At 09:25 28/09/2003 -0400, you wrote:
Keith, you do seem to have a thing about how hunters and gatherers engineered our genes to make us competitive. In working with aboriginal people in northern Canada, many of whom still hunt and gather, I've found them to be among the most cooperative and caring people I've ever met.
Of course! Of course! This is what I have been trying to say for years on this list. Our genetic behaviours co-evolved within moderately small social groups -- small, for logistical reasons of territorial patrolling and to control food sources. If we were not able to become cooperative in such environments over millions of years, then we would not have survived!
What has happened since is that we have discovered new forms of immensely greater productivity (firstly, agriculture, then industrialisation via fossil fuels) which have caused us to amplify almost every aspect of our lives -- including vast sizes of socio-political groups giving us problems we can't handle very well.
The groups I know something about were traditionally matriachial, and feminine values tended to dominate social behaviour. As one woman put it, men were considered boys until they were forty and they had to be kept in line!
Yes, well the women are the wise ones. Most of them anyway. They're always the ones who choose the partners. (This is why rape is such a major offence -- quite rightly, of course) Men like to think they choose the girls, but it's the girls actually do so at puberty when they look at the qualities of the boys -- and they'll go for as high a rank as possible, subject to (peaceful) competition among themselves. The boys will have already ranked themselves roughly in order of physical skills, but the girls will look for other qualities, too -- intelligence, reliability, protectiveness, tenacity, imaginativeness, generosity, etc, as good potential economic provider-partners as well as valiant hunters.
However, if a hunter-gatherer group gets above about 150-200 individuals then cooperativeness soon flies out of the window. Such a group will invariably divide into bitter factions and then split into smaller, separate ones. Always happens, unless some individuals gains access to rare and potent weapons -- then we have the beginnings of city-states and empires -- that is, when we started to leave hunter-gathering behind us at around 12,000BC.
Hunting and gathering societies developed a variety of responses to their environmental circumstances, depending on what these were. However, I'd suggest that, in general, small group survival would depend more on cooperative relationships than competitive ones.
Once again -- of course! But if an adjoining group starts to penetrate their territory in order to hunt-gather their food, then you will see quite another side to their natures! In habitats of high food productivity where fertility rates are high, hunter-gatherer tribes are almost always constantly at war with their neighbours.
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>, <www.handlo.com>, <www.property-portraits.co.uk>
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
