The Disillusionist
21st April 2015, 05:10
I'm just finishing a little term paper (only 8 pages) on a potential theory of capitalism from an evolutionary perspective, incorporating minor elements of biological evolution but heavily focusing on cultural evolution (through innovation and social learning). I doubt many of you, if anyone, will want to read it, but I thought someone might find it interesting, as it's a bit different from the Marxist perspectives that are so often discussed here. I'm sure I'll get attacked by some traditionalists (if anyone reads it) for posting this, but keep in mind that just because something has possibly developed through the processes of evolution doesn't mean that it is natural or right, or that there aren't better alternatives. And keep in mind that this paper doesn't argue against the Marxist perspective in any way (in fact, I informally adopted a little bit of Marxist theory into it) Also, this is a rough draft, so I'm sure there are still some rough spots, and spots needing citation. So, without further ado, here you go:
Capitalism is a highly complex economic system. Humans have developed all kinds of complex economic systems, but capitalism is particularly interesting because it has gained considerable influence worldwide, and because it is a structure that relies on a unique set of fundamental cultural concepts: the concept of private property, the concept of goods having exchangeable value as “capital,” the concept of economic “competition,” the concepts of wages and wage labor, and the concept of a “market” that determines the value and trade of varying types of capital. Finally, of course, capitalism relies on people to keep it running, as on some level, it is a participatory system.
From a biological and evolutionary viewpoint, capitalism is somewhat of a mystery. Though it has made new goods and services available to a huge percentage of the people on this planet, it has done so at quite a cost to human lives and to the environment. Even in developed countries, capitalism has built a framework that provides us with all manner of luxuries, but at the cost of almost complete alienation from the processes and resources that form the base of our own subsistence strategies. This capitalistic framework creates a fragile social structure in which we are far more reliant on others for our direct subsistence than humanity has ever been before. Though this risk provides significant payoff to many, it can also carry with it a significant cost. Loss of a job can have devastating consequences for workers under a capitalistic system, resulting in loss of a subsistence strategy and often loss of a shelter, potentially causing a person’s fitness to plummet, often through no fault of his/her own. Though capitalism tends to be associated in the public mind with political freedom, members of a capitalist society often have very little freedom over their own subsistence strategies.
Furthermore, in order to obtain money, to buy into this framework, we are required to expend considerable labor, often entirely for someone else’s benefit. Capitalism as a system is constructed to funnel resources from the laboring majority to the managing minority. The practical foundation of the success of any capitalist economy is that people receive less compensation for their work than the actual value of their work. This is what the concept of profit is based on. From the viewpoint of human behavioral ecology, this is contradictory to optimal foraging theory, which states that people should try as much as possible to optimize their subsistence strategies by minimizing the cost of labor in relation to the return on that labor. Success in a capitalist system requires an individual to take uncontrollable risks and to accept and pursue a suboptimal subsistence strategy as part of a system that is explicitly designed to benefit others more than themselves.
As a result, though this system has greatly benefited a minority, and some of that success has spilled over onto the main populace in developed countries, many of the majority, especially in developing countries, face a constant unwinnable struggle to survive, working constantly for a restrictive, meager lifestyle. The majority of individuals are sacrificing potential fitness for the benefit of a few, many of whom have already obtained more than enough resources to care for more children than they could ever hope to conceive. In fact, rather than maximizing their fitnesses and choosing not to expend energy beyond that point, the most powerful people in capitalist societies are amassing vastly excessive collections resources. For these reasons, capitalism seems to run completely against the nature of individual evolution.
Capitalism is not a natural process, and thus it is not subject to the mechanisms of individual evolution. Individual evolution on a biological level requires three factors: genetic variation, genetic heritance, and competition as the result of selective ecological pressures. There is no such thing as biological group evolution, on any level smaller than an entire species, because migration and the resulting genetic flow does not allow for sufficient genetic variation to develop between groups.
However, capitalism is very subject to the process of cultural evolution. A very important distinction to make between cultural evolution and biological evolution is that although in some cases it can influence individual-level biological evolution, cultural evolution does not operate directly on a genetic level, but rather on a more superficial behavioral one. Apart from that, cultural evolution has similar requirements to biological evolution. To have cultural evolution, there must be a variation in behaviors to choose from, there must be a means of transmission for these behaviors, in the form of social learning, and there must be competition as a result of selective pressures, which are very often ecological. Cultural evolution, unlike biological evolution, can take place on a group level, because different groups of people can embrace, teach, and encourage or discourage different cultural traits. For a cultural trait to become initially successful, it must be perceived by members of a group as better than alternative traits because it allows them to adapt themselves to specific pressures more effectively. Once these traits have been chosen, they must be taught to new generations in order to endure.
Capitalism as an evolutionary mystery can be examined with respect to the biological mechanisms that may have serves as foundations to its development and with respect to the culturally evolutionary processes that have allowed it to develop. Niko Tinbergen’s 4 categories of behavioral explanation serve as an excellent guideline for this analysis. It is possible to analyze the individual side of the question through Tinbergen’s two biologically focused levels of explanation: the proximate and the ontogenetic. The proximate level of explanation is focused on the direct causal mechanisms of a behavior, while the ontogenetic level is focused on the development causes of a behavior. The evolutionarily-focused side of the question of capitalism is best answered with the other two levels of explanation: the ultimate and the phylogenetic. The ultimate level of explanation is focused on the effect that a behavior has on an organism’s fitness, while the phylogenetic level of explanation is focused on the evolutionary history of a behavior.
Perhaps the best level of explanation to start with is the phylogenetic one, as that concerns the evolutionary history that has shaped and influenced all other levels of explanation. Capitalism is obviously not present in any of our evolutionary ancestors, no matter how recent. However, reciprocal altruism, the sharing of goods with the expectation that goods will be shared in return in the future, is present in chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relatives. Chimpanzees, for example, have been observed to develop relationships and alliances through the sharing of goods, such as meat, or services, such as grooming. This same type of behavior is thought to have played a significant part in the development of increased sociality among our more recent ancestors, eventually playing a key role in the development of human sociality as we know it today. Patterns of reciprocity may have been the most important evolutionary antecedent to modern human economies.
However, reciprocal altruism by itself does not seem like a sufficient foundation for the development of capitalism. A functioning capitalist system also requires the capability for abstract, symbolic thought, another capability that has been seen on some level in our most recent, living evolutionary ancestors but that became much more powerful during the evolution of early proto-humans. Only once we had evolved that capability would we have been able to participate in complex trading using representative currency.
Finally, a third vital skill, closely associated with reciprocal altruism, that humans would have needed in order to be capable of developing a capitalist system would have been the ability to delay gratification and calculate future cost for very long periods of time, in order to connect the ideas of wage labor, trade, and consumption. Scientists have done considerable research into the way that different animals, primates included, value or devalue increased future rewards in comparison to smaller present rewards. They have found that primates do indeed have the capacity to calculate future returns relative to present returns and act accordingly (source). However, complex trade economies require humans to use this cognitive ability on a level that is entirely outside the range of that measured in primates. This is yet another skill that must have evolved in our earlier evolutionary days as a species.
In relation to these points, exogamy, or the exchange of women in pair-bonding across different groups has been theorized (Chapais) to have played a significant part in the construction of modern human kinship and society, and it has also been theorized (other recent 306 source) that marriage in early human societies was very often associated with the exchange of a bride price or bride service. Perhaps the economic exchange of women was either an early driver or an early result of these evolutionary developments among early humans.
Overall, it seems that the most important foundations for the development of capitalism were already present in our evolutionary past, but it was our unique evolutionary development into the human species that jumpstarted those abilities and made them powerful enough that we could create such complex economic systems. This phylogenetic explanation leads right into a proximate level explanation, as the proximate explanation concerns the mechanisms that were developed in the human phylogenetic history.
On a proximate level, there are a number of mechanisms that have likely played a part in the development of capitalism. Since it’s likely that reciprocal altruism formed the foundation for the development of capitalism, the same mechanisms associated with reciprocal altruism should be associated with capitalism. Researchers in the field of human cognition have found that the reward center of the brain (what is it called?) is active when humans cooperate or punish defectors who don’t cooperate in their systems. These mechanisms are also present among chimpanzees, though as mentioned in the phylogenetic explanation, it is advanced human cognition that has allowed our mechanisms for cooperation, punishment, and “reciprocal scorekeeping” to become so complex. The selling and consumption of goods has also been shown to have a cognitive effect on humans, to the point that for some people these actions have become an addiction, an adrenaline rush that these people actively pursue. This addictive potential, and the powerful prevalence of a “consumer culture” in developed countries such as the US demonstrate very well the potency of the proximate mechanisms that prompt people to participate in capitalist systems. It is possible that the capitalist system has hijacked these proximate mechanisms, taking these short-sighted human drives and pandering to them, while neglecting the long-term perspectives that would reveal itself to be an unsustainable system.
“Greed” is a difficult aspect of human cognition to measure or label scientifically, but few would argue that it is not also a fundamental part of human thought and behavior. Greed, like altruism, has been suggested to be a symptom of the function of the reward center of the brain, caused by the association of pleasure with the accumulation of things of value. This proximate mechanism could explain why the most powerful members of capitalist societies often collect wealth and resources in quantities that far exceed what they could ever use.
The reward center of the brain is a highly generalized cognitive mechanism, and depending on an individual’s psychology, can be associated to varying degrees with food, sex, love, sharing, money, music, and beauty (source). This individual difference in psychology can potentially set the foundation for an ontogenetic, or developmental, explanation of why people participate in these systems.
People across cultures can have different views on capitalism, as it is not a biologically or developmentally inherent idea. However, development within a culture can have a significant influence on individual psychology, and culturally prescribed values can determine, to a large extent, with what people associate the feelings of pleasure that come from the cognitive reward center. Every society instills its values on its younger members. Young members of capitalist societies are taught through social learning to associate material gains with happiness, and they are taught that the pursuit of that “happiness” is the most important part of life, only obtained through hard work for other people. As a result, capitalism has become a belief system as much as an economic system for entire populations of people, resulting in an ideology powerful enough to potentially overcome even the logical processes that evolution has given us as a means of survival.
By building off of the foundation that the phylogenetic, proximate, and ontogenetic explanations provide, an attempt can be made at constructing an ultimate, holistic explanation for the relationship that capitalism has with human evolutionary fitness. Overall, capitalism seems to be a cultural system that uses social teaching to take advantage of individual biological drives that were developed during human evolution in order to create a final product, a system that actually stands contradictory to individual evolutionary nature by emphasizing group participation in a system that causes the excess resource accumulation of a few at the expense of the fitness of many.
This system likely could have culturally evolved as a result of an existing hierarchy in power, with the individuals at the top using their authority to create and perpetuate a system that maximized their own fitnesses, eventually creating a system that became so streamlined that fitness became essentially irrelevant, taken for granted, for the benefiting individuals, with success then being defined by the accumulation of excess resources, or capital, in comparison to others. By virtue of their own maligned evolutionary drives that keep motivating them to collect, despite not needing to, this system continues to be maintained by those with the power to influence social education, cultural norms, and punishments.
However, the majority may not be entirely misguided in participating in the capitalist system. Though the ruling elite do benefit the most from them, capitalist trade and production has created countless markets that can produce and provide vast quantities of a wide variety of goods. Those with authority seek to monopolize these resources, but in situations where the producing majority have managed to assert some sort of socio-political power, altering the capitalist dynamic, the poor and middle class have often benefited greatly from this modified system. As a result, it is often the case that the majority drive for the maximization of fitness and self-preservation overrides that of the powerful minority, resulting in a society that is more fit in general. This struggle between the majority and the minority has been a major defining element of modern history. The attempted development of economic alternatives to capitalism could be an excellent potential example of cultural group evolution selecting for the option that allows the most individuals to benefit.
In the end, Tinbergen’s 4 methods of explanation might not explain every aspect of such a complicated cultural phenomenon as capitalism, but they can offer a fresh perspective, helping to bring a more nuanced understanding to the system that is capitalism. They can offer potential explanations about the evolutionary history that could have set the foundation for capitalism, the proximate mechanisms evolved during this history that cause people to participate in capitalism, the developmental mechanisms that help to maintain capitalism, and finally, the ultimate evolutionary significance of capitalism. These tiers of explanation all help to pull away layers of potential confusion by directing each level of explanation at a potential layer of the phenomenon being studied in order to lay the steps for a foundational framework that can transcend these layers.
Capitalism is a highly complex economic system. Humans have developed all kinds of complex economic systems, but capitalism is particularly interesting because it has gained considerable influence worldwide, and because it is a structure that relies on a unique set of fundamental cultural concepts: the concept of private property, the concept of goods having exchangeable value as “capital,” the concept of economic “competition,” the concepts of wages and wage labor, and the concept of a “market” that determines the value and trade of varying types of capital. Finally, of course, capitalism relies on people to keep it running, as on some level, it is a participatory system.
From a biological and evolutionary viewpoint, capitalism is somewhat of a mystery. Though it has made new goods and services available to a huge percentage of the people on this planet, it has done so at quite a cost to human lives and to the environment. Even in developed countries, capitalism has built a framework that provides us with all manner of luxuries, but at the cost of almost complete alienation from the processes and resources that form the base of our own subsistence strategies. This capitalistic framework creates a fragile social structure in which we are far more reliant on others for our direct subsistence than humanity has ever been before. Though this risk provides significant payoff to many, it can also carry with it a significant cost. Loss of a job can have devastating consequences for workers under a capitalistic system, resulting in loss of a subsistence strategy and often loss of a shelter, potentially causing a person’s fitness to plummet, often through no fault of his/her own. Though capitalism tends to be associated in the public mind with political freedom, members of a capitalist society often have very little freedom over their own subsistence strategies.
Furthermore, in order to obtain money, to buy into this framework, we are required to expend considerable labor, often entirely for someone else’s benefit. Capitalism as a system is constructed to funnel resources from the laboring majority to the managing minority. The practical foundation of the success of any capitalist economy is that people receive less compensation for their work than the actual value of their work. This is what the concept of profit is based on. From the viewpoint of human behavioral ecology, this is contradictory to optimal foraging theory, which states that people should try as much as possible to optimize their subsistence strategies by minimizing the cost of labor in relation to the return on that labor. Success in a capitalist system requires an individual to take uncontrollable risks and to accept and pursue a suboptimal subsistence strategy as part of a system that is explicitly designed to benefit others more than themselves.
As a result, though this system has greatly benefited a minority, and some of that success has spilled over onto the main populace in developed countries, many of the majority, especially in developing countries, face a constant unwinnable struggle to survive, working constantly for a restrictive, meager lifestyle. The majority of individuals are sacrificing potential fitness for the benefit of a few, many of whom have already obtained more than enough resources to care for more children than they could ever hope to conceive. In fact, rather than maximizing their fitnesses and choosing not to expend energy beyond that point, the most powerful people in capitalist societies are amassing vastly excessive collections resources. For these reasons, capitalism seems to run completely against the nature of individual evolution.
Capitalism is not a natural process, and thus it is not subject to the mechanisms of individual evolution. Individual evolution on a biological level requires three factors: genetic variation, genetic heritance, and competition as the result of selective ecological pressures. There is no such thing as biological group evolution, on any level smaller than an entire species, because migration and the resulting genetic flow does not allow for sufficient genetic variation to develop between groups.
However, capitalism is very subject to the process of cultural evolution. A very important distinction to make between cultural evolution and biological evolution is that although in some cases it can influence individual-level biological evolution, cultural evolution does not operate directly on a genetic level, but rather on a more superficial behavioral one. Apart from that, cultural evolution has similar requirements to biological evolution. To have cultural evolution, there must be a variation in behaviors to choose from, there must be a means of transmission for these behaviors, in the form of social learning, and there must be competition as a result of selective pressures, which are very often ecological. Cultural evolution, unlike biological evolution, can take place on a group level, because different groups of people can embrace, teach, and encourage or discourage different cultural traits. For a cultural trait to become initially successful, it must be perceived by members of a group as better than alternative traits because it allows them to adapt themselves to specific pressures more effectively. Once these traits have been chosen, they must be taught to new generations in order to endure.
Capitalism as an evolutionary mystery can be examined with respect to the biological mechanisms that may have serves as foundations to its development and with respect to the culturally evolutionary processes that have allowed it to develop. Niko Tinbergen’s 4 categories of behavioral explanation serve as an excellent guideline for this analysis. It is possible to analyze the individual side of the question through Tinbergen’s two biologically focused levels of explanation: the proximate and the ontogenetic. The proximate level of explanation is focused on the direct causal mechanisms of a behavior, while the ontogenetic level is focused on the development causes of a behavior. The evolutionarily-focused side of the question of capitalism is best answered with the other two levels of explanation: the ultimate and the phylogenetic. The ultimate level of explanation is focused on the effect that a behavior has on an organism’s fitness, while the phylogenetic level of explanation is focused on the evolutionary history of a behavior.
Perhaps the best level of explanation to start with is the phylogenetic one, as that concerns the evolutionary history that has shaped and influenced all other levels of explanation. Capitalism is obviously not present in any of our evolutionary ancestors, no matter how recent. However, reciprocal altruism, the sharing of goods with the expectation that goods will be shared in return in the future, is present in chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relatives. Chimpanzees, for example, have been observed to develop relationships and alliances through the sharing of goods, such as meat, or services, such as grooming. This same type of behavior is thought to have played a significant part in the development of increased sociality among our more recent ancestors, eventually playing a key role in the development of human sociality as we know it today. Patterns of reciprocity may have been the most important evolutionary antecedent to modern human economies.
However, reciprocal altruism by itself does not seem like a sufficient foundation for the development of capitalism. A functioning capitalist system also requires the capability for abstract, symbolic thought, another capability that has been seen on some level in our most recent, living evolutionary ancestors but that became much more powerful during the evolution of early proto-humans. Only once we had evolved that capability would we have been able to participate in complex trading using representative currency.
Finally, a third vital skill, closely associated with reciprocal altruism, that humans would have needed in order to be capable of developing a capitalist system would have been the ability to delay gratification and calculate future cost for very long periods of time, in order to connect the ideas of wage labor, trade, and consumption. Scientists have done considerable research into the way that different animals, primates included, value or devalue increased future rewards in comparison to smaller present rewards. They have found that primates do indeed have the capacity to calculate future returns relative to present returns and act accordingly (source). However, complex trade economies require humans to use this cognitive ability on a level that is entirely outside the range of that measured in primates. This is yet another skill that must have evolved in our earlier evolutionary days as a species.
In relation to these points, exogamy, or the exchange of women in pair-bonding across different groups has been theorized (Chapais) to have played a significant part in the construction of modern human kinship and society, and it has also been theorized (other recent 306 source) that marriage in early human societies was very often associated with the exchange of a bride price or bride service. Perhaps the economic exchange of women was either an early driver or an early result of these evolutionary developments among early humans.
Overall, it seems that the most important foundations for the development of capitalism were already present in our evolutionary past, but it was our unique evolutionary development into the human species that jumpstarted those abilities and made them powerful enough that we could create such complex economic systems. This phylogenetic explanation leads right into a proximate level explanation, as the proximate explanation concerns the mechanisms that were developed in the human phylogenetic history.
On a proximate level, there are a number of mechanisms that have likely played a part in the development of capitalism. Since it’s likely that reciprocal altruism formed the foundation for the development of capitalism, the same mechanisms associated with reciprocal altruism should be associated with capitalism. Researchers in the field of human cognition have found that the reward center of the brain (what is it called?) is active when humans cooperate or punish defectors who don’t cooperate in their systems. These mechanisms are also present among chimpanzees, though as mentioned in the phylogenetic explanation, it is advanced human cognition that has allowed our mechanisms for cooperation, punishment, and “reciprocal scorekeeping” to become so complex. The selling and consumption of goods has also been shown to have a cognitive effect on humans, to the point that for some people these actions have become an addiction, an adrenaline rush that these people actively pursue. This addictive potential, and the powerful prevalence of a “consumer culture” in developed countries such as the US demonstrate very well the potency of the proximate mechanisms that prompt people to participate in capitalist systems. It is possible that the capitalist system has hijacked these proximate mechanisms, taking these short-sighted human drives and pandering to them, while neglecting the long-term perspectives that would reveal itself to be an unsustainable system.
“Greed” is a difficult aspect of human cognition to measure or label scientifically, but few would argue that it is not also a fundamental part of human thought and behavior. Greed, like altruism, has been suggested to be a symptom of the function of the reward center of the brain, caused by the association of pleasure with the accumulation of things of value. This proximate mechanism could explain why the most powerful members of capitalist societies often collect wealth and resources in quantities that far exceed what they could ever use.
The reward center of the brain is a highly generalized cognitive mechanism, and depending on an individual’s psychology, can be associated to varying degrees with food, sex, love, sharing, money, music, and beauty (source). This individual difference in psychology can potentially set the foundation for an ontogenetic, or developmental, explanation of why people participate in these systems.
People across cultures can have different views on capitalism, as it is not a biologically or developmentally inherent idea. However, development within a culture can have a significant influence on individual psychology, and culturally prescribed values can determine, to a large extent, with what people associate the feelings of pleasure that come from the cognitive reward center. Every society instills its values on its younger members. Young members of capitalist societies are taught through social learning to associate material gains with happiness, and they are taught that the pursuit of that “happiness” is the most important part of life, only obtained through hard work for other people. As a result, capitalism has become a belief system as much as an economic system for entire populations of people, resulting in an ideology powerful enough to potentially overcome even the logical processes that evolution has given us as a means of survival.
By building off of the foundation that the phylogenetic, proximate, and ontogenetic explanations provide, an attempt can be made at constructing an ultimate, holistic explanation for the relationship that capitalism has with human evolutionary fitness. Overall, capitalism seems to be a cultural system that uses social teaching to take advantage of individual biological drives that were developed during human evolution in order to create a final product, a system that actually stands contradictory to individual evolutionary nature by emphasizing group participation in a system that causes the excess resource accumulation of a few at the expense of the fitness of many.
This system likely could have culturally evolved as a result of an existing hierarchy in power, with the individuals at the top using their authority to create and perpetuate a system that maximized their own fitnesses, eventually creating a system that became so streamlined that fitness became essentially irrelevant, taken for granted, for the benefiting individuals, with success then being defined by the accumulation of excess resources, or capital, in comparison to others. By virtue of their own maligned evolutionary drives that keep motivating them to collect, despite not needing to, this system continues to be maintained by those with the power to influence social education, cultural norms, and punishments.
However, the majority may not be entirely misguided in participating in the capitalist system. Though the ruling elite do benefit the most from them, capitalist trade and production has created countless markets that can produce and provide vast quantities of a wide variety of goods. Those with authority seek to monopolize these resources, but in situations where the producing majority have managed to assert some sort of socio-political power, altering the capitalist dynamic, the poor and middle class have often benefited greatly from this modified system. As a result, it is often the case that the majority drive for the maximization of fitness and self-preservation overrides that of the powerful minority, resulting in a society that is more fit in general. This struggle between the majority and the minority has been a major defining element of modern history. The attempted development of economic alternatives to capitalism could be an excellent potential example of cultural group evolution selecting for the option that allows the most individuals to benefit.
In the end, Tinbergen’s 4 methods of explanation might not explain every aspect of such a complicated cultural phenomenon as capitalism, but they can offer a fresh perspective, helping to bring a more nuanced understanding to the system that is capitalism. They can offer potential explanations about the evolutionary history that could have set the foundation for capitalism, the proximate mechanisms evolved during this history that cause people to participate in capitalism, the developmental mechanisms that help to maintain capitalism, and finally, the ultimate evolutionary significance of capitalism. These tiers of explanation all help to pull away layers of potential confusion by directing each level of explanation at a potential layer of the phenomenon being studied in order to lay the steps for a foundational framework that can transcend these layers.