Thanks Steve. You raise good points. Essentially, we’re dealing with an absence of evidence. There is nothing in the deep archaeological record that suggests massive inequality.
Scientists usually take this to mean that inequality was absent, in the same way that the absence of evidence for little green men presumably means that little green men don’t exist. Both are assumptions … the absence of evidence never proves the non-existence of a thing.
What Dawn does is push back the dates in which there are signs of inequality. But the problem, again, is the strawman arguments. Many working scientists are aware of this evidence. So the claim that it is revolutionary is overstated. It’s like finding a fossil of an anatomically modern human that’s a bit older than expected. It hardly changes everything about our understanding of human evolution.
Another point, raised by David Boehm, Peter Turchin, and recently Richard Wrangham is that human paleolithic egalitarianism was actually a departure from our primate heritage. Wrangham makes the case that we basically domesticated ourselves — we used reverse dominance to kill off the big violent alpha males, turning ourselves into a much more socially docile species. The book is called The Goodness Paradox. I thoroughly enjoyed it, except for Wrangham’s refusal to discuss group selection. But that’s a whole other can of worms.
Back to Dawn. After a few days of reflection, here are my thoughts.
On the one hand, Dawn is a stunning piece of scholarship. The Davids compile a massive array of case studies to make the case that pre-history was extremely messy. Societies went in all sort of directions, some getting bigger and more hierarchical, while other societies rejected hierarchy and the trappings of agriculture. This evidence should be celebrated and taken seriously.
On the other hand, Dawn is a stunning example of bad science. It repeatedly attempts to win points by ridiculing theoretical straw men.
Sure, some anthropologists of the past once believed in a naive, linear view of evolution in which all societies went through distinct phases. Likewise, some evolutionary biologists of the past once thought of evolution in terms of the laughable ‘ascent of man’ imagery, in which all of life was working to make humans possible.
The problem is that today, few (if any) working scientists take these ideas seriously. They know that evolution is complex, contingent and messy. So it is frustrating to see the Davids take pot-shots at ideas that modern scientists don’t hold. In fact, I’d wager that very little of the evidence marshalled in Dawn would be considered controversial by working scientists.
So let’s diagnose the biggest problem with Dawn, which is this: the David’s cite many examples of individual trees; then they use these examples to make controversial claims about the forest. But the Davids don’t actually try to measure the forest to see if their inference is correct. It’s a big mistake.
Here’s an analogy by way of life’s evolution. To play the Davids’ game, I start by ridiculing the ascent-of-man imagery as hopelessly wrong. But I don’t tell you that most working scientists agree that this view of evolution is wrong.
Then I bombard you with a list of case studies which show that individual organisms evolve in all sorts of direction. Some ‘choose’ to get larger and more complex. Others ‘choose’ to get smaller and simpler. Again, I don’t tell you that this evidence is widely known and uncontroversial. At the level of individual species, evolution takes all directions at once, and working scientists know that.
Then the twist. I take this well-known evidence and claim that everything you think you know about the origin of life is wrong. In fact, it’s ridiculous to think that life even had an ‘origin’.
Here’s the problem with this reasoning. I’m taking observations about the trees and making inferences about the forest. But the catch is that I’m doing it without actually quantitatively aggregating the trees to look for average trends.
Yes, at the species level, evolution goes in all directions at once. But if we aggregate the big picture, it’s clear that life started small and then branched into bigness. Or put in more mathematical terms, life evolved a ‘fat-tail’ distribution of big organisms. The net effect is that on average, over billions of years, life got bigger. Looking at this average, it’s very clear that if you reverse the trend, it implies that life had an origin that was small. (Extensive DNA evidence corroborates this inference.)
I think the same is true for human societies. As the Davids show, there is a stupendous richness to the evolution of individual societies. But they error in then boldly arguing that this richness implies that inequality has no origin. Scientists who’ve tried to measure trends across time (i.e. measure the forest) clearly see a pattern towards societies with larger scale and more inequality. So when we look at the forest, it does appear that inequality has an origin, at least in a statistical sense.
So here’s my main beef with Dawn. The facts it musters are all consistent with what in my mind is the modern evolutionary understanding of human social evolution. In terms of the big picture, humans evolved from small-group living primates to present-day industrial societies which span the globe. There was never anything ‘inevitable’ about this process … indeed, it depended (like all evolution) on a whole series of contingent events. Still, the big picture trend towards larger scale and greater inequality is fairly clear (again, in a statistical sense).
This average trend is one set of facts, visible when we aggregate across many societies and large swaths of time. The other set of facts is of a whopping mess. When we zoom into the small picture, we find groups and societies going in all sorts of directions. Again, this mess is expected. The big-picture trends are statistical, not absolutes adhered to by every society.
Then problem with Dawn is that it insists on a strawman version of evolutionary theory, one in which large-scale statistical trends are universal laws of nature with no known violation. But few (if any) working scientists hold this view. So the book argues against an imaginary opponent.
So here’s the bottom line. Minus the ubiquitous strawman arguments, the Davids have written a welcome volume that illuminates the richness of human social evolution. So perhaps a better, less grandiose title would have been this: ‘Taking all roads at once: Social experimentation during the neolithic era’.