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Andy Rimmer (4/24/2008)
Maybe the problem is the size of the pack- in nature a pack would split if it became to big for local resources, hence my comment about civilised ( growing beyond natural boundaries might be a better description) The Pack would not split as I understand it, numbers would be controlled by self culling. This is demonstrated by several tribal human groups who will, if there is need, simply kill new borns or forcefully abort pregnancies. Splitting the pack will simply result in the same drain on resources and to the two groups competing. Many Animal groups will sacrifice young to ensure that one survives when there are limited resources, or simply abandon all young if limitataions are severe. The problem with humanity is that we appear to have convinced ourselves that attempting to control population is evil.
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Wag
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| Either way, we wouldn't end up with communities of 50,000 plus (what is the population of LA at the moment). Somehow I don't think it's that simple though, we could very quickly bring these people into line using violence- (natures solution?)but do we want to and how long would it last? If we don't want to use the violence solution then as Matt said we need to look at motivation. Crime is a low return career for most criminals( most of them don't make a fortune and arrest rates are fairly high)- however it also appears to require very little commitment, so it is attractive if you're lazy- though in Matts example laziness wasn't really an option- and it does give the same sort of freedom as self employment is imagined to. It's also attractive if you don't want to conform and many young criminals simply "grow out" of their behaviour in their early 20's, when pressure of partner and children (having or wanting)starts become an issue. Maybe we need to accept criminal behaviour asd a right of passage and look at minimising the harm?
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Andy Rimmer (4/24/2008) Maybe we need to accept criminal behaviour asd a right of passage and look at minimising the harm? Thats an interesting concept. *nods* I wonder of we could get funding...
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Andy Rimmer (4/24/2008)
Either way, we wouldn't end up with communities of 50,000 plus (what is the population of LA at the moment).
As far as I'm aware none of the "higher" mammals live in social groups that large (though I'm not biologist), but of course plenty of creatures do, mostly bugs mind you. I think the key question is to ask yourself what differences larger groups cause. However the key point of all the evolutionary psychology stuff is that criminal and lazy behaviour are perfectly normal, natural, sensible, logical, "proper" behaviour for human beings and we would expect them in communities of a few individuals. As Marios points out, groups of 50 chimps are enough to engage in complicated homicide plots. Blaming it on modern life exactly misses the point, that these instincts and behaviours have been with us throughout history.
I'm convinced that we can change society so that it's different to the way it is at the moment, if we choose to. Possibly even better, by some given definition of better. However I don't think we'll achieve that by assuming that something is wrong with "lazy" or "criminal" people or that it's a consequence of maladaption to large societies. These traits are normal, predictable and they are, according to evolutionary psychology, exactly what we should expect to see.
If we don't want to use the violence solution then as Matt said we need to look at motivation. Crime is a low return career for most criminals( most of them don't make a fortune and arrest rates are fairly high)- however it also appears to require very little commitment, so it is attractive if you're lazy- though in Matts example laziness wasn't really an option- and it does give the same sort of freedom as self employment is imagined to.
I think laziness as a social problem (lazy poor people is a social issue, lazy rich people are to be envied) is largely a consequence of our social net. People cheat. You can build a society where everyone tries to provide for everyone else, but the laws of nature say that if you do that, then it is in the interests of individuals to take and not put in. And therefore you should expect to see people trying to cheat the system. Whether it's 1 person in a family of five siblings, sharing their food or one individual in a community of five million signing on the dole. People cheat, we should expect, anticipate and plan accordingly. There is nothing wrong with these people and while it may be possible to "cure" them, to do so would mean over-riding basic human instincts. And that could be extraordinarily hard, outside the range of current science and would be morally questionable. Much easier to try to build social models which have less opportunities to cheat.
In less academic terms that means making benefits more conditional on effort. Personally I favour workfare schemes.
Unfortunately you have to be very careful and keep firmly in mind that any attempt to make laziness less profitable as a strategy is going to make criminality more attractive as a strategy. If you can't rob people by signing on and working at the same time, then an attractive alternative is to simply rob them.
It's also attractive if you don't want to conform and many young criminals simply "grow out" of their behaviour in their early 20's, when pressure of partner and children (having or wanting)starts become an issue.
A significant amount of crime is committed by this age group, particularly young men, which is again, pretty much what we would predict from the biology. First an anecdote:
Years ago, they caught a criminal who had been stealing cars to order. I seem to remember he was based in our local area and he had apparently been compiling logs of every valuable car in the area. Make, model, colour, year, etc. People were outraged that someone could be so calculating about crime, as if it were somehow more wrong than someone who just decided to nick a car on a whim. I was more fascinated by the workload that must go into compiling and maintaining lists like that and was struck by the initiative the guy showed in getting off his arse and building his own business. I bet he didn't get to apply for many grants...
Human beings, particularly men, are driven by a desire for status and wealth. As far as we can tell men are programmed to get it by any means possible, women are programmed to mate with it, by any means possible. Mother Nature doesn't seem to be a text book feminist as far as the biologists are concerned. We want to achieve and for many of us society lays out simple routes by which we can do this - go to university, get degree, get job, get house, get wife, get kids, satisfy DNA, die. For lots of people these routes do not seem accessible, either because they genuinely aren't or because they simply don't perceive them to be accessible.
We should expect a significant number of people who cannot "achieve" through the society routes that are acceptable (getting a "good" job) to attempt to achieve through the soceity routes that aren't acceptable - the most obvious of which is theft. Theft is dangerous and non-productive (from a society point of view) but it's perfectly rational in nature. Animals steal from each other all the time. Theft is endemic in nature and it only needs the right triggers, the right conditions for humans to do it to. When, in the judgement of the individual, crime is the best strategy to "achieve" then that human being will select crime. It's a perfectly rational and sensible thing to do. Because we're animals just like the other primates.
Teenage men are at a particularly vulnerable period. The danger with crime is that you are staking everything you own currently against a possible win in the future. If you don't own anything currently then you have nothing to lose. People with 25,000 a year jobs don't hang round on street corners nicking mobile phones.... Young males are a key age where everything is in flux and they stand to win big or lose everything. And consequently it makes evolutionary sense for them to take big risks. They need status and wealth to impress females and to gain status within their peer groups and if they need to take risks to do that then it is worth doing so if the alternatives seem to be worse.
If you look at Venderkesh's work on crack dealers this becomes very obvious. What Venderkesh couldn't get over was why anyone would be a crack dealer when it was such a bloody awful job. It's dangerous, it pays badly you have to meet daily with crack-heads. It's a terrible job. But it's aspirational. Young black men living in poor ghettos can see the visible, tangible evidence that success as a crack dealer can bring. If they make it then they can become a gang leader and that success is worth the risk because it brings status, wealth and women. It's a pay-off. You take the gamble, you work hard at the best opportunity available to you, dealing crack, and you try to make the big time. It's the ghetto equivalent of working hard at college for nice white middle class kids. It's your route to get on in life, and unlike the stories you're being peddled by "society" you can see this way works, because you live next to the man it worked for. It's a proven strategy, even if it is terribly risky.
At the moment laziness is a strategy you can employ to lead your life and it will work to give you a small dependable pay-off. You'll never hit the big time living on the dole but you can mange it and live your life that way. I lived on the dole for 18 months while completing my PhD, it wasn't fun, but it was a lot better living than many people in the world enjoy. If you reduce the effectiveness of laziness as a strategy, if you make it less easy to receive while contributing nothing then you inherently make crime a more attractive strategy and you have to expect criminal behaviour to rise. If you can make "having a career" a more attractive strategy than laziness and crime then you'd expect both of these two to fall. Ideally, if you are hell-bent on reforming society to reduce crime and laziness, then you want to make both crime and laziness less rewarding and make work more rewarding.
Of course how to do that, is the real challenge. But we can't answer the question successfully until we can frame it intelligently. A combination of harsher punishment of crime, better detection and prosecution rates, less support for lazy life strategies and critically a more equal distribution of wealth designed to provide more opportunities to those who don't have them currently. Basically make work pay, stop crime paying and making doing nothing less desirable seem to be the simple solution that our biology would offer up.
Maybe we need to accept criminal behaviour asd a right of passage and look at minimising the harm?
I don't think so. Again it's part of human nature to be outraged and indignant about crime and to want to punish cheats. Punishing cheats is difficult and dangerous, the cheats tend to oppose the idea and they've already displayed willingness to break the social rules everyone agreed to. So nature equips us with a visceral hatred for people we identify as doing wrong. We feel an instictive urge to hurt them, to punish them. These responses are biologically driven, jealousy is another classic example, and they exist for a very good reason. Just like our urge to cheat, we've been designed this way and it's perfectly "normal" and "natural" to want to see cheats punished. It serves to encourage us to choose to take the expensive path of punishing cheats.
The reason according to biology is that nature decreed that any animal that lives together in a community which doesn't share identical genetic values will cheat (families don't count, they aren't closely related enough, you need clones (like many insects) to break these rules). And if they are allowed to cheat then the cheats will prosper at the expense of those who don't cheat. Nature doesn't want you to get cheated, so she urges you to prosecute the cheats because she believes this is the best way to eliminate the threat they present, either by eliminating the individuals responsible or by making cheat strategies unprofitable. Why should anyone avoid cheat strategies in life if there is no punishment for them? What does it even mean to have rules if it is acceptable to break them, if breaking them brings no punishment?
Rather we need to ensure that we effectively punish cheats, be they muggers, tax evaders, speed limit violators, burglars or French merchant bankers. Deterrents are not the only way to control crime but they are an element for each individual in judging whether they should break the rules or not.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Matt Pennington (4/24/2008)
As far as I'm aware none of the "higher" mammals live in social groups that large (though I'm not biologist)
Hard to say since there's no definition of "higher" mammal - you don't in monkeys or apes as far as I know. For mammals, the obvious freaks are Naked Mole Rats - the only eusocial mammals - average 75-80 per burrow system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Mole_Rat
Matt Pennington (4/24/2008)
Human beings, particularly men, are driven by a desire for status and wealth. As far as we can tell men are programmed to get it by any means possible, women are programmed to mate with it, by any means possible.
Depends how you're defining status - if you're defining it as that social tag which means you'll be able to supply resources to your children (more or less like a broader definition of wealth) - then you might "benefit" from _marrying_ them while (also) screwing the sexy guy who mucks out the stables. That way you'll have Sexy Sons who are well-fed and inherit their father's status.
However, that does all depend very much on what sort of society you are in - as it seems to for other primate societies - it's really important whether one gender stays with the natal group more than the other. Whichever gender stays is going to be the one predominantly passing on social status (in bonobos female stay put and males move to a new group - the sons of the alpha female get a very substantial leg up). Evolutionary psychologists have a very bad track record for building immense towers of supposition (fair enough) starting on the kind of ignorant assumptions about "universal human society" you would expect from Joe Bloggs on the street (obviously human society is patrilocal - that's how it is in Britain/America - if human society is patrilocal that probably means it's genetic - if it's genetic, then it's probably a universal - if it's a universal, then we don't need to check anywhere other than Britain/America ...).
Matt Pennington (4/24/2008)
We should expect a significant number of people who cannot "achieve" through the society routes that are acceptable (getting a "good" job) to attempt to achieve through the soceity routes that aren't acceptable - the most obvious of which is theft.
As you say below, it's not about what the nonexistent concept "Society" deems un/acceptable - it's about what your real society - the people you know/interact with/care about - deem un/acceptable.
Matt Pennington (4/24/2008)
I don't think so. Again it's part of human nature to be outraged and indignant about crime and to want to punish cheats. Punishing cheats is difficult and dangerous, the cheats tend to oppose the idea and they've already displayed willingness to break the social rules everyone agreed to. So nature equips us with a visceral hatred for people we identify as doing wrong. We feel an instictive urge to hurt them, to punish them. These responses are biologically driven, jealousy is another classic example, and they exist for a very good reason. Just like our urge to cheat, we've been designed this way and it's perfectly "normal" and "natural" to want to see cheats punished. It serves to encourage us to choose to take the expensive path of punishing cheats.
There are papers flying about with regards to the human desire to punish - however, that's a personal, 'visceral' process - I don't think it's at all the same believing that juvenile delinquents who haven't stolen _your_ mobile. Also, those papers often miss out on an even simpler motivation - direct personal benefits of punishment (it's the alpha who hands out 'impartial' judgement and allocates punishment - the alpha male is generally a "loser supporter", possibly because the alpha male/prospective alpha male is the only person who gains by sacrificing individual allegiance for broad-base group support - very generally sensible monarchical behaviour, Macchiavelli makes a big point of it in The Prince).
In fact, if there aren't any _direct_ personal benefits to punishment, it's very hard for it to be a stable strategy (you end up needing 2nd order punishers who punish people who fail to punish cheaters ... then you need 3rd order punishers who punish 2nd order punishers who fail to ...) - ostracism is easiest (direct benefit because you won't get screwed by that person again - and you've made their strategy that little less attractive, if they are likely to take that into consideration).
Matt Pennington (4/24/2008)
The reason according to biology is that nature decreed that any animal that lives together in a community which doesn't share identical genetic values will cheat (families don't count, they aren't closely related enough, you need clones (like many insects) to break these rules).
Insect clones? Are you thinking of the very close relatives in hymenoptera species - supersisters which share 75% of their DNA? It is a very popular example, but it's actually dead wrong (because they share 25% of their DNA with their brothers on average they aren't any more related to the entire hive than non-haplodiploid eusocial insects - like termites). Eusociality seems to be more to do with the sort of niche they live in (living in underground burrows - like the Naked Mole Rats) and the haplodiploidy seems to come after.
I think lancet flukes are supposed to be clones http://www.weichtiere.at/Mollusks/Schnecken/parasitismus/dicrocoelium.html - I think the one which travels up to the ant's brain to 'steer' it effectively sacrifices itself and they only do that because they are clones of the other flukes. Even then, you can bet that, if this is the case, they operate some system of short-straw-drawing which has become very 'fair' due to equally matched pressures towards cheating.
Matt Pennington (4/24/2008)
Nature doesn't want you to get cheated, so she urges you to prosecute the cheats because she believes this is the best way to eliminate the threat they present, either by eliminating the individuals responsible or by making cheat strategies unprofitable.
That doesn't work unless you literally do gain _directly_ (or kin selectively) from the punishment (and kin selection generally works against this). If the cost of punishment is higher than what you gain directly then you're back with acting for the "good of the Species' rubbish - there are loads of papers with people trying to find ways around this - and there are, but they are all a bit contrived and boil down to making the person payoff higher than the cost.
Marios
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Marios (4/25/2008)
Hard to say since there's no definition of "higher" mammal - you don't in monkeys or apes as far as I know. For mammals, the obvious freaks are Naked Mole Rats - the only eusocial mammals - average 75-80 per burrow system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Mole_Rat
I was looking for population sizes that resemble cities. Say a few hundred thousand individuals. 75-80 is not "large" in that context. I *think* only the insects achieve these kind of numbers but I could be wrong. I don't know if fish shoals get that large. I'm certainly not aware of any mammals higher or lower that do, but I put higher just to reserve it to things the size and intelligence of cats and dogs more or less.
Insect clones? Are you thinking of the very close relatives in hymenoptera species - supersisters which share 75% of their DNA? It is a very popular example, but it's actually dead wrong (because they share 25% of their DNA with their brothers on average they aren't any more related to the entire hive than non-haplodiploid eusocial insects - like termites). Eusociality seems to be more to do with the sort of niche they live in (living in underground burrows - like the Naked Mole Rats) and the haplodiploidy seems to come after.
Apologies, bad writing on my part. I was specifically referring to the insect families where large numbers of individuals are not reproductive and all the reproductive burden for the whole genetic family is carried out by a few individuals (the queens). As I understand it that leads to very unusual reproductive strategies in which it makes perfect logical sense to sacrifice your own life to preserve the life of the queen. In models where helping the queen, even at your own cost, is in everyone's best interests, I would expect cheating to be significantly reduced.
Matt Pennington (4/24/2008)
That doesn't work unless you literally do gain _directly_ (or kin selectively) from the punishment (and kin selection generally works against this). If the cost of punishment is higher than what you gain directly then you're back with acting for the "good of the Species' rubbish - there are loads of papers with people trying to find ways around this - and there are, but they are all a bit contrived and boil down to making the person payoff higher than the cost.
I think your analysis misses out the fact that ostracism is a form of punishment, you seem to conveniently want to split the two off. The little I've read seemed to imply that punishment strategies were effective, but I admit I've only read the popular texts (Jack and Jane do evolutionary biology) and not the actual papers.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Matt Pennington (4/25/2008)
I was looking for population sizes that resemble cities. Say a few hundred thousand individuals. 75-80 is not "large" in that context. I *think* only the insects achieve these kind of numbers but I could be wrong. I don't know if fish shoals get that large.
It's tricky - obviously you want examples of 'interacting' populations, but what counts as an interacting population is a bit open. Human cities are somewhat like hives and somewhat like overlapping primate groups (whatever facebook says, you don't really significantly interact with 10,000 people).
Fish shoals strikes me as a potentially very good analogy - as far as I grasp shoaling behaviour (which isn't very far) it's a dilution effect (you're always going to be slightly better of if you join the shoal). I don't think they need to be related or really have any close dealings with eachother - so it's not terribly unlike people living near other strangers (thus partaking in public goods like road/tube stations). There are even species where 'group augmentation' (e.g. meerkats) means it's worth bringing up/assisting in the raising of other people's children - even if you're quite unrelated - sometimes to the extent of having only one active breeding pair in the group (King and Queen) - because the benefit of having a large group/meat shield between you and predators is very high and/or because if you wait your turn you stand a reasonable chance of having an entire group to help you breed.
Not being a proper biologist, I'm afraid this is precisely the kind of question piece-learning can't answer - nor is the kind of question well-suited to google. However:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-billed_Quelea
1.5 billion adults in a 'small' strip of Africa and they regularly engage in huge flocks - a sort of Flying Holland.
Matt Pennington (4/25/2008)
I'm certainly not aware of any mammals higher or lower that do, but I put higher just to reserve it to things the size and intelligence of cats and dogs more or less.
It's terminology that biologists don't use because it doesn't mean very much. Cats and dogs don't use (fashioned) tools - but New Caledonian crows do. Social 'intelligence' is, if anything, even less well-defined.
Matt Pennington (4/25/2008)
Apologies, bad writing on my part. I was specifically referring to the insect families where large numbers of individuals are not reproductive and all the reproductive burden for the whole genetic family is carried out by a few individuals (the queens). As I understand it that lead | | | |