Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity. By Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. Oneworld £10.99.
The title is a reference to the ‘survival of the fittest’, Charles Darwin’s alternative formulation of the idea of natural selection. This raises the issue of how fitness is measured: it is sometimes seen as a matter of physical strength, intelligence and power, and some racists even regard it as a justification for white supremacy. Here, however, Hare and Woods argue that it is friendliness and co-operation that have led to humans’ evolutionary fitness. The argument is in some ways similar to that of Rutger Bregman in Humankind (discussed in the May 2021 Socialist Standard), though the evidence here is more based on human (pre)history and psychological experiments, rather than discussion of human behaviour in the real world.
The essential concept here is that of self-domestication: ‘natural selection acted on our species in favour of friendlier behavior that enhanced our ability to flexibly cooperate and communicate … we thrived not because we got smarter, but because we got friendlier.’ Female preference for male friendliness is claimed to have caused a friendlier society to evolve. Other human species besides sapiens went extinct since they could not co-operate and communicate in the same way. Friendliness resulted in larger social networks and hence better technology, which meant bigger groups and even better technology, in a positive feedback loop. Human self-domestication happened before eighty thousand years ago. Dogs and bonobos are also ‘built for cooperative communication’, but chimps are not.
However, there is a negative side to the formation of larger groups of people: outsiders can be treated with fear and even aggression. They may even be dehumanised, considered less than fully human, and simianised (looked on as similar to apes). This occurred as part of the justification for the slave trade, and one recent study of Americans found that Muslims were regarded as only 90 percent fully human by the group tested. Dehumanisation seems to be central to explaining why some people do terrible things, along with obedience to authority and a desire to conform (note that all this is in the context of a society that sets people against each other). But contact with other groups reduces conflict, by removing the sense of threat and increasing empathy.
Unfortunately among this presentation is a truly bizarre claim that ‘communists’ (who support ‘extreme forms of egalitarianism’) and anarchists are dehumanisers. Naturally no explanation or justification is offered for this.
On the whole, though, this is a worthwhile account of aspects of human evolution, where co-operation and friendliness have played a crucial role in making modern-day humans such an intelligent and technologically-advanced species, with the potential to live in a world of equality where all needs are met.
Paul Bennett
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