THINKING BIG: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind"

In pursuit of understanding humans IN THEIR ENVIRONMENTS,  I have accumulated and borrowed through Interlibrary Loan a great many books over the last decade.  I have a basic kit of close experience with certain communities with quite different basic characteristics and an humanities education rooted in the Fifties ideas of “language and thought”.  Right now I feel as though I’ve found a book that is a handbook (so trendy that there’s a new verb:  “handbooking.”) that wraps around and illuminates all this stuff.

The book comes out of the United Kingdom, including most prominently Australia.  The basic argument is this: that we know a lot about human fossils and can now even reconstruct the weather and responding environment in fairly specific ways, including what there was to eat.  In the past scientists have taken a very strict approach to ideas about deep (pre-literate) history, esp. the transitions within and between the following groups:

Anthropoids (all primates including fossils, monkeys, hominins and humans), 

Hominids (all great apes (gorillas, orang utans, chimps, bonobos, gibbons), hominins and humans, 

Hominins (all our fossil ancestors),

Humans (us)

Anatomically modern humans without substantial evidence for cultural accoutrements (art, burials, ornament, musical instruments)

I don’t know where Neanderthals fit into this, since they genetically merge with modern humans.

There are three authors: 

 Clive Gamble, whom I already know from his book, "Origins and Revolutions", 

John Gowlett, who is associated with “Radical Anthropology” (a school of thought with a journal), and 
Robin Dunbar.

Robin Dunbar

Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar (born 28 June 1947) is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primate behaviour.  He is currently head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, and a visiting professor at Aalto University. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”.  The dependent theory is that the bigger a group of known and interacting people, the bigger the brain is likely to be.

These people, mostly English academics but researching in Africa, diverge from Cartesian object-and-logic thought, but have a  firm grip on the implied forces of evolution, which is what makes them radical.  Evolution is driven by the acknowledgement that time forces change and every change opens new possibilities.  The study of solid evidence of fossils and geology have reluctantly opened their more responsive minds in the face of the usual opposition of status quo thinkers.  The study of the evolution of the hominins AND all other humanoid forms (including us) in terms of brain development  (evolving along parallel to the rest of bodies), and the resulting social interactions between individuals, has been invisible.  A strong question has arisen:  why did the human brain-size in Africa remain the same for hundreds and thousands of years, but then suddenly -- without changing size -- explode into art, music, decoration and story?  Was it something they said?  Something they did?  

This book opens the door to a whole new realm.  These men often make distinctions: they repeatedly say, “two things are relevant” and then those two things are not opposed to each other, but either interacting in shaping ways or diverging from each other to explore new territory.  This is Bibfeldtian "both/and" thinking.  (Bibfeldt is a mythical scholar invented to counter "either/or" thinking.)

Lady bonobos

For instance, two things have shaped "apes".  One of the most intriguing little hints is that somehow our closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, diverged because bonobos went with social interaction as the primary focus of life (including sex as greeting, much to the fascination of humans), and the chimps went with tools -- which might have led to our technologies.  (I’m waiting for the invention of a keyboard for chimps — but, wait!  Hasn't anyone tried to get a chimp to use a tablet computer?)  Modern humans evidently came from a branch that refused to exclude either society or tools, until now they've converged.  These authors speak of the sensory ability and the materials available, both expanding interdependently. 

A fascinating riff on the subject of the "occipital bun", which is a pushed-out part of the rear skull, suggests that populating the northern territories required big eyes to gather more light, and therefore needed more brain processing space, which is at the back of the head.  Neanderthals have big eyes and that "bun".  The thought is that this meant the pre-frontal cortex behind the forehead couldn't develop, which kept them from the abilities housed there.

The authors do not indulge in silly thoughts, but stick to the serious business of survival as the planet constantly makes our current arrangements obsolete, maybe even impossible.  What’s the most basic crucial understanding we need?

One element is group size and the basis of their cohesion, which turns out to be music and laughing.  The proposition is that the following table is pretty universal:

5 people are an intimate group.  The authors call them “soul
     mates.”

15 people are a foraging group, best friends or maybe co-
     workers

50 people are a band, which they rename as “overnight
  camp groups”, all of whom know each other and get along.
  I recognize this as the named Blackfeet traveling groups,
   partly family.

150 people are “Dunbar’s number” — I’ll come back.

500 people are mega-bands related by marriage or trade.

1500 people are tribes united by one language.

Print it out, maybe enlarged, and add the names.

Good workshop exercise.

150 is about as many people we can handle in terms of trust and obligation.  These are the people we greet by name at the post office and linger a few moments to trade information.  

You may notice that each increment is threefold.  The authors relate it to classic military unit sizes:

12 men in a section

40-50 to a platoon (3 sections)
150 of 3 platoons to a company

500 is a battalion (3 companies)

5000 is a regiment (3 battalions)

5000 is a brigade (3 regiments)

15,000 is a division (3 brigades)

Dunbar’s number, 150, is the size that will allow balance between enough interaction to maintain social cohesion (grooming in apes, greeting in humans) and the time that will economically work to support survival.  The less time spent on work, the more there is for social cohesion, and vice versa.  In hunter-gathers groups a great deal of time is devoted to what we consider to be "idling" but is actually bonding.  What we consider work is often divisive.

Our technological society has been hard on neighborhoods, which in my post-WWII childhood were about 150 people who knew each other, by spreading them out over space on the Internet.   We even shop there.  People are reading my blog around the planet, which always startles me, and impresses me with the obligation of somehow providing what they are looking for.  

Some are boys or were when I got to know them.  I am sharply aware of the universal tendency to exclude young boys from both social protection and individual reassurance, which are the purpose of groups.  When the leopards come, the hominins go up trees, grabbing the babies to carry as they climb.  Some children can climb.  But the youngest boys are left on the ground.  At some point the hominins also began to act like leopards and destroy the easy prey of their own young.   (Abraham was not sacrificing his daughter. Just saying.)  There must be some survival value to the vulnerability of boys, or it wouldn’t have persisted so many millennia.  But what is it?

I recently read a disturbing account of young males, tortured dismembered discarded — it turned out to be about male dairy calves who are seen to have NO value in terms of human society.  Value = Survival.

Grown but uneducated men in a tech society are in a similar fix.  They can’t even sell sex.  Their blood, maybe.  In some cities they can’t sleep outdoors or in cars.  Those who wish to help them are forbidden to provide soup kitchens where the “nice” people live.  No one will even do what baboons do for each other: pick off fleas.  We’re devolving.

You’ll notice that I’ve left Radical Anthropology now and entered upon Social Commentary.  The line between is permeable and that’s excellent, because it means there are more variables affecting survival.  I was intrigued to see that these authors appreciate what they call “hot” cognition empathy — which is sharing on an emotional level — and “cold’ cognition empathy (theory of mind) which is aware of what others are thinking and feeling, but emotionally detached, even Machiavellian.  Babies seem to be born with hot empathy, but don’t develop Cartesian-style “theory of mind” until maybe age five, kindergarten.

There will be more as I explore this realm of thought.

THE SOCIAL WORLD: WHO ARE ALL THESE OTHERS?

What do we know about how our brain operates in the social world?

THE CELL EVIDENCE: VON ECONOMO NEURONS

Spindle-shaped brain cells, called von Economo neurons—named for the man who first described them—are found only in human beings, great apes and a handful of other notably gregarious creatures -- like elephants.  Von Economo neurons are thin and elongated, with just one dendrite at each end. They are four times bigger than most other brain cells, and even in species that have the cells, they are rare.

(This stuff is from an article in the Smithsonian about a man called John Allman.  The author of the original article is Ingfai Chen and I lifted some whole sentences.)

From von Economo's work, Allman learned that the unusual cells seemed to reside only in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and one other niche of the human brain, the frontal insula (FI). Brain-scanning studies have established that the ACC and FI are particularly active when people experience emotion. Both areas also seem to be important for "self-monitoring," such as noticing bodily sensations of pain and hunger or recognizing that one has made a mistake. 

By contrast, the frontal insula may play a more specific role in generating social emotions such as empathy, trust, guilt, embarrassment, love—even a sense of humor. According to experiments that measure the workings of various brain regions, the area becomes active when a mother hears a crying baby, for instance, or when someone scrutinizes a face to determine the other person's intentions. The FI is where the brain monitors and reacts to "gut feelings" from bodily sensations or interactions within a social network, Allman says. It's the link between self-monitoring and awareness of others that makes it possible for us to understand the feelings of other people. "The basic proposition that I'm advancing," he says, "is the notion that self-awareness and social awareness are part of the same functioning, and the von Economo cells are part of that."

(When I was a little kid, I had a jigsaw puzzle of the States.  I keep wishing I had one for the named parts of the brain, a snap-together brain.)  Here you go!

THE DISFUNCTION EVIDENCE

William Seeley is another researcher.  He concentrates on pre-frontal or frontal temporal dementia which affect the ACC and FI.  (This is what changed my father, brother and cousin via trauma.)  Patients suffer a breakdown in their character, losing social graces and empathy, turning insensitive, erratic and irresponsible. Marriages and careers implode. Many patients seem to lack physical self-awareness: when diagnosed with other illnesses, they deny having any problems. Brain imaging studies of patients with the dementia have uncovered damage to frontal areas of the brain.

THE TRAUMA EVIDENCE or DELIBERATE LESION EVIDENCE IN ANIMALS

In humans, studies have shown a high percentage of head injuries in prison populations and disorderly people (like expelled students) at large.  The most vivid and most often repeated case was the man working with explosives that drove a tamping rod through the front of his brain.  He survived -- he just wasn’t Mr. Nice Guy anymore.

Trauma or lesion evidence is subtractive.  Most developments that help survival and therefore are “conserved” are additive -- bigger, more, new.  Sometimes they involve a new use of an old capacity, like alphabets coming out of super-simplified outlines of animals which is a hunting skill, an old nubbin of flesh finding a new use.

SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS

People live in groups: families, tribes, communities.  Social psychology is what studies the relationships and orderings among those people.  The scientists invent ingenious experiments.

1.  If you put people in a room who collude to say something contrary to reality or not to act in the face of a threat (smoke coming in through a vent), the individual who doesn’t know about this will do what everyone else does, even though his personal evidence is against it.

2.  If you get a group to watch Ronald Reagan giving a speech that in real life caused a lot of laughing, they will have a high opinion of RR.  If you get a similar group to watch the same vid without the laugh-track, they think he’s a little scary.  This is why a laugh-track is added to things that are supposed to make you laugh -- so you’ll react with what you think is a group.

PRACTICALITIES

An infant without a family is a dead infant.  A child without a family or with a hostile or dysfunctional family is a suffering child.  An adult without a family, a community, an affiliation,  is a crippled person.  An adult with a family, a community and so on, but whose affiliation with like-minded people is prevented by social pressure and stigma is so bereft of social support that they are in danger of suicide.

Bullying is when one person afflicts another because of aggression meeting vulnerability.  Mobbing is when a whole social group turns on an individual and tries to destroy them.  As a child, I was mobbed for being a crybaby, for being near-sighted (no sports skill), and for being “too smart for my own good.”  Mobbing can be physical (pursuit while throwing rocks) or social.  (Native American literature “flaming” in the Nineties when anyone not “full-blood” was accused of stealing -- often with the piling-on collaboration of white liberals.  Two well-known suicides.)

Narcissism is when one person is centered only on his or her self and relates to others by using them for their own ends.  There is also group narcissism where a gang insists it is better and therefore justified in whatever they do to the out-group.

INSTITUTIONS

Affinity groups -- people with a common cause -- become organized (consciously or not) into institutions, mostly related to place (like governmental bodies), economic relationships (ownership, territory), and value systems (religions, schools).  They can control lives by controlling access, knowledge, skill-building, and defense of ownership.  Institutions can operate like individuals: narcissistic, mobbing, hoarding, stigmatizing.  The more crowded the population is, the more hierarchical, rigid and punishing the institutions become.  At an extreme -- which we may have reached by declaring corporations to be zombie people -- an institution and its associated practices can destroy the conditions that make life possible.  Religions are institutions.  

PAIR-BONDING

Some feel that the attachment of two people, most often parents of children, is the basic leggo block of all social life.  Certainly, what happens in the first years after birth will determine the individual’s understanding of how to relate to other human beings.  But there is no reason to confuse attachment with sex.  Gore Vidal famously said that the best way to preserve a lifelong bond is to keep sex out of it -- enjoy lots of sex, just not at home and not necessarily hetero.  It worked for him.

Again, other social animals teach us.  Elephants and chimpanzees are like us in needing each other and caring for each other. If economics, politics, or chance destroy dependable parental pair-bonding, the child produced may be cold, uncertain, bullying, and narcissistically affiliated -- always craving power and superiority.  (They might trust a dog.)

THE INTERNAL COMMUNITY

Some of my most valued companions are dead and have been for a long time.  They wrote books, they made movies, I knew them when I was a child, or in some other way they got into my head and heart.  They teach me how to demonize myself to seem big and dangerous.  They teach me how to be absurd and leave 'em laughin'.  They teach me how to be invisible, how to be valuable, how to to be taken for granted or not.  I could not go out without them.  They are my brain biota.