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Humanity spent 200,000 years living communally in social abundance. This is settled science in anthropology and biology [1][2][3] Social community is an essent

Humanity spent 200,000 years living communally in social abundance. This is settled science in anthropology and biology [1][2][3] Social community is an essential requirement for human life and the loss of community has now been used as proof of some kind of lamarckian anti-social evolution which has zero evidence. [1] Chan, E.K.F., et al. human origins in a southern African palaeo-wetland and first migrations. Nature 575,185–189 (2019) [2] Graeber, David, Wingrow, David (2021), The Dawn of Everything. (126) [3] Sahlins, Marshall (2009). Hunter-gatherers: insights from a golden affluent age. Pacific Ecologist. 18: 3–8

coding123 4y ago
The everyone is out for themselves, greed is king, insurance instead of family, sue thy neighbor is not backed by evidence? who knew?
goatlover 4y ago
If social community/communal existence is an essential requirement, then how do you explain the past several thousand years, where civilization has come to dominate, and the human population has grown to 8 billion? Civilization didn't just develop in the middle east, it cropped up separately in several different regions, including the Americas.
- ves 4y ago
  Competition in its recognizably modern form only recently became the foundational organizational system for civilization, and civilization “won” because (in part) a) it generally has no problem deploying incredible levels of violence and coercion, against people and the environment, and b) it promotes continuous population increase, even beyond what may be sustainable. There’s about a million places to source this, but I might start with something like James C. Scott.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Competition for resources and violence is seen in primates and many mammals. Smaller social groups does not necessarily remove this element. The main difference with humans is that we are capable of organizing and coordinating larger social structures. Large Organizations of individuals require other large organizations to defend against
  - goatlover 4y ago
    Tribal groups did also compete, and our hominid cousins, several of who were around the same time as modern humans, went extinct.
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  I'm excited you asked as I have a theory that is getting real traction that answers precisely that: https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    How do you address desirable goods that are really scarce? Such as downtown penthouses, beachfront property, spectrum licenses, etc... Since there will always be some fraction of the population who will desire to gamble the shirt on their backs for a chance at a larger prize.
    - AndrewKemendo 4y ago
      You are implicitly asking "Who decides how much is enough" As I say in the paper "There exists no regularized measure of relative deprivation that can be agreed on across all cultures and all time periods." I have no solution to the problem of relative consumption, I am simply suggesting that it is fundamentally destructive in the current structure. The only thing I can think of is to create systems that do not incentivize the risk taking behavior as you describe (and I was/am probably the most extreme version of what you describe by the way). My personal answer is to minimize my consumption as much as possible while still being able to carry out my personal values until I die. I have no advice for anyone else as I don't know what their circumstances are.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        I can't see how this desire is 'fundamentally destructive in the current structure'. Beaches, frequency bandwidths, etc., will exist regardless of whatever form human organizational structure takes. Any workable system will have to address how they will be allocated, since they can't be shared 8 billion ways.
        AndrewKemendo 4y ago
        In the paper it is laid out carefully. Said simply: Every watt of energy that goes to creating bullets is a watt not being used on creating and distributing necessary goods to those in the most need. That is how it is fundamentally destructive - The pie is fixed to the productive capacity of the planet. Every beanie baby created crowds out healthcare in rural missouri. The workable system is one where we memetically return to sharing economies via example and not coercive force. I think it's going to take centuries of non-violent mutual aid and cooperative organizations that do not follow into the trap of strict excludability, for us to get back to peace and health. These organizations and societies exist at small scales and often temporally at large scale (Think Sept 12th etc...), we just need more people to do it all the time everywhere. That's actually kinda all we need to do. Unfortunately we have 12000 years of trauma we're all reacting to so it's layers upon layers of structural and emotional fear.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
That period was also incredibly violent, as the unit of competition was the family, not the individual. Economies of scale were similarly inaccessible, which is why agrarian societies outcompeted their hunter-gathered kin. We can absolutely model our post-industrial society on that pre-historic ideal, but that also requires acknowledging its brutality and shortcomings.
- jdgoesmarching 4y ago
  Graeber’s last book, The Dawn of Everything, does a great job of dispelling a lot of these “brutal and short” notions as mostly ideological myths.
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    This is the same guy who believed Apple was founded in the 1980s by Republican ex-IBMers using laptops, though.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Graeber’s last book, The Dawn of Everything, does a great job of dispelling a lot of these “brutal and short” notions as mostly ideological myths Anyone casting this as settled science immediately attracts scrutiny. Our data from the epoch are spotty. But there is evidence it was very violent on a per-capita basis [1]. [1] https://stevenpinker.com/reviews-better-angels-our-nature https://stevenpinker.com/reviews-better-angels-our-nature
    - haswell 4y ago
      I agree that calling this "settled science" is problematic, but a large point of the book in question is to introduce new evidence from the epoch in question that directly challenges some of the common narratives, especially Pinker's. It's a thought provoking book worth reading.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
jhbadger 4y ago
Whether or not this is the case (although a handful of papers and one of Graeber's pop-sci books hardly makes it "settled"), all this deals with time periods far too recent for evolutionary biology to play a role in human behavior. Cultural "evolution" has nothing to do with actual evolution.
- haswell 4y ago
  > Cultural "evolution" has nothing to do with actual evolution. I can't imagine this could be strictly true. It's not as if human's social capacity turned on one day at full capacity, and the social hardware was complete. I do think it's fair to say that society evolves at a different pace given the capabilities of our current social software, but all such change is still underpinned by biological evolution before it. I sometimes wonder how far we can go as a species before we start malfunctioning widely, e.g. recent study [0] about schizophrenia that finds it non-existent in hunter/gatherer societies, and city living potentially playing a factor for some individuals. - [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763422003839 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342...
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  Nor am I suggesting as such
- msmenardi 4y ago
  This is totally wrong - people are much different in 2023 compared to earlier in our lifetimes, even people from 1990 would seem completely different to us now. Cultural evolution is a type of evolution, it's not a "fake" version or something like that.

coding123 4y ago

The everyone is out for themselves, greed is king, insurance instead of family, sue thy neighbor is not backed by evidence? who knew?

goatlover 4y ago

If social community/communal existence is an essential requirement, then how do you explain the past several thousand years, where civilization has come to dominate, and the human population has grown to 8 billion? Civilization didn't just develop in the middle east, it cropped up separately in several different regions, including the Americas.

ves 4y ago
Competition in its recognizably modern form only recently became the foundational organizational system for civilization, and civilization “won” because (in part) a) it generally has no problem deploying incredible levels of violence and coercion, against people and the environment, and b) it promotes continuous population increase, even beyond what may be sustainable. There’s about a million places to source this, but I might start with something like James C. Scott.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Competition for resources and violence is seen in primates and many mammals. Smaller social groups does not necessarily remove this element. The main difference with humans is that we are capable of organizing and coordinating larger social structures. Large Organizations of individuals require other large organizations to defend against
- goatlover 4y ago
  Tribal groups did also compete, and our hominid cousins, several of who were around the same time as modern humans, went extinct.
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
I'm excited you asked as I have a theory that is getting real traction that answers precisely that: https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  How do you address desirable goods that are really scarce? Such as downtown penthouses, beachfront property, spectrum licenses, etc... Since there will always be some fraction of the population who will desire to gamble the shirt on their backs for a chance at a larger prize.
  - AndrewKemendo 4y ago
    You are implicitly asking "Who decides how much is enough" As I say in the paper "There exists no regularized measure of relative deprivation that can be agreed on across all cultures and all time periods." I have no solution to the problem of relative consumption, I am simply suggesting that it is fundamentally destructive in the current structure. The only thing I can think of is to create systems that do not incentivize the risk taking behavior as you describe (and I was/am probably the most extreme version of what you describe by the way). My personal answer is to minimize my consumption as much as possible while still being able to carry out my personal values until I die. I have no advice for anyone else as I don't know what their circumstances are.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      I can't see how this desire is 'fundamentally destructive in the current structure'. Beaches, frequency bandwidths, etc., will exist regardless of whatever form human organizational structure takes. Any workable system will have to address how they will be allocated, since they can't be shared 8 billion ways.
      - AndrewKemendo 4y ago
        In the paper it is laid out carefully. Said simply: Every watt of energy that goes to creating bullets is a watt not being used on creating and distributing necessary goods to those in the most need. That is how it is fundamentally destructive - The pie is fixed to the productive capacity of the planet. Every beanie baby created crowds out healthcare in rural missouri. The workable system is one where we memetically return to sharing economies via example and not coercive force. I think it's going to take centuries of non-violent mutual aid and cooperative organizations that do not follow into the trap of strict excludability, for us to get back to peace and health. These organizations and societies exist at small scales and often temporally at large scale (Think Sept 12th etc...), we just need more people to do it all the time everywhere. That's actually kinda all we need to do. Unfortunately we have 12000 years of trauma we're all reacting to so it's layers upon layers of structural and emotional fear.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

That period was also incredibly violent, as the unit of competition was the family, not the individual. Economies of scale were similarly inaccessible, which is why agrarian societies outcompeted their hunter-gathered kin. We can absolutely model our post-industrial society on that pre-historic ideal, but that also requires acknowledging its brutality and shortcomings.

jdgoesmarching 4y ago
Graeber’s last book, The Dawn of Everything, does a great job of dispelling a lot of these “brutal and short” notions as mostly ideological myths.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  This is the same guy who believed Apple was founded in the 1980s by Republican ex-IBMers using laptops, though.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Graeber’s last book, The Dawn of Everything, does a great job of dispelling a lot of these “brutal and short” notions as mostly ideological myths Anyone casting this as settled science immediately attracts scrutiny. Our data from the epoch are spotty. But there is evidence it was very violent on a per-capita basis [1]. [1] https://stevenpinker.com/reviews-better-angels-our-nature https://stevenpinker.com/reviews-better-angels-our-nature
  - haswell 4y ago
    I agree that calling this "settled science" is problematic, but a large point of the book in question is to introduce new evidence from the epoch in question that directly challenges some of the common narratives, especially Pinker's. It's a thought provoking book worth reading.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago

jhbadger 4y ago

Whether or not this is the case (although a handful of papers and one of Graeber's pop-sci books hardly makes it "settled"), all this deals with time periods far too recent for evolutionary biology to play a role in human behavior. Cultural "evolution" has nothing to do with actual evolution.

haswell 4y ago
> Cultural "evolution" has nothing to do with actual evolution. I can't imagine this could be strictly true. It's not as if human's social capacity turned on one day at full capacity, and the social hardware was complete. I do think it's fair to say that society evolves at a different pace given the capabilities of our current social software, but all such change is still underpinned by biological evolution before it. I sometimes wonder how far we can go as a species before we start malfunctioning widely, e.g. recent study [0] about schizophrenia that finds it non-existent in hunter/gatherer societies, and city living potentially playing a factor for some individuals. - [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763422003839 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342...
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
Nor am I suggesting as such
msmenardi 4y ago
This is totally wrong - people are much different in 2023 compared to earlier in our lifetimes, even people from 1990 would seem completely different to us now. Cultural evolution is a type of evolution, it's not a "fake" version or something like that.