Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (47 page)

All of these problems arise because we seldom have access to the truth, and we normally arrive at some guess as to what it is by copying others. The conclusion from tournaments such as Laland’s that the number of innovators can be small might be surprising, but when we look around us, this is indeed what we see: successful inventors and entrepreneurs are rare and efforts to find them in television reality shows or to produce them in the classroom only serve to reinforce the point. And this is because for most of what we do, we cannot simply work out in our minds the best course of action, but social learning can sample (or steal) from others’ good luck or occasional good judgment. We see an awareness of this even at the highest levels of technical competition in, for example, yachting events such as the America’s Cup or racing events such as Formula 1. Boats and cars are often shrouded to conceal, until the very last moment, if ever, the complex shape of a rudder, or the bewildering configuration of airflow across an engine.

A feebleness about knowing what to do has evidently been true throughout our evolution, not just now when we have complicated things like yachts and Formula 1 cars, but also computers and derivative financial products to reach decisions about. What
is
the best way to shape a hand ax, or to make an arrowhead? And how would you know if you stumbled upon the right answer? You wouldn’t until you or someone else tried it. And the difficulty even now of answering these comparatively simple questions has meant that we have evolved to be good at what we can be good at: to take advantage of a sort of natural tournament of cultural selection played out in front of us every day, and which presents us with good solutions. Most of us are copiers. Natural selection has seized on the power of copying to make our minds very good at working within what cultural systems have to offer.

Part IV

THE MANY AND
THE FEW

Prologue

T
AXIING TO THE
terminal at Hong Kong airport, you notice a point across the bay where there is a forest of thin, white structures standing hundreds of feet tall. They have a peculiar monolithic appearance. They do not move or make any sound, and if you arrive at one of those times of the year in Hong Kong when the weather is hot and the air is hazy with pollution and humidity, these white structures look like some giant fungi that has sent up its fruiting bodies from the steaming forest floor, ready to disperse its spores.

But they are not fruiting bodies, at least not of fungi. These stalks have been made by humans. They are high-rise apartment towers, which house tens of thousands of people. And their remarkable feature is that they serve the same purpose as the fungal stalk does for its spores: both are vehicles that carry and promote the survival and reproduction of their inhabitants. But we are not fungi, or even ants, bees, or termites, so how is it that so many of us can live so tightly packed like this, reliant on such a small number of others to govern our lives?

CHAPTER 10

Termite Mounds and the
Exploitation of Our
Social Instincts

That large groups of humans can be led by a small number of elite
for the same reasons as termites, ants, bees, and wasps

A DILEMMA

T
ERMITES’ MOUNDS
and ants’ nests can house millions of individuals toiling in dark, cramped, and steamy conditions on behalf of a queen who lives a life devoted almost entirely to reproduction. Most of us instinctively recoil from such a scene as not being part of our nature. Yet it was vividly depicted in the dystopian view of the city of Los Angeles in the film
Blade Runner
, a crowded, teeming, drizzly place full of anonymous strangers. In cities all over the world millions of people live and work side by side ruled by a small elite, and in countries such as China and India over 1 billion people fall under the rule of a few. When we marvel at the purposeful and yet orderly behavior of a colony of ants, scurrying in and out of their nest, some carrying objects, others scouting for prey or invaders, we need not cast our imagination very far to think of construction workers on a large building site or laborers building a pyramid in ancient Egypt. We attend sporting events and musical performances in stadiums at which tens of thousands of us remain for hours only inches from each other, all following the actions of a few on the field or stage. There is something both strange and remarkable about this behavior: hypersocial and hyper-orderly. Apart from the social insects, no other animals can work together in such large numbers. Imagine a construction site or a sports stadium filled with tens of thousands of hyenas, or baboons, or even dogs, a species we have bred in our image.

We are able to live and work among others in our millions. And yet this poses a dilemma for one of the main ideas of this book: nothing in our evolutionary history specifically prepared us for this. If humans evolved a tribal nature that revolves around life in relatively small and exclusive cooperative societies, how do we explain the enormous social groupings of the modern world in which so many can be so willingly led by so few? The growth of human populations happened far too quickly for biological changes to our nature to have kept up. Until perhaps 10,000 years ago, all humans lived in small hunter-gatherer bands. The invention of agriculture changed all that as having the capacity to
produce
rather than simply gather food meant larger numbers of people could reside in the same place. Small bands of maybe ten to three hundred people gradually came to be replaced by tribes that were effectively bands of bands. Tribes gave way to chiefdoms, in which for the first time in our history societies became centralized. There was stratification by class and the chief sat at the top of a formal hierarchy of authority. Chiefdoms eventually gave way in turn to large city-states such as Jericho (in modern-day Israel) and
Ç
atal H
ü
y
ü
k in Turkey, or the Mesopotamian cities of Ur and Babylon. These were later succeeded by fledgling nation-states.

The forces propelling this growth were many, but mainly of three sorts—protection, economic well-being, and reproductive output. People were, in a word, better off, even if it is by now well established that we were often less healthy in these large groupings. But being better off does not alone tell us why it worked. Were we to provide 10,000 dogs, hyenas, or even apes with unlimited food and protection, we would not get the happy outcome we might have sought. Paul Seabright in
The Company of Strangers
suggests that human societies have been able to grow large because we have acquired an ability to trust strangers. We pay our taxes to unknown bureaucrats, buy things made in foreign lands and from people we do not know, walk past strangers in the street and even allow them into our homes without fear of being robbed or killed. We are able do these things because we have evolved rules and dispositions that allow us to exchange goods and services with people we have never met. And indeed, we have seen in earlier chapters how cooperation and trust can arise. The looming shadow of future encounters with the same people softens our tendencies to cheat them; we acquire reputations and learn those of others; and we count on the knowledge that you and those you would do business with bring to every exchange a sense of fairness that protects you and them from exploitation.

But if these rules remind us of anything, it is that we cannot possibly ever know enough about strangers per se to trust them. In fact, we have seen that there is reason to believe we have a hard-wired wariness of strangers. Rather, what we have acquired throughout our brief evolution is a taste for the benefits of cooperation and some rules that can make it work in the right circumstances. Thus, when we do appear to trust strangers, it is probably because they are not really strangers—we know or think we know something about them, the institutions they work for, or we think there are institutions such as the police, banks, or insurance companies ready to protect us from them. When a man knocks at my door asking to read my electricity meter, if I do let him in, it is with a mild apprehension. And even then I only do it because I know that it is my electrical company’s practice to send such people around and that my meter hasn’t been read for awhile. If this man knocked late at night, looked threatening, or it wasn’t my company’s practice to send such people around, it is doubtful I would let him in. Even when I do so, it is only after I have asked for his ID and sized him up, making a quick calculation as to whether I could overpower him should he try to rob me. It will also help if I haven’t heard anything in the local news about thieves or muggers who masquerade as meter-checkers as a way of gaining access to people’s homes.

When the waitress puts my credit card into a restaurant’s electronic scanner, I allow it not because I trust strangers, but because I observe others doing it, or have been told by people I do trust that others have used their credit cards at this establishment, or because I happen to know the restaurant has been there for some time. Still, I often feel a slight anxiety, wondering if some cloning device has been fitted to the scanner and I will receive word the next day that a large loan has been taken out against my card. Reminded that my bank will not charge me for purchases I have not made, I go ahead with the transaction anyway. And when I use the services of taxi drivers, banks, airline pilots, the police, and eBay, it is not that I trust them per se, but that I notice over long periods of time that in general airplanes are flown well, the police are not on the take, taxi drivers don’t take advantage of their passengers (on the whole), the reputation comments on eBay seem helpful, and my bank is fair with my money (or is it?). But even this is only true in parts of the world where these various services do work, or where I am familiar with the local culture. Many cities have “no-go” areas. Until recently, it was common in many parts of Africa to avoid putting your money into a bank—the widespread belief, often confirmed in practice, being that you wouldn’t get it back.

We learn from this that our capacity to live and work in large societies exploits the tactics we have acquired throughout our evolution for making cooperation work, and even then we begin with the most tentative of exchanges. So, if nothing in our evolutionary history specifically prepared us to live in large societies, almost everything about the way culture works does. Mathematicians call a mechanism
scale-free
if it doesn’t change as the size or scale of the group or phenomenon it is applied to changes. This chapter examines evidence that the large social groupings that began to emerge around 10,000 years ago did so by exploiting key evolved features of our cooperative behavior and psychology that happen to be scale-free. Our language, our diffuse and indirect style of cooperation and exchange based on reputation, our ability to specialize, and even our willingness to suspend disbelief—thereby making it more likely we might accept some chief as God’s representative on Earth—can all act relatively unfettered by the size of the group in which we reside. Having these scale-free cultural mechanisms meant that our societies could automatically grow to a larger size without having to invent new mechanisms beyond those that were in place by perhaps 160,000 to 200,000 years ago when our species arose.

Even these scale-free mechanisms cannot on their own explain why we chose to live in larger societies; they merely made it possible. Instead, we need to look for properties of our societies that make them not only an easy but also a productive thing to be a part of. Here, it turns out that our larger societies could naturally emerge by taking advantage of three properties they all seem to share: one is that they emerge from
local rules
; the second is that there can be some surprising
efficiencies
of larger groupings; and the third is
social viscosity
, or our tendency to maintain local ties within a larger society. The first of these allows larger societies simply to emerge so long as they pay their way; the second tells us how they pay their way; and the third shows us how our tribal psychology can still operate in a larger society. Revealingly, it is also these three features that oppressive and dictatorial regimes attack or exploit to break down a society and hold it within their grip.

LOCAL RULES AND THE EMERGENCE
OF SELF-ORGANIZATION

WHO DESIGNS
the societies we live in? The answer of course is that no one does. No one has a blueprint for the final product, no one has the whole picture in mind, and no one ever has. Instead, our societies naturally emerge from the players within them following what we can think of as local rules, and we should be grateful for this. To see why planning anything as complex as a society is out of the question, just consider what must happen for you to take a plane journey. Some time before leaving home you probably phoned for a taxi to take you to the local bus station. At the bus station you buy a ticket to take you to the airport. At the airport you have to check in and then pass through security and passport checks, perhaps buy some food at a restaurant. And finally you will board a plane and be taken to your destination. Once there, you again pass through various checkpoints, collect your bags, pass through more checkpoints, and then find some form of transport to your hotel.

When we do all this, it feels routine, if annoying and prone to jostling and delays. And yet, consider the apparatus that has to exist just to get you to your destination. Someone got up that morning ready to process your phone call for a taxi; someone else had started the day ready to drive you to the bus station. At the station the bus driver was ready to load your bag and take you to the airport. Once there, a phalanx of people had arisen that morning ready to check you in, handle your bags, perform security checks, and examine your passport. While waiting in the departure lounge, you buy coffee from someone who arose that morning ready to make it for you. The pilot and all the crew and maintenance staff also began their day preparing to carry you as a passenger, as did a small army of people at the other end, including finally the taxi driver who drops you off at your hotel.

We might not appreciate that all of this happens, and normally happens surprisingly well, because no one is actually preparing to do a single thing for you. Instead, everyone is following local rules. Those rules have emerged from a long trial-and-error process of people trying out their small part of the larger picture of a division of labor and exchange of goods and services. Someone drives a taxi, someone else a bus, and so on. The system has grown bit by bit in response to demands, and not a one of the people involved has to know or care very much about you. The systems are not perfect—remember the baby Jesus was born in a stable because there was no room in the inn—but all the things that happen just to get you to the airport are only the tip of the iceberg of things that must happen to make these systems possible. We haven’t even ventured down to the layer of the people who designed and then built the planes, buses, taxis, and roads that you used in your journey; the people who dug the raw materials out of the ground to make them; and the people who shipped them around the world to refiners and manufacturers.

Local rules and the complex interdependent systems that emerge from them have been with us throughout the history of biological and cultural evolution. One of the remarkable discoveries of the field of study known as
complex systems
is how order, or what physicists term a
lack of
entropy
, can be created out of seeming randomness by individuals or agents following a small number of very simple local rules, and without anyone specifying in advance what the outcome will be. Such systems are said to be self-organizing or self-assembling, and often have so-called emergent properties that were not part of any of the rules. The study of these emergent properties teaches us that it is the local rules themselves, not the finished product, that natural selection or some other selective process has sculpted to make the complex structures. The proof is that these agents never build quite the same structure—such as an ant’s nest, or even a large city—twice, as they would were they, say, making a model airplane from a fixed set of instructions.

For example, to build a single mound of wood chips in an environment consisting of randomly scattered chips, a hypothetical group of termites has only to follow one simple rule: wander in an area and if you find a wood chip, pick it up, unless you are already carrying one. In that case, drop the chip you are carrying and walk off. To convince yourself this rule works, imagine an area in which wood chips have been scattered randomly. At first, none of the termites will be carrying a chip, and when they encounter one, they will pick it up. They will then wander until they find another chip, at which point they will drop the one they are carrying, making a “mound” of two chips. Simultaneously, this will be occurring all over the area, so that small heaps of two chips each will dot the landscape. The termites that have dropped a chip set off again wandering until they find another. They might pick one up from a heap of two or encounter a lone chip and pick it up. They continue wandering, and some will bump into a heap of two, where they will drop their chip. The first signs of order are already appearing out of randomness.