Last weekend’s bloggingheads was an interesting discussion between John Horgan and Brian Ferguson on the unfortunate misconception many people have about human evolution — the simplistic idea that evolution is always about selection for individuals who are better at killing their competitors. It doesn’t work that way! Ferguson discusses the interesting and obvious idea that the data does not back up the notion that being a great warrior is generally a good strategy, because being a great warrior also greatly increases the likelihood that you’ll end up dead.
Evolution is about whatever works, and often cooperation is a winning tactic.
Oh… Great warrior? Wars not make one great.
People also often miss that “whatever works” is a moving target based on competition from a million other things also optimising “whatever works”. The system is not just more complex than many people imagine, it’s astronomically more complex because of the dynamism.
So,…er…I guess my Kropotkin links aren’t entirely gratuitous on this thread, right?
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_archives/kropotkin/mutaidcontents.html
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/ethics/toc.html
(Apologies. I can’t help myself.)
I remember a discussion about some sort of horned beetle that selected for larger and larger hors to fight over mates. Oddly, there was a small but significant group that had no front horns whatsoever, and who never won a mating fight because of it. After studying this for some time, the perpetuation of the hornless variety was discovered to come about because of sneakiness. Once the horned beetles had a mate, the female would live in a burrow, the entrance to which was guarded by the male. The hornless males would dig a long tunnel to the burrow and mate as many times as they could get away with, thus ensuring that the hornless types still had an opportunity to breed.
Small and sneaky sometimes wins the race.
I think Bush is good for showing people misconception with evolution.
Warrior misconception; Bush demonstrates that starting wars, but not fighting in them is a superior survival strategy.
Intelligence misconception; Bush demonstrates that intelligent does not always provide a better chance of survival or reproducing.
No transitional forms misconception;
the simplistic idea that evolution is always about selection for individuals who are better at killing their competitors.
I was under the impression that natural selection was all about reproduction and survival of the offspring. Fighters might have an advantage w/r/t getting laid, but would they be likely to stick around and protect the kids?
-jcr
Brian Ferguson:
Excellent.
(That’s cool that you were able to link to a particular portion of the video. Wish I knew how to do that.)
Yes, one strategy for procreation in a sexually dimorphic species is female impersonation. You avoid the costs of all the macho stuff, and you get free access to all the crumpet. I sometimes wonder if this is why lots of women are kinky for crossdressers. Sexual selection in action.
“Small and sneaky sometimes wins the race.” – Ransom, #4
…reminds me of “Old age and treachery will always triumph over youth and beauty …”
Time to bring out an old favorite:
Sun Tzu said:
1. In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.
2. Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
If one read this in evolutionary terms, it is kinda valid too, innit?
SC wrote:
Judging from the link he posted, it looks like he added to the end of the URL: ?in=<start time>&out=<end time>. This requires the site to recognize those extra commands, so will likely only work for Bloggingheads.
This is another place where the insights of “The Selfish Gene” really helps me put the whole thing in perspective as well.
Screw the individual – it’s all about the genes!
I don’t have time to see the discussion right now, so I don’t know if they mentioned this new paper. It’s a model of the situations where being a warrior can be a good strategy.
War and the evolution of belligerence and bravery
Richard Lewontin, favorable review of DS Wilson’s Unto Others, New York Review of Books, 10/22/98: “Success in war presumably enhanced group survival, however, so the altruistic act of the war chief, sacrificing himself for the group, would nevertheless lead to a survival and spread of the altruistic institution.”
But all of this human evolution and behavior stuff – aggression and fitness, self-sacrificing violence and kin selection, intergroup competition promoting intragroup cooperation, level of selection controversy – is mostly just a bunch of speculative yarns backed up with some mathematical models and a smattering of ethnographic and historical data.
Being a great warrior is fantastic for reproductive success. Just don’t bother with the war part very often, make it clear to men and women alike that you are a great warrior, and you’ll have many opportunities with females.
The one problem is that in most societies you’ll have to fight at some point if you’re going to be known as a great warrior. Usually that’s when you’re young, and indeed, the risks may be considerable. However, if you succeed in war, then you can be the guy who commands others to go to war (you’re too valuable to risk by now), continuing to be a “great warrior” by proxy.
Today, some of the “great warriors” don’t even have to ever succeed personally on the field of battle. Schmoozing and networking can propel you to the top over the years, and if you’re good at commanding, simply lucky, or excellent at propagandizing your failures into successes, you’re a “great warrior” without having any of the risks. The nameless can take the risks.
Obviously, even for the warriors who benefit greatly from early exploits, the point is not to keep risking your life and limbs. But there are important rewards and status to be had from actually fighting, which no doubt is a big reason why humans have warred with each other a great deal.
Yet it’s never simply a matter of nature being red in tooth and claw, and there are considerable advantages to being clever and good at maneuvering without fighting (read Homer, where cleverness and deception are both portrayed as successful practices, and as highly-regarded strategies). Even in war, killing is often not the real goal, after all.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
I have suggested this paper before – worth a bit of a glance.
“Human evolution and human history: A complete theory” by Paul M. Bingham, SUNY.
Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews
Volume 9 Issue 6, Pages 248 – 257 Published Online: 9 Jan 2001
I like the use he makes of “baseball” as showing our skills at clubbing / throwing at targets.
“…being a great warrior also greatly increases the likelihood that you’ll end up dead.”
I thought that was p=1 regardless of your lifestyle.
Whether that is necessary depends on the kids. If they can feed themselves and you simply have enough of them, nobody needs to protect them. To quote Tom Holtz from memory: “Treating your offspring as Darwinian ammunition DOES work.”
Including cooperation to despoil those weaker and/or less numerous than yourselves.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Thanks, mds. :)
Simply avoiding competition is far less risky than confronting it.
If there were one woman left in the world, the survival of your progeny would be much more likely if you and she paddled to a deserted tropical archipelago rather than trying to kill all of the other men, regardless of how good a killer you are.
Warriors may also be a lot more likely to suffer testicular damage as a result of all the fighting even if they survive. So, they may MATE, but aren’t necesarily the dad.
well, at least in species with exposed testes.
“… being a great warrior also greatly increases the likelihood that you’ll end up dead”
That made me want to quote Sun Tzu:
“A general that fights a hundred battles and wins a hundred battles is not a great general. The great general is one who finds a way to win without fighting a single battle.”
Glen Davidson has a good point (#16).
Consider this:
– I am a great guitar player
– My sexy girlfriends love guitar players; the better the player, the more turned on they get.
Does it make any sense to go around challenging other guitarists in the presence of my harem? Nope. I should just sit around and serenade them all day regaling them with tales of how I slew hordes of inferior guitarists (true or not).
BUT
If a challenger arrives, I would have to square off against him and risk losing because backing down would cause me to lose face and again risk losing the harem.
Some months ago I was watching a documentary about human ancestry on TV (I can’t recall if it was on the History or Science channel). One of the anthropologists interviewed noted a lack of weapon marks on the bones of skeletons he excavated during his career and remarked that he believed primitive peoples recognized the benefit of cooperation and peaceful coexistence as being necessary for their survival, despite frequent portrayals in movies and TV as them having been savages.
Richard Dawkins wrote about John Maynard Smith’s work on Evolutionarily Stable Strategies Vis-à-vis Hawks VS Doves in ‘The Selfish Gene’. Very Interesting.
“because being a great warrior also greatly increases the likelihood that you’ll end up dead.”
Last time I checked, the likelihood was 100% whether or not you are a great warrior. Now, being a warrior (great or otherwise) might get you killed *earlier* than being a non-warrior, but evolution doesn’t much care about how you die, only whether you leave offspring (and how well they, in turn, survive). It might just turn out that the warriors who survive long enough to produce offspring actually produce more than non-warriors, or maybe the offspring of warriors tend to be hardier. If either is the case, then evolution would favor the warrior (especially if ‘great’ means ‘successful’ or ‘surviving’).
In order to have a meaningful discussion about the evolutionary benefits of being a great warrior, we first need to find out how warriordom affects progeny, and not just make assumptions. If you aren’t measuring, you are guessing.
One other tidbit I forgot to add: If you are measuring the wrong thing(s), the answer(s) you get are very likely to be meaningless.
One other tidbit I forgot to add: If you are measuring the wrong thing(s), the answer(s) you get are very likely to be meaningless.
SC, what’s with the Kropotkin links? Are you an anarchist? That would be interesting.
Lots of women are kinky for crossdressers? Really?
(…Where do they find them?)
I’ve always rather fancied the idea that this is the explanation for the attraction to “bad boys.” To the extant that bravery is helpful to the group, and not the individual, having females differentially prefer brave males helps to ensure that those genes are passed on even if the carriers are likely to die young. Thus groups with females that dig males who are brave and die young are more likely to have a few brave self sacrificers around if they’re needed.
@Jim A: I’m pretty sure someone will be along in a moment to explain to you better than I, a humble mathematician, can) why group level explanations like that don’t work.
Yet another reason I’m begginning to hate the words “study” and “model”, the idiocy is carried further here:
http://www.physorg.com/news140174454.html
Whee! Let’s further the aims and ideas of the tribal supremacists, we can model it, Vahalla here we come!
I read somewhere that woman select mates based on the strength and virility of the men, but they marry the men that they think will look after the children.
i.e. we all want to do something really nasty to Russell Crowe when he’s wearing that gladiator outfit, but we don’t want to marry the asshole.
oh wait.. perhaps i’ve shared to much information.
SC, what’s with the Kropotkin links? Are you an anarchist? That would be interesting.
Indeed I am. Interesting how?
Um, I thought that historically a lot of the ‘great reproductive successes’ of warriors came from the raping of loser villages’ women. Right? So all this talk of ‘warriors getting laid more often’ is a little bit weird to me.
Odd that no one has mentioned the ‘Genghis Khan inversion’ that sugegsts that he [and a few close male relatives] fathered enough children, and incidentally killed enough competing males, to be ancestral to 10+% of the present population of a great swath of Eurasia. IF true, that would make up for a lot of stupid prematurely dead aggressors…
*surrounded by corpses holding an axe*
What? You’re kidding, right? Way to go, PZ. I could have used that information YESTERDAY!!! Ooooo… Cooperation, you say? Who wants to cooperate with me cleaning up this mess?
Impala stags exhaust themselves shagging and protecting territory at the same time so that they become easy prey to predators. Be warned!
“often cooperation is a winning tactic”
Surely everyone here is aware that this is why humans are susceptible to being religious?
Religion is “sticking together against everyone else” to the nth degree! I mean, just look at the religious commands – like half of them are ‘kill people not having this religion’ ‘help the ones with the same religion’, plus the self-promoting kinds of the variety ‘no other gods, remember?’ and ‘convert whomever you can’ (if not successful, see ‘1’).
I even once read the theory – not sure about how serious it should be taken – that food taboos such as the Jewish ‘Thou Shalt Eat No Pork’ were instigated to prevent the believers from sneaking out for a meal with the neighboring tribes, who ate pork, because this might lead to friendly feelings and an unwillingness to later kill them.
Genes that make people accept religion will therefore thrive while genes that make people agnostic or critical get weeded out quite effectively. If not directly by sudden death than indirectly by social isolation &c.
The Kropotkin links are due to him writing “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution”, in which he argued that co-operation between members of the same species contributes greatly to their fitness, moreso than competition between members of the same species.
He then extended that same argument in favour of communitarian anarchism. And got into arguments with Thomas Huxley over the latter’s support for competition (and social darwinism).
Read up on him – Kropotkin’s a fascinating person.
The comment by Alan Chapman (#26) reflects the theme of the paper I cited above (#17…) by Paul Bingham in Evolutionary Anthropology [v9(6), pp 248-57) on Human History + Evolution, a point I should have made when I posted (but it was late and I was tired).
As depicted in the scene at the start of the Sci-Fi classic “2001”, use of a club by one group of apes helps to defeat the other and thus provides an advantage. The ability to throw a rock (or baseball!) or swing a club allows individuals to kill similar sized or even larger creatures, changing the rules for interaction between individuals within the species, lest they kill each other off.
John McCain is the quintisential example of playing the warrior meme for power and glory.
Here is a man who finished nearly last in his class (John McCain finished 894 of 899 in his class at Annapolis) and was responsible for crashing five naval aircraft during his career (and still kept his job?), yet he can still get away with playing the war hero card in order to seduce both men and women into supporting him in his bid for power. : /
Like it or not, the veneration of the warrior classes in human cultures is a powerful (albeit primitive) meme to harness if you can. Provided you don’t get yourself killed in the process of establishing your bona fides.
“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” –George Patton
Even the most cursory glance at history shows that the reason Christianity and Islam are the two most widely surviving religions today is not because they were the most persuasive or most consistent with the facts of the real world.
It’s because they were the most bloodthirsty.
Except that Genghis Khan didn’t single handedly strole through Mongolia and China slaughtering thousands. He controled a vast army cooperating toward a common purpose. This cooperation required altruistic ideals (die for the tribe). Khan was also a brilliant strategist that knew when to apply force and when to back off, keeping his army intact, healthy, and most importantly, satisfied that they were being led properly. Now, Genghis Khan probably rightly deserves the title of monster, but that is not necessarily the genetic attitude so much as a personal one. We are not motivated 100% by our genes. The Khan genes probably have more charisma, physical strength, and mental aptitude than they do vicious warlord bloodthirst.
Well, actually until you find Genghis Khan’s mortal remains and do the DNA tests, you can’t really be sure that he was ancestral to 10% of the present population of large areas of Eurasia. Should I mention Mr L Prosser from “the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”? Richard Dawkins had a nice chapter “Nice guys finish first” in “the Selfish Gene” on co-operation.
I recall that when one of the kids in my social studies class in high school ask why there were so many people named Smith in the UK, the teacher replied, “Blacksmiths didn’t have to go to war.”
Alan Chapman – I’d be careful about reading too much into the rarity of excavated remains with signs of weapon marks (other than obviously long-healed wounds) – in very ancient times those slain in battle tended to be left unburied.
Leaving the whole “dying for my folks” altruistic side of the argument aside, there seems to be evidence from Yanomamö-studies that being a warrior (i.e. reaching unokai-status) correlates with reproductive success. There also seems to be some debate concerning this (isn’t there always) and anthropology’s not really my field, but nonetheless: that would make for a compelling individualistic story for why to become a warrior. In the end it becomes quantitative anyway, doesn’t it: Do more offspring but a possibly shortened life-time add up to increased reproductive success? That one should be hard to tackle verbally, even in a blog comment ;)
R. Brian Ferguson had many fascinating things to say. Unfortunately, Horgan did a lot of fumbling, a lot of ill-timed interrupting, and generally acted like an interviewer who thought he had an agenda, but hadn’t quite figured out what his own agenda was.
I wish someone competent, like D.J. Grothe had done that interview.
Ferguson points out that Chagnon’s data can’t answer that question, because Chagnon provides data only only warriors who lived to reproduce – he left out those who died before reproducing.
Funny, the first time I saw that figure it was 8%. It keeps going up.
Anyway – Horgan fumbled about in that general area, mentioning Genghis Khan’s reputed ‘thousands of offspring’. Ferguson rightly pointed out that it was irrelevant to hunter-gather populations, as Genghis Khan (or whatever 10th-13th century male who provided the common Y-chromosome) was very recent relative to the timescales of human evolution.
I’m reminded of the biblical story of King David sending Bathsheba’s husband a tiny bit too close to the enemy fortifications. Oops.
As Mel Brooks once said: “It’s good to be the king.”
Or to paraphrase George C. Scott (in the person of General Patton): “You don’t get to pass along your genes by dying for your country, you get lots more copulations by ordering some other poor bastard to die for his country.”
But seriously (inasmuch as I can take this twisted conception of evolution seriously at all) this is just the same old social Darwinism dressed up in greaves and a breastplate. Enough already.