Sex at Dawn полностью

Noticing the importance of grooming behavior in social primates, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar plotted overall group size against the neocortical development of the brain. Using this correlation, he predicted that humans start losing track of who’s doing what to whom when group size hits about 150 individuals. In Dunbar’s words, “The limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.”⁷ Other anthropologists had arrived at the same number by observing that when group sizes grew much beyond that, they tend to split into two smaller groups. Writing several years before Dunbar’s paper was published in 1992, Marvin Harris noted, “With 50 people per band or 150 per village, everybody knew everybody else intimately, so that the bonding of reciprocal exchange could hold people together. People gave with the expectation of taking and took with the expectation of giving.” Recent authors, including Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling The Tipping Point, have popularized the idea of 150 being a limit to organically functioning groups.

Having evolved in small, intimate bands where everybody knows our name, human beings aren’t very good at dealing with the dubious freedoms conferred by anonymity. When communities grow beyond the point where every individual has at least a passing acquaintance with everyone else, our behavior changes, our choices shift, and our sense of the possible and of the acceptable grows ever more abstract.

The same argument can be made concerning the tragic misunderstanding of human nature that underlies communism: community ownership doesn’t work in

large-scale societies where people operate in anonymity. In The Power of Scale, anthropologist John Bodley wrote: “The size of human societies and cultures matters because larger societies will naturally have more concentrated social power. Larger societies will be less democratic than smaller societies, and they will have an unequal distribution of risks and rewards.”⁹ Right, because the bigger the society is, the less functional shame becomes. When the Berlin Wall came down, jubilant capitalists announced that the essential flaw of communism had been its failure to account for human nature. Well, yes and no. Marx’s fatal error was his failure to appreciate the importance of context. Human nature functions one way in the context of intimate, interdependent societies,

but set loose in anonymity, we become a different creature. Neither beast is more nor less human.

He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra, Act II

Were we really born in the best possible time and place? Or is ours a random moment in infinity—just another among uncountable moments, each with its compensating pleasures and disappointments? Perhaps you find it absurd to even entertain such a question, to assume there’s any choice in the matter. But there is. We all have a psychological tendency to view our own experience as standard, to see our community as The People, to believe—perhaps subconsciously—that we are the chosen ones, God is on our side, and our team deserves to win. To see the present in the most flattering light, we paint the past in blood-red hues of suffering and terror. Hobbes has been scratching this persistent psychological itch for several centuries now.

It is a common mistake to assume that evolution is a process of improvement, that evolving organisms are progressing toward some final, perfected state. But they, and we, are not. An evolving society or organism simply adapts over the generations to changing conditions. While these modifications may be immediately beneficial, they are not really improvements because external conditions never stop shifting.

This error underlies the assumption that here and now is obviously better than there and then. Three and a half centuries later, scientists still quote Hobbes, telling us how lucky we are to live after the rise of the state, to have avoided the universal suffering of our barbaric past. It’s deeply comforting to think we’re the lucky ones, but let’s ask the forbidden question: How lucky are we really?

Prehistoric humans did not habitually store food, but this doesn’t mean they lived in chronic hunger. Studies of prehistoric human bones and teeth show ancient human life was marked by episodic fasts and feasts, but prolonged periods of starvation were rare. How do we know our ancestors weren’t living at the brink of starvation?