by Roger White, started May 00, copyright Aug 2002
In 1999 three adult chimpanzees broke out of their cage at the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City. It made the news because the chimps jumped two zoo keepers and mauled them severely, one lost fingers in the affair, and the rescuing zoo keepers contained the problem with a shotgun. This got me to thinking about man and chimpanzee, genetic cousins, and the differences between leadership styles between these two species.
Baby chimps are quite lovable and tolerant of other chimps and of humanity. This is why they show up on TV and at birthday parties. But even those baby chimps who receive the kindest treatment as youngsters grow up to be adults who are violent in dealing with other chimps, and violent and "treacherous" in their dealings with humanity. It appears that tolerance is "hardwired" into baby chimp thinking and violent dominance fighting is "hardwired" into adult chimp thinking.
This kind of wiring transition makes sense: a child can't stand up to an adult, and would get severely damaged in any serious attempt to do so, but an adult who doesn't "stand up for his or her rights" is going to be denied precious resources. Adults are always going to be "cranky" and "short fused" compared to their childhood natures.
But there are other consequences to this choice of having a "pecking order" based on winning dominance disputes. The world changes from day to day, animals get sick and die, or just old and weak. Those adults that lose a dominance contest one day, may find they can win on a subsequent day, so it pays to keep checking if the dominant can still dominate. The result of this is that the "leader" has a day filled with dominance contests, and the larger the group the leader dominates, the more time he or she must spend on dominance contesting. If dominance checking is basically a one-on-one check with each member of the tribe, then the difference between an "OK" size and a "too big" size will come up dramatically because the time spent checking will follow the 1, 3, 6, 10, 15... sequence that describes the number of connections needed in a "full mesh" network.
If the group gets too large, the time and stress consumed in dominance tests will weaken the leader, and he or she fails. Again assuming the group is too large, the stress will then quickly consume the replacement leader, and the next, and the next -- there is chaos at the top.
This chaos at the top has probably evolved as the signal that a tribe or clan should split. When the group splits, the time spent in dominance contests recedes dramatically, a leader can stay leader, and stability comes to the group again.
The "rules" I have just described apply to most social animals. If the animals travel in packs, and those packs have dominance hierarchies, then dominance disputes are going to be "serious" affairs. I suspect the poor zoo keeper that walked in on the loose chimps found himself embroiled in a dominance fight that the chimps had wanted to engage in for a long time -- the dominant chimp felt it was important to check who was on top: himself or the zoo keeper. The surprised zoo keeper then handled his side of the fight poorly -- he didn't win, and he didn't convince the chimp that the chimp had "won" before the chimp took some big pieces out of his hide.
The human story is full of dominance checking, too. And in societies adapted to Stone Age technologies, such dominance checking doesn't look terribly different from that of other animals. As a result, Stone Age tribes tend to be limited to small sizes, and that size limit may be determined by the stress dominance checking puts on the leaders.
As agriculture became popular with humanity, a change in leadership techniques was required. Agriculture gains in efficiency when groups larger than hunter-gatherer tribes are marshaled to work on agricultural projects. To benefit fully from agriculture mankind also had to devise new leadership technologies so that larger groups of people could work cooperatively.
One new leadership concept was the concept of hierarchy: a leader could be a leader to some people, but a follower to another person. The second innovative concept was the virtual leader. A leader who was not there, but whom two potential dominance contenders could both agree was their leader, and they could then cooperate. God is an example of a virtual leader. The concept of the warrior-priest class becoming dominant in a culture was a fusion of these two concepts. Another Great Thinker who supported hierarchy was Confucius.
Changing dominance technology may be a very recent event in human evolution. It may be as recent as the dividing line between prehistoric and historic societies. Ancient Egypt may have emerged from prehistoric Egypt as the Egyptians mastered new leadership technologies, and used the new leadership technologies to build farms and pyramids.
It may be that prehistoric mankind was too "wild at heart" to form larger groups.
It may be that this wildness was deliberately bred out of those human groups that were mastering agriculture. How so? By arranged marriages -- a family in an agricultural society is going to be attracted to mates who can "get with the program" rather than those who are suitable, but loose cannons or "uppity" (chronic dominance checkers).
If so, part of the "progress" of mankind that has taken place during the "historic generations" has been a profound enhancing of mankind's ability to cooperate, at the expense of the individual's propensity to test dominance. Prehistoric adult humans may have been as "cranky" and "treacherous" as the adult chimps of Hogle Zoo, but those tribes that embraced agriculture had to breed that out of their emotional makeup. And the more they bred it out, the more they prospered.
The human psyche may not have altered qualitatively since mankind gave up living in Stone Age hunter-gather tribes, but it's likely that there have been some quantitative differences that have been changing mankind's genotype. These changes are likely to make him or her less dominance testing and more cooperative.