Capitalists like to believe that Darwin’s theories justifies competition and inequality. They use evolution to argue that wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, produces the best for humanity despite that Darwin wrote in Descent of Man “Those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”, in other words, that the human species had succeeded because of traits like sharing and compassion.
Michael Tomasello, an American psychologist and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has synthesized three decades of research to develop a comprehensive evolutionary theory of human cooperation.
Approximately two million years ago, a fledgling species known as Homo habilis emerged on the great plains of Africa. Since they lacked the ability to take down large game, like the ferocious carnivores of the early Pleistocene, the solution they hit upon was scavenging the carcasses of recently killed large mammals.
This survival strategy brought an entirely new set of challenges: Individuals now had to coordinate their behaviors, work together, and learn how to share. For apes living in the dense rainforest, the search for ripe fruit and nuts was largely an individual activity. But on the plains, our ancestors needed to travel in groups to survive, and the act of scavenging from a single animal carcass forced proto-humans to learn to tolerate each other and allow each other a fair share. This resulted in a form of social selection that favored cooperation:
“Individuals who attempted to hog all of the food at a scavenged carcass would be actively repelled by others,” writes Tomasello, “and perhaps shunned in other ways as well.”
It was the human inclination for cooperation that allowed groups to grow in number and eventually become tribal societies.
This evolutionary legacy can be seen in our behavior today, particularly among children who are too young to have been taught such notions of fairness. For example, in a 2011 study published in the journal Nature, anthropologist Katharina Hamann and her colleagues found that 3-year-old children share food more equitably if they gain it through cooperative effort rather than via individual labor or no work at all. In contrast, chimpanzees showed no difference in how they shared food under these different scenarios; they wouldn’t necessarily hoard the food individually, but they placed no value on cooperative efforts either. The implication, according to Tomasello, is that human evolution has predisposed us to work collaboratively and given us an intuitive sense that cooperation deserves equal rewards.
Humans, more than any other primate, developed psychological adaptations that allowed them to quickly recognize members of their own group (through unique behaviors, traditions, or forms of language) and develop a shared cultural identity in the pursuit of a common goal.
“The result,” says Tomasello, “was a new kind of interdependence and group-mindedness that went well beyond the joint intentionality of small-scale cooperation to a kind of collective intentionality at the level of the entire society.”
Humans have evolved the ability to quickly form collective intentionality that motivates group members to pursue a shared goal. “Once they have formed a joint goal,” Tomasello says, “humans are committed to it.”
The author unfortunately uses the evidence produced by Tomasello to promote a system of worker-ownership through co-operatives rather than applying the evidence to advance the case for common ownership i.e. the abolition of private/state property. Without re-arguing our critique of co-operatives which has been presented extensively on the blog in earlier posts, Eric Johnson, without demanding the end of the exchange economy, offers a “solution” that will simply still continue the rat-race of competitive rivalry between enterprises and workers.
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