On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection [Hardcover]

Kinship, religion, and economy were not natural to humans, nor to species of apes that had to survive on the African savanna. Society from its very beginnings involved an uneasy necessity that often stood in conflict with humans' ape ancestry; these tensions only grew along with later, more complex-eventually colossal-sociocultural systems. The ape in us was not extinguished, nor obviated, by culture; indeed, our ancestry continues to place pressures on individuals and their sociocultural creations. Not just an exercise in history, this pathbreaking book dispels many myths about the beginning of society to gain new understandings of the many pressures on societies today.Chapter 1: A Brief History of Primate-Time on EarthChapter 2: The Weakness of Weak TiesChapter 3: Societal Protoplasm: In Search of the Primal HordeChapter 4: The Strength of Strong Ties: A New Basis of Primate SolidarityChapter 5: The Emergence of CultureChapter 6: The Emergence of Human Society: Hunting and GatheringChapter 7: The Rise of HorticultureChapter 8: Agrarian SocietiesChapter 9: Industrial and Postindustrial SocietiesChapter 10: Strangers in a Strange Land: Evolved Apes in Sociocultural Cages No one is better than Turner and Maryanski at interpreting the evolutionary pathways from primates to humans and showing the long-term consequences of human origins for subsequent societies. The story integrates social network patterns, brain physiology, and humans uniquely broad palette of emotions; the result is the ability of humans to create strong ties among members of large and flexible groups, via emotion laden symbolism. What evolves is not just brain size, intelligence, or tool use, but a quasi-language of emotions which are read by others and which also reflexively organize the human self. The types of human societies over past thousands of years have been pulled between selective pressures of environment, institutional requirements, and ever-present human nature harl“Ü