Very interesting theory. Like most psychoanalysis (or its variants) it is plausible but hard to actually test. The more we realize humans were hunter-gatherers for the vast bulk of our history, the more we clearly need to reflect upon the evolutionary and genetic impact this fact likely still has on our existence.

"The commenters of this blog are a tribe: I am quite sure that they are more likely to be altruistic toward each other than toward people chosen at random"

- Don't be too sure!!

I wouldn't say the commenters of this blog but rather the individuals who share the same interests. After all the tribal life is almost always "totemic", there is an iconic entity, be it abstract or not, who coordinates the group in it's actions. Ex: The readers of GNXP are from a broad spectrum but almost all share the same interests but GNXP harbours discussion as a means to an end: truth.
I thinking modern "tribalism" occurs mainly during puberty when one almost fights to get into a "group" of same minded individuals. Later in life, and perhaps due to our western civilization, we are pushed into solitute, either by free will or by society.

the most important characteristic of the tribe is that it gives the individual an identity. People who have a weak identity are likely to do crazy things to get one, like become a Nazi, or just become depressed. On the other hand, one who is immersed in his tribe lives with a certain kind of tranquility...

But the Nazis *were* a tribe, a tribe of ethnically German Germans. And they went way off the deep end with their tribalism. That is a potential problem for just about any modern group that embraces a tribal way of life, including your own. Humans may be built for a tribal existence, but we also have the brainpower to figure out better ways of living, or at least to rein in and modify our natural urge to form hostile, exclusionary groups.

I subscribe to this line of reasoning. It explains a lot of the impulses and social activity that has been branded as "irrational", or worse by contemporary social science.

Humans may be built for a tribal existence, but we also have the brainpower to figure out better ways of living

If we want to be happy, the "better ways of living" must answer our tribal needs. Any need not positively filled will end up being negatively filled.

You mention cats and dogs in your post and I believe that is telling. People isolated and unable to form with a "tribe" usually form quasi-tribes. At this stage it is usually
lower animals, strangers on the net, or the people they meet at the store etc (just witness the loneliness of the elderly, points in fact). In the future, given some technoligical wonders, we may form tribes with digital people or AI's. I know it's Science Fiction speculation but it is indicitive of a trend of isolation in our modern life.

I have often wondered about why depression is endemic to or atleast, more common, in highly fragmented societies.
I am aware of Sikh, Jain and Marwari communities in India and it is well-known that they are "happier" than comparable "others" and it is also true that these communities are highly homogenized & in many ways, more altrusitic than the rest. (Co-incidentaly, they are also the most financially successful groups in India)
The analysis, though limited and debatable(which truth always is), is thought-provoking.

The old days weren't so grand. Homicide rates among modern stone-age tribes is very high, implying it was probably very high then (much higher than in bad parts of Rio or Detroit). Health was crappy, comforts were few, and the pleasures of the mind from refined mathematics, music,and other sciences were not available. Just the 4 f's (feed, fight, flee and fornicate), with maybe a little nesting.

So now we have obesity, ennui, and angst. That's much better. The only constant 'problem' is our social status, which is mainly viewed relatively, and will always be cause for fluctuations in our happiness.

Human are tribal because we can only form intense relationships with a limited number of people.

The comedy format dominated of the late 90's were tribes of neurotic singles banding together against their unforgiving Manhattan environment (Seinfeld, Friends, Frasier, Will & Grace).

Zack

Humans may be built for a tribal existence, but we also have the brainpower to figure out better ways of living, or at least to rein in and modify our natural urge to form hostile, exclusionary groups.

Not really. This is why all our civilizations eventually collapse since civilized living requires us to suppress our natural tribal instincts.

I'm surprised no-one has mention English public schools as putative tribes. One even has the added advantage of inter-tribal warfare without - except on the rugby field -all that messy beheading, castration etc.

I think you are right about humanity's history, but the future is more problematic.

Be careful what you wish for. Small ethnic tribes only work well within larger societies that are *not* tribal. The Nazi response to the Jewish tribe was not incidental: it is a typical tribal reaction to "the intrusive others." Conflict is the inevitable result of tribalism.

The biggest mistake of Jewish tribalism was Zionism: reversion to a peasant lifestyle tied to a geographically delineated piece of land. And its inevitable result in Palestine was a resurgence of Arab tribal identity.

Tribalism might be an answer for elite groups (as it has been for quite some time), but it is not an answer for all of humanity.

The idea of school-as-surrogate-tribe may have great explanatory power for e.g. the willingness of schools to cut or eliminate academic and artistic programs even while they pour resources into sports such as football.  The people voting for this would appear to correspond to the "neolithic civilized humans" described in this NuSapiens post.

I'm not sure that the tribal genie can be shoved back into the bottle. For our pre-historic ancestors, the tribe was survival. Expulsion from the tribe meant death. Even if we formed tribal equivalents, in our minds, we would know that we could survive without the tribe, so the all or nothing commitment to the tribe wouldn't be the same.

Just a hunch here? And couldn't agree more, by the way, about the allure of tribal life. It explains (or helps explain) a lot.

But wouldn't it be helpful to think of operating on multiple levels? In other words, we have some built-in family needs ... some built-in tribal needs ... and we also want to take part in the more "liberal" and cosmpolitan modern world for many reasons. So instead of looking for one solution to the above, why not see it as a patchwork, or a juggling act? We turn to this group to fullfil this need; we develop this skill so we can take part in that, which helps fulfill that desire ... Not that social arrangements can't be tweaked and made more accomodating, of course...

"Conflict is the inevitable result of tribalism."

And tribalism is the inevitable result of human nature.So,channel inevitable tribal conflict into constructive means from team sports to academic competition to economic competion...

....and never make it one-winner-one-time-win-now-or-lose-forever competition unless you want the competition to transcend to war to the death.

This kind of reminds me of the Monkeysphere argument:
http:// www.pointlesswasteoftime....nkeysphere.html

Basically, it humorously argues (from an uncited comparative primatology study) that people don't function well dealing with affinity groups (kinship, shared interest, what have you) much larger than about 150, which might explain why human social behavior in cities and smaller (tribal) setting is so different. Has anyone here stumbled across a real scientific report on this?

Seems too much like the “noble savage”. Actually living as a primitive tribe wouldn’t be so nice. Consider chimpanzee or ape communities. Animals low in the social heirarchy live miserable lives (based on stress levels and observed social behavior).

My guess is that humans have never been well adapted to their environment. We are a “good enough” design that has done fairly well at adapting to many environments. On average I suspect we are happier than ancient humans in that we are less likely to be starving, sick, or in pain.

I doubt people are any more attracted to cult type behavior than in the past. A small percent of humans have always been crazy. Poor nutrition and health in the past would likely have made the problems more frequent. Modern society sets a very high standard in that all people are expected to live happy, successful lives.

(I agree that humans are social animals, i.e., tribal. I disagree that modern life is non-tribal. Humanity’s tribal nature is reflected throughout modern society.)

For some of the antecedents of this point of view see Marshall Sahlins, "Stone Age Economics;" Paul Sheperd, "Madness and Civilization"; and Gary Snyder's seminal essay, "Why Tribe?" All in book form and all still available.

There are lots of groups in modern life that are, to an extent, tribe-like, but there's a big difference between these pseudo-tribes and actual tribes: with real tribes, you're only in one at a time, and there's a pretty sharp distinction between "in the tribe" and "not in the tribe". Maybe it's better this way, maybe it's worse, but it's certainly different.

Surely ethnic nations are the most obvious modern forms of tribalism?

I am not so sure that pre-agricultural man had it all that rough. It depended on how much game there was around and the strength of the tribe you belonged to. Skeltons show them healthier than agricultural man, atkins diet an' all.

"Modern life, intimately bound to the social milieu of the city, became the native habitat of the majority only about a hundred years ago, and then only in the most technologically advanced countries of the world."

We are actually crossing the halfway mark for the urbanization of the population of the world right about now-ish.


"The commenters of this blog are a tribe: I am quite sure that they are more likely to be altruistic toward each other than toward people chosen at random"

I certainly have warm fuzzy feelings for Razib, Godless, and Scott... I don't hang out here enough to know the rest of you very well.


Personally, I get the "part of the tribe" feeling the most when I'm standing in line all day for seats at a newly released sci-fi, fantasy, or comic book movie. My fellow geeks who would also spend 12 hours standing outside in the cold just to get good seats for Lord of the Rings -- those are my people!

It does shed light on why trying to control "natural" behaviours like our sex drive or our eating habits merely by moral self-control is doomed to failure. We did not evolve for the modern world and so we are naturally maladapted to modern conditions of abundance.

It means that trying to lower our birthrate or our snacking proclivity purely by moral self-control is doomed to failure without pharmaceutical assistance. In the long run we must have contraception and fat-control medication. We either live hellish lives of desperate self-torment and futile self-denial or we accept that pharmacology is vital to our well-being.

We need chemical help to live in the modern world, to which we are poorly adapted,just as much as we need a space suit to live in space or scuba gear to live under water.

Dan Dare writes:

We need chemical help to live in the modern world...

I'd be careful with that concept if I were you.  The perfectability of man via Lysenkoism could become the perfectability of man via pharmaceuticals, and it isn't necessarily the individual who would be doing the perfecting.  Imagine Stalin with a legion of drug chemists of 2 decades from now... or even today.

Evolutionary psychology is worthwhile for helping us understand why certain social structures work better than others; we may be able to engineer our organizations more easily than trying to work the bugs out of mind-altering chemicals (which should be obvious when even Accutane causes changes in brain activity.

The tribal relations would seem to be quite opposed to groupings aligned by common leisure interests and such. The tribe is co-ancestral. As to adaptive fitness in modernity, here is a suggestion for an experiment. Let a foundation set up two matchmaking services, one of which uses commonality of interests. The other one uses similarity of genetics between unrelated subjects, matching as close as possible, while still maintaining the appropriate degree of difference on relevant genes such as those of the MHC. The objective would be to get strangers as close as second or even first cousins. Then compare the resulting marriages in each group for fertility, compatibility, indications of marital dysfunction, etc. If we are tribally adapted, does it follow that the closer-breeding group will score higher than the attitudinally more compatible couples?

< objective would be to get strangers as close as second or even first cousins. Then compare the resulting marriages in each group for fertility, compatibility, indications of marital dysfunction, etc. If we are tribally adapted, does it follow that the closer-breeding group will score higher than the attitudinally more compatible couples? >

Send the research team to the Islamic world, and merely compare marriages within and without (most probobly love matches) the family. Control for income, social class and a few other factorrs and we'll be abel to see which marital way of life works out...

That would probably be better, especially if trust could be established such that they could get reporting of abuse into a blind collector. Would this have been done; to the extent of correlating degree of relatedness with overall indicators, and matching the environments?

Engineer-Poet,

I wasn't thinking of mind altering chemicals. I was thinking more of chemicals to control fat metabolism. Eat what you like but don't get fat, and bypass most of the harmfull effects of obesity.

Some links and interesting story here:

http://www.betterhumans.com/News...ID=2004-06-02- 3

Birds of a feather flock together. On that assumption, may I suggest a good look at http://www.lowcarbportal.com/ as there are many research papers posted there about nutrition and mindset. After all, diet is a cohesive force in a tribal sense and if we all eat the same, then we may think the same??

Another site discusses the mental attributes associated with hunting, focusing on the prey to the exclusion of distracting events. Almost a form of Autism!

http://www.rdos.net/eng/asperger.htm
suggests a connection of Asperger's Syndrome with Neanderthals

Pericles

" People who have a weak identity are likely to do crazy things to get one, like become a Nazi, or just become depressed."

Why not a Communist? During the 1930s, some 30 million Soviet citizens were slaughtered by the command of one man, J. Stalin. In plain numbers, the Communists killed twice as many people as the Nazis. Selective history in some ways is more dishonest than no history.

When the casualties of all the wars that took place during the 20th century are totalled up, the final figure exceeds 100 million.

60 years of constant PR have pointed the finger of blame for genocide at the Nazis. They probably got their inspiration from the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians in 1915 and Stalin's efforts from 1933.

Left wing, right wing, Xtian, Islamic or Jewish. Hutu or Tutsi, the civil conflict in Sudan. Genocide is in our genes, it is Man's inhumanity to Man that we must conquer (or die).

Pericles

Natural sugar comes from fruit. Also in the fruit are certain vitamins (like vitamin C) that one wouldn't get from eating strictly meat.

So I presume that our sweet tooth developed during the ice ages when there weren't many fruit trees around and men had to eat some fruit whenever they found it.

These tribal idea are hardly new.

How many falsifiable hypotheses can be constructed from these speculations.

Sociobiology is a bit intellectually dangerous because it is so easy and satisfying to construct satisfyinig explanations for modern human behavior but much harder to scientifically examing them.

Many of the speculations semm obvious. But can we establish that they are correct to a reasonable certainty.

In spite of all of this, I'm always coming up with satisfying explanations along these lines of logic - but it ain't science.

Here's my own: tribes have to be small (some reasons were cited by others). Tribes tend to be composed of blood relatives (in a very bizarre coincidence, I recently discovered that my wife and myself both carry a small blood fraction from the same small Native American tribe). Tribes may provide explanations for altruism and life spans extending well past reproductive age. We still have primitive tribes - go check them out.

The hypothesized prehistoric tribes may have varied quite a bit during the evolution of man, for external reasons. Given the slow pace of genomic evolution, it's possible that we are not well adapted to any single model, but rather carry partial adaptations to a number of different social organizations.

Finally, a lot of political/social actions have been taken based on this kind of thinking - very damaging actions. The "blank slate" theory underpinned communism, for example.

[ Tribalism might be an answer for elite groups (as it has been for quite some time), but it is not an answer for all of humanity. ]

I.e., Jews can be tribal, but goys cannot.