by TWilliam » Tue 08 Apr 2008, 02:00:30
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'I') guess what I'm not sure about is, why is it so difficult to believe humans are/were capable of noticing changes in their surroundings and avoiding the worst effects of overuse?
These people weren't stupid, and they were very observant. They had to be or they would die.
Of course they noticed, which is why they migrated.
The problem as I see it is that that's the way we evolved, so that's the response we've got 'hardwired', so to speak. The real trouble isn't that we've overpopulated and are destroying our resource base; it's that we haven't got another planet handy...
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'I')ntertribal warfare isn't "murder."
Excuse me?
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Jared Diamond', 'I')n traditional New Guinea society, if a New Guinean happened to encounter an unfamiliar New Guinean while both were away from their respective villages, the two engaged in a long discussion of their relatives, in an attempt to establish some relationship and hence
some reason why the two should not attempt to kill each other.
...
How can we account for the empirical observation that band or tribal organization just does not work for societies of hundreds of thousands of people, and that all existing large societies have complex centralized organization? We can cite at least four obvious reasons.
One reason is the problem of conflict between unrelated strangers. That problem grows astronomically as the number of people making up the society increases. Relationships within a band of 20 people involve only 190 two-person interactions (20 people times 19 divided by 2), but a band of 2,000 would have 1,999,000 dyads.
Each of those dyads represents a potential time bomb that could explode in a murderous argument. Each murder in band and tribal societies usually leads to an attempted revenge killing, starting one more unending cycle of murder and counter murder that destabilizes the society.
In a band, where everyone is closely related to everyone else, people related simultaneously to both quarreling parties step in to mediate quarrels. In a tribe, where many people are still close relatives and everyone at least knows everybody else by name, mutual relatives and mutual friends mediate the quarrel. But once the threshold of "several hundred," below which everyone can know everyone else, has been crossed, increasing numbers of dyads become pairs of unrelated strangers. When strangers fight, few people present will be friends or relatives of both combatants, with self-interest in stopping the fight. Instead, many onlookers will be friends or relatives of only one combatant and will side with that person, escalating the two-person fight into a general brawl. Hence a large society that continues to leave conflict resolution to all of its members is guaranteed to blow up.That factor alone would explain why societies of thousands can exist only if they develop centralized authority to monopolize force and resolve conflicts.
As I noted earlier, this is exactly the same kind of behavior seen in street gangs. They are authentic modern band/tribal cultures.
