jayhanson | Organisms evolved a bias to maximize fitness by maximizing power.
With greater power, there is greater opportunity to allocate energy to
reproduction and survival, and therefore, an organism that captures and
utilizes more energy than another organism in a population will have a
fitness advantage.
Individual organisms cooperate to form social groups
and generate more power. Differential power generation and accumulation
result in a hierarchical group structure.
“Politics” is power used by social organisms to
control others. Not only are human groups never alone, they cannot
control their neighbors’ behavior. Each group must confront the real
possibility that its neighbors will grow its numbers and attempt to take
resources from them. Therefore, the best political tactic
for groups to survive in such a milieu is not to live in ecological
balance with slow growth, but to grow rapidly and be able to fend off
and take resources from others[5].
The inevitable “overshoot”
eventually leads to decreasing power attainable for the group with
lower-ranking members suffering first. Low-rank members will form
subgroups and coalitions to demand a greater share of power from
higher-ranking individuals who will resist by forming their own
coalitions to maintain it. Meanwhile, social conflict will intensify as
available power continues to fall.
Eventually, members of the weakest group (high or low rank) are forced to “disperse.”[6] Those members of the weak group who do not disperse are killed,[7]
enslaved, or in modern times imprisoned. By most estimates, 10 to 20
percent of all the people who lived in Stone-Age societies died at the
hands of other humans.[8] The process of overshoot, followed by forced dispersal, may be seen as a sort of repetitive pumping action — a collective behavioral loop — that drove humans into every inhabitable niche of our planet.
Here is a synopsis of the behavioral loop described above:
Step 1. Individuals and groups evolved a bias to maximize fitness by maximizing power,
which requires over-reproduction and/or over-consumption of natural
resources (overshoot), whenever systemic constraints allow it.
Differential power generation and accumulation result in a hierarchical
group structure.
Step 2. Energy is always limited, so overshoot eventually leads to decreasing power available to the group, with lower-ranking members suffering first.
Step 3. Diminishing power availability
creates divisive subgroups within the original group. Low-rank members
will form subgroups and coalitions to demand a greater share of power
from higher-ranking individuals, who will resist by forming their own
coalitions to maintain power.
Step 4. Violent social strife eventually occurs among subgroups who demand a greater share of the remaining power.
Step 5. The weakest subgroups (high or
low rank) are either forced to disperse to a new territory, are killed,
enslaved, or imprisoned.
Step 6. Go back to step 1.
The above loop was repeated countless thousands of times during the millions of years that we were evolving[9]. This behavior is inherent in the architecture of our minds — is entrained in our biological material — and will be repeated until we go extinct. Carrying capacity will decline[10] with each future iteration of the overshoot loop, and this will cause human numbers to decline until they reach levels not seen since the Pleistocene.
