Toby Stuart

So anyway.

So I had not read a lot of this stuff when I wrote the book because I came to it from the angle of like, I'm a modern social scientist.

I'm at this end of the river.

And how did this all come to be?

That wasn't actually a question that I thought much about.

So then I started to read a little evolution anthropology.

And so if you go back to primates, and Sapolsky's done a lot of

this work, the Baboon Project.

So you imagine a group of animals and you have to band together to make it.

So nearly every animal species, there's some sort of group or clan structure.

And the problem that you have in these structures, right, and this is Hobbes and Leviathan when we're talking about people, but the problems that you have in these structures is if you put a group of animals together and there's no structure and there's no rules and there's no hierarchy and there's no enforcement mechanism,

And there is a finite amount of resources.

We're basically going to beat the shit out of one another to fight over what there is.

So then what do you do?

Well, one is you have to organize.

And the second is it turns out that if you create a hierarchy, it solves the problem of resource allocation.

Not entirely because there's plenty of hand-to-hand combat in a baboon troop.

But the general idea is that the hierarchy becomes a mechanism for allocating resources.

And you want high status because if you're at the apex of the hierarchy, the two key resources aren't food or nourishment and mates, and you get

more of those but then once the hierarchy is established you move into sanctioning mode so if members of a group act in ways that are incompatible with their status in the hierarchy they're sanctioned right so if you take something that's beyond what you're entitled to given your position there's a sanctioning mechanism and it is for that reason that on the evolutionary side of things