First, a disclaimer: I have no moral qualms with with sex. My current interpretation is that, in humans, sex is a factor we use in deciding with whom to reproduce. If that’s true, the cult of monogamy serves, in some degree, to benefit individuals whose reproductive success is improved under that system. I also have no qualms about the theoretical underpinning of pick-up artists (PUAs) so far as it’s about jettisoning cultural baggage and presenting one’s self in the best light. Translation: I don’t hate the game.

Here’s where I do object: The hackneyed use of evolutionary psychology and pop-paleoanthropology to craft narratives of our evolutionary past, then use them to justify behaviors or strategies. Among PUAs, this is commonly manifested in a narrative that goes something like: “Humans evolved emotional responses that influence attraction in the paleolithic. During this period of human evolution, we lived in tribes. Because of the protective advantages, resource advantages, and social advantages of tribal leaders, women evolved an attraction to tribal leaders, a.k.a. alpha-males. Therefore, men should act like alpha males to attract women.”

Side Note: Lately, John Durant of hunter-gatherer.com has been writing about sorta similar things in the context of masculinity. While John’s recent posts have reminded me of my intent to write about this subject, I haven’t seen him construct this narrative. So… unless I missed something, the timing of this post is mostly a coincidence.

As to not be accused of constructing a straw-man, here are some quotes from “Mystery”, of the TV show The Pick-Up Artist. I can already hear the PUAs interjecting… “Yeah, but brah… he doesn’t represent all PUAs.” I fully agree with that point, but I don’t particularly give a fuck.

Evolutionary psychology and hunter-gatherer anthropology are ridiculously important and useful to a zillion things, and they continue to be held back by the pop-PUA bullshit that gets circulated endlessly. In other words, it makes my life difficult because I have to waste my time dealing with flak from people who object to the bullshit narrative — while I agree with their objections to the narrative. Darwin’s baby gets thrown out with the bathwater because a few people want to sell an image and a bunch of poorly researched ebooks.

The other objection I can hear rattling around in the most vapid of PUAs’ heads is, “Um, dude… So what, it fucking works.” That’s true in many cases, but it’s still a logically flawed argument. I’ll let those using it try to figure out why on their own.

But I digress… the quotes:

“Our emotional circuitry is designed to best suit our [survival and reproduction] based on an ancient environment and tribal social order that once existed tens of thousands of years ago.” – The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed (2005)

“Our emotions, and the behaviors they cause, are best adapted to a primitive tribal environment that no longer exists.” Revelation (2008)

“A friend that says, ‘He’s dated playboy models.’ Peacocking that screams tribal leader. Demonstrations of leading men in the group…. These are plotlines, and my game is full of them… learning that you are the tribal leader, having a jealousy plot line infuriate her…” The Pickup Artist: The New and Improved Art of Seduction (2010)

Anthropology argument against tribal alpha-male narrative

The main references cited in the PUA books mentioned in these posts are Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Evolution of Desire by David Buss (2003). I recommend both books, but the citations tend to misrepresent them. In the case of Dawkins’ book, it was written more than three decades ago, and anthropology has progressed radically in that time. Further, Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, not an anthropologist. Using his work as an anthropological reference is bound to be somewhat problematic.

There is no good reason to believe that humans evolved in hierarchical tribes between tens of thousands to two million years ago. To the contrary, there is a mountain of evidence showing that humans evolved in largely egalitarian bands that punished attempts of dominance with social sanctioning, banishment, and death (Boehm 1999). Yes, that’s basically saying that alpha males got offed by their social group — not exactly a benefit to reproduction. It appears that human ancestors likely lived in dominance hierarchies sometime in our distant past, but probably prior to the evolution of the hominin (human) line (Boehm 1999; Debreuil 2010). These works indicate that whatever “alpha” dominance tendencies evolved in our remote ancestors has most likely been evolving in the opposite direction for a couple million years. Among related primate ancestors, we see varying levels of dominance hierarchies, but the most recent common ancestor likely dates to 6 million years ago — a very far cry from merely “tens of thousands of years ago.” It must also be noted that as an evolutionary process, these behavioral traits exist on a continuum, and can’t be precisely mapped on a timeline. However, the “tribal” evolution narrative appears to be simply wrong.

Evolutionary argument against tribal alpha-male narrative

Without going into tedious detail, it’s unlikely that the alpha-male behavioral type (however imprecise that classification may be) is particularly adaptive. Traits that confer significant reproductive advantage tend to spread through a population rapidly. That basically means that traits that consistently vary widely among a species are probably not under significant selection pressures. If being alpha was the ne plus ultra of mate wooing strategies, there would be a whooooooollle lot fewer “betas.”

Evidence of what works better

If evolved human dominance behaviors have been decreasing over time, we would expect to see something else evolve to replace it. Because of the evolution of hominin brain size and cognition across the paleolithic, we might expect that whatever trait evolved via sexual selection related to these developments. Indeed, humor and intelligence appear to be more attractive to women than testosterone-related masculinity when it matters most — during female ovulation (Kaufman, et al. 2007). Greengross & Miller (2011) also found that humor relates to intelligence, and predicts mating success. Further, their data showed that Christopher Hitchens was right, and that males use humor to be selected by women.

Verdict

Masculine or “alpha” behavior is attractive to some women sometimes. It appears to be a retained trait from multiple millions of years ago, that was once advantageous, but has lost its significance with respect to the population as a whole. I’ve personally experimented with gender stereotypes enough to know that the opposite of masculinity can be attractive to women as well. When successful, either approach will lead to massive selection bias.

So, the PUAs are partially right on the attractiveness of masculinity. However, their narrative is a myth, and buying into such myths can limit reproductive success — or whatever term the PUA flavor of the month is using for “fucking” these days.

Then again, if you have intelligence, and the humor related to it, you probably already know that playing one strategy for every game is itself a sub-optimal strategy.

References

Boehm, Christopher (1999). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.

Dubreuil, Benoit (2010). Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies: The State of Nature.

Greengross, G., & Miller, G. F. (2011). Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males. Intelligence, 39, 188-192. [PDF]

Kaufman, S. B., Kozbelt, A., Bromley, M. L., & Miller, G. F. (2007). The role of creativity and humor in mate selection. In G. Geher & G. Miller (Eds.), Mating intelligence: Sex, relationships, and the mind’s reproductive system (pp. 227-262). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [PDF]

Over the past year, I witnessed a lot more criticism of evolutionary psychology than expected. Most of it seems to amount to little more than the political and emotional gasps of a dying blank slate paradigm. One criticism that I did pay credence to is that the anthropological narrative used in evolutionary psychology (and pop-renditions in particular) might be in need of some improvement. The fundamental underpinnings of EP recognize the importance of getting the paleolithic (EEA) component of this right. Of course, opponents of EP simply assume a fatalistic pose and tell us to pack it all in and give up because it’s impossible. Sorry haters, I’m not giving up that easily.

I’m not going to analyze any perceived divergence from what I see in the anthropology and the ‘narrative’ (as some would use as an epithet) of evolutionary psychology today. What I’m reflecting on today, and I hope you’ll entertain yourself, is the humanity of these individual people that we tend to reduce to categorizations and statistics. I recently finished one book, and am about 80% through two others, that have added a depth to my relationship with the words, numbers, and charts I’m bombarded with daily. I’ve mentioned about all of these before to varying degrees, but today I’m thinking about them in a more personal frame rather than my usual use — debunking agrarian arguments.

My Life With the Eskimo by Vilhjalmur Stefansson – This name gets batted about the Paleo community all the time in the context of the Inuit diet — consisting almost completely of animal products. I actually started reading it because the 77Zero Expedition Kickstarter project I’ve alluded to follows some of the same route as his 1909-1912 expedition. My interest in the contents from multiple angles certainly influences my experience with it, but I’ve found it enthralling. I found myself cracking up out loud at times, and enthralled most of the rest of the time. I gotta admit, his account of coming in contact with a tribe that had never before seen white men left me a little verklempt (talk amongst yourselves). The book is a monster in terms of insight into the religion, language, tradition, and lifestyle of hunter-gatherer. It’s also packed with insight on the transition from HG life to sedentism. I found this ridiculously useful because of Stefansson’s treatment of the subject. He’s basically just reporting his interactions, with less of an agenda than earlier conquistador style explorers and the cultural relativist social scientists later in the 20th century. I’ll be reading as much of his other work as possible.  [FREE ePub version for Nook, Kindle, etc.]

Resilience, Reciprocity and Ecological Economics: Northwest Coast Sustainability by Robert Trosper, PhD – This provides a political and economic breakdown of the tribes native to the Pacific Northwest. As I’ve spent most of my life in Alaska, Washinton, and Oregon, this hit me on a more personal level in terms of relationship to ecological inputs.

Against the Grain by Richard Manning – To be honest, this book incited the range of negative emotions from frustration to anger to resentment to disgust. I’ve talked about it in other recent posts so I’ll leave it at that for now.

I’ve recently started looking into the pockets of hunter-gatherer life in the Scottish Highlands that existed to some degree until at least the 18th century as well. My Thanksgiving challenge to you is this: look into the hunter-gatherer history of your local area, and the area of your family’s recent heritage. There are hunter-gatherer examples in the history of almost everywhere, and I predict that you’ll develop a connection that’s more significant than “our ancestors ate animals, fruit, and vegetables”.

“A scheduled wolf hunt in northeastern Oregon will remain on hold. At least for awhile. In September, the Imnaha wolfpack found itself under the close watch of local ranchers and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW).” [source]

Okay, that seems pretty straightforward, and I’m not trying to get all tree hugger or PETA on you. I can kinda see where there’s room for discussion about the pros and cons of wolfpacks <sarcasm>roaming the streets at night trying to devour your children</sarcasm>. But… this is where it gets weird:

“the court wants a $5,000 security deposit [from the group representing the public interest] to cover potential livestock losses caused by the two wolves that would have been dead if the state’s plan had gone forward. [source]

Say what? This has a few implications that I find disagreeable:

• The default mode of existence in the minds of our bureaucracy is the complete subjugation of wildness.
• It is The State’s obligation to facilitate the eradication wildness.
• Land ‘owners’ have a reasonable expectation of zero external risk whenever externalities can be exterminated.
• The public’s interest in wildness in our agrarian state system is subject to individuals’ economic interest.
• Theodore Roosevelt was cooler than a lot of other Republicans

In response to the comments on my post about libertarianism, I’ve turned a significant amount of attention to analyzing the evolution of property rights — with an eye to ascertaining any fundamental differences between land and products. Some of the comments in that post brought my attention to the native (I’m increasingly disenchanted by the categorization of natives and non-natives — once any individual is stripped of “native” status, the state makes stronger claims on ownership of their lives) people of the Pacific Northwest. It was suggested that these hunter-gatherers were ferociously defensive of strict rights to land, and this was meant as a refutation of my claim that land rights are anathema to HGs. It turns out that the groups in question were not hunter-gatherers anyway, so it doesn’t at all refute my line of argumentation, but that’s beside the point for today. The point is that these PNW cultures persisted in ecological stability for 2,000 years with a conception of land rights that didn’t require the eradication of wildness, and especially didn’t require the public to subsidize the destruction of wildness at the behest of insular landowners.

The burden of responsibility among land ‘owners’ in PNW tribes was on the owners themselves. The people did not exist to support them; the landowners were responsible for providing for the people. The ‘owners’ acted as stewards of the land. If the land was not productive, they were stripped of the privilege to act in an ownership capacity. In other words, the PNW natives’ system, and what we’ve inherited from the British/French, are not direct comparisons. Forgive the apparent U.S.-centricity. It just happens to be the case that many of the world’s governments are adapted from U.S. law, and thus share a similar provenance. Had a chief of a PNW tribe requested a $5,000 security deposit from the general public, he would have been deposed and/or killed for violation of the public trust.

“Further, it appears that livestock producers may have other sources of compensation, such as county grant programs.” – Oregon Court Document

The obvious counter-argument as it pertains to the wolves is that current ranchers would be acting as effective stewards by exterminating the wolves. However, contrary to the myth of the myth of the ecological “savage”, PNW tribes followed elaborate rules and norms that ensured the functioning of the ecological system. There was no barbed wire management required. Rather than the extermination of wildness, the focus was on fostering and perpetuating the productivity of the wildness.

I’m not going to build my entire land rights case today. I had no intention of writing this post until the visceral reaction I got from the notion that people interested in the ecology we all live in somehow owe real cash money to those poor maligned landlords who enjoy the privilege of excluding the rest of us from ‘their’ land. For now, I feel pretty confident putting the 2,000 years of PNW tribe resilience up against the fuedalistic remnants of our relatively brief experiment with the agrarian-corporation state — in terms of ethics and optimal human experience. Obviously, the U.S./European systems had a leg up in the violence and authoritarian domination department. And that, ultimately, is where this issue leads. My analysis will continue to observe the spectrum from egalitarian hunter-gatherers with high levels of autonomy, humor, and play to centralized authoritarian agrarian states with huge disparity between the impoverished and the wealthy, low levels of individual autonomy, and a bunch of boring, subdued people wading through rationalizations and coping by drug use. This notion of play vs. boredom also maps to wildness vs. civility.

My concern in all this is not petty battles between the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum political parties in the United States. This is a war between the wild animal side of our shared human nature and the warped motives of our modern world to pave, sterilize, and install child-proof caps on the entire planet, convert it to a personal ATM machine for a few individuals, then sell it back to us as if they’ve done us some favor. Newsflash: Disneyland has always been a cheap imitation of my imagination, and I don’t take kindly to milquetoast plutocrats trying to sell me tickets to their lobotomized version of The New and Improved Simulated Earth. And… this war ain’t limited to the borders of Los Estados Unidos.

OregonWild discusses the gray wolf’s return to Oregon after 168 years with a bounty on its head. Also, Vilhjalmur Stefansson says wolves are delicious.

• Against the Grain, book by Richard Manning (2005). Thanks to J. Stanton and Elizabeth Miller for the recommendation.
• America’s Lost Landscape: The Tallgrass Prairie, award-winning documentary film (2005). Available on DVD and through Netflix streaming.

The agrarian has offered us a devil’s bargain. By inducing population levels unsustainable by our planet’s naturally ecology through industrial agriculture, they now offer to sell us back the same product on the basis of said artificially inflated population. Their solution to unsustainable population? Shocker, doubling-down with more industrial agriculture.

“In the fertile lands of the Unites States and Canada a saying grew up that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” because the Indian encumbered the land which the farmer needed for cultivation of crops, and the miner for his digging and delving. The Indian was in the way and had to go, for we could not let questions of mere humanitarianism and justice restrain us from taking posession of the valuable lands that the Indian had inherited from his ancestors. In the South, economic and humanitarian interests were diametrically opposed, and the economic had their way. In the North, economic and humanitarian interests happened to coincide. The northern land was valueless to the farmer, and the country was of value to the trading companies only in so far as it produced fur; and furs could best be secured by perpetuating the Indian and keeping him in possession of the lands, because dead men do not set traps. The only good Indian in the North was the live Indian who brought in fur to sell.” – Vilhjalmur Stefansson, My Life With the Eskimo, 1912

The agriculturalists are quick to proclaim that we can’t survive without them. They declare that we’re better off under their management. These are, of course, imperialist lies.

“Some have said seventy-five million bison were on the Plains at the time of first European contact… Many think thirty million is a reasonable compromise… It almost doesn’t matter. The point is that… there were  tens of millions of buffalo, which means there was plenty to go around, especially for hunters on foot and armed with simple hunting weapons. There is no evidence that Aboriginal hunting of bison, over at least twelve thousand years, was making any serious dent in the population. On the contrary, evidence from the bones at many different sites of differing ages suggests that bison were certainly holding their own in terms of numbers, if not actually becoming more numerous through time.” – Jack W. Brink, PhD. Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains, 2008

Context: An average bison may yield 500 lbs. of meat after butchery. 500 lbs * 75 million = 37.5 billion pounds of meat. Assuming a 300 million population (roughly the current U.S. population), that equates to 125 pounds of bison for every individual in the U.S. at historic bison population. Obviously you can’t eat them all at once; this is just to provide some context. And… that’s just one species. How well did you say land management through barbed wire and farm agriculture are working again?

The agriculturalist has decimated the natural animal habitat of our planet. They have plowed grassland ecosystems naturally balanced with wildlife and offered us deserts and fossil fuel thirsty crops engineered on the barren lands of their parasitic tendencies. They have replaced the the equilibrium of an ecosystem in which we once thrived with mass extinction through mass extraction. Do not let the time that separates us from the agrarian subsumption of so many ecosystems serve as a chasm between us and the reality.

When speaking about the global ecology holistically, there is no such thing as sustainable agriculture. There are exceptions of course, agriculture ensures the sustainability of imperialist states. Agriculture ensures the sustainability of slavery — whether through slave labor, or its modern abstraction, wage slavery. Perhaps this is the sustainability we’re being promised by those offering agriculture as ne plus ultra sustainability.

The premise of all empires is that the backwards, uncivilized, primitives (read: the other) would be better off under the helpful guidance of their enlightenment. Despite a history of hunter-gatherers resisting assimilation by the state and its coercion, we’re told that those not blessed by our agrarian nightmare will be happy to subsist with the best of what industrial agriculture can provide. Forget that this claim has been demonstrated to be false time and again. The American Dream of unbridled consumption as a birthright is an illusion bearing the gift of an 80 hour workweek, alienation, and atomization. The dream is an easy sell, because we’re biologically driven to show off, but that impulse is a hollow replacement for living a vibrant life and demonstrating personality.

If you want less factory farmed meat, I have a solution: get the corn, soy, and wheat farms out of natural bison habitat. Of course, this is but one example.

And… for the sake of sustainability… I hereby forsake corn, soy, and wheat consumption… a practice not possible without fossil fuel agriculture and the GMO gestapo. Sustainability, you’re welcome.

Agriculture isn’t going away any time soon, but agrarians would do well to engage in some hard thinking on the full implications of their ideology. It’s certain that many veg*ns are unintentional imperialists — lulled by a life mediated by spectacular capital and swept away by its promises. It’s important to see its adherents as individuals, but ultimately: Veg*nism is imperialism. Drop the facade; self-righteousness doesn’t look good on imperialists.

And if you think hunters do not revere the animals that provide them with sustenance, you ain’t got no soul (in the James Brown sense). Try getting some via my recent post on life in ANWR, Robb Wolf on Discovery, The Wild Within on Travel Channel, or the San bushmen in a persistence hunt…

If you don’t at least begin to get it after that, you don’t know soul and I’ll let you get back to your robotic existence of denying humanity.

Libertarians, please hear me out. I once considered myself among your numbers, but I got over it. The reason I got over it may be the very reason you were drawn to it, or cling to it now. For some reason, there seems to be a proclivity to chant the infallible virtues of libertarianism within the paleo community. This is likely influenced by many factors. Perhaps the paleo diet attracts a disproportionate number of individuals with low Agreeableness. This isn’t an unreasonable explanation considering the community’s general rejection of conventional wisdom and opposition of mainstream nutritional advice. While I think personality may be part of it, I suggest that much of the impetus springs from flawed conceptions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors — whether in popular conception, or in the anthropological literature.

“Everyone’s entitled to their opinion… but you’re not entitled to your own facts. Sorry, you’re not.” -Michael Specter (probably not originator)

As part as the certification course required to wear my kilt in the United States of America, I was forced to watch Braveheart no less than 5 zillion times. Thus, I am well versed in the emotional appeal of yelling “FREEDOOoooommm…” until the blood loss from disembowelment lowers one’s blood pressure to levels no longer capable of sustaining breath and consciousness. As this pertains to libertarianism, there are a number of assumptions that need to be addressed before identifying oneself with the political philosophy. Libertarians who haven’t put any hard-thinking into the full meaning and implications of libertarianism seem to gravitate to it because of the more superficial associations with freedom. Look, it even starts off with the Latin root for freedom, liber! Individual liberty here we come! Great! Wipe off your blue face paint.

It ain’t that easy.

<sarcasm>But! But! The government of the United States of America told me that freedom is a good thing, and it intuitively seems like a good thing, and libertarianism puts it right up there in the front for all the world to see and know and love. Hooray! I’ve finally found the political party of my dreams that will let me live with personal freedom in an environment where everyone’s freedom is enforced by…</sarcasm>

Wait… enforced? Enforced doesn’t sound like liberty. Since when does “America the Beautiful” end, “Let the fear of enforcement ring”? Who’s doing this enforcement of freedom? How did we get from ad hoc hunter-gatherer bands to enforcement? The scope of those questions is slightly bigger than this piece affords, but let’s work toward that.

I’m not saying that all libertarians are unsophisticated in their attempt to reconcile libertarianism with human-nature. For example, these are Jason’s words from a recent post on his blog, Evolving Economics…

” [Libertarianism] is the preferred arrangement given human nature and the shape of the world today.” [source]

While I respect Jason’s thinking on many matters, I don’t find that libertarianism generally makes any sincere attempt to reconcile itself with human-nature. Saying “freedom is human nature, therefore libertarianism” is not enough. In a future post, I’ll outline improvements that libertarians could easily make that would bring it more in line with human nature AND the shape of the world today. In other words, libertarianism in its current iteration is burdened with sub-optimal and sub-accurate dogma. If libertarianism was a true political philosophy, rather than an ideology, it would self-correct in the face of new understanding.

Libertarianisms’ ground-rules

There are almost as many conceptions of libertarianism as there are libertarians. Because it seems to represent the popular conception of libertarianism, this is the basic framework I’ll be referring to in this piece:

“Libertarianism is grounded in the Principle of Equal Freedom: All people are free to think, believe, and act as they choose, so long as they do not infringe on the equal freedom of others. Of course, the devil is in the details of what constitutes “infringement,” but there are at least a dozen essentials to liberty and freedom that need shielding from encroachment:

1. The rule of law.
2. Property rights.
3. Economic stability through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system.
4. A reliable infrastructure and the freedom to move about the country.
5. Freedom of speech and the press.
6. Freedom of association.
7. Mass education.
8. Protection of civil liberties.
9. A robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states.
10. A potent police for protection of our freedoms from attacks by other people within the state.
11. A viable legislative system for establishing fair and just laws.
12. An effective judicial system for the equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws.”

– Shermer (2011) [emphasis mine]

Libertarianism is incongruent with observed hunter-gatherers

First of all, the hunter-gatherer ethnography is completely made up of bands characterized by egalitarian political organization, or at least something that looks egalitarian in practice (Boehm 2001). This egalitarianism is mainly manifest as a tenacious unwillingness of the group to be dominated by any one individual. Political upstarts are subject to corrective “leveling” mechanisms exacted at the behest of the group. These tend to take the form of non-violent (physically speaking) mechanisms of social pressure (Gray 2009) that may escalate to banishment from the group, and in some cases, killing of the offender (Boehm 2001).

Libertarianism offers no protection from hierarchical domination, and differs from agrarian state capitalism primarily in its desire to simply swap out government officials with business officials (Black 1984).

“we are at least entitled to the acknowledgement that there is nothing in the slightest unlibertarian about organization, hierarchy, leaders and followers, etc.” – Rothbard (1981) [emphasis mine]

“[Conservatives’ and libertarians’] articulation is not always harmonious but they share a common interest in consigning their conflicts to elite or expert resolution. To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst. And yet (to quote the most vociferous of radical libertarians, Professor Murray Rothbard) there is nothing un-libertarian about “organization, hierarchy, wage-work, granting of funds by libertarian millionaires, and a libertarian party.” Indeed. That is why libertarianism is just conservatism with a rationalist/positivist veneer.” – Black (1984)

“Authority is the very essence of social organization. Hence, it can not be absent from any single institutional organization.” – Malinkowski (1960)

While there may be nothing “unlibertarian” about oganization, hierarchy, and [authoritarian] contract-consecrated subservient arrangements, such principles are un-egalitarian and un-hunter-gatherer (Boehm 2001).

Referring to Shermer’s framework, at least five of the fundamental principles of libertarianism are contrary to what we observe in hunter-gatherer bands [in bold above]. I say at least because I am, for the moment, ignoring the gaping chasm between “laws” in their conception under a libertarian state (oxymoron much?), and social norms. This precludes the discussion of three further points which present further points of incongruence, though on a slightly different level. In the absence of codified laws, hunter-gatherer bands tend to shun physical punishment in favor of controlling social violations via social sanctioning mechanisms such as humor and play (Gray 2009).

I do not mean to fall into the fantasy “noble savage” trap by claiming violence does not occur among HGs. When social sanctioning of individuals remains ineffective after multiple transgressions, AND if forcing the individual out of the group does not work, then a coalition of individuals may decide to kill an individual (Boehm 2001). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors weren’t operating in a state of cerebral political enlightenment

I’m compelled to point out that the flip-side of the “noble savage” argument is also problematic. This occurs because the calculus for indexing violence among HGs involves a zillion data points consisting of songs and jokes and other social progressions levied against an individual, then all of the sudden, murder. In this way, the physical violence curve goes from flat to total violence in a way unfamiliar to our minutiae of legal gradations. Unfortunately for the fidelity of the picture, ethnocentricity leads to exclusion of things like jokes and songs from being recorded in the category of “violence”. Since hunter-gatherers have neither abstracted economic systems nor permanent land, sanctions such as fines and prisons are not available or practical options. From our perspective, this appears to result in what we might consider overly harsh punishments for social violations. Thus, HGs end up with a an apparently disproportionate level of violence because of errors in categorization of violence, and lack of alternative methods of sanctioning available to HGs.

Five Hunter-Gatherers V. Libertarian Incompatibilities

1. Property Rights.

For appropriate discussion of this principle, we must distinguish between two types of property: 1) Property made by individuals from natural resources, and 2) Property consisting of land (and the natural resources related to land).

An informal system of property rights does appear in HGs with respect to personal items such as tools. Such items tend to be fashioned from natural resources by individuals themselves. While the amount of property is almost trivial, there is some room for conversation on property rights in case #1.

However, by definition, hunter-gatherers have no ownership connection to land. The land ownership principle in libertarianism is an unfounded assumption of absolutely agrarian origins, and is completely unsupported by hunter-gatherer anthropology. Attempts to assert HG property rights must account for the fact that if a person moves several feet, the rights of the former space are immediately abandoned and flow to the new space. Thus, any ‘rights’ are more correctly described as rights of the individual’s body, which must at all times occupy some space, and not rights to the land per se.

It would be wise at this point to ask: “If not in hunter-gatherers, when do land rights arise?” We find the answer to this in what anthropologists refer to as delayed-return cultures (Woodburn 1982).

“Greater equality of wealth, power and of prestige has been achieved in certain hunting and gathering societies than in any other human societies. These societies, which have economies based on immediate rather than delayed return, are assertively egalitarian. Equality is achieved through direct, individual access to resources; through direct, individual access to means of coercion and means of mobility which limit the imposition of control; through procedures which prevent saving and accumulation and impose sharing; through mechanisms which allow goods to circulate without making people dependent upon one another. People are systematically disengaged from property and therefore from the potentiality in property for creating dependency.” – Woodburn (1982)

It is precisely at the shift from immediate-return to delayed-return societies that we see property (land in particular) rights arise.

Hunter-gatherers do not observe, and are not concerned with, land rights. HGs tend to reject land rights claimed by others (Scott 2010); point 3 below bears on this further. They do maintain personal property — to which we may ascribe some modern notion of rights — primarily in the form of tools. I do not advocate principles which would deny the right to the fruits of one’s labor, but a full analysis of this will have to wait for another day.

2. Economic stability through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system.

We must parse this further and recognize that two claims are here implied. 1) Economic stability is sufficiently important to human individuals to warrant its optimization, and 2) Economic security is only possible through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system. The term “economic” stability carries some assumptions that make it difficult to map to HGs. For the sake of discussion, this must be roughly understood to mean biological needs, as these tend to be the only concerns of HGs. Because of the mechanism of neo-Darwinian evolution, I will take claim #1 as true. In this, I include the biological drive to signal and display mate quality.

Hunter-gatherers do achieve economic stability, but not through banking or monetary systems. This is manifest by a psychology naturally focused on being in the present, and the absence of time conceptualization (lack of worry and planning for future events). Stability is gained primarily individual (and direct) self-sufficiency, and sharing (Woodburn 1982). This sharing maybe at times be considered voluntary, yet is also motivated by signaling and social sanctioning.

3. A reliable infrastructure and the freedom to move about the country.

This point implies some commonsensical, but problematic assumptions. These cascade into the incongruence of this and the remaining points about police and military. There are three issues: 1) Assumption of nationality (“the country”), and therefore, the legitimacy of a system of nation-states through which nationality may be attained, 2) The freedom to move about, 3) Infrastructure is required to enable movement, 4) It is the responsibility of the polity to provide said infrastructure. To remain withn the context of a hunter-gatherer political philosophy and libertarianism, we shall focus on issues 1 and 2.

“…we argue that the primitive state may have been a bad thing. To do so, we provide simple models of anarchy, of organized banditry, and of a state. We can think of the former as a “state of nature” and of the second as a society in which groups of raiders are relatively organized (the Vikings might be an example) but in which the settled population lack the kind of hierarchies or structures we associate with a state. By contrast, our state will have some minimal organization…” – Moselle (2001)

Nationality is a construct that has arisen directly from agrarians (Nozick 1974). It emerged out of the hunter-gatherer-incongruent concept of land rights on the small scale (Moselle 2001). Hunter-gatherers tend vehemently to reject assimilation into the nation-state system (Scott 2010), and there is more evidence of individuals attempting to escape the nation-state to join hunter-gatherer bands (Koehnline 1994) than the reverse.

The assumption of a system of nation-states may be the most ethnocentric and flimsy assumption made by libertarians attempting to formulate a political philosophy congruent with human nature. The notion of land rights is similarly poor and flimsy, but the nation-state concept builds on the land rights assumption with a mountain of other post hoc assumptions.

I already argued in favor of the freedom geographical movement in Part I of this series. However, limiting movement to one’s country of coincidental birth misses the point of that article.

4. A robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states.

This obviously relies on point #3. Since nation-states are assumed by default, but are already an incongruent construct, we can easily refute this point by simply remembering the fallacy of the nation-state system. However, hunter-gatherer anthropology (notably, the delayed-return or sedentary bands artificially created by geographical boundaries or modern property rights that don’t represent ancestral populations) is often used to demonstrate quasi-warfare and military action amount HGs. So let’s briefly look at hunter-gatherers’ relationship to the concept of military action.

In short, attempts to construe hunter-gatherer violence as warfare is a conflation of disparate categories of violence. As already described, hunter-gatherer violence leading to death tends to be a social leveling mechanism exacted when other options fail. However, family members of those being punished do not always take kindly to having their relatives executed. Thus, there is sometimes a tendency for retribution that will increase the death toll beyond a single individual.

Another sort of violence in hunter-gatherer tribes is that which is employed in service of mating opportunities. Again, when one man kills another man, family members may participate in retributive acts. In fact, this is one powerful scenario underlying the existence social sanctioning and other leveling mechanisms used in the preceding example of violence.

Note that the motivations of the violence in both of these scenarios is related to social/reproductive matters.

War is motivated by two primary factors: 1) Land, 2) Labor to cultivate the land — generally in the form of slaves — or provide other economic incentive based on said land (Scott 2009).

It is a testament to Homer’s insight into human-nature that he spun the Trojan War into a tale about the beauty of a woman and the jealousy of the men surrounding her. He demonstrates the power of reframing the context of armed group conflict as something personal and emotional, rather than the economic practice it always is. State propagandists have been capitalizing on this strategy ever since.

In other words, hunter-gatherers do not engage in warfare. We must not be lead astray by attempts to conflate violence motivated by personal/social conflicts of group members with violence motivated by land and the coerced labor needed to bring it into productivity. This act of decontextualization is commonly employed in misconstruals of hunter-gatherer violence.

There are zero examples of paleolithic tools designed for group warfare, or individual human-on-human violence in the archaeological record. Granted, tools used for killing animals for food may also be used for killing humans. However, human opponents are very different from non-human animal opponents. Throughout the neolithic history of implements of death, we see significant divergences in killing technologies used on prey, and those used to kill other humans. This is particularly true regarding groups of humans fighting other groups of humans. The dynamics of killing change, and this distinction drives differences in weapons accordingly. Thus, if humans were engaged in group conflicts with one another during the paleolithic, it would be reasonable to expect some divergence in weapon technologies for this purpose.

Primatology. Another common misconstrual of hunter-gatherer social behavior is the unsustainable generalization of other primate behavior to humans (Boehm 2001). Chimpanzees and gorillas both exhibit strong male-dominance hierarchies. This is often taken to indicate that humans have evolved in a way that justifies dominance hierarchies. While this question is complex, a brief examination of the chimpanzee and the gorilla will build our case against human warfare in the paleolithic.

Chimpanzees and gorillas both demonstrate dominance hierarchies. However, chimp violence and gorilla violence is characterized by many differences. While many of the differences are driven by their differences in mating strategy, there are two salient differences. Chimpanzee groups tend to consist of large numbers of related males living in a relatively fixed location. Gorillas tend to live in groups with one male and are relatively nomadic. Another difference is that chimps engage in group conflict with chimpanzees from other groups. Yes, chimps engage in land/territory based resource battles that resemble agrarian state wars in humans. Again, this is a complex topic, but I wanted to plant the idea that generalization from primates is not straightforward, and certainly does not support the libertarian notion of land rights (unless you’re a chimp?). See Boehm’s 2001 work for a thorough treatment of primates and hierarchy.

5. A potent police for protection of our freedoms from attacks by other people within the state.

Unpacking this statement reveals that many of the ‘freedoms’ requiring police protection within ‘the state’ are property crimes relating to the lack of “agrarian justice” in the modern nation-state system (Paine 1797; George 1879). Removing the assumption that ownership of land is a natural right alleviates many of the structural problems related to this. This is another good example of but one emergent property of the libertarian state that mirrors the current agrarian state.

Hunter-gatherers experience high degrees of personal autonomy/freedom without any form of police protection.

Human psychology guarantees sub-optimal well-being under libertarianism

As this article has run far longer than expected, I bridge this is-ought gap and cover this in a later post.

“the primitive state tends to result in lower levels of popular welfare than exist under organized banditry or anarchy. In some cases, our state can even increase disorder and decrease total output.” – Moselle (2001) [emphasis mine]

Libertarianism yields structures that mirror agrarian states

The following is Moselle’s account of the theories of the basic agrarian state. The specification of agrarian state is my addition. This is intentional — to show that these paragraphs lose very little of their meaning when also read through the mind of those wishing to justify the libertarian state. One must only change a few words for them to hold in both instances.

“In part, historians optimistic views of the state come, in the absence of evidence, from the theories of the state they have in the back of their minds. Theories of the state might address three issues. They might seek to explain the existence of the state, perhaps by some quasihistorical account of its origin. They might give a normative account of the state; that is, seek to legitimize the authority of the state. Finally, they might discuss the consequences of the state; that is, provide a model of the state. By far the most influential theory of the state, the contractual theory, does all three of the above.

In the typical contractual account, individuals live initially in a state of anarchy, and club together for protection. Economies of specialization lead to the hiring of agents to carry out this task, while economies of scale lead to the formation of (local) monopoly defense organizations. These “protective associations” can be identified as (minimal) states…

Contained in these accounts, however, is also an implicit model of what the state does. Typically the state provides certain services to its citizens, especially protection and the preservation of order. In return, citizens provide payments to their king or lord, perhaps in the form of taxes or feudal dues. Different contractual theories differ in the obligations both of the state and of its citizens. How good a contractual state is for the populace depends on the terms of this contract but, even in Hobbes’s least restricted of contractual states, life is preferable to that in his picture of anarchy. Indeed, if the supposed contract is agreed to by the populace as a whole, then they cannot be worse off under the state than under anarchy: their well-being were they to reject the contract places a lower bound on their well-being were they to accept.” – Moselle (2001)

Indeed, the libertarian account of the state is just another contractual theory of the state. It attempts to explain the state’s existence, to legitimize its authority, and provide a model of the state. Shermer happily jumps into this narrative by specifying specialized functions that lead to the hiring of agents to carry out the protection of individuals and contracts by way of military, police, legislators, and adjudicators. These “economies of scale” then lead to local monopoly defense organizations. Unfortunately for the libertarian contractual account of the state, the hunter-gatherer ethnography undermines the rationale for the state’s existence, its authority, and provides alternatives to its model.

Conclusion

A synthesis of hunter-gatherer political philosophy must account for the leveling mechanism of opting-out that was prevalent throughout the paleolithic, and the distinct change in behavior and mentality historically and invariably caused by the transition from nomadism (no land rights) to sedentism (enforced land rights).

Rather than account for either of these necessities, libertarianism begins its story with neolithic agrarians, and the land ‘rights’ (read: problems) associated with them. Thus, it cannot be considered to be in alignment with our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Indeed, it is possible to root the entirety of libertarian philosophy firmly in agrarian assumptions. In other words, libertarianism is NOT paleo.

I have not had time to make the connection from hunter-gatherer social conditions to human-nature in this post. Among other things, a discussion is warranted on the reasons we tend to paradoxically find the drive to egalitarianism present among already free people, while libertarian impulses primarily exist among those living under [relative] coercion with a gnawing sense of fear and uncertainty. Such a discussion is forthcoming.

And yes, I have intentionally avoided explicitly discussing the Austrian economic theory that tends to get bundled with libertarianism… for now.

Before you get all excited and go McCarthy on everyone, the reconciliation I will present in subsequent posts doesn’t end in ism, and doesn’t start with a ‘c’ or ‘m’. And… I’ll do it all without the redistribution of any person’s wealth.

I welcome your comments. Please avoid ad hominem and keep the discussion reasoned. Oh, I’m not the only one among the authoritarian-averse paleosphere who’s already jaded by another U.S. election cycle. After you’ve left a comment, maybe check out Richard’s post from a couple days ago.

References

Black, Bob (1984). “The Libertarian As Conservative“. Eris Society lecture.

Boehm, Christopher (2001). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Harvard University Press.

George, Henry (1879). Progress and Poverty.

Gray, Peter (2009). “Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence“. The American Journal of Play, 1(4), 476-522. [full-text PDF]

Koehnline, J. (Ed.). (1994). Gone to Croatan: The Origins of North American Dropout Culture. Autonomedia.

Malinowski , B . 1960. A scientific theory of culture. Oxford University Press.

Moselle, B. (2001). “A Model of a Predatory State“. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 17(1), 1-33. doi: 10.1093/jleo/17.1.1. [full-text PDF]

Nozick, Robert (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Basic Books.

Paine, Thomas (1797). “Agrarian Justice“.

Rothbard, Murray (1981). “A critique of the New Libertarian Manifesto“. Strategy of the New Libertarian Alliance. [online from Ludwig Von Mises Institute]

Scott, James C. (2010). The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press.

Shermer, Michael (2011).  “Liberty and Science“. Cato Institute (Cato Unbound).

Woodburn (1982). Egalitarian Societies. Man, 1(17), 431-451. [full-text PDF]

More good news: Switching to The Paleo Diet for Crackers will be an easy transition for those of you who are already familiar with The Paleo Diet. The prescription is as follows: eat a standard paleo diet, but add milk and other dairy products at your leisure (because they are good for you).

We have two graphics below, the first is our estimation of the degree of evolution that has occurred in the species Homo sapiens sapiens since the introduction of milk and other dairy products into the adult human diet. The lighter areas are those in which the species has evolved more fully. The darker areas represent a more primitive state of hominin evolution. The second graphic is a representation of our marketing department’s goal for saturation of The Paleo Diet for Crackers.

Please disregard the first graphic. It was mistakenly inserted by The Paleo Diet for Crackers graphics department. The entire [former] graphics department has been summarily fired, and we are working on getting the graphic removed. We can assure you that the first graphic is 100% irrelevant and the second graphic is sure to be accurate.

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Without further ado, it is with extreme excitement that I release my contribution to this discussion by way of an alternative hypothesis. It is currently in-press for the Journal of Applied Paleonthropological Hyperbole.

Abstract

The nature and causes of the disappearance of Neanderthals and their apparent replacement by modern humans are subjects of considerable debate. Many researchers have proposed biologically or technologically mediated dietary differences between the two groups as one of the fundamental causes of Neanderthal disappearance. Some scenarios have focused on the apparent lack of plant foods in Neanderthal diets. Here we report direct evidence for Neanderthal consumption of a variety of plant foods, in the form of phytoliths and starch grains recovered from dental calculus of Neanderthal skeletons. Some of the plants are typical of recent modern human diets, including legumes, and grass seeds (Triticeae), whereas others are known to be edible but are not heavily used today. Many of the grass seed starches showed damage that is a distinctive marker of cooking. Our results indicate that in both warm eastern Mediterranean and cold northwestern European climates, and across their latitudinal range, Neanderthals made use of the diverse plant foods available in their local environment and transformed them into more easily digestible foodstuffs in part through cooking them, suggesting that the extinction of Homo neanderthalensis may have been caused by introduction of food sources sufficiently deleterious to individual health.

The obvious question then becomes: How long do we have to wait before proclaiming Neanderthals were vegans? Why would Neanderthals continue to eat substances that were toxic?

For that, we need look no further than modern humans. When ingested items provide an observable short-term benefit in terms of calories, they are assumed to be beneficial. When the negative effects of toxic inputs are cumulative over a period of weeks, months, or years, individuals are incapable of isolating the confounding variables. This is further complicated by not being limited to dietary inputs, but also those of microbial, genetic, or other environmental factors such as shortages or overages of vitamins, minerals, and myriad chemical compounds. This problem has not been solved with modern scientific methods, and it is reasonable to assume that Neanderthals were less capable of determining cause and effect during the Pleistocene.

When the introduction of toxins does not manifest with sufficiently deleterious symptoms for a duration in excess of nine months in females, and nine seconds in males, significant adaptive pressure may not be placed on reproduction for that individual. Thus, the combination of an inability to disambiguate dietary toxins across a relevant period of time with the lack of strong selection pressure in delayed onset cumulative symptoms may result in both poor health and reproductive success, especially in the short-term. However, over time, the inability to recognize the delayed onset cumulative symptoms of the introduction of dietary toxins may lead to an increase in the consumption of the toxic sources. While a disconnect in the causal relationship between dietary input and its negative health outcomes persists, we may see a paradoxical increase in the consumption of such toxins which are believed to be beneficial. As consumption spreads through a population, the negative health consequences would come earlier in life, and with more frequency. Since we have no reason to assume adaptation in all cases (to the contrary, we must assume non-adaptation as the null hypothesis), it is possible that the paradoxical increase in consumption lead to unsustainable population levels within the species.

We are certain of two points: Neanderthals ate grains, and Neanderthals are extinct. To date, there is a complete lack of evidentiary support for hypotheses involving any benefits to the introduction of grains into the Neanderthal diet. Thus, we find all hypotheses of our colleagues that indicate grain consumption provided any survival or reproductive benefits to Neanderthals to be strange and unfounded. Since Homo neanderthalensis is extinct, and the deleterious effects of grain consumption can still be seen in the modern Homo lineage, it is more reasonable to conclude that increased consumption of grains in the Neanderthal diet played a role in their extinction.

Discussion

Grain consumption may result in death and subsequent fossilization of you and your species. Further research is required.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by evolvify.com in connection with the upcoming book, ‘The Extinction Diet: How to Lose Weight and Save the Planet Through Individual Death and Species Extinction’.

Aside from Richard Dawkins interviewing Stephen Pinker, there’s not a lot of evolutionary psychology related video content online. So I was pretty excited to find this recent talk from Wonderfest. An added bonus is that it’s not by evolutionary psychologists, but a pair of paleoanthropologists. Since critiques of evolutionary psychology are often levied by non-anthropologists by dismissing EvPsych for making too many assumptions about life in the paleolithic, this has a different flavor of credibility.

One point that I appreciated was Dr. Gilbert’s view on the “job” of scientists. Some scientists (and its critics) are fond of implying that us laymen should just sit around and wait for scraps of knowledge to be tossed our way. Here’s a more enlightened view:

“[As scientists], our business is not to speculate stories that you can then think about. Our business is to give you empirical evidence that you can go home and have all that fun of speculation yourself.”  – Henry Gilbert, PhD.

Protagonists

David DeGusta is a Research Paleontologist at the Paleoanthropology Institute.

Henry Gilbert is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at California State University, East Bay.

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Topics

• Studying the Evolution of Human Traits
• The Science of Human Origins
• Examining How Evolution Has Shaped Behavior
• Landmarks in Human Evolution
• The History of Evolutionary Psychology
• The Rise of Behaviorism
• Cognitive Psychology and the Refinement of Adaptationism
• Nature vs. Nurture and Modern Evolutionary Psychology
• The Dangers of Discussing Hardwired Behavior
• Studying the Evolutionary Origins of Language
• Studying Language Through the Fossil Record
• Studying Language Through the Genetic Record
• Studying Language Through the Archaeological Record
• Discussion on the Evolution of Language
• Studying the Evolution of Culture
• Possible Causes for the Development of Culture
• Discussion on the Evolution of Culture
• The Evolutionary Origins of Art
• Signs of Neanderthal Culture and Language
• Animals and the Neurological Basis of Lan