Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Socio-political Systems

Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Socio-political Systems. Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, Christopher Boehm. Behavioural Processes, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2018.01.007

Highlights

•    Strong social interdependence plus availability of lethal weapons in early hominin society undermined the standard social dominance hierarchy.
•    The successful political structure that replaced the ancestral social dominance hierarchy was an egalitarian political system in which the group controlled its leaders.
•    The heightened social value of non-authoritarian leadership entailed enhanced biological fitness for such traits as linguistic facility, political ability, and human hypercognition.
•    This equalitarian political system persisted until cultural changes in the Holocene fostered accumulation of material wealth, when a social hierarchy with authoritarian leaders could again be sustained.

Abstract: We deploy the most up-to-date evidence available in various behavioral fields in support of the following hypothesis: The emergence of bipedalism and cooperative breeding in the hominin line, together with environmental developments that made a diet of meat from large animals adaptive, as well as cultural innovations in the form of fire, cooking, and lethal weapons, created a niche for hominins in which there was a significant advantage to individuals with the ability to communicate and persuade in a moral context. These forces added a unique political dimension to human social life which, through gene-culture coevolution, became Homo ludens—Man, the game player—with the power to conserve and transform the social order. Homo sapiens became, in the words of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a zoon politikon.