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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

The thing is Kropotkin's actual book presented it as a scientific principle of evolution, which is nonsense. Yes, there are biological examples of cooperation (such as eusocial insects like bees and ants), but this only works because of the unusual reproductive strategy they use where all the members of a hive are siblings. That doesn't mean that humans can't choose to cooperate, but this choice has nothing to do with biology or evolution.

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Humanity spent 200,000 years living communally in social abundance. This is settled science in anthropology and biology [1][2][3]

Social community is an essential requirement for human life and the loss of community has now been used as proof of some kind of lamarckian anti-social evolution which has zero evidence.

[1] Chan, E.K.F., et al. human origins in a southern African palaeo-wetland and first migrations. Nature 575,185–189 (2019)

[2] Graeber, David, Wingrow, David (2021), The Dawn of Everything. (126)

[3] Sahlins, Marshall (2009). Hunter-gatherers: insights from a golden affluent age. Pacific Ecologist. 18: 3–8

The everyone is out for themselves, greed is king, insurance instead of family, sue thy neighbor is not backed by evidence? who knew?

That period was also incredibly violent, as the unit of competition was the family, not the individual. Economies of scale were similarly inaccessible, which is why agrarian societies outcompeted their hunter-gathered kin. We can absolutely model our post-industrial society on that pre-historic ideal, but that also requires acknowledging its brutality and shortcomings.

Graeber’s last book, The Dawn of Everything, does a great job of dispelling a lot of these “brutal and short” notions as mostly ideological myths.

This is the same guy who believed Apple was founded in the 1980s by Republican ex-IBMers using laptops, though.

> Graeber’s last book, The Dawn of Everything, does a great job of dispelling a lot of these “brutal and short” notions as mostly ideological myths

Anyone casting this as settled science immediately attracts scrutiny. Our data from the epoch are spotty. But there is evidence it was very violent on a per-capita basis [1].

[1] https://stevenpinker.com/reviews-better-angels-our-nature

I agree that calling this "settled science" is problematic, but a large point of the book in question is to introduce new evidence from the epoch in question that directly challenges some of the common narratives, especially Pinker's.

It's a thought provoking book worth reading.

> new evidence from the epoch in question that directly challenges some of the common narratives, especially Pinker's

“Challenges” and “theory” may be better terms than “dispels” and “ideological myths,” then.

I've noticed more and more often that many commenters on HN simply don't read the parent comment.

Not sure if directed at my or the preceding comment, but I’d note that the top-level comment states “social abundance” in pre-historic times is “settled anthropology and biology.”

It's considered rude when someone attempts to speak for the entire reader-base on HN.

This is the second identical reply you made to one of my comments, so this seems a lot like low effort trolling instead of an honest mistake.

The other one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34785689

It's odd that someone with a 2013 account and a decent posting history would choose to self-destruct like this. So I'm inclined to believe the account got hacked?

Graeber directly addresses this in the book and in my opinion completely nullifies Pinker's argument

Some years ago, I read a scientific article that compared the number of murders per capita in the stone age to nowadays. The authors came to the same conclusion: stone ages where way more violent than the present.

But I then calculated/estimated based on the numbers in the article and the assumption of hunter-gatherer groups of 50-100 people, that experiencing a murder in your group in that time was a once-in-the-lifetime chance.

I am in my mid-fifties, lived most of my life in a not so poor region in Germany, in a small village, and I know (knew) at least 2 person who got murdered, and a good handful who commited suicide. And I know personally at least 3 person who committed murder.

My mother was child in WWII, my father even faught in a 'hot-spot' as an 18 year old, I have heard really many first-hand stories about killing.

Furthermore, television is pretending a ridiculous violent world, and I think this does have a really negative influence on peoples mind.

Are raw numbers to be valued more than the well-feeling of the people?

If a fairy would ask me to choose when to live, I would not hesitate a split-second and choose the pre-neolithic.

If social community/communal existence is an essential requirement, then how do you explain the past several thousand years, where civilization has come to dominate, and the human population has grown to 8 billion? Civilization didn't just develop in the middle east, it cropped up separately in several different regions, including the Americas.

Competition in its recognizably modern form only recently became the foundational organizational system for civilization, and civilization “won” because (in part) a) it generally has no problem deploying incredible levels of violence and coercion, against people and the environment, and b) it promotes continuous population increase, even beyond what may be sustainable.

There’s about a million places to source this, but I might start with something like James C. Scott.

Competition for resources and violence is seen in primates and many mammals. Smaller social groups does not necessarily remove this element.

The main difference with humans is that we are capable of organizing and coordinating larger social structures.

Large Organizations of individuals require other large organizations to defend against

Tribal groups did also compete, and our hominid cousins, several of who were around the same time as modern humans, went extinct.

I'm excited you asked as I have a theory that is getting real traction that answers precisely that:

https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf

How do you address desirable goods that are really scarce?

Such as downtown penthouses, beachfront property, spectrum licenses, etc...

Since there will always be some fraction of the population who will desire to gamble the shirt on their backs for a chance at a larger prize.

You are implicitly asking "Who decides how much is enough"

As I say in the paper "There exists no regularized measure of relative deprivation that can be agreed on across all cultures and all time periods."

I have no solution to the problem of relative consumption, I am simply suggesting that it is fundamentally destructive in the current structure.

The only thing I can think of is to create systems that do not incentivize the risk taking behavior as you describe (and I was/am probably the most extreme version of what you describe by the way).

My personal answer is to minimize my consumption as much as possible while still being able to carry out my personal values until I die. I have no advice for anyone else as I don't know what their circumstances are.

I can't see how this desire is 'fundamentally destructive in the current structure'.

Beaches, frequency bandwidths, etc., will exist regardless of whatever form human organizational structure takes.

Any workable system will have to address how they will be allocated, since they can't be shared 8 billion ways.

In the paper it is laid out carefully. Said simply: Every watt of energy that goes to creating bullets is a watt not being used on creating and distributing necessary goods to those in the most need. That is how it is fundamentally destructive - The pie is fixed to the productive capacity of the planet. Every beanie baby created crowds out healthcare in rural missouri.

The workable system is one where we memetically return to sharing economies via example and not coercive force. I think it's going to take centuries of non-violent mutual aid and cooperative organizations that do not follow into the trap of strict excludability, for us to get back to peace and health. These organizations and societies exist at small scales and often temporally at large scale (Think Sept 12th etc...), we just need more people to do it all the time everywhere. That's actually kinda all we need to do.

Unfortunately we have 12000 years of trauma we're all reacting to so it's layers upon layers of structural and emotional fear.

Huh?

None of that addresses how to allocate actually scarce things.

Again, I don't give a solution because that is not within the scope of the paper.

Can you come up with a solution?

> I don't give a solution because that is not within the scope of the paper.

Are we reading the same paper titled "The Myth of scarcity and its threats to human society" by Andrew Kemendo?

There are five 'Propositions' enumerated that concern the scarcity, or alleged non-scarcity, of resources. And as we've discussed some resources, desired by many, truly are profoundly scarce.

Those things aren't scarce it's a complete fabrication - like Diamonds. It's artificial scarcity

People desire non-mandatory goods (you don't need them to live in health until old age) that are artificially scarce (could be produced at a higher rate than they are but are not because producers require a capital return) because they have more resources than they need.

Stray Kids "Official lightsticks" are "scarce." [1] Nobody on the planet needs an official stray kids lightstick for health, safety, reproductive success etc... The creation of the lightstick by a marketing manager induces a fear of being left out (anxiety) of being part of the cool kids (read: rich kids) in order to make more money for the band and the supporting businesses of the band.

The creation, marketing, production and purchasing of the stray kids lightstick - which will eventually wind up in a landfill - is a net drain on the overall productive capacity of Humanity.

Labor and capital that is not being used to provide someone else in REAL deprivation actual necessity goods - because the imbalance is real

You seem to miss the key point: As a species, we have enough of everything we need to survive and thrive, but too many of the wrong people have too much of the resources.

I'm just here to tell you it's fucked, someone else can figure out how to distribute it all without violence.

Read the paper again

[1]https://www.subkshop.com/products/stray-kids-official-light-...

What does this have to do with the allocation of beachfront property and the electromagnetic spectrum?

You need to allocate them somehow, it's not credible to suggest people won't compete for desirable goods.

They exist regardless of the specific form of human society, or indeed even if there isn't a society at all.

Whether or not this is the case (although a handful of papers and one of Graeber's pop-sci books hardly makes it "settled"), all this deals with time periods far too recent for evolutionary biology to play a role in human behavior. Cultural "evolution" has nothing to do with actual evolution.

> Cultural "evolution" has nothing to do with actual evolution.

I can't imagine this could be strictly true. It's not as if human's social capacity turned on one day at full capacity, and the social hardware was complete.

I do think it's fair to say that society evolves at a different pace given the capabilities of our current social software, but all such change is still underpinned by biological evolution before it.

I sometimes wonder how far we can go as a species before we start malfunctioning widely, e.g. recent study [0] about schizophrenia that finds it non-existent in hunter/gatherer societies, and city living potentially playing a factor for some individuals.

- [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342...

Nor am I suggesting as such

This is totally wrong - people are much different in 2023 compared to earlier in our lifetimes, even people from 1990 would seem completely different to us now. Cultural evolution is a type of evolution, it's not a "fake" version or something like that.

Its pretty rich to dismiss Kropotkins theories as bunk without evidence btw. He is actually recognised in biology for his contributions: see [1]. I mean Stephen Jay Gould one of the most eminent evolutionary biologists wrote an essay about him tilled Kropotkins was no crackpot [2]

[1] https://www.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/who-was-peter-krop...

[2] https://digitallibrary.amnh.org/handle/2246/6494?show=full

Gould is a controversial figure. He was a popularizer who mixed politics and science to a degree that made some uncomfortable.

The book was a direct answer to social darwinism (which has very much been proven to be bunk, but many people still argue like this almost a 100 years later), not to contradict darwinism.

I'm not sure what exactly you call bunk, Kropotkins whole point was that for many species communal support and altruistic behavior is an integral part of their existence. That does not only apply to hive societies. There are for example many bird species where young (often males) help with raising children even they are not their own. Similarly you can find many mammals who live in larger communities and where individulas exhibit "altruistic" behavior because it is to the advantage of the survival of the community.

I'm sure his science is bunk. But I'll note that no less a person than E O Wilson argues that humans are eusocial: https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/human-eusociality/

In more traditional societies, the family is the primary social structure (and support structure). It's only in "modern" society that we let go of that idea and handed the responsibility over to government. And when said government fails, family is the first thing people fall back on. So I wouldn't be too sure that humans are biologically solitary animals.

Arguably all multicellular life on earth is an example of biological cooperation.

If you are looking at the cells of that multicellular life. But if you look between multicellular organisms it's not so cut and dry. The lion and its prey are in cooperation only in some abstract sense of keeping their shared ecosystem alive, but are very much antagonistic in practice.

> The lion and its prey are in cooperation only...

Lions cooperate with other lions, humans cooperate with dogs, symbiotic organisms are all over the planet.

Humans are apex cooperators. Our civilization, from planes to schools, from the banana that you eat this morning to the microchips of your computers, all comes from a very complex cooperation between humans. Remove the trust to cooperate and we go back to live in caverns. Nobody cooperates better than humans, ants or bees cooperation is just on basic functions, we are way better than that.

The mammalian genes survive regardless. The gene for having a neocortex survives in both lions and antelope. And that survival may be at the expense of other more distant species.

but between cells that have the same genome.

Or biological totalitarianism.

Is easy for your privileged brain and nerve cells to claim such high-minded ideals.

Meanwhile, your skin cells are treated as disposable and have a medium lifespan of 14 days

that must mean there's a class of cells that keep skin cells in their station. which cells are those?

> which cells are those?

Macrophages, though your immune system broadly [1]. (Every cell has a variety of programmed death processes built in, too.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis

When cells try to "get above their station," it's called cancer, and there are classes of cells and other mechanisms in the body constantly fighting against it.

why'd you put "get above their station" in quotes? is it because the whole metaphor is kind of stupid?

I was merely setting the metaphor apart from the rest. I'm not sure if the metaphor is stupid or not.

Even singled celled life is cooperation between the many genes using those cells to reproduce.

At that level personification of biology breaks down completely. Genes are not cooperating. Genes are pieces of a self-replicating pattern. Those patterns get shuffled and mixed a lot, but they also just get copied over and over even more. Some patterns are easier/faster to copy than others, and some are uncopyable. Over time, some patterns remain stable while others disappear, but that's not a result of work and cooperation - it's just a purely statistical phenomenon.

>because of the unusual reproductive strategy they use where all the members of a hive are siblings

Specifically, eusocial insects are haplodiploidic, where workers are more related to each other (sharing 75% of their genes) than they would be to their own children, which reduces the genetic incentive to defect from the cooperative structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy

This sounds outrageously strange, but something similar can happen in humans: identical twins are also more related to each other than to their children.

That implies that there is a minimum set of relatedness that is required for alturism to improve survival. That is just not true. And it is not just about direct relatedness but shared genes.

Humans are biologically non-social?

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