On Aug 19, 5:23Â pm, Immortalist
yahoo.com> wrote:> On Aug 19, 12:00 pm, Publius
nospam.comcast.net> wrote:
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>>> Homo sapiens, if the anthropologists are right, has been on Earth for
>> about 200,000 years. Until the last 10,000 or so of those years, he
>> lived in small tribal villages, consisting of a few dozen to a few
>> hundred members --- small enough that all of its members knew all of the
>> others, indeed, had known each other all of their lives. They midwifed
>> one another's births, tended one another's illnesses, shared one
>> another's possessions, and married one another's cousins. They knew and
>> trusted one another, and had dense, intimate relationships among one
>> another. They needed no formal ethics nor any political structure to
>> govern their affairs, simply because each was and had always been a
>> part of every other’s life.
>
>> But with the rise of civilization --- the culture of cities ---
>> those bonds could not be maintained. People found themselves living in
>> large communities in which most of the people around them were
>> strangers, with whom they had no familial or other personal ties, and
>> often very little else in common. People began to notice the differences
>> among them --- differences in coloration and bone structure, in habits
>> of dress, in temperament and mannerisms, in interests and tastes, and
>> eventually even in religion and language. They acquired individuality.
>
> Although we have the ability to learn some higher level political
> skills, anything beyond paramount chiefdom-ship is somehow strange,
> like living in a world where sugar is available all the time and
> people get obese.
>
>
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.politics/msg/c77d489500677632
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> The Savanna Principle: Why Our Brains Are Stuck in the Stone Age
>
> ...there is nothing special about the human brain as a body part-leads
> to an important implication. Just as the basic shape and functions of
> the hand or the pancreas have not changed since the end of the
> Pleistocene Epoch ("the Ice Age") about ten thousand years ago, the
> basic functioning of the brain has not changed very much in the last
> ten thousand years. The human body (including the brain) evolved over
> millions of years in the African savanna and elsewhere on earth where
> humans lived during most of this time. This ancestral environment,
> where humans lived in small bands of 150 or so related individuals as
> hunter-gatherers, is called the environment of evolutionary
> adaptedness, or the ancestral environment. It is to the ancestral
> environment that our body (including the brain) is adapted. Even
> though we live in the twenty-first century, we have a Stone Age brain
> (just like we have Stone Age hands and a Stone Age pancreas).
>
> The evolved psychological mechanism produces adaptive behavior in the
> ancestral environment. Adaptive behavior is behavior that increases
> the chances of survival or reproductive success by solving the
> adaptive problems. Eating lots of sweet and fatty foods, which contain
> higher calories, is adaptive behavior that solves the adaptive problem
> of procuring sufficient food to survive. Becoming jealous at the
> remotest possibility of a mate's sexual infidelity, and guarding that
> mate so that she could not have sexual contact with other men, is
> adaptive behavior that solves men's adaptive problem of paternity
> uncertainty.
>
> Alan S. Miller (Author), Satoshi
Kanazawahttp://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-People-Have-More-Daughters/dp/0399533656
"For many thousands of years when people were hunter-gatherers and
small scale farmers, humans lived in small, "relatively non-
hierarchical" and mostly self-sufficient communities. However, the
human ability to precisely communicate abstract, learned information
allowed humans to become ever more effective at agriculture, and that
allowed for ever increasing population densities. David Christian
explains how this resulted in states with laws and governments:
As farming populations gathered in larger and denser communities,
interactions between different groups increased and the social
pressure rose until, in a striking parallel with star formation, new
structures suddenly appeared, together with a new level of complexity.
Like stars, cities and states reorganize and energize the smaller
objects within their gravitational field.
—David Christian, p. 245, Maps of Time
The exact moment and place that the phenomenon of human government
developed is lost in time; however, history does record the formations
of very early governments. About 5,000 years ago, the first small city-
states appeared. By the third to second millenniums BC, some of these
had developed into larger governed areas: the Indus Valley
Civilization, Sumer, Ancient Egypt and the Yellow River Civilization.
States formed as the results of a positive feedback loop where
population growth results in increased information exchange which
results in innovation which results in increased resources which
results in further population growth. The role of cities in the
feedback loop is important. Cities became the primary conduits for the
dramatic increases in information exchange that allowed for large and
densely packed populations to form, and because cities concentrated
knowledge, they also ended up concentrating power. "Increasing
population density in farming regions provided the demographic and
physical raw materials used to construct the first cities and states,
and increasing congestion provided much of the motivation for creating
states."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government
