Ok so most of you can immediately realize that when he says hierarchies are natural therefore hierarchies are good, he's using a logical fallacy. It's even got its own name: the naturalistic fallacy, but that's not what I want to talk about. I want to tell you guys why JP gets the science completely fucked.
So to start with I want to illustrate some concepts with eusocial insects. These are insects that have a specific social structure defined by three characteristics:
- The mother, along with individuals that may or may not be directly related, conducts cooperative care of young.
- A reproductive division of labor evolves from sterile castes which often have certain propensities or characteristics associated with helping behavior.
- There is an overlapping of generations which allows for the older generations of offspring to help related, younger generations.
Full disclosure I stole this from a rice university website that came up on google because I'm too lazy to type them all.
TL;DR: Eusocial insects have hive-like social structures. Think bees, ants, and termites.
First thing to mention is that as far as I can tell (any evo biologists correct me if I'm wrong), we are just as closely related to eusocial insects as we are to lobsters, which is to say not very. Hell, there are eusocial mammals like naked mole rats (who fun fact are immune from cancer). So next time a JP fan tells you to google lobsters tell them to google bees. Or naked mole rats, take your pick.
Second thing to mention is why they evolved this social structure. One of the foundational tenets of evolutionary psychology (or evo sociology) is that any evolved behavior can ultimately be explained by an interaction between that specie's genes and their environment. So the genes for eusocial insects are pretty interesting. They have a sex-determination system called haplodiploidy. I'm not going to get into the details of it, but I will leave a wiki link if you are curious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy
The upshot of this is that sisters are more closely related to each other than to either male brothers or their own offspring. This means from an evolutionary perspective it makes more sense to help your sisters survive than to reproduce. This is thought to be one of the big factors that made the evolution of eusociality possible. It isn't the only thing however, there are plenty of haplodiploid species who aren't eusocial. That brings the second part: environment. There was likely something different in the environment of ancient eusocial bees than the bee species which aren't eusocial. I don't think scientists are certain what this is because it's harder to learn the environment of ancient bees than it is the genetics, but it could be a number of things: food scarcity or plenty, different climate, predation or lack of it, etc.
Take-home point: The social structure of a species is determined by the interaction of that specie's genes and the environment.
The closer-to-home example of this is the difference between chimps and bonobos: the two closest living relatives of humans. I'm not going to go over chimp social structure in detail because I'm sure a lot of you have already heard it. The tl;dr is that they are aggressive, have a strict male-dominated hierarchy, and will kill strangers. Basically the sort of structure JP fans see themselves as on top of, but would actually end up getting their heads dunked in toilets. Bonobos however are completely different.
Bonobo facts
- Much less aggressive than chimps
- Still have dominance hierarchy but is female led. Male bonobos get their status from their moms.
- Males almost never attack females (unlike chimps). The females are generally dominant because they have close bonding behavior and will group up against a male attacker. They will often keep food away from males and bite of their fingers or toes.
- They are accepting of strangers, and will usually intermingle.
- They aren't hippies. They still fight all the time, but most conflicts are resolved with sex instead of violence. Ok so maybe they are hippies.
- They are the only primates along with humans who have sex face to face.
- They are the only non-human animals to French kiss.
- Female-female sex is common and thought to strengthen bonds which is why they stick together against the subordinate males. They also have a wide range of male-male sexual behaviors including scrotal sac rubbing after fights.
- Bonobos use context clues in vocal communication (same call means different things in different situations). Previously this was only thought to be exist in humans. They are overall some of the most vocal primates.
- Bonobo babies when tickled make noises with the same spectrographic frequency as human babies laughing.
Ok so why are bonobos so different from chimps? Well there are a lot of theories, but the most widely accepted is that they live in an environment where food is much more plentiful than chimpanzees. So less competition for food means aggression is no longer adaptive. This is a really, really important thing to remember about all evolved behaviors: they are ONLY adaptive in a certain context. Aggression costs a lot. Not only do you have to expend energy and time being aggro, but if an actual fight breaks out, even if you win, you can still be seriously hurt. This is why a lot of animals will go through aggressive displays (think owls puffing themselves up to look bigger) but will rarely actually fight. This means if your environment is such that there isn't huge amounts of competition for food, aggression can be extremely maladaptive.
Take-home point: Any behavior or social structure is only evolutionarily adaptive in the context in which it evolved.
Okay now finally on to humans. The first thing I want to highlight is our big-ass brain (at least relative to our body sizes). So a lot of people will talk about how very smart and clever we are, but rarely do they mention how much it costs. The brain takes up a absolutely massive amount of energy. Not only that, but it requires its own isolated blood supply and specialized immune system which are also difficult to maintain. Not only that, but because our brain is even larger compared to our body sizes than chimps and bonobos, our babies are born much earlier in development than theirs are. Chimp babies can walk, cling to their mothers, and largely eat by themselves. Human babies in comparison are a hot mess. They need to be fed, sheltered, and transported everywhere. This is an extreme evolutionary cost. So what is the big adaptive advantage of brains? It's not killing stuff because cheetahs and tigers will win that any day. It's not reproduction, because insects are beating us at that. It's the ability to adapt to new environments more rapidly than evolution can allow. Basically if a species moves into a new environment (or the climate changes around them) the adaptation process is gonna look like this:
1.Most of them are going to die. That's just how it is. Most camels would have a hard time in the Arctic. 2.A small few will do ok either because of some random genetic characteristic (thicker fur, longer claws, etc.) or because they had a propensity for an adaptive behavior the others lacked (cooperation, hunting tactics, etc.) 3. Their offspring will be slightly better adapted to the new environment, but most of them are still going to die. Repeat process all over again for many many generations. 4. Congrats you have now changed environments!
That process is obviously slow and involves a lot of dying. Humans on the other hand have two completely new, much faster, and less deathy options (because of our big brains)!
- Rapidly change their behavior, and teach others if it's a group behavior.
- Develop new tools that allow us to better deal with (coats) or change (space heaters) the environment.
Because we can do this, humans are one of the most widely spread single species in terms of environment we can survive in. I want to reiterate the point of this whole argument: the thing that makes humans special is how good we are at CHANGING our behavior (including social structure) to better suit our environment. A second related point is that more than any other species we have the ability to change the environment itself to suit us, hence cities, irrigation, civilization, etc.
Now I want to bring back a point I made earlier about any behavior only being adaptive in the environment it evolved in. A behavior that is very adaptive in humans is the fear response. For instance, people who are afraid of heights tend to stand very still. This makes sense because all the early humans whose instinct was to run, ended up at the bottom of cliffs. Now most fears in humans, as far as we can tell, are learned fears. However, we do have certain things (like heights) that we are more likely to develop fears of. Two of the most common are snakes and spiders. But why? Not that many people nowadays are killed by snakes and spiders. It would make much more sense evolutionarily to be afraid of cars. Cars are much more dangerous to modern humans than snakes or spiders. The problem is that evolution takes a long time. On the evolutionary scale cars haven't been around that long, but snakes and spiders have been killing us since we were little monkey-like mammals. However, humans can use their big brains to change our now maladaptive evolutionarily guided behavior. There are tons of therapies (such as exposure therapy) that have been developed to reduce your fear of snakes and spiders. Hell we keep them as pets now too. And only idiots don't look both ways before crossing the road. This is why JP is completely 100% wrong about hierarchies and how they apply to humans. I'll summarize in the TL;DR to make it easier for everyone.
TL;DR for the entire effort post.
- Social structure of a species is determined by the interaction of genes and that specie's environment (it also isn't static because environment can change)
- There are a wide array of evolved social structures other than strict male-dominated hierarchies (eusocial insects, bonobos) so you can't say for sure that's the only one humans can or do have.
- Any behavior or social structure is only evolutionarily adaptive in the context in which it evolved. A social structure easily becomes maladaptive once the environment changes.
- Humans have the ability to change their environment and behavior more than any other animal. Getting rid of old maladaptive social behaviors is literally the only thing that makes humans special
- Jordan Peterson can go fuck himself. Thanks for your time.