First, I want to say I have a hunch as to the answers to these questions but I am not a evolutionary scientist so I'm trying to find out what the experts have said and also even how I should pose the questions if I'm doing it wrong. I'm wondering if anyone knows why group species evolved and what is the evolutionary advantage of a group species over a solitary one, if there is one? Group species being a species that lives in groups and, to a variable degree, shares resources. A solitary species being one that does not. Most specifically, why humans have favored living in groups over being a solitary species. Are there any YouTube lectures anyone can recommend specifically on this by experts? Has the dominance of humans of the planet been scientifically attributed to their reduced competition and increased cooperation between each other more efficiently in groups than other group species? For instance, many group species other than humans still will violently compete over food, territory and mating to the death. Humans have largely (though not totally) overcome this instinct to compete over resources and our population has completely outpaced all other large species. Lastly, and I know this one is a long shot finding any studies on: Are there any studies or lectures on the political implications of the above? In a time when many on the Right are calling for self-sufficiency (individualism), can this be interpreted as an unconscious attempt to roll back group evolution or devolve? Any videos to lectures by experts would be perfect but if you have a book recommendation that deals exactly with this, that's great too. Thanks, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate.
Because their ancestors were group species. In general, species that live in groups do so primarily because it gives them extra protection against predators.
That's one confirmation that there is a survival advantage to living in groups. Thank you and Happy Thanksgiving in any sense you celebrate it. Still looking for links to any formally established conclusions accepted by the majority of anthropologists. Oddly, I can't even find any formal scientific mention of "group species" online! So forgive me if my terminology is wrong or antiquated.
Found something that deals precisely with this and sharing: [video=youtube_share;T64_El2s7FU]http://youtu.be/T64_El2s7FU[/video]
Try looking for "social species" or "kinship in early hominids" . The advantage is both protection and team efforts in hunting, gathering and defense of territory. The main reason for permanent groups is kinship. Great apes are very bright. Therefore, they take a long time to learn all that their elders need to teach them. They have a long period of immaturity, during which they are relatively helpless. Parents and other committed adult allies are essential top the young, and the young are essential to the species' continuity. Plus, because they're bright, they need a lot of comradery, affection, games and communication.
I also just discovered the books of Christophe Boesch and Steve Frank which deal with this precise topic, as well. Very interesting lectures on youtube. Looking forward to reading their books. There appears to be plenty of information out there on this.
A search for Zebra might result in some interesting photos. I once saw a photo of a herd of Zebra. It was difficult to visually distinguish an individual zebra. Lions tend to need a specific prey animal & when delayed by not being able to pick out an individual, the herd has extra time to escape. At least for the zebra, being in a herd is better than being a lone individual. While Lions & other cat predators are fast sprinters, they have very little endurance. That is the reason that lions try to creep close to their prey before attacking. Given a head start, most zebra & other prey can out run a lion. For more intelligent species, group cooperation has obvious advantages. BTW: Have you heard the story/joke about three friends who encountered a lion? Two of them proposed a united defense, saying we cannot fun faster than a lion. The third said. I have heard that agricutural workers in India/Nepal reduced their death/injury toll by wearing masks on the back of their heads. Tigers attempt to approach prey from the rear due to lack of stamina. The backward mask causes them to try an approach from the opposite direction & the tiger becomes confused.
There are (at least) two different kinds of social species, pack-social and herd-social. (These are not biologists' terms. I've never seen anything written by a biologist on this subject.) Herd-social species usually live in very large groups, sometimes hundreds or even more. - They afford each other the minimum respect and courtesy necessary for survival, such as not stepping on each other's feet, knocking each other down or stealing each other's food. - They protect the herd's young from predation, typically by forming a ring around them so that, for example, a hyena or jackal that could kill a baby would first have to get past the adults, which are much too large and powerful to attack. - The size of the herd also affords the adults some protection, by ganging up on solitary hunters, but they aren't so lucky with pack-hunters such as lions and wolves. - They tend to be grazers, because their food is presented in large quantities over a large area so there's no need to fight over it. But there are herd-social carnivores, such as some species of hyena, who may use sheer numbers to drive larger predators away from their kill and begin "scavenging" while the meat is still warm. The herd-social species with whom we are most familiar are artiodactyls (even-toed ungulates), e.g., cattle, sheep, pigs, hippos. - They generally do not form relationships we would recognize as friendship; they do not depend on or care for their herd-mates as individuals and are likely to nonchalantly step over a sick or wounded comrade and let him be eaten or die slowly. - They generally do not form strong pair-bonds before mating or after the birth of young. - Most herds have little or no hierarchical structure, although in some there may be an alpha male who gets all the girls, and in others there may be a lead cow whom everyone else follows to the next grazing territory--which is not enforced and individuals are free to go their own way if they so desire. As far as I can tell, the main survival advantage of the herd-social instinct is protection from predators. But perhaps the lead cow has especially keen senses and can lead the whole herd to a territory with the most abundant food supply. Pack-social species form much smaller groups, typically fewer than 100 and often just a dozen or so. - Pack-social species include both hunters (e.g., wolves, lions) and grazers (e.g., horses, elephants). - The individuals usually regard each other with something resembling camaraderie or outright friendship, and in many cases risk their own lives to help each other. When a team of biologists shot an African wild dog (not the same species as the domestic dog) with a tranquilizer dart and carried him into their tent to examine him, one of his pack-mates brazenly walked into the tent, grabbed his limp body by the tail and dragged him back home. They were so touched that they let him get away with it. - The pack usually has a leader whom everyone defers to. In predatory species he'll decide where to hunt. Among grazers he may just be the strong guy who leads the defense against predators, or the wise old guy who knows how to keep the peace among the troops. - Pack organization varies considerably. The alpha male gorilla drives younger males from the pack when they reach puberty and keeps his daughters and granddaughters as a harem. Chimpanzee packs appear to have no rules or organization; they fight among themselves a lot. Whereas bonobo packs spend much of their time in gigantic orgies. Although many cetaceans and many birds are social, I haven't included them since their instincts seem to be significantly different from terrestrial mammals and I am not as familiar with them. For example, some birds mate for life and some dolphins rape females in their own pod. Perhaps there is also pod-social and flock-social orgnization, but I'll let a real biologist discuss them--and hopefully give us the actual scientific terminology for my own words. Intelligence seems to favor group cooperation: Most of the primates are highly social, and all of the apes except the orangutan are. Our ancestral species were grazers and seem to have had a pack-social lifestyle. But as our brains got bigger we began to invent stone tools and these tools allowed us to eat more meat. First by scraping the leftovers off the the predators' kills, and ultimately by hunting our own game. The anatomy of a human does not make us particularly good as solitary hunters: a flint-tipped spear is great but one of them is hardly equivalent to claws on all four extremities and a mouthful of sharp teeth. But put a bunch of us together and we come up with ideas that vastly improve our hunting prowess, such as driving a herd of herbivores into a cul-de-sac. This growing intelligence eventually gave us the brainpower to invent the technology of speech at least 60KYA, and resulted in a quantum increase in our rate of development. Language allows us to plan and cooperate in intricate ways that far surpass the accomplisments of earlier humans. Clothing, preserved meat, boats, art, musical instruments, all of these technologies and hundreds more were invented by cavemen, i.e., nomadic hunter-gatherers. None of these things could have been developed by members of a solitary species; they all require complex coordination, often continuing over multiple generations. Eventually (12KYA) we invented the paradigm-shifting technology of agriculture (farming and animal husbandry). We stopped migrating and grew the food in our own back yards. From this moment on, humans had to live in a social structure. There is no way for a single person to cultivate plants and herd animals. In fact it's barely practical even for a small tribe, which is why from this point on we kept merging our tribes together into ever-larger communities. About a thousand years after the first agricultural villages were built, we expanded them into cities. At this point, humans had to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers. We invented laws, government hierarchies and bookkeeping to manage all these complicated relationships among people who don't know each other and in fact may never even meet. At this point, it might be suggested that we began changing ourselves from a pack-social species into a herd-social one. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It's generally attributed to our technology, specifically the technology from the Neolithic Era (the agricultural revolution) onward. Humans were pack-social, highly intelligent, and clever inventors for tens of thousands of years--in fact many of our basic technologies such as flint blades and controlled fire were invented by earlier species. Yet during that time humans didn't have a clear advantage over other animals. We starved during droughts, endured disease epidemics, and were eaten by predators just like them. As I mentioned above, the technology of language was a real milestone, yet it didn't really seem to give us a pronounced advantage. Sure, we managed to migrate to all the corners of the earth and survive there--but so did wolves and cats, and cats aren't even a social species! It was agriculture that made the difference. For starters, for the first time in the history of the planet there was a food surplus to get us through a bad year. Houses shielded us from the elements in a way that caves could not. Domesticated wolves (we call them dogs now) helped protect us from predators and our food from rodents and other scavengers. The human population began to expand more-or-less steadily from the Agricultural Revolution 12KYA until today. It's universally predicted to stop expanding around the end of this century, just in time to keep us from reproducing ourselves to death. (It turns out that prosperity is the best contraceptive. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) Humans competed violently for food until we invented agriculture. Sure, during good times the various tribes might have traded handcrafts and daughters at the Summer Festival, but during hard times each tribe fought to the death to protect its hunting-gathering territory from the guys on the other side of the mountain. Using modern instruments, we have examined fossils of Paleolithic (pre-agricultural) people and discovered that more than half of adult humans were killed by violence. In other words, more people were killed by other people than by all other causes combined. Only to the extent that there is a surplus of those resources and that it is distributed more-or-less equitably. There are still countries where people live under the thumb of despotic rulers who deliberately keep them ignorant and disorganized, and war is still waged there. Religion (an obsolete relic of the Bronze Age, if not the Stone Age) also plays a great part in this. Many religions teach their followers that they are just a little bit better than the rest of us, so they have the right and the duty to convert us to their way of life, by violence if necessary, and killing anyone who doesn't cooperate. We are the apex predator on this planet. We dine on the flesh of both bears and sharks. It's been noted that even though Thanksgiving is ostensibly a faith-based holiday, it has been so stripped of religious rhetoric and symbology that no one argues over it, and everyone is comfortable celebrating it--at least here in the USA.
Haha, I have actually heard that joke. You mentioned Lions. I am particularly interested in the resource management of group predators like Lions. In formations like that you typically have a few doing the work (or hunting) yet most or all members eventually share in the benefits (nutrition.) This, to me, appears to be an evolutionary paradigm shift that gave a group species greater survival value for its members over a solitary species. The spoils of the more successful members are not kept to one-self as they would with a solitary species but shared (admittedly sometimes reluctantly depending on the species, but shared nonetheless), regardless of whether some members did not actually earn it by direct participation in the hunt or not. And, of course, humans have even taken this further. Thus, group cooperation - if I'm successful on the hunt today, I share with you. if you're successful another day, you share with me and in this way we increase both our survival chances and therefore ultimate chance to replicate because we will both be alive instead of just one of us - challenges the old argument that it is proper natural selection that the weak and non-productive die or at least not be rewarded. It seems to me, that whether a member of a group is non-productive or not, there is survival benefit to keeping them alive anyway because there is strength in numbers, the more your group replicates, the less chance it has of dying out, they or their offspring could provide value to the group at a later time, they might bring different skills and therefore value to the group other than hunting, etc....you could possible go on and on naming invisible benefits. The point I'm trying to advance and get confirmation of is, individual member resource collection is pooled with the entire group and that ultimately benefits both the survival of the group and the individual. And so the recent political arguments and calls we hear for everyone in the group keeping their own resources to themselves and not having to have to share maybe really don't have any natural or evolutionary precedent except in solitary species. However, humans are not a solitary species but a group species so my exploration of this subject is centered on this sort of anti-altruism, "hands-off-my-stuff" socio-economic philosophy being perhaps antithetical to who we are as a species.
Somebody has been studying. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I read the whole thing through and can't find anything I would directly challenge or question and it definitely enlightened my understanding where it was weak. Of course, I realize you're not presenting a personal theory but merely a run down of where we are now. This definitely helps bring me up to speed some. There are some simple things I wasn't seeing this helped illuminate. The fact that you mentioned groups weren't an advantage for humans until agriculture totally set a light bulb off. You're right. There were other species in groups while humans were evolving, so if a group is our particular and unique advantage, why didn't other group species come to dominate the earth like humans? So yea, I have to agree now, groups are nothing new. What must have been new was our particular way of cooperating within a group because, as you affirm, a group was a necessary precursor for agriculture. So there must have been a behavior that made agriculture possible. However, my real assertion is more toward there being a survival advantage of a group species vs. a solitary species and thusly, if one species was going to emerge to dominate the earth, it would be a group species, and, of course, one has. Also, it is important to mention, as you did, that humans have still not stopped competing and fighting. And I should not assume just because we are the most technologically successful and dominate that it is because we have overcome our propensity for competition and violence amongst ourselves completely (we haven't) or even better than another species. Which introduces the very interesting question of who does science say is the least competitive and violent species? Is it us? Is it turtles? Does decreased competition within a species correlate to species dominance? I would think we would at least get a high score. Even though some of our members exhibit retro-behaviors that leave us susceptible to fighting over everything and hark back to our pre-historic territorial and mating behaviors, we still have largely over come them to an incredible degree. How could we not and still be able to cooperate to the degree we have to produce our whole civilization? Lots of good anecdotes to remember from both yours and Dinosaur's replies. Thanks.
