You don’t need to be a leader in a fission-fusion society to wander off and dig up some roots, as long as you return to the tribe at the end of the day.
But you do need to be a leader to wander off if you’re a soldier in an army. And military settings have much stronger selection pressures than any of the other settings humans evolved in. I think this is something that most talk of human evolutionary psychology misses; there are lots of selection effects, but some are much stronger than others, and the strong selection effects are found in extreme circumstances, not in daily life.
I’m sympathetic to that line of thinking in general, but this specific argument strikes me as suspiciously available. For the selection pressures against low-status independent action in combat to generalize to things like entrepreneurship or research, styles of group combat where those selection pressures dominate would have to have maintained for evolutionarily significant periods of time, and the psychology of group combat would have to be sufficiently close to that of the domains we’re discussing for the same instincts to kick in. Perhaps more importantly, they’d have to be common enough not to get lost in the noise of everyday life; “act independently” versus “wait for instructions” is a very general question, and a heritable tendency towards one or the other would have measurable effects on just about every domain.
That’s a lot of prerequisites, and I can think of evidence both for and against just about all of them. In the absence of clever and well-designed research into the question, I’d hesitate to draw strong conclusions about its evolutionary roots.
Interesting; it seemed to me that combat in the ancestral environment would be the main case where the tribe would shut up about status for five seconds and allow fighters to get stuff done.
That might be what you’d expect, but what we actually see is that militaries have explicitly tracked status (rank), and strong enforcement of that status (orders), and it’s been that way for at least as long as we have records. They also tend to have the death penalty for a wider variety of things, including for attempting to leave (deserting), for which there is a strong incentive that applies to everyone at once with a shared but varying strength.
Another interesting fact about warfare is that it makes tribalism a simple classification problem (my side/their side/neutral) with a high penalty for error; and wearing the wrong clothes (uniform), looking different (geographic origin), speaking differently (accent) or not recognizing culture references, are all strong indicators that someone is not on your side. Visibly trying to hard to match these criteria but failing would indicate a spy. Judging people on these things in daily life is bad today and probably wasn’t ever much better, but in war they’re proper Bayesian evidence of something important.
I also think that it’s probably a bad idea to talk about “the ancestral environment” as though it doesn’t include the most recent millenium. Some traits do evolve fast enough for selective pressures in recorded history to matter.
But you do need to be a leader to wander off if you’re a soldier in an army. And military settings have much stronger selection pressures than any of the other settings humans evolved in. I think this is something that most talk of human evolutionary psychology misses; there are lots of selection effects, but some are much stronger than others, and the strong selection effects are found in extreme circumstances, not in daily life.
I’m sympathetic to that line of thinking in general, but this specific argument strikes me as suspiciously available. For the selection pressures against low-status independent action in combat to generalize to things like entrepreneurship or research, styles of group combat where those selection pressures dominate would have to have maintained for evolutionarily significant periods of time, and the psychology of group combat would have to be sufficiently close to that of the domains we’re discussing for the same instincts to kick in. Perhaps more importantly, they’d have to be common enough not to get lost in the noise of everyday life; “act independently” versus “wait for instructions” is a very general question, and a heritable tendency towards one or the other would have measurable effects on just about every domain.
That’s a lot of prerequisites, and I can think of evidence both for and against just about all of them. In the absence of clever and well-designed research into the question, I’d hesitate to draw strong conclusions about its evolutionary roots.
Interesting; it seemed to me that combat in the ancestral environment would be the main case where the tribe would shut up about status for five seconds and allow fighters to get stuff done.
That might be what you’d expect, but what we actually see is that militaries have explicitly tracked status (rank), and strong enforcement of that status (orders), and it’s been that way for at least as long as we have records. They also tend to have the death penalty for a wider variety of things, including for attempting to leave (deserting), for which there is a strong incentive that applies to everyone at once with a shared but varying strength.
Another interesting fact about warfare is that it makes tribalism a simple classification problem (my side/their side/neutral) with a high penalty for error; and wearing the wrong clothes (uniform), looking different (geographic origin), speaking differently (accent) or not recognizing culture references, are all strong indicators that someone is not on your side. Visibly trying to hard to match these criteria but failing would indicate a spy. Judging people on these things in daily life is bad today and probably wasn’t ever much better, but in war they’re proper Bayesian evidence of something important.
I also think that it’s probably a bad idea to talk about “the ancestral environment” as though it doesn’t include the most recent millenium. Some traits do evolve fast enough for selective pressures in recorded history to matter.
Tribal combat even now is far from limited to large, structured military organisations.