In the Event of Women

In the Event of Women outlines the stakes of what Tani Barlow calls “the event of women.” Focusing on the era of the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century's Cultural Revolution, Barlow shows that an event is a politically inspired action to install a newly discovered truth, in this case the mammal origins of human social evolution. Highbrow and lowbrow social theory circulating in Chinese urban print media placed humanity's origin story in relation to commercial capital's modern advertising industry and the conclusion that women's liberation involved selling, buying, and advertising industrial commodities. The political struggle over how the truth of women in China would be performed and understood, Barlow shows, means in part that an event of women was likely global because its truth is vested in biology and physiology. In so doing, she reveals the ways in which historical universals are effected in places where truth claims are not usually sought. This book reconsiders Alain Badiou's concept of the event; particularly the question of whose political moment marks newly discovered truths.

Dream-Sharing and Human Self-Domestication

There are many theories of the function of dreams, such as memory consolidation, emotion processing, threat simulation and social simulation. In general, such theories hold that the function of dreams occurs within sleep; occurs for unrecalled dreams as well as for dream that are recalled on awakening; and that conscious recall of dreams is not necessary for their function to occur. In contrast, we propose that dreams have an effect of enhancing empathy and group bonding when dreams are shared and discussed with others. We propose also that this effect would have occurred in history and pre-history and, as it would have enhanced the cohesiveness and mutual understanding of group members, the fictional and engaging characteristics of dream content would have been selected for during human social evolution, interacting with cultural practices of dream-sharing. Such dream-sharing may have taken advantage of the long REM periods that occur for biological reasons near the end of the night. Dream-production and dream-sharing may have developed alongside story-telling, utilising common neural mechanisms. Dream-sharing hence would have contributed to Human Self-Domestication, held by many researchers to be the primary driver of the evolution of human prosociality, tolerance and reduced intragroup emotional reactivity. We note that within-sleep theories of dream function rely on correlational rather than experimental findings, and have as yet untested and speculative mechanisms, whereas post-sleep effects of dream-sharing are easily testable and have mechanisms congruent with the social processes proposed by the theory of Human Self-Domestication.

Carl Jung, John Layard and Jordan Peterson

In this article I discuss the relationship between analytical psychology and theories of human social evolution. More specifically I look at debates in evolutionary studies and anthropology regarding the priority of matrilineal social structure in the emergence of Homo sapiens. These debates were occurring in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and they provide the context for many of the assumptions of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. In this essay I will explore these issues in relation to analytical psychology. I will also discuss the work of anthropologist John Layard who proposed matriliny was humanity’s original form of social organisation. Interestingly, Layard’s field work had significant impact on Jung. I will also compare the work of Layard, and other theorists who adopt matrilineal theories of human social evolution, with the theories of Jordan Peterson. Peterson has developed an idiosyncratic evolutionary conception of analytical psychology, one in which he explicitly rejects the notion of matrilineal priority in human evolution. He also adopts certain assumptions about the evolutionary origins of contemporary socio-political hierarchy, assumptions I argue are not supported by data from numerous fields of scientific enquiry.

DLX5/6 GABAergic expression affects social vocalization: implications for human evolution

ABSTRACTDLX5 and DLX6 are two closely related transcription factors involved in brain development and in GABAergic differentiation. The DLX5/6 locus is regulated by FoxP2, a gene involved in language evolution and has been associated to neurodevelopmental disorders and mental retardation. Targeted inactivation of Dlx5/6 in mouse GABAergic neurons (Dlx5/6VgatCre mice) results in behavioural and metabolic phenotypes notably increasing lifespan by 33%.Here, we show that Dlx5/6VgatCre mice present an hyper-vocalization and hyper-socialization phenotype. While only 7% of control mice emitted more than 700 vocalizations/10min, 30% and 56% of heterozygous or homozygous Dlx5/6VgatCre mice emitted more than 700 and up to 1400 calls/10min with longer, uninterrupted, call sequences and a higher proportion of complex and modulated calls. Hyper-vocalizing animals were more sociable: the time they spent in dynamic interactions with an unknown visitor was more than doubled compared to low-vocalizing individuals.We then compared the DLX5/6 genomic regions from Neanderthal and modern humans to examine if DLX5/6 GABAergic expression could have been involved in human social evolution. We identify an introgressed Neanderthal haplotype (DLX5/6-N-Haplotype) present in 12.6% of European individuals that covers DLX5/6 coding and regulatory sequences. The DLX5/6-N-Haplotype is not significantly associated to Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) but includes the binding site for GTF2I, a gene associated to Williams-Beuren syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by hyper-sociability and hyper-vocalization. Interestingly, the DLX5/6-N-Haplotype is significantly underrepresented in semi-supercentenarians (>105y of age), a well-established human model of healthy ageing and longevity, suggesting its potential involvement in the co-evolution of longevity, sociability and speech.

RELEVANCE OF LINGUISTIC RESEARCH IN THE FIELD OF LAW

Language and law are phenomena that have emerged in the course of human social evolution and are "fundamental to human existence". The nature of their relationship within society has long been of concern to both linguists and legal scholars in terms of rhetoric, oratory, style, and terminology. This article examines the emerging socially significant problems that can only be solved in close interaction between linguistics and law. Thus, in the 20th century, it became necessary to create new language versions of existing legislation. It was possible to solve legal problems in close cooperation with linguists, which helped to strengthen ties between the two branches of science.

New research frameworks in the study of chimpanzee and gorilla sociality and communication

Group size in primates is strongly correlated with brain size, but exactly what makes larger groups more ‘socially complex’ than smaller groups is still poorly understood. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) are among our closest living relatives and are excellent model species to investigate patterns of sociality and social complexity in primates, and to inform models of human social evolution. The aim of this paper is to propose new research frameworks, particularly the use of social network analysis, to examine how social structure differs in small, medium and large groups of chimpanzees and gorillas, to explore what makes larger groups more socially complex than smaller groups. Given a fission-fusion system is likely to have characterised hominins, a comparison of the social complexity involved in fission-fusion and more stable social systems is likely to provide important new insights into human social evolution

The New Human Science

All prior attempts to understand human origins, behavior, and history have led to paradoxes and dilemmas, highly resistant to resolution. This chapter reviews specific cases of failures to resolve these apparent paradoxes and dilemmas in human evolution and the social sciences. The authors argue that these failures are rooted in confusing proximate with ultimate causation. They further argue that a sound theory of human origins, behavior, and history (social coercion theory) can help to understand the human condition scientifically; specifically, this theory argues that all the unique properties of humans emerge from the unprecedented human social evolution, driven, in turn by the evolution of cost-effective coercive management of conflicts of interest. Finally, the authors argue that social coercion theory yields the first general theory of history, economics, and politics, which provides an approach to problems within the social sciences while armed with a grasp of ultimate causation. Consequently, formerly intractable scientific questions and social concerns become manageable and solvable.

From Scale to Information and Back: Human Social Evolution in the Holocene

We use the recently introduced Seshat database to investigate the long-timescale development of human societies. Seshat contains high-dimensional sociopolitical features for hundreds of polities, from multiple continents, over many thousands of years. Examining the statistical covariations among those social features, we find that the process of sociopolitical development is dominated first by growth in polity scale, then by improvements in its information processing and economic systems, and then by further increases in scale. This allows us to define a Scale Threshold for societies, beyond which growth in information processing becomes paramount, and an Information Threshold, which once crossed permits additional growth in scale. Polities diverge from one another in sociopolitical feature space prior to crossing the Information Threshold, but then reconverge. Our results have implications for the timing of the appearance of moralizing gods, the role of population growth and institutions in sociopolitical evolution, and the causes for the evolutionary divergence between Old and New World polities.

Behavioural homogenization with spillovers in a normative domain

The importance of culture for human social evolution hinges largely on the extent to which culture supports outcomes that would not otherwise occur. An especially controversial claim is that social learning leads groups to coalesce around group-typical behaviours and associated social norms that spill over to shape choices in asocial settings. To test this, we conducted an experiment with 878 groups of participants in 116 communities in Sudan. Participants watched a short film and evaluated the appropriate way to behave in the situation dramatized in the film. Each session consisted of an asocial condition in which participants provided private evaluations and a social condition in which they provided public evaluations. Public evaluations allowed for social learning. Across sessions, we randomized the order of the two conditions. Public choices dramatically increased the homogeneity of normative evaluations. When the social condition was first, this homogenizing effect spilled over to subsequent asocial conditions. The asocial condition when first was thus alone in producing distinctly heterogeneous groups. Altogether, information about the choices of others led participants to converge rapidly on similar normative evaluations that continued to hold sway in subsequent asocial settings. These spillovers were at least partly owing to the combined effects of conformity and self-consistency. Conformity dominated self-consistency when the two mechanisms were in conflict, but self-consistency otherwise produced choices that persisted through time. Additionally, the tendency to conform was heterogeneous. Females conformed more than males, and conformity increased with the number of other people a decision-maker observed before making her own choice.