Another awesome post by Division By Zer0:
A Redditor asks:
I just think back to my earliest times of hanging out with friends, organizing baseball games, and working on group projects, and the utility and convenience of creating hierarchies seems like a part of the “natural order”
Another responds:
The hierarchies you speak of are, in many ways biological. Packing orders of other primates (baboons for example) also have hierarchical social systems. This doesn’t mean that they are desirable or unavoidable.
There are many natural symbiotic systems (bees and flowers for example) which are purely cooperative, with no top-down, pyramid hierarchies. They are complex systems and each entity needs to maximize it’s own natural abilities to take advantage of the others’ but in taking advantage of one another, neither entity is put at a disadvantage.
Even in primate packs there are no artificial governing rules that the individuals follow, they evolve naturally based on genetic predispositions of strength and intellect as well as factors like age and sex.
But one of the major evolutionary stepping stones on the way to becoming homo sapiens sapiens was the evolved ability of homo erectus so-called beta pack members to band together and form units that were, through strength in numbers, able to overpower individual alpha male “rulers” to form egalitarian hunter-gatherer communities that could successfully fend of warring packs and hunt large mammals without aid of alpha males or single centralized leadership.
This particular trait precipitated many evolutionary milestones in communication and technology. Coordinated hunts, for instance, require linguistic ability which in turn breeds technological advances.
That is not to say they didn’t have leadership or complex social structures it’s just that the responsibilities of leadership were divided amongst many and the social structures naturally evolved from that. This made homo erectus one of the most successful and long-lived species of hominid of all time, as well as, gave rise to the most successful branch of the homo genus and the entire Animalia kingdom – modern day humans.
And while modern day humans retain the tendency for hierarchical pecking orders inherited from primate orders that are still visible today, that tendency is, in fact, a primitive feature, like the opposable thumb.
Cooperation and egalitarianism are derived, advanced features, like the opposable pinky.
I agree with the last response, and was wondering what others made of it.
Natural Hierarchies vs Artificial Hierarchies
