)

By the end of the first millennium, Western Christendom had some consciousness of itself as distinct from the Islamic world; this would later help motivate the Crusades, but it would never be enough to spur unification. Much later, in the twentieth century, Europe would be divided by a different set of meta-ethnic frontiers, centered on the clash of ideologies, rather than civilization versus barbarism. But that’s a story for later

I now pronounce you

734 – 804 CE

Charlemagne was crowned emperor on Christmas Day in the year 800, a collaboration between Church and State. A particular division of power between secular and religious authorities would define European society for many centuries. 

On this blog I pay particular attention to kinship systems. They deserve this attention: the study of kinship is the most important contribution of cultural anthropology to the social sciences. And while kinship can seem like a recondite, specialized topic, I would argue that it is important for understanding not just small scale, tribal, “kin based” societies, but the major civilizations of Eurasia as well. Europe ­– specifically Western Christendom – followed a particular path in the development of kinship and family life. The Western Church prohibited cousin marriage, divorce and polygamy, and encouraged the breakup of extended families, and clans. Unusually among major civilization, Christian marriage depended on the consent of both groom and bride, rather than being arranged by parents (at least below the level of royalty and high aristocracy), resulting in a shift in power from older to younger generations, and probably encouraging the accumulation of physical and human capital by young couples.

There is evidence that modern Westerners, the W.E.I.R.D (Western Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), have a distinctive cognitive style, relatively individualistic and context-independent. The roots of this distinctive psychology may go back to the Middle Ages. This argument is made in several recent articles and a book from Joe Henrich and co-workers. A few observations: religion isn’t everything; differences in kinship systemsand intellectual style between Europe and China are evident well before the advent of Christianity. Also, it’s not just the influence of the Church that mattered for the establishment of the Western kinship system in the early Middle Ages, but the development of a particular economic regime, the bipartite manor, in which peasants worked some of the week on their own land and some of the week for their lords. The lords of the manors, clerical and secular, pushed for the establishment of independent nuclear families as basic units of production and surplus extraction. Here’s a scholarly treatment, and you can find a lot more from the blogger and tweeter who calls herself h-bd chick.

Just a generation after Charlemagne, Tang dynasty China presents an instructive contrast. Buddhism had been spreading extensively in China, and Buddhist monasteries had come to acquire considerable wealth. Buddhism presents some clear parallels with Christianity, both in ideals and institutions, but China followed a different path from Europe religiously and socially. Confucian scholars resented the new religion, and complained that it undermined the loyalty of father to son, and subject to emperor. Responding to these complaints, the emperor Wuzong suppressed Buddhist monasteries in 845, and the religion was brought under heavy state control. State patriarchy won, and would dominate China for more than another millennium.

Mirror empires

After centuries of division into warring states, China was united in 221 BCE, under the short-lived Qin and then the long-lived Han dynasties. (Here’s a dynamic map showing the process of unification.) Just a few years later, in 209 BCE, the nomads of the steppe north of China were united under the Xiongnu confederation.

China, like Rome, provides an instance of empire formation along a metaethnic frontier between civilized and barbarian peoples. But it also differs from the Roman case. The Roman frontier kept pushing into barbarian territory for many centuries. The descendants of Asterix and Obelisk would largely forget their identity as Gauls, and become Romans, speaking a dialect of Latin.

But in the Far East, the steppe north of China would not support agriculture, and the people who lived there would continue their nomad way of life and retain a separate ethnic identity. For centuries after 221 BCE, China held off the barbarians by a combination of military measures (notably of course the Great Wall) and bribery (poorly disguised as “gifts” from Emperor to subject). The Xiongnu held together as a centralized state because their ruler managed the flow of trade and tribute from China. In effect, Qin/Han and Xiongnu were “mirror empires,” – or, adapting a phrase from Thomas Barfield, the Xiongnu were a “shadow empire” of the Han – facing off across the line between Sown and Steppe.

Asabiya and meta-ethnic frontiers

In 390 BCE an army of Gauls, 30 thousand strong, marched out of northern Italy into Latium, an area that included Rome. They defeated a Roman army, sacked and burned Rome, and left only after being paid a large tribute. This marked a turning point for Rome, which resolved never again to allow such a disaster. Over the next century, Romans used a mixture of coercion and consent to bind their Italian allies more closely to them. Attempted secession was punished. But those who accepted their position as allies were not simply crushed and plundered (as in many other empires) but granted some or all of the privileges of Roman citizenship in return for military contributions. Membership in the Roman confederation was attractive enough that many Italian states sought it voluntarily.

The history of Greece during this period is different. Greek city-states never united. In the aftermath of the bloody Peloponnesian war, different city-states went on fighting for supremacy, until they were finally conquered by an outside power, Macedonia.

Peter Turchin is an ecologist-turned-social scientist who thinks that the contrast between Rome and Greece illustrates some general Laws of History. According to Turchin, the rise and fall of empires is partly conditioned on the strength of “asabiya,” or social solidarity. (He borrows the term from the medieval Arab historian ibn Khaldun.) The strength of states depends not just on material factors like population size and wealth, but also on morale – on the willingness of citizens to work together for the common good (which includes punishing free-riders). Asabiya was high in early Rome; in Greece, by contrast, while individual city-states might evoke strong group feeling, there was little willingness to cooperate for the good of Greece as a whole.

Asabiya in turn (according to Turchin) develops especially along “metaethnic frontiers,” where very different cultures meet and clash. The illustration (by me, writing about matrilocal asabiya, not Turchin) shows the general idea. When culture changes little, or changes gradually, with distance (a), there is little basis for uniting independent polities (stars) into enduring larger units, and alliances (dotted lines) shift constantly. Along the metaethnic frontier (b), the opposite is true (solid lines show cohesive enduring units). Think Game of Thrones versus Lord of the Rings: it’s easier to get men and elves and dwarves to work together when they are fighting an army of orcs serving the Dark Lord.

Sometimes a metaethnic frontier develops where major religions or ideologies clash. But in the Roman case, the metaethnic frontier ran along the line dividing civilized Italians from barbarian Celts. Greece, by contrast, experienced a surge in fellow-feeling when Athens and Sparta fought together to defeat Persia, but this was too short lived to lead to a unified state.

Also worth reading is Empires of Trust, tracing parallels between the expansion of early Rome and of the United States – two immense states on the western frontiers of civilization. (The book is better than most comparing America and Rome.)

And here’s me, on slime mold asabiya.