The Evolution of Politics, Part I

The input into we’ve been getting from culture has been anything but arbitrary over the past 200,000 years or so. In the context of trying to survive by foraging, social groups that value egalitarianism, cooperation, and open sharing of resources have proven to be far more successful over the long haul of prehistory than groups that didn’t value these pro-social behaviors. The conditions of hunter-gatherer life—conditions shared by all our foraging ancestors—demanded these qualities. Because these demands formed an important part of our ancestors’ social ecology for so long, they exerted a significant impact on the development of our species.

As evolutionary theorist David Sloan Wilson and others have argued, cohesive, smoothly-functioning social groups were central to the success of our species. Many contemporary evolutionary theorists are quick to pooh-pooh any discussion of so-called “group selection”—presumably because it smacks of socialism and undermines cherished fantasies of man being wolf to man, and so on. Yet back in 1871, Charles Darwin himself argued that group selection would logically proceed from natural selection because it offered clear adaptive advantages to cooperative societies: “A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.[i]

Well-known ethologist/primatologist Frans de Waal has noted that “Even though the process of natural selection is inherently competitive, it has produced all sorts of tendencies and configurations in nature, including socially positive and cooperative ones. The lethal territoriality of the male tiger is as much a product of natural selection as the death-defying solidarity among dolphins.” Some scientists go further—suggesting that processes beyond gene-centric competition may be crucial, under-appreciated parts of evolutionary change. In a recent paper published in Nature, a group of evolutionary theorists declared, “In our view, this “gene-centric” focus fails to capture the full gamut of processes that direct evolution. Missing pieces include how physical development influences the generation of variation (developmental bias); how the environment directly shapes organisms’ traits (plasticity); how organisms modify environments (niche construction); and how organisms transmit more than genes across generations (extra-genetic inheritance).”[ii] Whatever the multiplicity of mechanisms underlying evolution may be, it’s clear that they often result in organisms whose behavior is decidedly cooperative and generous.