What our Ancestors can Teach us about Community
The evolution of the support system…and how we can fix it
When I was taught about evolution in school, my Biology teacher pulled out a small box of teeth. In this box were curved and sharp canines, blunt molars, and shovel-like incisors. Each of these teeth, my teacher said, were shaped by evolution for distinct purposes. The canine teeth were shaped to tear apart flesh. The molars were shaped to grind up plants. The incisors where shaped to bite through fruits and vegetables.
The point was that individual creatures were endowed unequally with certain physical traits which either helped or hindered their comparative ability to survive. If the traits helped survival, they became more prevalent in the species’ population. If they hurt survival, they faded away. This elementary understanding is correct in a banal sort of way. You look at a lion and see rippling muscles, fangs, and deadly claws. This creature fights and hunts. The sharper the teeth, the easier the hunting. The better the survival. The more the offspring which will inherit those sharp teeth.
We humans are fleshy, delicate things by comparison. Our teeth are blunt. Our fingernails are useless vestigial relics from a pre-human past. We are without fur, possessing the teeth and digestive track of an adaptable omnivore, and the opposable thumbs of a tree climber and tool user. Evolution has shaped our bodies in its own way, just as it has the lions. But it’s not just the shape of our bodies which have been guided by evolutionary forces.
Throughout the history of homo sapiens, which has encompassed the last 200,000 years, we have always lived within groups of other humans. We lived in the wild. Life was hard, and there was no surviving as an individual. The only way to survive was to band together, usually in groups of 50–150 people. In the same way that physical traits can either advantage or disadvantage the survival of an individual organism, so can group traits also affect the survival of the group. If a group was too small, it didn’t survive. If it was full of selfish people, it did not survive. If the group was not able to pass on skills like hunting and gathering, it would eventually die out. Over the course of generations, as groups of humans formed, some survived and some died. The survivors were successful because the characteristics of their group were amenable to survival.
The surviving groups were cooperative, cohesive, and successful at sharing the duties of survival. Food was scarce, so it was important to have people spend lots of time trying to find it. Human babies are vulnerable and time consuming, so it was important to have people focused fully on caring for those babies. The ability to hunt is a learned skill, so it was important to have a tradition of passing that skill set onto the next generation.
The characteristics of these groups have allowed humans to spread all over the planet, thriving in every type of environment, no matter how cold, hot, wet, or dry. Despite this diversity of environment, our physical bodies aren’t really that different from one another. Our cultures, traditions, skills, clothing, shelter, etc ARE very different. It’s more important for humans to fit into these adaptable groups than it is for us to adapt as individuals to our environment.
All of our personality quirks, our behaviors, and emotional responses have been sharpened for the sole purpose of fitting into a group of humans. It’s easy to imagine why. If the group rejected you… you died. There’s a reason public speaking is such a common fear. Historically, when we were talking in front of a large group of people, we were speaking in front of every human we knew or would ever know. If they rejected us, we would be abandoned by the group and die. The fear of public speaking is directly associated with the fear of death. Additionally, groups with more cohesion were likely better able to survive than groups with poor cohesion. Life is easy today. We forget that, for millennia, we lived in the wild. We died easily, our children died easily, we went days at a time without eating. If your group was unorganized and lacked cohesion, it failed to procure enough food and everybody died. So not only have we adapted to fit into a group, but we also adapted to fit into a group in a way such that the group was more cohesive and successful. Perhaps this is why humans tend to be altruistic, and express other cooperative behaviors.
Let’s riff on this idea for a bit. I don’t want to jump too deeply into trying to hypothesize why we have certain fears and anxieties based on evolutionary ideas. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of pseudo-science or pop science. But let’s take this idea that we were shaped by the evolutionary demand to be skillful at navigating and fitting nicely into social networks of 50–150 people.
It strikes me that we no longer live in these sorts of groups. In the modern age, most Americans exist within either very small groups (friends and family) or very large groups (countries, cities, sports following, fan clubs, etc). Where are those 50–150 people groups? Perhaps we are part of a church, a neighborhood association, or an employee at a small company. But our membership in those groups is generally on the periphery of our lives.
Many of us no longer inhabit the sorts of social structures which have shaped our behavior over the last hundreds of thousands of years. Since we don’t live in the same environment for which we originally evolved, what has happened to the arsenal of behavioral tools which had been sharpened during that vast period of time for the specific purpose of fitting into a mid-sized group of people?
Those traits are atrophied or misappropriated.
It’s like our brain is a potato peeler, finely tuned by thousands or millions of years of evolution to peel potatoes. But now we live in a world where there are no potatoes. Only pumpkins. In order to use a potato peeler on the pumpkin, we are forced to use it in weird ways.
I think that’s happening with modern society. We scroll through twitter and it’s like we are surrounded by a strange tribe of people who are yelling at us and rejecting us all at once. We don’t actually see them, but we feel anxious none-the-less. We silo ourselves into political ideologies because they seem familiar to us. We focus more on destroying the OTHER ideology rather than focusing on good policies, because in our mind we are defending our group by destroying the other.
Let’s think about the incel movement. These guys who can’t get laid, so they form Red Pill or MGTOW clubs, and make up mysogynist theories about women. Their problem isn’t that they don’t have the correct shaped jaw, or they aren’t tall enough or good looking enough or not wealthy enough or whatever other nonsense theories they’ve cooked up. The problem is that throughout our history, we have always found sexual partners and mates through our extended group of 50–150 people. We can’t date our family and often don’t want to date our close friends. Typically, you want to meet people though your extended friend group, or maybe your mom’s friend wants to introduce you to her daughter.
Unfortunately, many young men are stuck trying to meet strangers at bars, clubs, or Tinder. This turns sex into a commodity. Something to be traded in a sexual marketplace. Very few people are equipped to compete in this strange new market, so they go sexless, congregate online, and radicalize themselves for recreation.
Additionally, maybe some people just haven’t spent enough time nestled within a peer group. Without the gentle teasing of a group of friends, how are you supposed to know when you’re doing something off-putting? I used to have a ridiculous haircut, and my friends teased me about it constantly until I finally changed it. Maybe you eat lots of onions and your breath stinks, but nobody has ever told you to stop eating so many onions at lunch, so the problem continues. These bite sized pieces of social criticism help us calibrate our outward appearance so that we are less off putting to other people. If you haven’t had that, then you stumble into the bar without wearing deodorant, with a ridiculous haircut, and an obnoxious way of talking that drives people away. Good luck getting laid.
The problem obviously goes beyond romantic relationships.
Everybody struggles with finding a job, affording a down payment for a mortgage, getting your car fixed, finding childcare for your new baby, or fixing up your house. In America, we access all of this stuff through the market. We spend money on it. It’s expensive. But if you are nestled safely within a large pack of humans, you can often find somebody to help you for free. Why pay $40k a year for a babysitter when you have the lady next door, or maybe there’s a couple down the street that has Wednesdays off and is willing to take your kids while you work if you take theirs on Friday.
People dream about starting a business, but can rarely afford to do so. With a close knit group of 50–150 people, you could probably petition at least 10 or 20 of them to lend some money to your cause…especially since they already know you and trust you. And if they DON’T trust you… well since they actually know you fairly well, that should give you some useful insight about your ability to run a business. Additionally, you have a vast pool of human capital to tap into. Your aunt can mail out packages, your friend can build the website, your cousin can help you answer phones, etc.
So much of our modern lives has to be handled analytically. In order to get a job, we have to perfectly design our resume, optimize our LinkedIn to show up in search results, and finely calibrate our cover letter to simultaneously attract attention and describe ourselves.
In a normal group of 150 people, you don’t have to do anything special to be noticed. You don’t need a blog, a youtube channel, or a brand. You just have to be you. You just have to communicate in the way that feels natural to you. In the way you have been carefully sharpened by evolution to do. Much is communicated through subtle body language and social cues. This is literally what we are designed to do. It’s as natural as chewing your food. It’s as natural as a bird flying or a squirrel running up a tree. It doesn’t need to be some complicated analytical task.
Small talk is widely panned, but it plays an important role. Rather than a means to exchange information, small talk is sort of like the human version of a dog sniffing butts. You are communicating mostly non-verbally. You’re vibing. Picking up subtle cues. Maybe you’ll think they’re nice, good people. Or maybe, for some reason you don’t really understand, you feel creeped out. That’s it. That’s communication. People spend 3 hours listening to Joe Rogan and his friends joke with each other. We enjoy hearing them vibe because it’s what we are naturally predisposed to do.
It’s like talking to your neighbor. You might have the same conversation about the weather over and over again, but it’s still enjoyable. There’s something beneficial and worthwhile to just vibe with somebody, to get an update on their mental and physical state.
Maybe the solutions to all of our problems isn’t to start a business, to improve our resume, to vote in the right politicians, or to change the way we communicate online. We don’t need a new photo sharing app or an updated version of Whatsapp. What we need is to de-emphasize online communication and re-emphasize physical contact with smaller local groups of people.
Seek out people who live near you. find neighborhood groups, church groups, or hobby enthusiasts. When you spend frequent time, physically, within a local group, you have access to a range of tools and intuitions which are specifically shaped to aid you in the process of navigating these groups. Maybe you don’t like everybody in this group, or maybe they’re more boring than the people you’ve selected to follow online. But understand that you’ve likely scoured the entire internet for the smartest, most interesting people and have gathered them onto your phone. Whereas, geographically you don’t have the same options. This is how it’s supposed to be. Accepting human failings, accommodating personality faults (including the fault of being boring or repetitive) is where empathy and sympathy come into play. If you continue to spend time with people you would otherwise ignore, you find that often you will naturally and spontaneously begin to care about them, even if you originally despised them. And they will care about you. This is something which normal human beings need. Let’s face it, you are probably not as interesting as the people you follow online either. You could probably use a little love, empathy, and sympathy as well. There’s an entire spectrum of emotional well being which can only come from physical contact with your fellow humans.
You might not have access to the world’s greatest mechanic, but Dave down the street could help you narrow down the reason your car won’t start. That could save you hundreds of dollars when you take it in to get fixed.
Perhaps we could all spend a little less time working on our resumes and building our brand and instead, shift our focus to organizing block parties and attending neighborhood association meetings.
