Authors & Works cited in this section (citations below): Up
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Aoki, Masahiko. Institutions as cognitive media between strategic interactions and individual
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Bandy, Matthew. Fissioning, Scalar Stress, and Social Evolution in Early Village Societies
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Boesch, Christophe et al. Technical intelligence and culture: Nut cracking in humans and
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Broodbank, Cyprian. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the
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Caldwell, Christine & Millen. Conservatism in Laboratory Microsocieties: Unpredictable Payoffs
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Camarinha-Matos, L & Afsarmanesh. Roots of Collaboration: Nature-Inspired Solutions for
Carbonell, Eudald et al. “Archaic lithic industries: structural homogeneity
Carbonell, Eudald et al. Structural continuity and technological change in Lower Pleistocene
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Chappell, Jackie et al. The development of tool manufacture in humans: what helps young
Cheney, Dorothy & R. Seyfarth. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind
Clark, Andy. A nice surprise? Predictive processing and the active pursuit of novelty
Collard, Mark et al. Risk, mobility or population size? Drivers of technological richness among
Cook, Claire et al. Where science starts: Spontaneous experiments in preschoolers’ exploratory
Corning, Peter. 2015. “A Synergy Approach to Living Systems.”
Corning, Peter. “Synergy Goes to War: A Bioeconomic Theory of Collective Violence.
Davidson, Iain. Stone Tools: Evidence of Something in Between Culture and Cumulative
De la Torre, Ignacio. Commentary on: Tennie et al. Early Stone Tools and Cultural Transmiss
Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life.
Di Paolo, Ezequiel & Evan Thompson. 2014. “The Enactive Approach
Diez-Martin, F. et al. New insights into hominin lithic activities at FLK North Bed I, Olduvai
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Dukas, Reuven. 2017. “Cognitive innovations and the evolutionary biology of expertise
Dunne, Jennifer & Hamilton. “Are Humans Truly Unique” How Do We Know?
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Erwin, Douglas. “Developmental push or environmental pull? The causes of macroevolutionary
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Flack, Jessica. “Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems
Fragaszy, D.M. et al. The fourth dimension of tool use: temporally enduring artefacts aid
Gaerdenfors, Peter & Lombard. “Technology led to more abstract causal reasoning
Garfinkle, Steven. “Ancient Near Eastern City-States
Gintis, Herbert et al. Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems
Glickman, Stephen et al. “Social Facilitation, … in the Social Life of Spotted Hyenas
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Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth.
Gowlett, J.A.J. “The elements of design form in Acheulian bifaces: modes, modalities, rules
Griffin, Andrea & Guez. Innovation and problem solving: A review of common mechanisms
Hansen, Mogens Herman. “Greek City-States.
Haslam, Michael et al. 2009. “Primate archaeology
Hayden, Brian. 2015. “Insights into early lithic technologies from ethnography
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Hermann-Pillath, Carsten. Institutional naturalism: Reflections on Masahiko Aoki’s contribution
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Hunt, Gavin & Uomini. A complex adaptive system may be essential for cumulative
Jaffe, Klaus. “Synergy drives the evolutionary dynamics in biology and economics
James, Harold. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create
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James, Harold. 2011. “International order after the financial crisis.
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Keen, Rachel. The Development of Problem Solving in Young Children: A Critical Cognitive
Kelly, Robert. L. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum
Kidd, Celeste & Hayden. The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.
Kimbel, William & Villmoare. From Australopithecus to Homo: the transition that wasn’t
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Kirch, Patrick. On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands
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Lombard, Marlize et al. Cognition: From Capuchin Rock Pounding to Lomekwian Flake
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Manning, Joseph. 2013. “Egypt.
Manrique, Hector M., C. Voelter & J. Call. 2013. “Repeated innovation in great apes
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Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography.
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Mokyr, Joel. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress.
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Schulz, Laura & Bonawitz Serious Fun: Preschoolers Engage in More Exploratory Play When
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Wynn, Thomas et al. ‘An Ape’s View of the Oldowan’ Revisited
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Wynn, Thomas et al. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies
Citations collected in 2020 (works listed above):
“However, energy capture alone is not adequate to measure everything that is important to social development. Even the most reductionist definition of culture that I know of, Leslie White’s C = E X T (culture = energy X technology), took it for granted that measuring the ways people use the energy they capture is as important as measuring the energy itself.” Morris, Ian. 2013. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton UP. p. 40.
“Another very striking change was the spread of iron, which greatly multiplied the effectiveness of muscle power. The metal had been in occasional use since quite early in the second millennium BCE, but soon after 1100 BCE smiths on Cyprus turned to it more systematically. This was probably a response to the difficulty of obtaining tin for bronze when trade routes collapsed after 1200 BCE, but by the time trade revived on a large scale after 800 the advantages of iron (especially its abundance and cheapness) had become clear, and iron remained the normal material for tools and weapons. By 1000 BCE nearly all weapons in Greece were made from iron, and around 700 the first iron tools appear in Greece. By then iron weapons were also normal in Italy, southern France, and eastern Spain.” Morris, Ian. 2013. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton UP. pp. 101-2.
“The [Chinese] literary sources attest further changes in land tenure, particularly a shift toward private landholdings in the possession of legally free peasants, taxed by the state, replacing the dependent peasantry working land for their lords. The first clear sign of this is a tax on yields in the state of Lu in 594 BCE, and by the third century BCE the shift to freehold was probably complete. This change in property rights probably encouraged more investment by the farmers themselves; if so, higher yields may well have been the outcome.” Morris, Ian. 2013. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton UP. p. 137.
“Energy capture at the end of the last Ice Age was very low, not much above 4,000 kcal/cap/day, and rose extremely slowly. There were gains in food calories, but, as Malthus saw two centuries ago, these were normally converted into extra bodies, which consumed the gains and kept most people’s food consumption below 2,000 kcal/cap/day. But as Malthus also saw, there were more substantial gains in nonfood calories, and these accumulated over time. Total (food + nonfood) energy capture consequently grew exponentially rather than arithmetically, and the exponent increased over time.
“In both East and West, we see knees in the curve around the time of the beginnings of cultivation (ca. 9500 BCE in the West and 7500 BCE in the East), the beginnings of domestication (ca. 7500 BCE in the West and 5500 BCE in the East), the rise of archaic states (ca. 3500 BCE in the West and 2000 BCE in the East), the creation of empires (ca. 750 BCE in the West and 300 BCE in the East), and above all the rise of fossil-fuel industries (ca. 1800 CE in the West and 1900 CE in the East). For roughly two thousand years, between the zenith of the great ancient empires and the industrial revolution, energy capture was trapped under what I have called a ‘hard ceiling,’ a little over 30,000 kcal/cap/day. This, I suggested, marks the limits of what is possible in agrarian societies.” Morris, Ian. 2013. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton UP. pp. 142-3.
“… through most of history, the size of the largest city in a region has been a function of the scale of political organization…. Only in the twentieth century CE did economic sources of power trump political sources to such an extent that Washington, D.C., the capital of the world’s most powerful state, did not rank among the world’s thirty biggest cities in 2000 CE, and Beijing, capital of the most powerful state in the East, ranked only twenty-fourth. Throughout all previous history, city size has been a fairly direct reflection of political organizational capacity.” Morris, Ian. 2013. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton UP. pp. 165-6.
“Like social organization, war-making capacity has been a function of energy capture, with quite small changes at the margin of energy capture regularly producing wild swings in war-making capacity.” Morris, Ian. 2013. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton UP. p. 214.
“… these transformations [introduction of guns into military tactics] began in Europe–and particularly Western Europe–rather than in China, India, Iran, or Turkey, because (a) Europe’s distance from the steppes made it difficult to maintain large cavalry armies, which meant that its battlefields contained a lot of slow-moving infantry, against which slow-firing guns could be effective; (b) Europe had a lot of walled cities, against which cannons were effective; and (c) Europe’s political fragmentation meant that there were a lot of wars going on, rewarding innovation.” Morris, Ian. 2013. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton UP. pp. 216-7.
“New World societies certainly had unique features [in considering whether it would be possible to test Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel hypothesis], and their combination of precocious (relative to Old World societies) urbanization and slow adoption of new war-making methods and information technology cries out for explanation.” Morris, Ian. 2013. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton UP. p. 257.
“However, the social development index forces us to recognize that the similarities within biomes [for cultures] were real and important. The major factor producing multilinear evolution was geography, not culture.” Morris, Ian. 2013. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton UP. p. 259.
“The social development index, I believe, points toward qualified unilinearity. On the one hand, there was only one path to modernity; on the other, it was available only to people living in certain places. But on the third hand, once enough people had gone far enough down that path, everyone else was dragged down it too.” Morris, Ian. 2013. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton UP. p. 260.
“Money is not a commodity medium of exchange, but a social technology composed of three fundamental elements. The first is an abstract unit of value in which money is denominated. The second is a system of accounts, which keeps track of the individuals’ or the institutions’ credit or debt balances as they engage in trade with one another. The third is the possibility that the original creditor in a relationship can transfer their debtor’s obligation to a third party in settlement of some unrelated debt.
“This third element is vital. Whilst all money is credit, not all credit is money: and it is the possibility of transfer that makes the difference…. Money, in other words, is not just credit–but transferable credit.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 27.
“Comparative studies of societies from Madagascar to the Andes reveal ‘a similar pattern of two related but separate transactional orders: on the one hand transactions concerned with the reproduction of the long-term social or cosmic order; on the other, a ‘sphere’ of short-term transactions concerned with the arena of individual competition.’” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 38; subquote: Parry, J. & M. Bloch. 1989. Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge UP. pp. 23-4.
“Mesopotamia had for millennia possessed one of the three components of money–a system of accounting, based upon its discoveries of writing and numeracy. But the immense sophistication of Mesopotamia’s bureaucratic, command economy had no need of any universal concept of economic value. It required and had perfected a variety of limited-purpose concepts of value, each with its respective standard. It therefore did not develop the first component of money: a unit of abstract, universally applicable, economic value.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 59.
“This spread of money’s first two components–the idea of a universally applicable unit of value and the practice of keeping accounts in it–reinforced the development of the third: the principle of decentralised negotiability.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 61.
“The result [of the minting of coins from the sixth century BCE] was a further acceleration in the pace of monetization. Everywhere, traditional social obligations were transformed into financial relationships. In Athens, traditional agricultural sharecroppers were converted into contractual tenants paying money rents. The so-called ‘liturgies’–the ancient, civic obligations of the thousand wealthiest inhabitants of the city to provide public services ranging from choruses for the theatre to ships for the navy–were now assessed in financial terms… The city states of classical Greece had become the first monetary societies.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 62.
“In a utopian community, money can consist of credit accumulated against the abstract notion of society–because every member has actively opted into that community. But in the real world, the hard-nosed creditor is bound to see herself facing not the noble ideal of the community but the altogether less fanciful prospect of the individual issuer. And the problem with the individual issuer is that he may default on his liabilities–and that other people might believe he will default. Money on any significant scale can therefore never consist of liquid credit accumulated against ‘society.’ The alternative is obvious–and was so at money’s birth. Money will naturally consist of liquid credit accumulated against society’s more concrete manifestation: the sovereign.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 74.
“The familiar consequences of the monetisation of previously static social relations appeared: the re-emergence of social mobility, the revival of ambition and avarice as prime factors motivating behaviour, and the realignment of aristocratic competitiveness from the battlefield and the jousting lists towards the accumulation and ostentation of wealth.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 86.
“So whilst the pounds, shillings, and pence of Charlemagne’s empire were deployed throughout Europe to organise the revived monetary practices of evaluation, negotiation, and contracting, all standardisation was lost…. The result was a monetary landscape that appeared superficially simple–since the monetary units of pounds, shillings, and pence were used almost everywhere–but was in reality extraordinarily complex, since the actual value of these units depended on the particular standard maintained by the individual feudal issuer.
“This revitalised monetary regime had one especially attractive feature for its feudal issuers. In an age when the imposition of direct taxes remained a logistical and economic challenge for many of them, the levying of seigniorage by the manipulation of the monetary standard represented an invaluable source of revenue. An important feature of the monetary technology of the day made this simple to do. The dominant technology for representing money was coinage, with silver the metal of choice for higher-value coins, and bronze or other less valuable metals and alloys for smaller denominations. But unlike today’s coins, medieval types were typically struck without any written indication of their nominal value: there was no number stamped on either face–only the face or arms of the issuing sovereign or some other identifying design. The value of the coins was then fixed by edicts published by the sovereign on whose political authority they were minted. This system had a great advantage for the sovereign. Simply by reducing the tariffed, nominal value of a coin, the sovereign could effectively impose a one-off wealth tax on all holders of coined money. A certain coin, the sovereign would announce, is no longer good for one shilling, but only for sixpence. The coin had been ‘cried down’; or equivalently, one could say that the standard had been ‘cried up.’….
“Naturally, this process was unpopular with users of the sovereign’s coinage. Fortunately for them, there was one partial, natural defence. High-value coins–minted from silver, for example–had an intrinsic value regardless of the tariff assigned to them: the price at which their metal content could be sold on the open market to smiths and jewellers, or indeed to competing mints. They included, as it were, portable collateral for the sovereign’s promise to pay.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 87-8.
“But for most businesses, these financial assets and liabilities–the firm’s accounts receivable and payable, as they are called in the book-keepers’ jargon–are dwarfed by the value of the business’ real assets: its plant, its premises, its inventory, and so on. In a bank, it is the other way round.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 102.
“As we have seen, any IOU has two fundamental characteristics: its creditworthiness–how likely it is that it will be paid when it comes due–and its liquidity–how quickly it can be realised, either by sale to a third party or simply by coming due if no sale is sought.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 102.
“The [early banking] system was simple. An Italian merchant wishing to import goods from a supplier in the Low Countries could purchase a credit note known as a bill of exchange from one of the great Florentine merchant houses. He might pay for this note either in the local sovereign money or on credit. By buying such a bill of exchange, the Italian merchant achieved two things. First, he accessed the miracle of banking: he transformed an IOU backed by only his own puny word for one issued by a larger, more creditworthy house, which would be accepted across Europe. He transformed his private credit into money. His second achievement was to exchange a credit for a certain amount of Florentine money into one for a certain amount of the money of the Low Countries where he was making his purchase. The bill of exchange itself was denominated in a private monetary unit created specially for the purpose by the network of exchange-bankers: the ecu de marc. There were no sovereign coins denominated in this ecu de marc. It was a private monetary standard of the exchange-bankers alone, created so that they could haggle with one another over the value of the various sovereign moneys of the continent. Somewhat bizarrely to modern eyes, the foreign exchange transaction included in the bill of exchange therefore involved two exchange rates–one between Florentine money and the ecu de marc, the other between the ecu de marc and the money of the Low Countries….
“Of course, the banker ran the risk that the exchange rates of the two sovereign moneys against the imaginary ecu de marc might change in between his issuing the bill of exchange and its being cashed in the Low Countries, but he made sure that his fees and commissions made this a risk worth taking.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 106-7.
“As they continually wrote and accepted bills of exchange to finance trade between the great European cities, the exchange bankers would accumulate credit and debit balances. The circle of exchange-bankers was a close-knit one, and willingness to allow outstanding balances to build up was therefore high. Nevertheless, to ensure a clear picture of who owed what to whom, it was necessary to have periodic offsets. These could be done bilaterally on an ad hoc basis; but the regular fairs provided a natural opportunity for more generalised clearing–and this is precisely what they gradually became. Every quarter, the clique of great merchant houses would meet at the central fair of Lyons in order to square their books. On the first two days of the fair there was a frenzy of buying and selling…. The third day–the ‘Day of Exchange’–was the heart of proceedings. The exclusive cadre of exchange-bankers would convene alone to agree on the conto: the schedule of exchange rates between the ecu de marc and the various sovereign moneys of Europe. This schedule was the pivot of the entire financial system, since it was at these exchange rates that any outstanding balances had to be settled on the final day of the fair–the ‘Day of Payments’–either by agreement to carry over balances to the next settlement date, or by payment in cash.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 107.
“There are good reasons, we recall, why sovereign money is generally the default. No private issuer enjoys the same extent for its markets, the same capacity to coerce demand for its liabilities, or the same psychological association with confidence in society.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 114.
“On the one hand, it was essential that banking remain the exclusive preserve of a narrow elite. Only a self-regulating clique could incubate the interpersonal trust necessary to operate a private monetary network, and the barriers to new entrants were negligible once its principles were understood. Unlike the sovereign, the bankers had no power of coercion to enforce their franchise. As a result, bankers guarded their secrets jealously and started a proud tradition of ‘shroud[ing] their practices in a finicky formalism which lent itself perfectly to preserving their monopoly.’ But these very same conditions also imposed obvious limits to its expansion. The credit notes of the international bankers could circulate amongst themselves, but outside that magic circle, they were bound to be a conundrum. The very features that made the bankers’ privater money work were the ones which emant it could not actually displace sovereign money.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 115; subquote: Boyer-Xambeu, M.T., G. Deleplace & L. Gillard. 1994. Private Money and Public Currencies. London: M.E. Sharpe. p. 30.
“… Great Monetary Settlement [with the founding of the Bank of England in 1694]. If they [private bankers with Whig grandee support] and the private money interest they represented would agree to fund the king on terms over which they, as the Directors of the new Bank, would have a statutory say, then the king would in turn allow them a statutory share in his most ancient and jealously guarded prerogative: the creation of money and the management of its standard. To be granted the privilege of note issue by the crown, which would anoint the liabilities of a private bank with the authority of the sovereign–this, they realised, was the Philosopher’s stone of money. It was the endorsement that could liberate private bank money from its parochial bounds. They would lend their credit to the sovereign–he would lend his authority to their bank. What they would sow by agreeing to lend, they would reap a hundredfold in being allowed to create private money with the sovereign’s endorsement. Henceforth, the seigniorage would be shared.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 118.
“The state’s blessing [for the Great Monetary Settlement] afforded general circulation to the Bank’s notes. The commercial ownership and management of the Bank improved the state’s credit-worthiness….. Without the state, the Bank would have lacked authority; without the Bank, the state would have lacked credit.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 119.
“The fusion of sovereign and private money born of the political compromise struck in 1694 remains the bedrock of the modern monetary world.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 120.
“For all the ingenuity of the new arrangements, one critically important question remained open: what was to be the standard on which the Bank of England was to issue its new public-private money?
“It was the immemorial dilemma of monetary policy–the very question over which sovereigns and their subjects had argued interminably for hundreds of years.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 122.
“The distinctive claim of money was that it could combine social stability and social mobility in a way that traditional society, with its immutable social structure, never could. It was this promise that made it so revolutionary and so irresistible an invention.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 138.
“… the triumph of Locke’s understanding of money [that money was specific quantity of some valuable commodity] led not to a new age of objectivity in economic affairs but, perversely, to just the opposite. It opened the way to the dominance of particular, quite arbitrary prejudices–and even worse, it covered their tracks with a veil of apparent scientific objectivity.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 144.
“Traditional society had intrinsic limits–limits defined by the immutable social obligations owed by peasants to chieftains, chieftains to priests, and so on. Monetary society, the Greeks feared, had none.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 152.
“The problem with conventional sovereign money [according to John Law’s plan for France in 1719] was that it consisted of financial claims of certain value backed by revenues whose value was intrinsically uncertain…. But there was only one ultimate source of sovereign revenue: the industry and commerce of France. If the economy prospered, the sovereign’s tax revenues grew, his credit improved, and his bonds would pay as promised…. Rather than pretending to his subjects that he can magic away the uncertainty inherent in economic activity, better for the sovereign to give them access to its proceeds directly–and by the same token, make them bear the risks. With government equity–shares in the Mississippi Company–this could be done directly.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 173.
“The Spartan and the Soviet strategies were fundamentally distrustful of money–and attempted to abolish or restrict its application. John Law, by contrast, believed that money’s capacity to unleash ambition and entrepreneurship was its most valuable quality. The Scotsman’s scepticism was reserved instead for the second leg of money’s promise: its ability to combine this social mobility with the security and stability provided by fixed financial obligations. His strategy therefore aimed not to restrain the use of the concept of universal economic value, but to square the circle instead by making the standard by which is it [sic] measured intrinsically flexible. This was the ultimate objective of the system: a new financial settlement in which the risks inherent in money’s contradictory promise were borne fully and explicitly by all money-users, rather than hidden behind the veil of unfulfillable promises by the sovereign to pay.
“By merging the single state holding company with the single state bank, Law made explicit what he believed to be obscured in a decentralised system of money and finance. All income and wealth flows in the end from the productive economy–and it is claims on this income alone that money ultimately represents. That income is, however, uncertain, because the world is an uncertain place–so the value of those claims is in reality uncertain too. The simplest way to acknowledge this fact of life is to transform the fixed financial claims that are generally used as money–otherwise known as debt–into variable ones–otherwise known as equity.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 175-6.
“The earliest known examples of this Mesopotamian practice of proclaiming a clean slate when the burden of debt became socially unsupportable are almost as old as the earliest evidence for interest-bearing debt itself–dating from the reign of Enmetana of Lagash in around 2,400 BC.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 179.
“Chief amongst these [Solon’s social reforms in sixth century BCE] was a cancellation of debts–but one which differed fundamentally from the oriental practice of the jubilee. For the central decision of any debt relief–who should gain and who should lose–was a matter of political compromise. The leadership of a gifted politician was of course crucial.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 180.
“The oldest sceptical strategy, however, is one which tries to remake money, rather than reduce it or remove it. It is the strategy that sees money as fundamentally force for good–but one which left unmanaged will inevitably get out of hand. It is the strategy which superimposes on monetary society a periodic recalibration–as dramatic as a one-off jubilee or unilateral default, or as humdrum as a gradual depreciation of the monetary standard–or even, in the unprecedented experiment of John Law, attempts a structural fix by withdrawing money’s promise to deliver stability entirely. The focus of these strategies–the Scotsman’s strategy, and Solon’s long before him–is on the flexibility of the monetary standard. They require, therefore, an answer to a question that the others do not: on what grounds should adjustments to the standard be made?” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 181.
“The Bank [of England] had married the commercial acumen of one privileged set of private bankers with the public authority of the sovereign to render the Bank’s money both credit-worthy and universally transferable. And in the subsequent century and a half, the Bank itself had struck the same marriage time and time again with an ever-widening harem of other private bankers.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 200.
“Just as the Bank’s money had originally gained its currency from its settlement with the sovereign, so now the moneys issued by the banks and bill brokers of Lombard Street gained theirs from the Bank, and the moneys of the country banks gained their currency from the banks and brokers of Lombard Street.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 201.
“A large part of the problem, Bagehot argued on the basis of the testimony of the Bank’s directors following the Overends crisis [of 1866], was simply that they had no properly articulated principles of monetary policy. So Bagehot supplied them–and he kept them simple enough for policy-makers to grasp.
“His first and most basic prescription was that the central banks’ role as the lender or broker of last resort should be made a statutory responsibility, rather than left to the directors’ discretion….
“The second was that in its role as lender of last resort, the bank should not try to make nice distinctions between who is insolvent and who merely illiquid in the heat of a crisis. It should lend ‘on all good banking securities’…. Bagehot therefore proposed his third principle to ward off this risk. Emergency lending ‘should only be made at a very high rate of interest’….” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 202-3; reference and subquotes: Bagehot, Walter. 1873. Lombard Street.
“This proposition [that economic value is a natural property, rather than a historically contingent idea a la Locke] had a profound consequence for the nature of classical economic analysis. In essence, it vastly simplified the task of understanding the economy. For if it was possible to take the concept of economic value for granted then economic analysis could indeed should, proceed without worrying about money at all.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 209.
“There is no guarantee that, in the aggregate, supply will always equal demand, for the simple reason that in a monetary economy, rather than having to buy goods and services with their income, people can hold money instead.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 212.
“Yet by focusing exclusively on the pricing of securities on private markets, academic finance developed an exact mirror image of the flaw of neoclassical macroeconomics. By ignoring the essential link between the financial securities traded on the capital markets and the monetary system operated by the sovereign and the banks, academic finance built a theory of finance without the macroeconomy just as neoclassical macroeconomics had built a theory of the macroeconomy without finance.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 217.
“What was critically missing was the insight of Bagehot… of the importance of liquidity as a distinct property of credit–the property which makes it money when it exists, and inert bilateral credit when it does not.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 217.
“In November 2009, a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, total sovereign support for the banking sector worldwide was estimated at some $14 trillion–more than 25 per cent of global GDP.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 231.
“It [the world of 2009 with massive government backing of banks] was a world that Walter Bagehot would not have recognised. The doctrine of the central bank as lender of last resort had become the doctrine of the sovereign as loss-bearer of last resort. This innovation of widespread credit support from national treasuries introduced a dramatic new dimension to the political calculus. When the central bank provides liquidity support, nobody, in principle, loses–and the widely shared benefits of a well-functioning monetary system are preserved. When the government provides credit support, however, taxpayers bear a real cost.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 232.
“Once upon a time, the idea of taxpayers bailing out bank bonds holders might not have been politically contentious, because there was little distinction between the two groups. One way or another, via the investments of pension funds and mutual funds, they were by and large one and the same. But in the modern, developed world, two powerful forces have conspired to undermine this convenient correspondence between those who fund the banking system and those who stand to bail it out when things go wrong. The first is increased inequality of wealth and income, which has opened up a divide between the wealthy few who own banks’ bonds, and the more modest majority who do not. Spending public money to protect bank bondholders has become an issue of rich versus poor. The second powerful force has been the internationalisation of finance. In countries such as Ireland and Spain, the globalisation of bond markets has meant that domestic taxpayers found themselves footing the bill for bank recapitalisation that benefited foreign bondholders.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 232-3.
“The historic deal struck between the sovereign and the Bank of England in 1694 involved a carefully calibrated exchange of benefits. The private bankers got liquidity for their banknotes. The crown’s writ, unlike their own, ran throughout the land, and money that had its blessing could enjoy universal circulation. In return, the bankers provided the financial acumen and the trusted reputation in the City that enhanced the crown’s credit-worthiness. In modern terms, the crown provided liquidity support to the Bank, while the Bank provided credit support to the sovereign. Yet the policy-makers’ response to the crisis revealed a starkly different world. Banks, of course, retained their privilege of issuing sovereign money–and the central bank stood ready to guarantee its liquidity in times of need. But far from receiving support to its credit in return, it was the sovereign that ended up supporting the credit of the banks. The banks–their employees, their bondholders, and their depositors–get both liquidity and credit support. The sovereign–that is, the taxpayer–gets nothing.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 233.
“The debt capital markets, it was realised, represented a vast opportunity to create intermediaries that specialised in individual component activities of banks; and hence the potential for enormous gains in efficiency. Borrowers could continue to come to the bank, and loan officers to scrutinise their requests and knock them into reasonable shape. But the business of actually approving the loans and of monitoring the borrowers could be done just as well–perhaps better–by investors themselves. The bank would merely arrange, rather than implement, the allocation of credit. The loan itself need never appear on the bank’s balance sheet. It would become instead a financial security–a bond–owed by the borrower, and owned directly by the individual or institutional investor. The traditional banking model of doing everything in-house began to give way to a new model of ‘originate and distribute’–of specialising in the identification of borrowers and end-investors, while letting others do the screening, warehousing, and monitoring of the loans. The business of financing companies and individuals was beginning a great migration from the world of banks to the world of markets for financial securities distinguished by their issuers’ credit risk–the credit markets, for short.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 235-6.
“The displacement of traditional banks by a disaggregated network of specialist firms linked together by complex supply chains, had not just been about greater efficiency, more choice, and better value, as it had in the car or mobile-phone industries. It had been about the reanimation of the Monetary Maquis (guerillas within the credit markets): the discovery of a miraculous new means of creating private money outside the control of government. The result, by 2008, was nothing less than a parallel monetary universe: a vast, unregulated, ‘shadow’ banking system organised internationally within the credit markets, alongside the regulated banking systems of nation states.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 240.
“… modern, orthodox macroeconomics ‘lacks an account of financial intermediation, so money, credit, and banking play no meaningful role.’” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 247; subquote: King, Mervyn. 2012. “Twenty Years of Inflation Targeting.” Speech at the London School of Economics, October 9, 2012. p. 5.
“But the notion of ‘liquidity transformation’ is, quite literally, a euphemism. Nothing is actually transformed at all. Banks’ liabilities remain short-term and of fixed nominal value, and their assets remain long-term and of uncertain nominal value, and never the twain shall meet. Instead, banks give the impression of achieving a transformation by artfully synchonising the payments in and out of their balance sheets.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 250.
“Global banking’s current structure generates an unjust distribution of risks, where losses are socialised–taxpayers are on the hook for bail-outs–while gains are private–the banks and their investors alone reap any profits. So how can the situation best be fixed? Two extreme options help frame an answer. The first would be to privatise all the risks–to restructure the banking system so that investors bear all potential costs, as well as all the profits. The other would be the opposite: to redesign the system so that the financial system socialises all risks. Taxpayers keep all the downside risk–but now they get the upside too.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 250.
“…‘Limited Purpose Banking.’ Under Kotlikoff’s radical proposal, banks as we now know them would cease to exist. All economic risk would simply pass unimpeded through an infinitely expandable spectrum of mutual funds from borrowers to savers. The phoney claims of financial intermediaries to practise ‘liquidity transformation,’ and the intrinsic mismatches that lie at the root of what is wrong with the current system, would be exorcised once and for all….
“Kotlikoff’s vision is a bold one–but even it stops short of taking the Scotsman’s strategy all the way to the revolutionary conclusion which John Law himself attempted. Under Limited Purpose Banking, although private banks are henceforth forbidden to issue short-term liabilities of certain nominal value whilst holding long-term assets of uncertain nominal value, the sovereign itself is not. Sovereign money remains just as we know it today at the heart of the system: a safe and liquid promise to pay under all circumstances. Law’s idea was to rid money-users of even this last resort of risk aversion. At the heart of his new financial world was to be not sovereign debt, but sovereign equity.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 251; reference: Kotlikoff, L. 2010. Jimmy Stewart Is Dead: Ending the World’s Ongoing Financial Plague with Limited Purpose Banking. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
“Law’s strategy of creating a monetary system which privatises all risk represents one extreme option. At the opposite end of the spectrum is a reformed monetary system structured to socialise all risk. This alternative extreme would see the banks replaced not by mutual funds, but by the sovereign. Money’s seductive promise would not be abolished. Instead, the one issuer actually capable of making good on it–the sovereign–would be the only issuer permitted to do so. Both capital markets and the banking sector would continue to coexist; and money would remain the special preserve of the latter. But under this extreme option, it would be entirely owned and operated by the state. Once again, it is a reform that sounds dramatic, but is not as far-fetched as it first appears. Indeed it is towards this extreme that the crisis, with governments’ nationalisation of banks and central banks’ unprecedented interventions in the money markets, has thrust us by default.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 252.
“… these extreme strategies have the merit that they would eliminate once and for all the problematic distribution of risks inherent in the current structure of the banking system. Unfortunately, they would do so only at the cost of destroying monetary society itself. The Scotsman’s [Law’s] solution would represent the apotheosis of the vision of modern academic finance: the abolition of banks and money in favour of capital market securities, the value of which would vary in perfect sympathy with the underlying risks present in the real world…. Money would no longer be a tool of government. Instead of a rule for anarchy there would be just anarchy–until some other system for organising society took its place. Rather than reimposing legitimate government, this is defeating the insurrection by permitting a free-for-all.
“Meanwhile, the alternative extreme of a return to sovereign money alone–a society in which all money is issued by the state because all banking is operated by it too–presents an equally nightmarish prospect. Money would no longer be a tool of government, it would have become government. All the benefits of decentralised decision-making in finance would be gone, replaced by a monetary system that replaced the injustice of taxpayers’ enforced insurance of the bankers by the alternative injustice of their insuring absolutely everybody all the time instead. Like encouraging a descent into anarchy, this is a counsel of despair: defeating the insurgency by becoming a totalitarian state.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 252-3.
“The unconventional view of money suggests three useful principles to begin from: two regarding where we want to go, and one regarding how we get there. First, the solution to the problem of moral hazard at the heart of the modern banking system lies neither in redesigning the system to privatise all financial risk, nor in redesigning it to socialise it. What is required is a closer match–not a perfect one–between the costs and benefits that taxpayers, bankers, and their investors are at risk of bearing…..
“Second, since money is a tool for organising society, and since the only authority with the political legitimacy to command how society should be arranged is by definition the sovereign, any redesign must maximise the room for monetary policy….
“A final principle relates to how to get to a system of money and banking reformed in line with these first two. The guiding rule must be that less is more. Conventional warfare will be an infinite regress: attempting to supervise the financial sector is a fool’s errand. The current regulatory proposals are correct that structural reform is the key. The trick is to set as few rules as possible and police them rigorously, while setting private initiative and innovation free for the rest.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 253-4.
“Like today’s regulatory response, it [Irving Fisher’s reform plan from the 1930s, often called ‘The Chicago Plan’] advocated doing this [fundamental bank reform matching principles above] by restricting sovereign support to a limited range of activities. But it is simultaneously simpler and more radical [than John Law’s reform]. Fisher’s proposal was to require that any deposit that could be withdrawn or used to make a payment on demand be backed by sovereign money–and banks which offered such deposits be permitted to do no other business….
“As for the rest of what banks now do–whether client-facing or not, whether wholesale business or retail–these things would be treated like all other capital market activities, and the institutions that undertake them would neither enjoy special sovereign support, nor suffer special sovereign supervision. The market would decide what products would be offered, and what institutions would offer them. Outside the realm of ‘Check Banks,’ even the dodgy promise of liquidity transformation would be permitted. If investors wanted to gamble on an intermediary’s ability to synchronise payments in and out of its balance sheet, they would be quite at liberty to do so–because there could no longer be any illusion on any side that such investors would be bailed out if the promise was not met….
“…and the clear distinction between narrow banks and everything else would eliminate the ambiguous no-man’s-land in which liquidity illusion and moral hazard have allowed the Monetary Maquis to thrive. Sovereign money would remain at the heart of the system, both as cash in the public’s pockets and as the only asset held by the narrow banks.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 254-5.
“The ultimate goal of monetary policy isn’t monetary stability, or financial stability, but a just and prosperous society….” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 265.
“… the problem is not capitalism, but money and the way we think about it.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 270.
“… money is a social phenomenon–like language–so the whole notion that the sovereign or the central bank controls the standard is in fact a myth. It doesn’t control the monetary standard any more than the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary control the meaning of words.” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 271.
“… money is, like language, in the last analysis, a social phenomenon…” Martin, Felix. 2013. Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 273.
“Social orders are characterized by the way societies craft institutions that support the existence of specific forms of human organization, the way societies limit or open access to those organizations, and through the incentives created by the pattern of organization. These characteristics of social orders are also intimately related to how societies limit and control violence.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 1.
“All of human history has had but three social orders. The first was the foraging order: small social groups characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies. Our primary concern is with the two social orders that arose over the last ten millennia. The limited access order or natural state emerged in the first social revolution. Personal relationships, who one is and who one knows, form the basis for social organization and constitute the arena for individual interaction, particularly personal relationships among powerful individuals. Natural states limit the ability of individuals to form organizations. In the open access orders that emerged in the second social revolution, personal relations still matter, but impersonal categories of individuals, often called citizens, interact over wide areas of social behavior with no need to be cognizant of the individual identity of their partners….
“The transition from the natural state to an open access order is the second social revolution, the rise of modernity. Although elements of the second revolution have spread everywhere, especially technology, most contemporary societies remain natural states.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 2.
“Over the long stretch of human history before 1800, the evidence suggests that the long-run rate of growth of per capita income was very close to zero. A long-term growth rate of zero does not mean, however, that societies never experienced higher standards of material well-being in the past. A zero growth rate implies that every period of increasing per capita income was matched by a corresponding period of decreasing income. Modern societies that made the transition to open access, and subsequently became wealthier than any other society in human history, did so because they greatly reduced the episodes of negative growth.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 3-4.
“Strikingly, the richest countries are not distinguished by higher positive growth rates when they do grow. In fact, the richest countries have the lowest average positive growth rates by a substantial amount…. When they grow, poor countries grow faster than rich countries. They are poor because they experience more frequent episodes of shrinking income and more negative growth during the episodes.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 6.
“The poorest countries, with incomes of less than $2,000 per year, had an average of 30 organizations and 2.8 organizations per million inhabitants. Countries with more than $20,000 in annual income had an average of 1,106 organizations and 64 organizations per million inhabitants.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 9.
“On the public side, for example, the United States in 1997 had 87,504 formally organized units of government (1 national, 50 states, 3,043 counties, 19,372 municipalities, 16,629 townships and towns, 13,726 school districts, and 34,683 special districts). On the private side in 1996 there were 1,188,510 tax-exempt organizations (654,186 religious and charitable institutions, 139,512 social welfare organizations, 31,464 war veterans organizations, 80,065 taxable and nontaxable farmers cooperative organizations, 77,274 business leagues, and 91,972 fraternal benevolent societies)…. … there is approximately 1 formal not-for-profit organization for every 160 people. The for-profit sector in 1997 contained 23,645,197 organizations (17 million proprietorships, 1.7 million partnerships, and 4.7 million corporations) – 1 formal business corporation for every 60 people: 1 formal-sector business organization for every 13 people.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 9.
“High-income countries create and sustain a much denser network of subnational government organizations.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 11.
“There are two basic social patterns in the modern world. The open access pattern is characterized by:
“1. Political and economic development.
“2. Economies that experience much less negative economic growth.
“3. Rich and vibrant civil societies with lots of organizations.
“4. Bigger, more decentralized governments.
“5. Widespread impersonal social relationships, including rule of law, secure property rights, fairness, and equality – all aspects of treating everyone the same.
“The limited access pattern is characterized by:
“1. Slow-growing economies vulnerable to shocks.
“2. Polities without generalized consent of the governed.
“3. Relatively small numbers of organizations.
“4. Smaller and more centralized governments.
“5. A predominance of social relationships organized along personal lines, including privileges, social hierarchies, laws that are enforced unequally, insecure property rights, and a pervasive sense that not all individuals were created or are equal.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 11-2.
“In contrast to institutions, organizations consist of specific groups of individuals pursuing a mix of common and individual goals through partially coordinated behavior. Organizations coordinate their members’ actions, so an organization’s actions are more than the sum of the actions of the individuals. Because they pursue a common purpose in an organization and because organizations are typically composed of individuals who deal with each other repeatedly, members of most organizations develop shared beliefs about the behavior of other members and about the norms of rules of their organization. As a result, most organizations have their own internal institutional structure: the rules, norms, and shared beliefs that influence the way people behave within the organization.
“We differentiate two types of organizations. An adherent organization is characterized by self-enforcing, incentive-compatible agreements among its members. These organizations do not rely on third parties to enforce internal agreements. Cooperation by an adherent organization’s members must be, at every point in time, incentive-compatible for all members. Contractual organizations, in contrast, utilize both third-party enforcement of contracts and incentive-compatible agreements among members. In contrast to members of adherent organizations, third-party enforcement of contracts allows members in contractual organizations to precommit to a subset of arrangements among themselves that may not otherwise be incentive-compatible at every point of time.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 15-6.
“In order for a formal rule – an institution – to constrain violence, particularly violence among individuals with no personal knowledge of one another, some organization must exist within which a set of officials enforce the rules in an impersonal manner.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 16.
“Systematic rent-creation through limited access in a natural state is not simply a method of lining the pockets of the dominant coalition; it is the essential means of controlling violence. Rent-creation, limits on competition, and access to organizations are central to the nature of the state, its institutions, and the society’s performance. Limiting the ability to form contractual organizations only to members of the coalition ties the interests of powerful elites directly to the survival of the coalition, thus ensuring their continued cooperation within the coalition.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 17.
“The natural state reduces the problem of endemic violence through the formation of a dominant coalition whose members possess special privileges. The logic of the natural state follows from how it solves the problem of violence. Elites – members of the dominant coalition – agree to respect each other’s privileges, including property rights and access to resources and activities. By limiting access to these privileges to members of the dominant coalition, elites create credible incentives to cooperate rather than fight among themselves. Because elites know that violence will reduce their own rents, they have incentives not to fight. Furthermore, each elite understands that other elites face similar incentives. In this way, the political system of a natural state manipulates the economic system to produce rents that then secure political order.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 18.
“Fragile natural states are unable to support any organization but the state itself. Basic natural states can support organizations, but only within the framework of the state. Mature natural states are able to support a wide range of elite organizations outside the immediate control of the state.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 21.
“Limiting access to organizational forms is the key to the natural state because limiting access not only creates rents through exclusive privileges but it also directly enhances the value of the privileges by making elites more productive through their organizations.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 30.
“Formally, we define a person as composing two interrelated parts: an internal individual persona and an external social persona…. Impersonality arises as social personas become standardized.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 33.
“Natural state elites sit at the top of, but are also embedded in, patron-client networks that extend down into the rest of society.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 36.
“Clients have more confidence in patrons if the patrons are embedded in a larger set of social arrangements where the patron’s ability to enjoy a stream of rents from his or her clients is part of what makes the larger arrangement sustainable. In that case, if the patron defaults on his or her clients the patron not only loses the stream of payments from the clients but may also lose the benefits from being part of the larger coalition. The benefits elites receive from heading their networks are part of what make arrangements within the dominant coalition credible, and in turn generate even more benefits for elites…. Natural states create and manipulate interests to ensure social order.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 38.
“Natural state coalitions face a fundamental trade-off. Expanding the coalition without increasing rent-generating activities adds members and increases the coalition’s ability to survive against internal and external threats. However, it also dissipates rents, which both lowers the value of being in the coalition and reduces the ability of members to punish the coalition by withdrawing their support. Because of this rent-dissipation, natural state coalitions are naturally self-limiting in size. Too large a coalition is unstable. The dominant coalition must be constantly aware of the danger that a subset of the existing coalition will attempt to displace the rest and take control of the state.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 39.
“Increasing trade and promoting specialization and the division of labor raise productivity and increase the surplus available to elites. As a result, natural state coalitions have incentives to promote trade. However, increasing specialization and division of labor often requires opening entry and access, and doing so dissipates rents, thus threatening the stability of the dominant coalition. Both forces operate in a natural state and, over time, produce ebbs and flows of access and entry.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 41.
“A fragile natural state is capable of containing violence, but all politics is real politics: people risk death when they make political mistakes. The coalition successfully provides order when the political interests of coalition members are balanced by their economic stakes in the existing order – the double balance. In a fragile natural state, not only is war politics by other means, economics is politics by other means.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 42.
“In contrast to fragile natural states, basic natural states sustain a durable and stable organizational structure for the state. The movement between fragile and basic natural states is gradual and marked by an increasing ability to structure durable arrangements within the organization of the state. Basic natural state institutions are largely public law institutions: institutions that structure aspects of the state, its internal relations, and its relations with members of the dominant coalition.
“These public institutions serve several purposes. They provide standard solutions to recurring problems: succession of the leader, succession of elites, determination of tax and tribute rates, and division of the spoils of conquest.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 43.
“From its founding in 753 BCE, the city of Rome had been governed by kings. In 535, Sextus Tarquin, the son of King Lucius Tarquin Superbus, raped Lucretia. Lucretia’s husband Lucius Tarquinnis Collatinus and Lucius Iunius Brutus (the king’s nephew) vowed vengeance, returned to Rome, and expelled the king. Rather than establishing one of themselves as king, Brutus and Collatinus were elected by the Senate to the newly created office of consuls, with the understanding that two new consuls would be selected by the Senate from the patriciate every year. Brutus and Collatinus validated the institution by stepping down as consuls at the end of their year. As a public institution, the creation of the consulship transformed the succession problem in the Republic, and it created a set of common beliefs among elites about the nature of political leadership.
“The Roman institutions [as a basic natural state] utilized shared beliefs within elites. Membership in the Senate was limited to patricians who had previously held magisterial offices…. The primary function of consuls was leading the army outside of Rome. The ability to create effective executive control of their armed forces under the consent of the Senate gave the Romans an organizational advantage.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 44-5.
“A perpetually lived organization is one where the identity of the organization is independent from the identity of its individual members. All states are organizations, and perpetually lived states are ones where the identity of the organization is independent of the identity of the individuals who make up the organization…. A basic natural state has a limited ability to make credible commitments through time. A basic natural state may have durable institutions, but the basic natural state is not perpetually lived.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 46.
“The third type of natural state is a mature natural state. A mature natural state is characterized by durable institutional structures for the state and the ability to support elite organizations outside the immediate framework of the state. Both characteristics distinguish the mature natural state from the basic natural state, but to reiterate, the differences are of degree rather than of kind. At the limit, a mature natural state is able to create and sustain perpetually lived organizations, but that is not a common feature of mature natural states.
“The institutions of mature natural states must emerge simultaneously to develop more sophisticated public and private organizations and more highly articulated public and private law. Private law provides individuals with an understanding of the relationships among individuals that the lord (or his agent or eventually the courts) would enforce and so provides individuals with a framework to reach agreements within the law’s bounds. A well-articulated body of public law specifies the offices and functions of the state and the relationship between the offices and functions, and provides for methods of resolving conflicts within the state and by extension, within the dominant coalition. The public law may be written or unwritten, but it must be embodied in state organizations, such as a court, capable of articulating and enforcing the public law. The durable public institutions of a mature natural state are capable, in normal circumstances, of lasting through changes in the makeup of the dominant coalition.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 47.
“… it is easy to overlook the dramatic implications that legal personhood has for the support of the internal structure of organizations. To function efficiently, contractual organizations need an external party to enforce their internal arrangements and their external dealings with individuals, other organizations, and the state. Official legal recognition of an organization as a legal person for external purposes also opens the door to formal legal recognition of internal organizational agreements as enforceable in the courts. Municipalities, for example, can sue and be sued, and the relationship of the mayor to the city can come under purview of the law.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 47-8.
“Elites have strong interests to promote trade and specialization and division of labor. They also have strong interests to define their privileges with respect to one another as elites. Initially these privileges are fluid, the result of the dynamics of the coalition. However, if a coalition stabilizes, the creation of public law institutions can in part be a mechanism for resolving elite conflicts. Our third proposition or prediction is that:
“The origin of legal systems lies in the definition of elite privileges.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 49.
“When elite organizations have an enhanced ability to discipline (or reward) the state for violating (honoring) its commitments, then natural states are better able to credibly commit to more sophisticated public organizations as well.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 50.
“… what we define as the natural state arises as societies reach populations of one thousand or more, and new forms of integrated political and economic organization develop to limit violence.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 53.
“All natural states face the problem of maintaining their dominant coalitions by granting elite individuals and organizations economic and political incentives to cooperate with one another.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 62.
“The essence of a natural state is personal relationships. The legal system cannot enforce individual rights if every individual is different, if every relationship between two individuals depends uniquely on their identity within the dominant coalition….
“The combination of the public law that creates and sustains organizations designated as legal persons and the private law rules about how persons relate to one another creates the possibility for a rule of law for organizations.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 63.
“England also had a long history of chartering municipalities and, within them, craft guilds. These formal chartered entities possessed economic privileges and limited access in several different dimensions. In the mid-sixteenth century, England began chartering joint-stock companies, the largest of which engaged in overseas trade and colonization. The first was the Russia Company, followed by the Virginia Company, the East Indies Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the Hudson Bay Company, among many others. These were all natural state creations: organizations controlled by elites who enjoyed, in this case, the explicit legal support of the state. Commercial and trading interests had always been a part of the dominant coalition in England, but in the seventeenth century, the growing importance of commerce, both domestic and international, engendered a shift of emphasis within the coalition, away from landed interests and toward commercial and manufacturing interests. These adjustments were not accomplished without bloodshed and disorder.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 71-2.
“As societies move toward basic natural states, these identities [of organizations] become less associated with specific individuals and more with social personas that become associated with powerful organizations. As societies move from fragile to basic natural states, these organizations become clearer and better defined. Organizations begin to become institutionalized.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 73.
“In mature natural states, credible institutions evolve that provide organizations a measure of rule of law. As more complex organizations develop, both inside and outside of the formal government, the distinction between public and private organizations begins to appear.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 73.
“Clear property rights make land more valuable, but they may also reduce the ability to use land as a tool to structure elite relationships in natural states. As a result, elites have conflicting interests in making land rights more secure. In fragile natural states, the flexible redistribution of landownership and control can serve as a tool to balance interests within the coalition, especially as the balance of power shifts among prominent members. In basic natural states, landownership typically stabilizes, but control of land remains within the direct framework of the state. In mature natural states, landownership may move beyond the direct control of the state and perhaps become truly impersonal.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 77-8.
“Initially [after 1066 in England], ownership of land reverted back to the king on the death of a tenant….
“The second stage in land law development began with the formalization of heritability. Powerful members of the coalition quickly sought the ability to confer the ownership of their lands on their heirs. The Coronation Charter of Henry I in 1100 recognized, in principle, the idea that tenants in chief should not have to buy back their lands from the king, but could enter into them on the payment of a just and lawful relief….
“However, the security of immediate inheritance did not eliminate the privileges possessed by a lord on the death of a tenant. The tenant was still required to pay relief to the lord, and if the heir was a minor, the lord was entitled to take the child as his ward and to administer the lands of the ward until the child reached the age of majority. The nominal monetary amounts to be paid for relief eventually became fixed for barons in the Charter of 1215….
“Inheritance differed for the tenants in chief in a significant way: the king retained the right to take back possession of their lands into his hands until all of the reliefs and fines were paid by the heir. Unlike lesser individuals, the tenants in chief did not enter into legal title to their property immediately upon the death of their ancestor. When all the requirements were fulfilled, the king’s ministers delivered the land to the legal heir, a process called livery. If the heir was under age, the king administered a wardship. These feudal incidents remained important to the king and tenants in chief into the seventeenth century.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 80-1.
“Remember that in the English system of land tenure multiple individuals held interests in the same piece of land. At the highest tenure levels, the tenants in chief held all their lands in freehold, although most of their lands were held in knight’s or other military tenures. Many of the tenants of the tenants in chief also held land in freehold tenure. All of these individuals had recourse to the royal courts to resolve disputes over land. At the bottom of the social ladder, the villeins and copyholders did not have access to the royal courts. They could look for justice with respect to landholding only in the manorial courts of the lords from whom they held their lands.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 83.
“Richard Duke of York (a major figure in the Wars of the Roses) was the son of the Earl of Cambridge. His father was executed as a traitor and, by virtue of being attainted, left little provision for his son. A few months later, Richard’s uncle, Edward Duke of York, died without issue in 1415. Had Richard’s Uncle Edward died before his father, Edward’s title and property would have been lost and Richard would have received nothing. However, because his uncle died after his father, Richard inherited everything from Edward and became Duke of York. The death of Richard’s maternal uncle, Edmund Mortimer, Early of March and Ulster, also without issue, left Richard the richest landowner in Henry VI’s England when he came of age in 1432. Richard’s story was spectacular in scale, but not unusual in process.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 94.
“By dispersing his army throughout the countryside William was able to control the population, provide order, and create incentives that aligned powerful lords with the interests of the king through the discretionary distribution of land. However, as the king’s ability to allocate and reallocate land declined with the strengthening of inheritance law, William’s descendants found the dispersal of military power more of a threat than a consolation.
“By the thirteenth century, the process of raising an army directly via a levy of feudal retainers had become too cumbersome. In Edward’s first Welsh War of 1276-7, he could have claimed the services of seven thousand knights. Instead, he called on the feudal service of 375 knights, extracted a monetary payment in lieu of service – scutage – from the rest, and raised further troops by other means.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 96.
“Powerful lords used multiple methods to influence the courts and juries [regarding title to land], including riot and forcible entry, illegal retaining and livery, maintenance, embracery, and conspiracy. Forcible entry, riot, and conspiracy related to attempts to enter onto land and establish seisin [actual occupation of land]. Maintenance and embracery were ways in which lords brought influence to bear on courts and juries. The prevalence of these practices is well established in the historical record, as are attempts to stamp out the practice through statues. Legislation dates from at least Richard II (1377-99) regarding livery and maintenance and continues unabated and largely ineffective through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 97.
“The privilege of holding court was valuable in post-Conquest England. When the king moved into the business of adjudicating land disputes in the twelfth century when he gave freeholders access to the royal courts, the manorial lords suffered a loss of revenue in the form of fines and court costs from cases that left their courts and moved to the royal courts.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 98.
“… we can see that England in the Middle Ages was a basic natural state governed by a dominant coalition whose rents were generated by limiting access to land, prayer, fighting, and justice. Elites held the coalition together through an interlocking set of personal relationships based on land but bolstered by relationships based on monetary exchange. This is the essence of bastard feudalism. To repeat, the significant organizations of production, governance, and salvation were all tied to the feudal manor: control over land amounted to control over manors. Control over the fundamental organizations of English society was all vested within the structure of the state. Powerful lords controlled more than one hundred manors apiece, and some of the most powerful lords were bishops. The hundred men at the top of the dominant coalition continuously worked out the arrangements that held English society together. Through its fascinating complexity, English land law enabled limited access to land at the higher and politically more important levels of aggregation and moved toward more open access at the level of small individual tenants who held alienable tenures from greater lords, then gradually lost their conditions of feudal service and moved to cash transactions.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 99-100.
“If elite property rights in land had been defined without ambiguity – and therefore if land distribution could be altered only by sale or grant – then the English system of government would have lost an important degree of flexibility. The irregular reallocations of land through land wars within the system of English land law reflected the changing political power of individuals within the coalition and were an integral part of what made the system work.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 100-1.
“Land gradually lost its role as a balancing item in the dominant coalition. Ownership of land was not completely secure from political manipulation until 1660. Estates would be confiscated and sequestered during the seventeenth-century civil war. Nevertheless, most of those estates would be restored to their owners. By the end of the seventeenth century, landownership and the organizations associated with land had been moved outside the immediate control and manipulation of the state. On the dimension of land, England exhibited the institutions and organization of a mature natural state.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 104.
“… between the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries the legal system moved from a system based on trial by combat and ordeal to one based on evidence and legal process. In the late sixteenth century and through the seventeenth century, England moved from a basic natural state to a mature natural state. The signature feature of a mature natural state – organizations independent of the state – began to emerge in the form of trusts, merchant firms, business corporations, political associations, and religious groups.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 105-6.
“Open access orders exhibit a virtuous circle linking the control of violence and open access. The political system limits access to the means of violence; open economic and social access ensures that access to the political system is open; credible prohibitions on the use of violence to compete maintains open economic and social access; and political and judicial systems enforce prohibitions on the use of violence. Similarly, open access to organizations in all systems sustains competition in all systems. Competition in all systems, in turn, helps sustain open access.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 110.
“Drawing on the idea of the double balance, we show that open access in all systems is mutually reinforcing. Our argument has three parts. First, citizens in open access orders share belief systems that emphasize equality, sharing, and universal inclusion. To sustain these beliefs, all open access orders have institutions and policies that share the gains of and reduce the individual risks from market participation, including universal education, a range of social insurance programs, and widespread infrastructure and public goods. Moreover, because these programs widely share the gains of the market economy in a manner complementary to markets, they reduce citizen demands for redistribution in ways that potentially cripple the economy.
“Second, political parties vie for control in competitive elections. The success of party competition in policing those in power depends on open access that fosters a competitive economy and the civil society, both providing a dense set of organizations that represent a range of interests and mobilize widely dispersed constituencies in the event that an incumbent regime attempts to solidify its position through rent-creation, limiting access, or coercion.
“Third, a range of institutions and incentive systems impose costs on an incumbent party that seeks to cement its position through systematic rent-creation and limiting access; imposition of systematic rent-creation yields a shrinking economy and falling tax revenue. Mobile resources leave the country, and the country’s competitive position in international markets deteriorates. These reactions impose direct costs on a regime that attempts limited access and grants the opposition a competitive opportunity to attract votes to regain power.
“An important property of open access orders is the seeming independence of economic and political systems. Economic organizations in open access orders do not need to participate in politics to maintain their rights, to enforce contracts, or to ensure their survival from expropriation; their right to exist and compete does not depend on maintaining privileges.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 111-2.
“An integral feature of the open access order is the growth of government. Incorporation of mass citizenry induces responsiveness to their interests.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 112.
“Nonetheless, all open access orders have a series of characteristics in common. First, all are characterized by a set of beliefs widely held among the population. These beliefs include various forms of inclusion, equality, and shared growth. All citizens are equal. All citizens have the ability to form organizations, to write contracts, to use the courts and the bureaucracy, and to access public goods and services. The specific nature of these beliefs differs across open access orders, with the Anglo-American countries tending to emphasize equality before the law and the East Asian countries tending to emphasize shared growth….
“Second, the eponymous characteristic, open access, is central to all open access orders. The civil society encompasses a wide range of organizations independent of the state. Open access also fosters competition in all systems, specifically in politics and economics. Systematic competition for control of the state means these states are democratic; systematic competition in the economy means that these states are market economies. All open access orders have constitutions, including institutions and incentive systems to sustain them.
“Third, all open access orders are, largely, impersonal. These societies have the only type of governments that can systematically provide services and benefits to citizens and organizations on an impersonal basis; that is, without reference to the social standing of the citizens or the identity and political connections of an organization’s principals…. An important feature of impersonality is the rule of law: rights, justice, and enforcement are rule bound and impartial. Economies in these states are also characterized by impersonal exchange.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 112-3.
“We summarize the characteristics of an open access order as follows. In addition to meeting the second two doorstep conditions – a perpetually lived state and consolidated political control over violence – an open access order has the following characteristics:
“1. A widely held set of beliefs about the inclusion of and equality for all citizens.
“2. Entry into economic, political, religious, and educational activities without restraint.
“3. Support for organizational forms in each activity that is open to all (for example, contract enforcement).
“4. Rule of law enforced impartially for all citizens.
“5. Impersonal exchange.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 114.
“Perhaps the most central feature of open access orders is the transformation of a society based on elites to one based on a mass citizenry.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 118.
“… political officials facing mass electorates respond by providing public rather than private goods.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 118.
“Historically, open access orders have provided different types of public goods in a sequence. In the beginning of the first transitions, societies extended the rule of law from elites to all citizens, …. Next typically came infrastructure and the beginning of mass education. For example, transportation infrastructure often transformed large areas of traditionally organized, low-income, and self-sufficient peasant economies into specialized food producers in integrated regional, national, or international markets, greatly increasing efficiency of both production and incomes. Third, after considerable struggles, often violent, open access orders began to ensure labor against vicissitudes that result from participation in impersonal labor markets.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 118-9.
“As the United States expanded, new states and territories on the frontier competed for scarce labor. In Schumpeterian fashion, political entrepreneurs in these states sought to make themselves attractive to labor by innovating through providing an array of institutions and public goods, including secure property rights, rule of law, and universal white male suffrage…. Whereas many people moving to the frontier in 1800 did so as self-sufficient farmers, those moving in the 1840s typically did so as prospective market specialists in interregional or international markets.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 119.
“… electoral losers have especially strong incentives to innovate in their efforts to regain power…. To capture power, today’s losers must devise new ways of combining interests, constituencies, and political support.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 125.
“Van Buren explained in the 1830s that without competition individuals and organizations that compose a party have only weak incentives to make the compromises necessary to maintain the party as an effective organization and electoral competitor. As organized political parties emerged in the first American party system in the early 1790s, each party sought to destroy the other. Americans in this era had no concept of the loyal opposition: one had never existed in any political system. When the opposition Federalist Party disappeared in the Era of Good Feeling (1816-24), the dominant Jeffersonian Party fell into several factions that failed to work well together. Demise of the opposition did not result in triumph.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 127.
“We now accept competition among parties as commonplace, but the idea of party competition, especially the idea of loyal opposition parties, had to be invented and sustained…. … we see that sustaining party competition results in limits on politics: the winners do not seek to destroy the opposition, nor is the goal of the opposition to take power and destroy the incumbents.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 128.
“… open access order democracies face many public issues and … no group can extract too much for fear of mobilizing a great many groups against it.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 128.
“The fiscal effect biases officials in favor of policies that enhance their revenue. Open access orders tend to raise revenue on broad taxes on economic activity, such as value-added taxes common in Europe or the general income tax in the United states. Dependence on taxes of this type means that the government’s fiscal resources rise and fall with economic prosperity. Policies that shrink the economy diminish tax revenue.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 129.
…the turn toward massive rent-creation is politically inefficient in mass electorates; political leaders do far better gaining votes with public goods (education, social insurance) than with private goods (rent-creation).” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 129.
“Because open access orders provide for thriving markets, they produce prosperity over the long term in ways that natural states cannot match.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 130.
“… the more limited ability to make credible commitments in natural states makes the set of feasible compromises smaller.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 135.
“The defining feature of an open access society is open entry into politics and economics….
“Economic and political accesses are deeply connected. Political responsiveness in open access orders reflects shifts in economic interests. This, in turn, leads political officials to provide a range of public goods and services that respond to economic opportunities. Early in open access history, public goods focused on access to institutions and services that were traditionally the exclusive domain of elites, such as access to markets, rule of law, and the administration of impersonal justice. Open access orders of the nineteenth century also provided infrastructure, especially those providing access to markets (roads, canals, railroads) ….” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 144-5.
“The ability of open access orders to provide impersonal benefits allows them to offer a far wider array of public goods than natural states. These states use public goods to respond to electoral demands in ways that are more complementary to markets at lower cost than do natural states.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 145.
“… the relations within the dominant coalition transform from personal to impersonal, and then those arrangements are extended to the larger population…. Impersonal elite relationships can develop within the natural state by changing formal rules that transform elite privileges into rights. When a natural state develops institutions, organizations, and beliefs that allow elites to treat each other impersonally, then that society is on the doorstep.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 148.
“The three doorstep conditions are:
“DC#1. Rule of law for elites.
“DC#2. Perpetually lived organizations in the public and private spheres.
“DC#3. Consolidated control of the military.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 151.
“Political, municipal, educational, fraternal, and religious corporations are numerically and substantively much more important forms of corporations than business corporations until the nineteenth century.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 152.
“The creation of perpetually lived organizations creates a form of impersonal exchange and relationships.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 152.
“In modern societies, public law includes various categories, including constitutional law, administrative law, and statutory law. In earlier societies, public law was constitutional law as well, but the constitution of the society was not defined in terms of relationships among abstract and impersonal actors – president, senator, prime minister, the bureaucracy, and citizens – but among live individuals such as kings, dukes, popes, and bishops whose identity was an amalgam of individual characteristics and social characteristics of their office. In modern open access societies, public offices have become impersonally defined and distinct from the individual identity of the person who occupies the office. In contrast, in earlier societies and in most natural states today, public law is unable to clearly separate the identities of public persons as specific individuals from the privileges they possess as office holders and from the organization they represent or head.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 156.
“A great deal of English history is written in terms of the tensions and conflict in the relationships between the king and nobility. By ignoring intra-elite disputes, historians overemphasize king-nobility disputes. Intra-elite competition dominated conflicts over land, not competition between the nobility and the crown.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 157.
“Intra-elite competition between the Chancery Courts and the Common Law courts, both royal courts, for jurisdiction and revenue produced many of the changes in English land law. Once all elite landowners possessed the same right, such as the right of inheritance and later the right to devise by will, the elite had a united interest to protect those rights, be it against the king or an element within the dominant coalition. The elites could collectively use the land more effectively because all elites had the same security of property. Ownership of land no longer gravitated to powerful individuals simply because they were politically powerful; it gravitated to individuals who could use ownership of the land most effectively.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 157.
“Rule of law for elites creates some space for impersonal relationships among members of the dominant coalition, but until those relationships can be embedded in a matrix of more sophisticated public and private organizations, impersonality does not emerge historically. The capacity to form and support perpetually lived organizations has direct consequences for a society’s ability to structure social relationships over time. The creation of legal personalities for organizations constitutes an essential element of perpetual life; it is inherently impersonal because it is defined without reference to any specific individuals.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 158.
“The body of economic assets held collectively by the corporation came to be known in the church as the christus and in the secular world as the fiscus. The christus and fiscus became the property administered by the leader/ruler/pope/bishop that was at the leader’s disposal to use, but remained the collective property of the corporate body. The christus and fiscus formed the nexus around which perpetually lived organizations could form.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 161.
“If the king was above the law, he then possessed ultimate sovereignty with respect to the fiscus. However, if the king could only alienate property with the consent of the corporate body [e.g., a council], then the corporate body possessed ultimate sovereignty with respect to the fiscus. How did the king fit into the corporate body?
“Kantorowicz explains how the notion of the king’s two bodies developed as a solution to the inalienability problem. The king (or pope, bishop, duke, priest) possessed two bodies, identities ascribed to him by law and social practice. One identity was a personal, corporeal, mortal body that died; the other social identity an abstract, corporate, perpetual, incorruptible body that did not die. The office of the king, his dignity, was part of his corporate body. The distinction separates the private interests of the individual holding the office from the interests, rights, and duties of that individual in his role as an officer. The king’s two bodies were two identifiable and separable legal persons.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 162-3; reference: Kantorowicz, Ernest. 1997 (1957). The king’s two bodies: A study in mediaeval political theology. Princeton UP.
“… the king’s commitment to honor his corporate responsibilities was not credible in and of itself because that commitment required the presence of a second corporate entity representing the fiscus.
“With respect to alienating property, recognition of the fiscus formally put the king under the law, fundamentally changing the identity of the king and making the king’s identity substantially more impersonal… Symmetrically the consent-granting corporate body also had to possess perpetual life. Perpetual life for the consent-giving body was achieved by vesting the right to consent in a specific set of office-holders – such as dukes, earls, or bishops. Critical to the process is the creation of at least two perpetually lived entities.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 164.
“The first societies to reach the doorstep conditions were Britain, France, the Dutch, and the United States. As these first movers reached the doorstep and access began widening in these societies, the corporate body of the sovereign state came to prominence. Over this period, the individual identity of the monarch faded in comparison to the corporate identity of the state. By the eighteenth century, the first movers had created a perpetually lived corporate state.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 166.
“From the American Revolution on, every state had a treasurer who was an officer of the state. Some were elected, but most were appointed. In almost every state, the treasurer’s accounts, and the money in them, were legally the property of the treasurer as an individual: they were not legally the property of the state. When a treasurer died in office, resigned, or was replaced, the accounts of the old treasurer had to be audited. It often transpired that the accounts of the old treasurer did not balance, embroiling the state in legal battles that could last for years. The new set of state accounts created with every new treasurer had to include an entry in which claims against the old treasurer were carried as unrealized assets of the state….
“The development of treasuries as formal organizations did not eliminate the problem of fraud and incompetence. However, it did mean that significant financial operations could no longer be carried out by the treasurer as a private individual playing with the state’s money.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 166-7.
“By definition, when military force is consolidated the military authority cannot be disciplined by the threat of military force from elsewhere in society.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 170.
“In order for elite groups and organizations to concede control of military assets to a single organization, they must believe they can collectively discipline the military organization.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 170.
“A separate corporate social organization possessed the power to decide when to fight and how much to spend on fighting. Separating the authority to make the two decisions [the when vs the how] produced political control of a consolidated military.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 171.
“Natural states are inherently limited, both in terms of access and in terms of the degree of specialization they can support.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 172.
“The logic of Bates’s argument is straightforward: As long as the violence specialist receives more from defending his clients than he receives from expropriating them, he refrains from using violence…. If the violence specialist gains more from doing good things (such as promoting the creation of wealth) than he does from doing bad things (such as expropriating wealth), then prosperity follows.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 174; reference: Bates, Robert. 2001. Prosperity and violence: The political economy of development. W.W. Norton.
“… the interesting part of the story for us emerges after 1500, a point at which none of the Western European powers had a distinct military advantage. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England, France, and the Dutch republic began to create more sophisticated organizations and state institutions within their basic natural state frameworks, including sophisticated elite organizations outside the direct control of the state. All three countries used quasi-private corporations as vehicles for colonization, whereas the Spanish and Portuguese did not. The British, Dutch, and French created colonial empires by licensing ‘merchants to organize colonial rule.’ Corporations were developed for domestic purposes as well. By 1700, the distinctive pattern of support for elite organizations outside the immediate framework of the state characterized the development of mature natural states in all three of the European first movers.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 176.
“In the Seven years’ War (1754-63), also known as the French and Indian War, the British defeated the French in Canada because the British Navy prevented the French Navy from provisioning their forces in Canada…. Success required that the British navy maintain an effective blockade of French ports and, when the French fleet did come out, to decisively defeat or contain it….
“The problem with blockading France, as Rodger explains, is that no navy in 1700 could keep a large fleet of ships at sea for more than a month or so. The low quality of provisions meant that the men and officers on ships became enfeebled and sick in a short time. Yet in 1758, Admiral Hawke’s fleet stayed at sea continuously for six months. Hawke stayed off the French coast until the French fleet came out of Brest on November 16. Hawke fought the French and confined the French fleet to the harbor at Quiberon Bay, where the French stayed under British blockade for the remainder of the war.
“Keeping the fleet at sea required not better sailors, ships, or tactics, but an administrative system to secure high-quality provisions and supplies on a regular basis….” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 182; reference: Rodger, N.A.M. 2004. The command of the ocean: A naval history of Britain, 660-1649. W.W. Norton. p. 279.
“By the 1750s, the British Navy had become a sophisticated organization of organizations; several of its component organizations were independent and had perpetual life – the Admiralty, the Navy Board, the Victualling Board, and the Ordinance Board among them…. One set of organizations emerged in financial markets that dealt in the various naval debt instruments and provided specialized monitoring of the current and future state of navy finances (tuned to each specific division within the navy structure). Another set of economic organizations developed in the form of elite, but competitive suppliers. Competition among suppliers eliminated the personal and rent-conveying natural state relationships that prevailed for centuries and that precluded significant increases in the quality of naval supplies. Elite competition transformed this system by reducing rents and providing the right incentives, separating the suppliers from their old role as creditors of the navy. To work, these new arrangements required perpetually lived organizations.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 185-6.
“Events quickly revealed the effects of parliament’s perpetual life, particularly after the creation of the Bank of England in 1694. The personal nature of sovereign debt in a natural state meant that all early modern European sovereigns were credit rationed, and the Stuart kings could not raise much money to finance their governments. After the Revolution of 1688, sovereign debt became the impersonal liability of parliament. To issue or alter debt now required a law of parliament. The king could no longer unilaterally alter the terms of debt without first obtaining a new law from parliament.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 187.
“The transition proper begins when elites find a common interest in transforming some elite privileges into impersonal elite rights shared by all members of the elite…. and then begin to expand access to citizenship rights to a wider share of the population.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 190.
“The specific idea that political manipulation of economic privileges posed the greatest threat to a republic was the central hypothesis of Whig or Commonwealth thinking in the eighteenth century in Britain, France, and the United States.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 190.
“Critically, ideas that factions, parties, and corporations were dangerous and needed to be contained by institutional constraints help us understand beliefs held around 1800 in all three countries [Britain, France, US].” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 191.
“The transformation of privileges into rights occurs when elites in general perceive that their privileges will be more secure from intra-elite competition when those privileges are defined as commonly shared rights rather than personal prerogatives.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 191.
“The transformation in thinking about organizations and the institutions that support organizations did not arise from eighteenth-century republican political theories. Earlier theories were based on a sophisticated analysis of natural states, which valued political balance and feared that political factions and the use of economic privilege for political ends would unbalance the constitutional equipoise of forces within society… Parties and corporations can only maintain a balance of interests, however, under conditions of open access and competition, a set of conditions that had not existed prior to the nineteenth century and that the eighteenth-century republican theorists could not have observed or foreseen.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 192.
“By 1880, competitive political parties and open access to corporate forms in many areas of economic and social life were prominent features of all three first movers.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 192.
“The extension of citizenship to a wider share of the population was an important element of intensified political competition. Governments began to provide public goods – infrastructure, education, and social insurance – and distribute them on the basis of impersonal criteria, foregoing the manipulation of those public goods for political gains.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 193.
“The belief that competition among factions was the primary threat to republics and that the liberty of a republic could only be secured if factions could somehow be contained was an empirical observation justified by close historical analysis as well as a causal belief about the structure of human societies. It is not surprising then, that major contributors to the theory of balance lived in societies governed by mature natural states: Aristotle in Athens, Polybius in Rome, and Machiavelli in Florence.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 195.
“The paradox of the early nineteenth century is that societies in which people initially believed that political parties and corporations were dangerous, even evil, eventually adopted open access mass political parties and open access to the corporate form for economic, religious, educational, and other social activities.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 197.
“… four types of early party development. The first two are parliamentary parties and electoral parties. Parliamentary parties develop within legislative bodies….
“Electoral parties develop when the suffrage is wide enough and the voters disorganized enough so that it pays political activists to devote resources to organizing voters and getting the vote out….
“Recognizable modern political parties, the third type of party, appear when parliamentary and electoral parties merge or arise together….
“Rather than emerging from the legislative or electoral process, external parties are ‘essentially established by a preexisting institution of which the true activities lie outside elections and parliament: it is then accurate to speak of creation from without’. Duverger treats labor and trade unions, socialist and other ideologically motivated groups, churches, philosophical societies, ex-servicemen’s associations, and business firms as prominent sources of external party organization… External parties with specific, narrow, factional interests that are allowed to compete in the political arena signal the arrival of open access politics.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 210-211; reference: Duverger, Maurice. 1959. Political parties: Their organization and activity in the modern state. London: Methuen.
“What limited access to charters was competition from existing interests. Parliament had a well-established procedure for establishing charter by act, but relatively few charters were created because of political opposition from existing interests.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 216.
“Agitation for new corporations was intense in the 1820s and 1830s, generated primarily by wealthy individuals already in business who wished to expand their operations under the structure of a corporation. In 1844, parliament passed new legislation, an act Registering, Incorporation, and Regulation of Joint-Stock Companies and an accompanying act for Facilitating the Winding Up of the Affairs of Joint-Stock Companies….
“The act did not confer limited liability on these joint-stock corporations, a provision that would come in 1856….
“… the 1844 act opened the gates to incorporation. Within fourteen months of the act’s passage, 1,639 joint-stock companies were provisionally registered, more than double the 700 or so in existence in 1843. By 1856, 3,942 companies had provisionally registered and an additional 135 companies were incorporated with limited liability. In the nine years following the introduction of general limited liability in 1855-6, an additional 4,859 limited companies were chartered. Britain went from seven hundred to ten thousand business corporations in twenty years, open access indeed.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. pp. 218-9.
“Rather than having a set of institutionalized checks and balances, the French, like the British, ended up with a system of parliamentary sovereignty. However, the Third Republic persisted, capable of accommodating entry and political competition in a way that France never had before. Unlike the two-party systems in Britain and the United States, France developed a multiparty system. The fifteen-fold increase in the rate at which corporations were created each year following the legisation of 1867 is the concrete expression of opening economic access. The multitude of political parties, particularly of socialist parties that would have been suppressed as late as 1872, is concrete expression of opening political access.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 227.
“Yet, once established, both [the US] Constitution and the national government were insufficient to ensure economic or political openness, to guarantee the full range of economic or political rights, or to provide the physical infrastructure to unite the nation and sustain economic development. Instead, federalism allowed creative state governments to solve the problem of opening access and general incorporation; state governments wrestled with the problem of sustainable, open access political parties (with some help from the national level); and state governments figured out how to provide physical and financial infrastructure that united the national economy. Much of American history, however, treats state government development as a sideshow, thereby missing crucial elements in the transition to open access in the United States.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 229.
“Although there were [US] national government elections, all elections were administered by state and local governments and regulated by state governments….
“At both the state and national level, direct popular elections were common for the lower house of the legislature, but indirect elections or selection by the legislature was more common for the upper house and the executive. Senators were chosen by state legislatures and the president through the electoral college. Most states selected governors through the legislatures rather than popular vote; initially only New York and Massachusetts had direct election of governors. A majority of states initially chose national presidential electors through the state legislature rather than by popular election.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 231.
“Corporate economic organizations played critical roles in the financial and transportation sectors, particularly important to the movement of agricultural goods from the rapidly developing western states to the settled eastern seaboard and across the Atlantic. Privileged corporations served valuable public purposes, but privileged corporations also threatened republican values because of their effect on politics. Individual citizens wanted banks, canals, and railroads to raise the value of their lands, help get their crops to market, and more closely integrate them into the American economy and society. They feared that those corporations would undermine and ultimately destroy the democratic political process they also valued. The solution hit upon by the Americans was not to eliminate corporations but to eliminate privileges by opening entry into the corporate form to anyone who wanted to form a corporation.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 238.
“Larger militaries required bigger budgets; but they also required bigger, better, and more complex organizations. Societies well along the road to developing those organizations possessed real advantages.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 246.
“In short, to understand the control of violence, we must begin with a group of powerful individuals, constrained by a set of self-enforcing arrangements, who manage to increase the degree of specialization within their coalition organization by allowing some members to specialize in violence, some in economic activities, and some in political activities.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 259.
“Institutions are the rules of the game, the patterns of interaction that govern and constrain the relationships of individuals. Institutions include formal rules, written laws, formal social conventions, and informal norms of behavior. Institutions must also include the means by which rules and norms are enforced.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 259.
“Greif shows how rules and norms, by themselves, are not self-sustaining; they must be embedded in a larger structure of organizations and beliefs.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 260; reference: Greif, Avner. 2006. Institutions and the path to the modern economy. Cambridge UP.
“Understanding social change in actual historical events requires separating institutions, organizations, and beliefs, as well as violence, in order to track their interrelated development over time.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 260.
“Organizations are made up of individuals who act in a coordinated manner to pursue common as well as individual goals. An adherent organization consists of individuals whose individual interests, at every point in time, enable the organization to secure voluntary cooperation. Contractual organizations, in contrast, utilize third parties to enforce agreements within the organization and between the organization and outsiders. Because they have additional tools to foster cooperation, contractual organizations are more powerful than adherent organizations.
“Our framework builds on three insights about organizations:
“1. The structure, extent, and number of organizations in any society are intimately tied to the way that society controls violence.
“2. The social technology of structuring organizations depends on personality and the identity of the individuals within the organization. The creation of impersonally defined, perpetually lived organizations whose identity is independent of the identity of their members is difficult to accomplish. But where it occurs, it fundamentally changes the possibility for relationships among individuals.
“3. The existence of organizations with impersonal identities, in both the public and private sphere, is a necessary condition for the existence of impersonal relationships in the larger society.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 260.
“Beliefs that impersonal identities can be sustained lie at the heart of beliefs in equality. Equality depends on impersonal identity; for citizens to be equal before the law, for example, the law must treat citizens impersonally.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 262.
“When public goods enhance human capital, the ability to provide impersonal policies allows open access orders to respond to citizens in ways that complement markets rather than undermine them.” North, Douglass, J. Wallis & B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge UP. p. 266.
“Here we use an artificial neural network model to focus on the potential for direct reciprocity, a behaviour that is widespread in humans, to select for advanced cognitive abilities. Rather than manufacturing some form of functional relationship between intelligence and fitness, we allow this relationship to emerge based on the demands of decision-making in two social dilemmas, and analyse the consequences for the evolution of intelligence.
“In order to consider the dynamics of cooperative social interactions, we use the framework of two classic social dilemmas: the iterated prisoner’s dilemma and the iterated snowdrift game [mutual defection payoff for both players is slightly greater than the low payoff for a cooperating player confronted by a defecting player in contrast to prisoner’s dilemma].” McNally, Luke, SP Brown, AL Jackson. 2012. “Cooperation and the evolution of intelligence.” Proceedings of the Royal Society: B. 279:3027-3034. p. 3027.
“It has previously been suggested that the pinnacles of cooperative behaviour in nature show a bimodal distribution with intelligence, with the most cooperative species displaying either limited cognition (e.g. microbes, social humenoptera) or exceptional intelligence (e.g. humans and other primates, certain cetaceans and birds). It is clear in the former case that cooperation has evolved primarily owing to combinations of kin selection and ecological factors. However, in the latter case, kin selection is not the only mechanism leading to cooperation, and may not even be the most important. A recent study has in fact suggested that relatedness was too low in human hunter-gatherer groups for kin selection to drive the evolution of human cooperation. In highly intelligent species, contingent behaviours (reciprocity, partner choice, etc.) appear to have been important in the evolution of cooperation. Our results may help us to explain this pattern by showing that the selection for appropriate behavioural assortment of cooperative acts can lead to selection for greater cognitive abilities and Machiavellian arms races, and that intelligence facilitates greater extremes of cooperation. Additionally, although kin selection is still of importance in highly intelligent taxa, high relatedness may hinder the evolution of intelligence by driving unconditional cooperation to fixation in the population, without any need of contingent behaviours.” McNally, Luke, SP Brown, AL Jackson. 2012. “Cooperation and the evolution of intelligence.” Proceedings of the Royal Society: B. 279:3027-3034. pp. 3032-3.
“Our results show that, in a freely evolving system, selection for efficient decision-making in social interactions can give rise to selection pressures for advanced cognition, supporting the view that the transition to the cooperative groups seen in the most intelligent taxa may be the key to their intellect.” McNally, Luke, SP Brown, AL Jackson. 2012. “Cooperation and the evolution of intelligence.” Proceedings of the Royal Society: B. 279:3027-3034. p. 3033.
“When we were living in the bush, some people gave and others stinged. But there were always enough people around who shared, people who liked one another, who were happy living together, and who didn’t fight. And even if one person did stinge, the other person would just get up and yell about it,….” Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Harvard UP. p. 80.
“Equality between the sexes is probably greater among gatherers and hunters, including the !Kung, than in most other societies around the world. Despite the prominence of !Kung women, however, men generally have the edge. One reflection of their dominance is the pressure in marriage. Polygynous marriage is something many men want and about 5 percent have at any one time. The advantages for the man are obvious: he gains a new sexual partner, he is likely to have additional children, and he adds a substantial new provider of food to his family. The usual advantages of obtaining a first wife also apply: he gains recognition and status in the community, and he extends his social and political influence to include his new in-laws, their village, and their foraging grounds….
“Most women, however, do not want to become involved in such relationships. Many become furious when their husbands suggest it. They claim that sexual jealousy, rivalry, subtle (and not so subtle) favoritism, and disputes over chores and other responsibilities make the polygynous life a very unpleasant one. Co-wives either share the same hut or have separate huts only a few feet apart; either way, each woman’s life with the husband is carried on in full view of the other. If the second wife is neither a close relative nor a friend, this enforced intimacy is even harder to tolerate….
“For co-wives who get along, the arrangement does offer benefits: constant companionship, someone to share chores and childcare, someone to take over in the event of illness or disability, and a possible ally in struggles with the husband.” Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Harvard UP. pp. 151-2.
“After any death and burial, the village is abandoned and a new one erected nearby; the traditional huts can be built in a matter of hours, and a new village can go up in a few days.” Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Harvard UP. p. 183.
“Although a few !Kung families lived apart from settlements as late as the 1960s, subsisting primarily on bush foods, the unquestionable trend has been toward sedentary village life. Each year finds more !Kung tending their own or other people’s goat and cattle herds, clearing and planting garden plots, raising chickens, and selling crafts, to earn the money to purchase grains, sugar, and salt. They are also using more traded and store-bought goods–pots, pans, dishes, silverware, kerosene, lamps and candles, colorful cloth and manufactured clothing, blankets, shoes, flashlights, and occasionally even a radio. !Kung hut style is also changing: huts are now being built to last, with sturdy frames, mud-base plaster walls, and separate thatched roofs–replicas of Bantu huts. Perhaps more significantly, individual compounds are, for the first time, being demarcated within the larger village area.
“Inevitably, there have been changes in daily life. Girls and boys who would have been playing or learning to gather or hunt now care for herds of goats. Adults are also busy with the tasks of the settled villages: elaborate thorn-bush fences have to be erected and repaired to protect gardens; planting and weeding have to be done; new huts, often requiring a week’s work, have to be built, plastered, and maintained; dishes have to be washed; clothing and blankets need sewing, washing, and mending; and some of the new foods need long preparation times.
“The pattern of child care has also been affected. Women who live more sedentary lives have shorter birth spacing between children. One explanation for this change may be the availability of cows’ and goats’ milk and its effect on nursing patterns. Or perhaps women are better fed and less active, making it easier to begin and maintain pregnancy. In any case, with two children to carry, the women are less likely to go gathering; they become more dependent on the new food sources, animal husbandry and agriculture. Having more children to care for and more household chores than before, !Kung women may actually be providing less food for their families than they used to. This trend, along with !Kung men’s increasing participation in tribal politics, may jeopardize the influence and the relatively high status !Kung women have traditionally enjoyed.
“The same may be true of the older !Kung. Once they were looked up to as the repositories of traditional culture. But how will their skills and knowledge apply to the concerns of their grandchildren, who are going to school, milking cows, herding goats and donkeys, and even learning to bore wells and use dynamite? What happens to the once-respected ‘owners’ of land areas and food resources in a world where land is controlled by government land boards, who allocate parcels to applicants with large herds of cattle and the sophistication to fill out complex legal forms? Despite these questions, some signs are positive. The relatively sedentary life of herding and farming is easier on old people: excursions to the bush are less frequent; older children, left behind in the village to tend the herds, are able to care for older adults as well; and donkeys, carrying back food from distant areas, make excursions more efficient and of shorter duration.” Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Harvard UP. pp. 194-6.
“Unlike !Kung hunters, !Kung gatherers have the solid assurance that when their families are hungry they will be able to find food–an assurance that fills them with pride.” Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Harvard UP. p. 217.
“Meat, the economic contribution of men, is considered more valuable than gathered foods…. Squeals of delighted children may greet women as they return from gathering, but when men walk into the village balancing meat on sticks held high on their shoulders, everyone celebrates, young and old alike. It may even precipitate a trance dance. The one thing women can bring in that causes a comparable reaction is honey, but the finding of honey is a much rarer event and one that men are usually enlisted to help with….
“!Kung men also provide women with their basic gathering kit and other implements: tanned skins to make carrying devices (infant slings, karosses, clothing, and pouches), digging sticks, mortars and pestles, sinew for mending and for stringing and sewing beads and ornaments, and shoes.” Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Harvard UP. p. 218.
“The economic picture becomes more complex when hunting and gathering activities are looked at more closely. Animal protein is not brought into the village only by men. Women collect lizards, snakes, tortoises’ and birds’ eggs, and insects and caterpillars, as well as occasional small or immature mammals. They also provide men with crucial information on animal tracks and animal movement that they observe while they travel in the bush.” Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Harvard UP. p. 219.
“Men’s knowledge about plants is comparable to that of women, and gathering is something men do whenever they want to. Men can account for as much as 20 percent of all foods gathered.” Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Harvard UP. p. 219.
“Village life is so intimate that a division between domestic and public life–an apt distinction for many other cultures–is largely meaningless for the !Kung,….” Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Harvard UP. p. 221.
“[Nisa’s words] Women are strong; women are important. Zhun/twa men say that women are the chiefs, the rich ones, the wise ones. Because women possess something very important, something that enables men to live: their genitals.
“A woman can bring a man life, even if he is almost dead. She can give him sex and make him alive again. If she were to refuse, he would die! If there were no women around, their semen would kill men. Did you know that? If there were only men, they would all die. Women make it possible for them to live. Women have something so good that if a man takes it and moves about inside it, he climaxes and is sustained.” Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Harvard UP. p. 257.
“One way the spirits affect humans is by shooting them with invisible arrows carrying disease, death, or misfortune…. An ancestral spirit may exercise this power against the living if a person is not being treated well by others. If people argue with her frequently, if her husband shows how little he values her by carrying on blatant affairs, or if people refuse to cooperate or share with her, the spirit may conclude that no one cares whether or not she remains alive and may ‘take her into the sky.’” Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Harvard UP. p. 259.
“N/um [spiritual power; ability to enter trance dance and bargain with spirits to effect cures] reflects the basically egalitarian nature of !Kung life. It is not reserved for a privileged few: nearly half the men and a third of the women have it. There is enough for everyone; it is infinitely divisible; and all can strive for it. Almost anyone who is willing to go through the rigors of apprenticeship can attain it.” Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Harvard UP. p. 261.
“Free-rider problems probably set an upper limit on optimal, or equilibrium group size. Beyond 30, conflicts between families may cause fissioning, and it is only when there are external constraints, like the prevalent warfare of some equestrian and complex foragers, that there are larger local groups.” Marlowe, Frank. 2005. “Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 14:54-67. pp. 58-9.
“Bilateral descent, tracing kin through both mother and father, is more prevalent among foragers (75%) than agriculturalists (25%), who are most often patrilineal. One advantage of patrilineal descent is that it is easier to assemble a large group of reliable allies in times of warfare or disputes, since people know which patrilineal clan they belong to and where their loyalties lie.” Marlowe, Frank. 2005. “Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 14:54-67. p. 60.
“In comparative perspective, humans are so behaviorally diverse that societies are more like different species than different populations of one species, although there are some common features shared by most. In some of their widely shared features, human foragers resemble social carnivores more than they do our closest primate relatives. Like wild dogs, foragers have long day ranges, large home ranges, central places, provisioning, food sharing, and bisexual dispersal.” Marlowe, Frank. 2005. “Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 14:54-67. p. 63.
“As noted, male contribution to diet is higher where fishing is more important. Even in the warm-climate sample, male contribution to diet is significantly higher where fishing accounts for >=20% of the diet (58% versus 49%). Since several other traits, such as lower mobility, are associated with fishing, dating the origin of fishing is important. In the ethnographic record, fishing is done with spears, bows, weirs, nets, baskets, and poison. Because many of those technologies probably did not appear prior to modern H. sapiens, we might use foragers who do little fishing as guides to earlier periods.” Marlowe, Frank. 2005. “Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 14:54-67. p. 65.
“Thus, starting in the mid-16th century, while Portuguese ships were returning from Africa with their first human cargoes, all the European governments began to impose the severest penalties against contraception, abortion and infanticide….
“As a consequence women began to be prosecuted in large numbers, and more were executed for infanticide in 16th and 17th-century Europe than for any other crime, except for witchcraft, a charge that also centered on the killing of children and other violations of reproductive norms…. Also the suspicion under which midwives came in this period – leading to the entrance of the male doctor into the delivery room – stemmed more from the authorities’ fears of infanticide than from any concern with the midwives’ alleged medical incompetence.
“With the marginalization of the midwife, the process began by which women lost the control they had exercised over procreation, and were reduced to a passive role in child delivery, while male doctors came to be seen as the true ‘givers of life’ (as in the alchemical dreams of the Renaissance magicians).” Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Automedia. pp. 88-9.
“For the witch-hunt destroyed a whole world of female practices, collective relations, and systems of knowledge that had been the foundation of women’s power in pre-capitalist Europe, and the condition for their resistance in the struggle against feudalism.
“Out of this defeat a new model of femininity emerged: the ideal woman and wife – passive, obedient, thrifty, of few words, always busy at work, and chaste. This change began at the end of the 17th century after women had been subjected for more than two centuries to state terrorism. Once women were defeated, the image of femininity constructed in the ‘transition’ was discarded as an unnecessary tool, and a new, tamed one took its place. While at the time of the witch-hunt women had been portrayed as savage beings, mentally weak, unsatiably lusty, rebellious, insubordinate, incapable of self-control by the 18th century the canon has been reversed. Women were now depicted as passive, asexual beings, more obedient, more moral than men, capable of exerting a positive influence on them.” Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Automedia. p. 103.
“Between 1435 and 1487, twenty-eight treatises on witchcraft were written culminating on the eve of Columbus’ voyage, with the publication in 1486 of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) that, following a new papal Bull on the subject, Innocent VIII’s Summis Desiderantes (1484), indicated that the Church considered witchcraft a new threat….
“Witch-hunting reached its peak between 1580 and 1630, in a period, that is, when feudal relations were already giving way to the economic and political institutions typical of mercantile capitalism….
“It was the Carolina – the Imperial legal code enacted by the catholic Charles V in 1532 – that established that witchcraft be punished by death. In Protestant England, the persecution was legalized by three Acts of Parliament passed in 1542, 1563 and 1604, this last introducing the death penalty even in the absence of any damage inflicted upon persons and things. After 1550, laws and ordinances making witchcraft a capital crime and inciting the population to denounce suspected witches, were also passed in Scotland, Switzerland, France, and the Spanish Netherlands. These were re-issued in subsequent years to expand the number of those who could be executed and again, make witchcraft as such, rather than the damages presumably provoked by it, the major crime.” Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Automedia. pp. 165-6.
“By the 16th century, the attack against magic was well under way and women were its most likely targets. Even when they were not expert sorcerers/ magicians, they were the ones who were called to mark animals when they fell sick, heal their neighbors, help them find lost or stolen objects, give them amulets or love potions, help them forecast the future. Though the witch-hunt targeted a broad variety of female practices, it was above all in this capacity – as sorcerers, healers, performers of incantations and divinations – that women were persecuted. For their claim to magical power undermined the power of the authorities and the state, giving confidence to the poor in their ability to manipulate the natural and social environment and possibly subvert the constituted order.” Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Automedia. p. 174.
“The question that remains is whether the rise of the modern scientific method can be considered the cause of the witch-hunt. This view has been argued most forcefully by Carolyn Merchant in The Death of Nature which roots the persecution of the witches in the paradigm shift the scientific revolution, and particularly the rise of Cartesian mechanistic philosophy, provoked. According to Merchant, this shift replaced the organic worldview that had looked at nature, women, and the earth as nurturing mothers, with a mechanical one that degraded them to the rank of ‘standing resources,’ removing any ethical constraints to their exploitation. The woman-as-witch, Merchant argues, was persecuted as the embodiment of the ‘wild side’ of nature, of all that in nature seemed disorderly, uncontrollable, and thus antagonistic to the project undertaken by the new science.” Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Automedia. pp. 202-3; reference: Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper and Row.
“[After author’s criticism of Carolyn Merchants argument above] We should also consider that the intellectual scaffold that supported the persecution of the witches was not directly taken from the pages of philosophical rationalism. Rather, it was a transitional phenomenon, a sort of ideological bricolage that evolved under the pressure of the task it has to accomplish. Within it, elements taken from the fantastic world of medieval Christianity, rationalistic arguments, and modern bureaucratic court procedures combined, in the same way as in the forging of Nazism the cult of science and technology combined with a scenario pretending to restore an archaic, mythical world of blood bonds and pre-monetary allegiances.
“This point is suggested by Parinetto who observes that the witch-hunt was a classical instance of how, in the history of capitalism, ‘going back’ was a means of stepping forward, from the viewponit of establishing the conditions for capital accumulation. For in conjuring the devil, the inquisitors disposed of popular animism and pantheism, redefining in a more centralized fashion the location and distribution of power in the cosmos and society. Thus, paradoxically, in the witch-hunt the devil functioned as the true servant of God; he was the operator that most contributed to paving the way to the new science. Like a bailiff, or God’s secret agent, the Devil brought order into the world, emptying it from competing influences, and reasserting God as the exclusive ruler. He so well consolidated God’s command over human affairs that within a century, with the advent of Newtonian physics, God would be able to retire from the world, content to guard its clock-like operations from afar.” Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Automedia. pp. 203-4; reference: Parinetto, Luciano. 1998. Streghe e Potere: Il Capitale e las Persecuzione dei Diversi. Milano: Rusconi.
“… economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 64; this is a quotation of Robbins, Lionel. 1935. An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan.
“To function well, society also needs other public services: roads and a transport network so that goods can be transported; a public infrastructure so that economic activity can flourish; and some type of basic regulation to prevent fraud and malfeasance. Though many of these public services can be provided by markets and private citizens, the degree of coordination necessary to do so on a large scale often eludes all but a central authority. The state is thus inexorably intertwined with the economic institutions, as the enforcer of law and order, private property, and contracts, and often as a key provider of public services. Inclusive economic institutions need and use the state.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 76.
“We call such institutions, which have opposite properties to those we call inclusive, extractive economic institutions–extractive because such institutions are designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 76.
“We will refer to political institutions that are sufficiently centralized and pluralistic as inclusive political institutions. When either of these conditions fails, we will refer to the institutions as extractive political institutions.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 81.
“There is a strong synergy between economic and political institutions. Extractive political institutions concentrate power in the hands of a narrow elite and place few constraints on the exercise of this power. Economic institutions are then often structured by this elite to extract resources from the rest of the society. Extractive economic institutions thus naturally accompany extractive political institutions.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 81.
“New technologies make existing skills and machines obsolete. The process of economic growth and the inclusive institutions upon which it is based create losers as well as winners in the political arena and in the economic marketplace. Fear of creative destruction is often at the root of the opposition to inclusive economic and political institutions.
“European history provides a vivid example of the consequences of creative destruction. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, the governments of most European countries were controlled by aristocracies and traditional elites, whose major source of income was from landholdings or from trading privileges they enjoyed thanks to monopolies granted and entry barriers imposed by monarchs. Consistent with the idea of creative destruction, the spread of industries, factories, and towns took resources away from the land, reduced land rents, and increased the wages that landowners had to pay their workers…. Urbanization and the emergence of a socially conscious middle and working class also challenged the political monopoly of landed aristocracies….
“The aristocracy was not the only loser from industrialization. Artisans whose manual skills were being replaced by mechanization likewise opposed the spread of industry. Many organized against it, rioting and destroying the machines they saw as responsible for the decline of their livelihood…. John Kay, English inventor of the ‘flying shuttle’ in 1733, one of the first significant improvements in the mechanization of weaving, had his house burned down by Luddites in 1753.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. pp. 84-5.
“Without significant political centralization and a firm grip on political power, neither the South Korean military elites nor the Chinese Communist Party would have felt secure enough to manufacture significant economic reforms and still manage to cling to power. And without such centralization, the state in the Soviet Union or China could not have been able to coordinate economic activity to channel resources toward high productivity areas. A major dividing line between extractive political institutions is therefore their degree of political centralization.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 94.
“This [exclusive economic practices] changed after the Glorious Revolution. The government adopted a set of economic institutions that provided incentives for investment, trade, and innovation. It steadfastly enforced property rights, including patents granting property rights for ideas, thereby providing a major stimulus to innovation. It protected law and order. Historically unprecedented was the application of English law to all citizens. arbitrary taxation ceased, and monopolies were abolished almost completely. The English state aggressively promoted mercantile activities and worked to promote domestic industry, not only by removing barriers to the expansion of industrial activity but also by lending the full power of the English navy to defend mercantile interests. By rationalizing property rights, it facilitated the construction of infrastructure, particularly roads, canals, and later railways, that would prove to be crucial for industrial growth.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. pp. 102-3.
“Such critical junctures [e.g. Glorious Revolution, Cultural Revolution in China] are important because there are formidable barriers against gradual improvements, resulting from the synergy between extractive political and economic institutions and the support they give each other.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. pp. 106-7.
“The differences created by institutional drift become especially consequential, because they influence how society reacts to changes in economic or political circumstances during critical junctures.
“The richly divergent patterns of economic development around the world hinge on the interplay of critical junctures and institutional drift.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. pp. 108-9.
“The Black Death and the expansion of world trade after 1600 were both major critical junctures for European powers and interacted with different initial institutions to create a major divergence. Because in 1346 in Western Europe peasants had more power and autonomy than they did in Eastern Europe, the Black Death led to the dissolution of feudalism in the West and the Second Serfdom in the East…. Because in 1600 the grip of the Crown was weaker in England than in France and Spain, Atlantic trade opened the way to the creation of new institutions with greater pluralism in England, while strengthening the French and Spanish monarchs.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 110.
“But growth under extractive institutions differs in nature from growth brought forth by inclusive institutions. Most important, it will be not sustained growth that requires technological change, but rather growth based on existing technologies.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 124.
“By the 1970s, economic growth [in the UdSSR] had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 128.
“One of the key bases for the economic expansion of Venice was a series of contractual innovations making economic institutions much more inclusive. The most famous was the commenda, a rudimentary type of joint stock company, which formed only for the duration of a single trading mission. A commenda involved two partners, a ‘sedentary’ one who stayed in Venice and one who traveled. The sedentary partner put capital into the venture, while the traveling partner accompanied the cargo. Typically, the sedentary partner put in the lion’s share of the capital. Young entrepreneurs who did not have wealth themselves could then get into the trading business by traveling with the merchandise. It was a key channel of upward social mobility. Any losses in the voyage were shared according to the amount of capital the partners had put in. If the voyage made money, profits were based on two types of commenda contracts. If the commenda was unilateral, then the sedentary merchant provided 100 percent of the capital and received 75 percent of the profits. If it was bilateral, the sedentary merchant provided 67 percent of the capital and received 50 percent of the profits.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. pp. 152-3.
“This economic inclusiveness and the rise of new families through trade forced the political system to become even more open. The doge, who governed Venice, was selected for life by the General Assembly. Though a general gathering of all citizens, in practice the General Assembly was dominated by a core group of powerful families. Though the doge was very powerful, his power was gradually reduced over time by changes in political institutions. After 1032 the doge was elected along with a newly created Ducal Council, whose job was also to ensure that the doge did not acquire absolute power…. This institutional change was followed by a huge expansion of Venetian mercantile and naval power….
“The economic expansion of Venice, which created more pressure for political change, exploded after the changes in political and economic institutions that followed the murder of the doge in 1171….
“These political reforms led to a further series of institutional innovations: in law, the creation of independent magistrates, courts, a court of appeals, and new private contract and bankruptcy laws. These new Venetian economic institutions allowed the creation of new legal business forms and new types of contracts. There was rapid financial innovation, and we see the beginnings of modern banking around this time in Venice. The dynamic moving Venice toward fully inclusive institutions looked unstoppable.
“But there was a tension in all this. Economic growth supported by the inclusive Venetian institutions was accompanied by creative destruction. Each new wave of enterprising young men who became rich via the commenda or other similar economic institutions tended to reduce the profits and economic success of established elites. And they did not just reduce their profits; they also challenged their political power. Thus there was always a temptation, if they could get away with it, for the existing elites sitting in the Great Council to close down the system to these new people….
“On October 3, 1286, a proposal was made to the Great Council that the rules be amended so that nominations had to be confirmed by a majority in the Council of Forty, which was tightly controlled by elite families….
“The debates and constitutional amendments of 1286 presaged La Serrata (‘The Closure’) of Venice. In February 1297, it was decided that if you had been a member of the Great Council in the previous four years, you received automatic nomination and approval….
“Having implemented a political Serratta, the Great Council then moved to adopt an economic Serratta. The switch toward extractive political institutions was now being followed by a move toward extractive economic institutions. Most important, they banned the use of commenda contracts, one of the great institutional innovations that had made Venice rich…. Another step came when, starting in 1314, the Venetian state began to take over and nationalize trade. It organized state galleys to engage in trade and, from 1324 on, began to charge individuals high levels of taxes if they wanted to engage in trade. Long-distance trade became the preserve of the nobility. This was the beginning of the end of Venetian prosperity.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. pp. 153-156.
“By 1686 in London, for example, there were 702 merchants exporting to the Caribbean and 1,283 importing. North American had 691 exporting and 626 importing merchants. They employed warehousemen, sailors, captains, dockworkers, clerks–all of whom broadly shared their interests. Other vibrant ports, such as Bristol, Liverpool, and Portsmouth, were similarly full of such merchants. These new men wanted and demanded different economic institutions, and as they got wealthier through trade, they became more powerful….
“When the Long Parliament sat and the Civil War broke out in 1642, these merchants primarily sided with the parliamentary cause. In the 1670s they were heavily involved in the formation of the Whig Party, to oppose Stuart absolutism, and in 1688 they would be pivotal in deposing James II. So the expanding trade opportunities presented by the Americas, the mass entry of English merchants into this trade and the economic development of the colonies, and the fortunes they made in the process, tipped the balance of power in the struggle between the monarchy and those opposed to absolutism.
“Perhaps most critically, the emergence and empowerment of diverse interests–ranging from the gentry, a class of commercial farmers that had emerged in the Tudor period, to different types of manufacturers to Atlantic traders–meant that the coalition against Stuart absolutism was not only strong but also broad. This coalition was strengthened even more by the formation of the Whig Party in the 1670s, which provided an organization to further its interests. Its empowerment was what underpinned pluralism following the Glorious Revolution.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 210.
“The Glorious Revolution was a momentous event precisely because it was led by an emboldened broad coalition and further empowered this coalition, which managed to forge a constitutional regime with constraints on the power of both the executive and, equally crucially, any one of its members. It was, for example, these constraints that prevented the wool manufacturers from being able to crush the potential competition from the cotton and fustian manufacturers. Thus this broad coalition was essential in the lead-up to a strong Parliament after 1688, but it also meant that there were checks within Parliament against any single group becoming too powerful and abusing its power. It was the critical factor in the emergence of pluralistic political institutions.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 211.
“The reasoning of the Ming and Qing states for opposing international trade is by now familiar: the fear of creative destruction. The leaders’ primary aim was political stability. International trade was potentially destabilizing as merchants were enriched and emboldened, as they were in England during the era of Atlantic expansion. This was not just what the rulers believed during the Ming [1368 – 1644] and Qing [after 1644] dynasties, but also the attitude of the rulers of the Song dynasty [960 – 1279], even if they were willing to sponsor technological innovations and permit greater commercial freedom, provided that this was under their control. Things got worse under the Ming and Qing dynasties as the control of the state on economic activity tightened and overseas trade was banned. There were certainly markets and trade in Ming and Qing China, and the government taxed the domestic economy quite lightly. However, it did little to support innovation, and it exchanged the development of mercantile or industrial prosperity for political stability.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. pp. 233-4.
“We can get some sense of this [resistance to new technology in Africa such as to writing] from the Kingdom of Taqali, situated to the northwest of Somalia, in the Nuba Hills of southern Sudan. The Kingdom of Taqali was formed in the late eighteenth century by a band of warriors led by a man called Isma’il, and it stayed independent until amalgamated into the British Empire in 1884. The Taqali kings and people had access to writing in Arabic, but it was not used–except by the kings, for external communication with other polities and diplomatic correspondence….
“Part of the story is that the citizens resisted the use of writing because they feared that it would be used to control resources, such as valuable land, by allowing the state to claim ownership. They also feared that it would lead to more systematic taxation. The dynasty that Ismai’il started did not get into a powerful state. Even if it had wanted to, the state was not strong enough to impose its will over the objections of the citizens. But there were other more subtle factors at work. Various elites also opposed political centralization, for example, preferring oral to written interaction with citizens, because this allowed them maximum discretion. Written laws or orders could not be taken back or denied and were harder to change; they set benchmarks that governing elites might want to reverse. So neither the ruled nor the rulers of Taqali saw the introduction of writing to be to their advantage. The ruled feared how the rulers would use it, and the rulers themselves saw the absence of writing as aiding their quite precarious grip on power.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. pp. 241-2.
“The initial circumstances in Sydney, New South Wales, were very similar to those in Jamestown, Virginia, 181 years earlier, though the settlers at Jamestown were mostly indentured laborers, rather than convicts. In both cases the initial circumstances did not allow for the creation of extractive colonial institutions. Neither colony had dense populations of indigenous peoples to exploit, ready access to precious metals such as gold or silver, or soil and crops that would make slave plantations economically viable. The slave trade was still vibrant in the 1780s, and New South Wales could have been filled up with slaves had it been profitable. It wasn’t. Both Virginia Company and the soldiers and free settlers who ran New South Wales bowed to the pressures, gradually creating inclusive economic institutions that developed in tandem with inclusive political institutions. This happened with even less of a struggle in New South Wales than it had in Virginia.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. pp. 281-2.
“In England there was a long history of absolutist rule that was deeply entrenched and required a revolution to remove it. In the United States and Australia, there was no such thing. Though Lord Baltimore in Maryland and John Macarthur in New South Wales might have aspired to such a role, they could not establish a strong enough grip on society for their plans to bear fruit.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 282.
“The rule of law is a very strange concept when you think about it in historical perspective. Why should laws be applied equally to all? If the king and the aristocracy have political power and the rest don’t, it’s only natural that whatever is fair game for the king and the aristocracy should be banned and punishable for the rest. Indeed, the rule of law is not imaginable under absolutist political institutions. It is a creation of pluralist political institutions and of the broad coalitions that support such pluralism. It’s only when many individuals and groups have a say in decisions, and the political power to have a seat at the table, that the idea that they should all be treated fairly starts making sense. By the early eighteenth century, Britain was becoming sufficiently pluralistic, and the Whig elites would discover that, as enshrined in the notion of the rule of law, laws and institutions would constrain them, too….
“… the Glorious Revolution was not the overthrow of one elite by another, but a revolution against absolutism by a broad coalition made up of the gentry, merchants, and manufacturers as well as groupings of Whigs and Tories. The emergence of pluralist political institutions was a consequence of this revolution. The rule of law also emerged as a by-product of this process. With many parties at the table sharing power, it was natural to have laws and constraints apply to all of them, lest one party start amassing too much power and ultimately undermine the very foundations of pluralism. Thus the notion that there were limits and restraints on rulers, the essence of the rule of law, as part of the logic of pluralism engendered by the broad coalition that up the opposition to Stuart absolutism.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. pp. 306-7.
“The internal logic of oligarchies [“iron law of oligarchy”], and in fact of all hierarchical organizations, is that … they will reproduce themselves not only when the same group is in power, but even when an entirely new group takes control.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 360.
“Our theory has attempted to achieve this [give useful and empirically well-grounded explanation for a range of processes] by operating on two levels. The first is the distinction between extractive and inclusive economic and political institutions. The second is our explanation for why inclusive institutions emerged in some parts of the world and not in others. While the first level of our theory is about an institutional interpretation of history, the second level is about how history had shaped institutional trajectories of nations.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 429.
“Central to our theory is the link between inclusive economic and political institutions and prosperity. Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions….
“Inclusive economic institutions are in turn supported by, and support, inclusive political institutions, that is, those that distribute political power widely in a pluralistic manner and are able to achieve some amount of political centralization so as to establish law and order, the foundations of secure property rights, and an inclusive market economy. Similarly, extractive economic institutions are synergistically linked to extractive political institutions, which concentrate power in the hands of a few, who will then have incentives to maintain and develop extractive economic institutions for their benefit and use the resources they obtain to cement their hold on political power.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. pp. 429-430.
“What is crucial, however, is that growth under extractive institutions will not be sustained, for two key reasons. First, sustained economic growth requires innovation, and innovation cannot be decoupled from creative destruction, which replaces the old with the new in the economic realm and also destabilizes established power relations in politics. Because elites dominating extractive institutions fear creative destruction, they will resist it, and any growth that germinates under extractive institutions will be ultimately short lived. Second, the ability of those who dominate extractive institutions to benefit greatly at the expense of the rest of society implies that political power under extractive institutions is highly coveted, making many groups and individuals fight to obtain it. As a consequence, there will be powerful forces pushing societies under extractive institutions toward political instability.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 430.
“The synergies between extractive economic and political institutions create a vicious circle, where extractive institutions, once in place, tend to persist. Similarly, there is a virtuous circle associated with inclusive economic and political institutions.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. pp. 430-1.
“In the same way that genes of two isolated populations of organisms will drift apart slowly because of random mutations in the so-called process of evolutionary or genetic drift, two otherwise similar societies will also drift apart institutionally–albeit, again, slowly.” Acemoglu, Daron & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Currency. p. 431.
“This raises the question: Why would these immigrants accept drawbacks of urban life, such as reduced personal freedom and increased susceptibility to disease, that, most likely, would have been well known to them?
“In the Mesopotamian case, this question [why immigrants came to early cities when death rates were probably high – “McNeill’s paradox”] has already been addressed from a variety of complementary viewpoints. Some researchers, for instance, note that from the perspective of rural populations, cities would have appeared as desirable places of refuge during times of regional hostilities. Other scholars emphasize the psychological underpinnings of Mesopotamian urban life, highlighting the appeal of living in centers that served as reservoirs of regional agricultural surpluses, providing insurance against what must have been perceived as a chronically unstable and unpredictable environment or, alternately, the allure of living in towns that were imagined to be the dwelling places of capricious gods who intervened in the world on a daily basis.
“A final group of researchers, among whom I count myself, highlights the connection between the expansion of economic activity in early Mesopotamian cities and the demographic growth of those cities, mostly by means of population inflows…. Taken together, these various scholarly traditions highlight the robust correlations that commonly exist among the rate of growth of a region, the number and size of its cities, the degree of specialization of their inhabitants, the rate of innovation of their industries, and the proportion of their economic output subject to increasing returns to scale.” Algaze, Guillermo. 2018. “Entropic Cities: The Paradox of Urbanism in Ancient Mesopotamia.” Current Anthropology. February. 39(1). p. 30.
“Explicitly or not, scholars who correlate economic and demographic growth conceptualize cities as transport hubs serving to mobilize regional and interregional resources and to produce commodities for internal consumption and export, all based on principles of comparative and competitive advantage. Ultimately based on the work of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, this perspective sees the influx of new populations into cities (whether willingly or dragooned) as ultimately explained by labor needs within those cities that arise from self-amplifying cycles set into motion by regional and cross-cultural exchange, with trade leading to increases in labor specialization, specialization leading to improvements in productivity, and both combining to widen the extent of existing markets. As this iterative process repeats itself at an ever-larger scale, economic activity and population grow in tandem.” Algaze, Guillermo. 2018. “Entropic Cities: The Paradox of Urbanism in Ancient Mesopotamia.” Current Anthropology. February. 39(1). p. 30.
“While forward and backward linkages are reasonably predictable and affect economic sectors that are demonstrably related at any one time, not all potential linkages are coterminous or easily foreseen. Unanticipated ramifications from the interaction between new types of work (diversification) and new forms of working (specialization) often lead to a third type of linkages that arise unexpectedly at later times, in different locations, and indifferent industries. For lack of a better term, I propose to refer to such linkages as ‘leapfrog’ ones. One example will suffice to illustrate such linkages: the spoke wheel, a means of transport attested by the end of the third millennium BC across parts of Central Asia, the Indus Valley, and Mesopotamia that was transformed, millennia later, during the classical age, into the upright waterwheel, an entirely new source of energy with broad ramifications in a variety of industries.
“Operating in tandem, forward, backward, and leapfrog linkages create a sort of evolutionary ratchet effect, wherein developments in one area of human activity create the basis from which further developments in the same or other areas will occur, generating recursive and cumulative cycles of economic growth that boost employment (via increased diversification and specialization) and population densities in already growing centers to levels that would have been unachievable by individual productive sectors operating outside a network of mutual linkages.” Algaze, Guillermo. 2018. “Entropic Cities: The Paradox of Urbanism in Ancient Mesopotamia.” Current Anthropology. February. 39(1). pp. 31-2.
“Further examples of the replacement of exotic imported stones are not difficult to find. Cases in point are the manufacture of frit and the use of colored glazes applied over clay. Of the two, frit was the earliest, and its origins trace back at least to the first quarter of the second millennium BC. Frit is a mixture of silicate of copper and high-soda mineral compounds that hardens into a crystalline material after firing. Frit production is, in effect, a way to make synthetic precious stones with a bluish/greenish tinge. It was produced in shapes that replaced beads, seals, inlays, architectural decorations, foundation deposits, and even plaques and statues, which in earlier times would have been made of lapis lazuli or various other imported stones.
“Frit is a perfect example of what I earlier described as leapfrog linkages, namely, how advances in one industry often lead to codevelopments in other areas. The manufacture of frit takes several established technological routines from different activities and recombines them into a new industry. In this case, it takes granular copper debris from metallurgical processes, combines it with sand or quartz, and then combines that, in turn, with either lime powder from lime plaster production or sodium carbonate from the production of alkalis used in textile production, and presto: after firing the mixture in a high temperature, a new industry is born, and with it the need for imported exotic stones lessens and local employment blooms.” Algaze, Guillermo. 2018. “Entropic Cities: The Paradox of Urbanism in Ancient Mesopotamia.” Current Anthropology. February. 39(1). p. 34.
“A further substitution of an imported utilitarian stone took place in the early centuries of the second millennium BC. This involved the replacement of vesicular basalt, which historically was used to process grain into flour in ancient Mesopotamia and could be obtained only from lava flows in northern Syria and southeastern Turkey. Evidence stems from the site of Tell Abu Duwari, where Elizabeth Stone and Paul Zimansky found numerous slabs of what, at first, they thought was basalt. However, subsequent chemical analyses showed that the slabs were deliberately manufactured by subjecting local alluvial silt to temperatures in excess of 1,200̊C, pouring the melted silt into molds, and then controlling the cooling process so that it would lose heat gradually.
“Stone and Zimansky calculate that at least 100 m3 of the synthetic basalt littered the site’s surface, and no doubt much more than that lurks under the surface. In addition to the obvious forward and backward linkages that such a scale of production would have entailed, we have here another excellent example of the sort of leapfrog linkages described earlier. No doubt the ability to create kilns capable of achieving high temperatures, maintaining them for an extended time, and reducing heat gradually–necessary to craft the synthetic basalt–owes much to earlier advances in kiln technology made while producing metals, ceramics, or alkalis.” Algaze, Guillermo. 2018. “Entropic Cities: The Paradox of Urbanism in Ancient Mesopotamia.” Current Anthropology. February. 39(1). p. 35; reference: Stone, Elizabeth & P. Zimansky. 2004. The Anatomy of a Mesopotamian City: Survey and Soundings at Mashkan-Shapir. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
“The study of how economic growth occurs has identified two main regimes: extensive growth and intensive growth. Extensive growth refers to the proportional increase in material output from an increase in the quantity of inputs: allocating more labor to foraging leads to an increase in collected food, an increase in the amount of obsidian used to produce blades leads to a proportional increase in the number of tools, and an expansion in the amount of land used to grow food can lead to an increase in harvested wheat. Intensive growth, on the other hand, is an increase in material output caused by more efficient use of inputs (land, labor, energy, materials) so that the increase in output is greater than the increase in input.” Smith, Michael & Jose Lobo. Commentary to: Algaze, Guillermo. 2018. “Entropic Cities: The Paradox of Urbanism in Ancient Mesopotamia.” Current Anthropology. February. 39(1). pp. 45-6.
“From a synergy perspective, it is immaterial whether or not a particular form of synergy is biologically determined, or socially learned, or invented de novo during the lifetime of an animal, or some combination of the three. What matters are the adaptive consequences for survival and reproduction. It is the bioeconomic payoffs that count.” Corning, Peter. 2007. “Synergy Goes to War: A Bioeconomic Theory of Collective Violence.” Journal of Bioeconomics. 9:2.
“The consequences of a behavior determine its evolutionary success. The economic view tells us that the consequences of a behavioral action can be assessed by the ratio of benefits (b) to costs (c). EIFT [extended inclusive fitness theory] shows that if b/c is high, even if b is dependent on a network of feed-back mechanisms, biological and economic evolution will favor this behavior.” Jaffe, Klaus. 2015. “Synergy drives the evolutionary dynamics in biology and economics.” CS-DC15 World e-conference. Sept. Tempe, US. had-01291123. p. 16.
“The term ‘pastoralism’ encompasses a broad range of animal husbandry practices that may or may not include mobility and some amount of agriculture, as well as a broad range of variation in community size and social organization.” Arbuckle, Benjamin & E.L. Hammer. 2018. “The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of Archaeological Research. doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-0124-8. p. 3.
“Where specific bioarchaeological data are available to address Neolithic pastoral mobility, herds appear to have been firmly anchored to agricultural villages. For example, at southern Levantine megasites such as Ain Jamman, Ain Ghazal, and Basta, caprines of all ages were slaughtered including young and older lambs, which indicates that herds were present around settlements for most of the year. In a recent study of isotopic evidence for caprine exploitation at Ain Ghazal, Makarewicz found no evidence for the use of distant grasslands as pasture and concluded that caprines were herded in the vicinity of the settlement. Together these results provide little support for large-scale pastoral mobility or specialization; instead Neolithic pastoralism was largely local in scale and operated within highly integrated, mixed agropastoral systems.” Arbuckle, Benjamin & E.L. Hammer. 2018. “The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of Archaeological Research. doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-0124-8. p. 15; reference: Makarwwicz, 2014.
“In addition to local-scale herding practices, PN [pottery Neolithic; 6500 – 5500 BCE] animal economics also exhibit early evidence for the exploitation of secondary products. The use of herds for secondary products, especially milk and fiber, is a central component of recent pastoralist lifeways. The first use of secondary products represents an important innovation that greatly increased the productive potential of early pastoral economies.” Arbuckle, Benjamin & E.L. Hammer. 2018. “The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of Archaeological Research. doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-0124-8. p. 17.
“Central features of Late Chalcolithic (LC) [4000 – 3000 BCE] pastoralism include increasing use of secondary products, particularly wool and animal traction; the appearance of the domestic donkey as well as wheeled vehicles in Southwest Asia; an expansion of sheep pastoralism, perhaps associated with the expansion of the southern Mesopotamian Uruk culture; and the emergence of a new source of archaeological evidence for pastoralism: writing.
“Sherrat argued in his early descriptions of the secondary products revolution (SPR) that an increased ability to harness animal power and productivity marked by the use of large animals for pulling plows and carts as well as the exploitation of dairy and animal fiber, was key to the development of complex societies in the Old World. Although archaeological evidence for the timing of the origins of the use of dairy products and perhaps animal traction has been pushed back to the Neolithic, the fourth millennium was an important period for intensification in the use of secondary products.” Arbuckle, Benjamin & E.L. Hammer. 2018. “The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of Archaeological Research. doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-0124-8. p. 22; reference: Sherrat, 1981.
“In addition to a transportation revolution in the fourth millennium, wool began to be used heavily. Although wooly sheep likely have their origins earlier in the Chalcolithic, wool was certainly used to produce textiles by the fourth millennium, as revealed by the first archaeological remains of woolen textiles.” Arbuckle, Benjamin & E.L. Hammer. 2018. “The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of Archaeological Research. doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-0124-8. p. 23.
“Archaeological approaches to pastoralism in Southwest Asia overemphasize the role of specialized, mobile forms of pastoralism as well as the dimorphic relationship between herders and farmers in the past…. Where data are available, they overwhelmingly suggest that sheep, goat, and cattle pastoralism was primarily practiced as part of integrated agropastoral economies and operated on a local scale.” Arbuckle, Benjamin & E.L. Hammer. 2018. “The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of Archaeological Research. doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-0124-8. p. 37.
“Although intensive pre-domestic management of sheep, goats, and cattle emerged in a variety of village communities across the Fertile Crescent region in the ninth millennium BC, these early management practices were characterized by high levels of local variability. Early herders managed phenotypically wild animals, facing significant problems with maintaining herd productivity and viability, and their pastoral systems are likely without modern analogs.
“From this initial millennium of experimental pastoralism, there emerged a body of effective management techniques that spread across Southwest Asia, including practices such as penning, foddering, pasturing, young male culling, and perhaps castration, as well as populations of biologically productive domesticated livestock adapted to living and breeding in anthropogenic environments….
“By the mid-to-late seventh millennium BC, it is clear that livestock herds were managed for both secondary and primary products and that milk was exploited and processed into low-lactose dairy products in Syria and central Anatolia.” Arbuckle, Benjamin & E.L. Hammer. 2018. “The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of Archaeological Research. doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-0124-8. pp. 37-8.
“Although the origins of wool-bearing sheep are currently poorly understood, caprine demographic profiles and the proliferation of material culture associated with textile production suggest the emergence of increasingly complex secondary products economies focused on animal fiber in the fifth millennium. By the third millennium, sheep breeding had progressed to the point that specific localities were known for both the quality and color of the wool their herds produced, and both urban and rural economies involved wool production.” Arbuckle, Benjamin & E.L. Hammer. 2018. “The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of Archaeological Research. doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-0124-8. p. 38.
“Much of the archaeological literature on pastoralism in Southwest Asia exaggerates evidence for pastoral mobility, specialization, and the dimorphic model of herder-farmer interaction, ignoring overwhelming evidence that herding was often tethered to agricultural settlements and integrated with mixed agropastoral economies. Archaeological evidence clearly shows that pastoralism emerged hand in hand with agricultural practices in early Neolithic settlements characterized by a high degree of sedentism. In the ‘core’ regions of the Southwest Asian Neolithic, there was no stage of pre-agricultural pastoralism, unlike the situation described for neighboring regions such as North Africa and the central Asia steppe. Interesting exceptions to this general rule are currently being explored as archaeological research pushes outside the Fertile Crescent and into the arid interior regions of Syria, Jordan, and the Arabian Peninsula, where hunter-gatherer-herder economies may have developed.” Arbuckle, Benjamin & E.L. Hammer. 2018. “The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of Archaeological Research. doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-0124-8. p. 39.
“Overall, our reading of the history of pastoralism from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age is that pastoralism developed within subsistence systems based on agriculture, evolved over millennia in response to technological innovations, and was frequently tethered to sedentary farming communities.” Arbuckle, Benjamin & E.L. Hammer. 2018. “The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of Archaeological Research. doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-0124-8. p. 42.
“Instead of representing a static archetype, pastoralism in Southwest Asia is better understood as a set of dynamic and ever-changing adaptations responding on a local, regional, and even supra-regional level to changes in economy, ecology, politics, and demographics.” Arbuckle, Benjamin & E.L. Hammer. 2018. “The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of Archaeological Research. doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-0124-8. p. 43.
“But as different as our civilization may be when compared to any of its predecessors, it works within the same costraint: it is nothing but a subset of the biosphere, that relatively very thin and both highly resilient and highly fragile envelope within which carbon-based living organisms can survive.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. xvii.
“Given the variety of growth processes, it is not surprising that even the two large categories of growth trajectories–S-shaped functions and confined exponential growth function–cannot subsume all variations of real-world growth. Ultimately, growth trajectories must be governed by first principles expressed through biochemical reactions, material limits, entropy change, and information decay, but actual nonlinear progressions will show irregularities and deviations from specific growth functions.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 53.
“… it is obvious that agriculture–cultivation of domesticated plants for food, feed, and raw materials–can be best defined as a set of activities to maximize NEP [net primary productivity], the goal that is achieved by maximizing GPP [gross primary productivity] while minimizing RA [autotrophic respiration] and, above all, by reducing RH. [heterotrophic respiration or the consumption of fixed photosynthate by organisms ranging from bacteria and insects to grazing ungulates]” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 111.
“… ever since White et al published a meta-analysis of 127 interspecific allometric exponents there should have been no doubts about the absence of any universal metabolic allometry. The effect of body mass on metabolic rate is significantly heterogeneous and in general it is stronger for endotherms than for ectotherms, with observed mean exponents of 0.804 for ectotherms and 0.704 for endotherms.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 134; reference: White, C.R. et al. 2007. “Allometric exponents do not support a universal metabolic allometry.” Ecology. 88:315-323.
“Small mammals with a high rate of metabolism grow fast but yield very little: this puts 1-2 kg rabbits and guinea pigs at the bottom of domesticates. Very large mammals grow too slowly and require large amounts of feed. As McCullough observed, animals raised for meat can be thus seen as compromise mammals, combining relatively fast growth with the capacity to accumulate mass, and that limits their body weights mostly to 40-100 kg. Not surprisingly, the largest domesticates are ruminants that can digest roughages indigestible by other mammals and can survive only by grazing.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 145; reference: McCullough, M. E. 1973. Optimum Feeding of Dairy Animals: For Milk and Meat. Athens: U of Georgia Press.
“No domesticated mammal can produce meat as efficiently as a pig, not because of its omnivory but because its basal metabolism is almost 40% lower than would be expected for its adult body weight. During the fastest phase of its growth, a healthy pig converts almost two-thirds of all metabolized energy in feed to grow new tissues, a performance more than 40% better than in cattle and even slightly ahead of chickens.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. pp. 145-6.
“These adjustments show that in mass terms (kg of feed/kg of edible meat and associated fat), the recent American feeding efficiency ratios have averaged about 25 for beef (but it must be remembered that most of it is phytomass indigestible by nonruminants), nine for pork and more than three for chicken, implying respective energy conversion efficiencies of 4%, 10% and 30%, while about 25 MJ of feed energy are needed to produce a gram of beef protein and the rates are about 10 MJ/g for pork and 2.5 MJ/g for chicken. These comparisons show that chicken growth produces meat protein with by far the highest efficiency and hence with relatively the lowest environmental impact, and the combination explains why chicken became the modern world’s most popular meat.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 151.
“Bogin identified five ways in which human growth differs from that of all other placental mammals. First, human growth velocity, both in mass and length, peaks during gestation and postnatal growth decelerates during infancy, while other placental mammals, be they mice or cattle, have the highest growth velocities during their infancy. Second, sexual maturation of mammals occurs soon after their weaning, but in humans there is, on average, a delay for more than a decade between gestation and puberty.
“Third, puberty in mammals occurs while their growth rates are in decline but still close to maxima, while in humans it takes place while growth in both height and mass are at their lowest postnatal points. Fourth, human puberty is marked by an adolescent growth spurt, while mammalian growth rates continue to decline; this growth spurt in stature and skeletal maturation is uniquely human, absent even in the closest primate species. Lastly, other mammals begin to reproduce soon after puberty but humans delay their reproduction.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 152; reference: Bogin, B. 1999. “Evolutionary perspective on human growth.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 28:109-153.
“The best explanation of that paradox [metabolic high cost of hominin brains] was the expensive-tissue hypothesis: it posits the need for a tradeoff, a reduction in the mass of another metabolic organ. That would be difficult with heart, liver, and kidneys but it has been accomplished with the human gastrointestinal tract thanks to an improved quality of diet. Unlike in nonhuman primates that have nearly half of their gut mass in the colon and 14-29% in the small intestine, the reverse is true in humans, with the small intestine accounting for nearly 60% and the colon for 17-25%. In turn, this shift was obviously related to eating more foods of better quality and higher energy-density, including the meat, nutrient-rich innards and fat that began to enter hominin diets with higher frequency in contrast to grasses, leaves, fruits, and tubers that dominate simian diets. Improved walking efficiency was another explanatory ingredient.
“But a new study of total energy expenditure in humans and large primates … shows that the key to our high encephalization has been metabolic acceleration. The total energy expenditure of humans exceeds that of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans by, respectively, about 400, 635, and 820 kcal/day, and this difference (averaging 27% more energy per day than chimpanzees) readily accommodates the cost of growth and maintenance of our greater brain and reproductive output. High encephalization is thus supported by hypermetabolic existence.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. pp. 153-4.
“Moreover, these [9 essential] amino acids [that humans cannot synthesize themselves] must be present in adequate proportions: while all common plant foods have incomplete proteins, all animal proteins have the desirable amino acid ratios and are also almost completely digestible.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 161.
“The body of masses of Pleistocene Homo specimens were, on average, about 10% larger than the averages for humans now living in the same latitudes. The decline of average body masses began about 50,000 years ago and continued during the Neolithic period, undoubtedly associated with the declining selective advantage of larger body weights.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. pp. 168-9.
“And WHO predicted that the number of obese children will surpass the total of undernourished ones as soon as 2022.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 171.
“Even cursory attempts at parallel classifications of man-made objects (ranging from smallest tools to massive structures) indicate that the diversity of artifacts is at least comparable to the diversity of organisms–and, although such a comparison is obviously one of apples and automobiles, it is not indefensible to conclude that the total of anthropogenic ‘species’ is actually far larger.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 225.
“There is a 100 million-fold difference in the mass of mammals between the smallest and the largest, but there is an even larger mass difference between the lightest flying object (miniature photo drone at 5 g) and fully loaded Airbus 380 (560 t).” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 228.
“Consequently, no matter if we compare overall diversity (species through evolution, artifacts through deliberate design) or the ranges of mass, capacity or typical performance, the universe of man-made objects and structures is as rich, and in some ways even richer, than the variety contained within the biosphere.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 228.
“Studies of mitochondrial DNA have identified a severe population shrinkage that took place between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago: Toba’s megavolcanic eruption is the best explanation of this late Pleistocene population bottleneck that reduced the global total to fewer than 10,000 individuals and brought the species close to extinction and ending its evolution.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 309.
“The possibility of further fertility declines has been conceptualized by Lutz et al as the low fertility trap: once a country’s fertility declines to a very low level, three self-reinforcing mechanisms can prevent it from ever rising again.
“The demographic component is the negative momentum of the established decline, as delayed childbirths and long spells of low fertility produce sequentially smaller and smaller infant cohorts. The normative component (with fewer and fewer children around) changes the perception of the ideal family size and sets it well below the replacement level. And the economic component arises from the altered relationship between personal aspirations and expected income: an aging population and shrinking labor force bring reduced social benefits, higher taxes, and lower disposable income, conditions when not only having children but even getting married becomes an unaffordable option.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 323; reference: Lutz W. et al. 2006. “The low-fertility trap hypothesis: Forces that may lead to further postponement and fewer births in Europe.” Vienna: Yearbook of Population Research. 4:167-192.
“Cities have also had a disproportionate influence on creating culture, setting commercial priorities, influencing political development, supplying an educated labor force, determining tastes and fashions, and fostering innovation.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 332.
“Growing cities enjoy disproportionate increases in productivity, average income, and accumulated wealth that can be attributed to the phenomenon of agglomeration whose importance–in terms of transport cost savings, customer-supplier interactions, labor pooling, and exchange of knowledge allowing companies, regardless of their size, to take advantage of economies of scale and scope–was first recognized by Marshall. Marshall’s law has been examined and elaborated by many economic analyses that have focused on transportation costs, and the sharing, matching and learning opportunities so uniquely afforded by growing cities.
“These realities are far more important than any natural advantages (such as a deep port or a location in a heavily frequented valley) that might have played some role in the past but that now appear to explain no more than about one-quarter of existing industrial concentrations.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 340; reference: Marshall, A. 1890. Principles of Economics. London: Macmillan.
“Studies [to explain city agglomeration of advantages] have focused on the accumulation of knowledge whose benefits also accrue to companies outside the original inventing outfit or even to different industries; on the importance of investment in human capital, and on the synergy of physical capital and disembodied knowledge; on the role of innovation spillovers in generating economic growth; and on the critical role of cities in fostering and diffusing these changes. But the specifics of this process will change with the stages of agglomeration. For example, an analysis of 170 US cities between 1956 and 1987 showed that interindustry knowledge spillovers were less important than the adoption of an innovation by additional sectors, particularly in fairly mature cities.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 341.
“Remarkably, even the post-1950 rise of inexpensive long-distance transportation (first large bulk carriers and tankers, then container ships in maritime trade; containerized diesel or electric railway shipments; long-distance trucking) and the rapid post-1980 diffusion of highly affordable instant communication, information and data sharing have not weakened the process of agglomeration…. And no less remarkably, a well-known array of congestion costs accompanying agglomeration (crowding, cost of living, traffic, noise, pollution) has not been costly enough to curtail the growth even in the cities notorious for their combination of such problems,….” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 341.
“Conurbations consist of ever-larger contiguously built-up areas (or transportation and material- and product-handling districts and corridors) but they are not classic cities with single centers that are true hubs of urban life and that include a central business district, government offices, and major cultural amenities.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. pp. 352-3.
“Both empires [Rome and China] had to face protracted barbarian pressures–but while Rome succumbed to them, China was eventually able to absorb them. Although both empires had to rely on large armies to defend their vulnerable borders, the institutions for doing so were different: Rome delegated power to its military and that made the Roman generals both kingmakers and contenders for the supreme power, while China’s governance relied on top-down bureaucracy that checked the authority of generals. These realities are illustrated by comparing the transfer of power in the Roman Empire and the Qin and Han dynasties: 62% of Roman changes of power involved military accession, while in China hereditary successions accounted for 87% of changes.
“Both empires had to reckon with new religions making bids for dominance, but the victorious Christianity did not prevent the Roman Empire’s demise (it may have actually accelerated it), while in china Buddhism (and later also Islam and Christianity) never rose to such prominence. The history of language is another key difference: although Latin survived for more than a millennium after the fall of the Western Roman Empire as the language of church, laws, chronicles, and serious writing, in everyday use it was gradually displaced by its successor Romance languages, while the Chinese language and ideographic writing system remained remarkably constant until the 1950s, when the Communists instituted just a minor change of character simplification. Clearly, the amalgam of China’s cultural forces was strongly centripetal, that of the Roman ways steadily more centrifugal.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 375.
“Although economists have a long history of ignoring energy, all economic activities are, in fundamental physical (thermodynamic) terms, simple or sequential energy conversions aimed at producing specific products or services.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 376.
“As for the basic material inputs, their increasing variety has been one of the quintessential marks of economic modernization. During the early modern era (1500-1800) even the best performers (18th-century England and Qing China) had overwhelmingly wooden economies (wooden house, ships, carriages, and tools) supplemented by considerable masses of stone and bricks in construction (common in Europe, rare in East Asia) and by very limited number of metallic, glass, and ceramic objects, ranging from armor to fine porcelain. Only the 19th century saw the introduction of affordable steel and cement and the first production of aluminum, and only the 20th century brought the synthesis of ammonia and plastics, and later of solid-state electronics based on silicon.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. pp. 376-7.
“The barter economy, common in all preindustrial societies, has been largely eliminated in modern economies, while unpaid services are as important as ever and unreported transactions are thriving. Housework has been always excluded from GDP, and although it can be argued that most household chores became easier over time, care of the elderly will be taking more unpaid time in all affluent societies with aging populations and rising life expectancies. Interestingly, Britain’s Office for National Statistics estimated that in 2014, when the country’s GDP reached £1.8 trillion, the value of unpaid labor was £1 trillion. And counting only what is sold and bought leaves out many important activities, particularly in modern economies with their rising shares of electronic information and digital production:….
“The size of the black economy can be only estimated but its share of total production was growing during the last decades of the 20th century, and at the beginning of the 21st century its size was put at about 15% of official GDP in affluent nations and at one-third in low-income countries, with shares as high as 40% or more in Mexico, the Philippines, and Nigeria.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 401.
“And then there is GDP’s almost utter inability to capture qualitative improvements.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 402.
“GDP is not a reliable measure of the total economic product, and it is an outright inferior measure as far as the quality of life and real prosperity are concerned. From a long-term perspective, the most fundamental failure of GDP accounts is to ignore diverse forms of environmental degradation caused by economic activities and treat the depletion of finite resources as current income that adds to wealth.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 402.
“All single-item theories of value suffer from what Rose called selective inattention to the complexity of civilizations and to the interconnectedness of things,….” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 406; reference: Rose, 1986 (missing info).
“Given the fact that the US continues to be the world’s largest economy, it is not surprising that the country’s declining growth rate has been reflected by the global trend. This is well conveyed by following decadal peak growth rates of the worldwide economic product: they declined from 6.66% during the 1960s to 5.35% during the 1970s, 4.65% during the 1980s and 3.67% during the century’s last decade. A high of 4.32% in 2010 was an exception due to the recovery from the world’s greatest post-WWII downturn, and the post-2011 rates stayed below 3%.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 416.
“A long-term perspective shows virtually no growth of major economies before 1750, and accelerated growth in the frontier (that is the richest Western) economies, in the UK after 1750 and the US a century later. This growth reached its peak in the middle of the 20th century and it has been declining ever since, raising an unorthodox question about how much further the frontier growth rate could decline. Gordon concludes that the second industrial revolution of 1870-1900 (with its introduction of electricity, internal combustion engines, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, launching of oil extraction and chemical industries) was far more consequential than both the first revolution (1750-1830, introducing steam and railroads) and the third (begun in 1960 and still unfolding, with computers, the Web and mobile phones as its icons).” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 423; reference: Gordon, R.J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.
“Looking ahead, Gordon sees six headwinds that will reduce long-term growth even if innovation were to continue at rates similar to the recent past: a changing population structure, changing education, rising inequality, impacts of globalization, challenges of energy and the environment, and the burdens of consumer and government debt.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 424; Gordon, R.J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.
“The best values for annual energy supply rates are as follows. Prehistoric rates, including food and fuel for open-fire cooking, were 5-6 GJ/capita. Roman energy capture for all uses was around 20 GJ/capita. Western (European and North American) means were no more than 25 GJ by 1800, and the population-weighted mean for all affluent countries was 240 GJ by the year 2000. Using this progression to gauge the advance of Western civilization would get us roughly a quintupling of average energy capture until the onset of the industrial era, and then roughly an order-of-magnitude increase by the year 2000, altogether an almost 50-fold gain in per capita energy supply since prehistory.
“But this sequence is misleading because it measures gross energy inputs, not the rates of actual useful energy conversions. Higher conversion efficiencies have been one of the key hallmarks of human progress. An open fire may convert less that 5% of wood energy into useful heat for cooking, but household gas-fueled heating furnaces are now more than 95% efficient. Draft animals or hard-working humans convert 15-20% of feed or food into useful mechanical energy, large diesel engines are 50% efficient, electric motors exceed 90%. My best estimates are that average conversion efficiencies of the total energy supply rose from no more than 10% in antiquity to 20% by 1900 and then close to 50% by the year 2000. After taking this quintupling of average conversion efficiency into account, the overall gain of useful Western energy capture would be about 250-fold since prehistory.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 445.
“This might be perhaps the simplest single-paragraph summation of civilizational advances, a concise summary of growth that matters most. Our ability to provide a reliable, adequate food supply thanks to yields an order of magnitude higher than in early agricultures has been made possible by large energy subsidies and it has been accompanied by excessive waste. A near-tripling of average life expectancies has been achieved primarily by drastic reductions of infant mortality and by effective control of bacterial infections. Our fastest mass-travel speeds are now 50-100 times higher than walking. Per capita economic product in affluent countries is roughly 100 times larger than in antiquity, and useful energy deployed per capita is up to 200-250 times higher. Gains in destructive power have seen multiples of many (5 – 11) orders of magnitude. And, for an average human, there has been essentially an infinitely large multiple in access to stored information, while the store of information civilization-wide will soon be a trillion times larger than it was two millennia ago.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. pp. 447-8.
“But scientific understanding offers no clear grasp of what lies ahead. Utopianism (now in its techno-optimistic-electronic-artificial-intelligence garb) and catastrophism (updated Malthusianism concerned with exhaustion of natural resources and destruction of the biosphere’s capacity to support continued economic growth) are not just labels for contradictory opinions and sentiments of uninformed commentators. The terms correctly describe divergent views that coexist within the mainstream of modern scientific research. Long-established scholarly journals considered to be the most reliable sources of information in their fields have been carrying these contradictory messages for decades, and I have not discerned any toning down of extreme claims in the 21st century.” Smil, Vaclav. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press. p. 499.
“Ultimately what is ‘urban’ is a matter of definition, but Catalhoyuk does not meet the criteria of either of the major definitions of urbanism used in archaeology and history. Louis Wirth’s influential demographic definition of urbanism requires a high population size and density, coupled with social heterogeneity. As a relatively homogeneous village of 15 ha, Catalhoyuk does not come close to qualifying as urban. The alternative functional definition requires settlements to have activities and institutions–whether economic, political, or religious–that affect a hinterland. Lacking such urban functions, Catalhoyuk does not match this definition either.” Smith, Michael, J. Ur & G. Feinman. 2014. “Jane Jacobs’ ‘Cities First’ Model and Archaeological Reality.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 38:1525-1535. doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12138. p. 1529.
“Excavations at Tell Brak have recovered all the indicators of urban social complexity found at Uruk, with the exception of pictographic tablets. Radiocarbon dating places these indicators at approximately 3900-3400 BC, that is, centuries earlier than the most reliable estimate for Uruk’s urban emergence. Brak’s initial urban development has interesting spatial properties, as revealed by intensive surface survey. Initially (ca. 4200-3900 BC) the settlement consisted of a central nucleus of about 55 hectares, with discrete small ‘suburbs’ surrounding it at a distance of 400-500 meters. With time, these outer settled areas expanded and grew together with the central nucleus to form a continuous settlement of around 130 hectares (ca. 3900-3400 BC)….
“This new picture of urban origins in extensive but low-density settlement finds further support from a second site, Khirbat al-Fakhar. Ceramic material dating to 4400-3900 BC is scattered over an area of 300 ha. The site had an uneven occupational pattern, with alternating built and open areas. The surface artifacts include enormous quantities of obsidian, a volcanic stone used for tools but originating hundreds of kilometers away. Residents of the site were importing raw material and manufacturing obsidian blades at an intensity unequalled anywhere else. Excavations have been limited, but they have not revealed any monumental architecture, or indeed any other signs that power was concentrated at Khirbat al-Fakhar. This combination of urban traits (demographic concentration, economic specialization) and characteristics not associated with Near Eastern cities (low density, apparent intra-settlement egalitarianism) led archaeologists to call the site ‘proto-urban.’” Smith, Michael, J. Ur & G. Feinman. 2014. “Jane Jacobs’ ‘Cities First’ Model and Archaeological Reality.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 38:1525-1535. doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12138. pp. 1529-30.
“To summarize, cities in the Near East emerged over more than a millennium, with initial proto-urban agglomerations around 4400-3900 BC, unequivocal cities in northern and southern Mesopotamia between 3900-3100 BC, and ubiquitous urbanism in the era of city-states between 2600-2000 BC. At the start of this sequence, human communities were using an integrated agricultural economy that was already three millennia old. That economy had its roots in the management of locally available plant and animal species that were millennia older still.” Smith, Michael, J. Ur & G. Feinman. 2014. “Jane Jacobs’ ‘Cities First’ Model and Archaeological Reality.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 38:1525-1535. doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12138. p. 1530.
“Along the Lower Yangtze, indisputable evidence for domesticated rice, which dates back at least 7000 years, precedes China’s earliest cities by several millennia. In North China, the domestication of millets may be even earlier than rice, so that the gap between the first domesticates and the earliest cities may even be longer…. There [high Mesoamerica], domesticated maize and squash predate even the first sedentary villages by up to six millennia, and urban settlements arose still later in time.” Smith, Michael, J. Ur & G. Feinman. 2014. “Jane Jacobs’ ‘Cities First’ Model and Archaeological Reality.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 38:1525-1535. doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12138. p. 1530.
“The repeated consistency of the documented temporal timeline in which agriculture preceded urbanism is clear in disproving Jacobs’ hypothesis.’
“Agriculture preceded urbanism. They did not, however, evolve independently. Settlement and agriculture developed in tandem, often making it impossible to say whether one was a response to the other.” Smith, Michael, J. Ur & G. Feinman. 2014. “Jane Jacobs’ ‘Cities First’ Model and Archaeological Reality.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 38:1525-1535. doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12138. p. 1531.
“Many parallels have been suggested between cities and other complex systems, from river networks and biological organisms to insect colonies and ecosystems. The central flaw of all these arguments is their emphasis on analogies of form rather than function, which limit their ability to help us understand and plan cities.” Bettencourt, Luis M.A. 2013. “The Origins of Scaling in Cities.” Science. June 21. 340:1438-1441. p. 1438.
“The interactions between people also provide the basis for institutional relationships via the appropriate groupings of individuals in social or economic organizations and by the consideration of the resulting links between such entities. Institutions and industries that benefit from strong mutual interactions may aggregate in space and time within the city in order to maximize their Y – W [urban property such as income minus total power dissipated], a point first made by Marshall in the context of industrial districts.” Bettencourt, Luis M.A. 2013. “The Origins of Scaling in Cities.” Science. June 21. 340:1438-1441. p. 1441; reference: Marshall, A. 1890. Principles of Economics. London: Macmillan.
“The spatial concentration and temporal acceleration of social interactions in cities has some striking qualitative parallels in other systems that are also driven by attractive forces and become denser with scale. The most familiar are stars, which burn faster and brighter with increasing mass. Thus, although the form of cities may resemble the vasculature of river networks or biological organisms, their primary function is as open-ended social reactors.” Bettencourt, Luis M.A. 2013. “The Origins of Scaling in Cities.” Science. June 21. 340:1438-1441. p. 1441.
“If ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,’ as the great twentieth century biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously observed, it is equally true that nothing about the evolution of biological complexity makes sense except in the light of synergy.” Corning, Peter. 2015. “A Synergy Approach to Living Systems.” UNESCO Complex Systems Digital Campus E-Conference. Sept 30-October 1, 2015. p. 1.
“What I call the Synergism Hypothesis is, in essence, an economic theory of complexity. Simply stated, cooperative interactions of various kinds, however they may occur, can produce novel combined effects – synergies – with functional advantages that may, in turn, become causes of natural selection. The focus of the Synergism Hypothesis is on the favorable selection of functional ‘wholes’ of different kinds, and the combinations of genes that produce these wholes. In effect, the parts (and their genes) that are responsible for producing the synergies may become interdependent ‘units’ of evolutionary change.” Corning, Peter. 2015. “A Synergy Approach to Living Systems.” UNESCO Complex Systems Digital Campus E-Conference. Sept 30-October 1, 2015. pp. 3-4.
“It [Synergistic Selection] includes, among other things, many additive phenomena with combined threshold effects and, more important, many ‘qualitative novelties’ that cannot even be expressed in quantitative terms. Synergistic Selection focuses our attention on the causal dynamics and selective consequences when synergistic phenomena of various kinds arise in the natural world.” Corning, Peter. 2015. “A Synergy Approach to Living Systems.” UNESCO Complex Systems Digital Campus E-Conference. Sept 30-October 1, 2015. p. 4.
“Functional synergy played a key role in this transformation [evolution of humankind]; it produced a variety of bioeconomic benefits – synergies of scale, threshold effects, new forms of cooperation and combinations of labor, functional complementarities, cost- and risk-sharing, and the like – all of which were highly advantageous for survival and reproduction. An accumulation of many small inventions over time, both cultural and biological, ultimately produced a synergistic new package. A threshold was crossed, rather like the achievement of fully-competent flight skills in evolving birds.
“This synergistic package included efficient bipedalism, highly manipulative hands, large and sophisticated brains, numerous tools and technologies, elaborate patterns of social cooperation, organized collective activities, and a unique capacity to accumulate and use (and communicate) information. In time, it also led to larger population numbers and more synergies of scale. Furthermore, each of these synergies supported and strengthened one another; there was a synergy of synergies. For instance, the controlled use of fire was a collective good that provided many different survival-related benefits, but it also required a combination of labor for gathering fuel, for fire tending, for transporting hot coals from one campsite to another and, eventually, for fire making. This in turn produced a greater degree of social interdependency and cooperation.” Corning, Peter. 2015. “A Synergy Approach to Living Systems.” UNESCO Complex Systems Digital Campus E-Conference. Sept 30-October 1, 2015. p. 5.
“… hunter-gatherers are often divided into two types, egalitarian and nonegalitarian, or what Woodburn labels immediate-return and delayed-return hunter-gatherers. In immediate-return systems, no surplus is created and resources, especially food, are consumed on a daily basis. These are egalitarian hunter-gatherers and include groups such as the Hadza, Mbuti, and Ju/’hoansi. Delayed-return hunter-gatherers, conversely, are those who reap the benefits of their labor some time after investing it. This category includes hunter-gatherers who store food for later consumption. But, in Woodburn’s view, it also includes Australian Aborigines because adult men give kinswomen away as brides in the expectation that their patrilineage will receive a bride back in the future; thus, men store obligations in the form of women. Extensive food storage does appear to be associated with nonegalitarian sociopolitical organizations among foragers, although it is not clear how storage itself necessarily results in exploitation.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 20; reference: Woodburn, J. 1980. “Hunters and Gatherers Today and Reconstruction of the Past.” In Soviet and Western Anthropology. Ed. by Gellner, A. pp. 95-117. London: Duckworth.
“This fact [that humans harvest and then return to camps] means that we must consider the cost of transporting food, as well as the cost of searching, harvesting, and processing it. Zoologists developed central place foraging models to help model the behavior of ‘refuging predators,’ birds and carnivores that bring food back to their young.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 66.
“The farther a forager travels from camp, the higher the postencounter return rate must be to make the additional cost of transporting the food worthwhile. This means that the range of foraging targets narrows the farther a forager travels from camp….
“This model assumes that all foods are transported by foot on someone’s back. Where transportation technology is available, such as canoes, dogsleds, or horses, a greater volume of resources can be moved…. transportation technology reduces the need to field-process many resources.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 68.
“Hayden sees the appearance in prehistory of broad-based economies as a product of our species’ continual struggle to increase subsistence reliability through technology that permits diversification (e.g. seed grinding, fishing technology, storage). The DBM [diet-breadth model], however, argues that diversification does not result from a conscious desire to reduce risk but rather from a reduction in the availability of high-ranked resources.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. pp. 69-70; reference: Hayden, Brian. 1981. “Research and Development in the Stone Age: Technological Transitions Among Hunter-Gatherers.” Current Anthropology. 22:519-528.
“Binford described the variability he saw in hunter-gatherer settlement systems with the concepts of foragers and collectors. These, in turn, rested on the concepts of residential mobility, movements of the co-residential group from one camp to another, and logistical mobility, movements of individuals or task-specific groups out from and back to a residential camp. Foragers move consumers to food resource through residential mobility and thus map onto a region’s resource locations. Collectors move residentially to key locations (e.g., where water or firewood is available) and use logistical forays to bring food to camp. In general, Binford argued that foragers have high residential mobility and invest less effort in logistical movements, whereas collectors make few residential moves but frequent, and often lengthy, logistical forays. Foragers move consumers to food; collectors move food to consumers.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 78; reference: Binford, L. 1980. “Willow Smoke and Dogs’ Tails: Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems and Archaeological Site Formation.” American Antiquity. 45:4-20.
“Although hunter-gatherers frequently do move campsites on the basis of foraging conditions, they also take into account such things as firewood, tree boughs for bedding, shelter, water, mosquitoes, and how dirty a camp has become.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 90.
“However, we now have many archaeological cases in which agriculture preceded sedentism or where sedentism preceded agriculture. In addition, there are many horticulturalists who are seasonally mobile, who make long foraging treks or who shift residence every few years in response to soil depletion or a decline in hunting returns. Thus, the relationship between agriculture and residential mobility is not straightforward.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. pp. 105-6.
“Binford challenged the idea that foragers become sedentary when resources are abundant – what he derided as the Garden of Eden argument and the Slug Principle. Hunter-gatherers remain mobile, Binford argued, not because they lack the opportunity to settle down but rather to maintain information about resources that they may need as backups in case the expected staple food is not available.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 106; reference: Binford, L. 1983. In Pursuit of the Past. London: Thames and Hudson.
“For hunter-gatherers to be sedentary and not become horticulturalists, there must be an adequate supply of food year-round or sufficient food in one season to produce food stores to carry a population through a lean season. This is why sedentary communities often appear on coasts or rivers, where the local resource base is harder to deplete. However, such a situation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sedentism. The decision to become sedentary is based on regional, not just local, resource conditions. It is not enough for resources to be abundant in one place because if they are equally abundant elsewhere, then we expect movement, even if infrequent, simply as a product of foraging-related depletion. Stated in the vernacular, sedentism is a product of local abundance in a context of regional scarcity.
“… it means that sedentary villages will be associated with control of a resource-extraction point. It also means that sedentism has a domino effect. When one group becomes sedentary, for example, at the mouth of a productive salmon stream, they remove a resource patch from others. This makes the environment more patchy and increases the cost of moving.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 107.
“The longer a camp is occupied, the greater the distance foragers must go to procure resources. And, the longer a camp is occupied, the greater the depletion of high-ranked foods and, consequently, the more time must be devoted to the harvesting and processing of lower ranked foods. Assuming that men hunt and that women gather lower return rate resources, sedentism means that men will generally spend more time away from children and that women will invest more time in resource acquisition and processing. This describes what has happened for some Bushmen groups as they have become sedentary. When parents, especially young mothers, devote much time to foraging and resource processing, or when fathers are away on long foraging trips, even six-month-old children may be passed to an older sibling for care, setting up peer-rearing.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 109.
“Several ethnographic analyses of hunter-gatherer food-getting technology build on data compiled by Wendell Oswalt. He defined subsistants as tools used in the food quest; these he divided into artifacts and naturefacts, the latter being unmodified stones, wood, and the like. Artifacts were divided into implements and facilities. A spear or bow is an implement; facilities are traps, stationary fishing nets, or weirs ( a wooden, dam-like fence across a stream that channels fish through one opening). Facilities can be tended and untended; a snare can operate without anyone tending it constantly, but a weir only ‘works’ if someone is present to harvest the fish channeled through the weir’s opening. Implements could be instruments, such as digging sticks, used to act on foods that are ‘incapable of significant motion’, or weapons, such as spears or a bow and arrow, used against sentient beings.
“Oswalt described facilities and implements using the concept of technounit: ‘an integrated, physically distinct, and unique structural configuration that contribute to the form of a finished artifact.’ A Ju/’hoan digging stick, for example, has one technounit: the stick itself. But a Nuvugmiut walrus harpon has ten: (1) the slate (or metal) harpoon head, attached to a (2) bone or ivory toggling head, (3) the ivory foreshaft, (4) the line attaching the foreshaft to the main shaft, (5) the main shaft, (6) the line attaching the toggling head to a float, (7) the float, (8) binding on the spear to hold the foreshaft in place, (9) a finger rest on the spear, and (10) binding to hold the finger rest onto the shaft.
“Oswalt also divided tools into simple and complex. Simple tools have parts that ‘do not change their position relative to each other during use’ (e.g., a weighted digging stick), whereas complex tools do (e.g., the toggling harpoon we just mentioned, since the head detaches from the shaft during use). By dividing a food-getting inventory’s total number of technounits by the total number of subsistants, Oswalt obtained a rough measure of the overall elaborateness of a particular group’s technology.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 120; reference: Oswalt, Wendell. 1976. An Anthropological Analysis of Food-Getting technology. NY: Wiley.
“The DBM [diet breadth model] suggests that foragers did not invest effort in pottery (or, sometime earlier in the Great Basin, grinding stones) until the depletion of high-ranked resources forced a broadening of the diet that demanded new technologies to help raise the return rate of low-ranked resources, such as seeds.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 126.
“Tools associated with the acquisition of ‘risky’ resources must be reliable by being overdesigned and/or maintainable by being quickly repairable through interchangeable parts.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 126.
“It should come as no surprise, then, that trapping technology is more prevalent among sedentary than nomadic foragers. Traps reduce search costs by allowing hunters to search for and pursue other resources while the trap is ‘pursuing’ another.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 126.
“A gill net can bring in a greater harvest but at a lower initial return rate if we add the net’s construction time into the calculation.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 130.
“Bettinger and his colleagues point out that this technological investment model leads to three insights: when technology changes, it is expected to change (a) quickly, because the decision to invest in a new technology is normally of the either/or type; (b) pervasively across a population as the benefits of a new technology become obvious and its manufacturing specifications known; and ( c ) usually irreversibly, because it alters knowledge of the net return that is possible with a new technology, and maintenance/ construction becomes embedded in other activities and downtime.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 130; reference: Bettinger, R.L., B. Winterhalder & R. McElreath. 2006. “A Simple Model of Technological Intensification.” Journal of Archaeological Science. 33:538-45.
“The amount of variation that exists in forager hard technology is one of the most dramatic dimensions of variation among foragers; it is almost certainly more variable than soft technology – the detailed knowledge that foragers use to survive in their worlds. Some foragers manage to survive quite well with a limited set of simple tools, whereas others, such as the Inuit or sedentary foragers, need a variety of often complex tools.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 135.
“Sharing among hunter-gatherers varies along a continuum, from treating resources as if they were common property to individual ownership. Although in the Cree language there may be no words equivalent to ‘property’ or ‘to own,’ in Australia, ‘notions of material and intellectual property are well developed … in the one case associated with land and in the other with rights in songs, myths, paintings, dances and esoteric knowledge.’ Generalized sharing occurs within families among northwest Alaskan Eskimos, but not between families, where different forms of exchange exist.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 138; subquote: Altman, J. & N. Peterson. 1988. “Rights to Game and Rights to Cash Among Contemporary Australian Hunter-Gatherers.” In: Hunters and Gatherers, Vol 2: Property, Power, and Ideology. Ingold, T, D. Riches & J. Woodburn (eds). pp. 75-94. Oxford: Berg. p. 76.
“The basis for much of the behavior labeled ‘territoriality,’ then, is the product of individuals deciding whether and how to share the right of resource use with others. These decisions are embedded in a complex intellectual process whereby people come to share an identity. Through kinship, trade, mythology, and other cultural mechanisms, people construct ways to relate themselves to each other and thus to land. These social relations form the basis for the right to be asked – and the right to ask – to use resources. The focus of research into land tenure, then, should be on the elements that condition permission-giving behavior. The question is not whether hunter-gatherers are or are not territorial but rather in what ways and to what extent does a group regulate access to land directly versus regulating access to social affiliation and hence to resources?” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 156.
“The EDM [Economic Defensibility Model] … predicts ‘exclusive use’ where resources are dense and predictable. Dense resources can presumably be defended more easily, at a lower cost, because a smaller area must be defended. And exclusive use may not be costly under the appropriate social conventions and sanctions. But, at some point, those social conventions may develop into overt territorial behavior, what we will call perimeter defense (building walls, patrolling borders, attacking trespassers, and making retaliatory or preemptive raids). These behaviors arise when demand for a territory increases.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 158.
“Elizabeth Cashdan argues that the benefits of permitting visitors outweigh the costs when resources are scarce and (consequently) territories are large, making them difficult to patrol. Under these conditions, hunter-gatherers ensure reciprocal access to the resources of others by maintaining social access to the group through individual(s) holding the right to grant permission to use those resources. These hunter-gatherers defend their physical resources by controlling their social boundaries. Cashdan refers to this as social-boundary defense.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 159; reference: Cashdan, Elizabeth. 1983. “Territoriality Among Human Foragers: Ecological Models and an Application to Four Bushman Groups.” Current Anthropology. 24:47-66.
“Where peoples’ fortunes are all tied to the same resource, or where resources are synchronized such that when one group does poorly their neighbors do the same, there is little utility to intergroup sharing of use rights. Territoriality may form under such conditions if resources are defensible (i.e., aggregated and predictable). Where the resources of different groups are not synchronized, but where there is variation in resource availability, land-tenure systems, whereby people are tied to the land through social processes of affiliation, may appear.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 164.
“Land tenure is as variable as sharing. Evolutionary ecology predicts that territoriality results when resources are sufficiently dense and predictable and, especially, where competition is high. But the land that foragers need to survive is often so large, and population density so low, that physical defense of a perimeter is impossible, yet the cost of allowing unregulated visitors in can be high. In these cases, foragers regulate physical access through social access, the strength of which is related to the cost of denying visitors the right to use resources versus the potential that visitors have to reciprocate in the future. This makes land tenure much like sharing, with variations predicted by resource density and reliability, intragroup variance, and intergroup correlation in returns.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. pp. 164-5.
“Wobst suggested that twenty-five [average number of people in a minimum group size] is a compromise between reproductive and economic needs: large enough to keep the group demographically viable, yet small enough to prevent rapid exhaustion of local resources….
“I suspect that before reproductive viability and politics become important, group size must balance the risk of going hungry against the rate of resource depletion.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. pp. 172-3; reference: Wobst, H.M. 1974. “Boundary Conditions for Paleolithic Social Systems: A Simulation Approach.” American Antiquity. 39:147:178.
“Put most simply, war is ‘relatively impersonal lethal aggression between communities.’ ‘Impersonal’ does not mean that warriors are not passionate. In fact, leaders must inspire passion if they want their followers to put their lives on the line and to kill someone who has done them no wrong. They accomplish this in part by what R. C. Kelly calls ‘social substitutability’ – the idea that a wrong can be righted by killing anyone in another group containing the offending member. War is often fought for revenge or to retaliate for some slight, but I suspect that for a group to be compelled to retaliate, rather than just the offended party, the goal must also be to secure some advantage: to acquire slaves, women, food, or territory, or to acquire security through a preemptive strike.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 205: subquote: Fry, D.P. 2006. The Human Potential for Peace. Oxford UP. p. 91; reference: Kelly, R.C. 2000. Warless Societies and the Origin of War. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press.
“Where others have glossed foragers as ‘violent’, it is instructive to point out that nomadic, egalitarian foragers do not go to war as much as sedentary, nonegalitarian foragers; these two social forms should not be combined. War, as defined here, is relatively uncommon among egalitarian foragers. Among nonegalitarian foragers, however, violence is culturally sanctioned and often raises a man’s status. And nonegalitarrrian foraging societies are universally sedentary peoples…. sedentary foragers arise not from food abundance but rather because population density is so high relative to habitable places on the landscape that residential movement is not possible without displacing another group. War appears when mobility is not an option.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 205.
“By helping care for domesticated animals, harvesting and processing agricultural produce, caring for other children, and doing tasks such as fetching water, children in sedentary Bushmen villages do substantially more work than children in nomadic camps.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 211.
“… once a system begins moving toward storage and sedentism, the long-term rate of population growth may increase, raising the population density and increasing the cost of residential mobility; this further reduces residential mobility, thus increasing storage and the population growth rate. This model needs archaeological testing but, if correct, it suggests that hunter-gatherers may become caught in an upward spiral of increasing population density once they become sedentary.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 213.
“The reason that postmarital residence rules seem to be ‘violated’ frequently is that they are not rules but rather the outcome of men and women aligning themselves with different people under different conditions. In the days of the ‘patrilocal-patrilineal’ band, anthropologists saw foragers’ residential groups as rather tightly knit and somewhat xenophobic. But this is not the case; in fact, the ‘mean’ foraging group, across many different kinds of environments, consists largely of unrelated individuals linked through marriages, brothers and sisters, and bilateral kin associations. Such residential groups are the collective result of individuals’ decisions to join (or to allow others to join) a group.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 230.
“We have already seen that postmarital residence ‘rules’ reflect tactics for surviving. Kinship is the same because it is a way of organizing people by placing them into categories that are accompanied by certain rights and responsibilities. Western society thinks of kinship as a way to categorize biological facts, but every anthropologist knows that this just the beginning and may, in fact, lead us astray.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 234.
“In brideservice societies, men work for their bride’s parents after marrying. In these societies, according to Collier, men seek their own wives and acquire them through their own actions. The wife’s family can neither give nor take back a wife (although the wife can leave – and may even have her parents’ assistance in this) because the parents to not have the right too control the daughter’s behavior….
“In equal bridewealth societies, men acquire a wife or wives through the giving of more or less standardized gifts, gifts that are frequently held or acquired by the groom’s seniors, his father, uncles, or older brothers (which they may have acquired from giving away the groom’s sisters as brides). In bridewealth societies, the groom’s seniors often arrange the marriage with the bride’s seniors. Thus, the groom is beholden to his seniors, and a kind of gerontocratic society can form in which young men must do the bidding of older men in exchange for marriage arrangements….
“In unequal bridewealth societies, gifts are not standardized and can vary from marriage to marriage; and they may be requested from the groom throughout the marriage. Wife-givers can extort labor from the husband (and his family) by constantly threatening to take back a wife. This marriage system is associated with social ranking, although it is hard to say how the process begins. Given a differential in prestige, a high-ranking male can refuse to give a daughter in marriage until a large bridewealth is secured or until he locates for his daughter a husband who will be unable to refuse to continue to give bridewealth.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. pp. 237-8; reference: Collier, J. 1988. Marriage and Inequality in Three Classless Societies. Stanford UP.
“Discussions of postmarital residence and descent point not only to the amount of variability present among foragers but also to the fact that the terms we use – rules of residence and forms of kinship – do not even describe the full range of variation. Rules of residence are related to a number of variables, but all revolve around individuals finding ways to joint one group or another.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 240.
“Rather than attributing nonegalitarian foragers simply to ‘resource abundance,’ as many have done in the past, we will see that sedentism, the resource base, geographic circumscription, storage, population pressure, group formation, and enculturative processes all play a role.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 242.
“Ethnographically, nonegalitarian hunter-gatherer societies are characterized by high population densities, sedentism or substantially restricted residential mobility, occupational specialization, perimeter defense and resource ownership, focal exploitation of a particular resource (commonly fish), large resident-group sizes, inherited status, competitive feasting, standardized valuables, prestige goods or currencies, food storage, and warfare.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 248.
“Inequality between groups results from the activities of key individuals, ‘accumulators’ or ‘aggrandizers,’ who manipulate competitive feasts and who skim off some resources for themselves and their households. Others patronize an accumulator by contributing to his feasts because they stand to acquire some of the prestigious goods that the accumulator will eventually receive in return, when he is the guest rather than host.
“In this argument, sedentism lifts the constraints of a nomadic lifestyle and thus releases human nature. Hayden explains that this process is inevitable because it permits aggrandizers, those with domineering personalities, to accumulate the goods and food necessary for prestige and economic competition.
“A second argument is the information processing argument. This one argues that hierarchies emerge because they resolve disputes, maintain efficient information flow about the changing availability of resources, and thus help redistribute resources, especially under conditions of stress. In this argument, hierarchy arises from stress on the subsistence base created by high population density, temporally and spatially incongruent resources, and reduced residential mobility. … as the number of ‘orgaizational units’ increases (individuals or family units), there is an exponential increase in the number of disputes and a similar decrease in the efficiency of decision making. This is termed scalar stress, and there are three possible responses to it:
“1. Groups can fission – the standard response among nomadic foragers.
“2. Where this is not possible, ‘sequential hierarchies’ merge smaller, independent groups (e.g., nuclear families) into larger units (based perhaps on kinship and held together by ritual or religious obligations), decreasing the number of organizational units and reducing scalar stress.
“3. If these groups last long enough, ‘vertical hierarchies’ appear, in which groups have leaders and groups of groups have leaders who process information.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 249; reference: Hayden, B. 1981. “Research and Development in the Stone Age: Technological Transitions Among Hunter-Gatherers.” Current Anthropology. 22:519-28.
“Through analysis of thirty-three foraging societies, Keeley found that sedentism (defined as a stay of longer than five months in one village), food storage, and population pressure were all correlated with nonegalitarian organization. In fact, Keeley concluded that population pressure ‘fits very well the expectations for a necessary and sufficient condition for and the efficient cause of complexity among hunter-gatherers.’ Foragers who are sedentary, store food, and have a nonegalitarian sociopolitical organization live under high population pressure.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 250; reference: Keeley, L. 1988. “Hunter-Gatherer Economic Complexity and ‘Population Pressure’: A Cross-Cultural Analysis.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. 7:373-411.
“From my perspective, a reduction in residential mobility due to increasing population density, which eventually results in sedentism, is the ‘kick’ that sets sociopolitical changes in motion…. Where resources are localized and defensible and travel is difficult, residential mobility will decrease quickly as population density increases.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 252.
“Making a storage economy work, then, may require that someone coordinate and/or control the efforts of some number of foragers.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 254.
“Thus, leaders become more important the larger the cooperating group since (a) they take on the cost of ejecting the free-riders who can invade large groups if no one is watching, and (b) they reduce the potential for inefficiency that increases with larger groups (and this becomes especially important with warfare). The importance of such leaders increases with the size of the difference between foraging alone and as part of a group and as the optimal group size becomes larger.
“In economics of scale, then, foragers benefit by turning over some of their autonomy to a leader.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. pp. 254-5.
“… optimal groups size for a leader is slightly larger than for nonleaders, assuming that key resources are economically defensible by a group’s leader. It is to a group leader’s advantage to keep members in the group, even when it is not necessarily to the other members’ maximum benefit….
“A leader has to justify this action to current group members. He can do so by permitting someone to join a group but by giving them second class status or by forcing them to give up some of their autonomy, such as the choice of where and with whom to forage and how much of a resource they can keep. When this happens, nonegalitarian society has formed.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. pp. 255-6.
“Where warfare is prevalent, we expect residential groups or clusters of cooperating communities to be larger than expected based on food abundance alone.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 256.
“Those who gain social access to another group become the funnel through which some or all members of one group have access to the resources of the other. These individuals become middlemen who control critical intersections in the social web. These individuals always walk a fine line, since they must manage an image of generosity and selflessness while maintaining authority and power. On the one hand, they must appear to their own group to be able to gain access to another group’s resources; on the other hand, they must appear to that other group as in control of their own constituents and able to guarantee access to their own group’s resources….
“Patrons in the patron-client relationship must communicate their power. For this reason, social hierarchies take on a life of their own as ever greater effort must be directed toward prestige activities such as feasting. Leaders ostensibly do this to acquire prestige, but the result is that they keep lower-ranking individuals in their group and control their labor.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 259.
“The patron-client strategy is viable only where each group tries to restrict social access and where members of an outside group want access to the resources of another.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 260.
“Warfare is always expensive, and it appears that as soon as European traders arrived on the scene [Northwest coast], warfare for territory ceased and conflict shifted to fights over access to trade routes and to the traders – the new patrons.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 265.
“Everywhere, potlatching allowed a group to evaluate a ranking individual’s authority relative to that of another village or kin group. They might then alter their allegiance, by moving if necessary.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 265.
“… a shift toward sedentism may precipitate changes in the structure of foraging activities, which can alter childrearing methods from parent-reared to peer-reared and change the modal personality…. Peer-reared children tend to display greater gender differentiation and to manipulate the world through social relations rather than through technology.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 266.
“Leaders arise as a product of the need to coordinate communal labor and alleviate the stress on group members of punishing free-riders. And, as more individuals join a group that has achieved its optimum group size, the per capita return rate decreases for all members, so there will always be tension between members and potential joiners, between patrons and clients. Where resources are defensible, the cost of joining the group may be that the joiner allows some of the results of his or her labor to be skimmed by a patron, lowering his or her returns below that obtained if returns were simply averaged over the entire group. Also important is that the optimal group size is larger for the leader than for the other group members, creating competition and tension between the leader and group members.” Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum: Second Edition. Cambridge UP. p. 267.
“During the Epipalaeolithic [20 kya to 10 kya] most people lived on small campsites in groups of from one to five families that moved frequently. Much of Southwestern Asia was sparsely settled or even unoccupied during this period. The Neolithic [10 kya to 7 kya] pattern of settlement was quite different: people lived in large, nucleated villages of mudbrick houses that endured for centuries. They developed a range of crafts–the manufacture of stone and pottery vessels, stone axes, and textiles–that denoted a new stage of cultural achievement. The population increased, and villages were founded over much of the rain-fed landscape of Southwest Asia.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. pp. 5-6.
“Abu Hureyra was sited to take advantage of a particularly favorable set of ecological circumstances. Its location on the ecotone between the Euphrates Valley and the steppe gave the inhabitants easy access to the resources of both zones. The Euphrates was a fast-flowing river with numerous meanders and backswamps rich in riparian species of plants and animals. The river had laid down a thick layer of alluvium on the valley floor on which grew a dense forest of trees and moisture-loving plants that offered cover for animals such as cattle, pigs, and fallow deer. The woodland-steppe was well drained with light but quite fertile soils and a rich cover of annual plants, shrubs, and scattered trees. It had a high carrying capacity and supported a considerable variety of herbivores and other animals. Beyond it to the west and north lay the open park woodland that was close enough, at least during Abu Hureyra 1A times [~12 kya to 11 kya], to have been an important source of plant foods for the inhabitants of the site.
“These general conditions were obviously attractive to the people of Abu Hureyra, but there were additional factors that drew them there, characteristics that made the place unique among potential locations for settlement along the Middle Euphrates. The first of these was the proximity of the Wadi Shetnet es-Salmas, because it offered a supply of surface water close to the site that was often more accessible than the Euphrates itself. It also served as a corridor along which terebinths and other trees characteristic of the xeric woodland could extend as far as Abu Hureyra. Second, Abu Hureyra was on a natural highway along the river valley that linked the steppe to the south with the forested hills to the north, and that afforded potential access to minerals and other raw materials not available locally. Most of the right bank of the Euphrates for many kilometers east and west of Abu Hureyra consisted of cliffs or steep hills. But the land to the south sloped gently up the plateau, so it was easy to reach the open steppe at that point, while the central Levant lay a few day’s walk away through the El Kum pass.
“Each spring herds of Persian gazelle moved northward from their wintering grounds in southern Syria, past Palmyra, though the El Kum pass, and on to the Euphrates. They were attracted by the exceptionally rich grazing of the open steppe south of Abu Hureyra. Their most likely route took them northwest to the river valley at Abu Hureyra, where they turned westward to fan out across the steppe. It was the proximity of the site to the gazelle migration route that made Abu Hureyra such a compellingly attractive place in which to establish a settlement.
“The location thus combined several elements that favored it uniquely, since they were not found together anywhere else along the Middle Euphrates. That provides part of the explanation for the longevity of the site, and its extraordinary growth and development under four successive economic systems: hunting and gathering in Abu Hureyra 1A; hunting, gathering, and farming in Abu Hureyra 2A [9.5 kya to 8 kya]; and herding and farming in Abu Hureyra 2B and 2C [8kya to 7 kya]. The attractions of the spot for people intending to live by hunting and gathering are obvious. The abundant plant foods and game from the steppe and valley bottom could supply much of their food for most of the year. Furthermore, the dense herds of gazelle that passed by each spring were open to mass slaughter. Their meat could be preserved and stored in quantity for later consumption. These factors remained of fundamental importance to the economy during much of the life of the site.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. pp. 475-6.
“The major shift in plant exploitation occurred quite rapidly at the beginning of Period 1B [11 kya to 10.5 kya]. The inhabitants collected far fewer grains of wild einkorn, other wild cereals, and the fruits of terebinth and other trees, all species of the park-woodland and woodland-steppe. This was an immediate result of the onset of the cooler, more arid climate of the Younger Dryas that caused the woodland zone to retreat westward away from Abu Hureyra. The inhabitants compensated for the decline in availability of these species by adopting farming. We have direct evidence from charred gains dated to 11,140 +/- 100 BP, 10,930 +/- 120 BP, and 10,610 +/- 100 BP, that they started to grow domestic rye from the beginning of Period 1B. There are indications from finds of other domestic grains in 1B and 1C [10.5 kya to 10 kya] levels that they may also have cultivated several more species of cereals during these periods and have grown some legumes. In addition, we have indirect evidence of the inception of cultivation from a steady increase in the incidence of field weeds through Periods 1B and 1C. These data, taken together, indicate that beginnig about 11,000 BP the people of Abu Hureyra 1 started to farm.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. p. 479.
“The hunting and gathering way of life pursued by the people who founded the village of Abu Hureyra 1 had a number of distinctive characteristics. It was a strongly seasonal in nature because the main species of plants and animals used for food were available in abundance only during a few weeks or months of the year. The mass slaughter of gazelle and the selective gathering of small-seeded plants indicate that the inhabitants practiced a particularly intensive kind of hunting and gathering. That called for investment in fixed structures to aid in securing and keeping food, the best example being the kites or their local equivalent at Abu Hureyra. The efforts of the inhabitants were carefully focused on a narrow range of animals, and although they collected a wide range of plant species for food and other purposes, the bulk of their vegetable food actually came from relatively few of those plants.
“The adoption of agriculture reinforced the strongly seasonal pattern of the economy. In a sequence that extended from the autumn to the following summer, the inhabitants had to prepare the soil, sow their crops, weed them, then harvest and process the mature plants. They also had to develop a new set of techniques and tools for farming. This added a further set of activities to an already complex annual cycle.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. p. 480.
“The structures and the numerous heavy tools we recovered [Abu Hureyra 1] indicate that the inhabitants spent considerable time there maintaining their settlement and manufacturing the equipment they needed.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. p. 481.
“The culture and economy of the inhabitants of Abu Hureyra 2 [9.5 kya to 7 kya] changed significantly from the patterns that had obtained in Abu Hureyra 1 [until 10 kya] and through the Intermediate Period [10 kya to 9.5 kya]. The village of Abu Hureyra 2 consisted of rectilinear mudbrick houses, and grew to great size on the basis of a farming economy. The inhabitants developed new crafts that attest to skilled artisanship and a rich aesthetic sense. The village represented, therefore, the maturing of a new mode of existence.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. p. 493.
“The village of Abu Hureyra 2A grew until it covered eight hectares. The second major phase of expansion occurred after the transition from Period 2A to 2B [8.3 kya], and the concomitant switch from dependence on gazelle to large-scale herding of sheep and goats. The settlement expanded over the entire area of the mound that survived into modern times, and farther out on the western side until it probably covered 16 ha or more. The inhabitants expanded their crafts and, before the end of the period, began to make pottery. Long-distance contacts seem to have quickened, since increasing quantities of obsidian reached the site from Anatolia.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. p. 493.
“The most striking characteristics of the village of Abu Hureyra 2 are its longevity–it lasted, after all, for two and a half millennia–and great size. In Period 2B, when it reached its greatest extent, it was one of the largest contemporary settlements in Southwest Asia, and several times bigger than nearly all other Neolithic sites in the Levant. The village probably supported a population of 2,500-3,000 people in Period 2A, growing to 5,000-6,000 in 2B, a ten to twentyfold increase over the estimated population of Abu Hureyra 1. The formation of a community on that scale represented a new order of settlement in Southwest Asia that was a direct result of, and a striking testimony to, the success of the agricultural economy that sustained it.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. p. 494.
“We found no large open spaces between the houses, no substantial storage buildings, and no workshops in the areas we excavated. We did find small storage bins within some of the houses, and there were abundant indications of artisan activities close by.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. p. 494.
“There was no indication from the burials that they had developed a social system based on a hierarchy of classes that was maintained from one generation to the next. Abu Hureyra [through Abu Hureyra 2], then, was an unusually large, early Neolithic village. It had not developed all the characteristics, for example, substantial public buildings, a social hierarchy, and large scale trade, that we associate with the towns of early historic times in Southwest Asia.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. p. 495.
“The economy of Abu Hureyra 2 developed in two stages: first farming, the raising of some domestic animals, hunting, and a continued interest in wild plant foods in Period 2A, and then farming and herding in Periods 2B and 2C. Thus, it was not until quite late in the sequence of occupation that the full Neolithic economy was adopted at Abu Hureyra. This was because the location of the site continued to favor a way of life that was based in part on a continuation of hunting, and a little gathering.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. p. 495.
“The economy of Abu Hureyra 2A was thus based on the cultivation of domestic plants and the herding of some domestic caprines, with the continuation of large-scale gazelle hunting and the gathering of some wild plants….
“The transition to the second economic stage of Periods 2B and 2C was accomplished with extraordinary speed about 8,300 BP, when gazelle hunting abruptly declined and the flocks of sheep and goats expanded.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. pp. 496-7.
“Yet our evidence indicates that the people of Abu Hureyra regularly obtained basalt, limestone, and alabaster from sources up to 130 km away, as well as obsidian from Anatolia, and other materials from more distant regions. The modest quantities of cowrie shells and exotic stones–a few pieces of turquoise among them–are hardly sufficient to demonstrate more than occasional contacts with the rest of the Levant and the Taurus and Anti-Taurus mountains.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. p. 498.
“Our evidence suggests that division of labor was an important principle of life in the village of Abu Hureyra 2. Women spent more time at home preparing food, running their households, and looking after their children, while the men would have been more involved in agriculture and the care of livestock. Children may have played a significant role in the production of food, for example, by weeding and helping to look after the animals. The burial evidence certainly supports this interpretation of role specialization by sex, since more women than men were buried beneath the house floors. All women, but few men, suffered from the distinctive deformation of the toes and other parts of the body associated with grinding grain, affirming that such a division of tasks was a regular part of daily life at Abu Hureyra.” Moore, A.M., G.C. Hillman & A.J. Legge. 2000. Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra. Oxford UP. pp. 502-3.
“The terms innovation and novelty are often used interchangeably in the literature, but here we make the distinction that a novelty is an individual-level concept of qualitative phenotypic change, whereas only a subset of novelties become innovations, the latter having population, community, ecosystem and evolutionary consequences.” Hochberg, M.E., P. Marquet, R. Boyd & A. Wagner. 2017. “Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:20160414. doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0414. p. 2.
“In performance innovations, the novel phenotypic trait is associated with increases in performance, without fundamental changes to the organism’s ecological niche….
“In niche innovations, the novel phenotypic trait is associated with the utilization of a new ecological niche.” Hochberg, M.E., P. Marquet, R. Boyd & A. Wagner. 2017. “Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:20160414. doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0414. p. 3.
“The broader picture is that humans, and ostensibly certain other primates, may be adapted to experiment and selectively transmit successful outcomes, providing a basis for the exaptation or amelioration of existing behaviours and the emergence and spread of novelties that become cumulative cultural innovations.” Hochberg, M.E., P. Marquet, R. Boyd & A. Wagner. 2017. “Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:20160414. doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0414. p. 11.
“Briefly [in considering domestication as niche construction], one species selects for sought-after traits in another, especially predictability, value and yield, and in so doing the former evolves through the development of management techniques and technologies.” Hochberg, M.E., P. Marquet, R. Boyd & A. Wagner. 2017. “Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:20160414. doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0414. p. 12; reference: Allaby, R.G., C. Stevens, I. Lucas, O. Maeda & D.Q. Fuller. 2017. “Geographic mosaics and changing rates of cereal domesticatin.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:20160429. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2016.0429.
“The type [of mutualism] less discussed involves members of different species joining in a single act of strategy that is more effective when more individuals employ it. Such mutualisms do not depend on division of labour among participants. Examples include gregarious fruiting of many tree species in dipterocarp forests, which reduces the proportion of seeds lost to seed-eaters, and Muellerian mimicry among distasteful butterflies that reduces the cost of educating predators about a warning coloration that advertises distastefulness.” Leigh, E.G. 2010. “The evolution of mutualism.” Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 23:2507-2528. Doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02114.x. p. 2508.
“Classifying mutualisms.
“I. By-product mutualisms
“II. Mutualisms where each partner has behaviours selected to benefit the other
“A. Mutualisms without division of labour
“1. Mutualisms of mutual benefit with no possibility of cheating: each participant benefits itself and others by sharing in a common action [gregarous fruiting in dipterocarps to satiate seed predators
“2. Mutualisms whose participants share in a common action offering scope for cheating (Muellerian mimicry among butterflies to simplify education of predators, parasitized by palatable Batesian mimics
“B. Mutualisms with division of labour
“1. Long-term mutualisms (symbioses)
“a. Mutualisms enforced by transmission of symbionts from a host to its offspring [organelles in eukaryote cells]
“b. Mutualisms enforced by partner fidelity [sponges that fuse to pool capacities to resist different hazards for their common good]
“c. Mutualisms enforced by partner choice [bobtail squid that test bioluminescent bacteria before admitting them as symbionts]
“d. Mutualisms enforced by partner sanctions [legumes and their nitrogen-fixing bacteria]
“2. Mutualisms of brief exchange
“a. Mutualisms enforced by partner sanctions [cleaner fish and their clients]
“b. Mutualisms with a limited degree of partner choice [seeds and their dispensers]” Leigh, E.G. 2010. “The evolution of mutualism.” Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 23:2507-2528. Doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02114.x. p. 2508.
“Natural mutualisms divide more readily than human ones into long-term relationships, symbioses, which are often essential to the survival of both participants, and brief exchanges. The former include major evolutionary innovations, such as corals housing symbiotic zooxanthellae, termites and their wood-digesting gut biota, and leaf-cutter ants that cultivate a leaf-digesting fungus. Brief-exchange mutualism include interactions between plants and their seed-dispersers, and between most animal-pollinated plants and their pollinators.” Leigh, E.G. 2010. “The evolution of mutualism.” Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 23:2507-2528. Doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02114.x. p. 2508.
“Ecosystems are both arenas of competition and webs of interdependence. Interdependence arises when fully exploiting the resources supplied by one guild inevitably supplies resources that guild needs. Such diffuse, accidental, costless yet often obligate, by-product mutualisms underlie ecosystem function. As life evolved over the last few billion years, innovations that triggered the spread of their inventors enhanced their ecosystem’s productivity and diversity. Some innovators exploited new sources of energy or nutrients, some exploited old ones more effectively, some put other organisms’ wastes to productive use, some enhanced the turnover of organic matter through herbivory or predation, some enabled colonization of new habitats, some found more productive ways to deal with herbivore pressure. Each of these innovations–photosynthesis, nitrogen fixation, denitrification (which keeps the oceans from becoming nitrate brines), sulphate reduction (which keeps the land from acquiring a skin of gypsum), decomposition, especially of dead vegetable matter, predation, herbivory, and the like have all provided livings for new kinds of organisms, enhancing diversity as well as productivity. Many of these developments enhanced interdependence as well as productivity. Animals need plants, both need decomposers, all need the bacteria that maintain the world ecosystem’s chemical balance.” Leigh, E.G. 2010. “The evolution of mutualism.” Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 23:2507-2528. Doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02114.x. p. 2520.
“A central problem is, do ecosystem productivity and diversity depend on mutualism? The analogy between ecosystems and human economies may point us to the answer. In human economies, some individuals cooperate with others to compete more effectively with third parties. Human societies have long used social sanctions of cheaters to restrict ‘unfair’ competition that destroys incentive for cooperation. In larger societies, public enforcement of contracts freely arrived at helps to control cheating within cooperative undertakings. The wider this enforcement’s reach, the more elaborate are the forms of cooperation, and the higher the economy’s productivity and diversity of occupations. Preventing cheating on freely formed mutualisms is thus perceived, surely correctly, as serving the society’s common good and enhancing its productivity. In both human societies and natural ecosystems, mutualisms are formed to exploit new opportunities or compete better with third parties, so mutualism should be as crucial to the productivity and diversity of natural as of human economies.” Leigh, E.G. 2010. “The evolution of mutualism.” Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 23:2507-2528. Doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02114.x. pp. 2520-1.
“The newest major natural terrestrial ecosystem, grassland, evolved where vertebrate herbivores excluded trees, allowing grasses to supply them with far more abundant and accessible food, and creating a partnership of mutual benefit between grasslands and grazers, that might be called a diffusely coevolved mutualism.” Leigh, E.G. 2010. “The evolution of mutualism.” Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 23:2507-2528. Doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02114.x. p. 2521.
“Grasses and vertebrate herbivores were originally antagonists. As we have seen, the evolution of grasses, grazers and predators, each in its own interest, later made the grass-grazer relationship far more mutualistic, as if an ecological counterpart of Adam Smith’s invisible hand were at work. Serengeti’s grasslands need elephants to exclude trees, and many grazers to maintain the grassland’s productivity, diversity and soil fertility. Although grazers reduce production of grass seeds by 90%, they increase vegetative reproduction. The grazers are adapted in many ways to maintain high grass production. The movement patterns and feeding habits of different grazer species, especially the wall of wildebeest that follows the rains and the new grass back and forth across the Serengeti, are crucial to maintaining grass production. Grazers preferentially manure favoured treeless habitats and keep them in arrested succession where they supply nutritious new growth as long as the soil stays moist. Grazers thus derive far more copious and nutritious food from the Serengeti than vertebrate folivores obtain from any rainforest. Serengeti grazers eat an average of 66% of its grasses’ above-ground production, whereas in a rainforest, vertebrates eat < 10%. Grass production would be even higher with somewhat fewer grazers: grasses load their root collars with silica to prevent overgrazing. Even though there is little sign that either grasslands or grazers evolved to benefit each other, the relationship between grasslands and grazers is somewhat like that between farmers and their crops,….” Leigh, E.G. 2010. “The evolution of mutualism.” Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 23:2507-2528. Doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02114.x. pp. 2521-2.
“If a cooperative behaviour results in net fitness benefits to the actor, irrespective of the behaviour of an interaction partner, i.e. if the benefits of acting outweigh the costs, the behaviour will be selected irrespective of its potential fitness effects on the partner. If two or more individuals interact in this way, we usually call this mutualistic…. A mutualistic behaviour yields beneficial effects to the direct fitness of the actor, and hence cheating is not favoured by selection.” Taborsky, Michael, J.G. Frommen & C. Riehl. 2016. “Correlated pay-offs are key to cooperation.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371:20150084. Doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0084. pp. 1-2.
“Intraspecific cooperation and altruism have been studied most extensively in the context of correlated pay-offs generated by genetic relatedness, which has revealed great explanatory power. In contrast, the general importance of green-beard effects for the evolution of cooperation has been questioned on theoretical grounds and its prevalence is currently unclear, partly because of the difficulty in detecting such mechanisms outside of microorganisms. Reciprocity, the third potential cause of correlated pay-offs, is arguably the most contended possibility to generate cooperation and altruism.” Taborsky, Michael, J.G. Frommen & C. Riehl. 2016. “Correlated pay-offs are key to cooperation.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371:20150084. Doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0084. p. 3.
“Cooperation typically generates non-additive positive fitness effects, i.e. synergism; the total effect of individual actions is greater than the sum of the individual effects. It has been suggested that ‘functional synergy’ can be the underlying cause of cooperation. Synergies may be important in any type of cooperation, either involving mutualism or correlated pay-offs; they will always enhance the probability that cooperative behaviour is positively selected.” Taborsky, Michael, J.G. Frommen & C. Riehl. 2016. “Correlated pay-offs are key to cooperation.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371:20150084. Doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0084. p. 10.
“Crop domestication is a special case of plant/animal co-evolution in which plant species have adapted to human control and are propagated in human-manipulated environments to enhance the survival and fitness of Homo sapiens. The result of this mutualism is not one-sided, as domestication has also resulted in increased fitness in domesticated crop and animal species, leading to dramatic increases in population sizes and expansion of domesticated species ranges outside their original geographic centers of origin.” Purugganan, Michael. 2019. “”Evolutionary Insights into the Nature of Plant Domestication.” Current Biology. 29:R705-714. p. R705.
“It is estimated that there are 1,000-2,500 semi- and fully domesticated plant species from about 120-160 taxonomic families, and all of these species are relatively young, having only originated since the Neolithic, and in some instances possibly existing for just a few centuries.” Purugganan, Michael. 2019. “”Evolutionary Insights into the Nature of Plant Domestication.” Current Biology. 29:R705-714. p. R705.
“Early domestication was driven in large part by unconscious, natural selection.” Purugganan, Michael. 2019. “”Evolutionary Insights into the Nature of Plant Domestication.” Current Biology. 29:R705-714. p. R707.
“Clearly some traits, such as color and possibly taste, likely were driven by conscious human choice. Other traits, however, such as seed non-shattering, seed size, seed non-dormancy and synchronous germination, may have occurred largely by unconscious selection, equivalent to natural selection….
“Although the idea that unconscious selection as a key element in domestication has a long history, the magnitude of selection on domestication traits had never been ascertained. What is new is that over the last decade it has become clear that archaeological remains provide a fossil record that demonstrates slow rates of phenotypic change in early stages of domestication. For seed non-shattering and seed size in cereal crops and some legumes, rates of trait evolution, were well within the low end of the distribution for wild plant species.” Purugganan, Michael. 2019. “”Evolutionary Insights into the Nature of Plant Domestication.” Current Biology. 29:R705-714. p. R707.
“Across disparate environments, many crops encountered similar selection pressures, both from similarities in agricultural environments, cultivation and processing practices, and human cultural preferences, resulting in phenotypic convergence of similar traits across multiple species. Some of these comprise the domestication syndrome phenotypes, which in cereals includes reduction in seed dispersal and increased seed retention (non-shattering), increased seed size, changes in shoot branching and stature, loss of seed dormancy, and synchronous germination. Moreover, there are also several diversification traits that have been subject to parallel selection in different cultures, including loss of bitterness, enhanced sweetness and fruit color polymorphisms.” Purugganan, Michael. 2019. “”Evolutionary Insights into the Nature of Plant Domestication.” Current Biology. 29:R705-714. p. R709.
“We now think, in general, that domestication is a protracted process, that selection strengths in domesticated species are consistent with unconscious (natural) selection, that interspecific hybridization may be an important mechanism for crop species diversification and range expansion, and that parallel genetic evolution underlies parallel phenotypic evolution.” Purugganan, Michael. 2019. “”Evolutionary Insights into the Nature of Plant Domestication.” Current Biology. 29:R705-714. p. R711.
“But evidence from fossils shows that new morphological features often arise long before they become ecologically or evolutionarily significant (macroevolutionary lags). For example, grasses originated and diversified into their major clades at least 25 million years before grasslands became widespread. In this case the presence of phytoliths (silica bodies unique to grasses) in sediments during the lag interval demonstrate that grasses were present, but were ecologically insignificant. These lags are not cases of failure of the fossil record, but instances where novelty has occurred but with little ecological impact (since palaeontologists commonly track taxic diversity rather than ecological abundance, the number of cases of macroevolutionary lags is probably underestimated). Innovation occurs when a novelty has sufficient ecological or evolutionary impact that removing the node represented by that taxa from an ecological network (not simply a food web) would noticeably impact the structure or functioning of the network.” Erwin, Douglas. 2017. “The topology of evolutionary novelty and innovation in macroevolution.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:20160422. Dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0422. p. 2.
“Where the genotype to phenotype mapping is straightforward, as in the case of the RNA example discussed several times, search is an appropriate approach to understanding the discovery of novel functions. In cases where the mapping is more complex, as with development in multicellular organisms or in cultural and technological domains, understanding how the introduction of new operators or the generation of new spaces occurs may be a more fruitful approach.” Erwin, Douglas. 2017. “The topology of evolutionary novelty and innovation in macroevolution.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:20160422. Dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0422. p. 6.
“Evolution as the cumulative effect of small genetic changes is the essence of microevolution. The classic model of search through genotypic and phenotypic spaces, whether driven by selection or drift through neutral networks, reflects such a viewpoint. In contrast, the generation of new operators as well as the generation of new evolutionary spaces reflects macroevolutionary change.” Erwin, Douglas. 2017. “The topology of evolutionary novelty and innovation in macroevolution.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:20160422. Dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0422. p. 6.
“… the ubiquitous variation in human cooperation is less well understood.” McClung, Jennifer S., S. Placi, A. Bangerter, F. Clement & R. Bshary. 2017. “The language of cooperation: shared intentionality drives variation in helping as a function of group membership.” Proceedings of the Royal Society: B. 284:20171682. Dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.1682. p. 1.
“Theory of mind also correlates with the degree of cooperation children engage in: those who can pass a typical false belief test cooperate more in an ultimatum game and children who are better at ascribing emotions to others offer more in a dictator game. To our knowledge, however, no game-theoretical study has examined how psychological processes influence cooperation in real-time social interactions. This is partly because game-theoretical research designed to assess the impact of social factors on cooperation typically restricts natural face-to-face social interaction.” McClung, Jennifer S., S. Placi, A. Bangerter, F. Clement & R. Bshary. 2017. “The language of cooperation: shared intentionality drives variation in helping as a function of group membership.” Proceedings of the Royal Society: B. 284:20171682. Dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.1682. p. 2.
“From its simpler to its more complex forms, human cooperation is facilitated by linguistic exchange. It is therefore odd that so many studies opt for cooperation games played in isolation and/or silence.” McClung, Jennifer S., S. Placi, A. Bangerter, F. Clement & R. Bshary. 2017. “The language of cooperation: shared intentionality drives variation in helping as a function of group membership.” Proceedings of the Royal Society: B. 284:20171682. Dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.1682. p. 2.
“While shared group membership and the ability to talk both led to increased costly helping and success during the egg hunt game (indicating that the impact of these two factors is strong enough to override any individual differences in cooperation, the analysis of players’ talk is the key aspect of our findings. Our conversation analysis reveals the crucial psychological process driving most of the observed variation in costly helping during players’ interactions: shared intentionality. It seems that sharing group membership alters people’s perspective, changing the same hunt from a simultaneous but very much separate task to one in which the two players could perceive their goals as shared. Consequently, people doing the hunt with an in-group member engaged in more shared intentionality than out-group members, who instead framed the task more in terms of individual goals. Our results suggest that entering into shared intentionality is the key to perceiving the hunt as a mutualistic as opposed to individual task and realizing that helping is a viable option in this game. Shared intentionality in turn predicted the degree to which people engaged in costly helping, which then predicted their success on the hunt.” McClung, Jennifer S., S. Placi, A. Bangerter, F. Clement & R. Bshary. 2017. “The language of cooperation: shared intentionality drives variation in helping as a function of group membership.” Proceedings of the Royal Society: B. 284:20171682. Dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.1682. pp. 5-6.
“… it is in fact shared group identity affecting the very nature of communication which then impacts cooperation. That is, shared group membership increases a person’s motivation to enter into a state of shared intentionality and to subsequently discuss shared intentions and goals with another, which in turn is what drives the variation we see in cooperation.” McClung, Jennifer S., S. Placi, A. Bangerter, F. Clement & R. Bshary. 2017. “The language of cooperation: shared intentionality drives variation in helping as a function of group membership.” Proceedings of the Royal Society: B. 284:20171682. Dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.1682. p. 6.
“However, as we show, communication does not have a uniform effect on cooperation. Instead, group membership affected the type of communication players used, and cooperation rates in the hunt between in-group members increased specifically as a function of the shared intentionality in their discussions. This suggests that shared intentionality is a crucial process driving the variation seen in many cooperative games.” McClung, Jennifer S., S. Placi, A. Bangerter, F. Clement & R. Bshary. 2017. “The language of cooperation: shared intentionality drives variation in helping as a function of group membership.” Proceedings of the Royal Society: B. 284:20171682. Dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.1682. p. 6.
“Two different classes of evolutionary explanation have been distinguished: those that focus on origin of evolutionary variation, and a second class that assumes the existence of variants but assigns the driving force to their differential distribution or success.” Erwin, Douglas. 2017. “Developmental push or environmental pull? The causes of macroevolutionary dynamics.” HPLS. 39:36. Doi:10.1007/s40656-017-0163-0. p. 2.
“Macroevolutionary approaches have been similarly divided between origins and distributional explanations. When Filipchenko introduced the term macroevolution he was focused on mechanisms that generated large-scale morphologic changes: an origins explanation. Goldschmidt shared this interest as did Gould when he was focused on the role of development. However, ever since Dobzhansky (a student of Filipchenko’s in Russia) introduced the term macroevolution to western evolutionary biologists and since its popularization by Simpson it has primarily been applied to distributional explanations of evolutionary patterns. This emphasis on distributional explanations has continued through the past several decades.
“This distinction between origins and distributional explanations for macroevolutionary patterns is reflected in another difference in evolutionary perspective: a focus on ecological opportunity is central to the views of Simpson, Mayr, many of those who work on adaptive radiations and much contemporary macroevolution research. The alternative proposed by advocates of comparative studies of the evolution of development (‘evo-devo’) is that the generation of new morphological variants through repatterning of developmental regulatory processes generates new morphologies. Developmental biologists are often not so much opposed to a role for ecology as they simply ignore it.
“The term macroevolution is thus used i[n] two different senses: as a description of large-scale patterns and as an argument for processes associated with origin and distributional sorting of taxa distinct from microevolutionary processes…. This leads to a discussion of evolutionary novelty and innovation, two of the key aspects of macroevolutionary patterns. Another way of viewing the differences between distributional and origins explanations is that the former emphasize the importance of ecological opportunity (‘ecological pull’) while the lat[t]er focuses attention on the generation of novel phenotypes (‘developmental push’).” Erwin, Douglas. 2017. “Developmental push or environmental pull? The causes of macroevolutionary dynamics.” HPLS. 39:36. Doi:10.1007/s40656-017-0163-0. pp. 2-3.
“Whether evolutionary theory needs to be reformulated and extended has provoked considerable controversy but may be largely beside the point. Our understanding of evolution has become incomparably richer over the past few decades as the intellectual hegemony of population genetics has faded. This is particularly true when considering macroevolutionary patterns. Macroevolutionary dynamics are both pushed by the origin of new phenotypes via developmental processes, as well as pulled by changes in climate and other aspects of the physical environment and biotic factors such as adaptive divergence and niche construction. The challenge moving forward will be to establish the relative importance of developmental push and environmental pull, the specific conditions under which each plays a significant role, and whether the relative contributions of development and environment have changed over time.” Erwin, Douglas. 2017. “Developmental push or environmental pull? The causes of macroevolutionary dynamics.” HPLS. 39:36. Doi:10.1007/s40656-017-0163-0. p. 12.
“… experimenters pair together chimpanzee individuals who are especially tolerant with one another in the context of food (established by an independent food tolerance test), they are much more likely to collaborate successfully and share the spoils at the end than are intolerant partners. And bonobos show both more tolerance around food and more cooperation in obtaining and sharing monopolizable food than do chimpanzees.” Tomasello, Michael, A. Melis, C. Tennie, E. Wyman & E. Herrmann. 2012. “Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis.” Current Anthropology. V. 53. No. 6. p. 676.
“It is not that each chimpanzee is scrambling for the monkey on its own [during monkey hunting], ignoring the others. In deciding what to do, each participant takes into account the position of the others and their behavior and how these might influence the monkey’s flight. The coordination is therefore an emergent property generated by individual decision making not aimed at that coordination.” Tomasello, Michael, A. Melis, C. Tennie, E. Wyman & E. Herrmann. 2012. “Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis.” Current Anthropology. V. 53. No. 6. p. 677.
“Interestingly, contemporary children seem to have virtually no interest in free riding, as participating in collaborations seems to be rewarding in itself.” Tomasello, Michael, A. Melis, C. Tennie, E. Wyman & E. Herrmann. 2012. “Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis.” Current Anthropology. V. 53. No. 6. p. 678.
“Humans have evolved extremely sensitive cheater-detection mechanisms of a type never observed in chimpanzees or other great apes–which lead them not only to shun free riders but sometimes even to punish them. Because everyone knows this to be the case, individuals are very concerned that others not think them to be laggards, and so they have developed a concern for self-reputation, something also never observed in other great apes.” Tomasello, Michael, A. Melis, C. Tennie, E. Wyman & E. Herrmann. 2012. “Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis.” Current Anthropology. V. 53. No. 6. p. 679.
“When the collaboration is obligate, the stakes are raised to the degree that there may be even competition for partners, and in this case a concern for self-reputation would be especially important. Note that by this point, reputation means both (i) a more motivated collaborator who will not cheat either by monpolizing the food or by lagging and (ii) a more skillful collaborator who is better able to form joint goals and coordinate roles. What enables good collaborators to find one another is thus not reputation for altruism or anything else external, but simply reputation for being a good collaborator–which is, with actual partners and direct observers, impossible to fake.” Tomasello, Michael, A. Melis, C. Tennie, E. Wyman & E. Herrmann. 2012. “Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis.” Current Anthropology. V. 53. No. 6. p. 679.
“It is noteworthy that whereas almost all other accounts of the evolution of human altruism rest on one or another form of reciprocity, reciprocity cannot explain uncontingent acts of altruistic helping. The current account, in contrast, does not depend on reciprocity because I am repaid for my altruistic acts not by reciprocated altruistic acts from others, but rather by their later mutualistic collaboration, which costs them nothing (actually benefits them). Indeed, it has recently been demonstrated experimentally that humans will actually compete with one another to be more altruistic so that observers will later choose them to engage in a mutualistic collaboration.” Tomasello, Michael, A. Melis, C. Tennie, E. Wyman & E. Herrmann. 2012. “Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis.” Current Anthropology. V. 53. No. 6. p. 680.
“In contrast [to bonobos and chimpanzees], humans, as already evident in young children, have evolved a suite of cognitive and motivational mechanisms for sharing food cooperatively, coordinating and communicating toward joint goals with complementary roles, and engaging in various kinds of reputation-based social selection (including a concern for self-reputation as a cooperator)–what we have called skills and motivations for joint intentionality.” Tomasello, Michael, A. Melis, C. Tennie, E. Wyman & E. Herrmann. 2012. “Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis.” Current Anthropology. V. 53. No. 6. p. 680.
“And so a big first step in the evolution of uniquely human cooperation is one in which the usual suspects–kin selection, sexual selection, direct reciprocity, and indirect reciprocity–play only minor roles. The heroes of our story are (1) mutualistic collaboration and the logic of interdependence and (2) social selection based on reputation as a good collaborator. But still, the collaboration we are talking about here was only small scale and ad hoc, in the sense that it existed only during the collaboration itself, when the foraging trip was over, so was the special ‘we’ it had engendered.” Tomasello, Michael, A. Melis, C. Tennie, E. Wyman & E. Herrmann. 2012. “Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis.” Current Anthropology. V. 53. No. 6. pp. 680-1.
“… what the current account make abundantly clear is just how difficult it is to establish and maintain cooperation in complex social organisms. Humans have all kinds of species-unique skills and motivations specifically designed to support cooperation, but still we are very, very far from perfect cooperators. Cooperation is really difficult.” Tomasello, Michael, A. Melis, C. Tennie, E. Wyman & E. Herrmann. 2012. “Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis.” Current Anthropology. V. 53. No. 6. p. 686.
“… the emergence of bipedalism and cooperative breeding in the hominin line–together with environmental developments that made a diet of meat from large animals adaptive as well as cultural innovations in the form of fire, cooking, and lethal weapons–created a niche for hominins in which there was a significant advantage to individuals with the ability to communicate and persuade.” Gintis, Herbert, C. van Schaik & C. Boehm. 2015. “Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems.” Current Anthropology. 56(3):327-353. p. 327.
“The hominin lineage branched off from the primate mainstream some 6.5 million years ago or earlier. The watershed event in the hominin line was the emergence of bipedalism. Bipedalism is well developed in Australopithecus afarensis, which appeared 3 million years after the origin of the hominin lineage. Homo ergaster (2.0-1.3 Mya) or Homo erectus (1.9-0.143 Mya) was the first currently documented specialized biped, having a relatively short arm/leg ratio that rendered brachiation infeasible.” Gintis, Herbert, C. van Schaik & C. Boehm. 2015. “Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems.” Current Anthropology. 56(3):327-353. p. 331.
“Cooking favors a central location to which the catch is transported and hence requires abandoning the competitive, socially uncoordinated ‘tolerated theft’ distribution of calories typical of food sharing in nonhuman primate species in favor of a distribution based on widely agreed-upon fairness norms. This major socio-psychological transition was probably made possible by the adoption of some form of cooperative breeding and hunting among hominins that had begun by the time Homo erectus emerged. In sum, while the early advent of cooking is not yet firmly established, it is likely that the control of fire and the practice of cooking were an important precondition of the emergence of a human moral order.” Gintis, Herbert, C. van Schaik & C. Boehm. 2015. “Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems.” Current Anthropology. 56(3):327-353. p. 332.
“As long as the material gains from a position of social dominance exceed the cost of coalition building and paying guard labor, social dominance of the sort common in other primate societies can be reestablished in human society. In fact, the appearance of farming and private property in land led to high levels of political inequality in only a few societies, and states with a monopoly in coercive power emerged only after a millennium of settled agriculture. Nor were early farming societies more economically stratified than hunter-gatherer societies. The accumulation of material wealth is thus merely a precondition for the reestablishment of social dominance hierarchies.” Gintis, Herbert, C. van Schaik & C. Boehm. 2015. “Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems.” Current Anthropology. 56(3):327-353. p. 335.
“Fire and cooking thus coevolved with the emergence of a normative order and social organization based on ethical behavior.” Gintis, Herbert, C. van Schaik & C. Boehm. 2015. “Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems.” Current Anthropology. 56(3):327-353. p. 336.
“The standard estimate is that some 3% of mammals have some form of allo-maternal care, but in the order Primates, this frequency rises to 20% or more. In many nonhuman primates and mammals in general, cooperative breeding is accompanied b generally heightened prosociality, as compared with related species with purely maternal care. The most plausible explanation is that cooperative breeding leads to a social structure that rewards prosocial behavior, which in turn leads to changes in neural structure that predisposes individuals to behaving prosocially. An alternative possibility is that there is some underlying factor in such species that promotes prosociality in general, of which collective breeding is one aspect.
“Human prosociality was strongly heightened beyond that of other primates living in large groups, including cooperative breeders, by virtue of the niche hominins occupied, which involved coordination in scavenging and hunting and sophisticated norms for sharing meat. This combination might account for the degree of cooperative breeding in the hominin line.” Gintis, Herbert, C. van Schaik & C. Boehm. 2015. “Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems.” Current Anthropology. 56(3):327-353. pp. 338-9.
“Enabled by bipedalism, environmental changes made a diet of meat from large animals fitness enhancing in the hominin line. This–together with cultural innovation in the domestication of fire, the practices of cooking, and collective childrearing–created a niche for hominins in which there was a high return to coordinated, cooperative, and competitive scavenging as well as technology-based extractive foraging. This development was accompanied by the likely use of clubs, spears, and long-range projectiles as lethal weapons and also led to the spread of specialized bipedalism and the re-organization of the upper torso, shoulders, arms and hands to maximize the effectiveness of these weapons.” Gintis, Herbert, C. van Schaik & C. Boehm. 2015. “Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems.” Current Anthropology. 56(3):327-353. p. 340.
“Competence discrepancies between cooperative partners thus create dependence asymmetries, which in turn provide experts with various types of power, including passive influence (being copied), active influence (being obeyed), bargaining power, leverage, and dependence-based coercive power (dominance) when experts are in position to withhold knowledge, services, or resources affecting others’ welfare….
“Simultaneously, competence-based status would have set the stage for nonauthoritarian leadership because leaders are a particular subset of experts.” Chapais, Bernard. Commentary to Gintis, Herbert, C. van Schaik & C. Boehm. 2015. “Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems.” Current Anthropology. 56(3):327-353. p. 341.
“We inferred five major pillars characterizing human deep social mind, enmeshed in an evolutionary socio-cognitive niche: hyper-cooperation, egalitarianism, cumulative culture, language, and mind reading (i.e., theory of mind)…. We argue that together these five pillars formed a powerfully synergistic, adaptive complex in which positive feedbacks operated between all of them. Mind reading, for example, means that the minds of a hunter-gatherer band interpenetrate and in a significant sense form an integrated group mind that–in concert with the other sociocognitive pillars–allows the band to operate as a unitary, coherent predatory organism that can more than successfully compete with professional predators.” Whiten, Andrew & D. Erdal. Commentary to Gintis, Herbert, C. van Schaik & C. Boehm. 2015. “Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems.” Current Anthropology. 56(3):327-353. p. 345.
“Anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) dispersed out of Africa at least twice. The two known dispersals significantly differed from each other in terms of space and time. An early dispersal took place roughly 120,000-90,000 years ago and was comparatively limited in geographic extend (i.e., Levant, Arabian Peninsula, and possibly parts of southern Asia). A later dispersal that occurred after about 75,000 years ago entailed colonization of Sahul no later than 65,000 years ago and invasion of northern Eurasia (above latitude 45̊ North) no later than 45,000 years ago.” Hoffecker, John F. & Ian Hoffecker. 2017. “Technological complexity and the global dispersal of modern humans.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 26:285-299. p. 285.
“One possible explanation for the contrast between the early or ‘near-modern’ and the later and global dispersal is that the modern humans who ventured out of Africa 120,000-90,000 years ago lacked the more structurally and functionally complex technology found among recent or ethnographic hunter-gatherers. Recent hunter-gatherers produced a variety of mechanical instruments, including self-acting ones that meet the formal definition of a machine and ensure a high rate of foraging success, among them bow and arrows, snares, traps, and fish weirs. They also ensure efficient harvesting of small vertebrates, including small mammals, birds, and fish. The modern humans who dispersed out of Africa after 75,000 years ago used these functionally complex technologies to expand their dietary breadth and increase their foraging efficiency, enabling them to colonize places where plant and animal productivity were low.” Hoffecker, John F. & Ian Hoffecker. 2017. “Technological complexity and the global dispersal of modern humans.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 26:285-299. p. 286.
“Direct evidence of insulated clothing also is lacking from early archeological contexts, but is reliably inferred from the presence of eyed ivory needles and bone awls, which are preserved in both cave and open-air site settings more than 30,000 years old.” Hoffecker, John F. & Ian Hoffecker. 2017. “Technological complexity and the global dispersal of modern humans.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 26:285-299. p. 288.
“To date, there is no evidence, direct or indirect, of artifacts or features designed by representatives of Homo before about 75,000 years ago that are either structurally or hierarchically complex (i.e., three or more organizational levels) or mechanical (i.e., containing one or more moving parts).” Hoffecker, John F. & Ian Hoffecker. 2017. “Technological complexity and the global dispersal of modern humans.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 26:285-299. p. 289.
“The four potential macroscale subsistence attractors identified by our analysis (pastoralism, hunting/gathering/fishing, extensive agriculture [shifting cultivation or horticulture], and intensive agriculture) are influenced by a small group of controlling variables, including temperature and precipitation seasonality, environmental productivity, degree of residential mobility, and population size. Mobility and population size may be the most influential.” Ullah, Isaac, I. Kuijt & J. Freeman. 2015. “Toward a theory of punctuated subsistence change.” PNAS. August 4. 112(31):9579-9584. p. 9582.
“We are thus left with an interesting conundrum. Mayr, Simpson, and others held that the supply of mutations is relatively constant and thus evolutionary innovation is largely controlled by the availability of ecological opportunity, with adaptive radiations playing a central role. In contrast, the recent interest in morphological novelty has emphasized that the nature of genetic and developmental changes plays a significant or controlling role in generating novelty, while largely ignoring the factors contributing to the evolutionary success of a novelty. Neither approach offers a unified view of the processes involved in generating novelties (however we define them) and explaining their success.” Erwin, Douglas. 2019. “Prospects for a General Theory of Evolutionary Novelty.” Journal of Computational Biology. November 7. 26:735-744. p. 737.
“One of the most significant challenges to modeling evolutionary novelty is that any novelty can be characterized by three factors, only one of which can be assessed at the time the novelty arises and thus can potentially be incorporated within a model. These factors are (1) radicality, the phenotypic distance of the new trait from the ancestral condition; (2) generativity, the consequences in terms of either taxic diversification or follow-on evolutionary change (including subsequent novelty); and (3) consequentiality, the impact of the novelty through innovation.” Erwin, Douglas. 2019. “Prospects for a General Theory of Evolutionary Novelty.” Journal of Computational Biology. November 7. 26:735-744. p. 738.
“… I recognize three different types of novelties. The first two correspond to Wagner’s types 1 and 2 novelties, newly individuated characters and deep modifications of these characters. The third is combinations of pre-existing characters. There is obviously a relationship between these types, as Wagner type 2 novelties are hierarchically nested within type 1 novelties. The third type of novelty relies upon the existence of previous novelties or other characters. Thus the probability of the latter two types of novelties should increase through the course of a model simulation.” Erwin, Douglas. 2019. “Prospects for a General Theory of Evolutionary Novelty.” Journal of Computational Biology. November 7. 26:735-744. pp. 739-740.
“Species differ in how they acquire and defend resources: they are producers, consumers, enemies, victims (or food), recyclers, and allies. In human economies, constructed by and for a single species, the formal equivalents of species are occupations. Individuals of different species or occupations interact and cooperate to create an economy.
“Positive feedbacks begin when innovation by one agent incidentally creates opportunities or new resources for other agents.” Vermeij, Geerat & E.G. Leigh. 2011. “Natural and human economies compared.” Ecosphere. April. 2(4):39. p. 3.
“Competition and defense jointly led to the evolution of dense populations and three-dimensionally complex environments–reefs, kelp beds, forests, and grasslands–forming new habitats and spurring economic activity.” Vermeij, Geerat & E.G. Leigh. 2011. “Natural and human economies compared.” Ecosphere. April. 2(4):39. p. 3.
“Dates (in Ma, millions of years ago) of major events in the history of life.
“3800 Origin of life on Earth
“3450 Microbial stromatolites
“2700 Oxygenic photosynthesis, microbial ecosystems
“2400 Great Oxidation Event
“2100 Eukaryotic cell, colonial organization
“2000 Multicellular organization
“1800 Phytoplankton
“1200 Obligate sex, differentiated multicellular organization
“1100 Oxidation on land
“635 Oxygenation, first animals
“550 Mineralized skeletons, burrowing in sediments, zooplankton
“500 Ordovician radiation, first terrestrial plants and animals
“420 Devonian revolution, oxygenation, first charcoal, first active pelagic swimmers
“300 Expanded terrestrial herbivory and decomposition
“230 Mineralized plankton, endothermy in large animals
“100 Increased photosynthetic capacity
“30 Grasslands
“1 Technological humans” Vermeij, Geerat & E.G. Leigh. 2011. “Natural and human economies compared.” Ecosphere. April. 2(4):39. p. 4.
“Economies grow in activity, scale, and interdependence because innovations build upon one another.” Vermeij, Geerat & E.G. Leigh. 2011. “Natural and human economies compared.” Ecosphere. April. 2(4):39. p. 4.
“Many mutualisms, such as that between animals and vitamin-synthesizing gut bacteria, are self-reinforcing because the symbiont can only reproduce by helping the host.” Vermeij, Geerat & E.G. Leigh. 2011. “Natural and human economies compared.” Ecosphere. April. 2(4):39. p. 4.
“Mutualisms and other innovations led to stepwise proliferations of life. Regional and global diversity rose in the sea and even more on dry land. The fossil record documents increasing productivity in the sea and on land; increased metabolic activity in animals and plants; and increased locomotor speed and distance traveled by animals of all sizes. These developments led to greater interconnection among habitats that were formerly more isolated from each other, such as fresh and salt water, land and sea, and tropics and the temperate zones, and the pelagic realm and the seafloor. Increased activity, often resulting from mutualistic partnerships and larger-scale interdependence, therefore made natural economies effectively larger over time.
“Similar but much faster trends characterize human economic history. They include rising per-capita productivity (output per man-hour), per-capita and collective energy use, consumption of ever more of the world’s natural resources, increased agricultural output, proliferation of occupations unrelated to food production, greater exchange of ideas and techniques, and globalization of culture and trade.” Vermeij, Geerat & E.G. Leigh. 2011. “Natural and human economies compared.” Ecosphere. April. 2(4):39. p. 5.
“Dates (in Ka, thousands of years before 2000) of major human inventions.
“2500 First tools
“1900 First cooking
“790 Controlled use of fire
“90 Compound tools, symbolic thought
“40 Widespread symbolism
“13 Cultivation of plants
“10 Domestication-agriculture
“6.0-5.5 Wheel
“5.7 Urbanized society
“4.4 First empire
“3.1 Iron Age
“2.6 Coins
“2.5 Agricultural wells
“1.5 Cutting plow
“0.8 Windmill
“0.67 Firearms
“0.55 Printing
“0.5 Rise of science
“0.5 Widespread use of coal and peat
“0.5 New World foods spread around the world
“0.3 Use of coke
“0.23 Precision machine tools
“0.2 Industrial Revolution
“0.16 Artificial fertilizers
“0.155 Telegraph
“0.15 Science linked to industry
“0.14 Widespread use of petroleum
“0.13 Widespread use of electricity
“0.10 Airplane
“0.09 Introduction of plastics
“0.05 Nuclear power
“0.01 Widespread use of computers”
Vermeij, Geerat & E.G. Leigh. 2011. “Natural and human economies compared.” Ecosphere. April. 2(4):39. p. 6.
“The explosive rise in global energy use by humans–an eight-hundred-fold increase in hydrocarbon consumption since 1750 and a twelve-fold rise from 1950 to 2000–exceeds in both magnitude and speed the three- to four-fold rise in photosynthetic capacity of land plants beginning 100 Ma and the roughly ten-fold increase in metabolic power with the evolution of endothermic vertebrates from ectothermic ancestors beginning 230 Ma. In the history of life, perhaps only the emergence of eukaryotic organization rivaled our technological expansion in raising productivity.” Vermeij, Geerat & E.G. Leigh. 2011. “Natural and human economies compared.” Ecosphere. April. 2(4):39. p. 6.
“The fastest change in population ever experienced by London was 93,000 new residents per year during the 1890s. New York grew by 220,000 new residents per year during the 1920s, and Los Angeles by 248,000 per year during the 1950s. In comparison, mega-cities in developing countries of the late 20th century are growing at absolute rates unseen in history. During the 2000s, Delhi added 620,000 residents per year. Beijing 603,000 per year, and Dacca 445,000.” Jedwab, Remi & D. Vollrath. 2015. “Urbanization without growth in historical perspective.” Explorations in Economic History. 58:1-21. p. 10.
“Given our evidence regarding urbanization rates and mega-cities, several patterns stand out in the relationship of urbanization and development. If we compare urbanization and development in 1500 to 2010, there has been a distinct level shift in urbanization rates over time at all levels of income per capita. On average, urbanization rates are about 25-30 percentage points higher today than in 1500. Urbanization has diffused across all levels of development over the last 500 years, and one could term this shift urbanization without growth.
“But this shift took place in two distinct phases. First, from the period 1500 to the mid-20th century, urbanization rose rapidly for the richest countries, while remaining stagnant for the poorest. The location of the largest cities was concentrated in the richest areas of the world in this period. In particular it is during the early 20th century, overlapping with the widespread industrialization of Europe and North America, when the correlation of urbanization and income per capita becomes the most pronounced.
“Second, from the mid-20th century to the present we have seen a distinct change in this pattern. Urbanization rates have risen for the very poorest countries, and the location of mega-cities is shifting towards poor, developing countries and away from rich, developed ones. The correlation between urbanization and development has been falling demonstrably over the late 20th century when compared to the historical experience.” Jedwab, Remi & D. Vollrath. 2015. “Urbanization without growth in historical perspective.” Explorations in Economic History. 58:1-21. p. 13.
“The experience of the classical Industrial Revolution has informed much of the literature on urbanization and development, which often uses it as an example of how urbanization and structural transformation interact to produce higher levels of GDP per capita. These theories reflect urbanization with growth, in that urbanization is seen as either a consequence of productivity growth that causes structural change into predominantly urban sectors, or a cause of productivity growth in the economy due to agglomeration effects.” Jedwab, Remi & D. Vollrath. 2015. “Urbanization without growth in historical perspective.” Explorations in Economic History. 58:1-21. p. 14.
“This approach [industrial revolutions] describes how a rise in industrial productivity attracts underemployed labor from agriculture into the industrial sector, which is presumed to be more concentrated in urban areas than is agricultural production. This approach either assumes that there is no food problem or that there is some other means of meeting subsistence food requirements. There could be surplus labor in the agricultural sector, as in the dual economy model of Lewis, or the industrial could be preceded by an agricultural revolution, as in Asia where the Green Revolution occurred early. Alternatively, an industrial revolution could directly facilitate the modernization of agriculture through better agricultural intermediate inputs. Lastly, a country could export manufactured goods (or services) to import food. Regardless of the exact mechanism, in these models an industrial revolution draws labor into urban areas in response to a productivity improvement.” Jedwab, Remi & D. Vollrath. 2015. “Urbanization without growth in historical perspective.” Explorations in Economic History. 58:1-21. p. 14; reference: Lewis, Arthur. 1954. “Economic development with unlimited supplies of labour.” Manch. Sch. 22(2):139-191.
“[Agglomeration effects] … the economic geography literature suggests that causation runs from urbanization to productivity in both developed countries and developing countries. Cities allow countries to save on the transportation costs of goods, people and ideas. First, by agglomerating thousands or millions of people in a few locations, cities facilitate the distribution of goods. Firms are closer to suppliers. They are close to consumers, and vice versa. Second, cities create thick labor markets and are centers of human capital accumulation. In particular, returns-to-scale imply that universities and hospitals are located in large cities. Third, if there are agglomeration economies within sectors or across sectors, firms directly benefit from being located close to firms of the same or different industries. As long as these agglomeration effects dominate congestion effects, cities increase productivity and wages in the long run.” Jedwab, Remi & D. Vollrath. 2015. “Urbanization without growth in historical perspective.” Explorations in Economic History. 58:1-21. p. 15.
“Negative theories of urbanization without growth work somewhat differently. These policies may use subsidies and/or taxes to raise wu [urban earnings per urban worker] relative to wr [rural earnings per worker], inducing people to move from rural to urban areas… Alternatively, if urban amenities Χu are increased by extracting rural resources, then this will induce a shift of population towards urban areas, but at the cost of lower rural wages relative to urban areas. In both cases, urbanization is associated with lower earnings per worker.” Jedwab, Remi & D. Vollrath. 2015. “Urbanization without growth in historical perspective.” Explorations in Economic History. 58:1-21. p. 17.
“In the period from 1500 to 1950, there appear to be some clear features of positive urbanization without growth occurring. Without taking a stand on causality, industrialization and improvements in urban technologies occur within a similar time period. Otis’ elevator arrives in 1852. The first skyscraper (the 10-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago) was built in 1885, and the first all-steel framed skyscraper arrived in 1889. For public sanitation, John Snow demonstrated the correlation of cholera and water sources in London in 1854, and that city began regulating water supply standards in 1855. Chlorination of drinking water to eliminate germs begins in the 1890s. The availability of clean drinking water and sewage service meant that 20th century cities were no longer ‘killers.’
“Transportation technologies like the steamboat and railroad, which arrived in the early 19th century, made supplying cities cheaper, allowing them to grow. Intra-city rail networks arrived in the mid-19th century (e.g. The Metropolitan Railway began service in 1863 in London). Automobiles arrived in the late 19th century, and by 1911 the first highway, the Long Island Motor Parkway, had opened. Taken all together, these technologies made cities more attractive places to live, allowing urbanization rates to rise without necessarily meaning that productivity increased. Urbanization without growth was a feature of the industrializing world, even if there [w]as also significant urbanization with growth occurring at the same time.” Jedwab, Remi & D. Vollrath. 2015. “Urbanization without growth in historical perspective.” Explorations in Economic History. 58:1-21. p. 17.
“For the post-1950 era, some combination of these positive and negative forces seems to be a plausible way of thinking about the shift up in the level of urbanization at low levels of GDP per capita. The mortality transition lowered urban mortality substantially in developing countries in this period and allowed for both ‘urban push’ demographic growth as well as making cities more attractive locations for workers….
“Rural poverty, driven either by increasing density, climate change, or wars, has driven more residents to mega-cities, again representing a negative source of urbanization without growth.” Jedwab, Remi & D. Vollrath. 2015. “Urbanization without growth in historical perspective.” Explorations in Economic History. 58:1-21. pp. 17-18.
“Our results at PP5-6 [location near Pinnacle Point, S. Africa] show that at this same time, early modern humans regularly employed pyrotechnology to increase the quality and efficiency of their stone tool manufacture process. This technology required in these early humans a novel association between fire, its heat, and a structural change in stone with consequent flaking benefits that may signal a complex cognition. Our gloss analysis of the PP13B [second Pinnacle Point site] lithics suggests that this technology may have originated by 164 ka.” Brown, Kyle, C. Marean, A. Herries, Z. Jacobs, C. Tribolo, D. Braun, D. Roberts, M. Meyer, & J. Bernatchez. 2009. “Fire As an Engineering Tool of Early Modern Humans.” Science. August 14. 325: 859-862. p. 861.
“Today’s economic map of the world is dominated by what I call clusters: critical masses – in one place – of unusual competitive success in particular fields. Clusters are a striking feature of virtually every national, regional, state, and even metropolitan economy, especially in more economically advanced nations. Silicon Valley and Hollywood may be the world’s best-known clusters. Clusters are not unique, however; they are highly typical – and therein lies a paradox: the enduring competitive advantages in a global economy lie increasingly in local things – knowledge, relationships, motivation – that distant rivals cannot match.” Porter, Michael. 1998. “Clusters and the New Economics of Competition.” Harvard Business Review. November-December. 98609. p. 78.
“Clusters promote both competition and cooperation. Rivals compete intensely to win and retain customers. Without vigorous competition, a cluster will fail. Yet there is also cooperation, much of it vertical, involving companies in related industries and local institutions. Competition can coexist with cooperation because they occur on different dimensions and among different players.
“Clusters represent a kind of new spatial organizational form in between arm’s-length markets on the one hand and hierarchies, or vertical integration, on the other. A cluster, then, is an alternative way of organizing the value chain. Compared with market transactions among dispersed and random buyers and sellers, the proximity of companies and institutions in one location–and the repeated exchanges among them–fosters better coordination and trust. Thus clusters mitigate the problems inherent in arm’s-length relationships without imposing the inflexibilities of vertical integration or the management challenges of creating and maintaining formal linkages such as networks, alliances, and partnerships. A cluster of independent and informally linked companies and institutions represents a robust organizational form that offers advantages in efficiency, effectiveness, and flexibility.” Porter, Michael. 1998. “Clusters and the New Economics of Competition.” Harvard Business Review. November-December. 98609. p. 79-80.
“A host of linkages among cluster members results in a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In a typical tourism cluster, for example, the quality of a visitor’s experience depends not only on the appeal of the primary attraction but also on the quality and efficiency of complementary businesses such as hotels, restaurants, shopping outlets, and transportation facilities. Because members of the cluster are mutually dependent, good performance by one can boost the success of the others.” Porter, Michael. 1998. “Clusters and the New Economics of Competition.” Harvard Business Review. November-December. 98609. p. 81.
“Investing in public goods is normally seen as a function of government, yet cluster thinking clearly demonstrates how companies benefit from local assets and institutions [so that trade associations and executives have or can invest in public goods for the cluster in place of government].” Porter, Michael. 1998. “Clusters and the New Economics of Competition.” Harvard Business Review. November-December. 98609. p. 88.
“And like in nature, new technologies create new niches, platforms for future innovations.” Wagner, Andreas & W. Rosen. 2014. “Spaces of the possible: universal Darwinism and the wall between technological and biological innovation.” Journal of the Royal Society: Interface. 11:20131190. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.1190. p. 5.
“Trial and error in populations become self-evident necessities, once we accept that humans–like nature–are very poor at anticipating successful innovations.” Wagner, Andreas & W. Rosen. 2014. “Spaces of the possible: universal Darwinism and the wall between technological and biological innovation.” Journal of the Royal Society: Interface. 11:20131190. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.1190. p. 7.
“Because protein genotype space comprises all possible proteins, it also comprises proteins with all possible functions, and thus all possible innovations that involve proteins.
“The very existence of such a space already helps explain the combinatorial nature of innovation and the ubiquity of exaptation. Both emerge very naturally from the realization that new proteins are new combinations of old amino acids, and such combinations almost inevitably provide new uses for the old, and thus create the potential for exaptation. What is more, because the framework of genotype space applies to innovations beyond new proteins–involving novel forms of regulation or of metabolisms–it can help explain the combinatorial nature of all biological innovation.” Wagner, Andreas & W. Rosen. 2014. “Spaces of the possible: universal Darwinism and the wall between technological and biological innovation.” Journal of the Royal Society: Interface. 11:20131190. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.1190. p. 7.
“All human innovation takes place in some space of the possible, but human innovators do not yet take advantage of this space in the way evolution does. For example, combining a compressor, a combustion chamber and a turbine into a jet engine is dependent on ingenuity–it is not obvious how to combine the elements of an existing technology to innovate. The blind innovation process of nature compensates for its lack of ingenuity by using components whose links are standardized, such that their combination does not require ingenuity, but only patience. A case in point is the peptide bond of proteins, a type of chemical bond that allows any two of the 20 proteinaceous amino acids to connect to one another. It is this peptide bond that allows nature to explore myriad different amino acid sequences.” Wagner, Andreas & W. Rosen. 2014. “Spaces of the possible: universal Darwinism and the wall between technological and biological innovation.” Journal of the Royal Society: Interface. 11:20131190. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.1190. p. 8.
“Four interrelated phenomena collectively describe and explain how complex life and its economic structures arise and change. These are: (1) self-organization–nonliving particles spontaneously move and interact in predictable ways to create ordered states according to the properties of the particles and their surrounding medium; (2) emergence and synergy–parts act together and combine to form wholes whose properties, interactions, and effects differ from those of their components; (3) selection and adaptation–living entities competing for locally scarce resources to survive are sorted according to criteria of performance set by living and nonliving sectors of the environment; and (4) feedback–life modifies its living and nonliving surroundings, which in turn modify the performance criteria for survival. Together these four phenomena encompass a theory of economic history applicable to all systems consisting of interacting, metabolizing entities.” Vermeij, Geerat. 2009. “Comparative economics: evolution and the modern economy.” J Bioecon. 11:105-134. DOI.10.1007/s10818-009-9062-0. p. 107.
“The pathways and transformations of matter and energy in a living system describe that system’s economy. Members of the economy compete, cooperate, produce, consume, and trade.” Vermeij, Geerat. 2009. “Comparative economics: evolution and the modern economy.” J Bioecon. 11:105-134. DOI.10.1007/s10818-009-9062-0. p. 110.
“Resources, benefits, costs, investment, price, and money can be expressed in units of energy, which is stored for later use of [or] expended in biological or economic work. Rates of production or consumption, ecological productivity (the rate of biomass production per unit time), economic profit, metabolic rate, growth rate , and the rate of evolution are expressible in units of power.” Vermeij, Geerat. 2009. “Comparative economics: evolution and the modern economy.” J Bioecon. 11:105-134. DOI.10.1007/s10818-009-9062-0. p. 110.
“Economic inequality among members is best expressed as a dimensionless ratio between either the energy or the power of entities.” Vermeij, Geerat. 2009. “Comparative economics: evolution and the modern economy.” J Bioecon. 11:105-134. DOI.10.1007/s10818-009-9062-0. p. 110.
“Although vertical inheritance is the norm in the evolution of ‘higher’ organisms–plants, animals, and fungi–genes and nongenetic information also flow horizontally. Viruses and bacteria aid in the lateral spread of genes among species, and in fact provide the basis for much of the genetic engineering that characterizes modern biotechnology. Sex, which involves a highly regulated recombination of genes between male and female to produce offspring whose genetic makeup differs from that of either parent is a form of horizontal gene transfer within species. Hybridization between members of separate species is widespread and often results in the formation of new species in both plants and animals. Well-integrated symbioses of phylogenetically distant component organisms have produced new organisms such as lichens, corals, wood-digesting termites, nitrogen-fixing land plants, rooted vascular plants, and the eukaryotic cell.” Vermeij, Geerat. 2009. “Comparative economics: evolution and the modern economy.” J Bioecon. 11:105-134. DOI.10.1007/s10818-009-9062-0. p. 112.
“In smaller economies or in certain special cases, a common code of conduct enforced in a unified, often genetically or linguistically homogeneous group of middlemen–specialized traders who facilitate exchange between buyer and seller–may substitute for the more formal, more impersonal institutions that characterize large modern economies. Such a code of conduct, or informal mutual understanding based on frequent interactions among the same people, exists among genetically/ethnically homogeneous Chinese merchants in Southeast Asian societies as well as the Jewish and Italian merchants in Medieval Europe. Like the formal mechanisms in larger economies, these arrangements depend on trust, and reduce the risks inherent in exchange between individuals whose interests do not always coincide. The homogeneous middleman groups exemplify a high level of cooperation among people operating in economies where formal law for the protection of property rights and contracts is not well-developed.” Vermeij, Geerat. 2009. “Comparative economics: evolution and the modern economy.” J Bioecon. 11:105-134. DOI.10.1007/s10818-009-9062-0. p. 117.
“Living things have constructed or used an enormous variety of extensions of their bodies that enhance nutrition, defense, and reproduction. Examples include soil, burrows, reef frameworks, nests, beehives, termite mounds, shells, tubes, cocoons, galls, beaver dams, and a wide variety of ‘domesticated’ organisms. Tool-use by some large-brained birds and primates, though primitive by our standards, demonstrates that deliberate modification of devices to perform specific functions evolved multiple times.” Vermeij, Geerat. 2009. “Comparative economics: evolution and the modern economy.” J Bioecon. 11:105-134. DOI.10.1007/s10818-009-9062-0. p. 124.
“Ecosystems and human societies all redistribute production, and although they vary in the degree to which this is accomplished by diffuse, bottom-up means or concentrated, top-down, government-like entities, the effect is to allow a greater diversity of economic players to coexist.” Vermeij, Geerat. 2009. “Comparative economics: evolution and the modern economy.” J Bioecon. 11:105-134. DOI.10.1007/s10818-009-9062-0. p. 127.
“Biological systems for billions of years have been characterized by redundancy, which spreads risks and enables systems of loosely linked but still interdependent parts to absorb and recover from shocks. Disruptions are inevitable–their history is as old as life itself–but policy-makers can limit their destructive power by building redundancy into the production and distribution of goods, even at the cost of reduced efficiency. Redundancy may be at odds with economic efficiency, but in the long run it is better to have a safety net of redundant production than to be efficient and dead.” Vermeij, Geerat. 2009. “Comparative economics: evolution and the modern economy.” J Bioecon. 11:105-134. DOI.10.1007/s10818-009-9062-0. p. 128.
“… the major cognitive innovations have fuelled an evolutionary cycle of greater investment per individual, which, in turn, selected for a larger allocation of resources and time for the development of enhanced cognitive abilities. This, in turn, empowered individuals to devote long time periods to acquiring complex skills. The evolutionary trend of increased individual expertise opened up novel niches requiring and selecting for greater animal intelligence.” Dukas, Reuven. 2017. “Cognitive innovations and the evolutionary biology of expertise.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:2016.0427. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0427. p. 2.
“The evolution of the nervous system is such a significant innovation because it has led to the establishment of the only other major biological information system besides genetic networks.” Dukas, Reuven. 2017. “Cognitive innovations and the evolutionary biology of expertise.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:2016.0427. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0427. p. 2.
“In addition to an increased need for inter-cell communication, the evolution of multicellularity also posed novel challenges of integration and coordination among cells. Given their initial role in communication, neurons were naturally preadapted for coordinating action among cells.” Dukas, Reuven. 2017. “Cognitive innovations and the evolutionary biology of expertise.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:2016.0427. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0427. p. 3.
“The evolution of learning and associated long-term memory is probably the most important cognitive innovation through-out the evolution of organismal life because it opened up numerous novel ecological and evolutionary opportunities. In the ecological domain, learning allows animals to exploit abundant environmental features that are unique to certain times and places. For example, an individual can learn the spatial features unique to its shelter location. This means that it can invest more in this shelter because it can return to the shelter after exploring for and exploiting resources such as food, and thus occupy the shelter throughout its life. This also means that spatial learning and memory can improve parental care because parents can invest more time and resources in a nest and keep using it while providing their offspring with shelter and food. Furthermore, provisioners such as bees can learn unique features including the spatial location, odour and colour of their preferred flowers, and learn new motor patterns for optimizing the handling of these flowers. Finally, in many animal species, individual recognition allows one to identify parents, neighbours, competitors, potential mates and offspring.
“In the evolutionary arena, learning increases the value of the individual. This is because experience can lead to older individuals having much higher reproductive success relative to that of young novices…. Increased individual value due to experience may have led to an evolutionary cycle of enhanced learning and memory selecting for life histories characterized by longer lifespans. In turn, longer lifespans may have increased the value of further investment in structures that improve learning and memory as well as other cognitive abilities, and so forth.” Dukas, Reuven. 2017. “Cognitive innovations and the evolutionary biology of expertise.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:2016.0427. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0427. pp. 3-4.
“Briefly, long-term memory is the culmination of multiple, interactive, dynamic processes that start with the neuronal encoding of new information via the modulation of synaptic properties by neurotransmitters. The initial chemical modulation is followed by a molecular cascade leading to gene expression activated by the cAMP-respone element-binding protein (CREB). The products of these genes cause structural and functional changes in selected synapses as well as changes in the intrinsic properties of certain neurons, which affect their subsequent activity.” Dukas, Reuven. 2017. “Cognitive innovations and the evolutionary biology of expertise.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:2016.0427. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0427. p. 4.
“The trouble with individual expertise is that it is lost when that individual dies. Social learning resolves this organic constraint by allowing other individuals and, most importantly, members of subsequent generations, to acquire relevant knowledge from experts. Second, the evolutionary cycle of increased individual value has probably also led to the evolution of parental care. Parental care can merely mean providing food and protection. Such care alone can dramatically increase a young individual’s probability of reaching adulthood. With social learning, however, parental care enables young novices to acquire successful skills from their experienced parents. This opens up novel ecological niches that require the use of extensive knowledge and complex abilities that are acquired through prolonged practice.” Dukas, Reuven. 2017. “Cognitive innovations and the evolutionary biology of expertise.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 372:2016.0427. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0427. p. 5.
“Male chimpanzee cooperation, which includes behaviors such as coalitionary aggression, hunting, sharing meat, and defending territories against males of other groups, has few parallels in the animal kingdom.” Langergraber, Kevin, J. Mitani & L. Vigilant. 2007. “The limited impact of kinship on cooperation in wild chimpanzees.” PNAS. 104(19):7786-7790. p. 7786.
“We followed individually identified adolescent and adult male chimpanzees to determine which dyads selectively affiliated and cooperated in the context of six social behaviors: associations, grooming, proximity maintenance, coalition formation, meat sharing, and joint participation in territorial boundary patrols….
“We found that male chimpanzees preferentially affiliated and cooperated with their maternal brothers….
“In contrast to maternal brothers, paternal brothers did not engage in any of the six social behaviors more frequently than did unrelated and distantly related dyads.” Langergraber, Kevin, J. Mitani & L. Vigilant. 2007. “The limited impact of kinship on cooperation in wild chimpanzees.” PNAS. 104(19):7786-7790. p. 7787.
“In sum, male chimpanzees show clear and consistent biases in their social behavior toward maternal brothers, confirming the importance of maternal kinship in structuring patterns of behavior in a primate species where males rather than females routinely spend their lives in their natal group. But although kinship is important, its impact is not widespread; paternal brothers do not preferentially interact, and males in the majority of highly affiliative and cooperative dyads are unrelated or distantly related. These results add to a growing body of research indicating that direct as well as indirect fitness benefits are important in explaining cooperation among animals.” Langergraber, Kevin, J. Mitani & L. Vigilant. 2007. “The limited impact of kinship on cooperation in wild chimpanzees.” PNAS. 104(19):7786-7790. p. 7788.
“Here we refer to cooperation in its broadest sense: behaviours which provide a benefit to another individual (recipient) or are beneficial to both the actor and the recipient.” Melis, Alicia & Dirk Semmann. 2010. “How is human cooperation different?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2663-2674. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0157. p. 2663.
“Cooperation between unrelated individuals can evolve if both actor and receiver obtain immediate direct benefits from the interaction, or if individuals, who invest to help others, obtain a future benefit greater than the initial investment, for example via reciprocation.” Melis, Alicia & Dirk Semmann. 2010. “How is human cooperation different?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2663-2674. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0157. p. 2663.
“The problem of free-riding differs between situations in which there is a delay between help given and received and situations in which there is the potential for immediate mutual benefits (e.g. individuals must work together to obtain a common goal which otherwise would be inaccessible or harder to obtain), the former being more vulnerable to defection than the latter.” Melis, Alicia & Dirk Semmann. 2010. “How is human cooperation different?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2663-2674. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0157. p. 2664.
“If the actor [in cooperative behavior] has immediate costs and only the recipient obtains immediate benefits, we term this investment.” Melis, Alicia & Dirk Semmann. 2010. “How is human cooperation different?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2663-2674. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0157. p. 2664.
“The return benefits [to an investing species] can be the consequence of self-serving behaviour by the recipient (pseudo-reciprocity) or a by-product of the well-being of the recipient: when individuals are interdependent, or have a ‘stake’ in the welfare of others. A typical example for pseudo-reciprocity are the interspecies ant-butterfly mutualisms, in which larvae of different butterfly species invest in producing nutritious liquids (nectar), which ants can feed from in exchange for ant protection from predators. Defence by the ants is a by-product since it is in the ants’ own selfish interest to defend their food source.
“Roberts proposed the concept of interdependence, which is an extension or generalization of pseudo-reciprocity. Interdependent individuals have a stake in the welfare of others since these others’ survival or well-being has secondary consequences for them, as for example due to group augmentation….. As suggested by Roberts, it is possible that interdependence plays an important role explaining investing behaviour in nature, since it is relatively stable against exploitation. It could also provide an explanation for many investing interactions among humans (e.g. food sharing in hunter-gatherers or friendships in human and non-human primates).” Melis, Alicia & Dirk Semmann. 2010. “How is human cooperation different?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2663-2674. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0157. p. 2664; reference: Roberts, G. 2005. “Cooperation through interdependence.” Anim. Behav. 70:901-908. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2005.02.006.
“Reciprocal investment assumes that investments can be evolutionarily stable when individuals alternate their roles as actor and recipient….. Control mechanisms such as punishment, parcelling, partner switching, ostracism, etc. create solutions to stabilize investment behaviour….
“… a lot of effort has been dedicated to finding examples of this form of cooperative behaviour in species other than humans which would fit the predictions of the theory and related formalized strategies. Nevertheless, although theoretically very compelling, the empirical evidence remains scarce.” Melis, Alicia & Dirk Semmann. 2010. “How is human cooperation different?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2663-2674. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0157. p. 2665.
“Studies have looked at the temporal sequence of cooperative exchanges in captive chimpanzees via observation or after experimental manipulation of the previous favours received from different partners have found weak effects or limited evidence for reciprocal interactions.” Melis, Alicia & Dirk Semmann. 2010. “How is human cooperation different?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2663-2674. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0157. p. 2666.
“Mutually beneficial cooperative behaviour provides immediate gains for all participants. At a dyadic level, the risk of potential defection is generally low since by acting together, individuals obtain higher benefits than they would obtain by acting alone. Although individuals act in their own immediate interest, and sometimes cooperation is a by-product of their independent but simultaneous actions, often they need to adapt to a greater or lesser degree to their partner’s behaviour, synchronizing and coordinating with each other.” Melis, Alicia & Dirk Semmann. 2010. “How is human cooperation different?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2663-2674. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0157. p. 2667.
“The problem of free-riding [for mutually beneficial cooperative behaviour] becomes more acute with increasing group size and whenever the cooperative act generates public and non-excludable benefits. Nevertheless, at a group level, predator mobbing, territorial defence and cooperative hunting are widespread phenomena among animals.” Melis, Alicia & Dirk Semmann. 2010. “How is human cooperation different?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2663-2674. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0157. p. 2667.
“It has been shown theoretically and empirically that small group sizes and high group benefits can remove a social dilemma from a public goods situation and make the cooperator strategy, when averaged over many small groups, more successful than the defector strategy.” Melis, Alicia & Dirk Semmann. 2010. “How is human cooperation different?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2663-2674. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0157. p. 2668.
“Evidence for rewards or benefits distributed only among contributors to the collective action has only been reported among chimpanzees [and not among other species] after hunting episodes.” Melis, Alicia & Dirk Semmann. 2010. “How is human cooperation different?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2663-2674. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0157. p. 2668.
“From a cognitive point of view, the question of interest in coordinated collaborative interactions is whether animals understand the role and intentions of the collaborative partner. This allows individuals to actively coordinate their actions with those of their partner, employing different social and communicative means to facilitate success in the joint action. This stands in contrast to simple co-production, where individuals independently but simultaneously direct similar actions to the common goal….
“In most studies, pairs of individuals are confronted with a cooperative food retrieval task, in which individuals need to coordinate their actions by pulling simultaneously on a rope/handle in order to retrieve the otherwise out-of-reach rewards. Since in most of these retrieval tasks, subjects can succeed as a by-product of individuals’ independent but simultaneous actions, active coordination between partners is often operationalized with measures such as pulling rates in the presence and absence of the partner, and monitoring behaviour between partners. In a study with capuchin monkeys, Visalberghi et al found that subjects pulled equally often when the partner was pulling than when it was not. This leads them to conclude that although capuchins can succeed in a joint action due to their simultaneous actions, they do not acquire an appreciation of the role of the partner. However, Mendres & de Waal and Cronin et al. have argued that capuchins and cottontop tamarins understand the role of the partner in a cooperative task since individuals pull more often in the presence of a partner, perform better if they can see the partner and monitor their partners more when cooperation is necessary than when it is not…. However, even if subjects developed some sensitivity to the role of the partner, subjects often participated in an extensive number of trials before showing efficiency in the task. Nevertheless, it seems that with experience, different primate species can learn the contingencies of a cooperative task.
“A later study with chimpanzees has provided stronger evidence for what may constitute knowledge of the role of the collaborative partner.” Melis, Alicia & Dirk Semmann. 2010. “How is human cooperation different?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2663-2674. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0157. p. 2669; references: Visalberghi, E., B.P. Quarantotti & F. Tranchida. 2000. “Solving a cooperation task without taking into account the partner’s behavior: the case of capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella).” J. Comp. Psychol. 114:297-301; Mendres, K.A. & F.B. de Waal. 2000. “Capuchins do cooperate: the advantage of an intuitive task.” Anim. Behav. 60:523-529; Cronin, K.A., A.V. Kurian & C.T. Snowdon. 2005. “Cooperative problem solving in a cooperatively breeding primate (Saguinus oedipus).” Anim. Behav. 69:133-142.
“Forming shared goals and joint intentions goes beyond coordinating the actions with those of a partner. When individuals form shared goals they also want the partner to be aimed at the goal and be successful in his role; that is why it has been argued that some form of communication, in which partners influence not only each other’s behaviour but also each others’ intentions, is critical to distinguish collaborative activities based on shared intentionality from collaborative activities in which individuals view their partners as mere social tools to reach their own individual goals.” Melis, Alicia & Dirk Semmann. 2010. “How is human cooperation different?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2663-2674. Doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0157. p. 2670.
“As Reader and Laland first pointed out, innovation may be defined as an end-product – ‘a new or modified learned behaviour not previously found in a population’–, or as a process – one ‘that results in new or modified learned behaviour and that introduces novel behavioural variants into a population’s repertoire.’” Griffin, Andrea & D. Guez. 2014. “Innovation and problem solving: A review of common mechanisms.” Behavioural Processes. 109:121-134. p. 122; reference: Reader, S.M. & K. Laland. 2003. Animal Innovation. Oxford UP.
“The first most compelling finding from this review is that problem solving of extractive foraging tasks requires motor variability. Hence, the number of different actions performed and their relative frequency of expression appears to provide an important source of raw material for behavioural variants. More diverse manipulative skills may provide increased opportunity for learning of object affordances and their physical properties…. The convergent evidence that behavioural variability is key to innovations in the wild and to problem solving of extractive tasks provides a strong basis from which to assert that problem solving provides a meaningful experimental assay for studying innovation.” Griffin, Andrea & D. Guez. 2014. “Innovation and problem solving: A review of common mechanisms.” Behavioural Processes. 109:121-134. p. 132.
“Our second most compelling finding is that problem solving is consistently associated with learning speed when learning involves the gradual acquisition of a motor technique. This finding suggests that problem solving is linked to operant learning, a form of associative learning in which behaviours that yield desired outcomes increase in frequency and those that do not decrease in frequency.” Griffin, Andrea & D. Guez. 2014. “Innovation and problem solving: A review of common mechanisms.” Behavioural Processes. 109:121-134. p. 132.
“We suggest, rather, that flexibility is most likely a multi-faceted concept, which encompasses the ability to inhibit a previously successful behaviour, the ability to invent a new behaviour in new circumstances, and the ability to perform an existing behaviour in a new context, amongst others. What’s more, animals may be flexible in one domain (e.g. foraging) and not in another (e.g. predator avoidance). The common usage of behavioural flexibility may represent an over-simplification of this complexity.” Griffin, Andrea & D. Guez. 2014. “Innovation and problem solving: A review of common mechanisms.” Behavioural Processes. 109:121-134. p. 132.
“Finally, we found mixed evidence that necessity systematically increases the likelihood of problem solving. There was no evidence that competitive ability predicted problem solving, and social rank was only occasionally associated with this ability…. In contrast, problem-solving ability was systematically related to persistence, indicating that task-directed motivation is key to problem solving. As persistence has been linked to food deprivation time, this finding indicates that necessity can facilitate problem solving. Perhaps surprisingly, motivation did not predict problem solving.” Griffin, Andrea & D. Guez. 2014. “Innovation and problem solving: A review of common mechanisms.” Behavioural Processes. 109:121-134. p. 133.
“The importance of collaboration is widely recognized in industry and services. From the long-term strategically established business communities such as those manifested as business ecosystems, to the dynamic goal-oriented virtual organizations such as those found in manufacturing and even in disaster rescue initiatives, there is a very wide spectrum of cases of organizational structures and co-working forms relying on the collaboration among their members…. The need to integrate multiple perspectives into an interdisciplinary view has led to the emergence and consolidation of Collaborative Networks (CN) as a new discipline, and the efforts towards CN reference modelling….
“An yet when it comes to practice, it is reported by various authors that many of the collaborative alliances fail, sometimes in excess of 50% and this is observed not only in business partnerships but also in R&D partnerships.” Camarinha-Matos, Luis & H. Afsarmanesh. 2018. “Roots of Collaboration: Nature-Inspired Solutions for Collaborative Networks.” IEEE Access. 6:30829-30843. p. 30829.
“A good number of studies [in nature-related studies of prosocial behaviors] focus on identifying and categorizing prosocial behaviours and their ontogenetic roots, both in animals and young humans. Examples include: (i) instrumental helping (‘acting towards goals of others’), (ii) sharing (‘letting others use what is yours’), (iii) informing (‘providing useful information to others’), (iv) comforting (‘providing emotional support to others’), as well as addressing their associated constraints and enablers.” Camarinha-Matos, Luis & H. Afsarmanesh. 2018. “Roots of Collaboration: Nature-Inspired Solutions for Collaborative Networks.” IEEE Access. 6:30829-30843. pp. 30836-7.
“The most basic aspect [considering biological markets as an explanation for cooperation] is the choice between offers, and there is ample evidence for the relevance of this process in many cooperative interactions. Interspecific mutualisms often follow the pattern of ‘hosts’ offering food or shelter to ‘visitors’ while gaining benefits from the visits, and the mobile visitors are then in a position to choose between hosts…. … it is clear that pollinator choosiness can dramatically influence the composition of host communities, such as when an invading plant out-competes the residents using a rich nectar to temp[t] pollinators away from the native plants.” Leimar, Olof & P. Hammerstein. 2010. “Cooperation for direct fitness benefits.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2619-2626. p. 2620.
“Mutualistic interactions of the kind where each partner invests resources in the other would seem the likeliest candidates for the operation of reciprocity, but even in such cases there are good reasons to instead look for mutual investments in by-product benefits. A case in point is mycorrhizal symbiosis. Many species of vascular plants form mycorrhiza with fungal mycelium in the soil. The association is based on the transport of organic carbon from plant photosynthesis to the fungal partner as well as a transport of soil mineral nutrients, such as phosphorous, from fungus to plant. These transports often represent mutual investment of plant and fungus in each other. Leimar & Connor suggested that the interaction might be understood as an investment by the fungus in the by-product benefit of local new root growth of the plant, which the investing fungus would have a competitive advantage in colonizing, together with investment by the plant in the by-product benefit of conferring a competitive advantage in the soil to more beneficial fungi. Recent split-root experiments, investigating the dynamics of mycorrhizal symbiosis, tend to support these suggestions.” Leimar, Olof & P. Hammerstein. 2010. “Cooperation for direct fitness benefits.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2619-2626. p. 2622; reference: Leimar, O. & R.C. Connor. 2003. “By-product benefits, reciprocity, and pseudoreciprocity in mutualism.” In: Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation. P. Hammerstein (ed.). pp. 203-222. MIT Press.
“Overall, even though the question of the occurrence and interpretation of sanctions in legume-rhizobium mutualism is not settled, there seems to be little doubt that by-product effects have proven themselves as cornerstones for the understanding of the evolution of cooperation. Their seeming importance might even increase as more knowledge accumulates.” Leimar, Olof & P. Hammerstein. 2010. “Cooperation for direct fitness benefits.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 365:2619-2626. p. 2622.
“… the major result is that little evidence supports a causal relation between the various social and political variables and the types of economic systems, except in some special cases. This conclusion, however, has considerable importance because it strongly suggests that the types of economic systems were not primarily a function of these ‘broader’ causal forces but rather were independent entities worth of study by themselves.” Pryor, Frederic. 2005. Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and Industrial Societies. Cambridge UP. p. 54.
“It may seem surprising that the environment appeared to play only a small role in the emergence of most types of foraging economic systems. The exceptions were the physical-wealth-oriented societies, which were located in harsh areas where considerable capital goods — either boats or elaborate hunting gear – were necessary to survive.” Pryor, Frederic. 2005. Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and Industrial Societies. Cambridge UP. p. 54.
“At the lowest level of economic development [of the 6 economic systems of foragers identified by clusters of characteristics of which economic development was an important one], the classic and transition foragers featured the most ‘communal’ distribution systems, with considerable emphasis on the sharing of food. They differed in that the classic foragers had less market/barter activities and the transition foragers featured more possession – either private or group – of land. At the relatively middle levels of economic development, both the human-wealth and the intangible-wealth foraging societies featured a relatively small group of people in possession of healing magic, which could be used for economic gain. The former were also more likely to have some form of slavery and the latter were more likely to use marriage rights as a source of wealth. At the highest levels of economic development, the politically oriented foragers had a system of taxation/tribute, while the physical-wealth-oriented foragers held considerable wealth in the form of capital equipment – a necessity in their environment – which they transferred to their heirs upon death.” Pryor, Frederic. 2005. Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and Industrial Societies. Cambridge UP. pp. 56-7.
“Several examples of proto-agriculture deserve brief mention. Certain tribes in Australia, North America, and elsewhere set fire to fields to encourage the growth of new plants by burning away the underbrush and the coarse tops of the old grass….
“In northern Australia, the long yam was a dry season staple. When harvesting it, certain groups would leave the top of the tuber attached to the tendril of the vine to ensure that it would grow again the following year.
“Certain foraging societies, such as the Owens Valley Paiute of California, flooded fields containing wild root crops to encourage their growth.
“Some Australian aboriginal tribes engaged in extensive turning of the soil to collect edible roots and tubers, a practice that encouraged their growth the next year.” Pryor, Frederic. 2005. Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and Industrial Societies. Cambridge UP. p. 61.
“The agricultural economic systems provide fewer constraints on the mix of institutions and organizations than in the other three cases. In other words, in agricultural economies, the ‘logic of institutions,’ which concerns the complementarities between institutions and organizations, was less binding.” Pryor, Frederic. 2005. Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and Industrial Societies. Cambridge UP. pp. 102-3.
“… the functions of the political leadership in the various types of economic systems were quite different. In the herding societies, the political leadership in the community, as well as supracommunity political leaders, often coordinated the routes and schedules of the seasonal migrations. In semi-marketized systems, the political leadership focused more attention on adjudicating contract disputes and land-ownership rights. In those societies with slavery, the political leadership was more concerned with the use of coercion to enforce the slave system and keeping the system together. In societies with an egalitarian system, governmental roles were more diffuse. In very few societies did the centralized political authorities centrally direct production, except to extract certain types of tribute-in-kind from particular communities or maintain irrigation.” Pryor, Frederic. 2005. Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and Industrial Societies. Cambridge UP. p. 118.
“The societies [of four economic systems found as clusters for agriculturalist societies] with a herding-plus system have been generally found among societies with relatively low levels of economic development. Holding their development level constant, they featured group rather than individual ownership of land, low tenancy, small communities, low population densities, and high inequalities of wealth (but not social inequalities). Although primarily herders, this group included one settled crop-producing society that shared many of these characteristics.
“Societies at the middle level of economic development were likely to have one of two economic systems. Holding the level of development constant, the societies with an egalitarian economic system had no slavery, little tenancy, low inequalities of wealth and low social inequalities, a relatively low amount of trade with other communities, and less internal strife. They also had the lowest average level of economic development of the three economic systems focused on crop production. Holding the level of development constant, the societies with an individualistic system appeared the least stable. They had significantly less mutual aid, high fixed land rents, high social inequalities, greater internal and external warfare, and, in most cases, greater political centralization.
“The societies with a semi-marketized system were generally found in the highest levels of economic development. Holding their development level constant, they featured more trade with other communities, more wage labor within the community and less slavery, high fixed land rents, a high population density, and, for its level of development, a low degree of political centralization. On average, these societies also had a much higher level of economic development than the other societies.” Pryor, Frederic. 2005. Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and Industrial Societies. Cambridge UP. pp. 124-5.
“Moreover, in all of these countries [Nordic countries at the onset of industrialization] (as in England), the long coastal strip in relation to the remaining land mass allowed traders and travelers to avoid road tolls, an easy income source for landlords elsewhere.” Pryor, Frederic. 2005. Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and Industrial Societies. Cambridge UP. p. 180.
“Holding the level of economic development constant [for advanced market economic systems], the cluster analysis shows that AS+ [Anglo-Saxon plus Japan], countries had the most liberal market economy with a relatively weak position of labor and a smaller government measured in terms of transfers or employment. The Nordic countries had a more organized economy, with greater participation of labor in firm decision-making, wages bargained at industry and national levels, a stronger role of labor unions and employer organizations, and a larger public sector, as measured by government consumption expenditures and coverage of the social security system. In many respects, countries with the Western European economic system were somewhat between those of the AS+ and Nordic nations; however, they had significantly greater unionization, fewer stockholder rights, and a larger government, as measured by government transfer payments. Finally, the nations with a Southern European economic system, which generally had lower levels of economic development than the other OECD nations, also had a poorer legal environment for markets, more regulated product markets, higher entry harriers of new enterprises, high unionization, and stronger protection of the rights of labor.” Pryor, Frederic. 2005. Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and Industrial Societies. Cambridge UP. pp. 189-190.
“The characteristics differentiating the economic systems of developing countries are not the same as those that differentiate the four economic systems of the OECD nations. The functional requirements of industrialization (and postindustrialization) appear to tighten the complementarities between particular institutions, even while allowing greater variation of the institutional patterns as a whole.” Pryor, Frederic. 2005. Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and Industrial Societies. Cambridge UP. p. 198.
“Economies at every stage of development feature a small number of distinct economic systems, defined in terms of particular groups of institutions that cluster together. From the statistical analysis presented in previous chapters, many of these economic systems do not seem to be generally determined by the social structure, political organization, or physical environment of the societies but rather appear as independent entities, worthy of study in their own right.” Pryor, Frederic. 2005. Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and Industrial Societies. Cambridge UP. p. 267.
“If the logic of institution holds, however, such [‘key’] institutions are related to others so that the question is whether it is the impact of the ‘key institution’ alone or together with related institutions that provides the crucial explanation. For instance, is it primarily the strength of property institutions alone, as some have argued, or in conjunction with institutions facilitating trade, labor mobility, and the flow of capital that caused such differences in growth between West Europe and the rest of the world in the nineteenth century?” Pryor, Frederic. 2005. Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and Industrial Societies. Cambridge UP. p. 271.
“But, certain institutions reinforce (or negate) the impact of others, so that it is not enough to correlate performance with one institution; rather, a whole cluster of institutions must be taken into account.” Pryor, Frederic. 2005. Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and Industrial Societies. Cambridge UP. p. 277.
“Archaeological and inscriptional evidence for wheeled vehicles is widespread after about 3400 BCE.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 66.
“Here [the steppes] wagons made portable things that had never been portable in bulk–shelter, water, and food. Herders who had always lived in the forested river valleys and grazed their herds timidly on the edges of the steppes now could take their tents, water, and food supplies to distant pastures far from the river valleys. The wagon was a mobile home that permitted herders to follow their animals deep into the grasslands and live in the open.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 73.
“Andrew Sherrattt bundled the invention of the wheel together with the invention of the plow, wool sheep, dairying, and the beginning of horse transport to explain a sweeping set of changes that occurred among European societies about 3500-3000 BCE. The Secondary Products Revolution, as Sherratt described it in 1981, was an economic explanation for widespread changes in settlement patterns, economy, rituals, and crafts, many of which had been ascribed by an older generation of archaeologists to Indo-European migrations. (‘Secondary products’ are items like wool, milk, and muscular power that can be harvested continuously from an animal without killing it, in contrast to ‘primary products’ such as meat, blood, bone, and hides.)” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 73; reference: Sherratt, Andrew. 1997 [1983]. “The secondary exploitation of animals in the Old World.” In: Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe: Changing Perspectives. rev. ed. Edited by Andrew Sherratt. pp. 199-228. Princeton UP.
“But it seems that language and material culture are related in at least two ways. One is that tribal languages are generally more numerous in any long-settled region than tribal material cultures…. But the opposite pattern seems to be rare: a homogeneous tribal language is rarely separated into two very distinct bundles of material culture.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. pp. 103-4.
“A most interesting fact about stable ethnolinguistic frontiers is that they were not necessarily biological; they persisted for an extraordinarily long time despite people regularly moving across them.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 106.
“Iroquoian adoptees were required to behave as Iroquois or they might be killed. The Iroquoian cultural identity remained distinct, and it was long established and persistent.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 107.
“Persistent, robust premodern ethnolinguistic frontiers seem to have survived for long periods under one or both of two conditions: at large-scale ecotones (forest/steppe, desert/savannah, mountain/river bottom, mountain/coast) and at places where long-distance migrants stopped migrating and formed a cultural frontier (England/Wales, Britanny/France, German Swiss/French Swiss). Persistent identity depended partly on the continuous confrontation with Others that was inherent in these kinds of borders, as Frederik Barth observed, but it also relied on a home culture behind the border, a font of imagined tradition that could continuously feed those contrasts,….” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 108; reference: Barth, Frederik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Prospect Heights: Waveland.
“Large, sustained migrations, particularly those that moved a long distance from one cultural setting into a very different one, or folk migrations, can be identified archaeologically. Emile Haury knew most of what to look for already in his excavations in Arizona in the 1950s: (1) the sudden appearance of a new material culture that has no local antecedents or prototypes; (2) a simultaneous shift in skeletal types (biology); (3) a neighboring territory where the intrusive culture evolved earlier; and (4) (a sign not recognized by Haury) the introduction of new ways of making things, new technological styles, which we now know are more ‘fundamental’ than decorative styles.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 111.
“Linguistic simplification has three causes. One is chain migration, where colonists tend to recruit family and friends from the same places and social groups that the colonists came from. Simplification also is a normal linguistic outcome of mixing between dialects in a contact situation at the destination. Finally, simplification is encouraged among long-distance migrants by the social influence of the charter group….
“As a font of tradition and success in a new land, the charter group exercised a kind of historical cultural hegemony over later generations.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. pp.112-3.
“… the geography of language reflects an underlying ecology of social relationships.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 115.
“Nettles showed that the average size of language groups in West Africa is inversely correlated with agricultural productivity: the richer and more productive the farmland, the smaller the language territory….
“But people who are moderately uncertain of their economic future, who live in less-productive territories and have to rely on multiple sources of income, maintain numerous weak ties with a wider variety of people. They often learn two or more languages or dialects, because they need a wider network to feel secure.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 115.
“Domesticated cattle and sheep started a revolutionary change in how humans exploited the Pontic-Caspian steppe environment. Because cattle and sheep were cultured, like humans, they were part of everyday work and worry in a way never approached by wild animals. Humans identified with their cattle and sheep, wrote poetry about them, and used them as a currency in marriage gifts, debt payments, and the calculation of social status. And they were grass processors. They converted plains of grass, useless and even hostile to humans, into wool, felt, clothing, tents, milk, yogurt, cheese, meat, marrow, and bone–the foundation of both life and wealth. Cattle and sheep herds can grow rapidly with a little luck. Vulnerable to bad weather and theft, they can also decline rapidly. Herding was a volatile, boom-bust economy, and required a flexible, opportunistic social organization.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 137.
“Cattle do not forage through even soft snow if they cannot see the grass, so a snow deep enough to hide the winter grass will kill range cattle if they are not given fodder. Neither cattle nor sheep will break the ice on frozen water to drink. Horses have the instinct to break through ice and crusted snow with their hooves, not their noses, even in deep snows where the grass cannot be seen. They paw frozen snow away and feed themselves and so do not need water or fodder…. People who lived in cold grasslands with domesticated cattle and sheep would soon have seen the advantage in keeping horses for meat, just because the horses did not need fodder or water.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 200.
“Cattle herders would have been particularly well suited to manage horses because cattle and horse bands both follow the lead of a dominant female. Cowherds already knew they needed only to control the lead cow to control the whole herd, and would easily have transferred that knowledge to controlling lead mares…. When people who depended on equid hunting began to keep domesticated cattle, someone would soon have noticed these similarities and applied cattle-management techniques to wild horses.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. pp. 200-201.
“We are reasonably certain that horses were bitted and ridden in northern Kazakhstan beginning about 3700-3500 BCE.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 220.
“Also, after about 3500 BCE horses began to appear in greater numbers or appeared regularly for the first time outside the Pontic-Caspian steppes… This general increase in the importance of horses from Kazakhstan to the Caucasus, the Danube valley, and Germany after 3500 BCE suggests a significant change in the relationship between humans and horses. Botai and Tersek [cultures in northern Kazakhstan] show what that change was: people had started to ride.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 221.
“Riding greatly increased the efficiency and therefore the scale and productivity of herding in the Eurasian grasslands. More cattle and sheep could be owned and controlled by riders than by pedestrian herders, which permitted a greater accumulation of animal wealth. Larger herds, of course, required larger pastures, and the desire for larger pastures would have caused a general renegotiation of tribal frontiers, a series of boundary conflicts. Victory in tribal warfare depended largely on forging alliances and mobilizing larger forces than your enemy, and so intensified warfare stimulated efforts to build alliances through feasts and the redistribution of wealth. Gifts were effective both in building alliances before conflicts and sealing agreements after them. An increase in boundary conflicts would thus have encouraged more long-distance trade to acquire prestigious goods, as well as elaborate feasts and public ceremonies to forge alliances.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 222.
“But even if horses were used for nothing more than transportation to and from the raid, the rapidity and reach of mounted raiders would have changed raiding tactics, status-seeking behaviors, alliance-building, displays of wealth, and settlement patterns. Thus riding cannot be cleanly separated from warfare.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 222.
“The long bows, irregular arrow sizes, and less-than-optimal attachments between points and arrows together reduced the military effectiveness of early mounted archery. Before the Iron Age mounted raiders could harass tribal war bands, disrupt harvests in farming villages, or steal cattle, but that is not the same as defeating a disciplined army. Tribal raiding by small groups of riders in eastern Europe did not pose a threat to walled cities in Mesopotamia, and so was ignored by the kings and generals of the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 223.
“By 4300-4200 BCE Old Europe was at its peak. The Varna cemetery in eastern Bulgaria had the most ostentatious funerals in the world, richer than anything of the same age in the Near East.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 225.
“They [cold years in 4120 and 4040 BCE] were harbingers of a 140-year-long, bitterly cold period lasting from 3960 to 3821 BCE, with temperatures colder than at any time in the previous two thousand years…. Agriculture in the lower Danube valley shifted to more cold-tolerant rye in some settlements. Quickly these and perhaps other stresses accumulated to create an enormous crisis….
“People scattered and became much more mobile, depending for their food on herds of sheep and cattle rather than fixed fields of grain…. Relatively mild climatic conditions returned after 3760 BCE according to the German oaks [pollen records], but by then the cultures of the lower Danube valley and the Balkans had changed dramatically. The cultures that appeared after about 3800 BCE did not regularly use female figurines in domestic rituals, no longer wore copper spiral bracelets or Spondylus-shell ornaments, made relatively plain pottery in a limited number of shapes, did not live on tells, and depended more on stockbreeding. Metallurgy, mining, and ceramic technology declined sharply in both volume and technical skill, and ceramics and metal objects changed markedly in style. The copper mines in the Balkans abruptly ceased production, copper-using cultures in central Europe and the Carpathians switched to Transylvanian and Hungarian ores about 4000 BCE, at the beginning of the Bodrogkeresztur culture in Hungary. Oddly this was when metallurgy really began in western Hungary and nearby in Austria and central Europe. Metal objects now were made using new arsenical bronze alloys, and were of new types, including new weapons, daggers being the most important….
“The end of Old Europe truncated a tradition that began with the Starcevo-Cris pioneers in 6200 BCE.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. pp. 227-8.
“The colder climate of 4200-3800 BCE probably weakened the agricultural economies of Old Europe at the same time that steppe herders pushed into the marshes and plains around the mouth of the Danube….
“Crop failures exacerbated by warfare would have encouraged a shift to a more mobile economy. As that shift happened, the pastoral tribes of the steppes were transformed from scruffy immigrants or despised raiders to chiefs and patrons who were rich in the animal resources that the new economy required, and who knew how to manage larger herds in new ways, most important among these that herders were mounted on horseback.
“The Suvorovo chiefs [mouth of the Danube and above] displayed many of the behaviors that fostered language shift among the Acholi in East Africa: they imported a new funeral cult with an associated new mortuary ideology; they sponsored funeral feasts, always events to build alliances and recruit allies; they displayed icons of power (stone maces); they seem to have glorified war (they were buried with status weapons); and it was probably their economic example that prompted the shift to pastoral economies in the Danube valley. Proto-Indo-European religion and social structure were both based on oath-bound promises that obligated patrons (or the gods) to provide protection and gifts of cattle and horses to their clients (or humans).” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. pp. 258-9.
“Beginning in about 3800 BCE and until about 3300 BCE the varied tribes and regional cultures of the Pontic-Caspian steppes seem to have turned their attention away from the Danube valley and toward their other borders, where significant social and economic changes were now occurring.
“On the southeast, in the North Caucasus Mountains, spectacularly ostentatious chiefs suddenly appeared among what had been very ordinary small-scale farmers. They displayed gold-covered clothing, gold and silver staffs, and great quantities of bronze weapons obtained from what must have seemed beyond the rim of the earth–in fact, from the newly formed cities of Middle Uruk Mesopotamia, through Anatolian middle-men. The first contact between southern urban civilizations and the people of the steppe margins occurred in about 3700-3500 BCE. It caused a social and political transformation that was expressed archaeologically as the Maikop culture of the North Caucasus piedmont.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 263.
“But while assimilation and incremental change characterized Tripolye towns on the middle Dnieper frontier, Tripolye towns closer to the steppe border on the south Bug River ballooned to enormous sizes, more than 350 ha, and, between about 3600 and 3400 BCE, briefly became the largest human settlements in the world. The super towns of Tripolye C1 were more than 1 km across but had no palaces, temples, town walls, cemeteries, or irrigation systems. They were not cities, as they lacked the centralized political authority and specialized economy associated with cities, but they were actually bigger than the earliest cities in Uruk Mesopotamia…. By 3300 BCE all of the big towns were gone, and the entire South Bug valley was abandoned by Tripolye farmers.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 264.
“The Maikop culture appeared about 3700-3500 BCE in the piedmont north of the North Caucasus Mountains, overlooking the Pontic-Caspian steppes. The semi-royal figure buried under the giant Maikop chieftan’s kurgan acquired and wore Mesopotamian ornaments in an ostentatious funeral display that had no parallel that has been preserved even in Mesopotamia.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 284.
“Land that had been open and wild became pasture that belonged to someone [during drier conditions dated between 3500 and 3000 BCE]. Soon these more mobile herding clans realized that bigger pastures and a mobile home base permitted them to keep bigger herds. Amid the ensuing disputes over borders, pastures, and seasonal movements, new rules were needed to define what counted as an acceptable move–people began to manage local migratory behavior. Those who did not participate in these agreements or recognize the new rules became cultural Others, stimulating an awareness of a distinctive Yamnaya identity. That awareness probably elevated a few key behaviors into social signals. Those behaviors crystallized into a fairly stable set of variants in the steppes around the lower Don and Volga rivers. A set of dialects went with them, the speech patterns of late Proto-Indo-European.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 300.
“Western Indo-European religious and ritual practices were female-inclusive, and western Yamnaya people shared a border with the female-figurine-making Tripolye culture: eastern Indo-European rituals and gods, however, were more male-centered, and eastern Yamnaya people shared borders with northern and eastern foragers who did not make female figurines. In western Indo-European branches the spirit of the domestic hearth was female (Hestia, the Vestal Virgins), and in Indo-Iranian it was male (Agni). Western Indo-European mythologies included strong female deities such as Queen Magb and the Valkyries, whereas in Indo-Iranian the furies of war were male Maruts. Eastern Yamnaya graves on the Volga contained a higher percentage (80%) of males than any other Yamnaya region. Perhaps this east-west tension in attitudes toward gender contributed to the separation of the feminine gender as a newly marked grammatical category in the dialects of the Volga-Ural region, one of the innovations that defined Proto-Indo-European grammar.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 305.
“It would have taken some time for a new, wagon-dependent herding system to get organized and begin to succeed. The spread of the Yamnaya horizon was the signature of that success.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 312.
“The subsequent spread [after wagons at about 3500 to 3300 BCE] of the Yamnaya horizon across the Pontic-Caspian steppes probably did not happen primarily through warfare, for which there is only minimal evidence. Rather, it spread because those who shared the agreements and institutions that made high mobility possible became potential allies, and those who did not share these institutions were separated as Others. Larger herds also probably brought increased prestige and economic power, because large herd-owners had more animals to loan or offer as sacrifices at public feasts. Larger herds translated into richer bride-prices for the daughters of big herd owners, which would have intensified social competition between them. A similar competitive dynamic was partly responsible for the Nuer expansion in east Africa. The Don-Volga dialect associated with the biggest and therefore most mobile herd owners probably was late Proto-Indo-European.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 317.
“Proto-Indo-European institutions included a belief in the sanctity of verbal contracts bound by oaths, and in the obligation of patrons (or gods) to protect clients (or humans) in return for loyalty and service. ‘Let this racehorse bring us good cattle and good horses, male children and all-nourishing wealth,’ said a prayer accompanying the sacrifice of a horse in the Rig Veda, a clear statement of the contract that bound humans to the gods. In Proto-Indo-European religion generally the chasm between gods and humans was bridged by the sanctity of oath-bound contracts and reciprocal obligations, so these were undoubtedly important tools regulating the daily behavior of the powerful toward the weak, at least for people who belonged under the social umbrella.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 342.
“Wealth, military power, and a more productive herding system probably brought prestige and power to the identities associated with Proto-Indo-European dialects after 3300 BCE. The guest-host institution extended the protections of oath-bound obligations to new social groups. An Indo-European-speaking patron could accept and integrate outsiders as clients without shaming them or assigning them permanently to submissive roles, as long as they conducted the sacrifices properly. Praise poetry at public feasts encouraged patrons to be generous, and validated the language of the songs as a vehicle for communicating with the gods who regulated everything. All these factors taken together suggest that the spread of Proto-Indo-European probably was more like a franchising operation than an invasion.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 343.
“The Usatovo culture [near the mouth of the Dniester] was exclusively a steppe culture, and it appeared simultaneously with the rapid expansion of the Yamnaya horizon across the steppes, after the permanent dissolution of many Tripolye towns near the steppe border…. Usatovo is not counted as a part of the Yamnaya horizon because of its close integration with the Tripolye culture, but it appeared at the same time as the Yamnaya horizon, in the steppes, with kurgan funeral rituals that repeated many old steppe customs; sacrifices and broken pottery also were placed on the southwestern side of the kurgan in Yamnaya and even Afanasievo graves…. Usatovo probably began with steppe clans connected with the early Yamnaya horizon who were able to impose a patron-client relationship on Tripolye farming villages because of the protection that client status offered in a time of great insecurity. The pastoral patrons quickly became closely integrated with the farmers.
“Tripolye clients of the Usatovo chiefs could have been the agents through which the Usatovo language spread northward into central Europe. After a few generations of clientage, the people of the upper Dniester might have wanted to acquire their own clients. Nested hierarchies in which clients are themselves patrons of other clients are characteristic of the growth of patron-client systems….
“If I had to hazard a guess I would say that this was how the Proto-Indo-European dialects that would ultimately form the root of Pre-Germanic first became established in central Europe: they spread up the Dniester from the Usatovo culture through a nested series of patrons and clients, and eventually were spoken in some of the late TRB communities between the Dniester and the Vistula.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. pp. 359-360.
“The Corded Ware [culture between upper Dniester and upper Vistula] horizon is often invoked as the archaeological manifestation of the cultures that introduced the northern Indo-European languages to Europe: Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic. The Corded Ware horizon spread across most of northern Europe, from Ukraine to Belgium, after 3000 BCE, with the initial rapid spread happening mainly between 2900 and 2700 BCE. The defining traits of the Corded Ware horizon were a pastoral, mobile economy that resulted in the near disappearance of settlement sites (much like Yamnaya in the steppes), the almost universal adoption of funeral rituals involving single graves under mounds, ….” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 367.
“The Yamnaya and Corded Ware horizons bordered each other in the hills between Lvov and Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine, in the upper Dniester piedmont around 2800-2600 BCE. At that time early Corded Ware cemeteries were confined to the uppermost headwaters of the Dniester west of Lvov, the same territory that had earlier been occupied by the late TRB communities infiltrated by late Tripolye groups. If Corded Ware societies in this region evolved from local late TRB origins, as many believe, they might already have spoken an Indo-European language. Between 2700 and 2600 BCE Corded Ware and late Yamnaya herders met each other on the upper Dniester over cups of mead or beer. This meeting was another opportunity for language shift, and it is possible that Pre-Germanic dialects either originated here or were enriched by this additional contact.
“The wide-ranging pattern of interaction that the Corded Ware horizon inaugurated across northern Europe provided an optimal medium for language spread. Late Proto-Indo-European languages penetrated the eastern end of this medium, either through the incorporation of Indo-European dialects in the TRB base population before the Corded Ware horizon evolved, or through Corded Ware-Yamnaya contacts later, or both. Indo-European speech probably was emulated because the chiefs who spoke it had larger herds of cattle and sheep and more horses than could be raised in northern Europe, and they had a politico-religious culture already adapted to territorial expansion. The dialects that were ancestral to Germanic probably were initially adopted in a small territory between the Dniester and the Vistuala and then spread slowly.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 368.
“The funeral sacrifices of the Sintashta culture [northern steppes west of Volga between the upper Ural and Tobol rivers 2100-1800 BCE] are a critical link between archaeology and history. They closely resembled the rituals described in the Rig Veda, the oldest text preserved in an Indo-Iranian language….
“Archaic Old Indic probably emerged as a separate tongue from archaic Iranian about 1800-1600 BCE. The RV [Rig Veda] and AV [Avesta, the oldest texts in Iranian] agreed that the essence of their shared parental Indo-Iranian identity was linguistic and ritual, not racial. If a person sacrificed to the right gods in the right way using the correct forms of the traditional hymns and poems, that person was an Aryan.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 408.
“The explosion of Sintashta innovations in rituals, politics, and warfare had a long-lasting impact on the later cultures of the Eurasian steppes. This is another reason why the Sintashta culture is the best and clearest candidate for the crucible of Indo-Iranian identity and language….
“In many small ways the cultures between the upper Don and Tobol rivers in the northern steppes showed a common kinship with the Aryans of the Rig Veda and Avesta. Between 2100 and 1800 BCE they invented the chariot, organized themselves into stronghold-based chiefdoms, armed themselves with new kinds of weapons, created a new style of funeral rituals that involved spectacular public displays of wealth and generosity, and began to mine and produce metals on a scale previously unimagined in the steppes.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. pp.410-411.
“With the appearance of Srubnaya and Andronovo [steppes cultures between Don and upper Ob and Irtysh rivers or Altai mountains] between about 1900 and 1800 BCE, for the first time in history a chain of broadly similar cultures extended from the edges of China to the frontiers of Europe. Innovations and raw materials began to move across the continent. The steppe world was not just a conduit, it also became an innovating center, particularly in bronze metallurgy and chariot warfare. The chariot-driving Shang kings of China and the Mycenaean princes of Greece, contemporaries at opposite ends of the ancient world at about 1500 BCE, shared a common technological debt to the LBA [late bronze age] herders of the Eurasian steppes.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. pp. 435-7.
“But [in contrast to Jared Diamond’s thesis that innovations spread across latitude bands] persistent cultural borders like the Ural frontier delayed the transmission of those innovations by thousands of years even within the single ecological zone of the steppes. A herding economy was accepted on the middle Ural river, near the headwaters of the Samara River, by 4800 BCE. Hunters and gatherers in the neighboring steppes of northern Kazakhstan, at the same latitude, refused domesticated cattle and sheep for the next two thousand years (although they did begin to ride horses by 3700-3500 BCE). The potential geographic advantage Diamond described was frustrated for millennia, not a short time, by human distrust of foreign ways of doing things and admiration for the familiar ways.” Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP. p. 463.
“A recent, comprehensive compendium on non-human animal tool-use behaviour lists four phyla and nine classes as containing tool-using species. Within several of these classes, estimates for the number of independent origins for the behaviour range from one to several tens of events. This broad phylogenetic spread of multiple origins, however, goes hand in hand with overall rarity: tool use has been documented in less than 1% of the animal genera currently identified, and an even smaller percentage of species.” Biro, Dora, M. Haslam & C. Rutz. 2013. “Tool use as adaptation.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20120408. p. 1.
“Several authors have distinguished, broadly, between two extremes of tool-use behaviours: those that appear ‘hard-wired’ within a species’ behavioural repertorie and that are generally not accompanied by other forms of tool use (referring to these cases as ‘specialist’ or ‘stereotyped’ tool users), and those that appear to be adopted largely through a combination of individual and social learning and that may be one of a suite of tool-use behaviours expressed by the species (‘flexible’ or ‘creative’ tool use).” Biro, Dora, M. Haslam & C. Rutz. 2013. “Tool use as adaptation.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20120408. p. 1.
“While a behaviour that appears according to a fixed ontogenetic pattern strongly suggests past (and likely present) advantages significant enough for natural selection to fix the behaviour genetically, the more flexible (and accordingly often not species-wide) adoption of tool use during individual life histories requires detailed examination of adaptive benefits.” Biro, Dora, M. Haslam & C. Rutz. 2013. “Tool use as adaptation.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20120408. p. 1.
“To date, both theoretical arguments and empirical evidence have supported the idea that innovation will be largely the product of domain-general cognitive abilities.” Navarrete, Ana, S. Reader, S. Street, A. Whalen & K. Laland. 2016. “The coevolution of innovation and technical intelligence in primates.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:2015.0186. p. 2.
“… technical innovation always exhibits a stronger relationship with brain size than non-technical innovation.” Navarrete, Ana, S. Reader, S. Street, A. Whalen & K. Laland. 2016. “The coevolution of innovation and technical intelligence in primates.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:2015.0186. p. 8.
“The direct connection between technical innovation and brain size provides support for ‘technical intelligence’ hypotheses in suggesting that in some primate lineages the ability to invent novel technical behaviours, specifically those involving tools, may have favoured encephalization, more than the ability to generate novel behaviours per se.” Navarrete, Ana, S. Reader, S. Street, A. Whalen & K. Laland. 2016. “The coevolution of innovation and technical intelligence in primates.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:2015.0186. p. 8.
“We also observed strong connections in causal graph analyses between primate technical innovation and both social learning and social group size, suggesting coevolution of elements of social, technical and ecological intelligence, as has been previously argued. Those primates that score highly for innovation and tool use (e.g. the great apes, capuchins, macaques) are also renowned for their social learning, and there is now extensive experimental evidence demonstrating that primates can acquire many tool-using methods through social learning. Indeed, a robust finding of both our causal graph analyses and our previous work is that innovation and social learning evolve together, a conclusion that holds here for both technical and non-technical innovation.” Navarrete, Ana, S. Reader, S. Street, A. Whalen & K. Laland. 2016. “The coevolution of innovation and technical intelligence in primates.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:2015.0186. p. 8.
“The consistently observed edge in our path analyses linking social group size and brain size supports the established finding that social intelligence is an important driver of brain evolution.” Navarrete, Ana, S. Reader, S. Street, A. Whalen & K. Laland. 2016. “The coevolution of innovation and technical intelligence in primates.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:2015.0186. p. 8.
“However, given that most primate species in our sample exhibited zero innovations, we emphasize that any causal role for innovation, be it technical or non-technical, in driving encephalization is likely to be only part of the story, and restricted to a subset of primate lineages.” Navarrete, Ana, S. Reader, S. Street, A. Whalen & K. Laland. 2016. “The coevolution of innovation and technical intelligence in primates.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:2015.0186. p. 8.
“Hence, while our analyses are consistent with the interpretations that in some primate lineages (i) technical innovation drove brain enlargement, or (ii) large brains (which evolved for reasons unconnected to innovation) are facultatively expressed in innovative behaviour, we suggest (iii) that technical innovation and brain size coevolved in certain taxa, with each driving enhancements in the other.” Navarrete, Ana, S. Reader, S. Street, A. Whalen & K. Laland. 2016. “The coevolution of innovation and technical intelligence in primates.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:2015.0186. p. 8.
“Reports of technical innovation are relatively sparsely distributed across the primates, and close relatives often differ considerably in innovation rates. This could reflect the difficulty in gathering a comprehensive sample of primate innovation, but also points to technical innovation being just a part of a larger story. Even focused on the restricted set of variables considered in our analyses, the emergent picture is one in which there are multiple drivers of the evolution of the primate brain and intelligence that feed back on each other in complex, nonlinear ways.” Navarrete, Ana, S. Reader, S. Street, A. Whalen & K. Laland. 2016. “The coevolution of innovation and technical intelligence in primates.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:2015.0186. p. 9.
“The scale [comparing manipulation abilities for primates with the resulting ranking of abilities] implies the following scale of manipulative complexity: First, manipulating two objects simultaneously is more complex than manipulating only one object with both hands. Second, the complexity of a manipulation increased with the capability to move digits asynchronously, and when using both hands instead of just one hand for the action. Third, manipulations with synchronous hand use tended to be more complex than manipulations with asynchronous hand use.” Heldstab, Sandra, Z. Kosonen, S. Koski, J. Burkart, C. van Schaik & K. Isler. 2016. “Manipulation complexity in primates coevolved with brain size and terrestriality.” Scientific Reports. 6:24528. Doi:10.1038/srep24528. p. 4.
“The primate pattern suggests that not only full terrestriality, but already a partly terrestrial habit may have positively affected the correlated evolution between manipulation complexity and brain size…. Furthermore, food manipulation complexity in mainly terrestrial species might also be higher as terrestriality affects the availability of food and raw materials to be used as tools. Terrestrial habitats present a wider range of possible substrates and materials, such as stones and grass stems, in addition to twigs and leaves that can be used as tools. Similarly, in birds, complex manipulations and tool-use behaviour have been observed in free-ranging species foraging a high proportion of time on the ground, such as ravens and several crow species including New Caledonian crows.” Heldstab, Sandra, Z. Kosonen, S. Koski, J. Burkart, C. van Schaik & K. Isler. 2016. “Manipulation complexity in primates coevolved with brain size and terrestriality.” Scientific Reports. 6:24528. Doi:10.1038/srep24528. p. 7.
“However, as the amount of variation in manipulation complexity explained by tool use or extractive foraging is rather small, brain size and terrestriality may be more important factors.” Heldstab, Sandra, Z. Kosonen, S. Koski, J. Burkart, C. van Schaik & K. Isler. 2016. “Manipulation complexity in primates coevolved with brain size and terrestriality.” Scientific Reports. 6:24528. Doi:10.1038/srep24528. p. 7.
“Although our results add manipulation complexity to a suite of emerging evidence linking cognition with ecological rather than with social factors, the outcomes of the present study are also consistent with a role for social factors, as among primates, the developmental acquisition of all complex manipulative skills has a major social learning component. However, if social challenges alone (independent of social learning of skills) were responsible for the evolution of the unusually large human brain, we would expect human manipulation complexity to be lower than expected for our brain size. The fact that the opposite was actually found is not favourable to the idea that only purely social challenges were involved.” Heldstab, Sandra, Z. Kosonen, S. Koski, J. Burkart, C. van Schaik & K. Isler. 2016. “Manipulation complexity in primates coevolved with brain size and terrestriality.” Scientific Reports. 6:24528. Doi:10.1038/srep24528. p. 7.
“… I have recently followed the identification of the importance of cutting by unpacking the concept of cutting into ‘severing,’ ‘slicing’ and ‘shaving.’ Severing is something that apes do in captivity when cutting a string to gain access to a feeding box and is difficult to document in the archaeological record; slicing–removing a small part to use while leaving the remnant–is evidenced empirically by the cut marks at Dikika; and shaving–removing and discarding small parts to shape the large part (i.e., not a remnant)–is probably implied empirically by the use wear on flakes from Koobi Fora that were used on wood….” Tennie, Claudio, L. Premo, D. Braun & S. McPherron. 2017. “Early Stone Tools and Cultural transmission: Resetting the Null Hypothesis.” Current Anthropology. 38(5):652-672. p. 655. Comments by Iain Davidson.
“There would be costs in not being able to produce an effective tool or in being delayed for weeks or months, especially in a competitive feeding context. Perhaps more important here, however, are the particular costs in terms of injury risks (e.g., lacerations, infection, eye damage, and strains through incorrect form) to a hominin attempting to learn the task solely through trial and error.” Tennie, Claudio, L. Premo, D. Braun & S. McPherron. 2017. “Early Stone Tools and Cultural transmission: Resetting the Null Hypothesis.” Current Anthropology. 38(5):652-672. p. 658. Comments by Stephen Lycett.
“It is virtually impossible to demonstrate social transmission in nature,… Thus, researchers have come to rely mainly on another approach, where they focus on one of the products of culture, namely geographic variation, to prove its presence….
“However, for animals two alternative, non-exclusive explanations need to be excluded: (1) individually plastic responses to ecological differences between populations; and (2) population differences in genetic predispositions. This line of argumentation laid the foundation of the currently most commonly used tool to detect the presence of animal culture, namely the method of exclusion (MoE, also frequently referred to as the ethnograhic method) in which we classify a behavior as cultural if we can demonstrate a high prevalence in some populations but its absence in others, but also can reasonably rule out genetic or ecological factors as causes of this behavioral difference.” Schuppli, Caroline & C. van Schaik. 2019. “Animal cultures: how we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.” Evolutionary Human Sciences. 1(e2):1-13. doi:10.1017/ehs.2019.1. pp. 2-3.
“However, we can list several shortcomings of the MoE which conspire to produce biased and highly restrictive estimates of cultural repertoires.
“First, social learning does not necessarily result in between-group heterogeneity. Identical ecological conditions are likely to bring about the same behavioral innovations in separate social units. Cultural transmission driven by social learning will thus inevitably produce similarities in behavioral repertoires between them, just as evolution driven by natural selection will often come up with the same genetic adaptations in similar environments. Whereas the latter is a widely acknowledged phenomenon, namely convergent evolution, the possibility of convergent culture is not yet widely acknowledged.
“Second, the MoE ignores all behavioral variants that covary with ecological factors, even if the behaviors are in fact socially learned and thus cultural. Social learning will often produce behaviors that are adapted to a population’s ecological conditions and help individuals to exploit natural resources. Thus naturally, a substantial part of a species’ cultural repertoire should indeed be linked to the local environment. Human culture exemplifies that ecological differences drastically shape cultural behavior. Ecology may make it impossible for certain socially learned behaviors to appear in some regions but their presence elsewhere still reflects cultural processes….
“Fourth, the MoE treats genetic differences underlying behavioral variation between populations as a deal breaker for culture. Genetic differences indeed often correlate with behavioral differences, which suggests that genetic differences may play a role in creating behavioral differences. Yet, in practice, genetic components do not rule out the presence of social learning. As with any complex phenotypic traits in nature, it is unlikely that behavioral repertoires can be strictly divided into innate and learned components. In particular, higher forms of social learning, which are based on a motivation to closely attend to the action of conspecifics, are likely to entail an element of genetically anchored social interest. According to the minimal definition of culture, behaviors based on genetic predispositions but expressed through socially mediated learning are to be considered as cultural.
“Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, the number of cultural variants detected by the MoE is highly dependent on the number of populations we compare. Whereas a behavior X may well be shared between populations A and B, it may not be shared with population C. If we compare only populations A and B, behavior X will not be considered to be cultural, because it is found in all of the populations compared. If we then add population C to this comparison, behavior X will suddenly count as cultural because is not universally shared among all compared populations. This inevitably leads to an underestimation of cultural repertoires.” Schuppli, Caroline & C. van Schaik. 2019. “Animal cultures: how we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.” Evolutionary Human Sciences. 1(e2):1-13. doi:10.1017/ehs.2019.1. pp. 3-4.
“Currently, then, it appears that the food-getting toolkits of hunter-gatherers and small-scale farmers and herders are influenced by different factors. Among-group variation in hunter-gatherer food-getting toolkits seems to be driven primarily by risk of resource failure. Other factors may be more important in certain regions, but at the global scale, risk of resource failure is the dominant influence. By contrast, risk of resource failure does not seem to influence among-group variation in the food-getting toolkits of food producers. Rather, differences in the richness and complexity of the food-getting toolkits of food producers appear to be the result of differences in population size.” Collard, Mark, B. Buchanan, M. O’Brien & J. Scholnick. 2013. “Risk, mobility or population size? Drivers of technological richness among contact-period western North American hunter-gatherers.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20120412. doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0412. p. 3.
“Results of the study reported here were unambiguous: technological richness among early contact-period hunter-gatherers of western North America was correlated with one of the proxies of environmental risk, mean rainfall for the driest month, and the direction of the relationship was consistent with the predictions of the environmental-risk hypothesis. By contrast, we found no evidence that technological richness was correlated with population size in the manner predicted by the population-size hypothesis or that technological richness was correlated with residential mobility in the manner predicted by the mobility hypothesis.” Collard, Mark, B. Buchanan, M. O’Brien & J. Scholnick. 2013. “Risk, mobility or population size? Drivers of technological richness among contact-period western North American hunter-gatherers.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20120412. doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0412. p. 6.
“Children grow up surrounded by clothing, furniture, shelters, musical instruments, and tools for food preparation, agriculture, hunting, personal hygiene, etc. They participate in the use of these artefacts as they become able to do so. The omnipresent constructed physical environment contributes to children learning technical skills, most powerfully in joint activity with other individuals. Thus, the physical and social dimensions of the human-constructed ontogenetic niche complement one another. Human cultural evolution represents an extreme case of complementary physical and social niche construction.” Fragaszy, D.M., D. Biro, Y. Eshchar, T. Humle, P. Izar, B. Resende & E. Visalberghi. 2013. “The fourth dimension of tool use: temporally enduring artefacts aid primates learning to use tools.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368: 20120410. p. 2.
“Persistent practice of the appropriate action is prerequisite to developing expertise; powerful intrinsic motivation supports this practice. From this point of view, fidelity of copying the actions of another is not the basis for the persistence of technical traditions. Rather, features of the physical properties of the tools and of the tool activities that promote persistent practice in the absence of reinforcement hold the key to the development of technical traditions that require expertise.” Fragaszy, D.M., D. Biro, Y. Eshchar, T. Humle, P. Izar, B. Resende & E. Visalberghi. 2013. “The fourth dimension of tool use: temporally enduring artefacts aid primates learning to use tools.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368: 20120410. p. 7.
“We suggest, following the reasoning of integrative evolutionary scientists, that the learning process itself is an adaptation, rather than a particular skill. A learning process in which young individuals are persistently attracted to others’ activity and the products of their activity, together with persistent motivation to engage in species-typical exploratory routines can support acquisition of diverse technical skills practised by others.” Fragaszy, D.M., D. Biro, Y. Eshchar, T. Humle, P. Izar, B. Resende & E. Visalberghi. 2013. “The fourth dimension of tool use: temporally enduring artefacts aid primates learning to use tools.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368: 20120410. p. 7.
“In this scenario [a learning process dependent on an enriched environment], artefacts provide a spatio-temporal extension of social support for learning technical skills.” Fragaszy, D.M., D. Biro, Y. Eshchar, T. Humle, P. Izar, B. Resende & E. Visalberghi. 2013. “The fourth dimension of tool use: temporally enduring artefacts aid primates learning to use tools.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368: 20120410. pp. 7-8.
“Such non-Cartesian approaches [embodied or extended theory of mind]have natural resonance for archaeologists because they reduce the sometimes troubling need to discuss ‘what was going on in the heads’ of long-extinct actors.” Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge. 2016. “Archeological Insights into Hominin Cognitive Evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 25:200-213. p. 201.
“… by 2.3 Ma evidence provided by core refits indicates the use of enhanced visual attention tied to examination of cores. The knappers at Lokalalei 2C used a technique in which they closely examined cores for workable angles, struck flakes, and then rotated the core in order to look for other workable angles. Bonobos trained to knap do not practice this kind of consistent, close monitoring. Thus, the Lokalalei knappers appear to have had better visual attention abilities than do apes. Otherwise, early knapping remained cognitively apelike,…” Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge. 2016. “Archeological Insights into Hominin Cognitive Evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 25:200-213. p. 204.
“A map is an allocentric representation of space, whereas route following relies on egocentric perspectives.” Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge. 2016. “Archeological Insights into Hominin Cognitive Evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 25:200-213. p. 206.
“There are currently three major versions of the social hypothesis: the Machiavellian hypothesis, which focuses on deception and social manipulation; the social learning hypothesis, which emphasizes the ability to learn information and complex routines, including tool use, from conspecifics; and the social brain hypothesis, which emphasizes individuals’ ability to establish and maintain social networks.” Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge. 2016. “Archeological Insights into Hominin Cognitive Evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 25:200-213. p. 207.
“Luckily, cognitive science has had a century-long interest in planning abilities and has not only parsed it into constituent components, but also identified many of the neural resources responsible. Known as ‘executive functions,’ they are an exhaustively researched domain of human cognition and thus provide an appropriate framework for approaching the record of human evolution. The term itself derives from clinical neuropsychology, the study of individuals with brain injury or pathology. In the 1920s and 1930s, the famed Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria documented a recurrent pattern of behavior in individuals who had survived wounds to their frontal lobes. They retained their language ability and their memories, but were unable to organize their daily lives. Several specific abilities were impaired, including the ability to ignore distraction, suppress automatic responses when necessary; switch attention back and forth, organize strings of sequential activity, and track multiple goals at the same time. In other words, Luria’s patients were unable to coordinate appropriate plans of action.
“In cognitive psychology, which studies normal adults, executive reasoning is one of the components of working memory,….” Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge. 2016. “Archeological Insights into Hominin Cognitive Evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 25:200-213. p. 208.
“Much of hominin cognitive evolution was co-evolutionary with material culture. Artifacts played a critical scaffolding role from at least the beginning of stone knapping. Stone knapping selected for developments in visual attention by 2.3 Ma. Manufacture of handaxes required developments in spatial cognition, theory of mind, and cognitive control. Much later, use of remotely operated traps relied on modern executive reasoning abilities. External memory aids such as tally boards and/or beads enabled the construction of abstract concepts of number and time. Arguably, none of these components of modern cognition could have evolved without active engagement with artifacts.” Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge. 2016. “Archeological Insights into Hominin Cognitive Evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 25:200-213. p. 211.
“An accepted consensus in biomechanics and movement science is that ensembles of specific nerves, joints and muscles constitute hypothetical entities called motor synergies.” Mangalam, Madhur & D. Fragaszy. 2018. “Reply to ‘Tool use and dexterity: beyond the embodied theory.’” Animal Behaviour. 139:e5-e8. p. e6.
“Van Schaik suggests that primates are unique in having no developmental canalisation for tool use. This means that tool use begins as a cultural adaptation in all species, and over time, other taxa like NC crows evolved an innate ability to use particular tools. Present-day innateness would thus diagnose an extended history of tool use in a species, along with specific morphology.” Hunt, Gavin & N. Uomini. 2016. “A complex adaptive system may be essential for cumulative modifications in tool design.” The Japanese Journal of Animal Psychology. 66(2):141-159. p. 146.
“Little is known about genetic dispositions specifically for tool use in either H. erectus or extant humans because nearly all humans are raised in a cultural environment that is rich with tools. Modern human infants begin to use tools from 8 months old, following a developmental trajectory involving sensorimotor manipulation and sequential planning. After 24 months, demonstration by an adult plays a major role in the child’s tool use acquisition. This would suggest that social learning is an essential factor in human tool use, regardless of whether any innate predisposition exists.” Hunt, Gavin & N. Uomini. 2016. “A complex adaptive system may be essential for cumulative modifications in tool design.” The Japanese Journal of Animal Psychology. 66(2):141-159. p. 146.
“NC crows have a strong genetic disposition to develop basic tool skills as naive juveniles raised in captivity developed these skills from inherited tool-oriented behaviours without social contact. This disposition, though, does not exclude learning and innovation in the development and transmission of their tool behaviour.” Hunt, Gavin & N. Uomini. 2016. “A complex adaptive system may be essential for cumulative modifications in tool design.” The Japanese Journal of Animal Psychology. 66(2):141-159. p. 146.
“A case of tool-use seems intuitively easy to identify, but a suitably precise definition has actually proved hard to pin down because of the problem of borderline cases. For instance, a widely-used definition is the use of an object ‘to alter… the form, position, or condition of another object, another organism, or the user itself when the user holds or carries the tool during or just prior to use.’ Several species (chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys and elephants) use branches or leaves to rid themselves of flies or parasites; but some chimpanzees use a vine for this purpose. The vine is not a detached object and would not ‘count’ as a tool, but is there a meaningful difference? Yet if we admit the vine, then perhaps the use of a scratching post by a cow or horse should count, and tool-use starts to bleed into any behaviour involving the external environment (for example, climbing a tree of building a nest). Water is another slippery case, as revealed by a problem-solving task given to orangutans and later to rooks. In both studies, a food reward was placed at the bottom of a transparent tube, out of reach of the subject, floating in a small volume of water. Orangutans brought the food within reach by spitting more water into the tube, while rooks added stones, raising the level of the water until they could reach the reward with their beaks. Were the rooks displaying tool use but the orangutans not? Archer fish, which spit jets of water to dislodge insects from the vegetation above them, are not usually considered tool-users. Nor are birds, such as seagulls and ravens, that drop encased food from a height onto a hard surface to crack them open; but is this really different from capuchin monkeys or chimpanzees throwing sticks and stones, or using stones to smash open nuts?” Seed, Amanda & R. Byrne. 2010. “Animal Tool-Use.” Current Biology. 20:R1032-R1039. DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2010.09.042. p. R1032; subquote: Beck, B.B. 1980. Animal Tool Behavior: The Use and Manufacture of Tools by Animals. New York: Garland.
“Human obligatory tool use is a derived condition resulting from strong, sustained, and directional selective pressure. If it were not, anthropologists would have long ago found groups of living humans who do not use tools.” Shea, John. 2017. “Occasional, obligatory, and habitual stone tool use in hominin evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 26: 200-217. p. 202.
“The strongest evidence against viewing the Plio-Pleistocene [greater than 1.7 Mya] lithic evidence as resulting from something more than occasional stone tool use would be for further archeological investigations in Plio-Pleistocene contexts to fill in chronological and geographic gaps between currently known stone tool occurrences.” Shea, John. 2017. “Occasional, obligatory, and habitual stone tool use in hominin evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 26: 200-217. p. 209.
“If hominin stone tool use before 1.7 was occasional and obligatory after 0.3 Ma, what was going on between these chronological benchmarks? This paper proposes that around 1.7 Ma hominin stone tool use acquired a ‘habitual’ dimension. Habitual tool use engages tools in stereotyped ways in activities with variable periodicities and evolutionary consequences. Individuals who use tools in one way reap fitness rewards differently than do those who use tools in other ways or not at all, but these benefits vary along with the periodicity in the need for tool use across time and space.” Shea, John. 2017. “Occasional, obligatory, and habitual stone tool use in hominin evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 26: 200-217. p. 209.
“The minimal geographically and chronologically patterned differences one sees among stone tools from Africa and Eurasia between 0.3-1.7 Ma contrasts starkly with the hypervariability and cumulative patterning one sees after 0.3 Ma. This contrast has occasioned much speculation about how Early-Middle Pleistocene hominins’ minds differed from those of Later Pleistocene hominins. While such cognitive differences probably existed, one does not need to invoke them to explain this evidence. Tool designs can remain minimally variable, ‘stereotyped’ because they are under strong stabilizing selective pressure for functional reasons.” Shea, John. 2017. “Occasional, obligatory, and habitual stone tool use in hominin evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 26: 200-217. p. 210.
“Possibly related developments in Later Pleistocene lithic technology include the making of small stone tools, devising lithic armatures for complex projectile weapons, and producing groundstone seed-pulverizing tools. All three of these technological innovations are forms of ‘intensification,’ efforts to recover more cutting edge from tool materials and more nutrients from existing resources. The increasing regularity with which small stone tools, lithic projectile armatures, and groundstone pulverizing tools appear from Later Pleistocene times onward may reflect human populations situated near dense and predictable resource patches investing more energy in tool production and use in order to remain in place when those resource-rich patches became depleted. Like an automobile’s ‘low fuel’ warning light, increases in these artifacts’ occurrence may indicate hunter-gatherer populations approaching the limits of their local carrying capacity trying to solve that problem by investing more in technological aids to ‘prey handling.’ In Southwest Asia and other regions, such tools become increasingly common in the millennia immediately preceding first evidence for agriculture and pastoralism and even more common thereafter.” Shea, John. 2017. “Occasional, obligatory, and habitual stone tool use in hominin evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 26: 200-217. p. 213.
“Broadly defined, institutions are the prescriptions that humans use to organize all forms of repetitive and structured interactions including those within families, neighborhoods, markets, firms, sports leagues, churches, private associations, and governments at all scales….
“The opportunities and constraints individuals face in any particular situation, the information they obtain, the benefits they obtain or are excluded from, and how they reason about the situation are all affected by the rules or absence of rules that structure the situation.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. p. 3.
“Action arenas include two holons: an action situation and the participant in that situation. An action situation can, in turn, be characterized using seven clusters of variables: (1) participants (who may be either single individuals or corporate actors), (2) positions, (3) potential outcomes, (4) action-outcome linkages, (5) the control that participants exercise, (6) types of information generated, and (7) the costs and benefits assigned to actions and outcomes.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. p. 14.
“The factors affecting the structure of an action arena include three clusters of variables: (1) the rules used by participants to order their relationships, (2) the attributes of the biophysical world that are acted upon in these arenas, and (3) the structure of the more general community within which any particular arena is placed.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. p. 15.
“According to Black, the word rule is used to denote regulations, instructions, precepts, and principles. When used in its regulation sense, rules refer to something ‘laid down by an authority as required of certain persons.’ The example of a rule in the regulation sense that Black uses is: ‘The dealer at bridge must bid first’….
“When the term rule is used to denote an instruction, it is closer in meaning to an effective strategy for how to solve a problem. An example of this usage is, ‘In solving quartic equations, first eliminate the cubic term’…. When rule denotes a precept, the term is being used as a maxim for prudential or moral behavior. An example would be: ‘A good rule is: to put charity ahead of justice’….
“The fourth sense in which the term rule is used in everyday language is to describe a law or principle. An example of this usage is: ‘Cyclones rotate clockwise, autocyclones anticlockwise.’” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. pp. 16-17; reference: Black, Max. 1962. Models and Metaphors. Cornell UP.
“… rules as used in this book are defined to be shared understandings by participants about enforced prescriptions concerning what actions (or outcomes) are required, prohibited, or permitted. All rules are the result of implicit or explicit efforts to achieve order and predictability among humans by creating classes of persons (positions) who are then required, permitted, or forbidden to take classes of actions in relation to required, permitted, or forbidden outcomes or face the likelihood of being monitored and sanctioned in a predictable fashion.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. p. 18.
“Markets are predicted to fail as effective decision mechanisms when they are the only arena available for producing, consuming, or allocating a wide variety of goods that do not meet the criteria of excludability, divisibility, and transferability. Market failure means that the incentives facing individuals in a situation, where the rules are those of a competitive market but the goods do not have the characteristics of ‘private goods,’ are insufficient to motivate individuals to produce, allocate, and consume these goods at an optimal level.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. p. 23.
“Whenever two or more individuals are faced with a set of potential actions that jointly produce outcomes, these individuals can be said to be ‘in’ an action situation….
“The structure of all of these situations–and many more–can be described and analyzed by using a common set of variables. These are (1) the set of participants, (2) the positions to be filled by participants, (3) the potential outcomes, (4) the set of allowable actions and the function that maps actions into realized outcomes, (5) the control that an individual has in regard to this function, (6) the information available to participants about actions and outcomes and their linkages, and (7) the costs and benefits–which serve as incentives and deterrents–assigned to actions and outcomes…. In addition to the internal structure, whether a situation will occur once, a known and finite number of times, or indefinitely affects the strategies of individuals.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. p. 32.
“For simplicity, it is frequently assumed in theoretical models that acts are costly and outcomes are beneficial… Actions may, however, have associated benefits, and outcomes may be ‘bads’ instead of ‘goods.’” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. p. 52.
“Some social processes may need to be thought of as composed of a series of linked situations. The outcomes of any one situation become inputs into the next situation. The intermediate outcomes of an early situation may not have much value unless the full series of linked situations is completed. Thus, getting a bill passed by the House of Representatives can be viewed as an intermediate step in finally getting a bill passed into law….
“An organization is composed of one or more action situations linked together by prescriptions specifying how outcomes from one situation become inputs into others. Organizations may be thought of as a tree or a lattice with situations at each node…. Thus, a tournament is one form of organization that prescribes how players will proceed through the tournament tree.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. pp. 56-7.
“A key requisite for successful cooperation is that conditional cooperators must be able to find one another–due to either institutional or spatial connections. If too many rational egoists surround conditional cooperators, cooperation can just collapse.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. p. 124.
“Children begin to learn strategies of constructing sentences and undertaking rule-ordered actions in the world at about the same time in their development.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. p. 126.
“An indirect evolutionary approach explains how a mixture of norm-users and rational egoists would emerge in settings where standard rational choice theory assumes the presence of rational egoists alone. In this approach, social norms may lead individuals to behave differently in the same objective situation depending on how strongly they value conformance with (or deviance from) a norm. Rational egoists can be thought of as having intrinsic payoffs that are the same as objective payoffs since they do not value the social norm of reciprocity….
“In indirect evolutionary theory, only trustworthy participants survive in an indefinitely repeated social dilemma characterized by complete information about the past actions of all subjects… Where a player’s type is common knowledge, rational egoists would not survive. Conditional cooperators interacting with other known conditional cooperators will obtain higher payoffs and come to dominance.
“Full and accurate information about all players’ intrinsic preference, however, is a strong assumption and difficult to achieve….
“Indirect evolutionary theory is able to explain how a mixture of contingent cooperators and rational egoists would emerge in settings where rational game theory predicts that only rational egoists should prevail. Given the recent development of this approach, direct tests of this theory are not yet extensive.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. pp. 127-9; reference: Gueth, Werner & H. Kliemt. 1998. “The Indirect Evolutionary Approach: Bridging the Gap between Rationality and Adaptation.” Rationality and Society. 10(3)(August):377-99.
“These studies [on interplay of external rules and cooperation] typically find that a social norm, especially in a setting where there is communication between the parties, can work as well or nearly as well at generating cooperative behavior as an externally imposed set of rules and system of monitoring and sanctioning. Moreover, norms seem to have a certain staying power in encouraging a growth of the desire for cooperative behavior over time, while cooperation that is primarily there due to externally imposed and enforced rules can disappear very quickly. Finally, the worst of all worlds may be one where external authorities impose rules but are able to achieve only weak monitoring and sanctioning. In a world of strong external monitoring and sanctioning, cooperation is enforced without any need for internal norms to develop. In a world of no external rules or monitoring, norms can evolve to support cooperation. In an in-between case, a low level of external monitoring discourages the formation of social norms, while also making it attractive for some players to deceive and defect, given the low risk of being caught.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. pp. 130-1.
“If the dilemma involved many individuals located in diverse settings around the world who have little opportunity to communicate and share no common rules–like an open-access ocean fishery or the global atmosphere–then the best predictions and explanations of behavior would be derived form assuming that most participants are rational egoists.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. p. 131.
“Conditional cooperators can do little without an appropriate institutional structure to support their norms.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. p. 131.
“Human beings are neither all-knowing saints nor devilish knaves. The institutions they grow up in–families, schools, playgrounds, neighborhoods–differentially reward or punish them over time so that intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are learned and developed over time. The situations they find themselves facing as adults in the workplace and their community also affect which norms they use and the outcomes they reach. When individuals learn the artisanship of crafting rules, they can experiment and learn to create more productive outcomes (as well as participants) over time. Learning to craft rules that attract and encourage individuals who share norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness, or who learn them over time, is a fundamental skill needed in all democratic societies.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. pp. 132-3.
“We view the concept of an institutional statement as a broad term encompassing three types of statements–rules, norms, and shared strategies. These statements describe opportunities and constraints that create expectations about other actors’ behavior. In other words, an ‘institutional statement’ encompasses a broad set of shared linguistic constraints and opportunities that prescribe, permit, or advise actions or outcomes for participants in an action situation. We stress the shared nature of these concepts.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. pp. 137-8.
“The grammar tool allows analysts to distinguish more systematically between institutional statements that are best understood as attributes of the community (strategies and norms) and those that are best understood as rules. This distinction recognizes that rules operate in such a distinct way in action situations that analysts need to know when an institutional statement is a rule and when it is not.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. p. 138.
“The general syntax of this grammar includes five components: [ATTRIBUTE], [DEONTIC], [AIM], [CONDITIONS], and [OR ELSE] where,
“A ATTRIBUTES is a holder for any value of a participant-level variable that distinguishes to whom the institutional statement applies. Examples include eighteen years of age, female, college educated, 1-year experience, or a specific position, such as employee or chairperson.
“D DEONTIC is a holder for the three modal verbs analyzed by von Wright. These are ‘may’ (permitted), ‘must’ (obliged), and ‘must not’ (forbidden).
“I AIM is a holder that describes a particular actions or outcomes in the action situation to which the deontic is assigned. An AIM may include a formula specifying an amount of action or outcome or a description of a process for an action.
“C CONDITIONS is a holder for those variables that define when and where an action or outcome is permitted, obligatory, or forbidden.
“O OR ELSE is a holder for the institutionally assigned consequence for not following a rule.” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. pp. 139-140.
“Many scholars tended to use the concept of an organization and of an institution interchangeably. North has insisted on a key difference between organizations and institutions. As North described his approach:…
“‘They [organizations] are groups of individuals bound by some common purpose to achieve objectives… [T]he emphasis in this study is on the institutions that are the underlying rules of the game and the focus on organizations (and their entrepreneurs) is primarily on their role as agents of institutional change; therefore the emphasis is on the interaction between institutions and organizations.’” Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton UP. p. 179; reference: North, Douglass. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. Cambridge UP. pp. 4-5.
“However, unbreached bone marrow retains low bacteria counts for much longer than exposed flesh or exposed bone marrow. This undoubtedly extended the amount of time it persisted in a fresh state, thus increasing encounter rates [for early hominins] relative to edible flesh and decreasing risk from carnivores that remain near fresher kills.
“In comparison to the outside-bone nutrients usually considered as the primary motivator for scavenging, inside-bone nutrients from scavenged carcasses are more likely to be highly ranked because of their persistence, palatability, and high fat content. Most small-bodied carcasses are divested of meat and marrow within a day, but marrow and brains can persist for several days in medium to large carcasses.” Thompson, Jessica. S. Carvalho, C. Marean & Z. Alemseged. 2019. “Origins of the Human Predatory Pattern: The Transition to Large-Animal Exploitation by Early Hominins.” Current Anthropology. 60(1): 1-23. p. 4.
“However, the focus on outside-bone nutrients deflects from the potential for hominins to begin exploiting large-bodied animals in the absence of flaked stone. Flaked stone production is a case of secondary tool production; it requires at least one or two tools (a hammerstone and a nodule or an anvil and a nodule) to create another tool (a flaked stone). The scenario in which flaked stones must predate large-animal exploitation is unnecessarily complex, demanding creation of a new technology (flaked stone) to be applied to an equally novel purpose (cutting meat). Fewer steps are invoked if hominins first began exploiting large-animal resources through hammerstone percussion, which transfers an existing extractive technology from one similarly packaged resource (nuts or other encased foods) to another (bones).” Thompson, Jessica. S. Carvalho, C. Marean & Z. Alemseged. 2019. “Origins of the Human Predatory Pattern: The Transition to Large-Animal Exploitation by Early Hominins.” Current Anthropology. 60(1): 1-23. p. 5.
“Now that the earliest Homo is reported at 2.8 Ma from Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia, the earliest evidence of butchery at 3.4 Ma from DIK-55, and the earliest flaked stone tools at 3.3 Ma from LOM-3, there has been a breakdown in this convenient and long-lived triumvirate: early Homo, the HPP [human predatory pattern], and the first flaked stone tools do not all appear to have emerged simultaneously at the start of the Pleistocene. Now, the candidate hominins for the origins of both behaviors appear to have been australopiths living at least 700,000 years earlier.” Thompson, Jessica. S. Carvalho, C. Marean & Z. Alemseged. 2019. “Origins of the Human Predatory Pattern: The Transition to Large-Animal Exploitation by Early Hominins.” Current Anthropology. 60(1): 1-23. p. 7.
“Yet, if language developed to instruct imaginations about what might be in one person’s head but could not be in others’ without words as cues, then it comes close to the core of narrative. We each have different experiences: our unique past and memories, our unique capacities, dispositions, interests, and perspectives. Narrative allows us beyond the limits of our lives, gives us access to the experience of others, to the past, the private, the imagined.” Boyd, Brian. 2018. “The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction.” WIREs Cognitive Science. January/February. 9:e1444. doi:10.1002/wcs.1444. p. 6.
“Narrative helps us know better what it can be to be human, what risks we may face, what options we may have, so that we can cooperate and compete better through understanding one another more fully…. It can spread, deepen, question, and inflect norms. This makes the social landscape more navigable, more expansive, more open with possibilities for all, changing the payoff of sociality for both individuals and groups.” Boyd, Brian. 2018. “The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction.” WIREs Cognitive Science. January/February. 9:e1444. doi:10.1002/wcs.1444. p. 7.
“Camps [in study of storytelling among Agta hunter-gatherers in the Philippines] with greater proportions of skilled storytellers were associated with higher levels of cooperation; the more skilled storytellers had higher reproductive success (0.53 more living offspring) than others,….” Boyd, Brian. 2018. “The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction.” WIREs Cognitive Science. January/February. 9:e1444. doi:10.1002/wcs.1444. pp. 7-8; reference study is: Smith, D., P. Schlaepfer, M. Dyble, AE Page, J. Thompson, N. Chaudhury, GD Salali, R. Mace, L. Vinicius & AB Migliano. Under review. “The power of a good story: storytelling and the evolution of hunter-gatherer cooperation.”
“The close link between memory and imagination, between experience and planning, meant that imagination was ready to recruit not just experience personally lived through, not just experience reported and activated in listeners’ imaginations, but also experience that was ‘only’ concretely and vividly recombined–concocted–from elements of remembered experience…. By their very nature language and narrative teeter already on the verge of fiction.” Boyd, Brian. 2018. “The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction.” WIREs Cognitive Science. January/February. 9:e1444. doi:10.1002/wcs.1444. p. 9.
“Fiction is narrative as play.” Boyd, Brian. 2018. “The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction.” WIREs Cognitive Science. January/February. 9: 1-16. p. 10.
“Because they are designed to earn attention, arouse emotion, and resonate in memory, stories can be particularly effective at imparting norms and showing the consequences of violating them, and thereby foster cooperation.” Boyd, Brian. 2018. “The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction.” WIREs Cognitive Science. January/February. 9:e1444. doi:10.1002/wcs.1444. p. 11.
“Because we have developed and evolved in the language niche, we have language-craving minds. Because we have evolved in the narrative and the fiction niches, we have story-craving minds. Because we have evolved in the religious niche, we have religion-craving minds: even children brought up in the modern secular West pass through a phase of fascination with fairies, witches, and Santa Claus as a counter-intuitive monitor of children’s deeds and rewarder of their virtues….
“We live now in a scientific niche that has transformed our lives and our world, but our minds can be made to accommodate science only through explicit teaching that most still find difficult. We are not yet a species of science-craving minds.” Boyd, Brian. 2018. “The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction.” WIREs Cognitive Science. January/February. 9:e1444. doi:10.1002/wcs.1444. p. 12.
“Once fueled by language, narrative impacted our development, our individual and social behavior, cognition, and emotion … It made us more dependent on learning from experiences not our own.” Boyd, Brian. 2018. “The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction.” WIREs Cognitive Science. January/February. 9:e1444. doi:10.1002/wcs.1444. p. 12.
“At every level of analysis of the system for the production of voluntary movements, there are more elements contributing to performance than are absolutely necessary to solve these motor tasks. For instance, the body has more joints than needed to position the center of mass in space, the human arm has more joints than needed to configure the spatial position and orientation of the hand on an object. Similarly, the hand has more fingers than needed to generate a grasp.” Latash, Mark, J. Scholz & G. Schoener. 2007. “Toward a New Theory of Motor Synergies.” Motor Control. 11:276-308. p. 276.
“The idea [a class of solutions to high DOF (degree of freedom) problem] is clearest in the context of muscle synergies: Multiple muscles are bound together such that a central control signal jointly and proportionally activates all muscles in the synergy. When task demands vary, the control signal to the synergy changes, leading to parallel changes in all muscles bound together in the synergy. By extending the notion of muscle synergies to groups of muscles that span multiple joints, the coordination of multiple DOF may be understood in a similar way. To avoid misunderstanding, we would like to state upfront that this understanding of synergies differs qualitatively from what we propose further in this article….
“Our view on the apparently redundant design of the system for movement production is quite different. We do not consider the numerous DOFs as a source of problems for the CNS but rather as a luxury that allows the controller to ensure both stability of important performance variables and flexibility of patterns to deal with other task components and possible perturbations….
“In this article, we will argue that current approaches to the DOFs problem deal predominantly with how combinations of DOFs are selected by freezing, by optimization, or by binding into groups with proportional scaling of the DOFs within a group. We will identify the concept of ‘sharing’ as the thread common to these approaches…. We will then argue that these approaches to the DOF problem fail to address another important feature of behavior of multi-element systems, namely how performance is allowed to show both stability against perturbations and flexibility to solve concurrent tasks….
“We start with an explicit definition of synergy that is going to be analyzed and explored in further sections: Synergy is a neutral organization of a multi-element system that (1) organizes sharing of a task among a set of elemental variables; and (2) ensures co-variation among elemental variables with the purpose to stabilize performance variables.” Latash, Mark, J. Scholz & G. Schoener. 2007. “Toward a New Theory of Motor Synergies.” Motor Control. 11:276-308. pp. 278-9.
“Foundational texts first arose in very few places, but as their influence spread and new texts emerged, the globe increasingly resembled a map organized by literature–by the foundational texts dominating a given region.” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. pp. xvii-xviii.
“As the larger story of literature slowly took shape in my mind, I saw it as unfolding in four stages. The first stage was dominated by small groups of scribes, who alone had mastered the early, difficult writing systems and therefore controlled the texts they assembled from storytellers, texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Hebrew Bible, and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. As the influence of these foundational texts grew, they were challenged, in a second stage, by charismatic teachers such as the Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus, who denounced the influence of priests and scribes and whose followers developed new styles of writing. I began to think of these vivid texts as teachers’ literature.
“In a third stage of literature, individual authors started to emerge, supported by innovations that made access to writing easier. While these authors first imitated older texts, more daring ones such as Lady Murasaki in Japan and Cervantes in Spain soon created new types of literature, above all, novels. Finally, in a fourth stage, the widespread use of paper and print ushered in the era of mass production and mass literacy, with newspapers and broadsides, as well as new texts such as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin or The Communist Manifesto.” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. pp. xx-xxi.
“Divination practices required interpreting special calendars and reading commentaries, but they also included skills beyond written words. To the trained eyes of scribes, not just the buildings of Nineveh but the whole world was full of traces that could be read. One could find written messages in the entrails of rams and in the sky–the secret writing of the gods. Writing was so powerful that humans now imagined this technology to be everywhere, legible to those trained in reading its signs. Writing, begun as an accounting technique, had changed the way humans viewed the world around them.” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. pp. 37-8.
“For Ashurbanipal, rising to the highest rungs of scribal art meant that he would be the first king not at the mercy of his interpreters, because he would be capable of disputing the findings of his divinatory scribes. He would be able to converse with the priests as an equal and to counter their interpretation of the stars. He would have access to the source code of power….
“Unlike his father, Ashurbanipal did not lead his army into battle; he controlled it remotely. Thanks to writing and the bureaucratic apparatus made possible by it, power could now be centralized as it had never been before, allowing a king to stay at home while extending his reach.” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. pp. 38-9.
“Thanks to Ashurbanipal, the Epic of Gilgamesh was copied many times and carried far afield, as far as Lebanon and Judea, Persia and Egypt, as a way to secure territory and to assimilate foreign cultures. Writing, it turned out, was a tool for building an empire, not only because of its effects on governance and the economy but also because of literature. Writing, centralized urban living, territorial empires, and written stories were closely aligned and would remain so for the next several thousand years.” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. p. 43.
“While old objets and building can give us access to the external habits of our ancestors, their stories, fixed and preserved by writing, give us access to their inner lives. This was why Layard [excavator of Nineveh around 1844] had been so frustrated by not understanding the cuneiform script. He could admire reliefs and statues, but he could not hear their voices, their language, their thoughts, their literature. The invention of writing divides human evolution into a time that is all but inaccessible to us and one in which we have access to the minds of others.” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. pp. 44-5.
“Scribes also generated the greatest and best-known part of the Bible: its creation myth. Most such myths, including the Mesopotamian ones, imagine a god molding the world and its inhabitants laboriously from clay. The older Hebrew creation stories, which were retained in the Hebrew Bible, do the same and have God engage in an act of divine craft, laboring with his hands. These creation stories were imagined by humans who were used to manual labor. Not so the opening of Genesis. God does not get his hands dirty. He does not work with them; indeed, he does not touch his creation at all. From nowhere in particular, he simply brings the world into being through the sheer power of words. This is creation as imagined by scribes who sit at a remove from manual labor and whose work takes place entirely in (spoken) language acting across great-distances.” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. pp. 49-50.
“The translation of the Hebrew Bible from a foundational text to scripture, and from a text rooted in territory to one that could function in exile, is also what made it survive, whereas the Epic of Gilgamesh got buried. The Hebrew Bible survived because it was not dependent on land, on kings and empires; it could do without them and create its own worshippers who would carry it wherever they might be.” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. p. 56.
“Textual fundamentalism rests on two contradictory assumptions. The first is that texts are unchanging and fixed. The second acknowledges that texts need to be interpreted but restricts the authority to interpret them to an exclusive group.” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. p61.
“‘When names are not correct, what is said will not sound reasonable; when what is said does not sound reasonable, affairs will not culminate in success; when affairs do not culminate in success, rites and music will not flourish; when rites and music do not flourish, punishments will not fit the crimes; when punishments do not fit the crimes, the common people will not know where to put hand and foot.’” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. p. 72; citation from Confucius. Analects. 13:3.
“It was therefore not surprising that Socrates would tell Phaedrus an Egyptian legend about the origin of writing. A god brought writing to an Egyptian king, praising the advantages of the new technology, which would miraculously make fleeting words permanent. Writing would improve memory and lead to knowledge and wisdom. But the Egyptian king rejected the offer because he realized that the opposite would be true. People would no longer bother to remember things, relying instead on the new technology, and their ability to think would deteriorate.
“Characteristically, Socrates didn’t stop there. He used the anecdote to argue that the effect of writing was even worse than in the Egyptian story. Writing was just a mute shadow of speech, a technique that captured words but without their sound, their breath, their soul. It was just a mechanical contraption, a technology, with enormous disadvantages. You couldn’t ask a piece of writing follow-up questions; words would be taken out of the context in which they were spoken, which would make them bound to be misunderstood, beyond the control of their author; words would survive the speaker’s death, so that he would be unable to refute false interpretations that might arise later.” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. pp. 79-80.
“The Diamond Sutra even encouraged its worshippers to transcribe and copy it. This emphasis on writing culminated in the declaration ‘Wherever this sutra is present, it is as if the Buddha and the Buddha’s reverent disciples were also present.’ The Buddha and the written text had become one. Like an organism seeking to replicate itself, the Diamond Sutra was spawning versions of itself, becoming something similar to what Ezra had created: sacred scripture.” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. p. 91.
“A full one-third of all works published in Germany during Luther’s life were by Martin Luther. He was the first superstar of the new public of print, the master of the new genre of printed polemics.” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. p. 166.
“It was this copy [Luther’s own printed Bible] he was thinking of when he declared with utmost conviction that scripture was more important than the Pope, that the institution of the Church wasn’t even mentioned in the Bible, nor were indulgences. Luther’s handy printed copy of the Bible had been his most important source of inspiration and was becoming his battle cry. Sola scriptura, he shouted, politely, in Latin: Scripture was the only authority to which he would bow. Show me the passage in the text, and I will burn my own sermons and theses. The idea of sacred scripture, first instituted by Ezra the scribe, was asserting itself powerfully in the new world of print.” Puchner, Martin. 2017 The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization. NY: Random House. p. 167.
“By 2015, a greater share of humanity (95 per cent) had access to at least 2G cellular coverage than to electricity (82 per cent).” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. p. 51.
“… [the role of finance is] to match idle money to activities that need it so that those activities can happen.” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. p. 67.
“Instead, we’ve [the uniqueness of the gains made by the present generation] crossed thresholds that will never be repeated and that mark this moment as our own golden age: the addition of nearly a full generation to global life expectancy since 1960; an absolute decline in poverty amidst a global population boom; near-universal literacy among the incoming generation of adults; a numerical superiority of women in education.” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. p. 132.
“But 500 years ago, the real shock [of Machiavelli’s book] was that in addition to composing the usual flattering lies about the virtues of the ruling class, he published observations of their actual behaviour. Political scientists have been doing the latter ever since.” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. p. 174.
“The broadest insight to emerge so far from the nanoscale realm is that the farther down we go, the blurrier the distinction between ‘physical’ and ‘life’ science becomes.” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. p. 213.
“Mainz, Gutenberg’s hometown, was a crossroads for two very different domains: wine-making and coin-minting. The former contributed many styles of grape press and the engineering craft to tinker with them; the latter, metal-working skills for making moulds and experimenting to find the best alloy for casting individual letters – one that would melt easily, cast well in a mould, yet survive repeated pounding in a press. These critical crafts were deep and local, but once Gutenberg successfully combined them, the diffusion of his press was guaranteed….” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. p. 218.
“Complexity breeds benefits.
“But it also presents a problem. The more complex our interactions become, the harder it is for us to see relationships of cause and effect.” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. p. 287.
“Connectivity presents choice. When many people make similar choices, concentrations result. Concentrations are not only geographical, but also conceptual and behavioural – from the standardization of managerial preparation in the form of MBA programmes, to the homogenization of crops and farming practices in today’s agribusinesses, to the global harmonization of regulations governing banking and trade.” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. p. 292.
“Despite its intuitive promise to help diversify risk, ‘globalization’ has reduced the variety of much of our investment and activity, as we all independently arrive at similar conclusions about how and where to minimize cost, maximize efficiency or achieve other common objectives. It is only recently that we have begun to appreciate how our private pursuits of similar outcomes have increased our collective vulnerability to shock events.” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. p. 322.
“Risk is flourishing, and the rising complexity and concentrations within our systems are to blame.
“With complexity, the hardest part of solving a problem is seeing it….
“If complexity strains our cognition, concentrations strain our judgement. Concentrations are the collective consequence of all our individual choices – choices guided by free will, by ambition, by our duty to loved ones. What do we do when our private actions increase the risk of collective shocks we never intended?” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. p. 333.
“The old gospel of globalization transferred political power from the general public to elite technocrats. The coining of that omnipresent word (global-ization), the process of becoming global) was itself an act of public disempowerment. Within the guise of a process of economic development, the word obscured many important political choices about how to go about creating wealth, and about how to share the rewards and risks that follow. The gospel taught that the public had little say over these matters; their preferences were constrained by inevitable economic laws and forces. To resist an inevitable -ization is irrational.
“Global-ism (the doctrine of becoming global) would have been more honest packaging. To accept an -ism without critical inquiry – now that’s irrational. The simple switch in language, from process to doctrine, would have shifted the burden of proof from those affected by the gospel to those who preached it….
“The new, anti-globalization gospel deceives in the other direction. To those who are weary of being pushed around by unseen forces and processes beyond their control, it preaches the power of popular will to defy reality.” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 375-6.
“Putting our immediate, narrow interests first can work to catapult political outsiders into power. It can work to restore our lost sense of control, or status. But it cannot give us the cures and jobs that others have to offer, nor can it spare us from calamities of which we did not approve.” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. p. 378.
“When faced with high and uncertain risks, humanity has always had two general coping strategies available: robustness and resiliency. The idea of the first is to strengthen each part so that it is less likely to fail. The idea of the second is to diversify, so that when one part does fail the whole can still function.” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. p. 418.
“… most major risks we face present a genuine dilemma between promoting private goods (choice, consumption, profit, efficiency) and accepting public bads (such as pollution, inequality and the occasional calamity). The complexity of how the former cause the latter makes it hard to convince the pubic to spend tax dollars or swallow tough trade-offs. The unevenness of costs and benefits across geographies (costs borne here, benefits felt there) and generations (costs borne today, benefits enjoyed by the as-yet-unborn) makes it nearly impossible.” Goldin, Ian & C. Kutarna. 2017. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury. p. 421.
“From an early date, sea crossings, and by inference reliable seacraft, brought hitherto inaccessible places into range, Australia across 60-100 km of ocean by at least 45,000 BC and maybe a lot earlier, the archipelagos of western Melanesia and Japan over the next 5000-10,000 years. These maritime thrusts from the eastern Eurasian rim may owe much to dispositions acquired along a southerly, coastal route eastward across Asia, maybe exiting Africa across the Red Sea at the Bab-el-Mandeb some 60,000 years ago – well before any circum-Mediterranean movement began. Whatever the precise dates, the contrast between this eastward route along tidal shores rich in marine resources and headed into a gigantic patchwork of outsized, accessible islands, and the separate, later and dry-shod exit across the Suez isthmus up through the island-poor Levant into Europe could explain why the initial expansion around the Mediterranean was so obdurately non-aquatic in character. Mediterranean moderns had to generate a seafaring orientation and technology from scratch, and that required time. If this distinction is valid, fervent faith in widespread and proficient Mediterranean seagoing from dates comparable to those far to the east is a victim of misleadingly uniform expectations, and also belittles the significance of the later passages of maritime thresholds that do stand out in the Mediterranean.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. pp. 112-3.
“The sea’s margin was no longer [after beginnings of seafaring] merely a source of food and materials, but a potential portal to maritime connections that could bind together patches of land hitherto cut off from each other, or separated by immense overland distances. This is most obvious in the case of islands…. From now on, islands’ qualities such as their size, distance, place amidst wider configurations, and rare resources would exert increasing influence over activity on and around them, whether seasonal visits or long-term settlement and the inception of island life.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 156.
“Heat-alteration of materials, whether lime extraction for plaster, softening of metals or hardening of clay, was widespread during the PPN [pre pottery Neolithic], with open fires and bread ovens providing chances to experiment at moderate temperatures. Fire-hardened clay objects date to as early as the 10th-9th millennia BC at Mureybet on the Euphrates, and from the 8th millenium in the Levant. Some already took the form of containers, alongside wares made of lime and ashes, woven baskets and presumably also wooden vessels. The shift to regular use of fired pottery took place in the early 7th millennium BC in the north and the late 7th in the south, incidentally long after its earliest global appearance among East Asian hunter-gatherers, and also, as we shall see, post-dating African innovations. By 6500 BC potting skill had improved greatly. Its products were used for boiling, stewing and serving food, leading to improvements in taste and nutrition. Another crucial function, proved by the extraction of fatty acids from potsherds of this date, was processing of milk, perhaps initially to create readily digestible yoghurts even before full lactose intolerance had developed among adults, as well as more durable cheeses and other milk-based foodstuffs – in short, the first attested secondary products.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 170.
“… we should approach the Levantine Late Neolithic as much more than the dustcart after the PPNB [pre pottery Neolithic B] parade. Its culture was more regionally variegated, less eye-catching and less interconnected, its settlements generally small (under 0.5 ha), dispersed and short-lived – mere hamlets or farmsteads. But they materialize in a strikingly broad range of ecological niches and hint at major shifts in the farming portfolio….
“…they anticipate a startling number of key elements of later Mediteranean life. Second, although many were subsequently realigned to serve the interests of large-scale economies, they appear first in the context of the transition to a small-scale world of little villages, hamlets, and farmsteads. Nearly two millennia [7th and 6th millennia BC] of experimentation in an ever more unreliable environment would elapse before they crystallized into a suite of strategies capable of supporting cycles of new, differently structured large-scale societies in the Levant. But third, and in contrast to previous population collapses in the fragile Levantine corridor, going back to the first hominin infiltrations, the new demographics enabled by farming, allied to the notable resilience and adaptive inventiveness of these generations of Mediterranean farmers, ensured that this time around the Levant, even in apparent recession, remained in play, both in its own right, and as a potential conduit of connections between the regions around it.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. pp. 172-3.
“Sheep and a few foxes followed soon afterwards [as human imports to Cyprus around 8000 BC as detected from faunal remains], but the most unexpected major arrivals were wild fallow deer, which to judge by the bones from kills, were released into the still understocked island and hunted as game without any effort at control.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 177.
“Neolithic farming communities replaced this Mesolithic world in the northern half of the Mediterranean basin at different times between 7000 and 5500 BC, save for a few enclaves that held out slightly longer. Overall, the trend was strongly from east to west, if with informative variations. The start date in the east was conditioned by the acceleration towards full domestication, followed by the Late PPNB boom in farming settlements. Over the course of its 3500-km expansion beyond central Anatolia and Cyprus, the Neolithic displayed impressive consistency in its core features, principally the suite of domestic animals and plants, pottery and other objects like polished stone axes, often collectively known as the Neolithic ‘package’.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 184.
“But stringent analyses of bones, seeds, the cave strata that contribute much of our information and most recently genetics [deeper into Europe], today testify beyond doubt that no such in situ transition to farming in fact took place on this flank of the Mediterranean before exogenous domesticates arrived from further east.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 185.
“Standing back, and acknowledging the variety of circumstances that spread the Neolithic throughout the northern half of the Mediterranean, three main conclusions are abundantly clear. One is that migration by farming groups remained a mechanism, and probably the dominant one, not just in the east and centre but also the west, much of it in the form of jumps from one favourable spot to the next. Second, some hunter-gatherer contribution to this process is indisputable, particularly through transmission of seafaring knowledge, starting in the Gulf of Iskenderun, with a later supercharging phase in the Aegean and perhaps another at the mouth of the Adriatic. Interestingly, this is best attested in the eastern half of the basin, not the west, where hunter-gatherers have traditionally held the interpretative upper hand. But instances of hunter-gatherers becoming even partly Neolithic are rare along the main axes of expansion and no less so in the west – indeed the shell-midden dwellers of Atlantic Iberia exemplify exactly the opposite tendency. Instead, this process belongs mainly to a twilight phase leading to the extinction of hunter-gatherer lifestyles in bypassed redoubts or on the basin’s margins, for instance the Sea of Marmara, the Po valley, the uplands of northern Italy, southern France and Iberia and eventually the Atlantic estuaries. Hunter-gatherers and farmers alike were superbly attuned to Mediterranean conditions, yet in different ways and in different niches that made conversions and cross-overs rarely viable until the future lay manifestly with the new way of life. This should hardly surprise us. Their seasonal schedules differed, the hard labour and indifferent health of the Neolithic is unlikely to have appealed to hunter-gatherers with access to good hunting, foraging and fishing, and the two probably had quite different concepts of nature and the supernatural (for example, contrast the Neolithic obsession with ancestors and fertility with the likely animistic spirit worlds of hunter-gatherers). In the Levant one had gradually transformed into the other over millennia, via floodwater cultivation, but this remained unique within the Mediterranean. Further west a pre-evolved farming package and its attendant ideology was juxtaposed with hunter-gatherers nowhere near the brink of opting for farming by themselves.
“Third, something changed drastically towards the end of the 7th millennium BC. As we have seen, evidence for late hunter-gatherer sites reduces sharply across broad central and western Mediterranean into which farmers later expanded. Local boom and bust cycles may have played a part, but responsibility for the overall horizon can surely be placed on the climate deterioration of the 6200 event [abrupt cold years], which hit hard and fast at the end of a long optimum…. Farmers would have been affected by the 6200 BC event too, but their numbers enabled faster recovery, and renewed advance before surviving hunter-gatherers had found a chance to recuperate.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. pp. 195-6.
“Yet however peacefully or otherwise each community got on with things [5th and early 4th millennia across the northern flanks of the Meditterranean], they still needed their neighbours on a variety of levels. Even the largest were barely populous enough for internal inter-marriage to suffice, and every smaller hamlet and farm would have had to marry out, cross-breed its small flocks with other herds, and draw upon a wider pool of expertise for specialized needs, including ceremonial rites and long-range trade. The wider ties and identities fashioned by such interdependence between hundreds if not thousands of people profoundly shaped Neolithic social landscapes, whether compressed into a cluster of big plains villages, or spread over thinly peopled country.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 226.
“Certainly, in both Egypt and Mesopotamia a dual riverine effect operated: the river as creator of alluvial lands made populous by farming, within which minor shifts in how things were done could amplify spectacularly, and the river as a conduit between zones with very different environments, resources and culture: highland Anatolia and the Persian Gulf for Mesopotamia, northeast Africa and the Levant for Egypt.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 269.
“Quite what we should call the political entities that emerged, typically focused on towns or cities, and ruling over a multitude of subjects spread over sometimes extremely extensive hinterlands, is an open question. In their own day, the terms of reference were the land, its symbolic limits and its ruler, and it is not by chance that while most of the Mediterranean proceeds into Copper and Bronze ages, Egyptian and Mesopotamian chronology, as described by contemporaries and in our own day, shifts to a sequence defined by royal lifetimes or ruling places….
“All these terms [polities, states, empires, complex societies], and others such as ‘kingdom’, will be deployed interchangeably henceforth, as seems intuitively appropriate. However we decide to name them, over the long term the economic impact of their spread across the Mediterranean lifted populations and aggregate wealth there to levels otherwise unattainable.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. pp. 269-270.
“The early states of Egypt and Mesopotamia are not just remarkable political creations. New kinds of elite culture and large-scale economy arose inextricably with them, and these reveal much common ground despite separate origins and enduringly different stylistic ‘looks.’ Some elements were genuine innovations under the prevailing hothouse conditions – for instance, writing, the fast potter’s wheel and others soon to be discussed. More, however, were expropriations, refinements and redeployments, in the pursuit of ambitious new goals, of practices developed earlier, at a smaller scale, within, or often beyond, their domains. Examples abound in the realms of metallurgy and other craft skills (including the bow-driven drill, a distant descendant of hunter-gatherer weaponry), viticulture and probably the wider use of fermentation to make leavened bread and beer, woollen textiles, administrative use of seals and, last but not least, increasingly elaborate ritual observances to supernatural beings. In certain cases, we simply cannot establish precedence. This is unfortunately true of one key breakthrough, that of animal traction hitched to both ploughs and wagons (the latter another deployment of rotary motion in parallel to the potter’s wheel).” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 276.
“Use of materials far beyond the ability of ordinary people to obtain was one option [to show off elite culture]. Lapis lazuli, whose source lay in the distant highlands straddling the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan, is an excellent example. Its deep blue became synonymous in Mesopotamia with fabulous riches, gods, royal heroes like Gilgamesh, and lustrous dark hair, and in Egypt with regeneration and the night sky. The queen’s name in one Jazira town translates as ‘lapis lazuli girl’. But there were other means of distinction. One was quantitative, evident in gargantuan buildings scaled up from humble predecessors, or staggering repetition: tens of thousands of stone vessels were buried with certain early pharaohs. Another explored the qualitative axis, through the virtuoso crafting of one-off, unique works. New fine metalworking techniques such as granulation, filigree, soldering and riveting embellished ornate jewelry, weapons, drinking, dining and liquid container vessels and other status symbols. An allied approach was the combination of precious substances, each with their symbolic resonances, to create multimedia, polychrome objects distinct from the typically single-medium status objects of earlier times, and flaunting an ability to acquire and pool materials of different origins until the time came to bring them together.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 278.
“For within them [urban populations of Egypt or Mesopotamia], the socially instigated desires for lifestyle markers, driven by a conspicuous elite in this respect, led to the birth of the first consumer societies, while a parallel obsession with establishing gradations of quality, plus perhaps the branding of goods with standard packaging containers and seals of authentication, created what were, in effect, commodities. Unsurprisingly, the creation of measures of capacity in the 4th millennium BC was followed in the 3rd millennium by full-blown metrology. And crucially, aspirations, materials, weights and measures became articulated by the rudiments of a market operation and its modes of calculation, in which the value of things, which fluctuated with supply and demands, was pegged against certain standards, both at the level of exchange between rulers and internally between private people. If the essence of a market could develop millennia before the layout of marketplaces, so proto-currencies could emerge long before coinage, and indeed without such a medium of value equivalence it is hard to imagine how multilateral exchange of any complexity could have flourished. It was in this context that metals became of revolutionary significance, and differentiated from other attractive or rare materials and traditional status goods.
“That metals became selected as the medium for proto-currencies as due not only to their glitter, relative rarity, portability, durability or even apparently universal appreciation, all of which contributed to their roles in elite culture, as we have seen, but were shared to varying degrees with rival materials. The decisive factor was their liquid convertibility, the fact that they could move to and fro between raw material, crafted object, and standards of value or, in effect, bullion.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 280.
“In addition, compared with the, to us, anonymous lives of most Neolithic people, a new assertiveness on the part of individuals leaps out [in the 3rd millennium BC], an emphasis on personae with lives differentiated from the group, and similar to those of others engaged in the same kinds of striving. Form and decoration in human figurines become immensely varied. Witness, for example, the variety among some 2000 stone, plaque-like images from southwest Iberia, which may reflect details of genealogy and identity. Facial details on figurines also became more prominent, and grooming and adornment of real bodies extremely popular, as reflected by finds of razors, tattooing needles, colourants, jewelry and hair- or dress-pins, as well as allusions to patterned clothing. Men’s and women’s roles were more vehemently distinguished, and gradually became entrenched into distinctions in power. Celebrations of masculinity were strident. One reason why daggers spread like wildfire was their adoption as the predominant male emblem, the first codification of an emergent warrior identity, alongside older ways of being a man in the wider world, notably hunting. In contrast, female referents in contemporary Italian imagery became their sex and clothing.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 306.
“… along the northern flanks of the Mediterranean by the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. Out of the landscape of scattered, interconnected farmsteads and hamlets new centres begun to emerge, including large villages quite unlike their Neolithic predecessors in form and location, accompanied by unmissable signs of aggrandizing individuals or groups equally without good local precedent….
“Initially mutual exchanges could easily become lopsided, generating net winners and losers over time, as some called on help more than others, leading the less fortunate to accrue debts redeemable only by offering food, goods or labour to those better favoured. Such people could then deploy accumulations of these to sponsor status-reinforcing largesse or compete for, and commission, further marks of distinction. Some kinds of successful place and people are in this sense predictable, for instance those in micro-environments that sustained slightly more reliable crops or perhaps a plough team. That this train of consequences is more than mere speculation is strongly supported by the fact that the most impressive spikes of aggrandizement shot up, as we shall see, in challenging areas where famine versus feast were starkly opposed, and the relatively advantaged could most easily establish a hold over their neighbours, and begin to compete with other winners in the next arena over the hills. Conversely, more clement regions are revealingly thinner on such indices of change. A second, sometimes complementary, possibility of equal significance was to exploit a central place in local or regional webs of communication.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. pp. 314-5.
“This portrait of the people behind Schliemann’s ‘jewels of Helen’ or buried in the echoing recesses of great tombs in the west [any organized polities around the 3rd millennium BC], is a harsh one, in which power was a pragmatic, often coercive business, and where distinctions between models of leadership in the end mattered less than the common aim of cornering resources, connections and people. As in the emergent states south and east of the Mediterranean, an element of persuasion and charisma, whether initially truly altruistic, merely bamboozling, or a bit of both, must also lie behind the embryonic stages of this new social order. Even once established, there will have been benefits for some outside the charmed circle – gifts, trickle-down gains and basking in reflected glory for members of a retinue, lineage or other hangers-on – while sponsored communal events sought the loyalty as well as labour of the wider group. Such benefits help to explain one last feature. In as fickle an arena as the mediterraneanized basin, holding on to gains for long would never be easy, and big man structures are chronically frail in these terms, because no framework exists to maintain a hereditary lead if descendants prove less adept at the game…. And yet, though almost every efflorescence of gathered power between Troy and Zambujal [in today’s Portugal] imploded eventually, with new ones thrusting to take their place, many in the Aegean and Iberia did manage to survive and expand for several centuries. We do not really know whether this was because their locations repeatedly favoured ambitious individuals, because corporate leadership facilitated passing on of power, or because hereditary principles and other structures had been formulated that allowed minor dynasties to emerge. Whatever the answer, such sustained ascendancies of individuals, places or social groups point to a future in which their successors would spring up ever more often, in more parts of the Mediterranean, and in ever larger, more structured and durable forms.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. pp. 324-5.
“At sea, we might initially imagine the equivalent [to the rapid diffusion of horse riding] to be a rapid adoption of the sail. But this was emphatically not the case. The expansion of sailing ship technology west across the Mediterranean was a stadial, staggered process that … took the entire 2nd millennium BC to reach Gibraltar – a reminder of the fact that such ships demanded a totally fresh approach to boatbuilding (simply mounting a canoe with a sail small enough to prevent capsizal made little difference to speed, while the Indo-Pacific outrigger solution was apparently never tried), as well as different operating disciplines, and capital investment that could as yet seldom be brought to bear.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 327.
“In fact, most of the contexts [of extensive artwork with boats across the Mediterranean] are ritually charged decorated pots on which canoes are juxtaposed with vulvas, fish and stars or sunbursts, rock images accompanied by rich symbolism, and colossal sacred buildings in Malta and Egypt. They suggest that, unlike everyday activity in smaller canoes, which continued unabated, travel in the new craft was ideologically charged, imbued with power, status and cosmological overtones. Among the Cycladic islands, only the largest communities and most powerful men commanded enough people to crew such craft, which substituted for the mainlanders’ great houses as the foci of organization and investment.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 329.
“Did access to the great world to the east give aspiring people in the Aegean a decisive advantage over their equivalents in Iberia and elsewhere in the Mediterranean?… The pool of economic, technological and ideological possibilities in the east, not least those already adapted to Mediterranean conditions by people in the Levant and parts of Anatolia, provided blueprints that obviated the need to reinvent the wheel. They offered points as to how power could be institutionally entrenched, beyond its assertion in extravagant competitive tournaments – even if these means, too, had to be converted to fit local circumstances and would never be straightforward to maintain in a precarious, ever-shifting social and natural environment. Likewise, even if, as is perfectly feasible in each case, such practices as ploughing, weaving of wool and olive and vine cultivation did arise independently, or at least at arm’s length from the ‘core’, the east proffered pre-formulated templates for fitting them together into defined lifestyles and effective packages for wealth generation.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 339.
“…two vegetal products that undoubtedly did move in quantities to match if not exceed metals and textiles.
“These are wine and olive oil, by now [2nd millennium BC] trade liquids par excellence. Both had a long storage life, greater in the case of wine than beer and other fermented drinks, and were simple to transport. They also offered great scope for creating more exclusive or simply differentiated products through refinement, wine by terroir, superior cultivars, vintages, blends or additives, oil by adding scent to render it a perfume, fancy soap or ritual ointment. Now, if not before, both accrued a wide range of sacred, sacrificial, erotic, medicinal and other connotations.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 378.
“Iron was functionally useful, creating lighter tools and weapons easy to resharpen, but its military impact can be exaggerated, and its true significance lay in the ubiquity of its ores, which made it harder to control centrally, once the necessary know-how had diffused, than only selectively available copper and distantly sourced tin.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 451.
“It would be several centuries before widely connected, ostensibly politically neutral temples and their divinities fully replaced the earlier pretensions of palaces to be the protecting agencies of the world of the sea, but the years around the turn of the 1st millennium BC offer insight into the advance of this process. At the small port of Phylakopi in the Cyclades [in the Aegean], the ruler’s residence went out of use around 1200 BC but the shrine with a mixture of Argolic, Cretan and Levantine figurines, survived in the lee of the ruined fortifications.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 467.
“Specifically, it suggests that the crisis [claims of destruction across the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC by ‘sea peoples’] marked the tipping point in a long term shift from the institutionalized, centrally organized command economies of Bronze Age palatial states and proto-empires, and the elaborate royal ideologies and culture that pervaded them, to more flexible, uncentralized and freelance trading practices, largely in the hands of private individuals or consortia, decoupled from the political sphere and explicitly motivated by profit….
“As with most apparently sudden, seismic events, pressure had been building up for some time. By the Amarna [trove of cuneiform tablets of correspondence between pharaohs and kings from 14th century BC found at Amarna, the then Egyptian capital] age the monumental but cumbersome edifice of the Great Kings and their imitators had established a highly coherent economy at the top, driven by centrally controlled flows of raw materials of natural scarcity, etiquette-ridden exchange of enormous, subtly valued packages of royally manufactured ‘gifts’ and, in the case of Egypt and Hatti, militarily enforced tribute. Yet alongside this, we glimpsed in the Levant and on Cyprus the emergence, surely from earlier roots, of a more openly mercantile and less risk-averse sector, interested in speed of response to matters of supply and demand, as well as measurable returns. Although this operated in ostensible harmony with the royal palaces, or in their interstices, fundamentally it was in tension with their fixation on legitimacy and social order. We also identified a further challenge to palatial supremacy in the growing legions of sub-elite consumers. Their tastes were only partially met by trickle-down benefits, and elements of certain industries began to address them more directly…. Further technologies slipped palatial control, while subversive new ones arose, of which iron was the most defining: in the longer-term, the freed-up, mobile horizons of many skilled craftworkers that accompanied the waning of palaces was just as significant for Iron Age culture as the triumph of freelance trade. And a final consumer-driven phenomenon, again with earlier stirrings, was the undermining by local substitution of the quasi-monopolies on niche products that certain production centres had established in distant markets – a further twist to the comparative advantages of importation versus local production….
“As the network ballooned, ever larger gaps appeared in the web of royal reach, particularly at sea, and within these different kinds of people began to flourish. These were at best fleetingly nameable as mercenaries, and soon openly running parts of the operation, from Lukka sea-raiders, hapiru and shashu [brigands?] during the 14th century BC to ‘sea people’ in the 13th and12th centuries. That the latter were regarded as more deadly merely indicates that by the late 13th century BC the ability of the two systems to coexist had been overwhelmed, as new modes of practice penetrated more domains of former royal prerogative or violently intercepted the interactions upon which palaces relied. The crescendo of destruction, dislocation and horror stories penned by the scribes of frantic kings around 1200 BC was but the inevitable collateral….
“The Bronze Age world of controlling palatial elites was gone forever from the Mediterranean, but the reality that replaced it was more complicated than a black-and-white contrast between rising merchants and toppled kings, triumphant subalterns and cast-down elites, or dynamic cities and failing empires. A glance into the immediate and longer term future reveals that plenty of royal houses endured, while differentials of wealth counted as much as ever, and empires would soon be back in more rapacious forms. At the heart of the matter, beyond the mayhem, was rather the degree to which those at the top, whoever they were and however they had got there, could extricate themselves from investment in the previous status quo, and decouple from the institutions and pretensions that had hitherto shaped political and economic values not so much who ruled, as how, on what basis and within what remit.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. pp. 468-470.
“With goods and myths came writing,… Alphabetical scripts originated in the later 2nd-millennium BC Levant, as merchants and other go-betweens sought to break the written word free from the limits of clay and formalities of scribal learning enshrined in cuneiform, and to promote mobile practices, easier learning and simpler transfers. Unsurprisingly, Iron Age expansion of the alphabet coincided with the decline of cylinder seals, and their rolled-out, recondite iconography, in favour of stamp seals bearing punchy, readily grasped images, which show up all over the basin. However, the pattern of adoption of the alphabet was more complex than it might at first sem. The Phoenician version circulated very widely and, with several consonants that were surplus to requirement in other languages switched to denote vowels in the early 8th century, an exceptionally speech-like variant emerged to write Greek and soon Italian languages… Likewise, although a crude correlation between alphabets and greater, or at least more socially widespread, literacy holds good, the range of early uses that survive across the Mediterranean is a bewildering mixture of sacred and royal proclamations, tomb curses, personal offerings and claims of ownership, poetry, exhortations to enjoy life and only rarely the regulatory preoccupations standard in the Bronze Age.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. pp. 518-9.
“One of the deepest contrasts between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age is the fact that in the former, religious structures in the east received less investment than palaces, and were at best modestly visible elsewhere, while in the latter they became not just holy places but visually and economically powerful elements in the Mediterranean’s land- and seascapes. Reasons for this change are not hard to come by. With the demise of centralized palaces and international diplomacy, even the rudimentary protection that these provided in the east for people and goods on the move evaporated, and nothing comparable had ever existed further west. At first, the resultant freedom balanced the drawbacks, but as trade and interaction over former cultural boundaries boomed in the 8th century, the desirability of universal regulating mechanisms grew. Moreover, with the partial exception of Tyre, the Mediterranean’s shallow-rooted, fissile elites were ultimately failing, for all their material glory, to secure the numinous mantle attached to earlier eastern rules – one of the factors that would gradually split off a secular political world from the transcendent realm, and equally widen personal access to the divine. The gods and their houses took on the roles of mediator and oath-binder, guarantor of qualities and quantities exchanged, secure haven for people and goods in transit, information bank and even lender of capital, reaping benefits in thanksgiving offerings and the dues from markets conducted under their protection. Shrines stuck out in emerging townscapes at this time, too, but with a few exceptions, those vital to Mediterranean connections tended to be less community specific, more inclusive, and situated in neutral areas, often stopovers or way-finding points along sea-routes. They sacralized harbours, headlands, islands and isthmuses, replacing or adding to the local spirits, gods and monsters with which the sea had presumably always heaved.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 530.
“Mediterranean towns were singly and collectively more fragile, vulnerable creations than is often realized – witness their mid-millennium abeyance in the Levant, one of their first strongholds, as well as their rise and demise during the Aegean’s Bronze Age. But the 7th and 6th centuries BC saw an immense surge in their numbers and distribution, even if most populations stayed in the four-figure range, with a few into five figures, and none attaining six figures until well after 500 BC. Most arose in situ, out of pre-existing settlements drawn together in advantageous nodal positions or ecological sweet spots. They coevolved with sail-driven shipping, and in this sense both interconnections and complex communities decisively pre-dated the florescence of towns themselves…. Towns in turn created their own gravity fields, some strong enough to warp or supercharge the webs of interaction around them….. Once this lifestyle became feasible on a Mediterranean-wide scale, the access it gave to everything from material goods to tutelary gods and security in an exposed world ensured its rampant popularity. These advantages more than countered the social cost of cooperation and a longer tramp out to the fields from which most town-dwellers still derived their livelihood.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. pp. 537-8.
“… long before its political history drew together, the Mediterranean was already an integrated, dynamic nexus of culturally convergent societies and economies, politically independent yet in every other sense interdependent, structured around a set of increasingly shared or easily convertible standards (citizens, coins, alphabets and Greek-style drinking vessels, to mention but a recent few), and all operating within an even older ecological whole.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 578.
“Looked at another way, the expansion of the middling, sub-elite sort, identified in Athens itself by archaeology as early as the 8th century and later in Solonic writing, was a widespread feature across the Mediterranean, in some regions from even earlier times; where coupled with weak elite authority it made power-sharing solutions more or less inevitable. In this sense the creation of several tens of thousands of adult male citizens throughout Athens and Attica (at best a fifth of the total population, and, of course, excluding all women, slaves and foreigners) simply represented one end of a spectrum that ran through large, inclusive oligarchies such as Sparta’s.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 583.
“Typically such polities [average Mediterranean city as reflected in Plato’s ideal city] combined a maritime outlet with surrounding lowland fields and a rugged hinterland for forest-derived products, orchards, pastoralism or mining, a cross section through Mediterranean ecological variation; and while a few of the locations that we have seen flourish over the 2nd and early 1st millennia BC were tiny islands with minimal adjacent farmland, most combined an advantageous maritime location with the arable wealth and ample labour that a decent, if rarely enormous, nearby territory provided. Although sacred kingship never seems to have been much of a starter in the Mediterranean, the first major polities to arise in the east were focused on a royal palace with a tentacular reach through society and economy. Such palace organizations survived for just over a thousand years in the Levant, where they first arose in touch with Mesopotamian models, but their duration became progressively shorter as they were taken up elsewhere, and they never extended beyond the Aegean. In their place less formally structured elite groups pressed forward, often with strong mercantile interests, and a more flexible, freelance approach to economic activity – both reflections of the fluid openness of Mediterranean conditions, and the growing difficulty in controlling flows and sustaining a fixed advantage within such an unruly maritime world.” Broodbank, Cyprian. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 603.
“I define microinventions as the small, incremental steps that improve, adapt, and streamline existing techniques already in use, reducing costs, improving form and function, increasing durability, and reducing energy and raw material requirements. Macroinventions, on the other hand, are those inventions in which a radical new idea, without clear precedent, emerges more or less ab nihilo.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 13.
“When classical civilization succeeded in creating a novel technique it was often unable or unwilling to take it to its logical conclusion and to extract anything approximating the maximum economic benefits from it. Many inventions that could have led to major economic changes were underdeveloped, forgotten, or lost. In some cases, breakthroughs that failed to spread had to be reinvented independently…. First, it may well be that many inventions did not work properly or could not be produced on a sufficient scale because of limitations in workmanship or materials. Second, many ancient civilizations were so thoroughly destroyed by savage marauders that the technologies they developed, embodied in implements or recorded in books, were simply lost. Third, as De Camp points out, the number of engineers and inventors was small and they often tried to keep their inventions secret, taking their ideas with them to their grave. As we have seen, the crank, the lateen sail, reaping machines, and ball bearings are all ideas that may have existed at some time but failed to affect the economy. This is not to say that the ancient economy was primitive, poor, or incapable of growth. But its growth derived from those aspects for which the Greeks and Romans are famous: organization, trade, order, and use of money, and law. This kind of growth can take an economy a long way, and it did. When the political foundation on which it is built becomes shaky, however, the prosperity based on Smithian [Adam; trade and division of labor] growth alone is rapidly lost.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 29; reference: De Camp, L. Sprague. 1960. The Ancient Engineers. NY: Ballantine Books
“The three elements of the new husbandry [agricultural practices that came to Europe by the closing of the Middle Ages] were all closely related: new crops, stall feeding of cattle, and the elimination of fallowing. The result was that farmers were able to maintain more and better-fed cattle, thus increasing the supply of animal products. Better-fed animals, produced more fertilizer, which helped to increase cereal yields. The new fodder crops, such as alfalfa, clover, artificial grasses, turnips, and mangel-wurzels, also turned out to be useful as alternating crops to cereals in new rotations. Some of these crops were nitrogen fixers and all of them broke disease and pest cycles. With the increased supplies of fertilizer and the need to hoe some of the new crops, such as turnips, fallowing the land became less necessary and the practice began gradually to disappear in some regions, increasing the effective supply of arable land.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 58.
“The large number of technical ‘how-to’ books published after 1450 provided a vehicle through which technology was diffused through Europe…. Thus, a technical literature emerged, written by engineers for engineers, and technical knowledge became increasingly communicable and thus cumulative….
“The meticulous description in books on engineering and mining may leave a misleading impression that the machines described by Agricola, Ramelli, and others were standard equipment in Renaissance Europe. In fact, the gap between the best-practice technique and the average-practice technique was large. For one thing, many of the complex machines described were simply too expensive: even if they would eventually pay for themselves, it was often difficult for a machine builder or engineer to cover the costs of construction or to borrow the necessary funds. In other cases, lack of local skilled labor and mechanics made it difficult to adapt a machine that worked well on one site to operate on another under different circumstances. Innovation remained a live force, but its effects on productivity came only slowly. It may well be that most of the increase in labor productivity in engineering industries and mining were the result of better tools, economies of scale, and a more efficient organization of labor.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 64-66.
“What is striking, however, is that during the Renaissance, the classical dichotomy between thinkers and makers had all but disappeared in Europe, whereas the modern distinction between scientist and engineer had not yet appeared. Many scientists made their own instruments and contributed to the solution of practical problems associated with their manufacture. Galileo built his own telescopes and supplemented his salary as a professor at the University of Padua by making and repairing instruments. In England, Robert Hooke, the brilliant and eccentric physicist and biologist, pioneered the use of balance springs for watches and invented the Hooke’s joint, an elegant device used for power transmission.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 73.
“From the viewpoint of the history of technology, Galileo is particularly important because his theory of mechanics and concept of force lies at the basis of all machines. Until Galileo, the idea that general laws governed all machines was not recognized; each machine was described as if it were unique…..
“In the writings of Galileo, the leading scientist of his time, economic efficiency is linked with science. In Motion and Mechanics, he wrote that the advantage of machines was to harness cheap sources of energy because ‘the fall of a river costs little or nothing.’” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 75.
“Between 1500 and 1750 important changes in the form of industrial organization occurred in Europe, and these changes are likely to have affected the rate of technological progress. The driving force in these changes was the de-urbanization of industry. Cities were unhealthy places, plagued by sieges, epidemics, fires, overcrowding, poor water supply and sewage, and consequently high mortality rates. During the Religious Wars, many cities were besieged and sacked. The poor quality of life and short life expectancy in cities raised urban wages relative to the countryside, since towns had to continue to attract migrants. Another cause behind manufacturing’s move to the countryside was the tight corporate structure of craft guilds, which restricted entry and imposed strict rules on the quality and price of output. It may well be the case that by the sixteenth-century town guilds had begun to stifle technological progress to protect their monopolistic position and vested interests. There are many documented cases of the authorities trying to suppress innovations in established industries, doubtlessly instigated by lobbies of vested interests.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 76-7.
“Medieval natural philosophy had pictured the universe primarily through biological metaphors. These organic images gradually yielded ground to a more mechanistic approach. Philosophers of the period increasingly adopted the view that technology was inherently virtuous and that knowledge of nature should be converted into control over nature for the purpose of increasing material production. Although such views were already implicit in medieval times, they are expressed with ever increasing clarity and vigor in the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries. Europeans were becoming conscious of the infinite possibilities that technology promised for human welfare, and realizing that by accepting change as a way of life, they could have access to a never-ending stream of free lunches.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 79-80.
“Spinning jennies, water frames, and mules were all tried in domestic industry, but soon the factory was found to be a more congenial location for the new spinning technology.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 98.
“Among the factors responsible for making the Industrial Revolution possible in the late eighteenth century rather than a century or two earlier must surely be the existence of a small but vital high-precision machine-tool making industry. In 1774, John Wilkinson patented a machine, originally designed to bore cast-iron cannon, in which the drill and material were independently manipulated. This technique greatly increased accuracy, and within two years he was hired by Boulton and Watt to finish cylinders and condensers. It is only a mild exaggeration to say that Wilkinson and his colleagues, by actually being able to manufacture the required parts as specified by the inventor, made the difference between Watt and Trevithick on the one hand and Leonardo Da Vinci on the other. Machine tools such as planing machines, milling machines, lathes, screw-cutting machines, and so on permitted the creation of precise geometric metal forms, essential to machinemaking and uniformity.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 103-4.
“The invention of ballooning by the Montgolfier brothers in France in 1783 is surely an epochal invention in terms of novelty and originality…. Montgolfier was aware of Henry Cavendish’s discovery in 1766 of hydrogen, a gas lighter than air. He believed that fire gave off a similar gas, and that when the gas was captured in a closed vessel, that vessel would be lighter than air and thus rise. The reasoning was thus partly fallacious. What made the Montgolfier balloon rise was not a gas lighter than air but air itself, which, heated, expanded and thus reduced its specific weight. Success was immediate…. Except for a few military applications, ballooning was, of course, of limited direct economic effect. But there can be little doubt that the consequences of the invention of ballooning were far-reaching. Few inventions were more powerful in accustoming people to the idea of technological progress and alerting them to the ability of human ingenuity and creativity to control the forces of nature and do things never done before.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 110-1.
“Even when all that was required was to combine previously known pieces of technical know-how into a new gadget that would actually work, the effort required by the inventor was often considerable. The ‘invention’ and ‘development’ stages of technological progress were not yet distinct.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 111.
“The factory system emerged when cottage industry, in which the firm size had been constrained by the size of the household, found it increasingly difficult to adopt new techniques as rapidly as the factories. Mass production was slow in evolving, and was still quite rare in 1870. In the last third of the century, however, these effects became more pronounced. To an ever-growing degree, learning by doing, large fixed costs in plant and equipment, positive spillover effect (externalities) among different producers, network technologies, and purely technical factors, such as the inherent scale economies in railroads, in the metallurgical and chemical industries, and in mass production employing interchangeable parts and continuous flow processes, all operated together to reduce average costs at the level of the industry as well as the firm.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 113-4.
“A special case of increasing returns coupled to external economies is the growing importance of technological systems and networks. Before 1850, technology consisted of more or less isolated chunks of knowledge in which sudden changes in production techniques could occur without dramatically affecting other industries or producers. Some exceptions to this rule should be noted, however. These exceptions occurred when the production technique consisted of a complex system in which individual components interacted. Under such circumstances, the components were subject to structural constraints that made dramatic developments more difficult to bring about. One example was open-field agriculture, in which different arable crops and livestock cultivation were all part of a system and were thus constrained in changing individual components by the need to fit in with the others. Another was the sailing ship, in which propelling, steering, navigation, defense, and maintenance all interacted to form a unit that was complex by the standards of the time. Because of the structural constraints associated with such systems, technologies in agriculture and shipping tended to develop gradually and slowly. After 1850, the complexity of technological systems increased. Examples of networks are found in the railroads, in the electricity, telegraph, telephone, and water supply systems, and in the need to supply spare parts and information to individuals…. … in such systems certain components may resist change in other parts of the system because compatibility with existing techniques had to be satisfied.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 114-5.
“The later nineteenth century is sometimes described as the age of steel and chemicals. It was that, but it was much more…. must be regarded as a technological avalanche.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 116.
“In 1847, the Italian Ascanio Sobrero discovered nitroglycerine, the most powerful explosive known at the time. Its instability caused numerous accidents, in one of which a Swedish manufacturer was killed. The victim’s brother, Alfred Nobel, grimly set upon the task of controlling nitroglycerine, and discovered in 1866 that upon being mixed with diatomaceous earth nitroglycerine retained its full blasting power, yet could be detonated only by using a detonating cap. Dynamite, as the new compound was called, was used in the construction of tunnels, roads, oilwells, and quarries. If ever there was a labor-saving invention, this was it.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 120.
“Because the physical and chemical processes in agriculture are far more complex than in manufacturing, better theoretical knowledge was required, and serendipity eventually ran into diminishing returns.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 121.
“The telegraph, like the railroads, was a typical nineteenth-century invention in that it was a combination of separate technological inventions that had to be molded together. Just as the strength of a chain can never be greater than that of its weakest link, the efficiency and reliability of a system can never be greater than that of its weakest component. Long-distance telegraph required many subsequent inventions and improvements, which took decades to complete. Submarine cables were found to be a difficult technology to master. Signals were often weak and slow, and messages distorted. Worse, cables were subject at first to intolerable wear and tear….
“The telegraph had an enormous impact on nineteenth-century society–possibly as great as that of the railroads. Its military and political value was vast, as was its effect in coordinating international financial and commodity markets. Unlike the railroad, it had no close substitutes, the closest being homing pigeons and semaphore….. Moreover, because telegraph messages often had to cross international borders, they required something that few technological innovations had required before: international cooperation. Bilateral agreements and treaties were signed in the 1850s and early 1860s, and the International Telegraph Union was established in 1865. Clearly, technology can, under the right circumstances, create the institutional environment it needs.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 123-4.
“Harnessing electricity as a prime means of transmitting and using energy was technically even more difficult than the development of the telegraph. Before electricity could be made to work, an efficient way had to be devised to generate electrical power using other sources of energy; devices to transform electricity back into kinetic power, light, or heat at the receiving end had to be created; and a way of transmitting current over large distances had to be developed.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 124.
“The railroad was not a proper ‘invention’ because it was in essence nothing but a combination of high-pressure engines with iron rails…. It is clear, however, that the meteoric growth of railroads between 1825 and 1850 would not have occurred without subsequent refinements, such as horizontal placement of the engine and improved axles, brakes, springs, couplings, roadbed grading, tunnels, communications, and so on.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 126, 128.
“Steamships displaced sailing vessels on short routes, but sailing ships continued to dominate the long-distance voyages until the end of the nineteenth century. Harley has shown that this was the result of differences in costs reflecting the nature of the technology. The completion of canals connecting major oceans and the growing fuel efficiency that came with better marine steam engines brought about the demise of the sailing ship in the twentieth century.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 129; reference: Harley, C. Knick. 1971. “The Shfit from Sailing Ships to Steamships, 1850-1890: A Study in Technological Change and its Diffusion.” pp. 215-223. In: Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain After 1840. McCloskey, Donald (Ed). London: Methuen.
“The case of the bicycle illustrates that neither purely technical factors nor purely economic factors, nor even a combination of the two, can fully account for technological change. The bicycle was a novelty in the deepest sense of the word; it did not replace an existing technique with a similar, more efficient one. The people who adopted the bicycle in the 1890s had previously walked or used public transportation. The optimal design of the bicycle was difficult because the attributes of the bicycle spanned a number of dimensions: speed, comfort, safety, elegance, and price were all considered and had to be traded off against each other. Long experimentation was necessary before the best type emerged. In cases of a completely new product, learning-by-doing on the part of the consumer is as important as learning-by-doing on the part of the producers. The bicycle became a means of mass transportation with incalculable effects on urban residential patterns.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 130.
“A working model of a gas engine was first constructed by the Belgian Jean-Etienne Lenoir in 1859 and perfected in 1876, when a German traveling salesman, Nicolaus August Otto, built a gas engine using the four-stroke principle. Otto worked on the problem from 1860 on, after he read about Lenoir’s machine in a newspaper. He was an inspired amateur without formal technical training. The problem was eventually solved with the four-stroke engine, but Otto initially saw this as a makeshift solution to the problem of achieving high enough compression. Only later was Otto’s four-stroke engine, which is still the heart of the automobile engine, acclaimed as a brilliant breakthrough.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 131.
“The effect of the automobile and the bicycle on technology was similar to that of the mechanical clock five centuries earlier: mechanics involved in making and repairing the devices acquired the skills and the ideas to extend the principles involved to other areas.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 133.
“By 1900, the turbine had become a serious rival to regular steam engines. Parsons’ engineering genius was heavily indebted to his scientific background, and his example should warn us against facile generalizations about scientific backwardness causing the decline of British technology in this period. If science owed much to the steam engine in the first half of the nineteenth century, it repaid its debt with interest in the second half.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 134.
“The railroad, steamship, bicycle, and automobile all helped make transport cheaper, faster, and more reliable…. But the effects of cheap transportation are profound and subtle once we recognize their positive feedback into technology. With improved mobility, technology itself traveled easier: the minds of emigrants, machinery sold to distant countries, and technical books and journals all embodied the technological information carried from country to country. More mobility also meant more international and interregional competition. Societies that had remained impervious to technological change, from Japan to Turkey, felt left behind and threatened as distance protected them less and less.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 134-5.
“Moreover, what was regarded in the 1850s as the American System was not exactly interchangeability, but the application of high-quality, specialized machine tools to a sequence of operations, particularly in woodworking, as well as higher operating speeds and sequential movements of materials. As Ferguson has pointed out, mechanized mass production and interchangeable parts were not identical, and the former did not imply the latter….
“At first, goods made with interchangeable parts were more expensive and were adopted mostly by government armories, which considered quality more important than price. Only after the Civil War did U.S. manufacturing gradually adopt mass production methods, followed by Europe. First in firearms, then in clocks, pumps, locks, mechanical reapers, typewriters, sewing machines, and eventually engines and bicycles, interchangeable parts technology proved superior and replaced the skilled artisan working with chisel and file.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 136, 137; reference: Ferguson, Eugene. 1981. “History and Historiography.” In: Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures. Mayr, Otto & R. Post (ed.) pp. 1-23. Smithsonian Institution.
“Of related importance was the development of continuous flow production, in which workers remained stationary while the tasks were moved to them…. Henry Ford’s automobile assembly plant combined the concept of interchangeable parts with that of continuous-flow processes, and it allowed him to mass-produce a complex product and yet keep the price low enough so that it could be sold as a people’s vehicle. Giedion points out that Ford’s great success was rooted in the fact that, unlike Oliver Evans, he came at the end of a long development of interchangeability and continuous-flow processes. Success depends not only on the ingenuity and energy of the inventor, but also on the willingness of contemporaries to accept the novelty.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 137-8; reference: Giedion, Siegfried. 1948. Mechanization Takes Command. NY: WW Norton.
“Much work in agriculture, such as weeding, picking and milking, was carried out by movements of the human fingers, as opposed to the sweeping or beating motions of the human arm. We have already seen how hard it was to substitute technology for human fingers in the spinning of yarn; much of agriculture was subject to the same kind of difficulties.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 139.
“The idea of preserving food by cooking followed by vacuum sealing was hit upon by Nicolas Appert in 1795. Appert originally used glassware to store preserved foods, but in 1812 an Englishman named Peter Durand suggested using tin-plated cans, which were soon found to be superior…. Canning, too, was a good example of technology leading science, because only after Louis Pasteur’s path-breaking discoveries was it understood why canning worked,….” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 140.
“Wireless telegraphy is one of the best examples of the new order of things, in which science led technology rather than the other way around. The principle of telegraphy, as yet unsuspected, was implicit in the theory of electromagnetic waves proposed on purely theoretical grounds by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. The electromagnetic waves suggested by Maxwell were finally demonstrated to exist by a set of brilliant experiments conducted by Heinrich Hertz in 1888. The Englishman Oliver Lodge and the Italian Guglielmo Marconi combined the theories of these ivory tower theorists into wireless telegraphy in the mid-1890s,…” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 144.
“The trend toward a more ‘scientific’ approach to technology continued, and many developments would not have been possible without the advances in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology that occurred after 1870. Three hundred years after Francis Bacon, his dream of advancing technology and material welfare by constantly increasing their scientific basis has become reality. Yet the nonscientific taproots of invention–serendipity, luck, and inspiration–have not disappeared, and probably never will.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 146.
“Yet technological progress is hardly ever Pareto superior, that is, an improvement for everyone affected: there are losers in the process, and while the gainers could compensate them, it is only rarely that they do. The stronger the aversion to the disruption of the existing economic order, the less likely it is that an economy would provide a climate favorable to technological progress.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 153.
“… the greatest invention of the nineteenth century, the cliche goes, was how to invent. Theory, careful measurement, and accurate instruments were science’s gift to technology, and the importance of serendipity has declined.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 154.
“Technological conservatism produces an economic inertia that seems an apt description of the history of most societies that ever existed.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 154-5.
“Moreover, even in cases of success the benefits of invention were limited in an age before mass production. Careers like those of nineteenth- and twentieth-century inventors–such as George Westinghouse, Charles Hall, or Edwin Land, who turned brilliant inventions into personal fortunes by building corporate empires based on mass production–were simply not available to medieval and early modern inventors.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 158.
“Engineers and mechanics such as Smeaton, Watt, Trevithick, and Stephenson learned from scientists a rational faith in the orderliness of natural phenomena and physical processes; an appreciation of the importance of accuracy in measurement and controls in experiment; the logical difference between cause and correlation; and a respect for quantification and mathematics. In many cases the new knowledge developed by scientists did filter down, and in subtle ways affected the questions asked and the solutions sought…. It was certainly the case that before 1800 there was not much in the physical sciences that would be of direct use to these engineers, but scientific method and individual insights proved both an inspiration and a guide leading to technological breakthroughs.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 168.
“The more wealth is measured by the consumption of positional goods [social prestige and political power, measured strictly relative to others’ consumption] relative to material goods, the less attractive technological change will look and the lower the prestige that will be associated with economic production.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 174.
“Only when strong governments realized that technological backwardness itself constituted a threat to the regime, as in the cases of Peter the Great’s Russia, post-1867 Japan, and, to a lesser extent, Napoleon’s France, did they decide to intervene directly to encourage technological change.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 181.
“Mumford’s description of war as an ‘agent of mechanization’ notwithstanding, its technological benefits before 1914 were modest….
“The idea that war could have technological spin-offs and thus be in some sense beneficial to the economy is a curiously Eurocentric notion. For the rest of the world, war was an unmitigated scourge….
“The historical correlation between advances in the production of guns and that of butter does not prove that more or better guns ‘caused’ more butter or the other way around; it could just as well be consistent with an overall increase in capacity that allowed society to have more of both. After all, that is precisely what technological progress is all about.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 186, 187.
“The [Roman] empire biased the direction of technological change toward the public sector, thus encouraging trade and through it Smithian growth, as well as public sector technologies such as hydraulic engineering and roadbuilding, but at the expense of technological progress in the private sector.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 198.
“The struggle for survival [among political entities in Europe as compared to stable regimes in the East such as China] guaranteed that in the long run rulers could not afford to be hostile to changes that increased the economic power of their realm because of the real danger that an innovation or innovator would emigrate to benefit a rival. Technological improvements made abroad were pursued and imitated, foreign artisans were tempted and bribed to immigrate. Regimes that did not follow this course, such as Spain and the Ottoman Empire, fell behind and lost their economic and political power.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 206.
“Where political fragmentation may have been decisive is in allowing Europe to escape the trap of what I shall call Cardwell’s Law. Cardwell has pointed out that ‘no nation has been (technologically) very creative for more than an historically short period.’ As stated, Cardwell’s Law is no more than an empirical regularity, and a crude one at that. The definition of a ‘nation, let alone that of a ‘short’ period, is ambiguous. What is more, Cardwell gives us no inkling as to the possible economic and social reasons his law might be true.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 207; reference: Cardwell, D.S.L. 1972. Turning Points in Western Technology. NY: Neale Watson Science History Publication. p. 210.
“The belief in a personal God looking with approval upon the relentless exploitation of material resources was lacking in China. Instead, Chinese (primarily Taoist) natural philosophy sought to find an equilibrium between humanity and the physical environment. Neither the submission of humans to overwhelming forces of nature, nor their unquestioned dominance over nature in the anthropocentric view held by Western civilization was prevalent in China. Rather, a steady state in which a cooperative, harmonious relationship between nature and humanity prevails was held to be ideal.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 228.
“In other words, by the middle of the eighteenth century, Britain had at its disposal a large number of technicians and craftsmen who could carry out the mundane but indispensable construction details of the ‘new contrivances.’ These skills rested on an informal and antiquated system of apprenticeship and on-the-job training; they had little to do with schooling. If England led the rest of the world in the Industrial Revolution, it was despite, not because of her formal education system….
“Britain had been fortunate. In the late seventeenth century it had taken the lead in clock- and watchmaking…. Another industry that produced skilled artisans was the shipping sector, with its demand for accurate and well-made instruments… A third industry that helped to prepare the skills and dexterity necessary for the Industrial Revolution was mining…. In Britain, the number of engineers and mechanics was sufficiently large to allow interaction with each other, through lecturing, spying, copying, and improving…. Interaction among engineers, scientists, and businessmen created a total that was larger than the sum of its individual components. Technological change and the creation of new information are processes that do not obey the laws of arithmetic.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 240, 241, 242.
“As it happened, most of the devices invented between 1750 and 1830 tended to be a type in which mechanically talented amateurs could excel. In many cases British inventors appear simply to have been lucky, although, as Pasteur once remarked, Fortune favors the prepared mind. The cotton, iron, and machine tool industries during the Industrial Revolution lent themselves to technological advances that did not require much scientific understanding of the physical processes involved. When, after 1850, deeper scientific analysis was needed, German and French inventors gradually took the lead, and the breakthroughs in chemistry and material science tended to be more concentrated on the Continent.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 244.
“Market integration has a more profound effect on the diffusion of new techniques. In a world of high production costs, inefficient and conservative producers are insulated from their more innovative competitors. A world of high transport costs is described by an economic model of monopolistic competition. One of the characteristics of such a model is that innovator and laggard can coexist side by side. In the region served by the innovator, lower production costs due to technological change meant a combination of higher profits for producers and lower prices for consumers. Nothing could force the laggards to follow suit, however, and the ‘survival of the cheapest’ model so beloved by economists is short-circuited….. In Britain, to a far greater extent than on the Continent, good transportation allowed competition to work, and the new technologies superseded the old sooner and faster than elsewhere.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 245-6.
“The importance of patenting differed from industry to industry. Overall, patents were more likely to be taken out in mechanical than in chemical inventions, and more in competitive than in concentrated industries….
“The patent system may have been a relatively minor factor because of the ‘free lunch’ property of technological progress, that is, because the social benefits of invention often dwarf the development costs. Consequently, it is not necessary for the inventor to capture all, or even most, of the social surplus created by his or her creation; a small fraction may suffice to make the effort worthwhile.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 251.
“The difference between the Industrial Revolution and previous clusters of technological change was in the extent to which innovations influenced each other. First, there was an imitation effect: James Watt and Richard Arkwright became famous and wealthy men whom many tried to emulate. Invention and improvement became, in some circles at least, respectable. Second, there was a complementarity effect: the successful solution of one problem almost invariably suggested the next step, and so chains of inspiration were created…. Neither of these ‘one-thing-leads-to-another’ theories constitutes an explanation of the Industrial Revolution. Both merely explain its time pattern, which is that when agents strongly affect each other, it is likely that success will appear in clusters.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 255.
“Insofar as the groups that benefit from the new technology coincide with the groups that pay the price (which is lower than the benefit), resistance to technological progress will be weak. The greater the divergence between these two groups, the greater the incentive for the losing groups to try to slow down progress.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 261.
“A ‘life cycle’ of a technologically advanced society would thus consist of three stages. First is the youthful stage, in which the new technology manages to break through, supplanting the previous technology by means of its greater efficiency. This stage corresponds with the period between 1760 and 1830 in Britain. The next stage is one of maturity, in which the new technology is in control, but creative destruction by new techniques takes an ever-increasing toll, leading to a growing incentive by those currently in control to protect themselves. In the third stage, the by-now old technology develops social or political mechanisms with which to protect itself against innovation. If it is successful, technological creativity comes to an end. If it fails, the cycle begins anew.
“Does such a schematic life-cycle theory of technological creativity have any value? Its predictive powers are very limited: without more information we cannot tell how long creativity will last, how it will end, or whether it will recur.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 261-2.
“In examining technological progress, the question arises whether we should consider creativity or stagnation the normal condition…. This question cannot be answered based on historical evidence alone. Clearly, over the entire human historical record, periods of technological change have been exceptional. The present and the future may be radically different, however, as a result of the Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, Cardwell’s Law seems too pervasive a phenomenon to take anything for granted.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 269.
“The approach I adopt here is that techniques–in the narrow sense of the word, namely, the knowledge of how to produce a good or service in a specific way–are analogues of species and that changes in them have an evolutionary character. The idea or conceptualization of how to produce a commodity may be thought of as the genotype, whereas the actual technique utilized by the firm in producing the commodity may be thought of as the phenotype of the member of a species…. Invention, the emergence of a new technique, is thus equivalent to speciation, the emergence of a new species.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 275, 276.
“My basic premise is that technology is epistemological in nature. It is not something that somehow ‘exists’ outside people’s brains. Like science, culture, and art, technology is something we know, and technological change should be regarded properly as a set of changes in our knowledge.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 276.
“Traits such as lower production costs, higher durability, and safer production processes are examples of well-defined adaptive features.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 277.
“To repeat: in the paradigm I am proposing it is neither the firm nor societies nor the people that are the analogue to species, but the technique itself.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 277.
“What modern biologists have called ‘the red queen hypothesis’–the need of species to evolve in order to keep up with others seems an apt description of the waves of innovation that Schumpeter and others have described. Species that fail to conform become extinct. Evolution, like technological progress, is creative destruction.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 282-3.
“The distinction between micro- and macroinventions matters because they appear to be governed by different laws. Microinventions generally result from an intentional search for improvements, and are understandable–if not predictable–by economic forces. They are guided, at least to some extent, by the laws of supply and demand and by the intensity of search and the resources committed to them, and thus by the signals emitted by the price mechanism. Furthermore, insofar as microinventions are the by-products of experience through learning by doing or learning by using they are correlated with output or investment. Macroinventions are more difficult to understand, and seem to be governed by individual genius and luck as much as by economic forces.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 295.
“Some technological systems, such as ships, mines, and farms, are complex and interrelated. Dramatic sudden changes are not impossible in such systems, but are less likely because of the need to preserve compatibility with other components….
“Here, then, is the most fundamental complementarity of the economic history of technological change. Without new big ideas, the drift of cumulative small inventions will start to run into diminishing returns. When exactly this will occur depends on the technique in question, but it seems clear that additional improvements in the sailing ship were becoming more difficult by the 1870s, that best-practice grain yields were approximating some kind of ceiling by the mid-nineteenth century, and that crucible steel had been taken a long way by 1856. Macroinventions such as the screw propeller, chemical fertilizers, and the Bessemer process revitalized a movement that was approaching something close to a technological ceiling.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 296, 297.
“…macroinventions rarely occurred alone, but rather tended to appear in clusters. In other words, the occurrence and timing of macroinventions is partly explained by other macroinventions.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 297.
“As Schumpeter stressed, the enemies of technological progress were not the lack of useful new ideas, but social forces that for one reason or another tried to preserve the status quo. These forces represented different interests and came in a variety of forms: environmental lobbies, labor unions, clayfooted giant corporations, professional associations, reactionary or incompetent bureaucracies….” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. pp. 301-2.
“From its modest beginnings in the monasteries and rain-soaked fields and forests of western Europe, Western technological creativity rested on two foundations: a materialistic pragmatism based on the belief that the manipulation of nature in the service of economic welfare was acceptable, indeed, commendable behavior, and the continuous competition between political units for political and economic hegemony.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 302.
“Social prestige, political influence, and personal services supplied by other human beings cannot be increased readily by technology. Hirsch refers to these goods as ‘positional’ goods. Insofar as positional goods are based on a ranking of individuals, their supply is fixed, and their allocation constitutes the quintessential zero-sum game.” Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford UP. p. 303: reference: Hirsch, Fred. 1976. Social Limits to Growth. Harvard UP.
“Plant geographers and ethnobotanists have long recognized that New Guinea and the adjacent Bismarcks are the probable place of origin for many tropical crops, because the wild ancestors of these plants are restricted in their natural distributions to this region. Among these domesticates are the Australimusa bananas, sugarcane, a tuber crop, the ti plant, probably breadfruit, a number of fruit and nut-bearing trees (including the Canarium almond, Tahitian chestnut), as well as several aroids, notably taro, ‘elephant-ear’ taro, and giant swamp taro.” Kirch, Patrick. 2017. On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact: Revised and Expanded Edition. University of California Press. pp. 67-8.
“Both adzes and fishhooks are among the objects manufactured from shell; these are two of the most fundamental implements in the classic oceanic tool kit: the adz for forest clearance and woodworking of all kinds, the fishhook for exploitation of sea resources beyond what can be simply speared or gathered in the inshore shallows.” Kirch, Patrick. 2017. On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact: Revised and Expanded Edition. University of California Press. pp. 71-2.
“The Lapita expansion out of Near Oceania [past the Solomon islands ~1100 to 900 BCE] into Remote Oceania–as far south as New Caledonia and as far east as Tonga and Samoa–was accomplished in less than three centuries, and probably closer to two hundred years. To put the Lapita dispersal in directly human terms, these small groups of seafarers explored an ocean realm stretching across 4,500 kilometers during the course of just ten to fifteen successive human generations….
“These were not merely voyages of discovery by itinerant sailors who came for a brief period and then returned to a homeland in the western Pacific. Quite the contrary, these were purposeful voyages of discovery and colonization. The earliest Lapita sites are permanent habitations, not temporary camps. The Lapita expansion involves successive groups of settlers, each in its turn founding a new colony on a previously uninhabited island.” Kirch, Patrick. 2017. On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact: Revised and Expanded Edition. University of California Press. p. 89.
“Socially, we must ask, what motives impelled these people to keep exploring southward and eastward into the unknown waters of the Pacific? It could not have been the sometimes-cited ‘population pressure’ of overcrowded islands, for many of the newly discovered lands were vast and uninhabited; it would take centuries before large islands such as Efate or Viti Levu were densely populated….
“Lapita social structure may have played a key role in driving the engine of exploration and colonization. Linguistic reconstructions of Proto Oceanic words for kinship, social statuses, and the like reveal that these peoples put great emphasis on birth order. Older and younger siblings were ranked, and inheritance of house sites, garden lands, and other kinds of property, as well as such intangibles as ritual privileges and esoteric knowledge, passed from parents to firstborn offspring. As I have written elsewhere, ‘In such societies, junior siblings frequently adopt a strategy of seeking new lands to settle where they can found their own ‘house and lineage, assuring their own offspring access to quality resources’. Rivalries between older and younger brothers are a frequent theme in the oral traditions of Polynesians.” Kirch, Patrick. 2017. On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact: Revised and Expanded Edition. University of California Press. p. 90.
“Wherever they sailed in Remote Oceania, Lapita groups came fully equipped to establish permanent settlements, carrying with them domestic animals and planting stocks of tuber, fruit, and tree crops, as well as a sophisticated knowledge of horticulture and plant manipulation…. The transported landscapes of the Lapita peoples were a fundamental part of what made them–and in due time their descendants–able to settle virtually every speck of habitable land in the Pacific Ocean….
“The roster of crop plants cultivated by Lapita gardeners–and successfully transported by them from island to island–runs to twenty-eight species….
“The Oceanic peoples are ethnographically characterized as keeping a triumvirate of chickens, dogs, and pigs.” Kirch, Patrick. 2017. On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact: Revised and Expanded Edition. University of California Press. pp. 100, 101.
“There is no doubt that the Western Polynesian archipelagoes of Tonga and Samoa, along with smaller islands such as Futuna and ‘Uvea, were settled early in the first millennium B.C. by Lapita voyagers…. A long period of gradual cultural change and adaptation to truly ‘oceanic’ environmental conditions ensued, with the emergence of a distinctive Ancestral Polynesian culture and Proto Polynesian language by the close of the first millennium B.C….
“The development of the double-hulled sailing canoe and enhanced navigational skills during the Ancestral Polynesian period led to the capacity to undertake exploratory voyages of long duration, transporting dozens of people and their cargo. By around A.D. 900-1000 these voyaging skills permitted an expansion out of the Western Polynesian homeland region into the central archipelagoes of Eastern Polynesia.” Kirch, Patrick. 2017. On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact: Revised and Expanded Edition. University of California Press. pp. 211, 212.
“In conditions of relatively low population density and relatively egalitarian social organization, conflict can be resolved by splitting the local group. This ease of fissioning is also thought to act as a check on the aspirations of ambitious leaders. The social dynamics of early village societies are therefore thought to have been fundamentally structured by fission or by the possibility of fission.” Bandy, Matthew. 2004. “Fissioning, Scalar Stress, and Social Evolution in Early Village Societies.” American Anthropologist. 106(2):322-333. p. 322.
“This association of successful leaders with larger than usual population concentrations is repeated in the ethnographic record of many parts of the world….
“The influence of these leaders, it should be noted, is not always primarily political in nature. Jane Atkinson provides a protracted discussion of shamanism and leadership among the Wana of inland Sulawesi. In her account, popular or renowned shamans can serve as nuclei for large population concentrations in this highly mobile society:….” Bandy, Matthew. 2004. “Fissioning, Scalar Stress, and Social Evolution in Early Village Societies.” American Anthropologist. 106(2):322-333. p. 323; reference: Atkinson, Jane. 1989. The Art and Politics of Wana Shamanship. University of California Press.
“Factors discouraging fissioning include warfare (a high level of external conflict), high levels of investment in landscape (nonportable) capital, and social circumscription [being able to move without running into already occupied territory].” Bandy, Matthew. 2004. “Fissioning, Scalar Stress, and Social Evolution in Early Village Societies.” American Anthropologist. 106(2):322-333. p. 324.
“All other things being equal, then, a regional system of villages with a steadily increasing population can be expected to demonstrate an initially high rate of fissioning followed by a cessation of fissioning and the appearance of the materialized manifestations of higher-level integrative practices. This straightforward evolutionary hypothesis is what I intend to test in the present analysis. In the argument to follow, I employ archaeological settlement data to discuss the process of village fissioning in the Early Formative period [1500-800 BCE] of Bolivia’s southern Titicaca Basin, and its cessation in the following Middle Formative period [800 – 250 BCE].” Bandy, Matthew. 2004. “Fissioning, Scalar Stress, and Social Evolution in Early Village Societies.” American Anthropologist. 106(2):322-333. p. 324.
“The fact that this period of steady growth without fissioning began immediately following the crystallization of a regional religious tradition is yet another line of evidence indicating that public ceremonialism and ceremonial architecture in particular have a social integrative effect.” Bandy, Matthew. 2004. “Fissioning, Scalar Stress, and Social Evolution in Early Village Societies.” American Anthropologist. 106(2):322-333. p. 331.
“The simple social evolutionary model with which I began this article accurately describes the course of the Early and Middle Formative sequence from the southern Titicaca Basin.” Bandy, Matthew. 2004. “Fissioning, Scalar Stress, and Social Evolution in Early Village Societies.” American Anthropologist. 106(2):322-333. p. 331.
“At the time of Columbus, fully a quarter of the world remained hunter-gatherer, even in places that are today leading agricultural producers, such as California, Argentina, and Australia, where one might logically expect agriculture to have evolved, or into which it should easily have spread.” Bettinger, Robert, L. Barton & C. Morgan. 2010. “The Origins of Food Production in North China: A Different Kind of Agricultural Revolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 19:9-21. p. 10.
“In contrast, delayed-return hunter-gatherers accumulate and store some resources for future use and thus place limits on their immediate consumption, often by privatization, making them the property of those who obtained them. Here the attitude is that resources belong exclusively to those who obtain them and society should punish those who take resources garnered by others without permission.” Bettinger, Robert, L. Barton & C. Morgan. 2010. “The Origins of Food Production in North China: A Different Kind of Agricultural Revolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 19:9-21. p. 12.
“If resources must be split with free-loaders, harvesters of low-return resources may well end up expending more energy than they obtain. For this reason, immediate-return hunter-gatherers generally restrict themselves to resources having returns high enough to offset free loader overhead, using just enough low-return resources to squeeze by and punishing those who hoard them. This keeps population size and density low. By contrast, because they are protected from free-loaders, delayed-return hunter-gatherers frequently target low-return resources, especially plants that are easily stored. This sustains larger, denser, and more stable populations while reducing the payoffs to individuals who continue to specialize in high-return resources, use of which can be sustained only by sharing.
“If follows that a shift away from a convention that treats resources as public property to one that treats them as private property might spark a previously frustrated trajectory of intensification and growth, leading to intensive hunting and gathering, low-level food production, and eventually intensive agriculture…. In this sense, the conventions of resource distribution and use rights generate what are termed frequency-dependent payoff structures that strongly favor sticking to an existing set of rules even if they are suboptimal….
“Resource use rights differ mainly in that, as we have seen, when populations are large privatization produces higher fitness payoffs than does generalized sharing. Still, frequency dependence will always make achieving these higher payoffs a group-level problem of coordination. The pattern of resource hoarding (storage) and privatization needed for agriculture to be viable cannot evolve piecemeal, one forager at a time, within a system where sharing is the norm, any more than a convention of driving on the left can evolve piecemeal, one driver at a time, within a system where driving on the right is the norm.” Bettinger, Robert, L. Barton & C. Morgan. 2010. “The Origins of Food Production in North China: A Different Kind of Agricultural Revolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 19:9-21. p. 12.
“Food production requires this rule shift [from sharing to private storage] which protects the labor investment of those who target and store more costly resources and punishes those who target only high-quality resources, do not store, and insist that others share. Variation in group size provides perhaps the greatest latitude for achieving this shift. Large groups impede social change because many individuals must simultaneously switch conventions;….” Bettinger, Robert, L. Barton & C. Morgan. 2010. “The Origins of Food Production in North China: A Different Kind of Agricultural Revolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 19:9-21. p. 13.
“Conversely, and again, all else being equal, the quality of the archeological record will be poor, with fewer sites having sparser deposits, where population is small, scattered, and mobile. These conditions promote restructuring of frequency-dependent social coordinations. This is broadly in accord with what we know about the pace of agricultural intensification and the quality of the archeological record in different centers of early agriculture around the world. Intensification and change are slow, taking thousands of years in the Near East and Mesoamerica, where the archeological record is good, with many sites and solid sequences. In contrast, agricultural intensification appears to have taken only a third of the time, just over 1,000 years from start to finish, in the early millet center of North China, where the archeological record is sketchy, with few sites and major cultural discontinuities….
“Dadiwan shows that what makes early millet farming different, at least in the western Loess Plateau, is a trajectory of intensification that did not unfold in situ but over space as the result of early Holocene population budding and migration south out of the main distribution of the North China Microlithic…. Groups along its more mesic southern margin, however, encountered both novel adaptive challenges and increasing opportunities for plant use, and were fragmented into small, thinly spread social units predisposed to the kind of social innovations needed to encourage costly experiments with plant use, storage, and tending.” Bettinger, Robert, L. Barton & C. Morgan. 2010. “The Origins of Food Production in North China: A Different Kind of Agricultural Revolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 19:9-21. p. 13.
“Menzel described the development of spontaneous cooperative tool-use by chimpanzees when sticks and poles were used as ladders. Beck carried out an experiment in which a pair of hamadryas baboons had to develop cooperative tool-use: the female learned to give the tool to the male who used it to get the food. The results show that each animal learned something different to reach a common goal.” Chalmeau, Raphael. 1994. “Do Chimpanzees Cooperate in a Learning Task?” Primates. 35(3):385-392. p. 385; references: Menzel, E.W. 1972. “Spontaneous invention of ladders in a group of young chimpanzees.” Folia Primatol. 17:87-106; Beck, B.B. 1973. “Cooperative tool use by captive Hamadryas baboons.” Science. 182:594-7.
“In summary, this study demonstrates that chimpanzees are able to learn to act together even if social factors [aggression by dominant to take food items gained by cooperative acts] limit the occurrence of a possible co-operation.” Chalmeau, Raphael. 1994. “Do Chimpanzees Cooperate in a Learning Task?” Primates. 35(3):385-392. p. 391.
“But more importantly, we argue that the identification of feasting in the Natufian record relates to the expansion of public ritual as part of increased social complexity initially triggered by sedentization. These social processes likely increased the public nature and scale of mortuary ritual and associated feasts in the Natufian period, heightening the likelihood of finding feasting residues in the archaeological record. In addition, we argue that changes in disposal practices linked to increasingly public mortuary feasts also increased the chance that the remains of feasts would be recovered by archaeologists. As mortuary rituals became larger in scale, increasingly public and formalized, the material remains including the trash associated with these events (‘ceremonial trash’) became more precious and worth of special burial.
“Conflict management, competition among individuals, and the need for social mechanisms to smooth over real or perceived emergent social inequalities are expected outcomes of closer daily contact between individuals brought on by increased sedentism. Community integrative mechanisms such as feasting and other forms of public ritual serve to mitigate scalar stress by bringing people together to engage in events based on shared ideologies, thus increasing solidarity.” Munro, Natalie & L. Grosman. 2010. “Early evidence (ca. 12,000 B.P.) for feasting at a burial cave in Israel.” PNAS. 107(35):15362-66. p. 15365.
“In psychology, the ability to model the knowledge and beliefs of others, as distinct from one’s own, is called ‘theory of mind.’” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 8.
“Chimpanzees cannot normally succeed in a task in which the rule is: whichever of two piles of food you point to, your companion gets to eat; you are left with the other. Trial after trial, a chimpanzee will point to the largest pile, only to be frustrated by the outcome: they simply cannot inhibit their natural attraction to the desired goal. But if Arabic numbers are substituted, they immediately solve the problem and switch to the lower number. If the test reverts to real entities, they again fail.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 11.
“I’ve watched chimpanzees enter a leopard’s birthing cave and emerge with the baby leopard, killing it while the mother leopard roared ineffectually but did not emerge to fight: these are not animals that run away from much.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 19.
“Are there cultural traditions in the gestures of great apes?… That has been examined in chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans: all studies concur in finding the variation between and within groups to be the same. We can therefore be sure that most ape gestures are not acquired culturally. Intriguingly, however, some of these studies report that just a few gestures do show a cultural pattern of group-specific usage: 6 out of 102 gorilla gesture types; 2 out of 20 bonobo gesture types; and at least 1 out of 29 orangutan gesture types.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 26.
“We concluded that almost all the gestures of the gorilla were a result of the species’ innate potential to produce them. As with cultural learning, ritualization is a possible means of acquisition, but it is the exception not the rule….
“Like that of the gorilla, the chimpanzee repertoire is a species-typical one, based on innate potential but used in a highly intentional and flexible way–and like the gorilla’s repertoire, it is very large.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 29.
“Apes give gestures deliberately and voluntarily, in order to influence particular target audiences, whose direction of attention they clearly appreciate and take account of in choosing which gesture to use. That shows greater insight into the process of communication than has been shown for any other non-human species…. Because of the large size of the repertoire, and the small number of semantic contrasts it encodes, ape gestures are redundant, with extensive overlaps in meaning.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 37.
“First [in social learning], by traveling with an expert, an ignorant individual is exposed to a different range of local environments…. Second, some (perhaps all) social animals show a tendency, called stimulus enhancement, to interact more with places and objects with which they see others come into contact. This automatically disposes the ignorant observer to interact with a more favorable range of objects and sites in the environment, again boosting effective learning…. Third, individuals may notice another individual carrying out an action that they recognize to be in their own repertoire, and in turn be more likely to carry out that action. This is called response facilitation, and in combination with exposure and stimulus enhancement it will mean that the ignorant animal is likely to try out the actions it has seen another do, in the place where they saw them used, applied to the sort of object the other was also interacting with. The result is going to look very like deliberate copying, and the word ‘imitation’ is often used; but remember that all these traits are proposed as mechanical, automatic tendencies.
“Stimulus enhancement and response facilitation are cumbersome jargon terms, but both can be understood very simply as a matter of priming brain records.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. pp. 70-1.
“Kat Koops and colleagues have shown that many intergroup differences are in fact driven by ecology, rather than physical barriers to the spread of knowledge. They review recent analyses of data on tool using from chimpanzees, orangutans, and capuchin monkeys and show that, in all cases, whether and how frequently individuals use tools depends on the opportunities that they have to encounter the resources for which tools are necessary and the raw materials for making tools….
“A very different understanding of ape culture results from this reappraisal. The differences between populations are now seen to be a result of differential opportunity, rather than obstacles to knowledge transfer.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. pp. 77-8; Koops, Kat, E. Visalberghi & C.P. van Schaik. 2014. “The ecology of primate material culture.” Biology Letters. 10(11): 20140508.
“There is very much better evidence for social learning, of traits that show inter-population differences, in both rodents and fish than in chimpanzees or orangutans. Local differences in rat and fish behavior have been firmly established by experiments to be a result of knowledge transfer by social learning; rats dive for mussels in some rivers but not others, reef fish prefer some coral heads for their mating displays but not others, and so on.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 79.
“Elephants use sticks to scratch awkward places on their body, Galapagos woodpecker finches pull off cactus spines and hold them in their short bills to probe deeply into tree-bark for insects, hermit crabs live permanently in mollusk shells, and octopus may temporarily hide under them; the list goes on and on. But in each of these cases, a single type of tool is used for a particular purpose: each species is a ‘one-trick pony’ when it comes to tool use. In many populations of chimpanzee, and one of orangutans, tool use goes well beyond the simple movements involved in those case, because an intricate series of actions is involved in selecting, constructing, and employing the tools. Consider chimpanzee termite-fishing. Fishing is not a response triggered by the perception of edible termites, the insects are hidden deep within termite mounds, which have no visible entrances. The ape must know that at a certain season it becomes possible to pick open a hole in certain places on the mound. Opening a hole is in fact only possible above what will later become the nocturnal emergence tunnel for the sexual forms of the termites, so the chimpanzee must also know how to recognize a sealed exit. Only when a suitably long, thin, and flexible plant stem is inserted slowly through this entrance can it be withdrawn with termites attached. And plants don’t just come that way; the stems have to be picked, stripped of leaves, and bitten to a standard length. Since the termite mound and suitable plant material may be separated by a considerable distance, tool preparation sometimes has to be done well in advance of arrival at the mound, and when it is not even in sight. One population of orangutans has shown similar abilities, probing for honey with a tool held in the mouth, and eating Neesia fruits. Neesia seeds are embedded in a mass of irritating hairs. When orangutans eat Neesia, they first make a small tool by biting off a twig and stripping it of bark, then use it to scrape out the irritating hairs from a ripe, part-open Neesia fruit; when the hairs are cleaned away, the same tool is used to dislodge the seeds to eat.
“Termite fishing and Neesia feeding share a characteristic that is just what we would expect from traditional transmission of technological information: intricate complexity of the behavior, because that’s where social learning is needed.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 80.
“Almost all orangutan populations lack regular tool use, but most show intricate, complex skills for dealing with plants, in particular to enable pith consumption from spiny palms and rattans. Gorillas do not make tools in the wild, but one population has been studied at the level of detail needed to detect skills of intricate complexity in plant processing. Several of their food-processing skills consist of highly structured, multi-stage sequences of bimanual action, hierarchically organized and flexibly adjusted to plants of highly specific local distribution. In terms of the number and dexterity of operations that need to be performed, gorilla plant-processing actually exceeds anything yet described in chimpanzees. Gorillas, like chimpanzees and orangutans, apparently sometimes rely for their survival on elaborate, deft, and intricate feeding skills that are highly unlikely ever to be discovered by a solitary individual.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 81.
“In theory, innovation is an alternative strategy to social learning, beneficial in quick-changing and unpredictable environments; in practice, the most innovative (and large-brained) species are often also those that rely the most on social learning.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 83.
“At present, there is positive evidence that chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys can show insight into another’s ignorance or knowledge; but the possibility that any non-human can compute another’s false beliefs has not been confirmed, despite several experiments designed to do so.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 89.
“When we plan to cooperate, it is critical to understand the contribution others can make to the joint activity, and this kind of understanding relies on mentalizing about other people’s knowledge, abilities, and likelihood of helping. Cooperation can also happen almost accidentally, without those levels of social understanding.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 89.
“In sum, there is some reason to think that there may be a common basis to: (1) the cognitive capacities that allow certain species to recognize a mirror reflection as being of themselves; (2) the capacity underlying strange reactions to conspecific death that suggest some understanding of what death involves; and (3) the capacity to feel sympathy and recognize empathically the problems faced by others.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 100.
“Most strikingly, Caro’s own work on cheetah and domestic cat prey-catching highlighted a number of characteristics that strongly suggest teaching. Like domestic cats, mother cheetahs bring back disabled prey for their young to ‘play’ with….
“Since then, experimental work on several species of very different kinds has discovered a few cases of teaching that meet every one of the operational criteria [of teaching].” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 101; reference: Caro, T.M. 1994. Cheetahs of the Serengeti Plains: Grouping in an Asocial Species. U of Chicago Press.
“Chimpanzees have shown that they understand the different role of the other in a two-role cooperative task, in contrast to monkeys who are able to learn either role but show no comprehension when the roles are suddenly reversed.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 105.
“Most remarkable of all, at Goualougo (Congo), the chimpanzees have been described to use sets of two different tools for no less than 11 different feeding tasks. To eat terrestrial termites, for instance, a Goualougo chimpanzee first uses a strong, smooth rod to probe deeply into the forest floor, forcing it down with considerable power, each time retracting the tool and sniffing the end until it can scent a pierced termite nest. Then, the rod is discarded, and a flexible, slender stem, whose end has first been frayed into a ‘brush’ by pulling over the teeth, is threaded into the hole created by the rod, then carefully retrieved. As with the more familiar mound-termite species, aggressive soldier insects attack the chimpanzee’s tool and can be pulled out to eat. Intriguingly, chimpanzees arriving at suitable sites for subterranean termite fishing usually come with tools ready prepared–but only of the second type, the brush-tipped flexible stem. The explanation is that the first sort, the strong wands, can be re-used many times and there are usually a few lying around, whereas the delicate brush-tipped probes need to be made anew each time.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 111.
“On current evidence, the laurels for complex organization of feeding sequences go to the mountain gorillas of the Virunga Volcanoes in Rwanda. The major diet items available to this population are nutritious and digestible, but all are physically defended or enclosed in some way–by spines, stings, hard casing, or tiny clinging hooks. Each of these challenges requires a very different technique to deal with it, and each technique involves several sequential stages. Throughout the several stages the two hands are used together, in different but synchronized roles. Sub-sequences can be repeated iteratively until some criterion is reached, whereupon the main sequence continues. Thus, the sub-sequences are treated as sub-routines. These characteristics show that the gorillas’ mental programs are organized hierarchically, not in the linear chains of actions that would be expected from associative learning. Nevertheless, juveniles attain adult levels of efficiency by the time they are weaned at 3-4 years old. Unlike the skilled tool use of chimpanzees and orangutans, which is employed only at certain times and much more by some individuals than others, the multi-stage hierarchical programs of mountain gorilla food preparation are used every day by every individual, because they are essential for consuming the major foods.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. pp. 112-3.
“Thus all three genera of non-human great ape–Pan, Pongo, and Gorilla–show an ability to construct complex, highly organized programs of action that are tailored to their own specific foraging problems.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 113.
“By correlating their behavior with weather observations, she [Janmaat] showed that the mangabeys were more likely to revisit if the weather had been warm and sunny on the intervening days, provided the tree had previously shown food that was nearly ready to exploit. Like a fruit farmer, the monkeys took account of the weather’s effect on ripening. Crucially, the effect of intervening weather was just as clear if the resource was insect larvae as it was with ripe fruit. While ripeness can be detected by smell, and so a huge mass of ripe fruit might in principle be detected at long range, insect larvae have virtually no scent. Thus, the mangabeys’ behavior shows that they can remember the state as well as the location of a tree they last visited several days ago, and they also notice and recall what the weather has been like since then.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 119; reference: Janmaat, Karline et al. 2006. “Primates take weather into account when searching for fruits.” Current Biology. 16:1232-7.
“At most of the locations this species [chimps] has been studied, right across Africa, several different kinds of tool are used by most or all members of a community, and the mix of methods varies from site to site. Each chimpanzee has a ‘toolkit,’ a repertoire of methods that depends on using objects as tools. … the distribution of each distinctive kind of tool use between communities is better explained by ecological needs than by constraints on the spread of knowledge by social learning. Social learning may be important, however, for an individual chimpanzee’s development of its tool repertoire. Indeed, some of the tool-using methods are so complicated and specific that it beggars belief that every individual could stumble upon just the same technique, or be shaped toward this norm by the constraints and affordances of the environment.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. pp. 125-6.
“Chimpanzees are alone among the apes in regularly making and using several different types of tool in the wild, sometimes even deploying more than one in planned sequence for a single purpose.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 126.
“Ironically, given the dominant role of tool use and tool making in anthropological reconstructions of human origins, it seems we cannot yet conclude much about insight from studies of animals using tools. Even when tools are made, and even when learning to use them involves social learning, the individual may have no insight into how tool use works.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 127.
“Primates and carnivores [in seminal study about curiosity] showed much greater interest than rodents, marsupials, or edentates (sloths, armadillos, and anteaters); reptiles showed least of all. Over successive minutes of the test sessions, the level of interest naturally declined, but primates’ level of interest held up longer than that of carnivores. Among the primates, the terrestrial Old World monkeys, animals like baboons and macaques, showed greater interest in the objects than other monkeys, manipulating and grasping them under close visual inspection, as well as simply looking at and chewing upon them. (Testing adult great apes was not possible, for safety reasons.) There were no general sex differences in curiosity, but younger animals showed greater interest than adults.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 131; referenced study: Glickman, Steve & R. Sroges. 1964. “Curiosity in zoo animals.” Behaviour. 26:151-8.
“… the chimpanzee is unique in its routine use of tools for many purposes in all groups studied in the wild, and the other great apes show similarly remarkable capacities for tool use in captivity. Yet even here, laboratory studies of causal cognition have failed to identify superior understanding of everyday physics by great apes. I suggest, therefore, that understanding of the physical world does not differ greatly among a wide range of animal species.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. pp. 132-3.
“Simply by accompanying those who already know how to do well in the natural environment, a social animal will be taken to places where success is definitely possible, and away from places where life is particularly dangerous and exploration highly risky. Moreover, this will afford them the chance to explore environmental debris resulting from others’ behavior, such as feeding remains or discarded tools, and what they learn about these objects may result in more rapid acquisition of the necessary skills for using them. Whether these mechanisms are called social learning or ‘socially guided learning’ is a moot point, but in any case they are benefits of social living that come free….
“Suppose an individual sees another of the same species engaged in some activity, and as a result their attention is drawn specifically to the place where the other is busy (hence one name for the effect, ‘local enhancement’), or drawn to a range of associated environmental aspects, including the objects that are being processed and any tools involved (hence the other name for it, ‘stimulus enhancement’)…. In ‘response facilitation,’ if a conspecific is seen to be using an action that is familiar to the observer (i.e., an action in its own repertoire), then it is more likely to try out that action than others in its repertoire when it gets the chance to explore the situation.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 135.
“It is only in cases where an action is not already in the natural repertoire of the species, and not at all likely to be discovered by trial-and-error exploration, that production imitation becomes really useful.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 137.
“At Karisoke in Rwanda, a gorilla’s four main foods all involve using the two hands in different but complementary roles. This is called manual role differentiation…. The sophistication in manipulation that manual role differentiation allows is further increased by the gorilla’s ability to control individual digits of the hand independently. This is called digit role differentiation.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 142.
“In the process, gorillas display a huge repertoire of functionally distinct actions (i.e., single actions that produce clear changes to the plant substrate; thistle-processing alone gave evidence of 72 distinct actions). Although attention has been drawn away from the chimpanzee’s general manual skills by the anthropological emphasis on tool use, when chimpanzee plant-processing has been studied in detail, similar abilities are found to those of gorillas.” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 143.
“To show understanding, the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget suggested that it is crucial to produce a correct verbal account of the situation, not just to get the correct answer. Thus, today, in developmental psychology there is a gulf between the ages at which children can show theory of mind by describing mental states, and those at which the same children show theory of mind by their observed behavior alone. I suggest that this apparent conflict will not be ‘resolved,’ because it accurately reflects two kinds of insight, gained by the child at different ages. First, the child becomes able to pass non-verbal tests of theory of mind, by using information derived statistically by behavior parsing: pretty good intentions. Only much later, the child becomes able to reflect upon what she sees….” Byrne, Richard. 2016. Evolving Insight. Oxford UP. p. 161.
“The level of behavioural organization between participants can vary, increasing in temporal and spatial complexity from mere similarity of action, to synchrony (similar acts performed in unison), then coordination (similar acts preformed at the same time and place), and finally collaboration (complementary acts performed at the same time and place).” Drea, Christine & A. Carter. 2009. “Cooperative problem solving in a social carnivore.” Animal Behaviour. 78:967-977. p. 967.
“Hyaena forays have no leaders and often involve long pursuits that culminate in hunters fanning out to encircle their quarry. Thus, using the scale developed by Boesch & Boesch, it would appear that hyaenas show similarity, synchrony and coordination, but perhaps not collaboration, when cooperatively hunting in the wild.” Drea, Christine & A. Carter. 2009. “Cooperative problem solving in a social carnivore.” Animal Behaviour. 78:967-977. p. 968: reference: Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573.
“Therefore, after much experience solving a solo task, partnered hyaenas spontaneously displayed cooperative behaviour, both at the level of synchrony, and at the level of coordination.” Drea, Christine & A. Carter. 2009. “Cooperative problem solving in a social carnivore.” Animal Behaviour. 78:967-977. p. 971.
“Notably, dyads involving the most dominant member were relatively inefficient and did not always open the trap door within the allotted time. By contrast, lower-ranking animals paired together were faster and successful every time…. Thus, hyaena performance was facilitated by greater numbers of animals present, but inhibited by the aggressive dominance relations between partners.” Drea, Christine & A. Carter. 2009. “Cooperative problem solving in a social carnivore.” Animal Behaviour. 78:967-977. p. 973.
“Despite the added complexity of our cooperation tasks, spotted hyaenas proved to be exceptionally skilled cooperators.” Drea, Christine & A. Carter. 2009. “Cooperative problem solving in a social carnivore.” Animal Behaviour. 78:967-977. p. 975.
“With less solo experience, the subjects of experiment 2 nevertheless evinced rapid pairwise cooperation, but only following group exposure to the task, suggesting a role for repetition and/or social facilitation in the acquisition of cooperative behaviour.” Drea, Christine & A. Carter. 2009. “Cooperative problem solving in a social carnivore.” Animal Behaviour. 78:967-977. p. 975.
“Their performance on temporal synchrony and spatial coordination tasks surpassed that of well-trained chimpanzees solving simpler synchrony tasks.” Drea, Christine & A. Carter. 2009. “Cooperative problem solving in a social carnivore.” Animal Behaviour. 78:967-977. p. 975.
“The relative ease with which spotted hyaenas solved complex cooperation tasks may partially reflect a strong biological ‘preparedness’ for cooperative hunting that is seemingly absent or less well developed in nonhuman primates. As obligate meat-eaters, spotted hyaenas routinely hunt to obtain food and often cannot kill larger, exceptionally combative prey without teamwork…. By contrast, nonhuman primates that hunt (either cooperatively or en masse) target specific prey species that, by comparison to the hunters, are smaller and individually less powerful. Thus, prey defensiveness notwithstanding, primate hunters (other than humans) do not require strength in numbers to overcome their victim….” Drea, Christine & A. Carter. 2009. “Cooperative problem solving in a social carnivore.” Animal Behaviour. 78:967-977. pp. 975, 976.
“The frequency of the independent occurrence of tool use across taxonomic groups suggests that important cognitive constraints are involved. Invertebrates and fish have the lowest frequency (one occurrence of tool use for every 98,090 species) compared to birds (one occurrence for every 165 species) and primates (one occurrence for every 38 species)…. These frequency data suggest (a) that tool use has arisen independently in birds and mammals at a far higher rate than in invertebrates and fish, and (b) an obvious positive correlation across the animal kingdom between the frequency of the independent occurrence of tool use and cognitive ability.” Visalberghi, Elisabetta, G. Sabbatini, A. Taylor & G. Hunt. 2017. “Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals.” pp. 673-701. In: APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology: Vol. 2. Perception, Learning, and Cognition. Call, J. (Ed) American Psychological Association. p. 674.
“As with primates, many bird species have only been seen to use tools in captivity.” Visalberghi, Elisabetta, G. Sabbatini, A. Taylor & G. Hunt. 2017. “Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals.” pp. 673-701. In: APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology: Vol. 2. Perception, Learning, and Cognition. Call, J. (Ed) American Psychological Association. p. 674.
“Interestingly, the published reports on tool use in captivity outweigh those in the wild, and a larger repertoire of tool behaviors have been described for captive groups than for wild populations….” Visalberghi, Elisabetta, G. Sabbatini, A. Taylor & G. Hunt. 2017. “Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals.” pp. 673-701. In: APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology: Vol. 2. Perception, Learning, and Cognition. Call, J. (Ed) American Psychological Association. p. 677.
“In contrast, tool use is very rare in gorillas and even rarer in bonobos, though in captivity all the great ape species use tools spontaneously in flexible and diverse ways.” Visalberghi, Elisabetta, G. Sabbatini, A. Taylor & G. Hunt. 2017. “Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals.” pp. 673-701. In: APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology: Vol. 2. Perception, Learning, and Cognition. Call, J. (Ed) American Psychological Association. p. 677.
“Chimpanzees also use tool sets to achieve a single goal. The most impressive case concerns a population in Gabon using a tool set of five objects (pounder, perforator, enlarger, collector, and swab) to obtain honey from underground hives.” Visalberghi, Elisabetta, G. Sabbatini, A. Taylor & G. Hunt. 2017. “Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals.” pp. 673-701. In: APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology: Vol. 2. Perception, Learning, and Cognition. Call, J. (Ed) American Psychological Association. p. 678.
“Sequential tool use differs from the use of a tool set because in the former the first tool acts on the second one to reach the goal, whereas in the latter the different tools are used one after the other.” Visalberghi, Elisabetta, G. Sabbatini, A. Taylor & G. Hunt. 2017. “Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals.” pp. 673-701. In: APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology: Vol. 2. Perception, Learning, and Cognition. Call, J. (Ed) American Psychological Association. p. 679.
“The manufacture of a range of designs for each type of hooked implement (i.e., stick and leaf type), and their use in orientations that enable birds to hook prey toward themselves, shows that New Caledonian crows are the only species besides humans to have incorporated hook technology into their tools.” Visalberghi, Elisabetta, G. Sabbatini, A. Taylor & G. Hunt. 2017. “Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals.” pp. 673-701. In: APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology: Vol. 2. Perception, Learning, and Cognition. Call, J. (Ed) American Psychological Association. p. 680.
“On the island of Mare, adult crows generally specialize in using either the wide Pandanus spp. tools that they make there or (nonhooked) stick tools, and even mated pairs can have different preferences. How this parallel manufacture of two distinct tool types within a local population is maintained remains unknown.” Visalberghi, Elisabetta, G. Sabbatini, A. Taylor & G. Hunt. 2017. “Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals.” pp. 673-701. In: APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology: Vol. 2. Perception, Learning, and Cognition. Call, J. (Ed) American Psychological Association. p. 680.
“In forest they [N.C. crows] repeatedly use tools at many probe sites, usually safeguarding them between foraging sessions.” Visalberghi, Elisabetta, G. Sabbatini, A. Taylor & G. Hunt. 2017. “Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals.” pp. 673-701. In: APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology: Vol. 2. Perception, Learning, and Cognition. Call, J. (Ed) American Psychological Association. p. 680.
“A number of studies have examined if New Caledonian crows are capable of sequential tool use in which one tool is used to gain access to another. Crows used a small stick placed in front of a toolbox to pull within reach a longer stick that could then be used to gain access to out of reach food. This behavior might have been underpinned by their natural tendency to attempt to retrieve attractive objects that are out of their reach. This hypothesis is supported by the finding that in a sequential tool task crows continued to use a short tool to get a longer tool even when no food was present as if long sticks were attractive objects in their own right, most likely because of their past association with food. To examine if this conditional reinforcement hypothesis is sufficient to explain sequential tool use in New Caledonian crows, Taylor, Elliffe, Hunt, and Gray created a three stage task where crows had to pull up a string to obtain a short tool, which could then be used to get the long tool and thereby get the food by using it. This short tool was an unattractive object, because it had previously been associated only with failure because crows could not use this tool to get food. According to the condition reinforcement hypothesis the crows should not solve this problem, as they would have to act to gain access to a negative, unattractive object. However, the crows solved this problem, thus showing the ability to hierarchically organize tool behavior.” Visalberghi, Elisabetta, G. Sabbatini, A. Taylor & G. Hunt. 2017. “Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals.” pp. 673-701. In: APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology: Vol. 2. Perception, Learning, and Cognition. Call, J. (Ed) American Psychological Association. p. 684; reference: Taylor, A.H., D.M. Elliffe, G.R. Hunt & R.D. Gray. 2010. “Complex cognition and behavioural innovation in New Caledonian crows.” Proceedings of the Royal Society: B. 277:2637-2643.
“Hunt et al. proposed that the differences between birds and primates might be due by different processes and mechanisms of transmission. Once tool use in New Caledonian crows appeared, strong selection probably drove their suggested adaptive complex for this behavior. In fact, the widespread occurrence of basic tool skills in New Caledonian crows and woodpecker finches has a strong genetic basis. In their scenario, an inherited disposition for a specific kind of tool use combined with limited social learning facilitates the vertical transmission of adaptive tool use within species…. In contrast, lack of a disposition for a specific type of tool use and an increased reliance on social learning (providing horizontal and vertical transmission of tool skills) facilitates greater contextual diversity of tool use within species, including non-adaptive tool use. Moreover, tool use in primates may have arisen even without strong selection pressures. In fact, the adaptive value of tool use in terms of individual fitness in primates has not yet been demonstrated and the relation between tool use and food scarcity is not supported by recent research whereas tool use rate correlates with the abundance of foods to be exploited with tools.” Visalberghi, Elisabetta, G. Sabbatini, A. Taylor & G. Hunt. 2017. “Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals.” pp. 673-701. In: APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology: Vol. 2. Perception, Learning, and Cognition. Call, J. (Ed) American Psychological Association. p. 691; reference: Hunt, G.R., R.D. Gray & A.H. Taylor. 2013. “Why is tool use rare in animals?” In Sanz, C., C. Boesch & J. Call (Eds). Tool use in animals: Cognition and ecology. pp. 89-118. http://dx.doi.org.10.1017/CBO9780511894800.007.
“Koops, Visalberghi, and van Schaik proposed a more general scenario in which three sets of factors, namely environment, sociality and cognition, influence invention, transmission, and retention of material culture. First, the environment provides ecological opportunities, in terms of resource density and likelihood to encounter them, which prompt innovation, transmission and retention of tool use. Second, social opportunities for tool use in terms of social tolerance, gregariousness and leftover artefacts from tool-use activities influence transmission and retention of tool use. Third, cognitive capacities for tool use in terms of individual and social learning abilities are also important.” Visalberghi, Elisabetta, G. Sabbatini, A. Taylor & G. Hunt. 2017. “Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals.” pp. 673-701. In: APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology: Vol. 2. Perception, Learning, and Cognition. Call, J. (Ed) American Psychological Association. p. 691; reference: Koops, K., E. Visalberghi & C. P. van Schaik. 2014. “The ecology of primate material culture.” Biology Letters. 10:20140508. http:/dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2014.0508.
“There is little evidence to date that primates which habitually use tools have adaptations associated with their tool behavior or have enhanced their tool designs in cumulative-like way. In contrast, New Caledonian crows appear to have a range of adaptations associated with their tool behavior and seem to have enhanced their tool designs in a rudimentary, cumulative-like way.” Visalberghi, Elisabetta, G. Sabbatini, A. Taylor & G. Hunt. 2017. “Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals.” pp. 673-701. In: APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology: Vol. 2. Perception, Learning, and Cognition. Call, J. (Ed) American Psychological Association. p. 691.
“He [McGrew] defined habitual tool use as tool-use patterns shown repeatedly by several members of a group; excluding single instances by one or several individuals, several instances by only one individual and all instances of insufficient data or involving released animals.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 2
“… habitual tool use has been set aside from other forms of (routine) tool use that are, for example, customary, idiosyncratic or absent in some sites owing to ecological or genetic variation. Accordingly, in contrast to these other forms of (routine) tool use, habitual tool use has been suggested to depend on cognitive flexibility that enables animals to solve disparate problems and use social cues, rather than rely on predisposed action patterns that are comparatively fixed.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 2.
“Many, though by no means all, habitually used tool behaviours are associated with a long period during which immatures interact with the tools and the goal objects, but use a characteristic pattern of non-random ‘errors’: either the wrong action or tool material, an incomplete action sequence, action sequences performed in the wrong order, or the correct complete and ordered action sequence applied towards the wrong goal or substrate. For example, Pandanus tool competence in New Caledonian crows progresses according to four probing techniques and five manufacturing techniques, of which only the fourth probing and fifth manufacturing technique resemble adult-like competence, which takes on average seven months to master. Adult-like proficiency (i.e. efficiency, speed, etc.) is acquired even later (ca. 12 months). All other probing and manufacturing techniques include errors that result in faulty detachment or dysfunction of the tool. Capuchins in Tiete go through eight developmental stages across 2.5 years before mastering their nut-cracking skills, from simple manipulation, to rubbing or hitting objects, to inserting in and hitting against substrates, striking objects against anvils and eventually placing nuts on anvils, followed by ineffective nut cracking before effective nut cracking…. Gombe chimpanzees start with pressing a tool to the termite mound or swiping the mound (at 3.5 years), and gradually change this into haphazard, rapid tool insertion without the required depth (4.5 year), to successful termite fishing (5.5 years).” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 4.
“However, errors diminish over time while tool-using skills improve, until eventually adult-like competence is reached before or around weaning age. Nonetheless, compared to adults, competent weaned immatures often still show inadequate skills by persisting at unrewarding locations, using tools at successful locations less often, having shorter or longer lasting tool sessions than adults, using more tools per session, modifying tools more frequently, using tools with different features (material, size and shape) than adults or–only relevant in some contexts–lacking hand preferences. Hence, although we might have mischaracterized play and exploration as ‘errors’, the ‘error-filled’ period of practice does seem to eventually result in skill improvement, whether actively goal-directed or facilitated by exposure to ecological and/or social factors.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 5.
“Given that individual variation in competence often varies with learning opportunity (with some immatures performing even better than some adults), we suggest that opportunities for learning, not maturation, is the primary limiting factor. Age might even constrain learning ability if a sensitive period of exposure has passed.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 5.
“Thumb morphology, for instance, allows for complex object manipulation in capuchins, chimpanzees and precision grip in humans, but capuchins initially tend to strike or rub objects, whereas chimpanzees tend to stack them. Thus, in acquiring nut-cracking skills, capuchins must learn to place a nut on the anvil before striking it, suggesting that striking is more fixed than stacking, whereas the contrary seems to apply to chimpanzees. Actions that are less fixed may therefore require more time to master and perform in a routine fashion than tool variants involving a more fixed action pattern, for which expression seems to be less variable and dependent on ecological contexts and learning opportunities.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 5.
“Work in the laboratory shows that inhibiting so-called ‘pre-potent’ responses can indeed be a significant hurdle to problem-solving in immature humans and mature primates.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 5.
“Likewise, both the tool-using New Caledonian crows and the non-tool-using common ravens start off with similar frequencies of object manipulations, considered a precursor for tool use, possibly originating from their shared propensity for food caching. Naive New Caledonian crows do show higher motivation for continued performance of object combinations, facilitating learning, whereas this decreases over time in common ravens, possibly owing to a higher probability of social interruption for ravens. Such evidence suggests that the cognitive traits underpinning tool use preceded rather than evolved with tool use. Tool use in these species may therefore be better conceived as a manifestation of cognitive traits, rather than a selective force on cognition.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 6.
“Additionally, reduced visual feedback, such as when the food is hidden or out of reach, or when visual attention is taken away from the movement of the goal (e.g. when focusing on the tool rather than the reward) may make the acquisition of a new tool-using action more difficult, as revealed by new work on both New Caledonian crows and chimpanzees. For chimpanzees, individuals that had already acquired the solution did not suffer any impairment from the removal of visual feedback, suggesting that feedback is most important during learning.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 6.
“Both apes and New Caledonian crows can also solve problems that involve finding a novel solution, which becomes obsolete after a time, requiring that solution to be abandoned and another to be found.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 6.
“One point to note is that to date there has been no evidence that tool users outperform non-tool-using relatives in the arena of innovation or problem-solving involving tools. Interestingly, performance in these studies is often characterized by large individual differences, with some experiments showing a minority of individuals completing the most difficult conditions. Of those solutions to natural problems which require innovations, social influence is likely to reduce intrapopulation variation in tool use. Can developmental studies support this?
“Observational field studies on individual variation within a population provide some of the clearest evidence that social-learning opportunities can have an impact on tool acquisition.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 6.
“Social-learning opportunities can result from the mere presence of other individuals (local-enhancement), the presence of materials manipulated by other individuals (directly by food and tool transfers, or indirectly by stimulus enhancement through artefacts), and models of the complete action (observational learning).” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 7.
“Most of the first self-made tools are dropped (without use) and replaced by tools made by others to obtain the food reward. Such re-use of tools may facilitate learning of how to use these tools and what kind of tool features may be required for the task, especially when visual feedback is minimal. Indeed, individuals master tool use, often if not always, before mastering tool manufacture.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 7.
“In conclusion, the observation that rates of scrounging, object play, feeding attempts, and food and tool transfers, and watching decline with age in most, if not all, species, seems to be a further indication for socially facilitated learning during the ontogeny of habitual tool users.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 7.
“… ecological and social-learning opportunities during the early stages of development appear to play an important role in determining later skill levels and thus individual and geographical variation. Variation among adults moreover indicates that tool performance is not simply a matter of brain maturation but also (social-) learning opportunities. Social transmission seems to be mainly vertical, through association, tool recycling, food and tool transfers, and watching.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 8.
“At one extreme, only minimal cognitive and social inputs are necessary for the occurrence of tool use, typically because of the presence of an inherent bias to manipulate objects in the first place. The studies of woodpecker finches and North American badgers are good examples, showing that expression of tool innovations mainly depends on ecological factors and when flexible cognitive strategies are involved, they appear to be domain-general learning mechanisms shared with non-tool-using relatives. Practice can nevertheless be important… At another extreme, more flexible cognition may be required to come up with innovations that deviate from more pre-potent action patterns and additionally require long periods of individual practice and social input to use the tool more systematically and habitually. Dolphins, for instance, are not ‘built’ for manipulative tool use, but can readily integrate acoustic and visual inputs to represent objects, and use their cognitive ability to solve problems with tools in laboratory and field, at least when the conditions call for it. Calves of bottlenose dolphins spend thousands of hours observing maternal tool use before the first instances of tool use are observed….
“For both extremes, there are indications that tool use may be better viewed as a possible manifestation (or by-product) of flexible cognitive abilities rather than acting as a selective force on intelligence itself. Note, however, that tool use may just be one among many other possible ‘tool-free’ manifestations of general intelligence (i.e. one extreme, such as habitual tool uses) and, hence, not all tool users need to be characterized by enhanced intelligence (i.e. other extreme, relatively inflexible tool ‘specialists’). Although for the moment, this remains speculative and needs further confirmation, this indeed would explain the flexible cognitive traits that are found in wild tool-using woodpecker finches, New Caledonian crows, robust capuchins, and chimpanzees, as well as their non-habitual tool-using (at least in the wild) close relatives: tree finches, common ravens and rooks, gracile capuchins and bonobos.” Meulman, E.J.M, A.M. Seed & J. Mann. 2013. “If at first you don’t succeed… Studies of ontogeny shed light on the cognitive demands of habitual tool use.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20130050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0050. p. 8.
“… four levels of growing complexity of organization between [chimpanzee] hunters
“Similarity All hunters concentrate similar actions on the same prey, but without any spatial or time relation between them; however, at least two hunters always act simultaneously
“Synchrony Each hunter concentrates similar actions on the same prey and tries to relate in time to each other’s actions
“Coordination Each hunter concentrates similar actions on the same prey and tries to relate in time and space to each others’ actions
“Collaboration Hunters perform different complementary actions, all directed toward the same prey”
Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 550.
“… Tai chimpanzees tend to follow the same direction for hours; when changing it, they communicate by means of drumming and pant-hooting to any group members within auditory distance. Hence we defined ‘detour for hunting” as a clear change of direction made without any auditory signal directly following the sound produced by the possible prey. Visibility being at most 20 m in the forest, we have the impression that the detection of prey is mostly made by ear. We have defined ‘search’ for prey as follows: the chimpanzees become totally silent, remain very close together, move one behind the other, and stop regularly to look up into the trees, alert to the sound of monkeys. Many silent changes of direction may occur. A chimpanzee might eat a fruit or leaf while passing by, but no general feeding of the group occurs during a search. These searches last on the average 16 minutes, 27 seconds….
“In Tai, 31% of the hunts must be classified as opportunistic, whereas in half of the hunts we could observe clear signs of hunting intention before any prey was seen or heard (searches only). As the observation of January 10, 1987 stressed, Tai chimpanzees have a specialized prey image and therefore begin a hunt by selecting a prey. Since monkeys can be detected by the rustle of the foliage in which they jump, it has happened that searching hunters have arrived under such a group before seeing them.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 554.
“Gombe hunters aim their actions toward infants and, frequently snatch them away from their mothers’ bellies, leaving the mothers unharmed [based on references from Jane Goodall]. This behavior was never observed in Tai, where small infants seemed to be caught incidentally, the objective being the mother. In addition, the capture of only a large infant seemed to be a disappointment, and the hunt usually continued afterward.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 555.
“… 92/5% [chart says 93%; this could be a typo for 92.5%] of all hunts include at least two hunters acting together against the same prey. This result, combined with the fact that the majority of the hunts seem to be decided before any prey is visible to the hunters, gives us some clues as to how Tai chimpanzees hunt. The critical factor in initiating a hunt seems to be the presence of other group members ready to hunt.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 558.
“Gombe [36%] as well as Mahale [24%] chimpanzees hunt in groups, significantly less than do Tai chimpanzees.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 558.
“Hunting success varies according to the number of hunters remaining very low for one (16%) or two (9%) hunters and increasing sharply for larger hunting groups. Tai chimpanzees seem to be aware of this difference, and the first lone hunter behaves so as to attract more hunters rather than trying to catch the prey on his own. He will follow the prey slowly making them produce alarm calls. Sometimes his behavior may even look deceitful, in that he gives ‘hunting barks,’ although he is never in the situation that normally elicits such a call, i.e., rapidly pursuing or about to capture a prey. If no chimpanzees joint the hunt, he will normally stop…. Groups of two hunters may persevere for longer periods of time, but, independently of their skills, the presence of a third hunter is necessary to make capture more certain. Indeed, when a third joins the hunt, the speed of all movements increases sharply….
“Hunters persevere longer as their number increases, and this may explain their greater success.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. pp. 558, 559.
“As can be seen, Tai chimpanzees hunt as a rule by collaboration (68%) [with 7% for similarity, 12% for synchrony, and 12% for coordination].” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 559.
“When hunting, females have a capture rate similar to males.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 560.
“Out of the 19 divisions in which we knew captor, he initiated 10 divisions and kept half of the prey; in five situations he was allowed by the more dominant animals to cut himself a piece of meat before they proceeded to the division among themselves; and in the last four cases, the captor was left empty-handed, although he later received some meat through sharing….
“The captor is one of the participants in the division if he is a high-ranking male. The second individual allowed by the group to take part in the division must also be high-ranking. Analysis of who was allowed to take part in such a division revealed a clear change in the dominance rank order of some individuals. Dominance in wild chimpanzees is difficult to determine in a straightforward way, as an individual’s status depends in part on the presence in his group of some potential allies. As the composition of such a group fluctuates all day long, we may say that the individual’s status may to some extent vary accordingly.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 561.
“Sharing is influenced by the quantity of meat available…. Tai chimpanzees share meat from small prey 1.7 times less often than from large ones.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 563.
“In Tai, about 90% of the sharing implies close contact between the owner and the beggar, both touching the meat. More than half is passively shared, and typically the meat is put in common by the owner. Both individuals, the owner and the beneficiary, hold and eat the same piece of meat for periods of time regularly exceeding 15 minutes…. Similarly, in active-passive sharings (31.9% of all episodes) the owner, while masticating, held the meat toward another individual. As a rule, a long piece of meat (i.e., an anterior or posterior half of a colobus) is pooled by the owner with another individual (passive sharing). In contrast, with a short but large piece of meat (i.e., the complete rump or thorax of a colobus), the owner will have a bite and then hold the piece toward a beggar, allowing the beggar to have a bite while the owner is chewing his piece (active-passive sharing)….. Active sharing occurs regularly (5.4% of all sharings).” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 564.
“In addition, males actively share significantly more with other males than with females. This higher generosity of the males toward other males is illustrated by the gifts. Gifts are normally observed when the owner has almost finished his meat and then presents the remains to another individual.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 564.
“In Tai, one use of tools as a defense weapon during a hunt was observed:
“On March 23, 1985, Darwin, a young adult male chimpanzee, was surrounded by a threatening group of adult red colobus, as soon as he went into the trees. He tried to avoid them, but they followed him. After 4 minutes he broke a fresh branch and threatened them once with it, by waving it towards them. Then he threw the branch at the two nearest colobus, hitting them. The colobus retreated.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 565.
“Our comparisons of a forest-living population of chimpanzees (Tai) with two populations living in a more open savanna/woodland habitat (Gombe and Mahale), lead to the conclusion that the forest population seems more efficient in hunting than the savanna ones. Tai forest chimpanzees tend to hunt more frequently for larger prey, with a higher rate of success, and they hunt more often in groups with a higher level of organization than do chimpanzees living in a more open environment. Sharing of meat is more frequent and more generalized in forest-living chimpanzees.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. pp. 565-6.
“The increase in hunting success with larger group size observed in Tai is intriguing, because a similar increase seems not to appear when Gombe chimpanzees hunt in groups. The higher hunting success of Tai males seems to be more related to organization than numbers…. Jane Goodall gained the impression that, by chasing prey in different directions, Gombe chimpanzees increased the confusion of the prey and prevented them from mobbing against the hunters. Thus Gombe males, when hunting in groups, seem to disorganize the prey’s defense rather than increase their own hunting organization, as do Tai males.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 567.
“As hunting group size is related to the level of cooperation in Tai, we should ask if cooperation is a consequence of hunting itself or results from the preexisting cooperative behavior in the population. Tai male chimpanzees always cooperate in territorial fights and always assist individuals that are giving distress calls either because they are facing potential predators (snakes and leopards) or because they are trapped in a snare. These examples illustrate the possibility that cooperation among unrelated individuals could have developed in contexts other than hunting.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 568.
“As more chimpanzees eat more meat, the meat-eating episodes are shorter, and probably hunters try to kill the larger prey when they have the choice. This finding may explain why Tai hunters were never observed to snatch colobus infants away from their mothers’ bellies without attempting to capture the mother as well.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 568.
“We have rarely observed this kind of trade [of meat for sex] in Tai chimpanzees, where males mostly share meat with females with which they have a good relationship independently of their sexual cycle.” Boesch, Christophe & H. Boesch. 1989. “Hunting Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 78:547-573. p. 569.
“Furthermore, even younger infants (9-10 months old) could use a tool to pull an out of reach toy towards themselves, but increasing the spatial gap between the tool and the toy decreased performance significantly.” Chappell, Jackie, N. Cutting, I. Apperly & S. Beck. 2013. “The development of tool manufacture in humans: what helps young children make innovative tools?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20120409. p. 2.
“We know that 3-5 year olds very rarely make a functional tool before demonstration, and even at 7 years old, fewer than half succeed. The majority of children do not succeed without a demonstration of the solution before about 8 years old.” Chappell, Jackie, N. Cutting, I. Apperly & S. Beck. 2013. “The development of tool manufacture in humans: what helps young children make innovative tools?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20120409. p. 2.
“Tool innovation is a multi-step process in which strategies must be selected and executed in the correct order while monitoring success, and it therefore requires inhibitory control to avoid perseveration and impulsivity.” Chappell, Jackie, N. Cutting, I. Apperly & S. Beck. 2013. “The development of tool manufacture in humans: what helps young children make innovative tools?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20120409. p. 3.
“… we have shown that children’s inability to stop implementing an unsuccessful strategy does not seem to explain their difficulty with innovation tasks.” Chappell, Jackie, N. Cutting, I. Apperly & S. Beck. 2013. “The development of tool manufacture in humans: what helps young children make innovative tools?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20120409. p. 6.
“Recent studies have shown that inhibitory problems in cognitive tasks can be reduced, and performance improved, by the introduction of a delay before children are allowed to respond. In Diamond et al.’s study children performed a simple Stroop-type task. When they saw a picture of the Sun they had to say ‘night’ and when they saw the Moon they had to say ‘day’. Four year olds find this difficult and are as likely to give the incorrect as correct response. However, when a delay of just a few seconds was introduced in between showing children the card and their response, performance improved significantly.” Chappell, Jackie, N. Cutting, I. Apperly & S. Beck. 2013. “The development of tool manufacture in humans: what helps young children make innovative tools?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20120409. p. 6; reference: Diamond, A. N. Kirkham & D. Amso. 2002. “Conditions under which young children can hold two rules in mind and inhibit a prepotent response.” Dev Psychol. 38:352-362. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.38.3.352.
“… we have shown that children’s striking lack of success in these tool-innovation tasks is not explained by impulsive behaviour, a lack of opportunity to explore materials or by perseveration.” Chappell, Jackie, N. Cutting, I. Apperly & S. Beck. 2013. “The development of tool manufacture in humans: what helps young children make innovative tools?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20120409. p. 8.
“Ill-structured tasks are those in which the problem itself does not directly provide a solution, requiring the subject to generate one.” Chappell, Jackie, N. Cutting, I. Apperly & S. Beck. 2013. “The development of tool manufacture in humans: what helps young children make innovative tools?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368:20120409. p. 8.
“Nevertheless, most apes (except orang-utans) overcame their old technique very efficiently once it became necessary, indicating high degrees of behavioural flexibility and inhibitory control….
“These results contradict previous findings showing that chimpanzees tend to stick with their initially learnt technique in a problem-solving situation even though they observed human demonstrators and conspecifics, respectively, using a more efficient strategy. The authors concluded that skill mastery inhibits further exploration and the adoption of new techniques. Here we show, however, that chimpanzees and other great ape species are in fact able to abandon a previously established technique when it is necessary.” Manrique, Hector M., C. Voelter & J. Call. 2013. “Repeated innovation in great apes.” Animal Behaviour. 85:195-202. p. 200.
“Voelter & Call also investigated the effects of perceptual-motor feedback on problem solving in great apes. They presented one group of apes with an apparatus with visual access of its internal workings so that the apes could see the effects that their actions had on the displacement of the reward. Another group faced the same apparatus but without visual access to the effects of their actions. The results were clear: only those individuals who had visual access to the effects (perceptual-motor feedback) were able to solve the task. This means that even though subjects in the opaque group could have solved the task by (blind) trial-and-error in the classical sense, they did not do so. Note that both groups of individuals operated on the apparatus but only those that got perceptual feedback continued to do so until they found the reward.” Manrique, Hector M., C. Voelter & J. Call. 2013. “Repeated innovation in great apes.” Animal Behaviour. 85:195-202. p. 200; reference: Voelter, Christoph & J. Call. 2012. “Problem solving in great apes (Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes, Gorilla gorilla, and Pongo abelii): the effect of visual feedback.” Animal Cognition. 15:923-936.
“This use of ancillary information produced during the course of problem-solving attempts often plays a crucial role in humans. We often do something that does not work, even when we know that it cannot work but the effects that our actions produce help us envisage the correct solution, which we then apply to solve the task at hand. In fact, collecting bits of disparate information to produce solutions is one of the major components of problem solving and something that may distinguish creative from noncreative individuals. Moreover, using bits of information to reproduce a complete solution has been hypothesized to play a major role in some forms of social learning, such as emulation, which are important for the way that apes solve problems. The importance of gathering incomplete pieces of information for problem solving should therefore not be underestimated and not be equated to blind trial-and-error.” Manrique, Hector M., C. Voelter & J. Call. 2013. “Repeated innovation in great apes.” Animal Behaviour. 85:195-202. pp. 200-201.
“Our own study shows that elephants not only (i) cooperate successfully in a coordinated pulling task but also (ii) recognize the need for a partner by waiting if the partner is delayed. Elephants perhaps also (iii) recognize the necessity of their partner’s actions, given that they discriminate between a partner with or without rope access. As with humans and other primates, it is hard to draw a line between learning and understanding, however. The least we can conclude is that the elephants demonstrated cooperative behavior in this experiment with attention to their partner’s presence and actions, thus showing a well-developed propensity toward partner-oriented, deliberate cooperation. These results put elephants, at least in terms of how quickly they learn the critical contingencies of cooperation, on a par with apes.” Plotnik, Joshua, R. Lair, W. Suphachoksahakun & F. de Waal. 2011. “Elephants know when they need a helping trunk in a cooperative task.” PNAS. doi/10.1073/pnas.1101765108. p. 5.
“Taken together, the results of these experiments support the hypothesis that tolerance constrains the ability of chimpanzees to solve cooperative tasks. The level of tolerance (i.e. the tendency to share food) between the dyads predicted spontaneous success or failure in the cooperation task. In fact, in experiment 2, social tolerance was a better predictor of success than was subjects’ understanding of the physical properties of the task. In addition, in experiment 3, subjects who had previously succeeded in cooperating (and probably had some understanding of the physical properties of the task) did not cooperate when paired with a less tolerant partner. Therefore, the lack of tolerance (which is probably related to dominance asymmetries) impeded cooperation.” Melis, Alicia, B. Hare & M. Tomasello. 2006. “Engineering cooperation in chimpanzees: tolerance constraints on cooperation.” Animal Behaviour. 72:275-286. p. 283.
“For the dedicated spotted hyena watcher, one of the most striking characteristics of the spotted hyena is the tendency of individual animals to do what other hyenas are doing, that is, to exhibit social facilitation of behavior. In his work with wolves, Lockwood made a similar set of observations and suggested that behavioral synchrony was required in social hunting groups on the move. It is a characteristic that pervades virtually every aspect of daily life. For example, within our colony, such social facilitation was observed to increase the probability of ingestive behavior, scent marking, meeting ceremonies, olfactory investigation, and play as well as promote the development of coalitions that serve to reinforce the existing dominance hierarchy.” Glickman, Stephen, C. Zabel, S. Yoerg, M. Weldele, C. Drea & L. Frank. 1997. “Social Facilitation, Affiliation, and Dominance in the Social Life of Spotted Hyenas.” From: The Integrative Neurobiology of Affiliation. Carter, C. Sue, I. Lederhendler & B. Kirkpatrick. pp. 131-140. MIT Press. p. 133; reference: Lockwood, R. 1976. “An ethological analysis of social structure and affiliation in captive wolves (Canis lupus).” Ph.D Thesis. Washington University.
“In keeping with this new picture of widely distributed parallel developments [for plant domestication taking place simultaneously in many places], what had initially been interpreted as genetic evidence for a single origin for some crops has also now been rejected. It is not until the Middle-Late PPNB [pre-pottery Neolithic B], c.9500 cal BP, that a reasonably consistent domesticated crop complex of cereals and legumes – the so-called founder crops: the hulled wheats einkorn and emmer, hulled barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch and flax – emerges, and only after c.8000 BP that domestic crops become overwhelmingly predominant.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 36.
“Now that the evidence suggests it took at least 2-3,000 years for domestication traits to become fully established it is much easier to see that significant commitments to the founder crops at times prior to the Holocene when the opportunity arose would have been open to frequent disruption and, conversely, to agree that if the Holocene had not been stable [climate wise] agriculture would not have taken hold and become a highly successful adaptation.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 37.
“However, in contrast to cattle and sheep/goat, it has been suggested that domestication in pigs started because, like dogs, they were ‘commensals’ rather than prey animals and were attracted to human presence by the possibility this offered for scavenging food.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 41.
“The complex range of different relationships between people and prey animals seen in Cyprus is further emphasised by the results of analyses carried out by Vigne and colleagues on the size and sex ratios of the remains of the goats introduced to the island. They suggest that although they must have been through a domestication process on the mainland, in Cyprus they were initially hunted and then underwent a local domestication a thousand years later, at which point they began to be used for milk.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 61; reference: Vigne, J.-D., I. Cartere, F. Briois & J. Guilaine. 2011. “The early process of mammal domestication in the Near East: new evidence from the Pre-Neolithic and Pre-Pottery Neolithic in Cyprus.” Current Anthropology. 52:S255-S271.
“In summary, the genomic and material evidence from the Balkans indicates a rapid range expansion by farmers of Anatolian ancestry but shows interactions with local forager groups in places like the Iron Gates [narrows on the Danube] with denser populations.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 74.
“In summary, just as there was a rapid spread of farming from central Anatolia and adjacent areas to western Anatolia and the northern Aegean, in less than 500 years, by 8500 BP, c.300-400 years later there was an equally rapid spread from the northern Aegean zone to north of the Danube in the period c.8200/8100-7900 BP. This Balkan EN [Early Neolithic] shows a set of common features in material culture, domestic plant and animal subsistence and domestic animal genetics that links it closely to the Aegean-Anatolian region and demonstrates continuing links well into the 8th millennium BP.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 76.
“In cultural evolutionary terms, this is a tightly bound package of subsistence, and no doubt other, practices that was under strong positive selection. With this agriculturally based population expansion went the spread not just of a few cultural elements but a village way of life that had originated in the core area, albeit with the loss of some of the more elaborate elements.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 78.
“In other words, the expansion of farming into the Carpathian Basin and then across Central Europe with the LBK [Linearbandkeramik culture] was the result of a demographic expansion from the south-east and ultimately from the Aegean and Anatolia.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 82.
“In summary, hunter-gatherer populations in the loess areas of Central Europe favoured by the LBK farmers existed at very low densities and had little to do with the expanding farming groups. In fact, as we will see, the distribution of the first farmers was restricted to certain extremely specific environments that were very limited in extent. Outside these areas hunter-gatherers must have continued to exist but are largely archaeologically invisible. It was only when farming and farmers expanded their distribution in the late 7th millennium BP that interaction on a larger scale occurred.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 85.
“In other words, here [from modern Hungary to western Germany], as in the Aegean and the Balkans, people were moving on from one area to the next long before those areas had reached the occupation density that the LBK agricultural system was later capable of supporting; in all these cases there was an initial phase of long-distance dispersal, followed by short-distance infilling.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 89.
“The widespread occurrence of enclosures is not the only indicator of change in the later LBK. Long-distance lithic exchange also declined. Throughout most of the LBK period supplies of high-quality flint were obtained from special sources and exchanged very widely. In the latest phase, exchanged lithic raw materials declined in frequency at settlement sites and increasing proportions of the lithic assemblages were made up of material from local sources of poorer quality. Relations between adjacent groups may have broken down so completely that long-distance exchanges, with material passing through many hands, became impossible.
“This process may have been one of the factors that led to a population crash in many LBK areas just after 7000 BP, including all those with evidence of massacres.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. pp. 103-4.
“To the west of Liguria [NW coastal Italy], evidence of Mesolithic occupation is found in the middle Rhone valley as late as 7500 BP but there are no indications of interactions with the first farmers, who almost certainly arrived by sea, occupying discontinuous sections of the coast where there was no Mesolithic occupation from c.7700 BP;….” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 114.
“Elsewhere, the Neolithic expansion goes hand in hand with an extremely rapid decline in the number of dates from Mesolithic contexts and little overlap, with the exception of central Portugal, where there seems to be an overlap of c.400 years between the occupation of local Neolithic sites and the continuing occupation of the famous Mesolithic Muge shell middens at the mouth of the Tagus, though there is no evidence for contact between the two.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 121.
“The fact that crop diversity was maintained in the west Mediterranean, and also that both milking and milk-processing practices were consistently transmitted points to strong cultural selection in their favour.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 127.
“Bernabeu Auban et al. have proposed and tested a ‘cultural hitchhiking’ model, to account for the distribution of the different Early Neolithic ceramic decoration techniques in the west Mediterranean. Cultural traits without any intrinsic benefits of their own can spread if they are linked with traits that do have such an advantage. The demic expansion of pioneer farming communities provides precisely such a context, as we suggested for the LBK. The farming economy provides the advantageous trait because it leads to demographic expansion. Pottery as a technology is part of that advantageous complex, for example for milk processing, as we have seen. However, on the cultural hitchhiking hypothesis the particular decorative attributes that spread are simply the ‘cultural baggage’ that happens to be associated with the groups that are fissioning and founding new settlements; they are transmitted with them, together with other attributes that are invisible to us, such as their language.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. pp. 127-8; reference: Bernabeu Auban, J., C. Manen & S. Pardo-Gordo. 2017. “Spatial and temporal diversity during the Neolithic spread in western Mediterranean. The first pottery productions.” pp. 373-398. In: Times of Neolithic Transition along the Western Mediterranean: Fundamental Issues in Archaeology. Garcia-Puchol, O. & D.C. Salazar-Garcia (eds). Springer.
“In western Germany all the main settlement regions show evidence of a population decline and/or a cultural hiatus. One such example is the Upper Rhine region, with a hiatus of c.150 years now established between the end of the LBK [about 7,000 BP] and the beginning of the Hinkelstein phase. The latter is the first in a series of cultural phases defined in terms of pottery styles, successively the Hinkelstein, Grossgartach and Roessen, that together make up the Middle Neolithic of the region and represent a continuation with modification of the LBK tradition, not just in terms of pottery but also house forms. The details of settlement history vary from region to region though the basic pattern of constraint within LBK limits is a constant. In the Lower Rhine area there is no settlement continuity with the LBK and it is only in the Roessen phase (c.4750-4600) that a similar population density to the LBK is reached again. By contrast, in the Upper Rhine the population reaches LBK levels again in the Grossgartach phase, when all the previous LBK settlement areas except one are re-occupied, while the subsequent Roessen has only half as many sites and they have a lower density of structures, without any evidence of house remains.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. pp. 131-2.
“In other words, the results suggest that some individuals, and presumably groups, maintained a foraging way of life for 2000 years after the arrival of farming, albeit interacting with farmers, while others became subsumed into farming groups, and in the time span represented here [c.6200-6000 BP] both were burying their dead in the same cave.” Shennan, Stephen. 2018. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge UP. p. 152.
“Only subjects who had visual access to the progress of the reward while turning the handle solved the problem. In contrast, visual access to the crank zone that yielded information on the causal mechanism involved did not have any effect on the performance…. Hence, visual feedback on the effects of their operations seems to be necessary and sufficient for the apes to solve this problem….
“After having found the solution in phase 1, the apes had no problem (not even an increased latency) to solve the task in phase 2 albeit the progress zone was now occluded…. This means that visual feedback may have been necessary to learn how to solve the task, but it was not necessary to maintain the solution.” Voelter, Christoph & J. Call. 2012. “Problem solving in great apes (Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes, Gorilla gorilla, and Pongo abelii): the effect of visual feedback.” Anim Cogn. doi 10.1007/s10071-012-0519-5. p. 11.
“In particular, the apes had no previous experience with a crank mechanism (or similar object manipulation tasks involving sequential turning of an object), and the perceptual salience of the parts of the apparatus that were to be manipulated was identical across conditions. Thus, these results suggest that the performance of the apes benefits from visual feedback on the effects of their actions.
“Results from the crank experiment allow us to catch a glimpse on the learning mechanism at work: having visual access not to the crank mechanism but to the progress of the reward turned out to be necessary for them to solve the task. This finding raises the possibility that operant conditioning plays an important role here: accordingly, the progress of the reward in response to the turning of the crank acts as an intermediate reinforcer, which would make the recurrence of this action more likely. However, three aspects suggest that even though operant conditioning may be implicated in the solution process, it does not fully explain it.
“First, operant conditioning is controlled by information about spatiotemporal means-ends relations. It is unclear that operant conditioning would work if subjects did not see the action that brings the reward closer (e.g., the cranking action) as a means toward the end of bringing the reward within reach. In fact, one could argue that based on operant conditioning alone, actions that did not lead to a successful outcome should be extinguished. Since turning the crank only produced the reward if this action was repeated multiple times, it should have disappeared, which is precisely what happened in those conditions in which the means-ends relations were not visible.
“Second, further support for the idea that the apes had some knowledge about the causal structure of the crank task is the fact that subjects with limited experience with the appropriate solving strategy had no problem whatsoever to solve the task when visual feedback of the progress of the reward was restricted. Once acquired, the response was not controlled by the visual feedback….
“Third, there is the issue of the impressive leap in performance from the first to the second trials…. When the degree of difficulty increases (in terms of the number and complexity of actions necessary to solve the problem, Experiments 2 and 3) only apes that got visual access to the interior of the apparatuses significantly improved their performance from T1 to T2. Together, these findings are compatible with the view that the apes take at least some of the basic causal structures of the tasks into account.” Voelter, Christoph & J. Call. 2012. “Problem solving in great apes (Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes, Gorilla gorilla, and Pongo abelii): the effect of visual feedback.” Anim Cogn. doi 10.1007/s10071-012-0519-5. p. 12.
“Ecological psychologists have traditionally asserted a commitment to realism, while enactivism was initially developed within a constructivist, and therefore anti-realist, framework.” Baggs, Edward & A. Chemero. 2018. “Radical embodiment in two directions.” Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02020-9. p. 2.
“The key to Gibson’s theory of affordances, and the most radical part of his theory of perception, is the distinction Gibson makes between the physical world and the environment of animals. The physical world exists at all spatial and temporal scales, from nanoseconds and nanometers to millennia and galaxies. The environment of animals is limited to the middle scale…. The environment consists of points of observation, places where an animal can put its sensory organs, and paths of locomotion connecting them. The environment of animals is not perceived in terms of time, but in terms of events: of things transforming or persisting under movement.” Baggs, Edward & A. Chemero. 2018. “Radical embodiment in two directions.” Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02020-9. p. 4.
“Most crucially, the physical world is inherently meaningless, but the environment is not; the environment contains affordances.
“In addition to containing affordances, the environment contains information about affordances. The laws of optics make it such that the light reflected from things in the environment is structured by the properties of those things. This lawful relationship between light and what it reflects from makes it the case that light contains information.” Baggs, Edward & A. Chemero. 2018. “Radical embodiment in two directions.” Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02020-9. p. 4.
“… light can carry information about whether the tree branch affords reaching, grabbing, climbing, etc. for the animal whose eyes are at that point of observation, and that information will be there at the point of observation, waiting for the animal to show up and put its eyes there.
“This is the key point: the environment is not a separate mental realm; it is just a subset of the physical world, considered from the vantage point of an animal. Because the environment contains affordances, there is no need for the animal to construct meaningful experience by building and manipulating representations in some phenomenal realm, or even in the brain.” Baggs, Edward & A. Chemero. 2018. “Radical embodiment in two directions.” Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02020-9. p. 5.
“… we have argued that it is necessary to subdivide what Gibson referred to as the environment. We need to make a finer distinction between, (1) the environment as a set of resources for a typical, or ideal, member of a species, which we call the habitat, and (2) the environment as the meaningful, lived surroundings of a given individual, which we call the umwelt. We offer this as a friendly amendment to Gibson’s distinction….
“The umwelt is a not a private, mental copy of the habitat. It is the habitat considered from the point of view of a particular living animal. Similarly the habitat is not distinct from the physical world: it is a subset of the physical world considered relative to a typical member of a species. When an animal performs an action, this typically has consequences in the umwelt, the habitat, and the physical world.” Baggs, Edward & A. Chemero. 2018. “Radical embodiment in two directions.” Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02020-9. p. 6.
“The affordance concept serves a different purpose depending on whether we invoke it in the habitat or in the umwelt. In the former case, affordances are dispositional properties, or persisting resources that exist across generations and exert evolutionary selection pressure. In the latter case they are relational properties that exist for only so long as a given animal continues to live, and that change as that animal develops new skills and abilities, or loses them.” Baggs, Edward & A. Chemero. 2018. “Radical embodiment in two directions.” Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02020-9. p. 9.
“Information-about should be conceived as a property of the habitat. The habitat of bees contains flowers that emit pollen. The presence of the pollen is specified in chemical trails that diffuse in the air. These trails constitute information-about the presence of flowers. Indeed, a description of the habitat of the bee that leaves the existence of this information out of account would be an incomplete description. Meanwhile, information-for should be conceived as a property of the umwelt. When a given bee goes out looking for pollen, it is actively seeking patterns in energy that are adaptive to its purposes. Again, these two views are not in conflict. The bee is not seeking to transduce external content into internal content; it is actively exploring its umwelt, which is a subset of the species-general habitat. Information-about tells us what kinds of structure are available in abstract terms, for an ideal organism. Information-for tells us how that structure enters into the directed activity of a living animal.” Baggs, Edward & A. Chemero. 2018. “Radical embodiment in two directions.” Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02020-9. p. 10.
“That is, the infant who tries and fails to reach a desired toy has placed her hand in a position very similar to the one she will later use to point at it. Crucially, the failed reaching gesture metamorphoses into the pointing gesture only when it is interpreted as such by an adult. The adult interprets the reach as a point, and the adult gives the child the toy that it was reaching for. Over time, the child learns that instead of failing to reach for things with its own arms, it can successfully reach for things by recruiting other actors. The umwelt is expanded. To the extent that we are able to learn throughout life, the umwelt never constitutes a limit on our experience, but is merely a label for the subset of our surroundings that we are currently oriented towards.
“The umwelt is not something we are trapped in because we can always see beyond it to the next thing we can learn. If we were trapped inside the umwelt, then learning would be impossible. That humans perceive beyond their own umwelts, and do so directly, is compatible with something that enactivists have been pointing out for more than a decade now: that the human mind is deeply social and ‘intersubjective’. A consequence of this deep sociality is that we perceive the umwelt of other humans–that is, we are sensitive to the way the world appears to others, or we perceive the relation between other animals and their surroundings. Indeed, this seems to be an ability that goes beyond humans. The back door does not afford opening for a pet dog, but the dog can perceive that it does for humans.” Baggs, Edward & A. Chemero. 2018. “Radical embodiment in two directions.” Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02020-9. pp. 13-4.
“Female-2 first passed the tool to male-2 on the fifth trial [L-shaped tool previously learned to pull a pan of food; male-2 was confined to one cage and male-1, female-1 were confined to another where a door was only large enough for all the other baboons to go through; female-2 and male-2 had a sexual bond; the tool began each experiment in the cage of m-1 and f-1; food pan only accessible from cage of male-2]. During the first four trials, female-2 had not even touched the tool…. At 12,030 seconds of the fifth trial, female-2 and male-2 were engaged in mutual grooming in male-2’s cage when she saw the tool lying loose in the male-1/female-1 cage. Female-2 abruptly left the grooming bout, entered the male-1/female-1 cage at 12,060 seconds, and picked up the tool at once. She carried the tool into the male-2 cage at 12,090 seconds where she sat holding the tool and watching male-2. Male-2 sat close to her, watching her and the tool attentively, but he did not try to take it. At 12,450 seconds, female-2 put the tool down, whereupon male-2 picked it up and began at once to use it to get the pan. He got the pan at 12,471 seconds and he and female-2 ate 99 percent of the food in about equal proportions.
“Trials 6 through 13 were independent acquisition trials….
“After 1320 seconds of trial 14, female-2 picked up the tool in the male-1/female-1 cage and brought it into male-2’s cage at 1950 seconds. Again male-2 watched her and the tool attentively but made no attempt to take it. At 1995 seconds female-2 dropped the tool and male-2 picked it up at once and got the pan at 2003 seconds.
“Female-2’s cooperative behavior then became firmly established: on 171 of the succeeding 186 trials female-2 passed the tool to male-2 by taking it through or to the door and giving it to him. The average duration of the 173 passing trials was 964 seconds… The shortest passing trial duration was 9 seconds, and duration was less that 120 seconds on 40 passing trials.” Beck, Benjamin B. 1973. “Cooperative Tool Use by Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Science. 182(4112):594-597. pp. 595.
“I suggest that female-2’s established sexual bond with male-2, characteristic for this species, uniquely predisposed her to cooperate with him. Other group members showed no evidence of learning to provide the tool to male-2 despite their eating food secured by him and despite their repeated observation of female-2.” Beck, Benjamin B. 1973. “Cooperative Tool Use by Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Science. 182(4112):594-597. p. 596.
“In summary, when only one tool is provided so that they [apes, unclear which species] can decide where to insert it, a substantial proportion of subjects can solve the table and platform tasks quite quickly. Furthermore, when subjects can choose between raking and pushing the reward out of the tube, they perform better in that task than when they can only push the reward. This means that implementing quite small procedural modifications that give the subjects more choices can substantially improve their performance and reveal capabilities not previously observed.” Call, Josep. 2010. “Trapping the Minds of Apes: Causal Knowledge and Inferential Reasoning about Object-Object Interactions.” In: The Mind of the Chimpanzee: Ecological and Experimental Perspectives. Lonsdorf, Elizabeth, S. Ross & T. Matsuzawa (eds). pp. 75-84. U. of Chicago Press. p. 78.
“One complementary way to tackle the question of causal knowledge in nonhuman animals is to present a task in which action does not occupy such a prominent role. Here is the basic procedure for one such task. A reward is hidden in one of two containers, and subjects witness some event involving a physical interaction between the reward and the containers. Using this information, they must determine the location of the reward. For instance, the subject witnesses the experimenter placing two boards flat on a platform. After raising a screen in front of the platform, the experimenter places a reward under one of the boards, (out of the subject’s view) so that it acquires a sloping orientation….
“One key feature of these causal inference experiments is that they are always composed of an experimental condition and a control condition. The control condition is perceptually as similar as possible to the experimental condition but, crucially, it differs in the underlying causal relations between its elements. Thus, subjects in the control condition of the inclined board experiment are confronted with a wedged board and a flat board placed side by side, whose appearance closely mirrors that of the stimuli presented in the experimental condition. Each of these two stimuli covers a hole in the platform where the reward can be hidden. This means that the reward cannot cause the board to slope, yet its appearance is very similar to that of the reward in the experimental condition, which the corresponding board does slope. In contrast to the experimental condition, subjects in the control condition showed no preference for the sloped surface (belonging to the wedge) over a flat one. Similarly, chimpanzees did not show a preference for the bottom cup in the balance experiment when the cups were mounted on a fixed sloping surface. Finally, apes did not preferentially select cups that were not shaken but were simply paired with the noise that food makes when shaken inside a cup.
“The point here is that innate or acquired predispositions for certain perceptual stimuli or configurations of stimuli cannot explain the success in the experimental conditions: otherwise such success would be also present in the control conditions…. Taken together these results suggest that apes attribute a special status to the experimental conditions. I have hypothesized that this special status is based on some grasp of the causal relations between objects–that is, of some level of causal knowledge that apes possess about their worlds.” Call, Josep. 2010. “Trapping the Minds of Apes: Causal Knowledge and Inferential Reasoning about Object-Object Interactions.” In: The Mind of the Chimpanzee: Ecological and Experimental Perspectives. Lonsdorf, Elizabeth, S. Ross & T. Matsuzawa (eds). pp. 75-84. U. of Chicago Press. pp. 80, 81.
“Although there was a positive transfer [of learning] between the modified table task and the gap task, other studies have not found any evidence of transfer across different trap tasks. Is this lack of transfer an indication of lack of causal knowledge? Not necessarily. Martin-Ordas et al. suggested that the lack of transfer may be related to a failure in analogical rather than causal knowledge. Although subjects may have knowledge about the causal relations within each task, they may not establish a connection between those relations across tasks. In other words, it is not a problem with relations between elements of the task, but with relations between relations. In this sense, subjects may understand each task as an isolated entity, but not a family of tasks that are functionally equivalent. Such a mixed picture is not totally surprising if one considers the literature in cognitive development in children. For instance, two of the key false-belief tasks (location change and deceptive box) do not correlate either–and when asked why, experts say that it is because in addition to false belief reasoning, each task also has different demands.” Call, Josep. 2010. “Trapping the Minds of Apes: Causal Knowledge and Inferential Reasoning about Object-Object Interactions.” In: The Mind of the Chimpanzee: Ecological and Experimental Perspectives. Lonsdorf, Elizabeth, S. Ross & T. Matsuzawa (eds). pp. 75-84. U. of Chicago Press. p. 82; reference: Martin-Ordas, G., J. Call & F. Colmenares. 2008. “Apes solve functionally equivalent trap-tube and trap-table tasks.” Animal Cognition. 11:423-430.
“Currently, the most promising hypothesis to explain the apes’ behavior in situations such as those reviewed in this chapter is that they are sensitive to the causal relations between objects and are capable of using that knowledge to avoid obstacles to obtain food and make inferences to locate hidden food.
“This does not mean that associative processes play no role in shaping the observed responses. Indeed, associative processes are very likely implicated in some aspects of problem solving, but I doubt that they are the only process contributing to the observed behavior. My proposal is that various animal species have at their disposal both associative and nonassociative processes, and that they engage them depending on the task at hand and the specific aspect of the task. Thus, observable responses are a mixture of processes, not the product of a single process. This so-called ‘composite hypothesis’ represents a clear departure from a Cartesian view that postulates a clear differentiation between the cognitive processes of humans and nonhuman animals. The composite hypothesis is also a departure from the view that the problem-solving behavior of certain organisms can be explained by invoking an intermediate process that is different from both associative and ‘higher-level’ reasoning. Without denying the existence of processes that are neither association nor reasoning, the composite hypothesis considers the joint contribution of all of these processes in finding solutions to a variety of problems.” Call, Josep. 2010. “Trapping the Minds of Apes: Causal Knowledge and Inferential Reasoning about Object-Object Interactions.” In: The Mind of the Chimpanzee: Ecological and Experimental Perspectives. Lonsdorf, Elizabeth, S. Ross & T. Matsuzawa (eds). pp. 75-84. U. of Chicago Press. p. 83.
“However, for a long time, cooperation has been employed in two different ways depending on the level of explanation considered. At the ultimate level, the partners’ behaviour is assumed to be adaptive and each individual increases its own fitness, with the emphasis on mutual benefits. At the proximate level, attention is shifted from outcomes to mechanisms; for cooperation to occur, partners must be aware of each other’s purpose: they act together, and questions address their possible motivations and intentions. However, both interpretations share the same assumption, namely that partners behave as participants involved in a shared goal: at present, cooperation usually means that partners aim to collaborate. Little consideration is given to the study of behaviour patterns which result in common effects without implying the use of a common tactic. Therefore, we use another term aimed at avoiding such difficulties, namely coproduction, which we define as the production of a common effect by two or more behaving individuals….
“While many instances of coproduction have been described in primates, reports of experimental coproduction are scarce.” Petit, Odile, C. Desportes & B. Thiery. 1992. “Differential Probability of ‘Coproduction’ in Two Species of Macaque (Macaca toneana, M. mulatta).” Ethology. 90:107-120. pp. 107-8.
“In contrast to the term coproduction, coaction does not consider the results of the action.” Petit, Odile, C. Desportes & B. Thiery. 1992. “Differential Probability of ‘Coproduction’ in Two Species of Macaque (Macaca toneana, M. mulatta).” Ethology. 90:107-120. p. 111.
“In the first series of tests [of Tonkean Macaques], lasting 11 d[ays], pieces of bananas were placed under 4 stones weighing 25, 35 (2 stones) and 45 kg. There were 319 instances of individual action and 24 of coaction. In the second series also lasting 11 d, raisins were placed under 2 stones weighing 45 kg. There were 371 instances of individual action and 4 of coaction (including 1 case where 3 subjects acted simultaneously)….
“Four of the 8 subjects involved in moving stones participated in instances of coaction…. 18 of the 28 instances of coaction led to stones being moved:… When sliding stones, both partners acted simultaneously. In lifting, usually, one subject started and the second one followed immediately after the first signs of stone motion. In most instances of moving, all partners fed… Finally, it is worth noting that coaction was not limited to kin-related partners: 44% of instances were performed by unrelated subjects….
“…coactors were significantly more effective than individuals in moving the heaviest stones which demonstrates that coaction resulted in coproduction….
“Subjects often remained passively beside others unsuccessfully attempting to move a stone. In 2 instances, individuals were observed unsuccessfully trying to move the same stone in opposite directions…. Also, there was no evidence that individuals learnt to act together as there was no increase in the number of coactions performed across days.” Petit, Odile, C. Desportes & B. Thiery. 1992. “Differential Probability of ‘Coproduction’ in Two Species of Macaque (Macaca toneana, M. mulatta).” Ethology. 90:107-120. pp. 111, 113, 114.
“Manipulation of the same stones by two individuals appeared to be relatively frequent in the Tonkean group but rare or absent in rhesus groups….
“In addition to the low rates of agonistic interactions in the Tonkean group, risks also appeared to differ between groups: several instances of biting were recorded in both rhesus groups compared to none in the Tonkean group.” Petit, Odile, C. Desportes & B. Thiery. 1992. “Differential Probability of ‘Coproduction’ in Two Species of Macaque (Macaca toneana, M. mulatta).” Ethology. 90:107-120. pp. 115, 116.
“A minimal threshold of social tolerance appears to be a prerequisite for coaction in a task such as moving stones. The two instances of coaction observed in one of the rhesus groups support this interpretation: they were performed by an oestrous female and a male at a time of strong mutual attraction between them.” Petit, Odile, C. Desportes & B. Thiery. 1992. “Differential Probability of ‘Coproduction’ in Two Species of Macaque (Macaca toneana, M. mulatta).” Ethology. 90:107-120. p. 117.
“Planning ahead in order to achieve a goal is solidly present during the second year of life, with the earliest inkling of this process beginning in the first year.” Keen, Rachel. 2011. “The Development of Problem Solving in Young Children: A Critical Cognitive Skill.” Annual Review of Psychology. 62:1-21. p. 2.
“Likewise, Marteniuk et al. found that if the subsequent action requires precise perceptual motor action such as placing the object into a tight-fitting hole as opposed to releasing it into an open container, then the hand’s approach is slower, has lower peak speed, and has a longer deceleration as the hand approaches the object.” Keen, Rachel. 2011. “The Development of Problem Solving in Young Children: A Critical Cognitive Skill.” Annual Review of Psychology. 62:1-21. p. 5; reference: Marteniuk, R.G., C.L. MacKenzie, M. Jeannerod, A. Athenes & C. Dugas. 1987. “Constraints on human arm movement trajectories.” Can. J. Psychol. 41:365-78.
“By presenting the same object (a ball) and encouraging the infant to sometimes throw it down and sometimes fit it into a hole, we might observe kinematic differences that forecast infants’ upcoming action. If infants reached similarly on all trials, we would conclude that the ball’s visible properties of size and shape determined the reach, rather than plans for future movement. Ten-month-olds were tested because infants younger than this have trouble with the throwing motion. Both peak and average speed of the approach for the ball were lower when the subsequent action was precise compared to imprecise. We concluded that infants are capable of planning two-stage actions, shown by the first stage being affected by the upcoming action of the second stage.” Keen, Rachel. 2011. “The Development of Problem Solving in Young Children: A Critical Cognitive Skill.” Annual Review of Psychology. 62:1-21. p. 5.
“By using this simple situation of offering food on a spoon with the handle oriented in different directions, we were able to study problem solving over a wide age range of children less than two years of age…. The most primitive strategy, termed ‘feedback-based strategy’ by McCarty et al., results in the ulnar [bowl end facing away from thumb end of hand] or bowl-end grip [grabbing by the bowl end of the spoon]…. Only when the expected food fails to arrive in the mouth does the 9-month-old appear to recognize the mistaken grip and correct it. The second stage, ‘partially planned strategy,’ is perhaps the most interesting. In this stage, which was most typical of our 14-month-old group, the child picked up the spoon in both orientations with the preferred hand, but on the way to the mouth realized there was a problem if the spoon had been sized in an ulnar grip. Solutions were many. Sometimes the child laid the spoon down on the table, twirled it until the handle pointed toward the preferred hand, then proceeded to pick it up again with that hand. Sometimes the child transferred the spoon to the nonpreferred hand, resulting in a radial grip for transport to the mouth. And sometimes the child maintained the ulnar grip in the preferred hand but twisted hand and arm to get the food into the mouth….
“Adults are quite good as assessing how a grip on an object will result in a future awkward posture, and they avoid it. Rosenbaum et al. have termed this the desire for end state comfort. That is, adults choose a hand or a grip that may be awkward initially but at the goal state will be comfortable. At 14 months, infants either do not mind the awkward end state of their arm and hand, or they are dead-set on using their preferred hand and will put up with the awkward end state. Two studies have tested children between 2.5 and 6 years of age and found that throughout this period, children do not plan grips that will end in a comfortable hand position….
“At 19 months of age, children executed a fully planned strategy…. They noticed the handle’s orientation and used it to guide their selection of which hand to extend and grasp the handle. They appeared to know in advance that the radial grip is the most efficient and comfortable, so as the spoon’s handle alternated to the left and the right, they alternated their choice of hand. In this way, those 19-month-olds achieved radial grips on every trial, abandoning the preferred hand’s awkward grip in favor of end state comfort with the nonpreferred hand.” Keen, Rachel. 2011. “The Development of Problem Solving in Young Children: A Critical Cognitive Skill.” Annual Review of Psychology. 62:1-21. pp. 8-10; references: McCarty, M.E., R.K. Clifton & R.R. Collard. 1999. “Problem solving in infancy: the emergence of an action plan.” Dev. Psychol. 35:1091-1101; Rosenbaum, D.A., F. Marchak, J. Barnes, J. Vaughan, J. Slotta & M. Jorgenson. 1990. “Constraints for action-selection: overhand versus underhand grips.” In: Attention and Performance XIII. Jeannerod, M. (ed) pp. 321-42. Erlbaum.
“… we presented children, 30 to 32 months of age, with the rod and tube task. The basic task consisted of the experimenter pushing a toy into the middle of a clear tube, then placing it in a mount in front of the child. Next, three rods differing only in length were arranged just beyond the tube, and the child was asked to select one in order to retrieve the toy. Only the longest rod was able to push the toy out of the tube; the others were shorter and could push the toy a little way but not far enough to retrieve it. This problem is fairly easy for this age child, and most solved it readily….
“After six trials of simple straight rods, a more difficult length problem was presented to test for transfer. The three rods were all the same overall length, but now crosspieces prevented full insertion into the tube. Again only one rod had the crosspiece placed close enough to one end so that the rod could be inserted far enough to expel the toy. Crosspieces on the other rods were placed toward their middle, resulting in partial insertion. If children transferred the concept of length as the characteristic that determined the effectiveness of a tool, they should realize that the length beyond the crosspiece was the portion of the rod that mattered, rather than overall length. Even after much trial and error, and repeatedly observing that the crosspiece prevented the rod from going into the tube, children failed at this task, with success on 45% of trials.
“In followup studies, we determined it was not the visual distraction of the crosspiece that confused children, but rather the necessity to see variation in the overall length of the rods. In other words, children 2.5 years of age did not evaluate the rod’s length except in relation to its overall length. It is as if the children could not coordinate their knowledge about the rod and tube into a coherent whole. They knew that a rod could be used to dislodge the toy from inside the tube. They also knew that length of the rod determined success. Through trial and error they learned that only the portion of the rod beyond the crosspiece would go into the tube, but they did not combine these pieces of knowledge to guide a correct choice among the three rods with crosspieces.” Keen, Rachel. 2011. “The Development of Problem Solving in Young Children: A Critical Cognitive Skill.” Annual Review of Psychology. 62:1-21. pp. 14-5.
“We presented 36-month-olds with both the rake and the rod and tube task, followed by a task that required sequencing both actions. The rake and the tube tasks were presented in their most simple form, not requiring tool selection among alternatives, with just a single effective tool provided. For the rake task, children were presented with a ball out of reach and given a rake that could retrieve it. For the tube task, a toy was pushed into the center of a clear tube and a single rod was provided that fit the tube. All children received four trials on each task. The coordination task followed immediately. The tube with toy inside was mounted as before, the rod was placed beyond reach, and the rake was placed within reach. The question was whether children would use the rake to retrieve the rod, then use the rod to expel the toy from the tube. Eight trials were given, with the experimenter providing hints (e.g., tapping the head of the rake and saying ‘This might help’ if the child failed to solve the problem after one minute) and eventually giving a full demonstration of the entire action sequence if the child remained unable to succeed.”
“Although children had previously performed both actions immediately prior to the coordination task, most found it extremely difficult to figure out what to do. Only four out of 16 children succeeded in sequencing their actions to obtain the toy with no help from the experimenter. An additional six children succeeded after verbal hints, five needed the full demonstration, and one never succeeded. Sequencing two different actions, each of which has a different goal, requires the child to bring together solutions from two problems. It seems that if a child can solve problem A and problem B independently, he/she should be able to sequence the solutions to succeed in problem A+B. But this was not the case.” Keen, Rachel. 2011. “The Development of Problem Solving in Young Children: A Critical Cognitive Skill.” Annual Review of Psychology. 62:1-21. p. 15.
“… cognitive studies … are more interested in the planning phase of action than in the execution of tool-use gestures.” Bril, Blandine. 2015. “Learning to Use Tools: A Functional Approach to Action.” In: Francophone Perspectives of Learning Through Work: Professional and Practice-based Learning. Filliettaz, Laurent & S. Billett (eds.). pp. 95-118. p. 97.
“An extended view of tool-use action could be generalised and summarised as follows: Acting in everyday life presupposes the capacity to perform goal-directed actions, that is, the faculty to produce conclusive behavioural sequences that bring the agent nearer to the objective. A distinction is consequently called for between the intentional aspect of the action (the goal to be achieved) and its operational aspect (the manner in which the goal is achieved).” Bril, Blandine. 2015. “Learning to Use Tools: A Functional Approach to Action.” In: Francophone Perspectives of Learning Through Work: Professional and Practice-based Learning. Filliettaz, Laurent & S. Billett (eds.). pp. 95-118. p. 99.
“Depending on the level of analysis, the number of degrees of freedom varies greatly. As far as joints are concerned, the upper limbs, for example, are generally considered to have seven degrees of freedom, the whole body about 102, but at the level of muscles, the number of degrees of freedom is as high as 103 and 1014, if the level of neurons is to be considered…. As a result, it is this great number of possibilities of action that guarantees the flexibility needed to adapt action to local circumstances. Depending on the level of analysis, the main question is then: how are these degrees of freedom controlled? How is a system, with an infinite number of possibilities that would be impossible to control, reduced to a controllable system?” Bril, Blandine. 2015. “Learning to Use Tools: A Functional Approach to Action.” In: Francophone Perspectives of Learning Through Work: Professional and Practice-based Learning. Filliettaz, Laurent & S. Billett (eds.). pp. 95-118. pp. 101-2.
“In sum, the mastering of a technical skill depends on the capacity of an organism to set up the constraints of the system according to the demands of the task and to mobilise the degrees of freedom of the system adaptively. At a behavioural level, the unfolding of the action may be viewed as an emergent process, at the interface of information available to the organism (affordances) and the set of constraints associated with the task.” Bril, Blandine. 2015. “Learning to Use Tools: A Functional Approach to Action.” In: Francophone Perspectives of Learning Through Work: Professional and Practice-based Learning. Filliettaz, Laurent & S. Billett (eds.). pp. 95-118. p. 103.
“The quality of the result of an elementary action will determine its relation with the next. It is then easy to understand that this dynamics of chaining elementary actions and their consequences on the productive process is [more?] heavily dependent on the level of mastery of the elementary action that [than it?] is on the mastery of the technique. This leads to the hypothesis that fine-tuning of the elementary action determines the ability to ‘plan’ the whole sequence of operations or subgoals necessary to reach the goal. It is not difficult to see that a very good knowledge of the method but no experience in the elementary action will not help achieve anything at all.” Bril, Blandine. 2015. “Learning to Use Tools: A Functional Approach to Action.” In: Francophone Perspectives of Learning Through Work: Professional and Practice-based Learning. Filliettaz, Laurent & S. Billett (eds.). pp. 95-118. p. 106.
“In other words, we consider the behaviour of the actor on the basis of the functional demands that have to be satisfied to succeed in solving the task at the level of the elementary action, whoever the actor involved is, be it a person or a robot. That is, we differentiate several layers of parameters, first those constituted by the task constraints [that depend on the goal objects and not the actor, and that are satisfied by “functional parameters”] and then those under the control of the organism that perform the task, in other words, the control parameters, the regulatory parameters and the movement parameters.” Bril, Blandine. 2015. “Learning to Use Tools: A Functional Approach to Action.” In: Francophone Perspectives of Learning Through Work: Professional and Practice-based Learning. Filliettaz, Laurent & S. Billett (eds.). pp. 95-118. pp. 106-7.
“The layer of functional parameters specifies the topology of the task, through relevant parameters including both geometrical and dynamical aspects: in the case of percussive actions, they include kinetic energy, point of percussion and the angle of blow. These are independent of the actor and apply whether the actor is a human or a non-human or a robot.
“To satisfy task constraints, the actor must generate specific values of functional parameters.” Bril, Blandine. 2015. “Learning to Use Tools: A Functional Approach to Action.” In: Francophone Perspectives of Learning Through Work: Professional and Practice-based Learning. Filliettaz, Laurent & S. Billett (eds.). pp. 95-118. p. 107.
“If, as we argue here, the movement performed when using a tool is idiosyncratic, it is not the movement that is imitated…. These authors [Byrne & Russon] scrutinise different animal behaviours, commonly viewed as imitation and that stricto sensu are not. The interesting point here is that referring to different levels of behaviuor, they show that what is imitated is not at the level of the elementary action itself, but at the level of the elaboration of sequences of coordinated action.” Bril, Blandine. 2015. “Learning to Use Tools: A Functional Approach to Action.” In: Francophone Perspectives of Learning Through Work: Professional and Practice-based Learning. Filliettaz, Laurent & S. Billett (eds.). pp. 95-118. p. 108; reference: Byrne, R. & A. Russon. 1998. “Learning by imitation: A hierarchical approach.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 21:667-721.
“The learning process is, therefore, defined as a process of discovering and exploiting the functional properties of the task, as repetition is often considered the guarantee that the motor pattern of the action will be imprinted and consequently easily accessible in the future. Following Bernstein during learning, one repeats ‘not the means for solving a given motor problem, but the process of its solution, changing and improving the means’. The learner learns ‘how to find a solution to a motor problem, in other words how to act’. This activity ‘repeating without repetition’ leads to an exploratory behaviour or to a search strategy among the vast amount of possible solutions…
“The different periods encountered in the learning process may correspond to different regions of stability. To each region of stability in turn corresponds a particular pattern of action, that is to say, different strategies, some being more efficient than others.” Bril, Blandine. 2015. “Learning to Use Tools: A Functional Approach to Action.” In: Francophone Perspectives of Learning Through Work: Professional and Practice-based Learning. Filliettaz, Laurent & S. Billett (eds.). pp. 95-118. p. 110; reference: Bernstein, N.A. 1996. “On dexterity and its development.” In: Dexterity and its development. pp. 1-235. Latash, M.L. & M.T. Turvey (eds.). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
“Indeed, the expanded brain size, human-like wrist and hand anatomy, dietary eclecticism and potential tool-making capabilities of ‘generalized’ australopiths root the Homo lineage in ancient hominin adaptive trends, suggesting that the ‘transition’ from Australopithecus to Homo may not have been that much of a transition at all.” Kimbel, William & B. Villmoare. 2016. “From Australopithecus to Homo: the transition that wasn’t.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371:20150248. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0248. p. 8.
“One trait that has often been regarded as definitively mammalian is the presence of three ear ossicles, signaling the complete detachment of the articular from the lower jaw and the final loss of the old reptilian jaw joint….
“The fourfold origin of the mammalian ear brings two points into sharp focus. First, we should expect that closely related animals will often evolve in parallel, especially in ways that are related to basic adaptations….
“The second point is an essentially analytical truth. All clades begin with a cladogenetic event – a speciation – and every speciation generates two sister clades. Therefore, the average number of systematic differences separating any two sister clades must, by definition, be of exactly the same magnitude as the average number of such differences between two sister species. All differences between sister taxa, at any level of the Linnaean hierarchy, will ultimately be found in almost all cases to be minor differences of the sort that distinguish sister species within a genus.
“It follows that higher taxa, and their supposed evolutionary importance, are illusions born of pervasive extinction and pervasive human ignorance. As that ignorance dissipates, the illusion of higher taxa evaporates with it. If, following a speciation event, major adaptive differences appear later on between the descendants of two sister species, they do so as a result of subsequent anagenesis and cladogenesis within each clade. Speciation events themselves never correspond to major adaptive innovations. Adaptive shifts are real, but they are not abrupt; and so we cannot expect differences between cladistically defined higher taxa to be adaptively significant.” Cartmill, Matt. 2012. “Primate Origins, Human Origins, and the End of Higher Taxa.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 21:208-220. pp. 213, 214.
“The origin of mammals was not an event. It was a gradual, widespread historical process, involving the slow accumulation over fifty million years of a hundred small apomorphies, often driven by inevitable trends that caused key features to appear in parallel in multiple lineages.” Cartmill, Matt. 2012. “Primate Origins, Human Origins, and the End of Higher Taxa.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 21:208-220. p. 215.
“Humanness is not a coherent package. We have known since the 1960s that our terrestrial bipedality evolved more than two million years before the onset of what was long held to be ‘… the fundamental human characteristic, that is the great development of the brain. If Ardipithecus is a hominin, then canine reduction similarly preceded terrestrial bipedality. If Ardipithecus is a hominin and an above-branch arboreal quadruped, many ‘hominoid’ apomorphies traditionally analyzed as adaptations for suspensory posture and locomotion must have evolved in parallel in at least six different groups of Y-5 catarrhines (Homo, Gorilla, Pan, Pongo, Oreopithecus, and gibbons), sometimes for unrelated reasons.” Cartmill, Matt. 2012. “Primate Origins, Human Origins, and the End of Higher Taxa.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 21:208-220. p. 217.
“If our family tree within the genus Homo is as bushy and speciose as some like to think, then parallel evolution was also rampant throughout the later Pleistocene, with brain enlargement and correlated cranial changes taking place independently between 1.0 and 0.3 Mya in the local Homo populations of Africa, Java (Ngandong), Europe (Neandertals), and perhaps in other isolated demes. Even at the species level, modern Homo sapiens (whatever that means) seems to have come into existence in Africa in a cascade of fits and starts, in which small novelties of anatomy and behavior that appeared and persisted in local demes were gradually assembled into a complex that could be successfully exported, with some foreign admixture, to other parts of the world.” Cartmill, Matt. 2012. “Primate Origins, Human Origins, and the End of Higher Taxa.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 21:208-220. pp. 217-8.
“Innovation can be the result of asocial learning or a combination of asocial and social learning, but it must be novel.” Carr, Kayleigh, R. Kendal & E. Flynn. 2016. “Eureka!: What is Innovation, How Does It Develop, and Who Does It?” Child Development. 87(5):1505-1519. p. 1508.
“Thus, it is advantageous to assign beneath the ‘innovation’ umbrella the terms of independent invention, when novel behavior results from asocial learning, and modification, when social influences are directly implicated.” Carr, Kayleigh, R. Kendal & E. Flynn. 2016. “Eureka!: What is Innovation, How Does It Develop, and Who Does It?” Child Development. 87(5):1505-1519. p. 1508.
“Although few in number, examinations of tool-use innovation in children have revealed one consistent finding: Children are poor innovators.” Carr, Kayleigh, R. Kendal & E. Flynn. 2016. “Eureka!: What is Innovation, How Does It Develop, and Who Does It?” Child Development. 87(5):1505-1519. p. 1509.
“There are a number of hypothesized contributors or precursors to the innovation process. These include, but are not limited to, causal understanding, insight, curiosity, exploration (discovery learning), divergent thinking, and creativity. They do not equate to innovation and alone are not sufficient to produce it.” Carr, Kayleigh, R. Kendal & E. Flynn. 2016. “Eureka!: What is Innovation, How Does It Develop, and Who Does It?” Child Development. 87(5):1505-1519. p. 1510.
“Exploration is particularly potent in its combination with divergent thinking (essentially the opposite of functional fixedness)…. While originality links divergent thinking and creativity, they are not synonymous; one can demonstrate good divergent thinking without demonstrating creativity. Conceiving multiple potential solutions to a puzzle does not imply they will be good, useful, or workable. In contrast, typical definitions of creativity require that creative ideas, behavior, and problem solving be both original and valuable.” Carr, Kayleigh, R. Kendal & E. Flynn. 2016. “Eureka!: What is Innovation, How Does It Develop, and Who Does It?” Child Development. 87(5):1505-1519. p. 1511.
“A number of potential sources of innovation have been identified, all of which are deemed capable of introducing new cultural variation into a population. These include, as listed by Mesoudi et al., chance factors (i.e., accidents and copying errors), novel invention (be it through trial and error, insight, or exploration), refinement (modification and improvement), recombination, and exaptation (the application of behavior to a new function).” Carr, Kayleigh, R. Kendal & E. Flynn. 2016. “Eureka!: What is Innovation, How Does It Develop, and Who Does It?” Child Development. 87(5):1505-1519. pp. 1512-3; reference: Mesoudi, A., K. Laland, R. Boyd, B. Buchanan, E. Flynn, R. McCauley, … & C. Tennie. 2013. “The cultural evolution of technology and science.” In: Cultural evolution: Society, technology, language, and religion. pp. 193-216. Richerson, P.J. & M. Christiansen (eds.) MIT Press.
“Although controversial, we believe many innovations are likely to be beneficial and adaptive for the individual and the population in the event of their successful social transmission. This complies with the human literature wherein there is the implication that innovations should represent an improvement upon current behavior and allow us to formulate not only solutions to problems but increasingly effective and efficient ones, enabling culture to evolve.” Carr, Kayleigh, R. Kendal & E. Flynn. 2016. “Eureka!: What is Innovation, How Does It Develop, and Who Does It?” Child Development. 87(5):1505-1519. p. 1514.
“We believe the inclusion of intentionality as an innovation criterion for children is unrealistic and unnecessary. Our argument is threefold. First, the ability to plan behavior develops gradually throughout childhood. This is especially true of the more cognitively complex and flexible advance planning, requiring one to anticipate action outcomes, in which children do not show higher levels of proficiency until aged 9-10 years or older…. Second, like insight, intentionality is difficult to determine. It is often indicated verbally when an intention is broken but arguably less so when it is met. Third, whether arising from accidental occurrence or intentionality, novelty impacts upon an individual’s future behavior when it is learned and repeated, both individually and more widely.” Carr, Kayleigh, R. Kendal & E. Flynn. 2016. “Eureka!: What is Innovation, How Does It Develop, and Who Does It?” Child Development. 87(5):1505-1519. pp. 1514-5.
“In the physical realm, a behavioral innovation is a new, useful, and potentially transmitted learned behavior, arising from asocial learning or a combination of asocial and social learning, that is produced so as to successfully solve a novel problem or an existing problem in a novel manner.” Carr, Kayleigh, R. Kendal & E. Flynn. 2016. “Eureka!: What is Innovation, How Does It Develop, and Who Does It?” Child Development. 87(5):1505-1519. p. 1515.
“The aim [for their classification system] is to remove some of the focus from the source of the innovation and allocate it instead to the outcome.” Carr, Kayleigh, R. Kendal & E. Flynn. 2016. “Eureka!: What is Innovation, How Does It Develop, and Who Does It?” Child Development. 87(5):1505-1519. p. 1515.
“The term ‘pharaoh’ was used of the king only properly from the New Kingdom [after 1550 BCE] on. Before then the term ‘pharaoh,’ literaly ‘great house,’ referred more broadly to the central state apparatus that evolved around the royal household.” Manning, Joseph. 2013. “Egypt.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 61-93. Oxford UP. pp. 64-5.
“While earlier scholarship on Asia and the Near East has often noted causal links between ‘hydraulic’ agriculture and centralized power, which led to a ‘despotic’ form of rule, irrigation and production were generally organized at the local level…. The state’s ability to move populations into new areas of exploitation was important, but most development should best be characterized as gradual adjustments from the Old Kingdom on through the building of canals, dykes, and so on. In no case was there ever developed a managerial bureaucracy centered on irrigation or production; there ‘never was an integrated system of basin or canal management or water allocation.’ the fundamental impetus for the creation, maintenance, and innovation of such systems was largely local and constituted ad hoc responses to demographic and environmental pressures.” Manning, Joseph. 2013. “Egypt.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 61-93. Oxford UP. pp. 68-9; subquote: Butzer, K.W. 1999. “Irrigation.” In: Encyclopedia of the archaeology of ancient Egypt. Bard, K.A. (ed). London. p. 382.
“City-states most often were not culturally distinct but rather existed among a network of otherwise independent city-states that shared a common language, material culture, and religion. This was true throughout the Near East in antiquity. The most obvious examples were the Sumerian and Akkadian city-states of southern Mesopotamia, the Canaanite city-states in Syro-Palestine, and later the Phoenician city-states on the Levantine coast. In this respect, the poleis of the Greeks, with which we are often more familiar, paralleled the earlier Near Eastern city-states. These city-state systems were quite extensive. We can identify at least fifteen major Sumerian city-states and similar numbers for the Canaanites and Phoenicians.” Garfinkle, Steven. 2013. “Ancient Near Eastern City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 94-119. Oxford UP. p. 95.
“By the end of the sixth millennium BCE there were towns and villages spread across the Near East. The settlement patterns were similar across the region as well. As the adoption of farming and animal husbandry became more widespread, settlements appeared of increasing size and complexity. This was especially true in Mesopotamia beginning in the Ubaid period [6000 – 4200 BCE]. Increasing social complexity and improved technological abilities were hallmarks of the Ubaid communities in Mesopotamia.” Garfinkle, Steven. 2013. “Ancient Near Eastern City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 94-119. Oxford UP. p. 98.
“Ultimately, the urban revolution that took place in southern Mesopotamia was on a scale that dwarfed all earlier settlement patterns in the Near East. This expansion of cities should be imagined in three ways. First, the size of the individual settlements grew exponentially. Second, the number of cities in close proximity to each other increased substantially, in densely populated southern Mesopotamia, the walls of one great city were visible to its closest neighbors. And finally, the percentage of the population that lived within the urban environment expanded tremendously.” Garfinkle, Steven. 2013. “Ancient Near Eastern City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 94-119. Oxford UP. p. 100.
“Improvements in irrigation, the use of draft animals to draw seeder plows, and better tools for harvesting and processing grain all allowed for a tremendous growth in productivity in southern Mesopotamia.” Garfinkle, Steven. 2013. “Ancient Near Eastern City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 94-119. Oxford UP. p. 100.
“We know from later administrative and legal texts that assemblies continued to play a role in Mesopotamia throughout antiquity. The assemblies appear to have handled a variety of local issues, including the trying of certain crimes, on behalf of the king…. … the assemblies, and the rights of urban residents, actually grew over time in the Near East.” Garfinkle, Steven. 2013. “Ancient Near Eastern City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 94-119. Oxford UP. p. 110.
“The basic building block of these communities was the household. The economic patterns of the Near Eastern city-states were based entirely on the interactions of the great and small households. The resulting social networks were the product of negotiations among these households.” Garfinkle, Steven. 2013. “Ancient Near Eastern City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 94-119. Oxford UP. p. 111.
“An individual’s place in society was based on his association with a particular household. Most significant for individuals was membership in a familial household. And for the heads of those households, this likely meant additional privileges and responsibilities, such as membership in the local assembly. Various officials, especially priests and military officers, belonged to one of the great institutional households, such as temple and palace, and therefore had more than one household affiliation.” Garfinkle, Steven. 2013. “Ancient Near Eastern City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 94-119. Oxford UP. pp. 111-2.
“The growth of state power was accomplished in cooperation with local groups, such as shepherds and merchants, who often performed specialized functions. Critically, these individuals, often organized in professional groups, retained a great deal of independence from the crown. Membership in professional organizations was most often hereditary and professional hierarchies were based on criteria, like kinship ties, over which the state had no direct control.” Garfinkle, Steven. 2013. “Ancient Near Eastern City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 94-119. Oxford UP. pp. 112-3.
“More permanently, a substantial percentage3 of the population was dependent laborers, bound to an institution that supported them with rations. Among the dependent laborers, many received rations for only part of the year and were othersie expected to work on subsistence plots or to hire themselves out….
“Alongside the constraints imposed by the local environment, the internal mechanisms of exchange were more of a determining factor in socioeconomic organization than other issues like foreign trade. Hence, the prominence of redistribution to provide for the vast system of dependent labor that characterized early Mesopotamia. This was an economy in which chattel slaves, in large part because of the high cost of their maintenance, were not economically significant. And debt slavery, which was commonplace, was a source of grave concern to the central administration because it affected the availability of dependent laborers.” Garfinkle, Steven. 2013. “Ancient Near Eastern City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 94-119. Oxford UP. pp. 113-4.
“As the urban population grew, over the course of the fourth and early third millennia BCE, the central administration moved from an emphasis on organizing distribution of rural surplus and of trade goods, and the control of some corvee labor for the maintenance of canals and public buildings, to the management of production as well. This established the patterns for the tributary economy that remained characteristic of city-states throughout their history in the ancient Near East….
“This was not a rational bureaucracy but rather a patrimonial administration in which the organizing principles of the large households were extended in scale and authority.” Garfinkle, Steven. 2013. “Ancient Near Eastern City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 94-119. Oxford UP. p. 114.
“Indeed, the military structure presents perhaps the biggest contrast between the organization of the city-states and that of the succeeding territorial kingdoms. The larger kingdoms pioneered the use of standing armies, and the army became a new pathway to elite status within the community. This was already the case in the twenty-fourth century BCE in the first great experiment with larger state formation in the Near East, that of Sargon of Akkad.” Garfinkle, Steven. 2013. “Ancient Near Eastern City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 94-119. Oxford UP. p. 115.
“The era when the city-state was the dominant form of political community in the Near East lasted from the fourth millennium BCE down to the beginning of the second millennium BCE. Even after this long epoch, city-states remained a vital part of the Near East in peripheral and coastal areas in spite of the growth of territorial and imperial states. Indeed, while individual regimes in the Near East were often fragile, and frequently did not outlast a single dynasty, the cities themselves were the most durable expression of civilization. Uruk, the earliest and largest of the Mesopotamian city-states, was still among the largest and most productive urban centers of the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid empires 3,000 years after its entrance into the historical record.” Garfinkle, Steven. 2013. “Ancient Near Eastern City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 94-119. Oxford UP. pp. 116-7.
“When we survey the biological worlds, we find only two groups of organisms that practice large-scale warfare: human beings and ants. It should not be surprising that both groups also construct huge and highly cooperative societies, albeit organized on very different principles.” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. p. 110.
“Just as between-group competition nurtures cooperation and within-group competition destroys it, external war (war between societies) tends to be a force of destructive creation, and internal war (war within societies) tends to be merely destructive….
“But if it’s [the outcome of a war] inconclusive, it will not be a force of cultural group selection. This is a very important point: what makes war creative is not how many people are killed. What matters is the effect on cultural evolution….
“Cultural evolution can also take gentler forms, however. One alternative to genocide is ethnocide, or culturcide. This is when the losing group is not physically destroyed, but forcibly assimilated into the culture of the winners….
“In reality, empires rarely pursue deliberate programs of cultural destruction. Assimilation happens gradually and is mostly voluntary. For a subject people, it often makes sense to adopt the imperial culture, because of its high prestige and because it is in the economic interests of the subjugated.” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. pp. 116-7.
“The distinguishing characteristic of human combat is the ability to strike from a distance coupled with mobility. This worked against large dangerous animals on the Pleistocene steppe, including sabertooth cats and mammoths….
“Such a fluid way of war was also horribly effective in human-on-human violence, both in its ancient forms and as used by modern guerrillas.” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. pp. 129-130.
“Furthermore, not all areas with farming societies developed into states. New Guinea is the most striking such area, because New Guineans started growing crops 10,000 years ago–nearly as early as the first farmers in the Fertile Crescent of southwest Asia. The highlands of New Guinea continued to be home to small-scale farming societies for 10 millennia! Other areas that resisted the rise of hierarchy are found in tropical Africa and South America. Numerous ethnic groups that live in the mountainous regions of Asia stretching from the hills of Indochina into eastern Afghanistan also failed to evolve inequality and state-level organization, despite being surrounded by empires from ancient times.” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. pp. 138-9.
“We know that, over the past 10,000 years, larger polities consistently outcompeted smaller ones, with the result that 99.8 percent of people today live in countries with populations of one million or more.” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. p. 140.
“… under conditions of intense warfare and a real existential threat to groups that are defeated, we should expect a strong selection not only for larger size, but also for effective military hierarchies.” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. p. 159.
“In his summary of the evidence, Fry makes several excellent points. He agrees with Pinker that after the rise of large-scale states, or roughly over the past 5,000 years, the overall trend in violence had been downwards. But he fervently disagrees about the trajectory during the 5,000 years following the adoption of agriculture, but before the rise of the states. He argues that violence, and especially warfare, actually increased before it started to decline.” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. p. 169; references: Fry, D.P. (ed.) 2013. War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views. Oxford UP; Pinker, S. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Declined. NY: Penguin Books.
“My primary interest is in cultural group selection, and thus I define warfare as lethal group-on-group violence, no matter what form it takes (battle, raid, ambush of stray individuals, etc.).” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. p. 170.
“Here then, is the logic of my explanation. Rampant warfare leads to intense selection for larger society size. In order to make this transition, a number of seemingly disparate, but actually synergistic cultural traits need to coevolve. One necessary bundle of cultural traits is what makes agriculture possible–not only knowledge of how to cultivate plants and herd livestock, but also new social institutions such as property rights. Another set of cultural traits was large-scale rituals that bound together cooperative groups. Because both agriculture and large-scale rituals are driven by a third factor, warfare, in principle they could arise in any sequence.” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. pp. 174-5.
“Growing food instead of gathering it, requires more work and has substantial health costs, but it makes land much more productive. Gardens and fields can be cultivated near a stronghold, providing greater security against sudden attack. Tilled fields can support many more warriors than the same area under forest. The military value of agriculture is huge and trumps the costs. When farmers and foragers come into contact, farmers always win eventually and farming spreads. And with farming spreads private property.” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. p. 175.
“Once property evolves, so do differentials in wealth. There is a kind of inevitability about it, so much so that social scientists came up with a name for it: the Matthew Principle. It goes back to what Jesus Christ said in the Gospel According to Matthew (13:12), in the New testament: ‘For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.’ In short, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. p. 175.
“The invasions of horse archers from the steppe into southwest Asia triggered a cascade of interrelated military, political, and religious upheavals. The centuries around 500 BCE saw a military revolution and intensification of warfare, which made agrarian states much more vulnerable to extinction. At the same time we see the spread of qualitatively new Axial religions and the rise of unprecedentedly large Axial empires.” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. p. 200.
“While hoplites [infantry with big wooden shields against arrows and in tight formations which horses would not charge] were a reasonably effective way of dealing with the steppe raiders, heavy infantry cannot be used offensively against cavalry, which has the advantage of much greater mobility. Heavy infantrymen did not solve the strategic dilemma of the agrarian states. Should they try to protect all settlements, while running the risk of being picked off piecemeal. Or should they concentrate all their troops and abandon the countryside to the plunderers?
“There was only one way out of this quandary: drastically to increase the size of the state.” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. p. 201.
“‘Big Gods’ are supernatural beings who have three important abilities. First, they are capable of looking inside your head to find out what you think. In particular, they know whether you really intend to fulfill your part of the bargain, or whether you are planning to cheat. Second, Big Gods care whether you are trying to be a virtuous person or not. And third, if you are a bad person, they can punish you….
“So large groups in which belief in a moralistic, all-knowing punisher became rooted would be more cooperative than the atheistic ones….
“Once the belief in a supernatural, moralistic punisher is pervasive in a group, non-belief becomes personally costly. People will not make deals with you, because you cannot be trusted.” Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. pp. 207-8.
“For all age groups [children 14, 16, 18, 20, and 22 months old], the difficulty of using a tool increased with the spatial distance between the toy and the tool [cardboard and rake-like]….
“Taken together, the results suggest that the development of tool use emerges from a continuous and gradual process rather than abruptly. What mechanisms could underlie this progression over the period from 14 to 22 months, in particular as concerns the difficult conditions of spatial gap, where the toy cannot be retrieved without understanding the tool’s functionality? At 14 months, even if infants almost always express their interest in the toy at some time during the trial, they seem to be mainly interested in exploring the tool without keeping the goal of retrieving the toy in mind. At 16 months, infants are more likely to focus their attention on the goal of retrieving the toy, often ignoring or discarding the tool. From 22 months onward, infants seem to become able to spread their attention simultaneously on the toy and the tool and to make the link between the two.” Rat-Fischer, Lauriane, J. K. O’Regan & J. Fagard. 2012. “The emergence of tool use during the second year of life.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 113:440-446. pp. 445, 446.
“Our findings [in experiment with series of university student tower builders in competition to build highest] are consistent with the notion that learners should rely more heavily on social information when ‘decision-making forces’ are weak. In situations where payoffs are transparent, little cultural heritability is expected. In contrast, when payoffs are difficult to judge, or feedback about payoffs is delayed until after an individual’s own decisions have been made, greater heritability is likely.” Caldwell, Christine & A. Millen. 2010. “Conservatism in Laboratory Microsocieties: Unpredictable Payoffs Accentuate Group-Specific Traditions.” Evolution and Human Behavior. 31:123-130. p. 128.
“Cultural evolution proceeds much more rapidly than genetic evolution, such that innovations in one area (such as the invention of agriculture, bows and arrows, or smart phones) can be rapidly tracked by innovations in other areas (such as marriage rules, body armor, and social media, respectively).” Glowacki, Luke, M. Wilson & R. Wrangham. 2017. “The evolutionary anthropology of war.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.014. p. 5.
“In behavioral ecology, aggression is viewed as a strategy by which animals attempt to acquire and defend resources essential to their reproductive success. Animals are predicted to use aggression when the anticipated costs are low compared to the expected benefits.
“Based on evolutionary game theory, behavioral ecologists argue that fatal fighting should only occur when the benefits are unusually large, the ‘value of the future’ is unusually low (i.e., when an opponent has a short life expectancy anyway, and thus has nothing to lose), or when the attackers experience unusually low costs in the effort to kill.” Glowacki, Luke, M. Wilson & R. Wrangham. 2017. “The evolutionary anthropology of war.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.014. p. 5.
“Coalitionary killing of adult conspecifics is unusual and appears limited mainly to social insects such as ants, social carnivores such as lions, wolves, and spotted hyenas, and a few primates, including humans and chimpanzees. The species distribution of such coalitionary killing appears best explained by the imbalance-of-power hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, the fission-fusion grouping patterns of species such as chimpanzees create opportunities for attackers to kill victims with very little risk.” Glowacki, Luke, M. Wilson & R. Wrangham. 2017. “The evolutionary anthropology of war.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.014. p. 6.
“… a number of studies have systematically examined intergroup relations in small-scale societies and mostly found similar results supporting the generalization that warfare was a common feature of intergroup relationships among hunter-gatherers….”
“While the imbalance-of-power hypothesis may be sufficient for explaining the evolution of psychological mechanisms favoring coalitionary killing in humans, by itself it does not explain the full range of behaviors found in human warfare, including the greater risk-taking in human warfare, peaceful intergroup relationships, and the strategic use of alliances and war to advance group functional aims.” Glowacki, Luke, M. Wilson & R. Wrangham. 2017. “The evolutionary anthropology of war.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.014. pp. 9, 10.
“One of the best-supported hypotheses about the role of warfare in shaping human psychology is the male-warrior hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, men have psychological mechanisms that facilitate their ability to form coalitions for intergroup conflict against out-groups. Aggression against outgroups functions to protect or acquire reproductive opportunities. The male warrior hypothesis makes a number of specific predictions about male psychology. For example, men will engage in greater discrimination and ethnocentrism than women, and they will be more severe against male outgroup members than female outgroup members. Compared to women, men should more easily reconcile following a conflict within the group, as has been found. There are varying levels of support for these predictions but substantial evidence exists that men and women have different coalitional psychologies that appears to have resulted from intergroup aggression.” Glowacki, Luke, M. Wilson & R. Wrangham. 2017. “The evolutionary anthropology of war.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.014. p. 11.
“In most small-scale societies, warriors obtain private benefits from their participation that are mediated by culture and these can provide powerful incentives for participation. The ‘cultural war-risk’ hypothesis posits that the additional risk-taking in human warfare is explained by individual-level private incentives that alter the payoffs from participating in risky combat. While all members of a successful group gain access to collective goods such as territory, through cultural institutions private incentives are available to those who participate in conflict. The types of incentives vary across cultures but commonly include status, increased reproductive opportunities, and allies.” Glowacki, Luke, M. Wilson & R. Wrangham. 2017. “The evolutionary anthropology of war.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.014. p. 11.
“Group selection arguments for the evolution of parochial altruism [group cohesiveness] face challenges in explaining why an extraordinary degree of altruism would develop in humans but not in other species with similar levels of intergroup violence, such as chimpanzees, lions and wolves. Since rates of intergroup killing and levels of genetic differentiation between subsistence-level groups appear similar between chimpanzees and human hunter-gatherers, intergroup killing alone seems insufficient to explain the extraordinary prevalence of prosocial behavior in human societies. Additionally, given that hunter-gatherers (like chimpanzees) seek out low-cost opportunities to kill enemies, it is not clear that extraordinary mechanisms are needed to explain participation in hunter-gatherer warfare.” Glowacki, Luke, M. Wilson & R. Wrangham. 2017. “The evolutionary anthropology of war.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.014. p. 12.
“Archaeology and history have chronicled repeated cases in which military innovations have enabled early adopters to sweep away their rivals and establish empires, including horses, chariots, crossbows, gunpowder weapons, and the like.” Glowacki, Luke, M. Wilson & R. Wrangham. 2017. “The evolutionary anthropology of war.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.014. p. 13.
“Despite the appeal of cultural group selection in accounting for the variability of human warfare, there is limited empirical evidence in support of it as a mechanism of cultural change. Among the few empirical tests was one conducted by Soltis and colleagues who examined data from New Guinea on rates of group formation and extinction and between-group variation. They found that group selection was a plausible mechanism for rates of change on the order of 500-1000 years, but that different mechanisms were needed to explain cultural change that takes place on faster timescales.” Glowacki, Luke, M. Wilson & R. Wrangham. 2017. “The evolutionary anthropology of war.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.014. p. 13; reference: Soltis, J., R. Boyd & P. Richerson. 1995. “Can group-functional behaviors evolve by cultural group selection?” Current Anthropology. 36(3):473-494.
“Given that warfare is widespread in some societies, it is likely to be adaptive in those contexts–otherwise it would have ceased to exist. This argument does not require any differences in the genetic predispositions of people in war-like versus pacific societies. Instead, cultural traits, including social institutions such as warfare and the socialization of boys to be either warriors or peace-leaders, affect the survival and reproductive success of people adopting those cultural traits. If war tended to decrease the reproductive success of participants, war would become extinct. This would be the case whether war is the result of biological evolution, cultural evolution, or some mix of these.
“War may be adaptive under some conditions, but not others. Under certain conditions, warfare clearly does not pay.” Glowacki, Luke, M. Wilson & R. Wrangham. 2017. “The evolutionary anthropology of war.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.014. p. 15.
“… evolutionary studies of conflict have relied heavily on the game theory concept of the Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS), a strategy that if adopted by a population cannot be invaded by another strategy. Whether a given strategy is an ESS does not depend on whether it is encoded in genes or cultural traditions. Strategies that promote their own replication become more common: strategies that impede their own replication become extinct. For example, the adoption of agriculture appears adaptive in some ecological contexts; agricultural populations thus have replaced hunter-gatherers throughout most of the well-watered parts of the world. But in regions not suitable for agriculture, other subsistence strategies are more successful, such as pastoralism in drier grasslands and cold tundras. Agriculture is an ESS in well-watered landscapes; societies that don’t adopt it are quickly replaced by societies that do adopt it, once agricultural technology reaches an area….
“Similarly, warfare appears to be an ESS under a broad range of ecological conditions. The patterns of warfare in agricultural empires that emerged in different parts of the world are strikingly similar.” Glowacki, Luke, M. Wilson & R. Wrangham. 2017. “The evolutionary anthropology of war.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.014. p. 15.
“We will argue that in periods where the primary focal species was caribou, the bow and arrow was present in the north. When the focal species was moose, bison, or sea mammals, the atlatl was the dominant choice of technology. This holds true until the self-bow was replaced by the Asian War Complex, entering North America across the Bering Straits after 1300 BP. With introduction of the backed and recurve bows, armor, wrist guards, and other features, the bow became the dominant and resilient technology except within the context of hunting sea mammals.” Maschner, Herbert & O. Mason. 2013. “The Bow and Arrow in Northern North America.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 22:133-138. p. 133.
“Sometime in the early Holocene, approximately 12,000 years ago, evidence of the bow and arrow appeared in the north….
“At the time of their use, caribou, sheep, and perhaps elk would have been the dominant species harvested. Furthermore, they occur just before the massive dart end-blades that dominate the Northern Archaic Tradition, which coincide with the expansion of larger ungulates in the region between 7,000 and 4,000 years ago. There is little evidence of the bow and arrow during the period of the Northern Archaic Tradition….. We conclude that the self bow of the early Holocene did not have enough power to bring down the large ungulates of the middle Holocene such as bison and moose….” Maschner, Herbert & O. Mason. 2013. “The Bow and Arrow in Northern North America.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 22:133-138. pp. 133-135.
“By 1,300 years ago, there was a change. From the eastern Aleutian Islands eastward to Kodiak and south to the Northwest Coast, defensive landforms were occupied in substantial numbers. Something clearly had shifted both technology and social dynamics, and all evidence points to the introduction of the Asian War Complex, highlighted by the recurved bow and other compound varieties….
“The adoption of the bow and arrow in interior Alaska, where it was used for the first time on moose, also occurred about 1300 BP…. The fact that the bow and arrow were now being used on moose is testament to the development of a much more powerful bow capable of taking the largest mammals. This is the first time this occurred.
“By 1,000-200 years ago, there is extensive evidence of conflict from the Bering Sea to arctic Alaska and across Canada to Greenland. This co-occurred with the transition to large corporate households on the north Pacific rim, where social complexity arose before any evidence of economic complexity.” Maschner, Herbert & O. Mason. 2013. “The Bow and Arrow in Northern North America.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 22:133-138. pp. 136, 137.
“Here [with the cultural microevolution of Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman or Boyd & Richerson] , ‘culture’ is defined as ‘information capable of affecting individuals’ behavior that they acquire form other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission.’ ‘Social transmission,’ ‘social learning,’ and ‘cultural transmission’ are used interchangeably to denote the nongenetic transfer of learned information from one individual to another. ‘Cultural trait,’ ‘cultural variant,’ and sometimes ‘meme’ are ued to refer to the information (e.g., ideas, attitudes, skills) that is transmitted.” Mesoudi, Alex. 2017. “Pursuing Darwin’s curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution.” PNAS. 114(30):7853-7860. p. 7853.
“Selection-like ‘content’ or ‘direct’ biases favor the acquisition and transmission of some cultural variants over others due to their memorability or effectiveness, just as some alleles have higher fitness than others.” Mesoudi, Alex. 2017. “Pursuing Darwin’s curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution.” PNAS. 114(30):7853-7860. pp. 7853-4.
“…models of the evolution of culture show that cumulative culture is particularly effective at increasing mean population fitness beyond the population fitness of noncumulative cultural species. A major research question is therefore ‘What allows human culture to be uniquely cumulative?’
“There has been much focus on high-fidelity social learning, which is needed to preserve modifications over successive generations such that they can accumulate. It was initially suggested that imitation (i.e., the copying of bodily actions rather than products) was key to this high fidelity. This claim seems doubtful, given that chimpanzees can imitate tool use techniques with high enough fidelity for alternate techniques to stabilize in different groups. Rather than an ‘imitation vs. no-imitation’ dichotomy, perhaps humans are more effective, spontaneous, or compulsive imitators. Other comparative work has suggested roles for prosociality and language-mediated teaching. As well as individual cognitive abilities, cumulative culture may also require favorable demography, such as larger populations or populations partially connected via migration, as is typical of human societies. Currently, there is no consensus on which of these factors is key to explaining uniquely human cumulative culture.” Mesoudi, Alex. 2017. “Pursuing Darwin’s curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution.” PNAS. 114(30):7853-7860. p. 7855.
“Although not even the strongest advocates of demography would argue that population size should always predict cultural complexity, the notion that demography has no effect at all is surely also incorrect in light of the positive evidence cited above.” Mesoudi, Alex. 2017. “Pursuing Darwin’s curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution.” PNAS. 114(30):7853-7860. p. 7856.
“There is also evidence of cross-cultural variation in social learning, specifically higher social learning in collectivistic East Asian societies than in individualistic Western societies….
“Whether individual variation in human social learning is nonadaptive noise, reflects frequency-dependent equilibria between information producers and scroungers with no group-level benefit, or adaptive at the group level by maintaining a mix of innovation and tradition is unknown.
“Cultural variation in human social learning suggests that we acquire norms via social learning that, in turn, affect our degree of social learning. This process may generate cultural dynamics entailing the ‘social learning of social learning’….” Mesoudi, Alex. 2017. “Pursuing Darwin’s curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution.” PNAS. 114(30):7853-7860. p. 7857.
“It appears that interrelated religious elements that sustain faith in Big Gods have spread globally along with the expansion of complex, large-scale human societies. This has occurred despite their rarity in small-scale societies or during most of our species’ evolutionary history.
“Connecting these two puzzles, we argue that cultural evolution, driven by the escalating intergroup competition particularly associated with settled societies, promoted the selection and assembly of suites of religious beliefs and practices that characterize modern prosocial religions…. The causal effects of religious elements can interact with all of these domains [cooperation & norms] and institutions, and this causality can run in both directions, in a feedback loop between prosocial religions and an expanded cooperative sphere.
“It was this cultural evolutionary process that increasingly intertwined the ‘supernatural’ with the ‘moral’ and the ‘prosocial.’ For this reason, we refer to these culturally selected and now dominant clusters of elements as prosocial religions.” Norenzayan, Ara, A. Shariff, W. Gervais, A. Willard, R. McNamara, E. Slingerland & J. Henrich. 2016. “The cultural evolution of prosocial religions.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. doi:10.1017/S0140525X14001356. p. 3.
“Yet, according to Baumard et al., increased wealth made religious morality possible rather than the other way around. Baumard and colleagues selected eight regions of antiquity, from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica, and looked at the several variables in each region over time, concentrating on energy capture per capita and moral notions of ‘personal transcendence.’ They argue that critical moral developments in Greece (Stoicism, Skepticism), North India (Buddhism, Jainism) and North China (Confucianism, taoism) all sprouted like Athena from the head of Zeus within a narrow 200-year time span in the Axial Age (500-300 BC) once energy capture per capita reached a critical threshold.” Atran, Scott. “Moralizing religions: Prosocial or a privilege of wealth?” Commentary on: Norenzayan, Ara, A. Shariff, W. Gervais, A. Willard, R. McNamara, E. Slingerland & J. Henrich. 2016. “The cultural evolution of prosocial religions.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. doi:10.1017/S0140525X14001356. p. 20.
“Recent studies have confirmed long-held intuitions that belief in gods is rooted in the motivations to feel in control and to alleviate fear or stress….
“Living in large communities comes with many advantages but also places the individual in a somewhat paradoxical position. The structural complexity of larger communities requires the individual to relinquish control over the surroundings, with social conventions limiting personal behavioral repertoire. In other words, to enjoy the benefits of living in a more stable and less threatening environment, one renounces a greater freedom over one’s actions. The emergence of these new social restrictions on behavior gives rise to different kinds of uncertainties, which directly extend into the religious realm – more complex communities create special places to access the gods (temples) and an elite of religious experts (priests), thus distancing individuals from smaller gods. In order to reduce the uncertainty in this more complex and restrictive social environment to an optimal level, one possibility is to modify internal belief systems. Big Gods, we would argue, emerged in increasingly complex societies driven by a motivation toward optimization of long-term predictability in a more regulated and restrictive environment….
“Therefore, by believing in Big Gods that reward good deeds and punish bad actions, believers create an external ‘placeholder’ for the excessive cognitive uncertainty caused by a reduced control over the environment when living in very large and complex communities. In contrast, the less complicated social structure in smaller societies offers individuals a greater influence over the events and outcomes affecting them. This influence allows them to act on reducing uncertainty without needing very powerful, moralizing Big Gods to gain an optimal sense of control.” Brazil, Inti & M. Farias. “Why would anyone want to believe in Big Gods?” Commentary on: Norenzayan, Ara, A. Shariff, W. Gervais, A. Willard, R. McNamara, E. Slingerland & J. Henrich. 2016. “The cultural evolution of prosocial religions.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. doi:10.1017/S0140525X14001356. p. 24.
“… we argue that a more realistic hypothesis is that polytheistic societies on the borders of, and often also threatened or dominated by, more developed and successful societies raised people’s feelings of uncertainty. They therefore developed a rigid religious system in which there was no room for uncertainty, as all will unfold according to the plan of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-benevolent (to His worshipers) God. This eliminates the uncertainty associated with one or numerous gods with human characteristics.” Dutton, Edward & G. Madison. “Even ‘Bigger Gods’ developed amongst the pastoralist followers of Moses and Mohammed: Consistent with uncertainty and disadvantage, but not prosociality.” Commentary on: Norenzayan, Ara, A. Shariff, W. Gervais, A. Willard, R. McNamara, E. Slingerland & J. Henrich. 2016. “The cultural evolution of prosocial religions.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. doi:10.1017/S0140525X14001356. p. 28.
“Belief in BG [Big Gods] is not necessary to explain prosocial behavior. There are many sources of morality and prosocial behavior. Morality can spring from the passions (Hume) and from reason (Kant)….
“At minimum, the theory [of Norenzayan et al] ought to provide a more textured distinction between the beneficent effects of prosociality and the destructive effects of oppression and submission (e.g., persecution and punishment of dissenters).” Krueger, Joachim. “Hell of a theory.” Commentary on: Norenzayan, Ara, A. Shariff, W. Gervais, A. Willard, R. McNamara, E. Slingerland & J. Henrich. 2016. “The cultural evolution of prosocial religions.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. doi:10.1017/S0140525X14001356. p. 33.
“The point of our comment is that prosocial religions may have contributed to cultural progress partly by improving self-control. Evidence linking religiosity to self-control was reviewed by McCullough and Willoughby (2009), though their work was motivated by seeking to explain the link between religion and longevity, not morality. Moreover, many findings were correlational, rendering ambiguous what caused what. The link between self-control and moral behavior has clear support, such as reflected in experimental evidence that people perform immoral actions more when their self-control is impaired than when fully functioning.
“Self-control can fail for several reasons, reflecting its structural and motivational bases. Specifically, it can fail because of unclear standards, insufficient monitoring, depletion of regulatory resources, and a heightened emphasis on immediate desires rather than long-term enlightened self-interest. We suggest that religion can help reduce each of those pitfalls.” Reynolds, Tania & R. Baumeister. “Self-control, cultural animals, and Big Gods.” Commentary on: Norenzayan, Ara, A. Shariff, W. Gervais, A. Willard, R. McNamara, E. Slingerland & J. Henrich. 2016. “The cultural evolution of prosocial religions.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. doi:10.1017/S0140525X14001356. p. 37.
“In addition to the pendulum motion [of city-state culture with imperial unification], a few long-term social and economic trends characterize Mesopotamian history. In particular, the south underwent a progressive ruralization between the period of the early city-states and the time of the large territorial empires. Both textual evidence and archaeological surveys show that the percentage of urban population in southern Iraq decreased steadily from about 80 percent during the urban explosion of the mid-third millennium to less than 20 percent during the mid-first millennium BCE. Once can also observe an overall shift in the pattern of settlement as the center of population moved progressively from south to north. Finally, there was a dynamic interplay between periods of political centralization and weakness in southern Iraq and western Iran; large regional states or empires rose in Iran during periods of political fragmentation in southern Mesopotamia and vice versa.” Barjamovic, Gojko. 2013. “Mesopotamian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 120-160. Oxford UP. p. 124.
“Here the term ‘empire’ is left intentionally vague to denote any type of larger territorial state that held political hegemony over several cities and kinship groups or tribes through military power, formed a supranational elite, and developed a sense of state ideology distinct from that of the individual communities it controlled.” Barjamovic, Gojko. 2013. “Mesopotamian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 120-160. Oxford UP. p. 127.
“The importance of taxation as a source of state income appears to have increased through time. The early city-states did not support themselves by levying taxes on land or its produce but set aside prebendary lands to generate an economic surplus for the support of its central institutions. Imperial taxation strategies would focus on systems of corvée that were tied into existing systems of land ownership and as a rule that state did not tax income. Work was not taxed directly either, and levies were collected primarily as tribute on a provincial basis through local officials.” Barjamovic, Gojko. 2013. “Mesopotamian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 120-160. Oxford UP. p. 127.
“The Phoenician states were alternately under Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian imperial control, but the indirect way in which all three empires chose to incorporate them suggests that in spite of their importance as a source of income and strategic resources the trading communities were left politically intact because this allowed them to perform the functions required by the empire more efficiently. The income generated by trade was subject to state taxation in various ways. Evidence for a direct tax on trade is attested, for example, in the Old Assyrian Period. The state could also exact rights of preemption on select cargo at favorable prices, demand of private merchants that they carry out trade on behalf of state institutions, and impose customs or tolls on imported goods.
“The phenomenon of keeping the trading communities under indirect control is by no means unique, but relates to issues of outsourcing economic risk, and the fact that private initiative may have been better suited to manage transnational commercial enterprises. Social issues were probably at stake as well, as suggested by the frequent physical separation of the state administration and trading communities. This gave rise to trading quarters that were often removed from the rest of the city and could have local institutions and even their own legislation. Examples of dual cities, such as medieval Cairo and Fustat, Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, or Westminister and the City, may also be in evidence in ancient Mesopotamia, such as at Kanes and Ur. The first member of each pair served as the theater of local political power and was settled by individuals whose wealth was typically tied to ownership of land and its associated social status. The latter were separate communities dedicated mainly to trade and populated by those whose wealth was tied to the fickle and socially volatile proceeds generated by commerce.” Barjamovic, Gojko. 2013. “Mesopotamian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 120-160. Oxford UP. pp. 128-9.
“Direct imperial economic strategies would generally be associated with production, and include the founding of settlements dedicated to a particular purpose (cattle stations, military establishments, logging communities, ports of trade), establishing a communication infrastructure (roads, postal systems), and promoting agricultural specialization (viticulture, olive growing, date cultivation, etc.) through a control of labor forces.” Barjamovic, Gojko. 2013. “Mesopotamian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 120-160. Oxford UP. p. 129.
“Sargon of Akkade founded the first imperial state in Mesopotamia circa 2350 BCE. It lasted for more than a century and became a prototype of statecraft and political leadership….
“Sargon came from the Semitic-speaking population settled on the northern periphery of the great Sumerian cities, where traditions of centralized government and systems of land tenure may already have existed. Mesopotamian history contains many such examples of northern groups expanding into the populous but politically fragmented south….
“In other respects the early Akkadian empire may be described as an exploded city-state, whose economic basis and ideological superstructure were founded on time-tested urban traditions…. The empire was a territorial addition to the city of Akkade, craeted through military conquest by a standing army in a self-reinforcing process of expansion and militarization.
“The new combination of political traditions, which led to the formation of a private royal army within the framework of a civic political system, may in itself have been an engine for territorial expansion.” Barjamovic, Gojko. 2013. “Mesopotamian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 120-160. Oxford UP. pp. 129, 130.
“Traditional civic institutions and local elites were left with an extensive measure of self-government in exchange for the payment of imperial grain-taxes and the provision of workers for state-administered building projects.
“Instead, large workforces were recruited to extend the irrigational system in southern Mesopotamia, allowing substantial new territories to be brought under the plow. This allowed the foundation of new urban settlements in the space between the territories of the traditional city-states. Imperial administrators were appointed to oversee these new agricultural centers, whose surplus production was reserved primarily for the imperial capital and the army.” Barjamovic, Gojko. 2013. “Mesopotamian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 120-160. Oxford UP. p. 130.
“A century after the fall of Akkade, the Ur III empire (ca. 2100-2000 BCE), with its royal capital located at Ur, once more brought the independent Mesopotamian city-states under centralized rule…. Local authority within this zone was maintained through governors appointed from the traditional ruling families of the city-states. In counterbalance to local tendencies the empire appointed military commanders to each city; this system was based on ‘new men’ appointed by the crown, and provided a venue of social mobility for loyal imperial servants.
“The sphere of the governors was essentially that of the city-state and its old temple institutions, retailored to fit the centralized framework of the empire. The domain of the military commanders was built on state dependents living on crown land. In parallel to the Akkadian empire, new administrative foundations were established in the urban countryside beyond the traditional authority of the city-states to function as hubs for the production and redistribution of state resources….
“Further out was a ring of allies and client states, often with direct ties to the royal family in Ur through dynastic intermarriage. The importance of this zone was primarily to secure the imperial frontier and keep open the trade routes leading to and from the center.” Barjamovic, Gojko. 2013. “Mesopotamian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 120-160. Oxford UP. pp. 131-2.
“The estate [archaeology of specific estate] was owned by an army general and his wife (herself a royal princess) and housed various industries, including a brewery, a textile workshop, a flourmill, a leather workshop, fields, canals, and orchards. The estate seems to have been located within the territory of the Umma province, but it formed an independent household that was run as a semiprivate enterprise….
“It remains to be seen whether this arrangement is representative of the way in which the agricultural hinterland of the Ur III state was organized. Its existence underlines the proposal that the success of the early Mesopotamian empires rested upon their ability to mollify the social and religious elite of the city-states on the one hand, and exploit an exceptional access to labor through mandatory public service on the other, so as to open up new farmland and generate a surplus production that was not tied to the traditional urban centers. One can argue that this remained an underlying feature of Mesopotamian imperialism in the centuries to come.” Barjamovic, Gojko. 2013. “Mesopotamian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 120-160. Oxford UP. p. 133.
“Following the collapse of the Ur III state, Mesopotamia reverted to a political landscape of city-states and tribal groups tied into networks of changing political alliances that could intermittently attain a character of loose imperial states [Zimrilim in Syria, state created by Samsi-Adad, state created by Hammurabi]….
“All three held political hegemony over several cities and kinship groups or tribes, built their power on military organization and elite creation, and developed a sense of ideology that was distinct from that of the individual communities they controlled. But they were also political entities in which monarchic rule was weak and intersected with group-oriented forms of governance to form a social structure based on authority that would transcend territorial demarcation. One can argue that they represent a hybrid model of organization, which connects the epoch characterized by micro-states and loose hegemonic empires in the third millennium BC to an era of organizationally integrated empires that followed from the second half of the second millennium BCE.” Barjamovic, Gojko. 2013. “Mesopotamian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 120-160. Oxford UP. pp.133-4.
“When Mitanni became caught up in a war of succession circa 1360 BCE Assur reclaimed its independence and began a process of rapid territorial expansion. The resulting state can be said to represent a culmination of the imperial drives in Mesopotamia, the biggest swing of the pendulum, so to speak. It existed for over three-quarters of a millennium and was able to act on a wider scale than any empire before it. It became a prototype for transnational imperialism, royal ideology, and court culture, and it established a model of imperialism that came to reach beyond its own history and the geographical area in which it had evolved.” Barjamovic, Gojko. 2013. “Mesopotamian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 120-160. Oxford UP. p. 137.
“Imperialism in Mesopotamia was tied to an urban world; the populous city-states had been the dominant form of social and political organization since the late fourth millennium BCE, and they formed the essential component of any larger state to rise in the region. General patterns of interaction between the urban centers and imperial superstructures are visible already from the earliest example of an empire in Mesopotamia. One recurring ambition was to incorporate agricultural land beyond the reach of the system of city-states and fill out the physical and conceptual space between them. This suggests that the window of operation for the early empires was limited, and that the political strength and status of the urban communities was difficult to control or transgress. The continued reappearance of empires on the other hand implies that they had organizational capabilities beyond those of their constituent components: they could concentrate efforts into the control of labor for large building projects and increase agricultural production. The surplus generated by the imperial organization went into elite consumption and the upkeep of large military forces.” Barjamovic, Gojko. 2013. “Mesopotamian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 120-160. Oxford UP. pp. 150-1.
“But there was never a process of ‘Persianization’ at work comparable to the process normally referred to as ‘Romanization’ among classicists….
“Even so, the relatively thin veneer of ideological and cultural integration achieved by the Achaemenids, combined with the enduring strength of local and regional traditions, is typical of large premodern empires. It was sufficient to allow stable rule for centuries.” Wiesehoefer, Josef. 2013. “Iranian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 199-231. Oxford UP. p. 214.
“… Alexander acted in Achaemenid fashion already before the death of his opponent Darius, not toward his Macedonians or the Greeks, but toward the non-Greek subjects and officials of the Great King and to Darius himself. Well versed in the prerequisites of Persian kingship and benefitting from his successes, he attempted to outdo his opponent in the virtues of a Great King, to let the splendor of the founder of the empire, Cyrus, shine on himself and to draw over high Persian dignitaries to his side. He was able to offer all those who changed sides positions and benefices comparable with their previous privileges. Therefore, it is wrong to suppose that those subjects did not feel deeply invested in Achaemenid rule and did not really care that much who was in charge. Alexander’s successes lent him and his policy the necessary charisma. However, he could not have afforded even a single defeat, and, after all, the final conquest of the Persian empire took him more than ten years.” Wiesehoefer, Josef. 2013. “Iranian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 199-231. Oxford UP. pp. 214-5.
“The three Iranian ‘world empires’ [Achaemenid 550-323 BCE; Arsacid-Parthian 250 BCE -224 CE; Sasanian 224-642 CE] stand out for their extraordinary military capacities. For a long time, no rivaling power was able to overcome them. That all three of them finally collapsed was not due to a gradual decline of military, political, or economic power but to the specific strategic planning and accomplishments of Alexander, Arashir [first Sasanian great king], and the Muslim generals.” Wiesehoefer, Josef. 2013. “Iranian Empires.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 199-231. Oxford UP. pp. 226-7.
“There were Greek poleis all over the Mediterranean world, from Emporion in the Pyrenees to Ai Khanoum in Afghanistan, and from Olbia at the mouth of the Bug River in Ukraine to Kyrene in Libya. Almost all these poleis had arisen or been founded in the period from 750 to 200 BCE, and as late as the sixth century CE some of them were still city-states, though most were just cities….
“A polis was a strongly institutionalized and centralized microstate consisting of one city (polis) and its immediate hinterland. There were in all approximately 1,500 poleis. Over 600 are attested in Greece proper; over 400 were colonies of Hellenized communities along the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea; and in addition there were over 300 Hellenistic foundations in the Near East as far as the Indus River. But there were never 1,500 poleis at the same time…. At any given point of time in the Classical period there were at least a thousand poleis, and that makes the ancient Greek city-state culture the biggest in world history.” Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2013. “Greek City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 259-278. Oxford UP. p. 259.
“The most urgent need of the polis as a habitation center was a sufficient supply of fresh water, and as a specific type of public monumental architecture many poleis were adorned with one or more fountain houses where the inhabitants could supplement the water drawn from wells in private houses.” Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2013. “Greek City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 259-278. Oxford UP. p. 265.
“But there are of course differences between the polis and the modern state. One is that the modern state is primarily identified with the government or the territory, whereas the polis, first of all, was identified with the people, that is, the citizens. A polis was the community of adult male citizens, and the name of the state was not the name of the country but the people. We use the toponym ‘Athens’ about the Athenian city-state; its ancient name was hoi Athenaioi (the Athenians) or Athenaion ho demos (the Athenian people).” Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2013. “Greek City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 259-278. Oxford UP. p. 268.
“In practice citizenship was defined as being born from citizens whereas, functionally, the citizens were those who participated in the running of the political institutions of one’s polis…. In a democracy the two definitions of citizenship coincided; in an oligarchy citizenship was restricted to those natural-born citizens who also fulfilled a census qualification; and in a monarchy, in the strict sense of the term, the monarch was the only person who was a citizen in the functional sense.” Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2013. “Greek City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 259-278. Oxford UP. p. 269.
“Both as a political and as a military organization the polis was a male society from which women were excluded. Religion was different. Here women took part in the rites and cults of both their household and the polis itself.” Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2013. “Greek City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 259-278. Oxford UP. p. 272.
“From a modern point of view the political institutions are often seen as a framework through which the state regulates community life. The Greeks took a different view of their polis. They took participation in political life to be a value in itself, and the political institutions were not seen as a frame of the polis but as the core of the polis.” Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2013. “Greek City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 259-278. Oxford UP. p. 272.
“Most poleis were split into two rival poleis, one of the rich, who supported oligarchy, and one of the poor, who preferred democracy. The rival parties could also be different ethnic groups living side by side in the same polis, a situation typical of poleis founded by colonists from several different city-states. Or the community could be polarized about two rival groups of rich contending for power. The result was almost constant political tension that often led to civil war, in which every group was ready to work hand in hand with a like-minded group in a neighboring city or in one of the powerful cities that led the shifting alliances of poleis. The members of both groups were therefore prepared to sacrifice the independence and autonomy of their city if, in return, they could keep or win power in the polis. Such a group was called a stasis, and the word was also used as the term for the civil war itself that often resulted from the splitting of rival groups.” Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2013. “Greek City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 259-278. Oxford UP. p. 273.
“Everywhere in the Mediterranean world Greek poleis formed complicated hierarchical networks of hegemonic poleis, independent poleis, and dependent poleis…. In the second half of the fifth century BCE almost all the approximately 330 members of the Delian League were dependent city-states that had been deprived of their autonomia by Athens. Syracuse came to rule all poleis in eastern Sicity, and so on.” Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2013. “Greek City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 259-278. Oxford UP. p. 273.
“War between poleis was endemic, and for most poleis war was the norm and peace the exception. Longer periods of peace were only experienced under the Roman principate.” Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2013. “Greek City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 259-278. Oxford UP. p. 273.
“From circa 500 BCE onward a constantly increasing number of poleis united to form federations. All poleis in a region, such as Phokis or Achaia, set up a koinon, a community with a kind of federal government responsible for defense and foreign policy, whereas all other matters rested with the individual poleis…. The subjugation of poleis due to conquest, the formation of alliances and federations, as well as the creation of the large Hellenistic monarchies had the result that, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, almost all poleis were dependent poleis.” Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2013. “Greek City-States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 259-278. Oxford UP. p. 274.
“Driven by competition for scarce resources in an age of improving climate, expanding population, economic growth, and pressure from neighbors, the leaders of the small city-states that started congealing in the eighth century [all dates BCE] struggled to deepen their organizational capacity and turn themselves into rulers of multicity states. Had they succeeded, as the Romans did in Italy, they would presumably–again like the Romans–have expanded their struggle and turned their territorial states into multiethnic empires.
“The Greek experience was entirely typical of processes that were operating all across Eurasia. In the early first millennium hundreds of Eastern Zhou city-states in northern China, scores of Ganes Valley city-states in India, and more than a thousand Mediterranean city-states struggled. This went on until a few larger territorial states–Jin, Qi, Chu, and Qin in China; Magadha in India; Macedon, Rome, and Carthage in the Mediterranean–swallowed them up in the mid-first millennium. Then the territorial states struggled until a few great empires–the Qin in China, Mauryan in India, and Roman in the Mediterranean–swallowed them too in the third century.” Morris, Ian. 2013. “Greek Multicity States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 279-303. Oxford UP. p. 280.
“By the eighth century, inland Sparta was already pursuing a coercion-intensive path, using violence to turn neighbors in Laconia and Messenia into dependent helots. Early Spartan history is particularly disputed, but it seems that by the sixth century (and probably much earlier) the Spartan state was moving in very peculiar directions. It developed high levels of human capital, in the form of extraordinary warriors who could train full-time thanks to helot farm labor, but the state needed very little physical capital since the warriors provided their own arms and rations. It therefore required minimal capacity for taxation and bureaucracy.
“According to Herodotus, Sparta tried to extend helotage into Arcadia [center of the Peloponnesian peninsula and north of Sparta] but it suffered a disastrous defeat around 560. Thereafter, Sparta shifted toward extending its power through bilateral agreements with other cities. Historians rarely consider this a path of state formation, yet the Peloponnesian League (as the Spartan organization is normally called) functioned to provide Sparta with by far the biggest hoplite army in Greece. It was, in effect, a coercion-intensive form of state formation requiring little capital and even less organizational capacity. Members paid no taxes before 382 but did provide troops, which freed Sparta from the need to train and pay bureaucrats or put garrisons in subject cities….
“Within certain limits, this low-end, coercion-heavy system worked well, but already by 500 simply having a strong phalanx was no longer enough. To defeat Persia in the early fifth century, Sparta needed Athens to provide a fleet, and to defeat Athens in the late fifth century, Sparta needed Persia to provide a fleet. Classical Spartan history was a constant struggle to maintain state power in an increasingly competitive and expensive environment without having to introduce reforms that would threaten the Spartan way of life.” Morris, Ian. 2013. “Greek Multicity States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 279-303. Oxford UP. p. 283.
“By 500 … I suspect that Athens, Miletus, and Samos had reached the point that they required grain imports in most years. The incentives to build state-funded fleets were growing, and since cities seem to have generated much of their revenue through indirect taxes on trade, the increasing scale of this trade to feed burgeoning cities also provided means to pay for fleets. Cities that followed this path started building navies and deepening state organizational capacity around 500, and it is probably no coincidence that the first democracies, run by the same men who rowed in the fleets, appeared at this time.” Morris, Ian. 2013. “Greek Multicity States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 279-303. Oxford UP. p. 284.
“The naval alliance formed in 478/7, which committed many small cities in the Aegean to paying annual phoros, made this [maintaining a naval fleet] possible. Athens could never have created such an organization without widespread fear of Persia; but had Athens not led the Aegean toward a multicity state that could pay for a fleet, Persia might well have brought Greece into its empire after all in the 460s or 450s.” Morris, Ian. 2013. “Greek Multicity States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 279-303. Oxford UP. p. 290.
“Between 800 and 300 the population of Greece probably increased tenfold, but instead of seeing incomes driven down to starvation levels, Greeks saw per capita consumption rise 25 to 50 percent, their total energy budgets growing from around 21,000 to at least 26,000 kilocalories per capita per day. Studies of stature, houses, urbanization, and real wages all suggest that fifth- and fourth-century Greece was one of the richest societies in the premodern world.
“The contribution of the multicity states to this economic boom remains unclear. Athens’ capital-intensive route certainly provided many of the institutions that economic historians normally assume are crucial for growth, including peace, suppression of piracy, a stable coinage, large markets with low tariffs, uniform weights and measures, reasonably transparent laws, and strong property rights.” Morris, Ian. 2013. “Greek Multicity States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 279-303. Oxford UP. p. 293.
“The Greeks lived in something of a power vacuum from 1200 until circa 580, when the Lydian empire moved against the Aegean coast. When Darius turned Persian attention seriously toward the Aegean around 520 the pressure intensified, setting off a process of rapid secondary state formation, in which Greeks modernized their own states to protect themselves from being forced into the larger Persian state. The victories over the Persians in 480-479 offered a unique opportunity to combine dozens of poleis into a taxpaying multicity state, and the Athenians seized this; but their own state formation set off vicious competition with Sparta and ultimately Syracuse, fueling further waves of secondary state formation in Carthage, Macedon, and Italy. After 410 the western Greeks faced relentless Carthaginian pressure, after 350 Macedon was a constant presence in the Aegean, and after 300 Rome gradually swallowed up all the Greeks.” Morris, Ian. 2013. “Greek Multicity States.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 279-303. Oxford UP. p. 299.
“To fill the ranks of the legions, growing numbers of recruits had to be admitted without independent means, that is, landless members of the country population. On discharge these came to depend on the state, and in particular their general, to secure for them a small plot of land for sustenance. This development turned the army of the last century of the republic into an increasingly potent weapon in the political struggles and rivalries of competing factions of the Roman aristocracy.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. pp. 413-4.
“In the process of consolidating his monarchy, Augustus set about terminating this social conflict [the dependency of retiring soldiers on their generals and thereby the impetus for civil war] by creating an institutional infrastructure that sought to regularize the retirement of the soldiery. The reform combined several elements. To finance discharge payments, a permanent fund was established that would receive the proceeds from the introduction of two new taxes. The land allotments to the veterans had caused considerable tension and discontent during the final decades of the republic. It was impossible to find sufficient unoccupied arable land in Italy. Confiscation and forced purchases on an extensive scale had been inevitable. During his reign Augustus gradually discontinued this much-hated practice. If given land on retirement, the legionaries would now receive it in newly founded colonies in the provinces. There the veteran communities might even help to consolidate Roman rule as props of the imperial order. But in the long term, it was more important that increasingly the soldiers began to receive a cash bonus instead of a plot of land. Finally, the burden on state finances was made more manageable by further extending the time of service required before retirement. Army strength was kept up by fewer people serving longer and numbers needing discharge payment were cut back.
“The most powerful institution of the Mediterranean world, the Roman army, had in large measure been tamed and the interests of the soldiery tied into the continuation of the imperial monarchy.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. p. 414.
“… early-modern and Roman war craft differed in one important respect. The latter was consolidated by the imposition of a Mediterranean-wide empire, with few real rivals left to challenge the might of Rome; the former was relentlessly driven on in an arms race fueled by intensifying competition of ever more compact regional monarchies in a state system where every attempt to establish hegemony failed. Then, whereas post-Napoleonic Europe brought the Darwinian military struggle of states to its logical conclusion in the mass mobilization of national armies, the Roman imperial army was increasingly recruited from the empire at large, rather than, as historically, from Italy. The exploitation of extensive and hegemonic empire would chart an alternative to the path of internal buildup dictated by the unabating pressures of foreign competition. Consolidation rather than continuous intensification is what characterizes Roman state formation under the rule of the Caesars.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. p. 415.
“During the long period of internal division [235 – 284 CE], the city of Rome had finally ceased to be the center of political power while emperors began to set up court in regional capitals. Power had irreversibly gravitated toward the provinces and the armies stationed there. In the course of the fourth century CE, the tendency to a regionalization of imperial power, with several co-emperors, alternated with brief interludes where particularly successful emperors managed to unite government under their authority.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. p. 415.
“In a long-term perspective, it is remarkable that the level of military capacity that the republic had had to build up to defeat Carthage in the Second Punic War (218-201 BCE) was more than enough to translate into a pan-Mediterranean hegemony during the second century BCE. No other foreign power could pressure Rome to a similar last-ditch effort again. Maintaining armies at half or two-thirds the size of the peak levels reached during the confrontation with Hannibal, the republic went on from triumph to triumph, acquiring a steadily expanding empire with one had tied behind the back, so to speak.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. p. 418.
“For the imposition of Roman hegemony on the greater Mediterranean world did in all likelihood cause a fall in the overall military costs borne by the region, not only in relation to the late republican civil war peak but also in more general terms as the armies of rivals and enemies were dismantled following defeat and the frequency of warfare decreased inside the enormous imperial territory. The other side of the coin was that resources had to be husbanded carefully to make ends meet. Substantial warfare on more than one front at a time was likely to overstrain the capacity of the imperial government. A rigid economy of force governed and constrained the deployment of the Roman military; it was not to be wasted indiscriminately. Hence we find, for instance, that most routine patrolling and combat of low-level threats from brigands and other such enemies of the ‘peace’ had to be left to local, independent militias….
“In the course of the first century CE, Italians ceased to constitute the majority in the legions, and soldiers were increasingly recruited in the provinces where they were stationed. All this eased pressure on the population of Italy and spread the burden of military service on a wider segment of the peoples of the empire.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. pp. 422-3.
“By and large, emperors succeeded in keeping control of the army, not to the extent of completely depoliticizing it but enough to contain the legions for long stretches of time. Instrumental to this remarkable achievement was the decision to garrison much of the army in the frontier regions away from Italy. Geographically dispersed and divided under separate military commanders, the provincial armies were unable to act in unison and were too far from the center of power to influence politics at court decisively.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. p. 424.
“With most of the army stationed safely away from Italy, the emperors retained in Rome a horse guard and the so-called praetorian guard, a corps made up of specially privileged infantry cohorts…. As the only sizable and strong military force left in Italy, the guard was protector of the monarchy but might also turn against the reigning emperor…. Emperors attempted to control this potential king-maker by dividing the command of the guard between two prefects and selecting the incumbents not from among their peers in the senate, but from the second tier of the Roman aristocracy, the equestrian order.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. pp. 424-5.
“A key component of the army and the imperial state apparatus was the officer corps, many of whom were appointed directly by the emperor…. Imperial interest in appointments reached right down to the level of centurions. These officers commanding the basic organizational units of some eighty men in the legions constituted the backbone of the Roman army…. Many of them would see service with different regiments and units as they were promoted and might on discharge be able to sport a career marked by stationing in distant and widely dispersed regions. Their wider circulation helped to preserve the mobility and loyalty of an infantry army, many of whose units would often remain garrisoned in the same area for decades with all the risks this entailed of putting down strong roots in the host society.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. p. 425.
“More importantly, as a political system, the empire had no clearly defined border. Rather it comprised territories under different degrees and modes of submission. At the center was Italy, privileged and tax-exempt, then the bulk of the empire divided into some forty to fifty taxpaying provinces, and, finally, a fluctuating number of client kingdoms and tribal chieftains.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. p. 426.
“As was the norm in ancient societies, the republic and its empire had been governed by a group of so-called honoratiores, an aristocratic elite who employed their own vast households, retinues, and wealth in service of the commonwealth. The emperor had emerged out of this group to claim leadership. This meant two things: the imperial household now came to function as the center of government and the old pluralist republican system had to be tailored to fit the need of the monarchy for stable rule. To achieve stability, the emperor had to give attention to three sources of disturbance and volatility under the republic: taxation, the populace of Rome, and political competition among the elite. Next to the army, large companies of tax farmers had emerged as a powerful and destabilizing force of late republican politics. Enormous concentrations of aristocratic landed properties had been tied up under these. This potential source of organized opposition, alternative center of power, and cause of provincial disaffection was significantly curbed when the choicest provinces were taken away from them and government took over responsibility for collecting the land taxes from the numerous communities of the realm. From now on, tax farming was mostly restricted to the imperial customs and excise duties as well as public and imperial properties. Under the republican influx of plunder and tribute, Rome had grown dramatically to become the biggest city of the Mediterranean world. The capital of the empire dwarfed the surroundings. Feeding it was a major challenge and its urban masses, hungry and volatile, a potential source of instability. The emperors took responsibility for organizing the food supply and continued the late republican practice of distributing a free grain dole to some 150,000 to 200,000 people. Coupled with extensive programs of monumental building and elaborate displays of public pageantry, this combined formula of ‘bread and circuses’ transformed Rome into a splendid metropolitan stage for the monarchy. The unparalleled level of conspicuous consumption made manifest and projected to the subjects and the world the unmatched power of the ruler.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. p. 429.
“At the core of this system was the imperial household staffed by a multitude of slaves, freedmen, and eunuchs. All these were, in a very direct sense, the emperor’s men. Marked by the ignominy and social opprobrium of servitude, this group would never be able to constitute an aristocracy that could compete with the emperor in its own right. Quite the reverse, the more fortunate and trusted of these retainers depended on their position in the imperial household to afford them with status and privileges that would raise them above the common lot of servants and ordinary people. This made the imperial slaves and freedmen eminently suited to manage the central administrative tasks of government…. … the slave-domestics of the imperial household could be relied upon to identify with the interests of the ruler. This was their raison d’etre, but also their great limitation. Government through such instruments alone would have been reduced to a feeble and fickle business, lacking in legitimacy and with little support in society, as Muslim rulers were later to experience at the end of the Abbasid Caliphate.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. pp. 429, 430.
“In Roman society, and the empire at large, aristocratic landowners represented a source of social power that could not be ignored. Their enormous accumulated wealth, command of vast retinues, and traditional authority constituted a concentration of power without and against which government could not easily function. They had to be admitted to share in the government of the monarch. Indeed, the Roman political elite expected this as its customary birthright; it had been defined and formed by its historical record of office-holding within the res publica…. Roman contemporaries explained the civil wars as an example of how ambition had broken through the bounds of virtue. No longer had the protagonists in the political competition been willing to bow to the interests of the common good and the patria. The monarchy, therefore, embarked on an ostentatious program for the restoration of public virtue… Honor was harnessed and the combative republican order domesticated to serve the emperors.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. p. 430.
“The two aristocratic orders of Roman society, the timocratic equestrian and the political senatorial, received firmer demarcation as the criteria for inclusion were made more demanding and the formal insignia, privileges, and ceremony of rank suitably brushed up…. As members of the second tier of the aristocracy, prominent equestrians from among the high-ranking officers in the army were picked to serve in a small, but slowly expanding number of trusted positions within the imperial administration. By the mid-second century CE, the tally had run to 110 ranked in a hierarchy defined by four levels of pay. The majority of these positions were procuratorships created to manage the many imperial estates scattered around the realm and oversee the collection of taxes in some of the territories. In addition, the equestrians held the position of governor in a number of minor provinces–Pontius Pilate for instance was in charge of Judea.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. pp. 430-1.
“… the monarchy also rested conspicuously on a claim to having restored the traditional republican constitution. The key to this was the senate. The old republican hierarchy of magistracies was modified and geared up keep the senators actively engaged in ruling the empire. After their terms of office, senators continued to be employed abroad as governors and commanders of legions and at home in administrative posts…. As the number of consulships was significantly increased with the addition of suffect consuls to the customary two who gave their name to the year, the prospects for the average senator of reaching the highest ranks even improved under this regime. But instead of popular assemblies, it was now the emperor who functioned as the arbiter of senatorial careers.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. p. 431.
“The most convincing estimates see imperial taxation as moderate. It is possible to form a considered, very broad estimate of the cost of the army based on our knowledge of basic legionary pay. The resulting totals seem to locate expenditure by the imperial government in the range of 5 to 7 percent of gross domestic product…. Archaeologists uniformly agree that material culture was more diverse and copious under the Roman empire than both before and after.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. p. 443.
“It was a significantly modified state-edifice which the reunification under rulers such as Aurelian (r. 270-276 CE), Diocletian (r. 284-305 CE), and Constantine (r. 306-337 CE) progressively brought about. First of all, the governmental organization and administrative apparatus had been enormously expanded. The few hundred aristocratic administrators, assisted by a few thousand slaves, that had sufficed during the principate was multiplied perhaps by an order of magnitude to reach 30,000 to 35,000. Secondly, it was a development very much of the provinces. Rome had effectively ceased to be the seat of government and the old senatorial aristocracy had lost ground. Even in Italy, ruling emperors withdrew from the ancient lady on the Tiber to set up court in Milan and later Ravenna. A new and much enlarged elite was taking shape on the basis of the military and equestrian branch of the emperor’s administration. Into this fast-growing cadre rose many of the prominent families that had previously dominated the councils of the many cities of the empire. The provincial takeover of the Roman world was capped, first when Diocletian revoked the freedom from land taxes that Italy had enjoyed as the privilege of victory since the end of the third Macedonian war in 167 BCE; and finally when Constantine founded a new splendid seat of government for himself on the Bosporus. Government was becoming much more of a presence in imperial society and, for better or worse, was moving closer to the subjects. But as the early-modern comparison leads us to expect, more intrusive rule also made it more difficult for government to remain united in one person. The story of how Diocletian was able to stabilize the empire under his rule is instructive. From his accession in 284 CE, he steadily worked during the next decades on taking out his many rivals. But to do that, he effectively found, step by step, that he had to appoint colleagues to lead armies against opponents. When victorious the colleague would then set up a friendly court in place of that of the defeated foe. In this way, Diocletian ended up with a system of four allied rulers, each governing their own section of the empire, but with himself as the acknowledged senior. This so-called tetrarchic arrangement did not last beyond the moment its creator chose to abdicate in 305 CE. The inbuilt potential for rivalry, and the power of the hereditary principle of succession, were too strong. Nevertheless, it would only be for brief interludes that any of the followng emperors were able to establish sole rule. The norm in the fourth and fifth centuries CE was that the empire would be divided between several rulers, in concert or in conflict.
“This late antique reconsolidation of Roman military hegemony used to be thought of as a state system in terminal decline. But that is the result of a perspective too narrowly focused on the northwestern part of the empire where the fifth century saw the disintegration of the imperial government and the rise of barbarian kingdoms. In the east, however, the reformed imperial state of Diocletian and Constantine proved more than durable. It lasted till the Arab conquests of the 630s or basically as long again as the previous years of the imperial monarchy. From a state formation perspective, the government that came out on the other side of the third-century crisis was more ambitious in scope; its organizational capacity had increased across the board.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. pp. 449, 450.
“During the years of crisis and division insecure emperors went searching for methods to shore up their desperately shaky legitimacy. Concord and unity were to be reinforced, their rule naturalized. The result was a more intrusive religious policy, at first based on an enhanced sense of the emperor’s divinity: Sol, Juppiter, Hecules. Greater demands were made on the loyalties of wide groups of subjects. It was these more ambitious religious policies which for brief periods spawned the active and infamous persecution of Christians by the Roman authorities in the second half of the third and the first years of the fourth century. Ironically, it was the very same ‘ecumenical’ impulse that eventually would elevate the much-maligned sect to favored status. The decisive step was taken under Constantine when he became convinced that the Christian God stood behind this attempt to win the empire to himself. The new creed did not tolerate imperial divinity, though. But Constantine and his successors would settle for less. Presenting the emperor as a thirteenth apostle or God’s anointed was quite ‘august’ enough when the world would go on to refer to the palace as ‘divine’ and imperial commands as ‘sacred’. For monotheism offered other advantages; it presented an image of the cosmos as the product of one, indivisible supreme force, just as empire and world ought to be governed by one sole power, and it was supported by a set of ‘codified’ teachings fixed in writing and with universalist aspirations. ‘Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the peoples’, the mission command was an ambition that spoke well to emperors that claimed to unite the world under their command. Christian and imperial universalism drew water from the same well.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. pp. 452-3.
“Few have paid much attention to Weber’s observation that the ambition of modern bureaucracies to operate according to impersonal rules and routine regulations developed on the basis of the ability of social elites to curb monarchical discretion by consolidating their privileges. Historically, high bureaucratic office did not necessarily develop separately from aristocratic rank. Quite the reverse, at court aristocrats were able to lay claim to positions that would otherwise have had to be filled by the emperor’s domestics…. In the ancient Mediterranean, office-holding within city-states, and increasingly so within imperial governments, was an important source of aristocratic social power. Offices were treated as prebends: they were supposed to return a (significant) profit for the holders, were readily used as a source of patronage, and conferred rank…. Positions in the imperial service had great purchase in elite patronage networks while the huge expansion in numbers saw the formation for the first time of a truly empire-wide hierarchy of aristocratic ranks, as many of the locally leading families in the cities of the empire took their chance to move further up in the world graced with imperial instead of urban distinctions. Rank and honors here might be as important as actual office. More sought these positions than could be accommodated within the administration. Hence developed the phenomenon of supernumerarii where men of some substance were able to claim the title without the office, and with the title power and distinction.
“This newly formed, empire-wide aristocracy was able to carve out for itself a very large part of the imperial pie. Rewards, privileges, and immunities galore helped it to accumulate and amass great concentrations of wealth and landed property. Compared with the principate, the imperial aristocracy seems steadily to have become even richer. This was the price the ruler had to accept for the opportunity to intensify the extraction of tribute from the subject population.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. p. 456.
“The late imperial state, too, nourished its great aristocratic households enabling them to amass extensive portfolios of lands and public functions; some of them even turned to warlordism. Generally, however, the great ‘houses’ did not threaten the functioning of the state system; they relied as much on access to the patronage of imperial government as it did on their collaboration. The two were intertwined and mutually dependent. Yet the greater control these households came to enjoy over the agricultural base of the empire did significantly circumscribe the potential of the Roman government to increase the extraction of resources and build up capacity.
“A good illustration may be offered by the introduction of the so-called recruits’ gold. This was a tax paid in gold by landowners instead of supplying peasants for the imperial army. The arrangement allowed the elite to hold on to much valued producers serving on its estates while the government got cash in hand to pay for mercenaries. Cheap and abundant supplies of recruits could be readily found among the scatter of volatile tribes living along the distant, permeable frontiers of the empire. These marcher areas, particularly those on the Germanic frontier, became an increasingly important source of soldiers for the Roman military during the fourth century…. The tribes on the imperial frontier were not merely convenient allies, they were also potential enemies. With relatively undifferentiated economies, much of their male population could be called up into military service, and plunder might be an important secondary source of income. Normally this type of threat could be contained because tribal communities lacked mass organization. But long interaction with and direct experience of Roman military life changed that; it firmed up the organizational capacity of the ‘barbarian’ tribes. When this happened, they might band together into larger coalitions…. But some of the bands of Germanic soldiers, intermittently serving the imperial court in Italy, managed to establish more enduring entities. This happened when they began to build alliances with parts of the Roman landowning elite.
“The employment of ‘federated’ Germanic warbands in the army exercised a pull on the tribes of the frontier region and drew them into the empire. In return for service to the Roman rulers, their leaders aspired to receive lands in the provinces on which to settle and extract revenue. Again, meeting such aspirations was nothing new. But the scale was different and by the beginning of the fifth century, it became a problem particularly to the court that controlled the western part of the empire. Ceding lands to the direct control of auxiliary soldiers and their leaders might see them become more or less autonomous…. The Germanic soldiers had ceaed to depend on central government for their basic maintenance. On the contrary, they vigorously set about expanding the areas originally ceded to them by the threat of further violence and raids against neighboring districts. Some Roman landowners lost their properties in this process while others managed to strike a deal with the new military power. This alliance became the basis for the formation of a number of Germano-Roman kingdoms that gradually hollowed out the western parts of the empire from within….
“The new Germanic lords could not offer the same extensive administration to the landowners, but they did something else: they provided cheaper protection. Much of their military costs were paid for directly out of the lands they controlled and taxation gradually withered away…. The Germanic successor kingdoms offered fewer services, maintaining a less elaborate administrative and judicial apparatus, but also significantly slashed the price of protection. This began to look like an acceptable deal to sections of the Roman aristocracy in the Latin parts of the empire during the fifth century.” Bang, Peter F. 2013. “The Roman Empire II: The Monarchy.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp.412-472. Oxford UP. pp. 457, 458, 459.
“As this journey deepened, I found myself entering a spiraling love affair with this intelligence, a Being so vast I can only describe it using the vocabulary of the Divine even while the sessions themselves were repeatedly demonstrating how limited and childlike our historical conceptions of the Divine have been…. I do not know the limits of this Being and I hesitate to even call it a ‘Being’ at all. As I have experienced it, it is the fabric of existence itself. I think of it as the generative intelligence of our universe, the Mind of the Cosmos–both transcendent source and manifest body of existence, beyond all categories of He or She yet infinitely more than any It.” Bache, Christopher. 2019. LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven. Park Street Press. pp. 21, 22.
“In my view, the gods depicted in our religious traditions, including the God of monotheism, are cultural approximations that fall far short of the reality they are attempting to represent. These forms fall away as deeper levels of reality continue to open.” Bache, Christopher. 2019. LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven. Park Street Press. pp. 152-3.
“I did not see then what has become glaringly obvious to me now, that all up-and-out cosmologies fail to grasp the true purpose of physical existence and therefore misconceive what the goal of reincarnation truly is. The physical universe is not a punishment or trap into which we have fallen and from which we must be saved. It is not a spiritual wasteland we should escape from as quickly as possible. The purpose of rebirth is not to spiritually awaken and then leave the universe. The purpose is to awaken and become a conscious player in its continuing growth and transformation.” Bache, Christopher. 2019. LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven. Park Street Press. p. 203.
“The main characteristic of the annual plant that is one of its strengths as a food plant, is also its biggest weakness. The annual plant only lives for one growing season. The plant growing fast for a single season culminates its life with an even faster death. Once the seeds have ripened, the plant dies. This characteristic means that the crop must be planted again the next year. Planting an annual seed also requires disturbing the soil. These two factors of annual plants are the cause of a perpetual treadmill of endless toil for humans, their beasts of burden, their machinery and the entire social and economic system that keeps it all going.” Shepard, Mark. 2013. Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers. Acres USA. p. xix.
“Fertility, which came from livestock raised on-farm, now came in a bag from the agri-chemical company down the road. In less than one lifetime, farms went from being self-contained ecological production systems, to debt-ridden, input-dependent ‘agri-businesses’ that soon required massive government subsidies to keep them afloat. In less than one lifetime, farms went from being biologically diverse systems that relied upon animal husbandry, crop rotation and perhaps additions of mined substances (calcium, for example) to specialized single-crop systems that were merely extensions of the chemical companies who manufactured the toxic brews to be spread on American soil.” Shepard, Mark. 2013. Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers. Acres USA. p. 6.
“We need to convert our annual crop farms into perennial polyculture ecosystems. One tree at a time.” Shepard, Mark. 2013. Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers. Acres USA. p. 293.
“According to the former [model of state creation], state structures develop in order to manage risk and technological complexity, for instance trade or irrigation. They envision a kind of ‘social contract’ in which the state provides benefits through managing complexity, by coordinating and organizing large numbers of people. In conflict theories, the state arises out of competition within a given group (i.e., between strata or ‘classes’) and between groups. In this view, the state depends on and maintains and reinforces inequality….
“It has consequently repeatedly been observed that integrative and conflict theories are not mutually exclusive but merely highlight different aspects of interdependent processes. For instance, David Christian notes that conflict theories resemble predator/prey relations in population biology whereas managerial theories resemble the evolution of complex systems with increasing division of labor, as within multicellular organisms or animal groups: only a combination of both perspectives can fully account for observed outcomes.” Scheidel, Walter. 2013. “Studying the State.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 5-57. Oxford UP. pp. 11-13; reference: Christian, David. 2004. Maps of time: An introduction to Big History. Berkeley, CA.
“By the middle of the second millennium BCE, at a time when states covered not more than 1 percent of the earth’s surface, they might perhaps already have claimed as many as half of all people on earth, mainly in the Middle East but increasingly also in India and China. By the beginning of the Common Era, states had extended their control to one-tenth of the land mass but closer to three-quarters of the species, contained mostly within just four imperial super-states.” Scheidel, Walter. 2013. “Studying the State.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 5-57. Oxford UP. p. 14.
“Since the production of violence enjoyed large economies of scale, the state was in a privileged position to provide it.” Scheidel, Walter. 2013. “Studying the State.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 5-57. Oxford UP. p. 20.
“The struggle over control of surplus producers made war endemic, rendering other governmental functions auxiliary to taxing or military function or both, such as infrastructure services (with corvee), food storage, and fortifications….” Scheidel, Walter. 2013. “Studying the State.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 5-57. Oxford UP. p. 22.
“Blanton and Lane Fargher approach early state formation through the lens of the rational choice theory of collective action, which addresses the problem that the rational and self-interested behavior of social actors may limit the potential for collective action and group solidarity…. They compare the properties of different polities by coding key features, using as their main variables the provision of public goods, bureaucratization, principal control, and resource source. Revenue sources are classified as ‘external’ when they are gained from narrow, wealthy constituencies (from taxing trade, establishing monopolies, and deriving income from state assets) that are ‘external’ to a broad base of potential taxpayers. Conversely, ‘internal’ sources are derived from that base. The central idea is that rulers are more likely to strike bargains when they are strongly dependent on surplus obtained from a large base of taxpayers, and that subjects lose bargaining power if rulers depend less on their revenue inputs. They define public goods as roads, bridges, water supplies, public safety, redistribution, and investment in religion and welfare (but not in military activity); bureaucratization as the feasibility of appeals, the degree of tax farming, modes of officeholder recruitment, detection and sanction of public agency, and the presence of salaried officials; and principal control as monitoring principal adherence to moral codes, the role of high officials and councils, and restriction on the ruler’s control of material and ideological resources and on the ruler’s standard of living.
“Their survey produces strong statistical support for a positive relationship between ‘internal’ or ‘mixed’ revenue sources and the other three variables: the correlation is strongest for the relationship between revenue source and public goods and for that between bureaucratization and principal control, and also quite strong for the relationships between revenue source and principal control and between bureaucratization and public goods, but least strong for the relationship between principal control and public goods. They conclude that broadly funded governments can be established and maintained only with great difficulties, facing the collective action problem of taxpayer free-riding and noncompliance, and of power abuse by principals and agents; hence, ‘the only way to build an endurable polity is through organizational change and the formulation of new cultural schemes, so that, in exchange for taxpayer compliance, rulers provide public goods, control the agency of officials (bureaucratization), and relinquish some aspects of their power (principal control) to validate their trustworthy participation in the collective enterprise.” Scheidel, Walter. 2013. “Studying the State.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 5-57. Oxford UP. pp. 25-6; reference: Blanton, R. & L. Fargher. 2008. Collective action in the formation of pre-modern states. New York. p. 252.
“The most detailed taxonomy of different spheres of interaction has been developed by Chase-Dunn and Hall, who differentiate between bulk-goods networks (BGN), prestige-goods networks (PGN), political/military networks (PMN), and information networks (IN). Given logistic constraints, early BGNs were necessarily by far the smallest type of network; PMNs were comprised by states that engage in warfare and diplomacy, whereas both PGNs and INs were able to expand much farther because they required only minimal interaction and heavily relied on intermediation. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, all these types of networks pulsated over time, growing and contracting as state power and demand for traded good waxed and waned. Their impact on the constituent polities can be expected to have varied tremendously: while BGNs had the greatest influence, PMNs did so to a lesser degree, and PGNs and INs were the least important ones.” Scheidel, Walter. 2013. “Studying the State.” In: The Oxford Handbook of The State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Bang, Peter F. & W. Scheidel (eds). pp. 5-57. Oxford UP. p. 34; reference: Chase-Dunn, C. & T.D. Hall. 1997. Rise and demise: Comparing world-systems. Boulder, CO.
“In short, the 1870 house was isolated from the rest of the world, but 1940 houses were ‘networked,’ most having the five connections of electricity, gas, telephone, water, and sewer.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 5.
“The coexistence of industries experiencing rapid productivity growth (e.g., manufacturing) and those with little or no productivity growth (e.g., house-building or education) is summarized by the paradigm of ‘Baumol’s disease,’ in which the relative price of the innovation-intensive idustries, e.g., the production of computers, declines over time while the relative price of the noninnovative industries, e.g., the playing of a string quartet, increases over time. Baumol’s disease can be cured in some instances, exemplified by how the inventions of phonograph records, tapes, CDs, and MP3s have allowed a single performance of a string quartet to be heard by millions. But some parts of economic activity still exhibit Baumol’s diesease without technological relief for rising relative costs, including seats for live performances, college tuition, and medical care expenses.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 13.
“The effect of a rising ratio of capital input to labor hours is usually called ‘capital deepening.’” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 16.
“This measure [total factor productivity (TFP) or ‘Solow’s residual’] is the best proxy available for the underlying effect of innovation and technological change on economic growth. And the results are surprising. Because the contributions of education and capital deepening were roughly the same in each of the three intervals [1890-1920, 1920-1970 & 1970-2014], all the faster growth of labor productivity in the middle period is the result of more rapid innovation and technological change…
“The margin of superiority of TFP growth in the 1920-70 interval is stunning, being almost triple the growth rate registered in the two other periods.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 16.
“Agriculture, thanks to technological advances, has required the efforts of a constantly decreasing portion of the work force, from nearly half of all workers in 1870 to 17 percent in 1940 and only 1 percent in 2009.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 54.
“Because deprivation stunts growth whereas extreme affluence does not increase height, the average height of a given population declines with greater income inequality.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 83.
“Customers flocked to an alternative world of money-back guarantees and the acceptance of returns with no questions asked. Thus catalogs did more than lower prices; they also increased the quality of each transaction.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 91.
“When electricity arrived, gone was the darkness, not to mention the air pollution emitted by candles, wax lamps, and gas lamps as well as the ‘care and feeding’ of kerosene lamps, which included filling, emptying, and wick-trimming. That said, however, the arrival of electricity moved the pollution from the inside of the home to the outside, for the generation of electricity from coal-fired plants sent carbon emissions into the atmosphere.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 116.
“This was one of the most surprising aspects of electric light–the ability to turn it on and off with a click, without gas lights’ need for individual lighting and snuffing.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 118.
“Electric household appliances were quickly invented but were slow to reach the average household. Adoption was initially held back by the flimsy electric wiring initially installed in houses, sufficient only to supply light. The heavier electric drain of stoves, refrigerators, washing machines, and irons required rewiring and faced the obstacle that during 1900-1920 there was as yet no standardization of electric plugs and electric outlets. In fact, there was not even standardization on today’s alternating current, for some electric companies offered direct current as late as the 1930s. Moreover, voltage varied.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 121.
“An overall change in life after 1870 was a switch, particularly in urban America from dependence on self-carried water and fuel to dependence on networks. The new networks of telephone lines, water mains and sewers, and power cables did not just appear suddenly. They were gradually built and expanded from urban cores to areas having less population density. A need was perceived, and a combination of government infrastructure agencies and private capital made meeting it possible.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 127.
“Starting in the 1840s and 1850s, the steam railroad made the stagecoach, canal boat, and paddle-wheel river steamboat obsolete almost as quickly as the rails were laid. But except for commuter lines to suburban enclaves for the relatively rich, steam railroads never penetrated the internal passenger transportation needs of the city or solved the farmer’s problem….” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 131.
“Initially attached to carriage-like vehicles, the internal combustion engine’s promise for motor transportation required another decade in which to develop reliable mechanisms to transfer engine power through a transmission device to the wheels. In 1900, there were only 8,000 motor cars registered in the United States, but the number skyrocketed to 468,000 in 1910, 9 million in 1920, and 23 million in 1929. Most astonishing, the total power created by automobiles exceeded that of all farm animals as early as 1910. A basic difference between the railroad and motor vehicle, viewed as fundamental inventions in the history of transportation, is that the railroad did not replace the horse but rather raised the demand for horses by extending civilization into hitherto unreachable parts of the country, whereas the motor vehicle directly replaced the horse and led to its disappearance as a prime mover.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 131.
“Our treatment of the automobile, truck, and bus revolutions includes technological developments and quality changes that mattered to consumers, including complementary inventions such as highways, suburbs, supermarkets, and leisure travel, each of which shifted the demand curve for motor vehicles to the right and thus raised the consumer surplus associated with the initial invention.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 132.
“The growth of railroads and their influence on the standard of living is synonymous with Chicago’s emergence as the world’s fastest-growing city between 1870 and 1930…. By 1905, about 14 percent of the world’s railway mileage passed through Chicago….
“By 1889, the 400-square-mile Chicago switching district, twice the size of the Chicago city limits, served 5,000 industries, 160 freight yards, and seventy-six freight stations. By the turn of the century, 650 freight trains arrived in or left Chicago daily on thirty railroads.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 137.
“… the successful trial of a two-stroke engine by Karl Benz on New Year’s Eve of 1879….
“By 1886, Benz had developed a four-stroke successor to the original engine and mounted it on a three-wheel chassis, the very first horseless carriage….
“Just as the railroads required a series of technical improvements between 1830 and 1850, so the automobile benefited from a sequence of developments before its emergence around 1910 as a dominant form of transportation and a driving force in the leap to supremacy of America’s standard of living…. Spark plugs, carburetors, transmissions, and self-starters were invented and gradually improved…. including the development of cold-rolled steel, accurately machined gears, ball and needle bearings, and pneumatic tires; between 1887 and 1894, twenty-four U.S. patents were issued for the rubber tire and the crucial problem of its adherence to a metal wheel….
“This is a classic example of a theme of this book–that many inventions are one-time only events subject to a long succession of subsequent incremental improvements.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 150.
“Numbered highways began in Wisconsin in 1918, the white center line in the middle of the highway dates back to Michigan in 1911, the stop sign was first used in Detroit in 1915, and the modern thee-color electric traffic signal was fully developed between 1910 and 1920.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 158; reference on the traffic signal: Hugill, Peter. 1982. “Good Roads and the Automobile in the United States 1880-1929.” Geographical Review. 72(3):327-349.
“The speed of transformation of farm transportation was one of the fastest of any invention in American history and, indeed, rivals the speed of diffusion of the Internet after 1995. By 1924, the 6.5 million U.S. farms were equipped with 4.2 million automobiles, 370,000 trucks, and 450,000 tractors.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 164.
“In early 1876 Bell filed what has been called the most valuable patent application in history for a speaking telephone, only hours before a competing patent was filed by rival inventor Elisha Gray. At that time, neither had achieved a functional telephone, so these patents were speculations about future success.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 181.
“Baumol’s cost disease was originally proposed using the example of a Mozart string quartet. Any performance of the quartet would always require four players, thus precluding any productivity gains. But in the economy as a whole productivity increases, and wage rates increase roughly at the same rate. Thus, to prevent chamber music players from defecting into other lines of work paying higher wages, their wages must increase as well, thus requiring price increases for classical music concerts. This ‘cost disease’ afflicts not just classical music, but also education, health care, and any industry in which productivity gains are limited, right down to the lowly neighborhood barbershop.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 186.
“… the annual rate of improvement in life expectancy was twice as fast in the first half of the twentieth century as in the last half….
“These [explanations] include the development of urban sanitation infrastructure, including running water and separate sewer pipes, that were part of the ‘networking’ of the American home that took place between 1870 and 1929. A contribution was made by Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease, which fostered public awareness about the dangers inherent in swarming insects and pools of stagnant water. The internal combustion engine deserves its share of credit for removing the urban horse and its prodigious and unrestrained outpouring of manure and urine onto city streets. Window screens, invented in the 1870s, contributed by creating a barrier in farmhouses to prevent insects from commuting back and forth between animal waste and the family dinner table. Government action at the local level built urban sanitation infrastructure and, at the national level, created the Food and Drug Administration….
“The great achievement between 1870 and 1940 was the rapid reduction in the mortality rate of infants and children. In contrast, life expectancy at age 60 increased more rapidly after 1940 than before.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 207.
“There were few horses in agriculture before the 1830s and 1840s. It was the development of mechanical implements starting with the metal plow that made horses the essential source of power on the nineteenth-century farm. Cast-iron plows were replaced several decades later by steel plows that reduced the amount of power needed to pull the plow. A simple invention to reduce human drudgery was the sulky plow, which allowed the farmer to ride atop it instead of walking behind it….” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 263.
“The government intervened in the development of the economy in numerous ways. As we have seen in previous chapters, government actions included the Homestead Acts, the granting of land to railroads, the food and drug regulations introduced in 1906 and subsequent legislation, and Prohibition during 1920-33. Other government actions included the establishment of land-grant universities and agricultural research stations, the patent system, the antitrust legislation of the Progressive Era, and the array of New Deal legislation, both that directly aiming at reducing the severity of the Great Depression and that providing permanent benefits after World War II, including deposit insurance, banking regulation, Social Security, and unemployment compensation.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 310.
“During the two decades between 1850 and 1870, the federal government granted fully 7 percent of the area of the continental United States to railroads, mainly in the south and west.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 311.
“In the 1920s, Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce from 1921 to 1929, achieved in the business world a standardization of sizes, from nuts and bolts to automobile tires and plumbing parts. Together with the assembly line, introduced in 1913 by Henry Ford, the standardization of component sizes is a little-known factor that facilitated the enormous expansion of weapons production achieved by the United States as the Arsenal of Democracy between 1940 and 1945.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 313.
“Life insurance was transformed in the late nineteenth century to an instrument of saving, with each policy having a cash and loan value.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 317.
“The first industrial revolution (IR#1), based on the steam engine and its offshoots–particularly the railroad, steamships, and the shift from wood to iron and steel–resulted from inventions in the period 1770 to 1820 that were sufficiently important for their exploitation to require most of the nineteenth century. The second industrial revolution (IR#2) reflected the effects of inventions of the late nineteenth century–particularly electricity and the internal combustion engine–and had its maximum effect on output per person and on productivity in the half-century 1920-1970. Between 1940 and 1970, output per person and output per hour continued to increase rapidly, in part as a result of three of the most important subsidiary spinoffs of IR#2–air conditioning, the interstate highway system, and commercial air transport–while the world of personal entertainment was forever altered by television.
“The third industrial revolution (IR#3), associated with information and communication technology, began in 1960 and continues to this day. Like IR#2, it achieved revolutionary change but in a relatively narrower sphere of human activity. The domain of IR#2 covered virtually the entire span of human wants and needs, including food, clothing, housing, transportation, entertainment, communication, information, health, medicine, and working conditions. In contrast, only a few of these dimensions, in particular entertainment, communications, and information, were revolutionized by IR#3. This single fact, the narrowness of the effects of IR#3, is enough to explain why growth in output per person and output per hour began to slow down after 1970.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. pp. 319-320.
“Among the many sources of advance not captured by real GDP were the brightness and safety of electric light as compared to the inconvenience, danger, and dimness of the previous kerosene and whale oil lamps.
“Real GDP does not value the increased variety of food available after 1870, with the invention of processed food, from corn flakes to Coca-Cola, and the increased availability of fresh meat made possible by refrigerated railroad freight cars. Real GDP does not value the invention of the modern urban department store,… the invention of the thousand-page mail-order catalog,… the removal of horse droppings and urine from city streets… the increase of speed and load-carrying capacity made possible by the motor vehicle,… the epochal decline in price and improvement in the quality of the motor car between 1900 and 1935, because the motor car was not included in the Consumer Price Index until 1935.
“Real GDP does not count the value of instant communication via the telegraph, of voice communication via the telephone, of reproduction of music by the phonograph, or of instant availability of news and entertainment… the difference in the quality between a nickelodeon showing a few silent moving images on the screen compared to the multidimensional 1939 experience of seeing Gone with the Wind… the reduction of infant mortality from 22 percent of new births in 1890 to about 1 percent in 1950. Real GDEP does not account [for] the change in the body and soul when the seventy-two-hour weekly work schedule in the steel industry… was replaced by a forty-hour weekly work schedule….
“Real GDP does not value the increase in consumer surplus as clean running water arrived at the in-home tap… the replacement of the outhouse… the comfort of privacy of taking a bath in a private enclosed bathroom in a tub or a shower… the liberation of women, who previously had to perform the Monday ritual curse of laundry done by scrubbing on a wash board, as well as the Tuesday ritual of hanging clothes out to dry.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. pp. 321-2.
“The general tendency for hours per person to decline over time reflects the widespread desire of workers to use some of their rising incomes to achieve shorter hours of work… This historical tendency for hours to shorten was interrupted between 1975 and 1998 by the influx of women into the labor force.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 326.
“We gain perspective by noting that over a longer period reaching back to 1891 and ending in 2007, output per person grew at 2.1 percent per year….
“The white line in the graph representing trend growth in output per person lies above the historical trend of 2.1 percent between 1953 and 1968 and below 2.1 percent after 1968. The steady decline in the white line after 1999 reaches a value of zero in 2013 and 2014. In those years, the positive growth in labor productivity of about 0.6 percent per year was almost exactly offset by negative growth in hours per person, resulting in zero growth in the trend of output per person.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 327.
“However, estimates of the rate of improvement of computer quality based on memory and speed inherently underestimate the improved performance relative to price by failing to place any value on more advanced ways of accessing memory (flash drives versus floppy disks), more advanced input-output connectors (USB ports instead of serial and parallel ports), shorter boot times, better audio-video capability, and the enormous increase n portability and reduction in weight that have occurred since 1982.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 445.
“… there is no doubt that computer prices have declined more quickly than those for any other product in the history of invention.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 446.
“The standard technique of aggregating capital input by placing a higher weight on short-lived capital such as computers than on long-lived capital like structures has the effect of hiding inside the capital input measure the contribution of innovation in shifting investment from structures to computers.
“This leaves education and reallocation as the remaining sources of growth beyond innovation itself. However, both of these also depend on innovation to provide the rewards necessary to make the investment to stay in school or to move from farm to city. This is why there was so little economic growth between the Roman era and 1750, as peasant life remained largely unchanged. Peasants did not have an incentive to become educated, because before the wave of innovations that began around 1750, there was no reward to the acquisition of knowledge beyond how to move a plow and harvest a field. Similarly, without innovation before 1750, the reallocation of labor from farm to city did not happen…
“Thus every source of growth can be reduced back to the role of innovation and technological change.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 569.
“The U-shaped interpretation of entrepreneurial history starts with a primary role of individual entrepreneurs, working by themselves or in small research labs like Edison’s. By the 1920s, the role of the individual entrepreneur reached the bottom part of the U, as innovation came to be dominated by employees working for large corporate research laboratories.
“But then the process began to climb the right side of the U as the seminal developments of the transition from mainframes to personal computers and the Internet were pioneered by individual entrepreneurs…. The Third Industrial Revolution, which consists of the computer, digitalization, and communication inventions of the past fifty years, has been dominated by small companies founded by individual entrepreneurs, each of whom, created organizations that soon became very large corporations.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. pp. 571, 572.
“Individual inventors flourished in the United States in part because of the democratic nature of the patenting system… Detailed specifications of any patented invention were required to be made public immediately, and the patent fee was set at only 5 percent of the amount charged in Britain. Patents solved the problem of theft of intellectual property in an environment in which inventors needed to learn about the latest inventions that might be complementary or perhaps a key ingredient in their own newest developments.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 573.
“…the great surge in the level of TFP [total factor productivity] was achieved primarily between 1920 and 1970 and was the result of the implementation and extension of many of the great inventions associated with the Second Industrial Revolution (IR#2) of the late nineteenth century. The brief revival of TFP growth in 1994-2004 reflects the contribution of the Third Industrial Revolution (IR#3) associated with computers and digitalization. Judged by their contributions to TFP growth, the two industrial revolutions were quite different–IR#2 created a great surge of TFP growth that lasted for a half century, while IR#3 caused a revival in TFP growth during 1994-2004 that was much shorter lived and smaller in magnitude.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 575.
“Though the great inventions of IR#2 mainly took place between 1870 and 1900, at first their effect was small. Paul David has provided a convincing case that almost four decades were required after Edison’s first 1882 power station for the development of the machines and methods that finally allowed the electrified factory to emerge in the 1920s. Similarly, Karl Benz’s invention of the first reliable internal combustion engine in 1879 was followed by two decades in which inventors experimented with brakes, transmissions, and other ancillary equipment needed to transfer the engine’s power to axles and wheels.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. pp. 575-6; reference: David, Paul. 1990. “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox.” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings. 80(2):355-61.
“…the ration of net investment to the capital stock has been trending down since the 1960s relative to its 1950-2007 average value of 3.2 percent.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 586.
“It is notable that innovations to fight pollution and global warming involve fighting ‘bads’ rather than creating ‘goods.’ Instead of raising the standard of living in the same manner as the past two centuries of innovations that have brought a wonder of new goods and services for consumers, innovations to stem the consequences of pollution and global warming seek to prevent the standard of living from declining.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 590.
“In fact, much of IR#2 was not a surprise. Looking ahead in the year 1875, inventors were feverishly working on turning the telegraph into the telephone, trying to find a way to transform electricity coming from batteries into electric light, trying to find a way of harnessing the power of petroleum to create a lightweight and powerful internal combustion engine. The atmosphere of 1875 was suffused with ‘we’re almost there’ speculation.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 591.
“Some of the most important sources of human progress over the 1870-1940 period were not new inventions at all. Running water had been achieved by the Romans, but it took political will and financial investment to bring it to every urban dwelling place. A separate system of sewer pipes was not an invention, but implementing it over the interval 1870-1930 required resources, dedication, and a commitment to using public funds for infrastructure investment.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 591.
“Just as 1970 was a watershed…, the dividing point between rapid and slow growth in TFP, so there was a parallel and independent transition between equal growth for all before 1970 and unequal growth after 1970.” Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton UP. p. 605.
“Obviously, the amount [of organic carbon] in today’s biosphere is sufficient for all life today and has been estimated to be approximately 6 X 1015 kg. That sounds like a lot, but in fact if all of the biomass could be spread evenly over the Earth’s surface area it would form a layer ~ 10 mm think. Furthermore, if the biomass could somehow be broken down into monomers like amino acids and the glucose content of cellulose and then dissolved in the ocean, the solution would be very dilute, about 5 micromolar. At this concentration there are 10 million water molecules for every monomer molecule…. For instance, the biochemical metabolites in living cells are in the millimolar range, a thousand times more concentrated.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 33.
“It has been estimated that even today approximately 30,000 tons of extraterrestrial material enters the Earth’s atmosphere every year as IDPs [interplanetary dust particles] and micrometeorites.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 36.
“A reasonable conclusion is that there may have been a continuing addition of intact organics to the atmosphere of the early Earth when IDPs entered the atmosphere and were heated to a temperature that flash-evaporated intact volatile compounds. The particles themselves with the remaining organic load would also have survived. Most of the organics would eventually reach the ocean as rainfall and disappear into a very dilute solution. However, an important point is that any portion falling onto volcanic land masses would accumulate on mineral surfaces and be washed into hydrothermal water where it would become increasingly concentrated.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 37.
“… in order to react, the compounds must be sufficiently concentrated. There are three possibilities. The most obvious is evaporation, but adsorption to mineral surfaces has also been proposed. Thermal gradients existing in porous media have also been demonstrated to concentrate solutes.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 46.
“In the absence of self-assembly processes, life as we know it would be impossible.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 51.
“The most familiar self-assembly forces are the hydrogen bonds that stabilize base pairing in nucleic acids….
“A more general force that stabilizes the structure of certain single-stranded nucleic acids and the double helix of DNA is the stacking of nucleotide bases within the strand…. These have been studied extensively in the DNA double helix, and the surprising result is that base stacking is more significant than base pairing in stabilizing the duplex structure.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 52.
“The next self-assembly process relevant to the origin of life is that longer strands of biopolymers like nucleic acids and proteins do not exist in solution as threads. Instead there is a strong tendency to form globular structures stabilized by hydrogen bonding, electrostatic interactions, and entropic effects. An important point is that random sequences of monomers–nucleotides and amino acids in the strands–may undergo folding but the resulting structures are all different and generally lack functional capacity. However, even in random sequences a few rare structures will happen to exhibit functions such as catalytic activity and would be classified as ribozymes (RNA) or enzymes (proteins). The central theme of this book is that these rare polymers can only become functional systems if they are encapsulated in a membranous compartment. The system and the compartment can then be subjected to selective processes that drive the first steps of evolution.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 53.
“… the most important first steps toward the origin of life in prebiotic conditions would have been due to self-assembly of organic compounds dispersed or dissolved in water. These are understood in terms of spontaneous physical processes rather than being primarily chemical in nature. In a sense, only after self-assembly of certain structures had occurred could the chemical reactions essential for life begin.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 54.
“Micelles have a purely hydrophobic interior composed of hydrocarbon chains, while liposomes are defined by a lipid bilayer boundary that contains an interior aqueous volume.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 57.
“The first indication that membranes are surprisingly fluid was an experiment by Frye and Ededin who used fluorescent dyes to label the membranes of cells, then caused the cells to fuse. They observed that the labeled components of two separate membranes began to diffuse into each other within minutes and concluded that the membrane had a fluid character rather than being fixed in place.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 59; reference: Frye, L.D. & M. Edidin. 1970. “The rapid intermixing of cell surface antigens after formation of mouse-human heterokaryons.” J Cell Sci. 7:319-335.
“The reason that potassium ions are so impermeable arises from an effect called Born energy, named after Max Born who pointed out that ions have a property associated with their electric field which he called self-energy. As a result of the field, ions in a polar medium like water strongly interact with the electrical charges on the water molecules, and those interactions must be broken to move the ion into a nonpolar medium like the oily phase of a lipid bilayer. This requires a very large expenditure of energy, one estimate being ~ 40 kcal mole-1, so virtually no ions would be able to penetrate the bilayer. The fact that they do, albeit at a very slow rate, can be accounted for by transient fluctuations in the bilayer structure that allow hydrated ions to cross the barrier.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 61.
“Polymers produced by condensation reactions are thermodynamically unstable and would be expected to hydrolyze at a certain rate in aqueous solutions. Therefore, we must find a mechanism by which condensation reactions occur faster than hydrolysis so that polymers will accumulate in a mixture of potential monomers. Although we do not usually think of it in this way, the polymers of all life today exist in a kinetic trap away from equilibrium. I[f] there were no kinetic traps life would not be possible because proteins and nucleic acids would hydrolyze as fast as they are synthesized and could not assemble into living systems.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 72.
“Amino acids are defined as any small molecule having both an amine group and a carboxyl group on the same molecule. Even though 70 compounds in meteorites fit this definition, just ten of them are among the 20 amino acids used by life today. The other ten are synthesized by metabolic pathways that appeared later in evolution.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 72.
“Some fraction of the product polypeptide or polynucleotide chains formed in the concentrated state would have been large enough to fold into compact secondary structures, shielding the hydrolytically sensitive peptide and ester groups within the interiors of the structures from reaction with water….
“Depending on their sites and shapes, the folded polymers would fall into a series of stability wells of varying depths. The wells are referred to as kinetic traps: relatively low-energy havens allowing survival of the more stable fraction of the oligomer populations. Relatively unstable oligomers return to monomers, and what then emerges during dilution/concentration cycles is a dynamic filtering out of the unstable structures and an enrichment of stable structures.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 82.
“However, it is possible to sort out a limited set of factors that are either present or absent in any given simulation [model of origin of life]….
“Physical processes:
“self-assembly of molecular structures such as by adsorption onto surfaces or templates, base pairing, folded polymers, or boundary membranes (As)
“cycles such as light-dark or hydration-dehydration (Cy)
“encapsulation of reaction mixtures and products derived from self-assembly such as the formation of lipid vesicles (En)
“transport to accumulate nutrients from the external environment (Tr)
“concentration of reactants (Cn)–an active process such as adsorption or evaporation that concentrates otherwise dilute reactants
“heating (He)–in chemical laboratories a mixture of reactants is often heated to add activation energy and make a reaction go faster, and some of the simulations are heated for this purpose
“Chemical processes:
“chemical energy is either present in the reactants or is added by impinging energy sources (Ce)
“condensation reactions lead to polymerization when ester or peptide bonds are synthesized (Cd)
“metabolism chemically alters nutrients to be used for energy and growth (Me)
“kinetic traps in which the rate of synthesis exceeds a back reaction so that products accumulate in a steady state (Kn)
“Emergent processes:
“catalytic and autocatalytic activity, either of environmental components such as metals, or emerging in products of reactions (Ca)
“hill climbing, in which a given reaction mixture becomes more complex as products accumulate and begin to interact (Cl)
“feedback circuits that regulate reaction rates and products (Fe)
“combinatorial selection of systems incorporating molecular systems that vary in composition or amounts (Cm)
“coding of a sequence of monomers in one polymer that can direct the monomer sequence during synthesis of a second polymer (Co)
“mutations occur when errors are made during coding (Mu)
“selection takes place when populations of molecular systems are exposed to conditions that allow only some of the systems to survive (Se)
“evolution begins when certain molecular systems are either more efficient at capturing and utilizing resources or survive an environmental stress that disrupts less robust systems (Ev)
“Each of these eighteen factors can affect reactants and their products as they undergo cyclic iterations and are the minimal number required for a sufficiently complex simulation in which an input mixture of simple reactants yields an increasingly complex mixture of products related to the origin of life. They can be expressed as a function of time, and we will use the following scheme to describe various simulations:
“Reactants =>(As, Cy, En, Tr, Cn, He, Ce, Cd, Me, Kn, Ca, Cl, Fe, Cm, Co, Mu, Se, Ev) time => Increasing complexity
“The notation should not be considered to represent typical chemical reactions in which reactants proceed to equilibrium. Instead, the notation reflects reactants and products interacting in a steady state maintained by a source of energy. It is significant that the emergence of one or more products having catalytic activity will shift one steady state to an alternative steady state.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. pp. 104-5.
“The cycling drives serial, natural experiments that undergo combinatorial selection in the form of encapsulated polymers. We refer to this process as ‘coupled phases’ because during each cycle, polymers are exposed to three distinct phases that involve self-assembly properties of amphiphilic compounds: a multilamellar phase characterized by reduced water activity; a hydrated phase in which encapsulated polymer mixtures are released into an aqueous bulk within vesicles; and an intermediate gel-like phase in which surviving protocells and concentrated solutes aggregate before fusing back into a dehydrated multilamellar phase.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. pp. 133-4.
“Even if some protocells are successful natural experiments that pass testing during the hydrated phase, that is not the end of the story. Protocells at this stage cannot express catalytic functions nor live independently. For the system to evolve, it must engage in a network in which properties and innovations of molecular selection are shared. At this point the gel phase of the cycle plays a role, because close contacts and fusion events allow sharing of polymers that happen to have essential functions, particularly the ability to create useful metabolic products and catalyze polymerization and replication….
“The aggregated protocells in the gel phase resemble the progenote concept described by Woese and Fox. Progenotes represent a transitional form between simple chemical systems and the more complex biochemical functions of biology.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. pp. 136-7; reference: Woese, C.R. & G.E. Fox 1977. “The concept of cellular evolution.” J Mol Evol. 10:1-6.
“It is not difficult to guess what the functional properties of the polymers will be, because they are precursors to functional polymers in cells today. Some general properties are described next, with abbreviations that hint at their functions; the order of the list shows the increasing complexity required for stepwise evolution of protocells toward living systems.
“S-polymers have the simplest function, which is to bind to and stabilize a membrane-bounded compartment so that its contents are less likely to disperse into the environment. Examples in cells today are cytoskeletal polymers like spectrin that stabilize erythrocyte membranes.
“P-polymers also have one of the simplest functions, which is to form pores in the bilayer membrane that allow access of potential nutrients to the interior volume and equilibration of osmotic pressure gradients. Examples today include short peptides like gramicidin (15mer) and alamethicin (20mer) that form ion-conducting channels in bilayers.
“M-polymers catalyze the steps of a primitive metabolism involving chemical reactions among potential nutrients from the external medium after they enter the protocell. The reactions are a source of energy, and the products can be used for polymerization reactions.
“R-polymers are able to undergo a primitive version of replication. It may be possible that the monomers not only form polymers under hydrothermal field conditions, but once formed, the polymers can undergo nonenzymatic replication because after the first cycle, any newly synthesized polymer can act as a template. As dehydration occurs, the increasingly concentrated monomers begin to line up on the template by complementary base pairing, and at some point, the reduced water activity drives ester bond synthesis that links them into a second strand.
“I-polymers provide a primitive genetic function that first emerges as simple templates for replication catalyzed by R-polymers. However, to support the inheritance of coherent sets of functional polymers and control their actions, more centralized informational polymers must be written, read, and expressed by polymerases that use a coding-translation mechanism.
“F-polymers are selected to provide feedback circuits controlling the timing and rates of reactions.
“D-polymers initiate and control the division of a protocell following the duplication of its distinct sets of functional polymers and genetic complement.” Deamer, David. 2019. Assembling Life. Oxford UP. p. 142.
“In the 1960s, U.S. corporations changed the way they went after profits in the international economy. Instead of producing goods in the U.S. to export, they moved more and more toward producing goods overseas to sell to consumers in those countries and at home….
“Financial institutions and other global corporations without national ties now use governments to dissolve any national restraints on their activities.” Dollars and Sense Collective. 2012, “The ABCs of the Global Economy.” In: Globalization: the Transformation of Social Worlds. pp. 81-91. Eitzen, D. Stanley & M.B. Zinn (eds). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. pp. 81-2.
“For most of this century [twentieth], however, capitalist governments have curbed labor’s natural mobility through passports, migration laws, border checkpoints, and armed border patrols, while capital has been rendered movable by treaties and laws that harmonize the treatment of wealth around the world.” Dollars and Sense Collective. 2012, “The ABCs of the Global Economy.” In: Globalization: the Transformation of Social Worlds. pp. 81-91. Eitzen, D. Stanley & M.B. Zinn (eds). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. p. 85.
“The WTO functions as a sort of international court for adjudicating trade disputes….
“Though corporations have no standing in the WTO–the organization is, officially, open only to its member countries–the numerous advisory bodies that provide technical expertise to delegates are overflowing with corporate representation. The delegates themselves are drawn from trade ministries and confer regularly with the corporate lobbyists and advisors who swarm the streets and offices of Geneva, where the organization is headquartered. As a result, the WTO has become, as an anonymous delegate told the Financial Times, ‘a place where governments can collude against their citizens.’” Dollars and Sense Collective. 2012, “The ABCs of the Global Economy.” In: Globalization: the Transformation of Social Worlds. pp. 81-91. Eitzen, D. Stanley & M.B. Zinn (eds). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. p. 87.
“Describing the very dynamic global trade of the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century has become a standard part of the repertoires of economic historians. But that era was not the only episode of globalization before the latest one. Archaeological evidence indicates the global reach of trade during the Roman Empire, with Roman coins being traded in coastal regions of Sri Lanka and Vietnam. And there were subsequent expansions of global trade and finance. In many of them, ideas from classical antiquity and from the Roman age of globalization (and global rule) were revived, as in the economic rebound of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (the economic backdrop of the Renaissance), or the eighteenth century, when improved technology and increased ease of communications opened the way to global empires (for Britain and France).
“All of these previous globalization episodes came to an end, almost always with wars that were accompanied by highly disruptive and contagious financial crises.” James, Harold. 2012, “The Late, Great Globalization.” In: Globalization: the Transformation of Social Worlds. pp. 125-133. Eitzen, D. Stanley & M.B. Zinn (eds). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. p. 127. (reprinted from: 2009 Current History 108: )
“Global integration, global violence, and a crisis of values are–from a historical perspective–closely enmeshed with each other. We should not think them strange when we encounter them in our own age of globalization.” James, Harold. 2012, “The Late, Great Globalization.” In: Globalization: the Transformation of Social Worlds. pp. 125-133. Eitzen, D. Stanley & M.B. Zinn (eds). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. p. 127.
“Specifically, Tulving proposed that episodic recall involves the ability to ‘mentally time travel’ to reexperience specific events, a capacity that requires a sense of self, subjective time, and autonoetic awareness (conscious awareness that the experience occurred in the past). Although this definition may capture the phenomenological aspects associated with episodic memory in humans, it relies entirely on verbal reports of subjective mental experiences. Because this definition of episodic memory precludes its investigation in animals, the hypothesis that this capacity is unique to humans lacks falsifiability.” Allen, Timothy & N. Fortin. 2013. “The evolution of episodic memory.” PNAS. 110(suppl. 2):10379-10386. p. 10379; reference: Tulving, E. 2002. “Episodic memory: From mind to brain.” Annu Rev Psychol. 53:1-25.
“The events-in-context approach [to test for episodic memory] capitalizes on the fact that, in the episodic memory system, information about specific events is tied to the spatial, temporal, and other situational contexts in which they occurred. Based on this operational definition, demonstrations that animals can remember events in context provided compelling evidence that core properties of episodic memory are present in nonhumans. This capacity is often termed episodic-like to emphasize that, whereas it does not address the phenomenological aspects associated with episodic memory in humans, it satisfies three key behavioral criteria:
“i) Content: The individual remembers information about the event (‘what’) and its context of occurrence (e.g., ‘where’) or ‘when’ it happened).
“ii) Structure: The information about the event and its context is integrated in a single representation.
“iii) Flexibility: The memory can be expressed to support adaptive behavior in novel situations.
“These criteria have provided a solid theoretical framework for behavioral tests of episodic memory. It is important to note that the criteria are usually satisfied using converging evidence from multiple studies, as it is impractical to address them all in every experiment. Here, we examine the three main approaches used to study the memory for events in context: (i) ‘what-where-when,’ (ii) ‘what-where,’ and (iii) ‘what-when.’” Allen, Timothy & N. Fortin. 2013. “The evolution of episodic memory.” PNAS. 110(suppl. 2):10379-10386. pp. 10379-80.
“There are different forms of memory for when events occurred, including memory for the order of events in a sequence, for how long ago events happened, and for the time of day at which they took place. The vast majority of studies have focused on memory for the order of events, which reflects the capacity of episodic memory fo preserve the ‘flow of events’ as they occurred in experience.” Allen, Timothy & N. Fortin. 2013. “The evolution of episodic memory.” PNAS. 110(suppl. 2):10379-10386. p. 10380.
“The evidence reviewed strongly suggests that core properties of episodic memory are present across mammals, as well as in a number of bird species.” Allen, Timothy & N. Fortin. 2013. “The evolution of episodic memory.” PNAS. 110(suppl. 2):10379-10386. p. 10380.
“Studies of neurological patients and functional neuroimaging in humans have shown that episodic memory critically depends on the integrity of the hippocampus but also involves a large network of cortical areas that includes the adjacent parahippocampal region and the prefrontal cortex.” Allen, Timothy & N. Fortin. 2013. “The evolution of episodic memory.” PNAS. 110(suppl. 2):10379-10386. p. 10380.
“The hippocampus has been identified in many species, including a large breadth of mammals, birds, reptiles, and teleost fish. The neurobiological and functional evidence strongly suggests that the hippocampus is a homologous structure across species.” Allen, Timothy & N. Fortin. 2013. “The evolution of episodic memory.” PNAS. 110(suppl. 2):10379-10386. p. 10380.
“In mammals, the hallmark of cortical-hippocampal connectivity is the existence of associative cortical structures that serve as an interface between the hippocampus and the rest of the neocortex. These associative regions include the entorhinal cortex, perirhinal cortex, and parahippocampal cortex, which are collectively referred to as the parahippocampal region.” Allen, Timothy & N. Fortin. 2013. “The evolution of episodic memory.” PNAS. 110(suppl. 2):10379-10386. p. 10381.
“In sum, the hippocampus, parahippocampal region, and prefrontal cortex form a neural system that is thought to underlie episodic memory capacities in humans, but this basic neurobiology is not unique to humans. Considerable evidence shows that this circuit is present across mammals and that a comparable circuit exists in the avian brain. Interestingly, regions that are homolgous to the hippocampus also exist in reptiles and bony fish. Considering the long evolutionary history and structure-function similarities, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the human episodic memory circuit shares an ancestral protoepisodic memory system with other mammals and possibly birds.” Allen, Timothy & N. Fortin. 2013. “The evolution of episodic memory.” PNAS. 110(suppl. 2):10379-10386. p. 10382.
“… we propose that the main function of episodic memory is to provide memory-based predictions to support adaptive behavior in the present or immediate future. There are two ways in which episodic memory could contribute to this capacity. First, episodic memory is the only memory system to provide spatially and temporally specific information about single experiences. For instance, when faced with a specific need (e.g., a tool), an individual could use episodic memory to make predictions as to how to satisfy this need (e.g., look where the tool was last seen). This unparalleled specificity allows animals to take into account unique events in guiding their behavior and to quickly adapt to changing circumstances. Second, episodic memory could contribute to memory-based predictions by supporting the capacity to make novel inferences. In fact, it has been proposed that a fundamental role of the hippocampus is to integrate episodic and semantic memories into a relational (declarative) memory network. Because many of our memories overlap in information content, the network is thought to represent relationships among memories by linking them using their common elements. This network structure could support the flexible expression of inferred relationships between elements that were never experienced together, such as deducing a novel trajectory between two locations or the social hierarchy among a group of individuals.” Allen, Timothy & N. Fortin. 2013. “The evolution of episodic memory.” PNAS. 110(suppl. 2):10379-10386. pp. 10383-4.
“Interestingly, there is considerable overlap between the neural circuits involved in retrieving episodic memories and those involved in simulating future events, suggesting that the two capacities are intrinsically linked.” Allen, Timothy & N. Fortin. 2013. “The evolution of episodic memory.” PNAS. 110(suppl. 2):10379-10386. p. 10384.
“Although it is clear that the behavior of other animals can be future-oriented or based on future consequences, it remains to be determined whether animals other than humans, apes, and scrub jays are capable of future planing.” Allen, Timothy & N. Fortin. 2013. “The evolution of episodic memory.” PNAS. 110(suppl. 2):10379-10386. p. 10384.
“For instance, in humans, episodic memory is thought to be intrinsically tied to other mental capacities such as language, a sense of self, empathy, and theory of mind.” Allen, Timothy & N. Fortin. 2013. “The evolution of episodic memory.” PNAS. 110(suppl. 2):10379-10386. p. 10384.
“Animals eequipped with a capacity for positive and negative states (e.g. pleasure and pain) may prospectively guide actions by learning about their immediate antecedents: when the learned antecedents recur, the animal can predict imminent reward or punishment, and drive action before these become manifest.” Suddendorf, T., A. Bulley & B. Miloyan. 2018. “Prospection and natural selection.” Behavioral Sciences. 24:26-31. p. 26.
“Language enables humans to refine their foresight through others’ experiences, predictions and reflections.” Suddendorf, T., A. Bulley & B. Miloyan. 2018. “Prospection and natural selection.” Behavioral Sciences. 24:26-31. p. 28.
“Whereas many species use tools and some even make them, only humans seem to keep them, refine them, and share them.” Suddendorf, T., A. Bulley & B. Miloyan. 2018. “Prospection and natural selection.” Behavioral Sciences. 24:26-31. p. 28.
“The degree to which an individual is prepared to wait in childhood has been found to robustly predict subsequent academic, personal and social successes even 40 years later in life. An individual tendency to prefer immediate but smaller rewards over larger but delayed ones has conversely been associated with a range of maladaptive behaviors including substance abuse, physical inactivity and pathological gambling.” Bulley, Adam, J. Henry & T. Suddendorf. 2016. “Prospection and the Present Moment: The Role of Episodic Foresight in Intertemporal Choices Between Immediate and Delayed Rewards.” Review of General Psychology. 20(1): 29-47. p. 31.
“Interestingly, the discounting rates of humans and nonhuman animals are quite similar when rewards are directly consumable food or water rather than money, and in some contexts humans have even been found to be less patient than chimpanzees when waiting for food. Nonetheless, this should not obscure the fact that most animals only wait for a few seconds for a reward, and chimpanzees for a few minutes, whereas humans can delay their gratification for days, months or even years.” Bulley, Adam, J. Henry & T. Suddendorf. 2016. “Prospection and the Present Moment: The Role of Episodic Foresight in Intertemporal Choices Between Immediate and Delayed Rewards.” Review of General Psychology. 20(1): 29-47. p. 32.
“Further evidence from studies of people with hippocampal amnesia support the argument that making intertemporal choices generally, and the delay of gratification, are not dependent on episodic foresight. Damage to the medial temporal lobes usually results in profound difficulties imagining personal future events, but nonetheless patients with this damage can select delayed rewards and do exhibit somewhat normal delay discounting rates.” Bulley, Adam, J. Henry & T. Suddendorf. 2016. “Prospection and the Present Moment: The Role of Episodic Foresight in Intertemporal Choices Between Immediate and Delayed Rewards.” Review of General Psychology. 20(1): 29-47. p. 32.
“Recent evidence suggests that engaging in episodic foresight while making intertemporal choices can result in significantly reduced rates of delay discounting….
“Interestingly, preferences in such modified intertemporal choice tasks have been found to shift toward future rewards whether participants are asked to imagine the actual consumption of a delayed reward, events around the time of future reward receipt, or future events in general.” Bulley, Adam, J. Henry & T. Suddendorf. 2016. “Prospection and the Present Moment: The Role of Episodic Foresight in Intertemporal Choices Between Immediate and Delayed Rewards.” Review of General Psychology. 20(1): 29-47. p. 33.
“… recent correlational studies have also suggested a link between individual differences on episodic foresight measures and a preference for delayed over immediate rewards. First, Bromberg et al. demonstrated that the vividness with which healthy adolescents imagined the future was negatively correlated with their delay discounting rate. Second, a greater tendency to engage in task-unrelated mind-wandering has also been associated with reduced delay discounting.” Bulley, Adam, J. Henry & T. Suddendorf. 2016. “Prospection and the Present Moment: The Role of Episodic Foresight in Intertemporal Choices Between Immediate and Delayed Rewards.” Review of General Psychology. 20(1): 29-47. p. 34; reference: Bromberg, U., A. Wiehler & J. Peters. 2015. “Episodic future thinking is related to impulsive decision making in healthy adolescents.” Child Development. 86:1458-1468.
“Indeed, in order to balance the value of immediately perceptible versus imagined rewards one must be able to infer how one will feel upon the receipt of a delayed reinforcement. As such, some authors have postulated that the same ‘theory of mind’ mechanisms involved in inferring the thoughts and feelings of other people may be used to simulate the motivational state of one’s ‘future self,’ as well as the emotional reaction of this future self to the receipt of delayed rewards.” Bulley, Adam, J. Henry & T. Suddendorf. 2016. “Prospection and the Present Moment: The Role of Episodic Foresight in Intertemporal Choices Between Immediate and Delayed Rewards.” Review of General Psychology. 20(1): 29-47. p. 36.
“For instance, the ‘ease’ with which a mental model of a possible future event comes to mind may act as a heuristic or ‘best guess’ of the likelihood of it happening. Experimental evidence shows how imagined events that are more easily simulated may come to be estimated as more plausible, probable or likely, and that imagining a possible future occurrence can bolster its subjective plausibility.” Bulley, Adam, J. Henry & T. Suddendorf. 2016. “Prospection and the Present Moment: The Role of Episodic Foresight in Intertemporal Choices Between Immediate and Delayed Rewards.” Review of General Psychology. 20(1): 29-47. p. 37.
“Several properties of MTT suggest that it may also play this role [restraint on impulsiveness] of a countermotivation device that offsets the effects of time discounting: (i) episodic recall and imagined futures are often noncontrolled – a situation or a plan can trigger specific time-travel experience without the need for deliberate retrieval or construction; (ii) once triggered, they generally activate emotional circuitry, leading to immediate rewards; (iii) these emotional rewards themselves are outside cognitive control and (iv) the emotions are appropriate given the situation recalled or imagined.
“In this view memory and imagination may play the role of a brake on impulsiveness or a boost on patience by associating our plans with non-controlled, non-opportunistic rewards, negative or positive.” Boyer, Pascal. 2008. “Evolutionary economics of mental time travel?” Cell Press. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.03.003. p. 2.
“But the point here is that some emotions are adaptive-motivation devices to the extent that they are not altogether consistent with our current goals.” Boyer, Pascal. 2008. “Evolutionary economics of mental time travel?” Cell Press. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.03.003. p. 3.
“Time travel may be functional to the extent that it provides emotions that bypass current goals as well as time discounting and, therefore, provide us with immediate counter-rewards against opportunistic motivation. The model goes against common intuitions of ‘cool cognition’ as adaptive and ‘hot emotion’ as irrational, a model widespread in traditional decision-making paradigms.” Boyer, Pascal. 2008. “Evolutionary economics of mental time travel?” Cell Press. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.03.003. p. 4.
“I argue that access to a domestic fire’s benefits improves an individual’s chance of surviving and reproducing, and that cooperation improves a fire’s returns and an individual’s chance of having access to fire. Therefore, individuals that cooperated to keep a domestic fire would have been at an advantage. There are many ways in which cooperation would have been adaptive in a fire using society, such as accessing fire from nature or other humans, transporting fire or trying to prevent it from going out.” Twomey, Terrence. 2014. “How domesticating fire facilitated the evolution of human cooperation.” Biol Philos. 29:89-99. p. 90.
“In one sense, representations of temporal junctures may simply be construed as a first-person, temporally oriented form of false-belief understanding: people understand that they can imagine both true and false versions of past and future events. However, temporal junctures also have a characteristic asymmetry: true versions of past events are typically represented as being fixed, whereas true versions of future events are often represented as being open. In other words, only in the future is a temporal juncture ‘live’, in the sense that a person experiences that each subjectively possible outcome of an event both could and could not happen. Once the outcome has become known, however, a person recognises that the temporal juncture is ‘expired,’ in the sense that each previously possible outcome either did or did not happen.” Redshaw, Jonathan & T. Suddendorf. 2020. “Temporal Junctures in the Mind.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 24(1):52-64. p. 53.
“On the whole, these findings suggest that many 4-year-olds but few younger children can mentally represent and prepare for alternative possible outcomes of an uncertain future event. Notably, several studies have found that non-human great apes and monkeys, like young children, tend to prepare for only a single version of the future on uncertain versions of the task.” Redshaw, Jonathan & T. Suddendorf. 2020. “Temporal Junctures in the Mind.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 24(1):52-64. p. 54,
“Considered individually, the results of morphometric analyses, archaeological experiments and micro- and macro-fracture studies may each have interpretative shortfalls for assessing the general presence of bow and arrow technology. However, when the cumulative and contextualised results of such studies are substantiated by micro-residues and other direct use-trace evidence, there is a strong argument for the use of stone-tipped arrows at Sibudu by 64,000 years ago.” Lombard, Marlize & L. Phillipson. 2009. “Indications of bow and stone-tipped arrow use 64,000 years ago in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.” Antiquity. 84:635-648. pp. 645-6.
“… the fact that the Japanese EUP [early Upper Paleolithic] hunters may have used bows-and-arrows imply that the fist modern humans expanded into East Asia together with bow-and-arrow technology.” Sano, Katsuhiro. 2016. “Evidence for the use of the bow-and-arrow technology by the first modern humans in the Japanese islands.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 10:130-141. p. 139.
“Multiple lines of evidence thus support the hypothesis that the KP1 [Kathu Pan 1 site in S. Africa] points were used as spear tips. Evidence for hafted hunting technologies ~500 ka is consistent with the evidence that both Neandertals and MSA hominins used hafted hunting tools and implies that this knowledge was also held by their common ancestor.” Wilkins, Jayne, B. Schoville, K. Brown & M. Chazan. 2012. “Evidence for Early Hafted Hunting Technology.” Science. 338:942-946. p. 945.
“The evolutionary process of the rules of the societal game is thus complex and fluid. A change in societal rules cannot be simply designed, implemented and enforced by statutory laws, nor by political entrepreneurs. It involves the process of actual playing of the game as well as cognitive filtering, both individual and social. Through this process, only if some public indicators gain the status of salience in that they appear increasingly persuasive, reasonable and dominant, players’ behavioral beliefs are induced to become convergent, overlapped and coordinated to a substantive degree. Only then may we say that new rules of societal games, or institutions, have emerged.
“Thus the process of rule change may be regarded as rather gradual. On one hand it involves the process of actual moves (physical actions) of play of societal games as indicated by the upper part of the circular process [four boxes in clockwise causal influence – top left box ‘experimental strategies,’ top right ‘evolving states of play,’ bottom right ‘salient public indicators,’ bottom left ‘partially convergent, partially individually reconstituted behavioral beliefs’]. On the other hand, it involves the institutional-cognitive process as represented by the lower part. The former generates constantly moving states of play by comprising adaptive responses to changing quasi-environments, experiments, emulations, mistakes, as well as results of the turnovers of the players due to various factors (e.g., demographic change, exits and entries of business corporations and political organizations). The constantly moving states of play need, however, to be summarized by the construction of various public indicators and filtered through individual cognitive processes to generate shared behavioral beliefs. This process may move slower than the first. In some cases prevailing formal public indicators and/or societal cognitive categories, such as laws, regulations, rules, organizations and the like, may even become misaligned with the evolving states of play. Such situations create social tensions, inducing agents’ motivations and actions in public and other domains to consciously challenge those unfit public indicators. Thus, the process of institutional evolution would be bound to take time and be gradual.” Aoki, Masahiko. 2011. “Institutions as cognitive media between strategic interactions and individual beliefs.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 79(1-2):20-34. p. 32.
“… this essay started out with a simple characterization of the societal rules as ‘commonly cognized, salient patterns of the ways by which societal games are being played.’ It appears to be similar to North’s seminal definition of institutions as formal and informal rules. But by adding the adjective ‘commonly cognized,’ I implicitly assume that they represent first of all self-enforcing patterns of behavior cum beliefs. Then, I argued that in order for the circularity between societal interactive patterns and individual behavioral beliefs to evolve and be sustained, various types of public linguistic representations (societal artifacts) have to mediate the process to make individual beliefs ‘meet’ each other in a well-defined sense. Those public representations may include enforceable laws, norms, and organizations. They are substantive forms of institutions. An important point is to recognize that they need to effectively serve as media between the societal state of play (behavior) and behavioral beliefs (cognition) to create and sustain a social order.” Aoki, Masahiko. 2011. “Institutions as cognitive media between strategic interactions and individual beliefs.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 79(1-2):20-34. p. 32.
“The discussion in this essay may suggest to us a three-level approach to institutions. At the basic, theoretical level, conditions for equilibrium rules for societal games to exist can be explored to clarify the role of history/culture, relationships between individual choices/beliefs and the roles of societal cognitive artifacts in institutional evolution. Then, at the intermediate level, substantive forms of institutions as the rules of societal games are to be identified, and patterns of their interrelationships across domains are to be explored. They may provide reference points for comparing the nature and workings of over-all institutional arrangements synchronically across economies, as well as diachronically over time. Finally, at the empirical and policy level, the concrete processes of rule-evolution are to be analyzed by using context-specific game-forms, and formal rules may be designed and proposed with the aim of mediating a desired change in the ways for societal games to be played in incentive compatible manner. But this needs to be done with understanding gained from analyses of the preceding two levels as background.” Aoki, Masahiko. 2011. “Institutions as cognitive media between strategic interactions and individual beliefs.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 79(1-2):20-34. p. 32.
“These casual observations just give an illustration of my fundamental point: signs emerge in social interactions, but their role in institutions is not to represent something, but to trigger dispositions to act. Therefore, we need to turn to causal analysis here, which is entirely blanked out by Hindriks and Guala: If they think of ‘eliminating’ the Y [term from Searle where X stands for Y as bills for money, that would implyl that these have no causal effects on their own. However, causality is the litmust test for distinguishing between their view and the naturalistic perspective on social ontology: In the latter view, institutions exist, because they have causal powers. Money exists, because it transforms behaviour, and we can demonstrate this by means of historical analysis and experimental psychology.” Hermann-Pillath, Carsten. 2016. “Institutional naturalism: Reflections on Masahiko Aoki’s contribution to institutional economics.” Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review. 14:501-522. p. 511; reference: Hindriks, Frank & F. Guala. 2015. “Institutions, Rules, and Equilibria: A Unified Theory.” Journal of Institutional Economics. 11(3):459-480.
“Now, distributed cognition entails a revision of the individualistic notion of agency as well. If cognitive operations are conjunctions of neuronal states and external entities, we have to conceive agency as being distributed. By implication we can no longer separate the agent from the institutions, which is the essential condition for almost all economic theories about institutions. The agency of agents is being constituted by the institutions, and the mediating process is the creation of certain cognitive capacities via the emergence of causal mechanisms between external entities and internal neuronal states of agents.” Hermann-Pillath, Carsten. 2016. “Institutional naturalism: Reflections on Masahiko Aoki’s contribution to institutional economics.” Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review. 14:501-522. p. 512.
“It is important to notice that there is a long intellectual tradition in brain research that is non-reductionist in the sense that human agency is not seen as being explicable by neuroscientific research. The central question is how to explain the emergence of the self out of what is basically an extremely complex, highly fragmented and decentralized, and immensely productive neuronal machinery. The solution to this puzzle is to consider the role of external anchors, especially the role of language or symbolic systems in general. In this view, the self emerges from the socialization of the neotenic human brain, thus creating the identity of the individual human agent via the emergence of narratives of the self which are also shared among different individuals. I think that this idea is extremely important for institutional analysis, as this implies that agency is impossible without being embedded and enabled by institutions, and crystallizes in the phenomenon of identity, once we approach institutions in the Aoki sense as being essentially rooted in sign systems, of which language as a medium of narratives is one of the most important.” Hermann-Pillath, Carsten. 2016. “Institutional naturalism: Reflections on Masahiko Aoki’s contribution to institutional economics.” Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review. 14:501-522. p. 514.
“There is a number of modifications of the original model [of Aoki’s four circularly causal elements – see Aoki above] that reflect the strictly naturalistic approach:
“The first is that we do no longer use the notion of public representation, and employ the notion of sign systems [lower right box with causality going clockwise] instead. Signs are by definition ‘public’ because they are population-level phenomena that relate to communication and interaction among members of a population. yet, they do not ‘represent’ anything even though they might be perceived in this way by the individuals themselves… This function [of reproducing the entire causal feedback loop] is realized by triggering certain dispositions [lower left box] to act on part of the individuals of a population in which the signs are used. This does not necessarily imply that the individuals consciously reflect upon the meaning of signs….
“Accordingly, dispositions are action tendencies that cause certain actions, not necessarily choices… But there are also many dispositions that are not directly related to beliefs, and that do not presuppose awareness of the underlying dispositions, apart from observing one’s own actions. This distinction is well-known from philosophy and has been also received in economics, namely the distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge. The linkage between signs, dispositions and actions is therefore essential for explaining the cognitive functions of institutions….
“The working together of actions results into certain equilibria or, a term used by Aoki in earlier versions, ‘recursive states of play.’ One aspect of these states is the production of the signs that further channel the behaviour of agents.” Hermann-Pillath, Carsten. 2016. “Institutional naturalism: Reflections on Masahiko Aoki’s contribution to institutional economics.” Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review. 14:501-522. p. 517.
“Taking all these things into account and focusing on uncontroversial features that are commonly discussed in the lithic analysis literature, we have identified 35 procedural units that may be associated with lithic technology:
“Preliminary steps
“(1) Raw material treatment: evidence of heat treatment
“Core Preparation Techniques
“(2) Decortification: cortex is removed
“(3) Shaping of platform: platform intentionally prepared by flaking….
“Blank Production Techniques
“(13) Hard hammer percussion used…
“Product Shaping
“Edge shaping: (22) retouched edge (edge of final product is retouched)….
“Core Rejuvenation
“(30) Tablette: platforms reshaped by removal of single large flakes…
“(35) Face shaping: core reshaped by lateral flaking between removals or series of removals” Perreault, Charles, P. J. Brantingham, S. Kuhn, S. Wurz & X. Gao. 2013. “Measuring the Complexity of Lithic Technology.” Current Anthropology. 54(Suppl. 8): S397-S406. pp. S399, S400.
“Our preliminary analysis suggests the existence of a long-term trend toward greater complexity in the evolution of lithic technologies throughout the Paleolithic period but that there is a particularly sharp increase in complexity within the Middle Paleolithic and the Middle Stone Age.” Perreault, Charles, P. J. Brantingham, S. Kuhn, S. Wurz & X. Gao. 2013. “Measuring the Complexity of Lithic Technology.” Current Anthropology. 54(Suppl. 8): S397-S406. p. S403.
“The difference in the effect of goal-specific future thinking and non-goal general future thinking suggests that engaging in future thinking that is aligned to the decision-making task increases activation of brain structures related to prospection in order to counteract the tendency of people to discount the future, and to choose a larger but delayed reward over a smaller, but immediate reward.” O’Donnell, Sara, T. O. Daniel & L.H. Epstein. 2017. “Does Goal Relevant Episodic Future Thinking Amplify the Effect on Delay Discounting?” Conscious Cogn. May 51:10-16 Doi:10.1016/j.concog.2017.02-014. p. 13.
“Considering these findings [mixed results in future thinking from optimism to pessimism], we propose that thinking about the future often involves preparation for action so as to bring about desired outcomes. This preparation for action can entail two heuristic stages, one of which focuses on identifying desired future outcomes, and the second one devoted to considering whether and how to bring those about….. The first two steps in Oettingen’s model consist of formulating a wish and envisioning the best possible outcome. Such thoughts tend to be inherently optimistic and positive. The later steps involve thinking about obstacles standing in the way of success, which leads people to determine whether reaching the outcome is not only desirable but also feasible, and if so then implicitly or explicitly making a plan to succeed despite the obstacles. These latter steps may be much less positive and indeed are grounded in realistic awareness of the central obstacles that need to be conquered on the way of wish fulfillment.” Baumeister, Roy, K. Vohs & G. Oettingen. 2016. “Pragmatic Prospection: How and Why People Think About the Future.” Review of General Psychology. 20(1):3-16. p. 4; reference: Oettingen, Gabriele. 2012. “Future thought and behaviour change.” European Review of Social Psychology. 23:1-63.
“That is, a large part of social psychology studies situations as consisting of things that might but might not happen, as in research on threat, opportunity, worry, negotiation, risk, and success versus failure.” Baumeister, Roy, K. Vohs & G. Oettingen. 2016. “Pragmatic Prospection: How and Why People Think About the Future.” Review of General Psychology. 20(1):3-16. p. 7.
“Viewing prospection as pragmatic means that prospective thinking is less concerned with knowing what will definitely happen than with predicting possibilities and contingencies. That is, it may be useful to predict not what is inevitable but what the probabilistic structure of the matrix of possibilities is. Two kinds of crossroads are particularly relevant. First, there are decisions (choice points), at which the person must select among multiple possible options. Second, there are performance demands, which by definition offer the possibility of both success and failure, or a range of possible outcomes with varying degrees of success. Prospective thought thus seeks not to predict the final outcome but rather to know what choice points and performance demands will confront oneself with multiple options.” Baumeister, Roy, K. Vohs & G. Oettingen. 2016. “Pragmatic Prospection: How and Why People Think About the Future.” Review of General Psychology. 20(1):3-16. p. 7.
“Baumeister, Vohs, Aaker, and Garbinsky found that ratings of the meaningfulness of life correlated with how much people mentally linked the past, present, and future (unlike happiness, which was correlated positively with thinking about the present only). The experience sampling data by Baumeister et al provided more thorough evidence, because those included ratings of the meaningfulness of particular thoughts, not just of life in general. The meaningfulness of thoughts conformed to a J-shaped function. Thoughts invoking the future were the most meaningful, and the farther into the future they extended, the more meaningful they were. Thoughts about the past were also highly meaningful (and the more remote the past, the more meaningful), but in general the future was more meaningful than the past. Thoughts confined to the present had the lowest average level of meaning.
“Another key finding indicated that linking ‘time zones’ (past, present, or future) increased meaning. Baumeister et al. coded each thought for whether the participant indicated a single time zone or indicated that it referred to two or three of those. Thoughts that incorporated more than one were rated as more meaningful overall than thoughts that referred to just one time zone. The most common combination involved present and future, and so the findings indicate that people rated their thoughts highly meaningful when the thoughts linked present to future. Further analyses revealed that meaning increased steadily as more time zones were invoked. The least meaningful thoughts were those that lacked any time frame, and the most meaningful were the ones that combined past, present, and future.” Baumeister, Roy, K. Vohs & G. Oettingen. 2016. “Pragmatic Prospection: How and Why People Think About the Future.” Review of General Psychology. 20(1):3-16. p. 7; references: Baumeister, Roy, K. Vohs, J. Aaker & E. Garbinsky. 2013. “Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life.” The Journal of Positive Psychology. 8:505-516; Baumeister, Roy, W. Hofmann & K. Vohs. “Everyday thoughts about the past, present, and future: An experience sampling study of mental time travel.” Manuscript under review.
“The simple notion that prospective thought is inherently pragmatic has further implications. One concerns how people imagine the future. Rather than thinking of it as the unfolding of a fixed script, as would be conducive to an emphasis on prediction, people seem to think of it as a matrix of competing, often incompatible possibilities. The perennial view that the future is in some sense already inevitable (and therefore subject to be known in advance) does not mesh well with how people actually conceptualize the future in terms of contingencies, options, and other possibilities.” Baumeister, Roy, K. Vohs & G. Oettingen. 2016. “Pragmatic Prospection: How and Why People Think About the Future.” Review of General Psychology. 20(1):3-16. p. 13.
“… the response of China to the world financial crisis is the central reason why the financial turbulence that emanated from the US subprime crisis did not completely destroy the world economy and lead to a repeat of the 1930s Great Depression….
“In the Depression, according to Kindleberger, the United States should have provided an open market to foreign goods. Instead, the Smoot Hawley tariff closed off American markets and provoked other countries into a spiral of retaliatory measures. US financial institutions should have continued to lend to distressed borrowers, in order to prevent a spiral in which the unavailability of finance forced price reductions and intensified the process of world deflation. Instead, the US banks were widely blamed for the international lending in the boom that had preceded the bust. They became so intimidated by the ferocious political criticism that they were weakened and the flow of American credit stopped.
“After the Second World War, as a leading figure in developing the Marshall Plan, Kindleberger set about applying these lessons, advising that the US should keep its markets and its flow of funds open to support other countries. he then generalized the experience into a theory of how a benign large power could potentially align its interests with the whole world community by keeping trade and financial markets open.
“How different the twenty-first century looks from the Depression story! It is as if the Chinese leadership were ‘A’ students in one of Kindleberger’s courses. Throughout the crisis, the Chinese economy continued to grow at an amazing pace, in part as a consequence of large state countercyclical strategies. When anyone wants an example of how a Keynesian strategy can be highly effective in the short term, internationally as well as domestically, they should look at China’s 4 trillion renminbi stimulus. Prime Minister Wen Jinbao spoke of the package as ‘an important engine for the world economic recovery.’
“Apart from the six months following collapse in September 2008 of Lehman Brothers, in which trade finance stopped and the world did look as if it was close to Great Depression circumstances, China, with other emerging markets, helped those industrial economies with a strong export sector to recover. The surprising strength of many northern European economies today, with more vigorous growth than at any time in the past 15 years, is due to the dynamism of emerging market demand….
“China also followed Kindleberger’s financial lessons. For a moment it looked as if a contagious crisis, driven by fears of government overindebtedness, would destroy the politically fragile compromise that European countries had delicately built over a 50-year period. The turning point in the euro-panic of spring 2011 came when the big holders of reserve currencies signalled that they saw the need for the euro as an alternative to both the increasingly problematic dollar and the equally vulnerable yen. China started to buy EU government bonds, and a high-profile Chinese team even went to Greece to buy not government paper but real assets that were underpriced because of the crisis.” James, Harold. 2011. “International order after the financial crisis.” International Affairs. 87(3):525-537. pp. 531-2; reference: Kindleberger, Charles. 1986. The World in Depression 1929-1939. Second Edition. University of California Press.
“Yesterday’s globalization was thought of as Americanization, the imposition of mindless consumerism; today’s globalization is already being thought of as Chinafication, the spread of low-wage production.” James, Harold. 2011. “International order after the financial crisis.” International Affairs. 87(3):525-537. p. 534.
“A market society cannot live simply on the basis of the values that it generates itself as a result of its own commercial activities and exchanges. Capitalism–whether the American or the Chinese style–does not simply engender its own popularity and legitimacy by an automatic magic of the market. The world of colourful baubles does not last. Conduct in a market society needs rather to be guided by some external source of commonly defined and commonly held values. If those values erode, instability ensues.” James, Harold. 2011. “International order after the financial crisis.” International Affairs. 87(3):525-537. pp. 535-6.
“The fundamental values that underlie empathy derive from some other source. What are the sources of basic values regarding human dignity, human motivation and conduct? A powerful current of interpretation suggests a religious origin. In a famous tract, Max Weber tried to suggest that the ethic that drove modern capitalism had originated with cultivation of a very unbusinesslike asceticism in the world of the Reformation. The idea of renunciation and a denial of consumption then produced an accumulation of surpluses. The initial asceticism of the business elite gradually eroded as it was replaced by what Weber called the ‘iron cage’ of rationalistic calculation. The original motivation disappeared, generating a feeling of emptiness in Weber’s account. That process of sucking out meaning from the economic process was what in Weber’s view produced a backlash.” James, Harold. 2011. “International order after the financial crisis.” International Affairs. 87(3):525-537. p. 536.
“Technical innovation works with globalization, and is diffused by globalization, while political innovation often works to harness the effects of globalization and limit the extent of technical transfers, in short, to constrain globalization. Strains appear when political institutions that are supposed to ‘manage’ globalization, at either a national or a supranational level, cannot live up to expectations, and a cycle of disillusion and disenchantment sets in.” James, Harold. 2017. “Deglobalization as a Global Challenge.” Centre for International Governance Innovation paper no. 135. June. p. 3.
“But trade in goods covers a shrinking proportion of economic activity. We are more dependent on services. Just as agriculture declined, so the share of manufacturing employment is likely to shrink until it becomes – like agriculture today – fundamentally trivial.
“The critical issue is services – and who provides them…. That is why the most realistic and incidentally, also the most optimistic scenarios on how to avoid anti-globalization populist backlashes focus on improving the quality and provision of a wider array of services.” James, Harold. 2017. “Deglobalization as a Global Challenge.” Centre for International Governance Innovation paper no. 135. June. pp. 5-6.
“During the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first four of the twentieth, basic political control in Japan shifted twice. In the 1910s, it shifted from a handful of oligarchs to a larger group of professional politicians. In the 1930s it shifted again, this time to a set of independent military leaders.” Ramseyer, J. Mark & F.M. Rosenbluth. 1998. The Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice in Imperial Japan. Cambridge UP. p. 1.
“When one oligarch wanted to increase his share of the oligarchic spoils, he organized one segment of the population. When another oligarch wanted to retaliate, he organized another. Once organized, however, these groups tended to endure. Gradually but steadily, the oligarchs enlarged the fraction of the population informed and organized enough to lobby for political power. Gradually but steadily, they caused power to devolve from oligarchy to democracy.” Ramseyer, J. Mark & F.M. Rosenbluth. 1998. The Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice in Imperial Japan. Cambridge UP. p. 7.
“Because none alone was strong enough, the leaders of the Meiji Restoration had to band their forces together to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate. But once collectively in power, each individually had an incentive to wrest more power from the others for himself.” Ramseyer, J. Mark & F.M. Rosenbluth. 1998. The Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice in Imperial Japan. Cambridge UP. p. 17.
“The oligarchs still had to deal with the vast majority of the samurai, and the last thing they needed was a rebellion by all the weapons-wielders in the country. Since they could not buy off all the samurai with government positions, they decided to reduce the risk of revolt in two other ways. First, they would eliminate the samurai class’s centuries-old monopoly on weapons and institute nationwide conscription for military service in itsplace. Second, to soften the blow of lost income and status, they issued each samurai family government bonds in December 1873 as a severance payment.” Ramseyer, J. Mark & F.M. Rosenbluth. 1998. The Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice in Imperial Japan. Cambridge UP. pp. 19-20.
“In another step to restructure the configuration of power in Japan, the oligarchs introduced – in the name of the emperor, of course – a peerage system in 1876.” Ramseyer, J. Mark & F.M. Rosenbluth. 1998. The Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice in Imperial Japan. Cambridge UP. p. 20.
“It was no easy task to forge a coherent government from the leaders of the twenty-three feudal domains that together toppled the Tokugawa forces. This was an unwieldy group with few common interests and many disparate ones, as the frequent institutional reshuffling testified. The first Meiji government, instituted in January 1868, consisted of three ‘branches’: a president, a council of 30, and a body of 106 ‘advisors.’ The advisors – who were the real activists in the Restoration – presided over seven ‘departments’ that were to implement the policies decided in the council: imperial, internal, foreign, military, fiscal, judicial, and structural affairs.
“The Meiji leaders reorganized themselves three times in the next four months. In 1869 they streamlined their government into a more hierarchical system. The government was to be led by two councils: the Imperial Affairs Bureau, which was to be paramount, and the General Governance Bureau. Below these were six ministries to handle the day-to-day tasks of government: Public Affairs, Finance, Military, Justice, Imperial Household, and Foreign Affairs.” Ramseyer, J. Mark & F.M. Rosenbluth. 1998. The Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice in Imperial Japan. Cambridge UP. p. 22.
“The oligarchy eventually went the way of many tacit cartels: It collapsed under the weight of massive cheating from within its own membership. The multitude of ways in which the oligarchs could cheat on each other undetected, the strength of popular support for that cheating, and the large variance among the oligarchs in their ability to take advantage of the popular support doomed the oligarchy long before the military took over the Japanese government in the early 1930s. By the time the oligarchs drafted a constitution in the 1880s, their differences of view were so profound that they failed even to enshrine their own power in the document.” Ramseyer, J. Mark & F.M. Rosenbluth. 1998. The Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice in Imperial Japan. Cambridge UP. p. 28.
“The mainstream oligarchs began work on a constitution that made as many concessions as necessary, but as few as possible. The maverick oligarchs, with their latent power to mobilize the rebellious masses, had forced them to retreat from autocratic rule.” Ramseyer, J. Mark & F.M. Rosenbluth. 1998. The Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice in Imperial Japan. Cambridge UP. p. 31.
“Through the Meiji Constitution the oligarchs undeniably made significant concessions to the public – and to the mavericks who threatened to galvanize the public. Not only did they permit political entrepreneurs to mobilize voters, they paid these men to do so.
“In many ways, however, the oligarchs stopped short of giving voters and their representatives a full veto. Although they buried the mechanisms in a variety of provisions, they retained for themselves several ways to circumvent uncooperative legislatures. They could often avoid statutes through Imperial Orders, and the House of Representatives could not change the status of the Constitution, the Privy Council, or the House of Peers even if it wished.” Ramseyer, J. Mark & F.M. Rosenbluth. 1998. The Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice in Imperial Japan. Cambridge UP. p. 36.
“What happened after Columbus, this new research says, was nothing less than the forming of a single new world from the collision of two old worlds–three, if one counts Africa as separate from Eurasia. Born in the sixteenth century from European desires to join the thriving Asian trade sphere, the economic system for exchange ended up transforming the globe into a single ecological system by the nineteenth century–almost instantly.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. p. xxv.
“Newspapers usually describe globalization in purely economic terms, but it is also a biological phenomenon; indeed, from a long-term perspective it may be primarily a biological phenomenon.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. p. 7.
“The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colon’s voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. p. 23.
“The lack of domestic animals [for Indians especially surrounding the settlement at Jamestown] had momentous consequences in a country without horses, donkeys, and cattle, the only source of transportation and labor was the human body. Compared to England, Tsenacomoco [preexisting kingdom where Jamestown was founded] had slower communications (no galloping horses), a dearth of plowed fields and pastures (no grazing cattle), and fewer and smaller roads (no carriages to accommodate). Battles were fought without cavalry; winters endured without wool; logs skidded through the forest without oxen.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. p. 57.
“Lacking draft animals and metal tools, the Powhatan [tribe surrounding Jamestown named by the colonists after their leader, Powhatan] perforce used different methods and obtained different results. They toppled trees by circling their bases with a ring of fire, then laboriously hacked at the burned zone with stone axes until the trunk collapsed. Brush and slash were put to the torch, leaving a heave of blackened stumps. Around the stumps farmers dug shallow holes with long-handled hoes made from bone or clamshells, dropping in each hole a few kernels of maize and several beans…. Below the maize grew squash and gourds, pumpkin and melon, common beans and runner beans, ropy vines asprawl in every direction….
“Except for defensive palisades, Powhatan farmers had no fences around their fields. Why screen off land if no catle or sheep had to be kept inside?…. The lack of physical property demarcation signified to the English that Indians didn’t truly occupy the land–it was, so to speak, unimproved. Equally unfamiliar was the Powhatan practice of scattering their farm plots within larger cleared areas. To the Indians, fallow lands were a kind of communal larder, a place for naturally occurring useful plants, including grains (little barley, sumpweed, goosefoot), edible greens (wild lettuce, wild plantains), and medicinals (sassafras, dogbane, smartweed). Because none of these species existed in Europe, the English didn’t know the groundcover was useful. Instead they saw ‘unused’ land, something that bewildered them. How could Indians go to the trouble of clearing the land but then not use it?” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. pp. 61-2.
“Removing forest cover, blocking regrowth on fallow land, exhausting the soil, shutting down annual burning, unleashing big grazing and rooting animals, introducing earthworms, honeybees, and other alien invertebrates–the colonists so profoundly changed Tsenacomoco that it became harder and harder for its inhabitants to prosper there.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. p. 94.
“When Europeans brought smallpox and influenza to the Americas, they set off epidemics: sudden outbursts that shot through Indian towns and villages, then faded. Malaria, by contrast, became endemic, an ever-present, debilitating presence in the landscape. Socially speaking, malaria–along with another mosquito-borne disease, yellow fever–turned the Americas upside down. Before these maladies arrived, the most thickly inhabited terrain north of Mexico was what is now the southeastern United States, and the wet forests of Mesoamerica and Amazonia held millions of people. After malaria and yellow fever, these previously salubrious areas became inhospitable….
“Even today, the places where European colonists couldn’t survive are much poorer than places that Europeans found more healthful. The reason, the researchers said, is that the conquering newcomers established different institutions in disease zones than they did in healthier areas. Unable to create stable, populous colonies in malarial areas, Europeans founded what Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson called ‘extractive states’….
“Because both diseases killed European workers in American tobacco and sugar plantations, colonists imported labor in the form of captive Africans–the human wing of the Columbian Exchange. In sum: ecological introductions shaped an economic exchange, which in turn had political consequences that have endured to the present.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. pp. 102-3; reference: Acemoglu, D., S. Johnson & J. Robinson. 2001. “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation.” American Economic Review. 91:1369-1401.
“If employers constantly lost workers to the lure of cheap land, then they would want to restrict their freedom of movement. Bondage was the inevitable end result. Paradoxically enough, America’s wide-open frontier was, from this perspective, an incitement to slavery….
“The conflict [English Civil War] was disastrous: between 1650 and 1680 the country’s population fell almost 10 percent. As economics would predict, the decline in the number of English workers drove up English wages, which inevitably increased the price necessary to lure indentured servants across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the indentured servants who had finished their terms in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Carolina were establishing new plantations and seeking their own indentured servants, increasing demand, which, as one would expect, further lifted prices.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. p. 121.
“In the late seventeenth century, the new flintlock rifle was becoming available–the first European firearm that native people regarded as superior to their bows….
“The southeastern confederacies, quickly understanding the new weapons’ superiority, determined not to be outgunned, either by the English or their native rivals. An arms race ensued across the Southeast. To build up their stores of flintlocks, native people raided their enemies for slaves to sell–an action that required more firearms. Needing guns to defend themselves, they in turn staged their own slaving raids, selling the captives to Europeans in return for guns. Demand fed demand in a vicious cycle.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. pp. 125-6.
“Here notice a striking geographical coincidence. By 1700, English colonies were studded along the Atlantic shore from what would become Maine to what would become South Carolina. Northern colonies coexisted with Algonkian-speaking Indian societies that had few slaves and little interest in buying and selling captives; southern colonies coexisted with former Mississippian societies with many slaves and considerable experience in trading them. Roughly speaking, the boundary between these two types of society was Chesapeake Bay, not far from what would become the boundary between slave and non-slave states in the United States. Did the proximity of Indian societies with slaves to sell help grease the skids for what would become African slavery in the South?… The implication is speculative, but not, it seems to me, unreasonable.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. p. 128.
“The colonists [in Carolina] decided to use the warm climate to grow rice, then scarce in England. Soon after came reports of ‘fever and ague’–rice paddies are notorious mosquito havens.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. p. 129.
“Unfortunately, Indians were just as prone to malaria as English indentured servants–and more vulnerable to other diseases. Native people died in ghastly numbers across the entire Southeast. Struck doubly by disease and slave raids, the Chickasaw lost almost half their population between 1685 and 1715.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. p. 129.
“China was the world’s biggest economy. Its ‘silverization’ [because the government had too often abused paper money with inflation by over-issuing it] meant that tens of millions of wealthy Chinese suddenly needed chunks of silver for such basic tasks as paying taxes or running a business…. To get the silver necessary to keep business going, merchants turned to wokou [pirates]. Businesspeople sold silk and porcelain to brutal men with silver, then turned around and used the silver to pay their taxes, which in turn was spent on military campaigns, against those brutal men. The Ming government was at war with its own money supply.
“Unable to reconcile the contradiction, Beijing finally allowed Fujianese merchants to trade overseas without fear of punishment. Now acting in the open, they sent thousands of people–younger sons from extended families–throughout Asia to establish beachheads for later trading or extortion. Even a backwater like the Malay village of Manila may have had as many as 150 Chinese residents in 1571, when Legazpi showed up. Hundreds more apparently resided elsewhere in the islands. The unexpected discovery of silver-bearing foreigners in the Philippines was, from the Chinese point of view, a godsend. The galleons that brought over Spanish silver were ships full of money.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. p. 178.
“The only reason Manila attracted any Europeans at all was because it represented an extraordinary opportunity: China would pay twice as much for Spanish silver as the rest of the world. And its merchants were willing to sell silk and porcelain amazingly cheaply.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. p. 196.
“Because the situation had reverted to its pre-massacre state, the Spaniards in Manila were as few, dependent, and scared as ever they had been. Eventually they again tightened restrictions on the Chinese. Rebellions flowered in the Parian [Chinese quarter near the port], followed by expulsions and massacres. The cycle repeated itself in 1639, 1662, 1686, 1709, 1755, 1763, and 1820, each time with an awful death toll.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. p. 205.
“In the textbooks, government appears mainly as an outside factor that imposes tariffs, quotas, levies, and so on, influencing the outcome of private trade, often reducing the net economic benefit. But the state does this because trade has two roles: one highlighted in economics textbooks, where private markets allow both sides to gain economically, and one that rarely appears in those textbooks, in which trade is a tool of statecraft, the goal is political power, and both sides usually do not win. In this second role, the net economic benefit of trade is much less important than the political benefit to each side, and the government interventions that exasperate economists can be useful, even vital tools to achieve national preeminence.
Footnote: “In practice, the picture is complicated by business’s attempts to manipulate government for their own ends, often to the detriment of state policies, and by groups within the state that use power for private gain. Nevertheless, the distinction between trade as a private exchange between willing parties and trade as a tool of state aggrandizement is useful. Indeed, one reason for the conflict between today’s free traders and anti-globalization activists is that the former regard the first role as paramount whereas the latter think in terms of the second. [End of footnote]
“The greatest expansions of world trade have tended to occur when both roles are aligned and commercial ambitions can be enforced….
“At the same time, the two roles often conflict, and the conflict leads, as in Manila, to a considerable amount of profoundly fractured cerebration. For Spain, Manila was both a trading post and a projection of Spanish power n the Pacific. Its traders wanted to generate as much profit as possible by importing as much silk as possible; its political rulers, by contrast, wanted to seize Asian lands, convert Asians to Christianity, thwart Dutch and Portuguese ambitions–and have as much of the silver as possible come to Spain, because the state needed it to pay for wars in Europe. Considered purely as a trading entrepot, Manila should house as few Spaniards as possible–they were expensive to send over and kept dying of disease–and let Chinese people do all the work. To serve best as an imperial outpost, though, the Spaniards needed to ensure that all vital civic functions were in loyal Spanish hands, and minimize the number and influence of the Chinese. Every step to satisfy one imperative worked against the other.
“Like the Spanish court, the Ming court struggled to reconcile the divergent roles of trade. On the one hand, silver from the silk trade became a source of imperial wealth and power. American silver helped pay for huge military projects, including much of the Great Wall of China, which the Ming were revamping and extending. And it fueled an explosion of commerce within China, which led to an economic boom. On the other hand, the money that enabled business to grow also set off inflation, which had its worst impact on the poor. And silver was ever a political threat to the dynasty, because it controlled neither the trade nor the source. Alarmingly, the emperors could not restrict the flow of silver into Fujian, even if they wanted to, because of rampant smuggling.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. pp. 206-7.
“Compared to grains, tubers are inherently more productive….
“Many scholars believe that the introduction of S. tuberosum [potato] to Europe was a key moment in history. This is because their widespread consumption largely coincided with the end of famine in Northern Europe. (Maize, another American crop, played a similar but smaller role in southern Europe.)” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. pp. 252, 253.
“As important in the long run, the European and North American adoption of the potato set the template for modern agriculture–the agro-industrial complex, as it is sometimes called. Celebrated by agronomists for its bounteous harvests and denounced by environmentalists for its toxicity, the agro-industrial complex rests on three pillars: improved crops, high-intensity fertilizers, and factory-made pesticides. All three are entwined with the Columbian Exchange, and with the potato.
“Not only did the Columbian Exchange carry the ultra-productive potato to Europe and North America, it also brought the world’s first intensive fertilizer: Peruvian guano. Andean peoples had mined it for centuries from great excremental deposits seabirds left on coastal islands. Fertilizer ships crossed the Atlantic by the hundreds, brimming with guano–and, many researchers believe, a fungus-like organism that blighted potatoes, causing a famine in Ireland that by some measures was the worst in the historical record.
“Not long after, potatoes fell to the attack of another imported species, the Colorado potato beetle. Panicked farmers turned to the first inorganic pesticide: a widely available form of arsenic, sprayed with enthusiasm over the field. Competition to produce ever-more-effective arsenic compounds launched the modern pesticide industry–the third component of modern agribusiness.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. pp. 253-4.
“At the same time that the sweet potato and maize were midwifing a population boom in China, the potato was helping to lift populations in Europe–the more potatoes, the more people. In the century after the potato’s introduction Europe’s numbers roughly doubled….
“According to the two researchers’ ‘most conservative’ estimate, S. tuberosum [potato] was responsible for about an eighth of Europe’s population increase.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. pp. 269, 271; reference: Nunn, N. & N. Qian. Forthcoming. “The Potato’s Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence from an Historical Experiment.” Quarterly Journal of Economics.
“… every internal combustion engine contains many pipes and valves that channel, usually under pressure, water, oil, gasoline, and exhaust vapor. Unless the parts are manufactured perfectly, engine vibrations will cause liquids or gases to vent dangerously from the joints. Flexible rubber gaskets, washers, and O-rings almost invisibly fill the gaps. Without them, every home furnace would be at constant risk of leaking natural gas, heating oil, or coal exhaust–a potential death trap.
“‘Three fundamental materials were required for the Industrial Revolution,’ Hecht, the UCLA geographer, told me. ‘Steel, fossil fuels, and rubber.’” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. pp. 317-8.
“The first two, small movements into Sao Tome failed–killed off by disease. A third, larger attempt in 1493 succeeded, partly because it was accompanied by a mass of slave labor: convicts and undesirables, notable among the latter some two thousand Jewish children who had been taken forcibly from their parents. Sugar planters and sugar processors, criminals and children–all died in droves…. In 1554, six decades after colonization began, Sao Tome had but 1,200 Europeans. By 1600 the figure had shrunk to about two hundred–slaves outnumbered masters by more than a hundred to one. In 1785 an official report, claimed that just four people–four people!–of pure European stock lived on the island. Trying to build up the colonial population, the monarchy ordered that female African slaves be awarded to every new male European arrival, along with exhortations to breed….
“Despite the lack of colonists the colony flourished–for a while. At the height of the boom Sao Tome exported four times as much sugar as Madeira. About a third of the island’s surface had been converted to sugarcane; much of the forest had vanished to fuel sugar mills. Because few Europeans ventured there, the land was not sliced into small parcels, like Madeira. Instead Sao Tome was divided into a few dozen big plantations, each with several hundred slaves. From a distance, the plantations looked like tiny cities, with the slave huts clustering like suburbs around the high-timbered ‘big house’ for the plantation manager and his family, many of whom were the mixed-race results of the free-concubine system (the owners themselves remained in Portugal if they could). With their tiny, fever-ridden European populations brutally overseeing thousands of enchained workers, Sao Tome and Principe were the progenitors of the extractive state.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. pp. 378-9.
“…’slaves were the only form of private, revenue producing property recognized in African law.’ In western and central Europe, the most important form of property was land, and the aristocracy consisted mainly of large landowners who could buy or sell property with little legal restriction. In western and central Africa, by contrast, land was effectively owned by the government – sometimes personally by the king, sometimes by a kinship or religious group, most often by the state itself, with the sovereign exercising authority in the manner of a chief executive officer. No matter which arrangement held true in a given polity, though, the land could not be readily sold or taxed. What could be sold and taxed was labor. Kings and emperors who wanted to enrich themselves thus didn’t think in terms of occupying land but of controlling people….
“Because labor was the main form of property in West Africa, rich West Africans almost by definition owned a lot of slaves. Plantations were rare in that part of the world–coastal West Africa’s soil and climate typically won’t support them–so big groups of slaves rarely were found working in fields as was common in American sugar or tobacco plantations. Instead slaves were soldiers, servants, or construction workers, building roads and fences and barns. Often enough they did almost nothing; wealthy, powerful slave owners kept more slaves than they needed, in the way that wealthy, powerful landowners in Europe would pile up unused land.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. pp. 428, 429; subquote: Thornton, J.K. 2010. “African Political Ethics and the Slave Trade.” In: Peterson, D.R. (ed). pp. 38-62. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa and the Atlantic. Athens: Ohio University Press.
“In the past, most African slaveholders had known something about their slaves’ previous lives. Sometimes they were related to their bondsmen, distant cousins or in-laws; other times they understood exactly what familial, lineage, or tribal obligation had resulted in their enslavement. Even prisoners of war had been obtained in a known location, in a known conflict. Chattel slavery on colonial plantations, by contrast, made slaves anonymous–they were, so to speak, something bought in a store, selected purely on physical characteristics, like so many cans of soup.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. p. 432.
“Slaves continued to escape and to live in the forest. But they didn’t repeat the mistake of forming big, centralized communities like Palmares. Instead they created ten thousand or more small villages in a flexible, shifting network that spread across much of eastern Brazil and the lower Amazon. They mixed with extant native settlements, collected Indian slave escapees, threw open their doors to Portuguese misfits and criminals. Many Africans had lived in tropical environments before being shipped across the ocean. They were comfortable in hot, wet places where people farmed palms and kept trapfuls of shrimp in the stream. They were happy to learn when Indians showed them how to fish by scattering poison in a tributary or make protective ‘boots’ by melting latex over their feet or squeeze the bitter compounds our of manioc with long, tubular baskets. Ideologically opposed to ‘going native,’ the Portuguese were much less willing to adjust. In consequence, the forest seemed dangerous to them, a place to be ventured into only with an army…. In consequence, the quilombos [fugitive communities] were left largely alone–unless they were unlucky enough to be in the path of gold miners, rubber tappers, or other people who sought quick wealth in the forest.” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. pp. 476-8.
“Complicating all [of the economics and externalities of the world after the Columbian Exchange] is the welter of mixed motives. On the one hand, people want the wash of goods and services that the world-wide market provides….
“On the other hand, the same people who want to satisfy their desires also resist the consequences of satisfaction. They want to have what everyone else has, but still be aggressively themselves–a contradictory enterprise. Floating in the capitalist stream, they reach down with their feet, looking for solid ground. To be a good place to stand, it must be their own, not somebody else’s place. As human desires bring the Homogenocene into existence, billions of people marching through increasingly identical landscapes, that special place becomes ever harder to find. Things feel changed and scary. Some people hunker down into their local dialects of customary clothing or an imagined version of their own history or religion. Others enfold themselves in their homes and gardens. A few pick up weapons. Even as the world unifies, its constituent parts fragment into halves, and the halves into quarters. Unity or division –Thelma’s Paradise [Filipino tourist resort] or New People’s Army [Filipino guerrillas]–which will win out? Or is the conflict inevitable?” Mann, Charles. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books. pp. 507-8.
“The enactive approach … entails that both the organism and the meaningful structures in its environment emerge from a set of self-organising dynamic processes.” Ward, Dave, D. Silverman & M. Villalobos. 2017. “Introduction: The Varieties of Enactivism.” Topoi. 36:365-375. p. 368.
“Since TEM’s [The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience] publication there have been at least three semi-distinct currents of enactivist theorising. First, what is sometimes called autopoietic enactivism, which emphasises TEM’s project of grounding cognition in the biodynamics of living systems; second, sensorimotor enactivism, which focuses on analysing the structure, content and character of perceptual experience in terms of the relationships between sensation and embodied activity; third, radical enactivism, which focuses on the case for rejecting representationalist explanations of cognitive capacities in favour of explanatory strategies emphasising patterns of embodied interaction. Finally, enactivist theorising overlaps with various attempts to understand minds as embodied, embedded, extended and affective that draw on the traditions sketched [earlier] …, while rejecting or remaining neutral on particular enactivist tenets.” Ward, Dave, D. Silverman & M. Villalobos. 2017. “Introduction: The Varieties of Enactivism.” Topoi. 36:365-375. p. 369.
“How can I see the whole tomato when I am only presented with its facing side? Because, answers the sensorimotor enactivist [e.g. Alva Noe], I implicitly understand the regular and predictable ways in which exploratory movements would bring other aspects of the tomato into view. How can I experience the environment as rich and detailed given the limits of my sensory sensitivity? Because I understand the ways in which further details of the environment can be revealed through exploratory activity.” Ward, Dave, D. Silverman & M. Villalobos. 2017. “Introduction: The Varieties of Enactivism.” Topoi. 36:365-375. p. 371.
“But whereas autopoietic enactivists aim to explain a wide variety of cognitive capacities in terms of the autopoietic and adaptive dynamics sketched above, sensorimotor enactivists usually restrict their focus to perceptual experience, which is to be explained by appeal to sensorimotor dynamics relating perception to action. And while autopoietic enactivists are often committed to a Jonas-inspired deep continuity between life and mind, and a conception of perceptible qualities as enacted, rather than existing independently of the perceiver’s activity, sensorimotor enactivists typically remain neutral on these phenomenological and metaphysical claims.” Ward, Dave, D. Silverman & M. Villalobos. 2017. “Introduction: The Varieties of Enactivism.” Topoi. 36:365-375. p. 372; reference: Jonas, Hans. 1966. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. Northwestern University Press.
“As Hutto emphasises, however, REC [radical enactive cognition] should be seen as an attempt to improve and unify anti-representationalist aproaches to cognition rather than as competing with autopoietic or sensorimotor enactivism.” Ward, Dave, D. Silverman & M. Villalobos. 2017. “Introduction: The Varieties of Enactivism.” Topoi. 36:365-375. p. 372; reference: Hutto, D. 2017. “REC: revolution effected by clarification.” Topoi. 36.
“REC thus draws on the same intellectual lineage as the above varieties of enactivism, rejecting cognitivism in favour of an emphasis on interactive dynamics. It goes beyond autopoietic and sensorimotor enactivism in its scepticism about the propriety of representational or contentful talk in characterising these dynamics, and this scepticism motivates a distinction between ‘basic’ cognitive capacities grounded in adaptive sensorimotor interaction and the richer socioculturally scaffolded capacities characteristic of mature human cognition.” Ward, Dave, D. Silverman & M. Villalobos. 2017. “Introduction: The Varieties of Enactivism.” Topoi. 36:365-375. p. 373.
“In emphasising organism/environment interactions enactivists likewise commit themselves to a view of cognition as essentially embedded–to be explained not only by properties of the organism itself, but also by properties of its environment and its interactions with it.” Ward, Dave, D. Silverman & M. Villalobos. 2017. “Introduction: The Varieties of Enactivism.” Topoi. 36:365-375. p. 373.
“In particular, the view that cognition should sometimes be understood as extended–that is, as having a material substrate that includes portions of the environment as well as of the organism–enjoys an uneasy relationship with enactivism.” Ward, Dave, D. Silverman & M. Villalobos. 2017. “Introduction: The Varieties of Enactivism.” Topoi. 36:365-375. p. 374.
“… Wheeler argues that autopoietic enactivism’s appeal to biodynamics that create and maintain a stable boundary between organism [and] environment locks the processes constitutive of cognition within that boundary.” Ward, Dave, D. Silverman & M. Villalobos. 2017. “Introduction: The Varieties of Enactivism.” Topoi. 36:365-375. p. 374; reference: Wheeler, M. 2008. “Mind, things and materiality.” In: Renfrew, C. & L. Malafouris (eds). The cognitive life of things: recasting the boundaries of the mind. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Publications.
“Hutto et al. argue that radical enactivism entails a form of extended cognition, since replacing a conception of cognition as essentially content-involving with the radical enactivist’s emphasis on patterns of scaffolded interaction removes the temptation to construe cognition as a primarily internal process that can, in appropriate cases, extend. Instead, a relational, environment-implicating conception of the material basis of cognition becomes the default starting point.” Ward, Dave, D. Silverman & M. Villalobos. 2017. “Introduction: The Varieties of Enactivism.” Topoi. 36:365-375. p. 374; reference: Hutto, D.D., M.D. Kirchhoff & E. Myin. 2014. “Extensive enactivism: why keep it all in?” Front Hum Neurosci. 8(706):1-11.
“… Colombetti argues that the enactive framework pemits the dynamic processes constitutive of life to extend beyond the biological boundaries of an organism–as when, for example, aquatic insects breathe underwater by creating and exploiting trapped air bubbles.” Ward, Dave, D. Silverman & M. Villalobos. 2017. “Introduction: The Varieties of Enactivism.” Topoi. 36:365-375. p. 374; reference: Colombetti, G. 2017. “Enactive affectivity, extended.” Topoi. 36.
“In contrast, in order to sidestep methodological individualism, and to further the externalist thread in institutional economics, we introduce the notion of ‘cognitive institution’. This notion builds upon the externalist hypothesis called the ‘socially extended mind’.” Petracca, Enrico & S. Gallagher. 2020. “Economic cognitive institutions.” Journal of Institutional Economics. 1-19. doi:10.1017/S1744137420000144. p. 2; subquote: Gallagher, Shaun. 2013. “The Socially Extended Mind.” Cognitive Systems Research. 25(1):4-12.
“Looked at through the lens of the internalist/externalist distinction, Arthur Denzau and Douglass North’s well-known definition of institution as ‘shared mental models” is positioned between the two poles. On the one hand, mental models – roughly intended as representations of the external world located in agents’ minds, no matter how accurate and reliable they are – belong to a markedly internalist position in philosophy of mind. On the other hand, requiring that these mental models have to be ‘shared’ in order to constitute an institution possibly takes the first step toward an externalist understanding of institutions.” Petracca, Enrico & S. Gallagher. 2020. “Economic cognitive institutions.” Journal of Institutional Economics. 1-19. doi:10.1017/S1744137420000144. pp. 2-3; reference: Denzau, Arthur & D. North. 1994. “Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions.” Kyklos. 47(1):3-31.
“To substantiate the weakly constrained/highly scaffolded distinction, Clark points to the asymmetry that he sees between market supply and market demand in competitive markets. As concerns the supply side, strong pressures in the competitive arena induce firms to maximizing behavior. This makes competitive markets cases of highly scaffolded choice for firms. ‘By contrast, the theory of consumer behavior [the demand side] is weak and less successful. This is because individual worldviews and ideas loom large in consumer choice and the external scaffolding is commensurately weaker’.” Petracca, Enrico & S. Gallagher. 2020. “Economic cognitive institutions.” Journal of Institutional Economics. 1-19. doi:10.1017/S1744137420000144. p. 6; reference/subquote: Clark, Andy. 1997. “Economic Reason: The Interplay of Individual Learning and External Structure.” pp. 269-290. Drobak, J. & J. Nye (eds). The Frontiers of the New Institutional Economics. San Diego: Academic Press. p. 273.
“The definition of cognitive institutions states that ‘they are not only institutions with which we accomplish certain cognitive processes, but also are such that without them such cognitive processes would no longer exist’. In philosophical terms, cognitive institutions would not only enable, but also constitute cognitive processes. Of course, in the same way in which not all external resources extend the mind in any situation (a pen used to stretch or reach to retrieve keys fallen in a manhole does not extend our mind), not all social interactions constitute an institution. But most of them involving social and cultural practices actually do. Crucially, what is required as a criterion of social extension is the coupling between agents and institutional resources.” Petracca, Enrico & S. Gallagher. 2020. “Economic cognitive institutions.” Journal of Institutional Economics. 1-19. doi:10.1017/S1744137420000144. p. 7; subquote: Gallagher, Shaun. 2013. “The Socially Extended Mind.” Cognitive Systems Research. 25(1):4-12.
“While Slors rightly acknowledges that the two questions – how the individual can be extended by an institution and the role of the individual in making institutions – may serve different research purposes, from the ontological point of view they may be read as two faces of the same coin. In the case of economic cognitive institutions, this means that the way in which economic agents’ reasoning processes are enabled or constituted by the economic system forms a complementary perspective to the way economic institutions are enacted through individuals’ reasoning, actions, and interactions. This means, in philosophical terms, that the notion of constitution advocated by the socially extended mind approach is eminently dynamic….” Petracca, Enrico & S. Gallagher. 2020. “Economic cognitive institutions.” Journal of Institutional Economics. 1-19. doi:10.1017/S1744137420000144. p. 12; reference: Slors, M. 2019. “Symbiotic Cognition as an Alternative for Socially Extended Cognition.” Philosophical Psychology. 32(8):1179-1203.
“In a nutshell, what any completely internalist account of institution misses is an entire line of causality that loops back from social objects and institutions to affect agents – it not just constrains or enables possibilities but also constitutes and even changes them. In still other words, what internalism lacks is a conceptualization of the dynamical, two-way coupling between individuals and institutions.” Petracca, Enrico & S. Gallagher. 2020. “Economic cognitive institutions.” Journal of Institutional Economics. 1-19. doi:10.1017/S1744137420000144. p. 13.
“In this vein, we specifically define cognitive institutions in institutional economics as extended problem-solving entities. In so far as cognitive processes are understood pragmatically, that is, as ways to successfully act in the real world, cognitive institutions, as an extension of these pragmatic cognitive processes can be defined as extended entities aimed to solve problems that individuals and society could not otherwise solve.” Petracca, Enrico & S. Gallagher. 2020. “Economic cognitive institutions.” Journal of Institutional Economics. 1-19. doi:10.1017/S1744137420000144. p. 13.
“The notion of cognitive institution emphasizes that what is distributed in the market is not only information but also artifacts, routines, practices, social interactions, and affordances that may all be called, synthetically but effectively, ‘resources’ for extended problem-solving processes.” Petracca, Enrico & S. Gallagher. 2020. “Economic cognitive institutions.” Journal of Institutional Economics. 1-19. doi:10.1017/S1744137420000144. p. 15.
“This paper has advanced the idea that institutions do not just constrain or enable individual (economic) reasoning and behavior but are also constituted by the actions and interactions of individual agents. Once we acknowledge the centrality of social interactions and of the dynamical notion of constitution, institutions are no longer understood, as in Denzau and North and as in Clark, as structures that merely constrain and enable individual actions. Something more complex and richer goes on in institutions. Importantly, these reciprocally constituting relations where individuals in their social interactions enact institutions and institutions shape individuals and their social interactions can happen in either productive or unproductive ways. This gives us the opportunity to understand not only the origins of institutions, but also cases where they succeed or fail, crucially depending on whether individuals and institutions are rightly coupled or not.” Petracca, Enrico & S. Gallagher. 2020. “Economic cognitive institutions.” Journal of Institutional Economics. 1-19. doi:10.1017/S1744137420000144. p. 16; references: see previous quotes for this article.
“… the controversies over these wide perspectives have become outdated. Distributed cognitive processing is no longer usefully understood in terms of embodied cognition, extended cognition, enactivism, or distributed cognition alone, and our claim is that these views, in essence, offer mainly abstract heuristics that cannot do much explanatory work in isolation. In this paper, we propose that they are more useful in offering guidance for building multifaceted models of causal mechanisms responsible for cognition. Indeed, by going mechanistic, wide approaches can become non-trivial and integrated explanatory proposals, and we believe that this is what is happening right now.” Milkowski, Marcin, R. Clowes, Z. Rucinska, A. Przegalinska, T. Zawidzki, J. Krueger, A. Gies, M. McGann, L. Afeltowicz, W. Wachowski, F. Stjernberg, V. Loughlin & M. Hohol. 2018. “From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution.” Frontiers in Psychology. December 6. 9(2393):1-17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02393. p. 2.
“By wide cognition we mean an approach to cognition that cites wide factors, i.e., factors that go beyond intracranial processes. These include embodied, embedded, extended, enacted, and distributed cognition, which are related but distinct concepts. These research approaches are also inspired by earlier wide accounts of cognitive processes that include ecological psychology, biosemiotics, and sociocultural psychology [e.g., Vygotsky].” Milkowski, Marcin, R. Clowes, Z. Rucinska, A. Przegalinska, T. Zawidzki, J. Krueger, A. Gies, M. McGann, L. Afeltowicz, W. Wachowski, F. Stjernberg, V. Loughlin & M. Hohol. 2018. “From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution.” Frontiers in Psychology. December 6. 9(2393):1-17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02393. p. 2.
“However, one can distinguish at least four quite distinct flavors of the enactivist framework: sensorimotor enactivism, which deems action as essential to perception and cognition; autopoietic (or classical) enactivism, which grounds cognition in autonomous organization of biological entities; participatory sense-making enactivism, which understands cognition as relying on interactions between autonomous agents; and radical enactivism, which denies the role of mental representation in explanations of cognition.” Milkowski, Marcin, R. Clowes, Z. Rucinska, A. Przegalinska, T. Zawidzki, J. Krueger, A. Gies, M. McGann, L. Afeltowicz, W. Wachowski, F. Stjernberg, V. Loughlin & M. Hohol. 2018. “From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution.” Frontiers in Psychology. December 6. 9(2393):1-17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02393. p. 3.
“The distributed cognition (DC) approach expands the classical focus on cognition as a property of an individual organism/agent toward the components and operations of larger cognitive systems, which may encompass multiple individual agents and artifacts.
“This distinguishes DC from other approaches labeled here as ‘wide cognition,’ which usually treat an individual organism as the main unit of analysis, describing, for example, the way an individual is embedded, connected to his/her environment or how his/her body matters from the perspective of cognitive processes. In the case of DC, the focus is on heterogeneous elements (e.g., biological, material, discursive), which take part in sequential or simultaneous processes of generation, transmission and transformation of representational states. DC identifies such processes with cognition. Moreover, in DC, representational states are not understood as mental states or other inner states of any individual agent. Examples of representational states can instead include meaningful gestures or poses of agents, written or spoken information, visualizations displayed on screens, lines drawn on a navigational chart and the chart itself, but also non-symbolic cues which modify the behavior of agents. Representatives of DC stress that a larger cognitive system works in a different manner and has different properties than individual agents who may be part of the system. Unlike the extended mind approach, the agent’s mind need not be the center of such a cognitive system: ‘some systems have a clear center while other systems have multiple centers or no center at all’. However, according to the pioneer and leading theoretician of the approach, Edwin Hutchins, DC is not a kind or a special case of cognition, but a perspective on all of cognition; therefore, ‘all instances of cognition can be seen as emerging from distributed processes,’ which is especially useful in studying a particular type of systems mentioned above. Thus, the difference between the extended mind approach and DC is not a difference of type, but a difference of the level of the analysis.” Milkowski, Marcin, R. Clowes, Z. Rucinska, A. Przegalinska, T. Zawidzki, J. Krueger, A. Gies, M. McGann, L. Afeltowicz, W. Wachowski, F. Stjernberg, V. Loughlin & M. Hohol. 2018. “From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution.” Frontiers in Psychology. December 6. 9(2393):1-17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02393. pp. 3-4; subquotes: Hutchins, Edwin. 2014. “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition.” Philos. Psychol. 27:34-49. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2013.830548. pp. 37, 36.
“Mechanistic explanatory strategies have been nicely summarized by Bechtel in his metaphor of looking down, around and up:
“Accounts of mechanistic explanation have emphasized the importance of looking down–decomposing a mechanism into its parts and operations. (…) But once multiple components of a mechanism have been identified, researchers also need to figure out how it is organized–they must look around and determine how to recompose the mechanism. (…) Researchers also need to look up–situate a mechanism in its context, which may be a larger mechanism that modulates its behavior. When looking down is combined with looking around and up, mechanistic research results in an integrated, multi-level perspective.” Milkowski, Marcin, R. Clowes, Z. Rucinska, A. Przegalinska, T. Zawidzki, J. Krueger, A. Gies, M. McGann, L. Afeltowicz, W. Wachowski, F. Stjernberg, V. Loughlin & M. Hohol. 2018. “From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution.” Frontiers in Psychology. December 6. 9(2393):1-17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02393. p. 6; subquote: Bechtel, W. 2009. “Looking down, around, and up: mechanistic explanation in psychology.” Philos. Psychol. 22:543-564. doi: 10.1080/09515080903238948. p. 543.
“There are two classic competing accounts of mind-reading: theory theory and simulation theory. According to theory theory, mind-reading relies on a body of implicit knowledge, represented as general rules or underwritten by innate modular mechanisms. In contrast, simulation theory holds that understanding others does not depend on inferential processes relying on rules or modular mechanisms but on mental modeling, pretending or imagining oneself to be in the other’s situation. In spite of this difference, the two competing accounts share one important feature: on these orthodox conceptions of human social cognition, differences in the sophistication of social interaction, e.g., cooperation and coordination, across phylogenetic and ontogenetic time, can be traced to the sophistication of interactants’ theories of mind. For example, whereas non-human primates are restricted to an understanding of con-specifics’ goals, perceptions, emotional states, and behavioral dispositions, adult humans can also attribute beliefs, intentions, and other propositional attitudes arranged in rational plans causally responsible for their interactants’ behaviors.” Milkowski, Marcin, R. Clowes, Z. Rucinska, A. Przegalinska, T. Zawidzki, J. Krueger, A. Gies, M. McGann, L. Afeltowicz, W. Wachowski, F. Stjernberg, V. Loughlin & M. Hohol. 2018. “From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution.” Frontiers in Psychology. December 6. 9(2393):1-17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02393. p. 8.
“The mind-shaping hypothesis [from Zawidzki, who argues that culture as well as pedagogy and over-imitation result in greater predictability of what other agents will do], and the role of propositional attitude attribution in justifying apparently counter-normative behavior to one’s interactants, suggest a very precise sense in which human social cognition is ‘wide’: much of the work required to predict our fellows involves not intracranial socio-cognitive resources, like so-called ‘theory of mind,’ but rather, external cultural practices aimed at making our likely interactants more familiar and easier to anticipate.” Milkowski, Marcin, R. Clowes, Z. Rucinska, A. Przegalinska, T. Zawidzki, J. Krueger, A. Gies, M. McGann, L. Afeltowicz, W. Wachowski, F. Stjernberg, V. Loughlin & M. Hohol. 2018. “From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution.” Frontiers in Psychology. December 6. 9(2393):1-17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02393. p. 9.
“The variety of mind-shaping techniques employed by a given culture–over-imitation, pedagogy, norm construction and enforcement, the use of linguistic narrative, e.g., myths, to construct ‘virtual’models for all to imitate–can all be seen as forms of wide social cognition, aimed at regimenting the potentially unruly and intractable social environment.” Milkowski, Marcin, R. Clowes, Z. Rucinska, A. Przegalinska, T. Zawidzki, J. Krueger, A. Gies, M. McGann, L. Afeltowicz, W. Wachowski, F. Stjernberg, V. Loughlin & M. Hohol. 2018. “From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution.” Frontiers in Psychology. December 6. 9(2393):1-17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02393. p. 9.
“In fact, over the past 15 years there have been many new research programs epxploring the impact of culture on the development of human cognitive structures. areas of knowledge that deal with this subject are cross-cultural psychology, neuroanthropology and cultural nuroscience. What units the above-mentioned discipliens is the emphasis put on socio-cultural laspects of human cognitive abilities. This position is sometimes known as bio-cultural constructivism and it states ‘that brain and culture are in a continjuous interdependent, co-productive transaction and reciprocal determination.’” Milkowski, Marcin, R. Clowes, Z. Rucinska, A. Przegalinska, T. Zawidzki, J. Krueger, A. Gies, M. McGann, L. Afeltowicz, W. Wachowski, F. Stjernberg, V. Loughlin & M. Hohol. 2018. “From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution.” Frontiers in Psychology. December 6. 9(2393):1-17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02393. p. 9; subquote: Baltes, P.B., P.A. Reuter-Lorenz, F. Roesler & I. Ebrary. 2006. Lifespan Development and the Brain: the Perspective of Biocultural Co-Constructivism. Cambridge UP.
“Embodied approaches to emotion thus emphasize the extent to which emotions depend upon extra-neural factors and feedback. Moreover, if the physical expression of anger, say, is literally a part of the anger itself–that is, part of its physical realization–some emotions, in virtue of their embodied character, can be said to have a social face. They are partially constituted by world-directed features perceptually available to other agents.” Milkowski, Marcin, R. Clowes, Z. Rucinska, A. Przegalinska, T. Zawidzki, J. Krueger, A. Gies, M. McGann, L. Afeltowicz, W. Wachowski, F. Stjernberg, V. Loughlin & M. Hohol. 2018. “From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution.” Frontiers in Psychology. December 6. 9(2393):1-17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02393. p. 10.
“To a large extent, proponents of embodied or extended accounts of emotion are not that radical in claiming that emotions cannot be understood exclusively as properties of individuals. From the evolutionary point of view, the expression of emotion plays primarily a communicative role, and to understand the causal structure of the communication process, one cannot limit the explanation to the agent that experiences one emotion.” Milkowski, Marcin, R. Clowes, Z. Rucinska, A. Przegalinska, T. Zawidzki, J. Krueger, A. Gies, M. McGann, L. Afeltowicz, W. Wachowski, F. Stjernberg, V. Loughlin & M. Hohol. 2018. “From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution.” Frontiers in Psychology. December 6. 9(2393):1-17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02393. p. 10.
“Individuals do not respond to a stimulus until it is stronger than some minimum threshold. Thus, the response threshold is a fundamental organizing property of the behavior of neurons and individuals.
“Because of the stimulus-threshold relationship of behavior, division of labor–the hallmark of social organization–is an inescapable property of group living…. For example, honey bee colonies thremoregulate, maintaining the brood chamber of the colony near 34.5̊C. When the temperature exceeds this, cooling behavior begins, during which some bees circulate air through the nest by fanning their wings. The result of the response to the heat stimulus, fanning, reduces the stimulus, heat, below the temperature response threshold. This can lead to a division of labor with labor specialists’ when group members have different response thresholds for temperature. Those with lower response thresholds respond first by fanning, reduce the stimulus, and thereby reduce the probability that others will perform that task.” Erber, Joachim & R. Page. 2019. “The Evolutionary Dynamics of Social Organization in Insect Societies: From Behavior to Genes and Back.” pp. 81-91. In: Krakauer, David (ed). Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019. Santa Fe Institute Press. p. 84.
“It is clear that, while biology is a natural science whose observations can be quite precise and often quantitative, the biological notion of understanding assigns less importance to predictions about the specific course of the future than is given in chemistry or physics. The roles of accident, individuality, and uniqueness are correspondingly greater in biology,…” Smith, Eric & H. Morowitz. 2019. “Searching for the Laws of Life: Separating chance from Necessity.” pp. 115-127. In: Krakauer, David (ed). Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019. Santa Fe Institute Press. p. 116.
“The Krebs cycle, though, contains a telltale clue that modern organisms are not the place to look for its explanation. It is a cycle that takes two three-carbon sugar fragments, digests one of them to carbon dioxide to make energetic hydrogen ions, and returns the other through a so-called anaplerotic [word related to carbon pathways in the citric cycle] reaction chain as a seed to begin the cycle again. Since the sugar is provided externally, this two-into-one cyclicity is not needed to supply materials. Further, from the perspective of SFI [Santa Fe Institute] science, it is the ultimate paradox. The business of life is to build more life; why is the core engine of synthesis of all life a cycle that turns two copies of a complex molecule into only one?…
“The two-stage history of life resolves this deep puzzle, because in the earlier stage, the core biochemistry was a sort of mirror image of what we find in the later stage. We now know that the Krebs cycle is also present in the self-sufficient organisms of the first phase and is an engine of synthesis in them, just as in us. This is certainly true for the deep-ocean bacteria found today, and we suspect it has been a property of organisms back to the first cells. In these organisms, though, it turns in the right direction for autocatalysis. In other words, this revere-direction Krebs cycle regenerates itself from nothing more than environmental small molecules, and then serves as a foundation from which all the rest of biomass is formed. Only after a complex life evolved to use and share sugars was an alternate pathway found to use sunlight for their formation. Then, the same Krebs cycle that had once built them was the most natural pathway to run in reverse, to break them down.” Smith, Eric & H. Morowitz. 2019. “Searching for the Laws of Life: Separating chance from Necessity.” pp. 115-127. In: Krakauer, David (ed). Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019. Santa Fe Institute Press. pp. 120-1.
“His [Bruce Trigger’s Understanding Early Civilizations] basic findings are striking. First, the economics of early civilizations were highly variable and reflected the process of local adaptation to the specific environments in which each emerged. Second, the political organizations of early civilizations also varied, falling into one of two basic types: city-states, where a large number of farmers lived with elites in urban centers and full-time craft specialists produced goods that were distributed to all through markets; and territorial states, where most farmers lived outside of urban centers and craft specialists produced goods primarily for the elite. Third, the religious beliefs of early civilizations did not vary. In all these societies, relations between humans and the forces of nature were imagined as parallel to relations between commoners and rulers. Anthropomorphized forces of nature required material sacrifices in order to persist and fulfill their roles in maintaining the natural order; and, in the same way, elites required surpluses and labor from commoners in order to fulfill their roles in maintaining the social order.
“To the extent that variation across independent cases implies latitude in adaptive possibilities, and uniformity implies constraints, these findings imply that the strongest constraint in the emergence of early civilizations was beliefs that supported new scales of social coordination.” Ortman, Scott. 2019. “Imagining Complex Societies.” pp. 181-191. In: Krakauer, David (ed). Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019. Santa Fe Institute Press. p. 182.
“To many, hierarchical organization suggests the nesting of components or individuals into groups, with these groups aggregating into yet larger groups. But this view–at least superficially–privileges space and matter over time and information.” Flack, Jessica. 2019. “Life’s Information Hierarchy.” pp. 201-225. In: Krakauer, David (ed). Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019. Santa Fe Institute Press. p. 201.
“Proteins, for example, can have a long half-life relative to RNA transcripts and can be thought of as the summed output of translation. Cells have a long half-life relative to proteins, and are a function of the summed output of arrays of spatially structured proteins. Both proteins and cells represent some average measure of the noisier activity of their constituents. Similarly, a pigtailed macaque’s estimate of its power is a kind of average measure of the collective perception in the group that the macaque is capable of winning fights, and this is a better predictor of the cost the macaque will pay during fights than the outcome of any single melee, as these outcomes can fluctuate for contextual reasons. These coarse-grainings, or averages, are encoded as slow variables. Slow variables may have a spatial component as well as a temporal component, as in the ptotein and cell examples, or, minimally, only a temporal component, as in the monkey example.” Flack, Jessica. 2019. “Life’s Information Hierarchy.” pp. 201-225. In: Krakauer, David (ed). Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019. Santa Fe Institute Press. pp. 204-5.
“As a consequence of integrating overabundant microscopic processes, slow variables provide better predictors of the local future configuration of a system than the states of the fluctuating microscopic components. In doing so, they promote accelerated rates of microscopic adaptation. Slow variables facilitate adaptation in two ways: they allow components to fine-tune their behavior, and they free components to search, at low cost, a larger space of strategies for extracting resources from the environment.” Flack, Jessica. 2019. “Life’s Information Hierarchy.” pp. 201-225. In: Krakauer, David (ed). Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019. Santa Fe Institute Press. p. 205.
“A macroscopic property can be said to be an output of a computation if it can take on values that have functional consequences at the group or component level, if it is the result of a distributed and coordinated sequence of component interactions under the operation of a strategy set, and if it is a stable output of input values that converges (terminates) in biologically relevant time. Examples studied in biology include aspects of vision such as edge detection, phenotypic traits such as the average position of cells in the developing endomesoderm of the sea urchin, switching in biomolecular signal-transduction, chromatin regulation, and social structures such as the distribution of fight sizes and the distribution of power in monkey societies.” Flack, Jessica. 2019. “Life’s Information Hierarchy.” pp. 201-225. In: Krakauer, David (ed). Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019. Santa Fe Institute Press. p. 213.
“Another approach is to ask how close the system is to a critical point–that is, how sensitive the target macroscopic property is to small changes in parameters describing the microscopic behavior. Many studies suggest that biological systems of all types sit near the critical point. A hypothesis we are exploring is that sitting near the critical point means that important changes at the microscopic scale will be visible at the macroscopic scale. Of course this also has disadvantages as it means small changes can potentially cause big institutional shifts, undermining the utility of coarse-graining and slow variables for prediction.
“If balancing trade-offs between robustness and prediction on the one hand, and adaptatbility to changing environments on the other, can be achieved by modulating the coupling between scales, we should be able to make predictions about whether a system is far from, near, or at the critical point based on whether the data suggest that robustness or adaptability is more important given the environment and its characteristic timescale.” Flack, Jessica. 2019. “Life’s Information Hierarchy.” pp. 201-225. In: Krakauer, David (ed). Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019. Santa Fe Institute Press. p. 218.
“This essay covers a lot of work, so allow me to summarize. I suggested that the origins of the information hierarchy lie in the manipulation of space and time to reduce environmental uncertainty. I further suggested that uncertainty reduction is maximized if the coarse-grained representations of the data the components compute are in agreement (because this increases the probability that everyone is making the same predictions and so tuning the same way). As this happens, the coarse-grained representations consolidate into robust, slow variables at the aggregate level, creating new levels of organization and giving the appearance of downward causation.” Flack, Jessica. 2019. “Life’s Information Hierarchy.” pp. 201-225. In: Krakauer, David (ed). Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019. Santa Fe Institute Press. p. 219.
“This ‘prey-switching’ behavior is common to generalist predators and turns out to be ecologically stabilizing for the whole food web. As generalists turn their attention to different prey species, the species that were getting depleted get a chance to recover, reducing the risk of extinction….
“But there’s a new problem: in the industrialized modern world, humans don’t always prey switch.
“For example, as the bluefin tuna becomes harder to find due to overfishing, its economic feedback cycle value as one of the most prized sushi fish goes up, spurring more fishing, which drives the price up, and so on. Not only does this drive bluefin tuna toward extinction, it can potentially place other species in the marine food web at risk by interrupting the many interactions that connect species in food webs.” Dunne, Jennifer & M. Hamilton. 2019. “Are Humans Truly Unique” How Do We Know?” pp. 249-255. In: Krakauer, David (ed). Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019. Santa Fe Institute Press. pp. 254-5.
“And those averages were 16 billion neurons in the human cerebral cortex, 69 billion in the cerebellum, and slightly fewer than 1 billion in the rest of brain, for a total of 86 billion neurons in the entire human brain.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. p. 79.
“The human advantage, I would say, lies in having the largest number of neurons in the cerebral cortex [16 billion] tha[n] any animal species has ever managed–and it starts by having a cortex that is built in the image of other primate cortices: remarkable in its number of neurons, but not an exception to the rules that govern how it is put together. Because it is a primate brain–and not because it is special–the human brain manages to gather a number of neurons in a still comparatively small cerebral cortex that no other mammal with a viable brain, that is, still smaller than 10 kilograms, would be able to muster.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. pp. 105-6.
“… we can infer that the cerebral cortex has been gaining mass faster than the rest of brain ever since the first mammals appeared–and that primates diverged away from that pattern with a stepped-up increase in the mass of the cerebral cortex, and an even faster increase in the mass of the cerebral cortex relative to the rest of brain. This means that both the absolute expansion of the cerebral cortex and its relative increase over the rest of brain have been particularly fast in primate evolution.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. p. 110.
“Because the first mammals to evolve were small, the increasing relative mass of the cerebral cortex with increasing brain mass is the basis for the notion that, in the course of its evolution, the cortex has undergone both an absolute and a relative expansion, slowly taking over brain mass–and, supposedly, brain functions as well–in primates and nonprimates alike.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. pp. 111-2.
“When plotting variations in the number of neurons in the cerebellum against the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, what we found was not that the numeric preponderance of cortical over cerebellar neurons increased with larger brains across species, but, instead, that the two brain structures gained neurons proportionately in a linear relationship, such that, on average, the cerebellum gained four neurons for every neuron added to the cerebral cortex.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. pp. 113-4.
“Cerebellum and cerebral cortex gain neurons proportionately, with, on average, four neurons added to the cerebellum for every neuron added to the cerebral cortex across mammalian species.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. p. 115.
“These species [nonprimate and nonartiodactyl–even-toed ungulates like the pig, deer, and antelope–species] maintained a constant ratio of two neurons in the cerebral cortex (and eight in the cerebellum) for every neuron in the rest of brain, which we have proposed to be the ancestral way of distributing neurons across the main brain structures.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. p. 116.
“… our cerebral cortex and cerebellum are the largest among primates, with the most neurons–but, once more, these structures hold just the number of neurons expected for a generic primate of our brain and body mass. Everywhere we look, the same pattern is confirmed again and again: humans are not special. We are a large primate species, with the large number of brain neurons that comes with it. So much for encephalization, then, since our brain is not too large for our body mass. rather, it is the brains of great apes that are too small for their body mass.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. p. 136.
“Average neuronal mass in the rest of brain thus scales with the linear dimension of the body, and the increase in body length is a very likely candidate mechanism to drive this increase in average neuronal cell mass by elongation of their fibers contacting targets in the growing body.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. p. 140.
“Give me the size of a mammalian brain structure–any structure in any species–and I can predict, with good accuracy, how many glial cells it will have. The larger the brain, the more glial cells it will have; and two brains of the same size will have similar numbers of glial cells. As it turned out, all mammalian brains were made the same–in regard to how many glial cells build brain tissue….
“The scaling rule is a power function with the exponent +1.05, nearly linear,….” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. p. 151.
“Glial cells must be doing something so sensitive, so important in the brain that the way their numbers are added to build brain tissue has remained very much the same over at least the last 300 million years of evolution.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. pp. 152-3.
“Karbowski thus found that larger brains cost a total amount of energy that grows proportionally with brain mass raised to the power of +0.85 across the species available. This means that the total metabolic cost of the brain increases at a faster rate than the metabolic cost of the body as a whole, which Max Kleiber had shown that increases with body mass raised to the smaller power of +0.75.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. p. 160; reference: Karbowski, J. 2007. “Global and regional brain metabolic scaling and its functional consequences.” BMC Biol. 5:18.
“This translates into 3.3 billion molecules of glucose consumed on average per human neuron per minute, which seems like a startling number. Put into perspective, however, it is actually not much. At the rate of 3.3 billion molecules of glucose per neuron per minute, 1 gram of glucose–one-fourth of a teaspoon—contains enough glucose molecule to feed all 86 billion neurons in the human brain for 12 minutes….
“Not only was there not much variation in the average energy cost per neuron across species… but there was also no significant correlation between neuronal density and the average energy cost per neuron in the brain structures. Larger neurons did not cost more energy.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. pp. 161-2.
“Typically ‘brain activation’ indicated by those red blotches on MRI images amounts to no more than 2-5 percent increases in local energy consumption. It is amazing how much we are able to do with such a slight variation in energy use by brain neurons….
“Because provision of energy to brain neurons is directly dependent on blood flow, even decreases of 1 percent in overall blood flow compromise brain function, leading to dimmed or blackened vision and to unconsciousness.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. p. 165.
“It is interesting to think that a series of fundamental neuronal properties may be direct consequences of constraints on neuronal activity imposed by a limited energy budget. One such property, ‘synaptic homeostasis,’ which describes the adjustment in sensitivity of individual synapses in a neuron over time depending on their level of activity, avoids runaway increases in excitatory synaptic activity and therefore in energy cost. Another, synaptic plasticity, the process of removal of unused or nonfunctional synapses as other new ones are added or strengthened, might be a mandatory mechanism that keeps the total number of excitatory synapses and their energy cost in check. New synapses are added to the brain throughout life–but necessarily at the cost of giving up synapses elsewhere.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. pp. 166-7.
“… bipedality potentially increases the amount of calories that can be amassed in a day by extending the range of food picking, for it is much easier and costs four times fewer kilocalories to walk on two feet, as humans do, than on all fours, as modern great apes do and as the ancestor from which australopithecines originated must have done.” Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable. MIT Press. p. 189.
“The enactive account of intersubjectivity calls attention to participatory and non-individualistic processes, unlike traditional approaches where social understanding is reduced to the inferences or simulations a typically passive observer can make about the intentions of others based on their external behavior. Making explicit the domain of social interaction is to take a crucial step away from methodological individualism. For this step, De Jaegher and Di Paolo use the idea of autonomy, but now applied to the relational processes that often take place in the encounter of two or more people.” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & Evan Thompson. 2014. “The Enactive Approach.” pp. 68-77. In: Shapiro, Lawrence (ed). The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition. Routledge. p. 75; reference: De Jaegher, H. & E. Di Paolo. 2007. “Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 6(4):485-507.
“Given that sense-making is an embodied process of active regulation of the coupling between agent and world, social interaction–through patterns of bodily coordination and breakdown–opens the possibility of this process being shared among the interactors. This shared form of sense-making is what is meant by ‘participatory sense-making.’” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & Evan Thompson. 2014. “The Enactive Approach.” pp. 68-77. In: Shapiro, Lawrence (ed). The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition. Routledge. p. 75.
“Flake and core assemblages that meet the basic parameters of assignment to the Oldowan continued to be manufactured in various parts of the world up to historic times.” Wynn, Thomas, R. Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar, L. Marchant & W. McGrew. 2011. “‘An Ape’s View of the Oldowan’ Revisited.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 20:181-197. P. 188.
“After five decades of studying wild chimpanzees, new types of tool use continue to be found, thus extending the impressive repertoire of this species. Some examples of novel tool use come from dry, open, and seasonal habitats (Fongoli, Ugalla), and some from rainforest (Nimba). Some of the new tool use reports come from unhabituated subjects (Ugalla, Nimba) where indirect evidence guided their discovery. Newly reported types of tool use, such as tool-assisted hunting, USO digging, and cleaver percussion, shorten the list of tool-assisted behavioral patterns believed to be uniquely hominin.” Wynn, Thomas, R. Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar, L. Marchant & W. McGrew. 2011. “‘An Ape’s View of the Oldowan’ Revisited.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 20:181-197. P. 192.
“However, if anything, living apes demonstrate a greater variety of technical activities than can be reconstructed for the Oldowan.” Wynn, Thomas, R. Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar, L. Marchant & W. McGrew. 2011. “‘An Ape’s View of the Oldowan’ Revisited.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 20:181-197. P. 193.
“We studied 81 flake assemblages from 34 sites in Africa, southwest Asia and western Europe. Many of the assemblages were excavated using modern archaeological standards….
“We applied a comparative approach for tracing tendencies in flaking stone by measuring two geometric variables–platform depth [overall thickness] and exterior platform angle [sharpness]–on more than 19,000 complete and unmodified flakes.” Rezek, Zeljko, H. Dibble, S. McPherron, D. Braun & S. Lin. 2018. “Two million years of flaking stone and the evolutionary efficiency of stone tool technology.” Nature Ecology & Evolution. doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0488-4. pp. 1, 2.
“The spread of flake assemblages produced after 1 Ma clearly reveals that later H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis and Neanderthals started to manipulate platform depth and exterior platform angle in a way that allowed them to produce more sharp edge relative to the size of a tool.” Rezek, Zeljko, H. Dibble, S. McPherron, D. Braun & S. Lin. 2018. “Two million years of flaking stone and the evolutionary efficiency of stone tool technology.” Nature Ecology & Evolution. doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0488-4. p. 2.
“Over time, hominins produced tools with more sharp edge, but there was also more variability in sharp edge production. After 50 ka, the variation in sharp edge production is at its greatest. Modern humans applied various techniques, such as pressure flaking and indirect percussion, to increase the precision of impact…. Precise placement of fracture initiation allows for increases in flake size without running the risk of total failure in flaking stone (for example, very large of ‘overshot’ flakes could damage the core entirely). A possible direct advantage of pressure flaking and indirect percussion is that they could have acted as effective technological solutions in response to shortages in stone.” Rezek, Zeljko, H. Dibble, S. McPherron, D. Braun & S. Lin. 2018. “Two million years of flaking stone and the evolutionary efficiency of stone tool technology.” Nature Ecology & Evolution. doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0488-4. p. 2.
“We propose that the increase in variability in sharp edge production through time is related to the evolution of complexity in a multitude of behaviours of managing stone to achieve fitness advantages. In this multi-behavioural space, the production of stone tools of varying size, edge amount, shape or design was only one behavioural strategy used by hominins to access resources. Other ways to increase access to resources included the behaviours of selection of appropriate stone raw materials, the relatively economic transport of stone raw materials or tools across the landscape, the selection, recycling and re-use of existing stone tools, and the maintenance or resharpening of tool edges. More intensive interrelations between these behaviours of using, managing and modifying stone could have led to greater efficiency of stone tool technology. The fact that our results show an increase in variability in one of these behaviours–sharp edge production–through time suggests that later hominins were exploiting the complexity of this multi-behavioural space more intensively.” Rezek, Zeljko, H. Dibble, S. McPherron, D. Braun & S. Lin. 2018. “Two million years of flaking stone and the evolutionary efficiency of stone tool technology.” Nature Ecology & Evolution. doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0488-4. p. 3.
“Gowlett defined or deconstructed handaxes through a series of ‘design imperatives,’ or minimum features that all handaxes share. These imperatives guided prehistoric knappers at a very fundamental level…. The account began with a description of the most basic core-tool type, the Oldowan ‘chopper,’ then took a ‘value added’ approach, identifying what must have been added to this basic pattern to produce a handaxe. There are six added imperatives:
“1. Glob-butt: This rather inelegant term refers to the mass of stone that fits readily in the hand. It is an ergonomic notion – what can be held in one hand and manipulated conveniently….
“2. Forward extension: This principle took handaxes out of the range of pebble choppers. The maker aimed for a longer tool that could provide leverage and a longer cutting edge. The center of gravity needed to remain in the hand, and thus the handaxe needed to be thinner toward the tip.
“3. Support for the working edge: The handaxe was a large cutting tool. Knappers produced the cutting edge through bifacial trimming, alternately removing trimming flakes from the margin onto both faces off the tool…
“4. Lateral extension: If the forward extension was too narrow, the handaxe would twist badly as it was used. Thus, some lateral extension was needed to provide stability. This is another ergonomic function.
“5. Thickness adjustment: Knappers controlled the overall weight of handaxes primarily by adjusting their thickness. This also affected the edge angles at the margins. Heavier, thicker handaxes had different functional characteristics than did thinner, lighter ones.
“6. Skewness: Knappers appear to have biased their handaxes slightly according to handedness (left or right).
“Henceforth we will refer to this set of imperatives as the handaxe “GLOBFELTS,’ a rough acronym of the six basic elements…. GLOBELTS are a set of ergonomic constraints and thus are not cultural ideas or memes in the usual sense of the terms, although social learning may be the most efficient way to achieve them.” Wynn, Thomas & J. Gowlett. 2017. “The handaxe reconsidered.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 27:21-29. DOI: 10.1002/evan.21552. p. 22; reference: Gowlett, John. 2006. “The elements of design form in Acheulian bifaces: modes, modalities, rules and language.” In: Goren-Inbar, N. & G. Sharon (eds). Axe Age: Acheulian Tool-making from Quarry to Discard. London: Equinox. pp. 203-222.
“On hindsight, it seems that the elements of the Acheulean package belong together in an entirely natural way, but the archeological record suggests that the makers struggled over a long period to put together these ideas, most of which had existed separately, or in subsets, in earlier toolkits. So earlier examples may show bifacial working, but no symmetrical outline; they may be handaxe shaped but unifacial; or they may have the basic handaxe form, but lack an effective thinned tip.
“The ‘emergent phenomenon’ of the classic handaxe developed from this background at least 1.79 million years ago and is highly recognizable, although also highly varied, both at and between individual archeological sites.” Wynn, Thomas & J. Gowlett. 2017. “The handaxe reconsidered.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 27:21-29. DOI: 10.1002/evan.21552. pp. 22-23.
“Although many Acheulean handaxes are roughly finished, we regularly find that the shape of an Acheulean handaxe was often ‘over-determined’: that is, the maker gave more attention and effort to producing the shape than was necessary for basic GLOBFELTS functionality, similar to the ornamental flourishes modern armorers add to ceremonial swords. This characteristic appeared long before one million years ago, often in one or two exceptional specimens that stand out from others at a site. The effort appears to have focused on certain regular forms, symmetry being perhaps the most salient, and the earliest.” Wynn, Thomas & J. Gowlett. 2017. “The handaxe reconsidered.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 27:21-29. DOI: 10.1002/evan.21552. p. 23.
“Striving for regularity in form is evident in most of the overdetermination seen in some handaxes. The simplest explanation for this is that hominin knappers experienced pleasure from this accomplishment. The majority of early handaxes are not highly refined; they were everyday tools, perhaps made by everyone. But a few handaxes were more than this, even as early as 1.7 Ma. Many scholars have suggested that handaxes had an esthetic component, but have rarely stipulated how this might have worked. An except is Derek Hodgson, who has argued that basic Gestalt forms such as bilateral symmetry produce ‘visual resonance,’ in which excitation of specific shape-detecting neural pathways produces pleasure via the same neural pathways that operate during other pleasurable activities. This is an uncontroversial fact of visual processing. We would add to Hodgson’s general account two well-documented components of neuroesthetics, peak shift, and prototypicality. If a sensory effect produces a pleasurable response, an exaggerated version elicits a greater response. This is peak shift. Political cartoonists, for example, regularly exploit this phenomenon, which is also very common in other forms of art.” Wynn, Thomas & J. Gowlett. 2017. “The handaxe reconsidered.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 27:21-29. DOI: 10.1002/evan.21552. p. 23; reference: Hodgson, Derek. 2009. “Evolution of the visual cortex and the emergence of symmetry in the Acheulean technoo-complex.” C R Palevol. 8:93-97.
“At its most basic the handaxe was an ergonomically guided solution to the problem of producing a sturdy hand-held cutting tool in the context of a knapped-stone technology that lacked hafting… This ergonomic solution (the GLOBFELTS) first appeared with the advent of tool-oriented technology some 1.8 million years ago and slowly fell out of popularity with the advent of hafting a million and a half years later.” Wynn, Thomas & J. Gowlett. 2017. “The handaxe reconsidered.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 27:21-29. DOI: 10.1002/evan.21552. p. 27.
“Finally, because the GLOBFELTS and the preference for regularity of form were not simply cultural ideas or memes, but represent a fusion of functional needs, ergonomic imperatives, and cultural experience, the very nature of cultural learning becomes a moot point….” Wynn, Thomas & J. Gowlett. 2017. “The handaxe reconsidered.” Evolutionary Anthropology. 27:21-29. DOI: 10.1002/evan.21552. p. 27.
“Detailed observation since the mid-twentieth century has, however, revealed a wide variety of habitual tool use among wild chimpanzees in Africa, adding to records of less complex tool use by other species. At the same time, stone artefacts made by hominins–the human lineage since the split with chimpanzees some 5-7 Myr ago–have been found dating back 2.6 Myr. Because this earliest Oldowan technology already shows much planning depth, spatial coordination and manual dexterity in its creators, it is probable that earlier, currently unrecognized, tool manufacture occurred. Appeals to phylogenetic proximity therefore posit the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans to have been a tool user, and for many archaeologists chimpanzees have become the dominant referent for modelling early hominin behaviour. However, recent recognition that wild South American bearded capuchin monkeys (Cebus libidinosus) also habitually use tools, whereas wild bonobos rarely do, forces us to rethink the accepted roles of continuity and convergence in primate tool use. We may ask, for example, how many extinct primate groups independently ‘invented’ tool use during the past several million years, and what circumstances permitted or prevented such discoveries.” Haslam, Michael, A. Hernandez-Aguilar, V. Ling, S. Carvalho, I. de la Torre, A. DeStefano, A. Du, B. Hardy, J. Harris, L. Marchant, T. Matsuzawa, W. McGrew, J. Mercader, R. Mora, M. Petraglia, H. Roche, E. Visalberghi & R. Warren. 2009. “Primate archaeology.” Nature. 460:339-344. doi:10.1038/nature08188. p. 339.
“Free-living primate populations use a wide variety of plant materials for extractive foraging, social interaction and self-maintenance.” Haslam, Michael, A. Hernandez-Aguilar, V. Ling, S. Carvalho, I. de la Torre, A. DeStefano, A. Du, B. Hardy, J. Harris, L. Marchant, T. Matsuzawa, W. McGrew, J. Mercader, R. Mora, M. Petraglia, H. Roche, E. Visalberghi & R. Warren. 2009. “Primate archaeology.” Nature. 460:339-344. doi:10.1038/nature08188. p. 339.
“Moreover, the parsimonious explanation that widespread Homo and chimpanzee material culture indicates a tool-using common ancestor cannot reasonably be extended to the common ancestor of apes and Cebus or Macaca. The New and Old World monkeys split from the line leading to the apes around 35 and 25 Myr ago, respectively, and wild tool use in these lineages is rare. Convergence in tool use among primates is therefore plausible, probably owing to similar adaptive pressures, foraging requirements and physiological constraints. Significantly, acceptance of convergence in monkeys opens the door to the possibility of repeated gain and loss of tool use among extinct primates in multiple lineages over millions of years.” Haslam, Michael, A. Hernandez-Aguilar, V. Ling, S. Carvalho, I. de la Torre, A. DeStefano, A. Du, B. Hardy, J. Harris, L. Marchant, T. Matsuzawa, W. McGrew, J. Mercader, R. Mora, M. Petraglia, H. Roche, E. Visalberghi & R. Warren. 2009. “Primate archaeology.” Nature. 460:339-344. doi:10.1038/nature08188. p. 341.
“In particular, a large part of the patterning of flaked stone tools is a product of the constraints of knapping stone combined with the effects of use. Some of the patterning occurred not because of any cultural habits of the knappers, but because there were not many options.” Davidson, Iain. 2016. “Stone Tools: Evidence of Something in Between Culture and Cumulative Culture?” In: Haidle, Miriam, N. Conard & M. Bolus (eds.) The Nature of Culture: Based on an Interdisciplinary Symposium ‘The Nature of Culture’, Tuebingen, Germany. pp. 99-120. Springer. p. 108.
“The proposition here is that the similarity of form of Acheulean bifacial handaxes seems unlikely to result from the sharing of cultural values about shape over distances and times over which hominins or people were unlikely to have been able to communicate at all. Similarity of form is an unreliable guide to cultural similarity, particularity when there may have been some common constraints imposed by the physics of flaking….” Davidson, Iain. 2016. “Stone Tools: Evidence of Something in Between Culture and Cumulative Culture?” In: Haidle, Miriam, N. Conard & M. Bolus (eds.) The Nature of Culture: Based on an Interdisciplinary Symposium ‘The Nature of Culture’, Tuebingen, Germany. pp. 99-120. Springer. p. 109.
“Isaac discussed the various forces that affected the outcome of knapping, emphasizing the physical properties of the raw material, the ‘tradition’ within which knapping was learned and the functional requirements, but the lessons have not always been heeded.” Davidson, Iain. 2016. “Stone Tools: Evidence of Something in Between Culture and Cumulative Culture?” In: Haidle, Miriam, N. Conard & M. Bolus (eds.) The Nature of Culture: Based on an Interdisciplinary Symposium ‘The Nature of Culture’, Tuebingen, Germany. pp. 99-120. Springer. p. 109; reference: Issac, G.L. 1972. “Early phases of human behaviour: Models in Lower Palaeolithic archaeology.” In: Clarke, D.L. (ed). Models in Archaeology. p. 167-199. London: Methuen.
“Thus, for example, when Australian Aboriginal people were asked to cut trees as an exercise in experimental archaeology, and supplied with, effectively, an unlimited supply of raw material, they did not fashion a polished axe but used expedient flaking to produce a chopper of a form reminiscent of the Oldowan and similar forms have been described from the archaeological record. It would seem that Oldowan industries are not so much an indication of a particular set of cultural circumstances as a default condition, an expedient one that arises whenever flakes are produced by simple flaking.” Davidson, Iain. 2016. “Stone Tools: Evidence of Something in Between Culture and Cumulative Culture?” In: Haidle, Miriam, N. Conard & M. Bolus (eds.) The Nature of Culture: Based on an Interdisciplinary Symposium ‘The Nature of Culture’, Tuebingen, Germany. pp. 99-120. Springer. p. 110; reference for experimental archaeology: Hayden, B. 1979. Palaeotlithic reflections: Lithic technology and ethnographic excavations among Australian Aborigines. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal studies.”
“Certain stoneworking gestures are irreducible in the sense that they must be done in combination or controlled stone flaking will not occur.” Moore, Mark. 2011. “The design space of stone flaking: implications for cognitive evolution.” World Archaeology. 43(4):702-715. dx.doi:org/10.1080/00438243.2011.624778. p. 703.
“The experience of modern experimental knappers demonstrate how the restrictions of knapping design space caused past stoneworkers to repeatedly discover similar approaches.” Moore, Mark. 2011. “The design space of stone flaking: implications for cognitive evolution.” World Archaeology. 43(4):702-715. dx.doi:org/10.1080/00438243.2011.624778. p. 704.
“Mindless repetitions of the flake removal algorithm, combined with the channeling effect of stoneworking design space, could unintentionally reproduce the ‘good tricks’ discussed here. Since stone flaking is cellular, considerable skill might be reflected in the removal of individual flakes, but ‘mindless’ linking of units might converge on cores with straight edges, elongated shapes, bifacial edges, and symmetry, as well as traits such as mass enhancement and thinning, asymmetrical reduction and ‘predetermined’ flake morphology.” Moore, Mark. 2011. “The design space of stone flaking: implications for cognitive evolution.” World Archaeology. 43(4):702-715. dx.doi:org/10.1080/00438243.2011.624778. p. 711.
“The closeness of the boundaries of design space led hominin stoneworkers into some well-trodden areas. Trajectories through design space were confined into channels – some broad, some narrow – as stoneworkers struggled with the medium’s various physical constraints. It is these well-used channels – forced by design space boundaries – that offer the key to interpreting the emergence of complex combinations of the ‘good tricks’ of stoneworking in early hominin evolution.” Moore, Mark. 2011. “The design space of stone flaking: implications for cognitive evolution.” World Archaeology. 43(4):702-715. dx.doi:org/10.1080/00438243.2011.624778. p. 712.
“Whether individuals [from a group of socially housed pit-tailed macaques] win or lose fights depends on temporally stable factors–including body size, fighting experience and size of alliance networks. Contextual factors, including fatigue, variation in priorities, leverage, the presence of coalition partners and immediate past successes or failures in fights are also important in so far as they generate stochasticity in fight outcomes, but it is temporally stable factors that predict who will be the winner on average.” Flack, Jessica. 2012. “Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367:1802-1810. doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0214. p. 1804.
“Once a pattern of losing exceeds a certain threshold, the individual perceiving itself as likely to lose signals this recognition using a bared teeth (BT) display….
“Individuals exchanging peacefully-emitted silent-BT displays have stronger affiliative relationships with one another (more grooming, more reconciliation and less aggression) than those who only exchange the BT display during fights…..
“Whereas the agonistic BT variant signals submission–defined as impending withdrawal in the present interaction, the data in the studies reviewed above suggest the peacefully-emitted silent-BT displays are subordination signals that communicate agreement to a primitive social contract in which the signaller agrees for some time period to the subordinate role, and thus to yield when a conflict arises in the future….
“The contract is upheld as long as two conditions are satisfied. The signaller yields when the receiver expresses an interest in a resource, and the underlying asymmetry must continue to be perceived by the subordinate as large. We have proposed that an advantage of the contract is that it establishes a new conditional symmetry, in which the sender and receiver are free to interact with a reduced concern that a fight will erupt–a form of conditional equality.” Flack, Jessica. 2012. “Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367:1802-1810. doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0214. p. 1804.
“The data suggest it takes several reversals of edges in the fight network before a signal is withheld and many more before signal sender and receiver reverse their contract. This means that statistical features of the signalling network–for example, the rate of edge flipping and the weighted degree distribution, should be relatively impervious to fluctuations in fight outcomes.” Flack, Jessica. 2012. “Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367:1802-1810. doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0214. p. 1805.
“The subordination contract encodes coarse-grained, reliable information about fighting ability and consequently a single signalling event is a better predictor of fight outcomes than any single fight outcome is. My collaborators and I have called these kinds of predictive, coarse-grained variables slow variables.” Flack, Jessica. 2012. “Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367:1802-1810. doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0214. p. 1805.
“Encoded in the subordination signalling network is information about power; that is, how much consensus there is among group members that an individual is capable of successfully using force….
“In general an individual’s power score will change more slowly than any one of its contracts because either many of its contracts need to change or many contracts of other individuals need to change, before its power score will change.” Flack, Jessica. 2012. “Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367:1802-1810. doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0214. p. 1806.
“The data suggest that these power structures can support the implementation of novel, beneficial conflict regulatory mechanisms, such as policing. For any individual to adopt this policing role, it must be able to estimate the cost it will pay for intervening, and that cost must be low. In our study group, this cost is negligible for the individuals in the tail of the power distribution.” Flack, Jessica. 2012. “Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367:1802-1810. doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0214. p. 1806.
“A behavioral knockout experiment in which the policing mechanism was temporarily disabled by preventing the policers from intervening in fights, showed that policing increases societal robustness to conflict perturbations. Knockout resulted in a destabilization of the groups’ social networks: the cost of social interaction increased, investment in social capital acquisition, like alliance partners, decreased, and the cliquishness and associative structure of the group’s social networks increased.” Flack, Jessica. 2012. “Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367:1802-1810. doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0214. p. 1806.
“Our data suggest that the advantage of multiple, hierarchically organized networks are that their variable rates of change can be used to maximize objectives that would be at odds if there was only a single time-scale. Individuals, by temporarily agreeing to a contract, reference the slowly changing contract for strategic decisions concerning the receiver (or dominant partner) rather than the rapidly changing and potentially misleading fluctuations in fight outcomes with that individual. Individuals use information about their relative power encoded in the signalling network to make decisions about how to behave during polyadic conflicts, as described at the beginning of this case study. Allowing a low level of fighting to continue even after contracts are formed and a stable power structure had been established is advantageous because it prevents lock-in by allowing learning to continue.” Flack, Jessica. 2012. “Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367:1802-1810. doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0214. pp. 1806-7.
“Slow variables, whether social or biological, arise from mechanisms that naturally integrate over fast, microscopic dynamics. Proteins, for example, have a long half-life relative to RNA transcripts, and can be thought of as the summed output of translation. Cells have a long half-life relative to proteins, and are a function of the summed output of arrays of spatially structured proteins. Social power scores in our primate study group have a long half-life compared with individual interactions. Power, proteins and cells–as different as they are–all represent some average measure of the noisier activity of their constituents. As summary statistics for lower level dynamics, these variables can serve as reliable reference states that, when perceivable by system components, can be used by components to make strategical decisions and tune their behaviour.” Flack, Jessica. 2012. “Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367:1802-1810. doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0214. p. 1807.
“Social niche construction has been defined as the process whereby individuals in social groups, by edge-building in their social networks, collectively co-construct aggregate level social properties with functional implications for individuals.” Flack, Jessica. 2012. “Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367:1802-1810. doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0214. p. 1808.
“An unanswered question in evolutionary theory is why life organizes itself hierarchically. From cells, to organisms, to societies, evolution generates structures nested in space and time. My collaborators and I have proposed that the construction of slow variables–whether subordination contracts, ocean reefs, proteins or cells–reduces environmental uncertainty and represents the first step in the evolution of a multi-scale system. The underlying idea is that multiple timescales can solve the dual problem of informational noise and informational lock-in. As an interaction history accumulates at the lower level, competitive dynamics amplify asymmetries among components and slowly changing, coarse-grained representations of these dynamics become more predictive of the future state of the system than the interactions themselves. A new level of organization arises as components begin using these slowly changing coarse-grained statistics to make strategical decisions.” Flack, Jessica. 2012. “Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367:1802-1810. doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0214. p. 1808.
“Binford describes one important aspect of technological organization on a continuum ranging from curated to expedient. Technologies based on curation comprise tools that are effective for a variety of tasks, are manufactured in anticipation of use, maintained through a number of uses, transported from locality to locality for these uses, and recycled to other tasks when no longer useful for their primary purposes. Technologies based on expediency comprise tools that are manufactured, used, and discarded according to the needs of the moment. Curation should produce assemblages that are technologically sophisticated and probably formally distinct, with individual tools used for a variety of anticipated purposes. Expediency should produce assemblages that are technologically simpler and formally less patterned because tool manufacture is an immediate response to the specific task at hand.” Bamforth, Douglas. 1986. “Technological Efficiency and Tool Curation.” American Antiquity. 51(1):38-50. p. 38; reference: Binford, L.R. 1979. “Organization and Formation Processes: Looking at Curated Technologies.” Journal of Anthropological Research. 35:255-273.
“Tools made from non-local materials, then, are more highly maintained and recycled and as a class tend to be used for a wider range of tasks than tools made of local materials. This contrast suggests that the Paleoindian hunters at Lubbock Lake relied on a toolkit with two distinct components: a basic component of more curated tools made from high quality non-local material and a specialized and more expedient component made from local material. The use of this latter set of tools for a limited range of tasks suggests that it was probably prepared specifically for the needs of a given trip.” Bamforth, Douglas. 1986. “Technological Efficiency and Tool Curation.” American Antiquity. 51(1):38-50. p. 48.
“Two aspects of curational behavior, tool maintenance and recycling, provide clear examples of the importance of raw material availability to technology. The intensity of maintenance and recycling appears to vary in response to raw material availability.” Bamforth, Douglas. 1986. “Technological Efficiency and Tool Curation.” American Antiquity. 51(1):38-50. p. 48.
“These results [in experiments for children’s play that isolated causal ambiguity to test if they chose to spend more time there and to design informative interventions to clarify ambiguities] suggest that preschoolers distinguish, not only ambiguous and unambiguous evidence but also potentially informative and uninformative interventions. In cases where there was information to be gained, preschoolers spontaneously selected and designed actions to effectively isolate the relevant variables.” Cook, Claire, N. Goodman & L. Schulz. 2011. “Where science starts: Spontaneous experiments in preschoolers’ exploratory play.” MIT Open Access. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2011.03.003. p. 22.
“However, these results suggest that children’s normative understanding of evidence and their curiosity about the causal structure underlying observed evidence play a significant role in their decision to explore. At least in simple cases, preschool children distinguish confounded and unconfounded evidence and selectively engage in more exploration when the causal structure of events is ambiguous. The exploratory play of even very young children appears to reflect some of the logic of scientific inquiry.” Schulz, Laura & E. B. Bonawitz. 2007. “Serious Fun: Preschoolers Engage in More Exploratory Play When Evidence is Confounded.” Developmental Psychology. 43(4):1045-1050. p. 1049.
“Also, it must be recognized that stone-knapping is distinct from nut-cracking in that it requires assessment and adaptation of the stone core features following each strike.” Bril, Blandine, R. Parry & G. Dietrich. 2015. “How similar are nut-cracking and stone-flaking? A functional approach to percussive technology.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 370:20140355. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0355. p. 2.
“Adaptive behaviour such as tool use, however, implies somewhat more than this [regarding tool use as primarily a product of intrinsic capacities]. It entails continuous interaction between the nervous system, the body and the environment. The ecological psychology movement and dynamical systems approach to the study of human behaviour emphasize this point. From this perspective, understanding behaviour cannot be reduced to either cognitive or biomechanical capacities of the organism alone. It is the system itself comprising both organism and environment that becomes the unit of interest.” Bril, Blandine, R. Parry & G. Dietrich. 2015. “How similar are nut-cracking and stone-flaking? A functional approach to percussive technology.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 370:20140355. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0355. p. 3.
“In the nut-cracking task, multiple combinations of striking behaviours (unique blow, successive blows of increasing kinetic energy, etc.) were observed to be equally valid for obtaining the desired effect, while only unique blow effects were functionally valid for the stone-flaking task. In other words, the way in which the elementary actions were combined to fulfill task objectives was not comparable across tasks.” Bril, Blandine, R. Parry & G. Dietrich. 2015. “How similar are nut-cracking and stone-flaking? A functional approach to percussive technology.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 370:20140355. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0355. p. 9.
“One of the more simple yet consequent aspects of the nut-cracking/ stone-flaking comparison was the description of different blow combinations across the tasks. As stated above, numerous different blow combinations were effectively mobilized for nut-cracking, whereas stone flake productions was dependent upon the effect of unique blow actions. The nut-cracking task as opposed to stone-flaking may be accomplished by the progressive fracturing of the shell. Multiple different behavioural combinations are therefore possible to achieve the overall aim. Accordingly, we propose that the relative simplicity of the nut-cracking is related to the simple fact that the mechanics of the task imply a greater number of opportunities/possibilities of valid actions. Even where a blow has a suboptimal effect, this may be compensated with an additional blow. In stone-knapping, the properties of the stone core may afford several viable surfaces for the removal of a stone flake. Despite this, once the striking point for removal of the desired flake is identified, the selected action must be optimal in terms of precision, kinetic energy and angle of the blow with respect to the exterior angle in order to have the desired effect.” Bril, Blandine, R. Parry & G. Dietrich. 2015. “How similar are nut-cracking and stone-flaking? A functional approach to percussive technology.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 370:20140355. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0355. p. 10.
“If imperatives [six principle goals of stone knapper that resulted in Acheulian axe form – see Wynn & Gowlett 2017 above] get closer to mapping the number of true variables and how they interact, they also hint at the need for integrating or smoothing abilities to bring them together in a final package. It is in this combining stage that there is the need for geometric and transforming abilities.
“The progress comes through understanding that in talking of ‘elements of design form’ one need not talk initially about a sort of geometric form, but rather about a set of imperatives or pressing needs that must be balanced or traded off to get a solution. This behaviour, responding to need, is likely to demand the handling of geometric concepts in the realization (packaging) of a solution….
“The imperatives also help to explain symmetry. Balance is important or even crucial in the use of an artifact, and excess mass in any inappropriate direction creates unwanted turning moments.” Gowlett, J.A.J. 2006. “The elements of design form in Acheulian bifaces: modes, modalities, rules and language.” pp. 203-222. In: Goren-Inbar, N & G. Sharon (eds). Axe Age: Acheulian Tool-making from Quarry to Discard. London: Equinox. p. 217.
“By contrast, detached representations stand for objects or events that are not present in the subject’s current or recent external context and so could not directly trigger the representation. For example, when a chimpanzee plans to fish for termites with a stick, it walks away and breaks off a twig from a nearby tree and prepares it to fish with. Forming a mental image of the prepared stick is a detached representation that becomes part of the plan of the chimpanzee.
“Being able to use a detached representation requires that one can suppress the sensations one has for the moment: otherwise they will come into conflict with the representation.” Gaerdenfors, Peter & M. Lombard. 2020. “Technology led to more abstract causal reasoning.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:40. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09757-z. p. 2.
“Spreng and Grady argue that ‘remembering one’s past, imagining one’s future, and imagining the thoughts and feelings of others… are similar in that they all involve simulating an experience that is distinct from stimulus-driven behaviour.’ We aim to show that such simulations are also central for abstract causal reasoning,….” Gaerdenfors, Peter & M. Lombard. 2020. “Technology led to more abstract causal reasoning.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:40. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09757-z. p. 3; subquote: Spreng, R.N. & C.L. Grady. 2010. “Patterns of brain activity supporting autobiographical memory, prospection, and theory of mind, and their relationship to the default mode network.” J Cogn Neurosci. 22:1112-1123.
“It seems that non-human primate reasoning about forces is less developed compared to that of humans….
“Also in Boesch et al’s comparative study on nut cracking in humans and chimpanzees, they found that humans understood how to apply force using hammerstones to extract numerous nut species. Yet, the chimpanzees in their study group only ever applied such force to Panda nuts, although they regularly eat kernels from hard Irvingia nuts using their teeth–sometimes causing tooth breakage because of the force required. Chimpanzees in other groups and regions cracked different nut types with hammerstones, but to our knowledge the same group of chimpanzees never or seldom uses hammerstones to extract a range of food sources.” Gaerdenfors, Peter & M. Lombard. 2020. “Technology led to more abstract causal reasoning.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:40. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09757-z. p. 7; reference: Boesch, C., D. Bombjakova, A. Boyette & A. Meier. 2017. “Technical intelligence and culture: nut cracking in humans and chimpanzees.” Am J Phys Anthropol. 163:339-355.
“A key evolutionary question then becomes why only humans evolved causal thinking that is based on forces? The answer, we suggest, derives from the fact that the Homo lineage is the only group who can be defined based on their intimate relationship with technology.” Gaerdenfors, Peter & M. Lombard. 2020. “Technology led to more abstract causal reasoning.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:40. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09757-z. p. 8.
“Tools function as amplifiers. First, many tools amplify actions. A hammer-stone amplifies the pounding power of hands. A stick used to fish for termites or honey extends the poking of fingers. Using a stone flake to cut meat amplifies the cutting power of teeth. Secondly, as the blind person’s stick illustrates, tools can amplify perception.” Gaerdenfors, Peter & M. Lombard. 2020. “Technology led to more abstract causal reasoning.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:40. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09757-z. p. 8.
“Consider tightening a nut and bolt with either the hand or a pair of pliers. The jaws of the pliers function just like the opposed fingers of the hand, but the hand movements we perform in the two cases are quite different. Arbib et al. write that this ‘suggests that some abstract effector-independent representation provides criteria for success in achieving a goal that guides learning’.” Gaerdenfors, Peter & M. Lombard. 2020. “Technology led to more abstract causal reasoning.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:40. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09757-z. p. 9; reference: Arbib, M.A., J. Bonaiuto, S. Jacobs & S. Frey. 2009. “Tool use and the distalization of the end-effector.” Psychol Res. 73:441-462.
“With normal pliers the hand is first opened and then closed to grasp an object, while with reverse pliers the hand is first closed and then opened. Grasping an object with the two tools required opposite sequences of hand movements to achieve the same grasping goal. Umilta et al. then checked whether the firing of a neuron correlated better with hand motion or end-effector motion. They found that neurons that discharged when the hands was [sic] opening with normal pliers discharged when the hand was closing [sic] reverse pliers were used, supporting the hypothesis that the neuron react [sic] to the action of the end-effectors and not to the hand actions.” Gaerdenfors, Peter & M. Lombard. 2020. “Technology led to more abstract causal reasoning.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:40. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09757-z. p. 9; reference: Umilta, M.A., L. Escola, I. Intskirveli, F. Grammont, M. Rochat, F. Caruana, V. Jezzini & G. Rizzolatti. 2008. “When pliers become fingers in the monkey motor system.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 105(6):2209-2213.
“A further example of ‘seeing oneself from the outside’ is Pickering’s ambush hunting hypothesis. The strategy requires stealth, rudimentary observational skills to find a game trail or waterhole regularly used by intended prey animals, and intentionally setting oneself up in concealment of such prey. Thus to be successful, ambush hunters need to be aware of how they will appear to the prey, which requires an objective body representation. It is currently held that between about 1 million years and 300 thousand years, hominin meat-getting strategies developed from advanced scavenging strategies into hunting with rudimentary spears, exploiting ambush situations that placed prey animals at a disadvantage. For example, at Olorgesailie, Kenya, spanning ~1.2 to 0.5 million years, and Elandsfontein, South Africa, at ~600 thousand years ago, there is evidence that hominins were capable ambush hunters who understood animal use of the landscape….” Gaerdenfors, Peter & M. Lombard. 2020. “Technology led to more abstract causal reasoning.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:40. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09757-z. pp. 10-11; reference: Pickering, T. 2013. Rough and Tumble: Aggression, Hunting, and Human Evolution. U of California Press.
“In contrast, the tool manufacture of hominins was flexible and typically learned by practice. They could not have been made without thinking about the possible actions and their causal consequences. In this way, tool making supports the development of causal thinking. Vice versa, thinking about actions that may lead to a goal opens up for thinking about the potential of different kinds of tools.” Gaerdenfors, Peter & M. Lombard. 2020. “Technology led to more abstract causal reasoning.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:40. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09757-z. p. 12.
“The central explanatory concept of CAT [cultural attractor theory, where its theorists are called cultural epidemiologists] is that of cultural attractors. Cultural attractrors are theoretical posits that capture the way in which certain ideational variants are more likely to be the outcome of transformations than others. Insofar as these transformations are systematic across members of a population, CAT can be used to explain changes in the distribution and form of ideational variants in a population over time.” Buskell, Andrew. 2017. “What are cultural attractors?” Biol. Philos. 32:377-394. p. 377.
“While transformative approaches [like CAT] take it that change involves the (re-)constructing activities of systems, preservative approaches take it that change involves error or noise in a copying process.” Buskell, Andrew. 2017. “What are cultural attractors?” Biol. Philos. 32:377-394. p. 378.
“One can identify two approaches to modelling distribution dynamics in the cultural evolutionary literature. The first takes the process of acquiring ideational variants to be preservative, where individuals acquire variants with fidelity from some pre-existing template or model. The second approach takes the process of acquisition to be a [sic] transformative, where individuals reconstruct what is acquired during the acquisition process.” Buskell, Andrew. 2017. “What are cultural attractors?” Biol. Philos. 32:377-394. p. 379.
“CAT emphasises the explanatory role of the transformative approach, where reconstructive processes during learning lead to variation in the content of ideational variants.” Buskell, Andrew. 2017. “What are cultural attractors?” Biol. Philos. 32:377-394. p. 380.
“Such content-based or direct biases [by Richerson, Boyd & Henrich] are those that make individuals ‘more likely to learn or remember some cultural variants based on their content…. But this already assumes an underlying preservative approach, with content-based biases acting as a selective process either during memory consolidation or by means of direct comparison.” Buskell, Andrew. 2017. “What are cultural attractors?” Biol. Philos. 32:377-394. p. 381.
“Indeed, I suggest that we can distinguish four distinct conceptualisations, or notions, of the cultural attractor concept from the analyses above. These four notions are tendencies: (1) for individuals to transform variants in patterned ways; (2) for variants to cluster around a specific point; (3) for a variant (or variants) to increase in relative frequency, and; (4) for variants to settle at some equilibrium point.” Buskell, Andrew. 2017. “What are cultural attractors?” Biol. Philos. 32:377-394. p. 384.
“The cultural attractor concept is statistical, picking out populational tendencies. These tendencies in turn are the aggregate result of many lower-level processes. These lower-level processes are what cultural epidemiologists call factors of attraction. But what are these factors of attraction? Here too, I suggest, we find a great deal of variation. In what follows, I distinguish three different sets of causal factors that have been discussed in the literature: reconstructive learning, motivational factors, and ecological factors.” Buskell, Andrew. 2017. “What are cultural attractors?” Biol. Philos. 32:377-394. p. 389.
“Let us call this set of processes, those that involve doxastic, affective, axiological, and cognitive influences on the inferences made during learning, reconstructive learning.” Buskell, Andrew. 2017. “What are cultural attractors?” Biol. Philos. 32:377-394. p. 390.
“Finally, cultural epidemiologists do not just speak about psychological factors. They also appeal to a wide variety of ecological factors of attraction. Just as there are natural barriers (oceans, mountain ranges) that in part determine the spread of diseases–so too, the thought goes, can ecological factors impact the spread of ideational variants. To take one example, if there is no clay in my local environment, I won’t be able to produce clay tablets for writing or throw pots.” Buskell, Andrew. 2017. “What are cultural attractors?” Biol. Philos. 32:377-394. p. 391.
“Yet as these few remarks suggest, cultural epidemiologists have not focused their energies on taxonomising and characterising ecological factors of attraction. Indeed, much of the empirical and conceptual work in CAT is targeted at psychological factors of attraction. This is unfortunate, not least because these ecological factors of attraction seem to work at various spatiotemporal scales, and would seem to have very different causal effects on the distribution and form of cultural variants. Distinguishing, characterising, and organising various kinds of ecological factors of attraction seems a pressing issue for future CAT work.” Buskell, Andrew. 2017. “What are cultural attractors?” Biol. Philos. 32:377-394. p. 392.
“Cognitive psychologists are in general agreement about the behavioral characteristics of this kind of expert performance:
“1. Novices require years to attain mastery….
“2. The expert performs at a high level of accuracy and reliability, making few ‘unforced’ errors….
“3. The expert makes rapid, in-depth, assessments of problems….
“4. Experts can be interrupted and return to a task or problem with little or no loss of information….
“5. Experts learn new material very rapidly….
“6. Expert performance is limited to narrow domains of activity. Chess masters have no advantage in checkers or Go.
“7. Experts’ responses appear largely automatic, requiring little in the way of active attention.” Wynn, Thomas, M. Haidle, M. Lombard & F. Coolidge. 2017. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies.” pp. 21-43. In: Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge (eds). Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaelogy. Oxford UP. p. 23.
“Expertise in the guise of master-level performance is impressive, but as a style of thinking it is not limited to a talented few. It is in fact a very common form of cognition. We all have domains of expertise: driving an automobile, keyboarding, cooking, and so forth.” Wynn, Thomas, M. Haidle, M. Lombard & F. Coolidge. 2017. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies.” pp. 21-43. In: Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge (eds). Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaelogy. Oxford UP. p. 23.
“LTM [long term memory] consists of information stored and retained for periods longer than a few seconds. WM [working memory], on the other hand, consists of information held and processed in active attention and is very limited in capacity. WM is effortful in the sense that one must constantly refresh its content or lose it. Yet WM is the locus of most active problem solving–hence the puzzle of expert performance. Experts appear to deploy information held in LTM with a rapidity and facility generally associated with WM.” Wynn, Thomas, M. Haidle, M. Lombard & F. Coolidge. 2017. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies.” pp. 21-43. In: Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge (eds). Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaelogy. Oxford UP. p. 24.
“Clearly, experts are able to access task-relevant information in LTM very rapidly. The two leading models for how cognition does this are the template theory and long-term working memory [LTWM].” Wynn, Thomas, M. Haidle, M. Lombard & F. Coolidge. 2017. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies.” pp. 21-43. In: Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge (eds). Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaelogy. Oxford UP. p. 24; “long-term working memory” is the theory that current authors employ further; this theory is from Ericsson, K.A., V. Patel & W. Kintsch. 2000. “How experts’ adaptations to representative task demands account for the expertise effect in memory recall: Comment on Vicente and Wang (1998).” Psychological Review. 107(3): 578-592.
“Procedural memories are the predominant component of technical expertise and thus of particular relevance.
“One clue to the organization of procedural memories comes from how they are learned. Through repetition is the key. A novice repeats the same sequence of motor actions again, and again, and again, until it becomes automatic…. The only way to do this is to deploy an evolutionarily old system of learning–association. One discrete motor component of the sequence triggers the next directly because they have been linked by association. As the novice practices, he or she strengthens these associations and lengthens the chain of elements. At an expert level, the performer need only detect any small indication of key change to engage all of the appropriate scales and chords. This is a very reliable way to learn information, but it is very slow.” Wynn, Thomas, M. Haidle, M. Lombard & F. Coolidge. 2017. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies.” pp. 21-43. In: Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge (eds). Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaelogy. Oxford UP. p. 25.
“There is also a processing component of active manipulation of the information held in attention. These they [see reference below] termed the ‘central executive’ because they consist of executive control mechanisms roughly equivalent to the executive functions of neuropsychology. An example of a test of WM capacity is the N-back test. For example, a participant is read a series of sentences and asked to remember the word that occurred three from the end in each of the sentences. The number of words remembered correctly is WM capacity (WMC). There is a processing component (counting back three from the end) and a memory component (holding the sentence in memory in order to count back and then retaining a list of these three-back words). As the label implies, executive functions are the higher level control and decision-making functions of active thinking. Three of these executive control mechanisms are response inhibition, task switching, and filtering distraction.” Wynn, Thomas, M. Haidle, M. Lombard & F. Coolidge. 2017. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies.” pp. 21-43. In: Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge (eds). Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaelogy. Oxford UP. p. 25; reference: Baddeley, A. & G. Hitch. 1974. “Working memory.” In: Bower, G.A. (ed). Recent Advances in Learning and Motivation. pp. 47-90. New York: Academic Press.
“Not surprisingly, one’s WM capacity correlates strongly with measures of general intelligence. Interestingly, experts do not necessarily excel at WM problems, just as they do not necessarily excel in tests of general intelligence. Yes, experts with high WM capacity do tend to perform better, but high WM capacity does not produce expertise. The key to expertise appears to be rapid access to LTM.” Wynn, Thomas, M. Haidle, M. Lombard & F. Coolidge. 2017. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies.” pp. 21-43. In: Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge (eds). Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaelogy. Oxford UP. p. 26.
“The LTWM model incorporates two quite different neural networks–LTM and WM–each of which could have been under its own set of selective pressures. LTM capacity is arguably the more important of the two for successful technical cognition, especially the capacity for motor procedures. Any increase in long-term procedural memory capacity would have paid technical benefits. Increased capacity can be exploited in two ways in technical cognition; the size of procedural chunks and the number of procedural chunks. For motor procedures, size effectively means length of procedural chains; number means variety. Any increase in maximum length of a segment of motor procedure or in the variety of procedures available to an artisan will have payoffs in technical complexity. The neural network for procedural LTM is almost certainly the object manipulation network that evolved long ago in anthropoid primates. Indeed, hominin technology must have been an elaboration of these resources; there are no other candidates.” Wynn, Thomas, M. Haidle, M. Lombard & F. Coolidge. 2017. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies.” pp. 21-43. In: Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge (eds). Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaelogy. Oxford UP. p. 28.
“Technical expertise also evolved via enhancements of WMC, but the benefits are not as obvious. Indeed, LTWM appears to be a solution to the problem of the very small storage capacity of WM. Expanding the number of items that can be actively held in attention from four to five will not suddenly enable an artisan to visualize an entire technical procedure. Access to LTM will always be necessary. But an increased WMC might enable the addition of other elements to the technical task. If activation of a retrieval structure does not exhaust WMC, then there is free capacity that can attend to other things. Such a situation often arises during especially well-learned procedures. Of course, day dreaming is a natural consequence that can lead to accident, but free capacity might also be used for innovation.” Wynn, Thomas, M. Haidle, M. Lombard & F. Coolidge. 2017. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies.” pp. 21-43. In: Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge (eds). Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaelogy. Oxford UP. p. 28.
“After all, most authorities on early hominin stone knapping continue to describe it as an evolutionary Rubicon requiring complex cognition. The expert performance model provides a framework with which to compare early hominin knapping to nonhuman percussive technology. The first conclusion is that no qualitative difference is apparent. Resources of long-term procedural cognition are sufficient to account for capuchins cracking open nuts and for hominins at Lokalalei producing and using flakes. No ‘complex hierarchies’ are required in either case. Both are easily within the WM capacities of modern apes. The Lokalalei knappers may have used longer procedural chains and perhaps had more procedural chains. This argues for a modest increase in LTM capacity. But we urge caution. There are examples of chimpanzees using procedural chains equal to or longer than those documented at Lokalalei. Thus, our conclusion is not that capuchin percussive technology and Lomekwian/Oldowan percussive technology are indistinguishable, only that the difference was not dramatic and did not require a qualitative jump in the cognitive resources of the anthropoid object manipulation network.” Wynn, Thomas, M. Haidle, M. Lombard & F. Coolidge. 2017. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies.” pp. 21-43. In: Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge (eds). Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaelogy. Oxford UP. pp. 33-4.
“Chunking and chaining can yield ‘complex’ sequences without recourse to a hierarchical generator of some kind.” Wynn, Thomas, M. Haidle, M. Lombard & F. Coolidge. 2017. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies.” pp. 21-43. In: Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge (eds). Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaelogy. Oxford UP. p. 34.
“Prepared-core technologies were well established by at least 300,000 years ago, but might have been in use as early as 500,000-800,000 years ago.” Wynn, Thomas, M. Haidle, M. Lombard & F. Coolidge. 2017. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies.” pp. 21-43. In: Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge (eds). Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaelogy. Oxford UP. p. 38.
“Direct evidence for composite technologies in the form of use traces and birch tar on stone tools dates to about 200,000 years ago.” Wynn, Thomas, M. Haidle, M. Lombard & F. Coolidge. 2017. “The Expert Cognition Model in Human Evolutionary Studies.” pp. 21-43. In: Wynn, Thomas & F. Coolidge (eds). Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaelogy. Oxford UP. p. 38.
“Among the three specific knapping actions (flaking, shaping and retouching), flaking is most prominent. Retouching is found in limited occurrences, and only towards the end of the Oldowan do we find polyhedric shaping. Among the dozens of techniques invented for modifying stones, only three of them were put to use during the Oldowan: (1) direct percussion with a hand held stone hammer, (2) direct percussion on an anvil (no hammerstone; the block of raw material is held in hand), and (3) bipolar percussion between a hand-held stone hammer and anvil, the raw material to be fractured being held with the second hand (analogous to the technique used to crack a hard-shelled nut).” Roche, Helene, R. Blumenschine & J. Shea. 2009. “Origins and Adaptations of Early Homo: What Archaeology Tells Us.” pp. 135-147. In: Grine, F.E. et al (eds). The First Humans: Origin and Early Evolution of the Genus Homo, Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer. p. 138.
“At Lokalalei 1 flakes were produced by simple and non-organized debitage of globular cores, while at Lokalalei 2C an organized debitage predominated. Moreover, the simple debitage at Lokalalei 1 was inadequately implemented, considering the petrographic organization of the raw material (which, by the way, is of good knapping quality and has been selected for this purpose). The result is low productivity, with a majority of accidentally broken flakes, and with cores bearing many scars of knapping accidents. In contrast, at Lokalalei 2C, controlled debitage has been conducted, following constant rules applied to a good quality raw material…. The production of such a large number of flakes [at Lokalalei 2C] shows foresight and anticipation while the whole operational sequences is in progress. This cognitive ability goes with a controlled motor skill, shown by the high control of percussion gestures, which can be seen on flakes and cores, and with a very circumscribed and limited area bearing percussion marks on the hammerstones.
“It has not yet been demonstrated that a similar level of raw material management, anticipation, and manual dexterity exists elsewhere during Oldowan times.” Roche, Helene, R. Blumenschine & J. Shea. 2009. “Origins and Adaptations of Early Homo: What Archaeology Tells Us.” pp. 135-147. In: Grine, F.E. et al (eds). The First Humans: Origin and Early Evolution of the Genus Homo, Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer. p. 139.
“Assuming that there was some degree of local-scale continuity among Oldowan toolmakers, a strategy of returning unused flakes to central places/residential sites and/or one involving in-bulk stockpiling of raw materials at strategic points on the landscape would be, in effect, a strategy with direct benefits to the knappers themselves and to their immediate descendants.” Roche, Helene, R. Blumenschine & J. Shea. 2009. “Origins and Adaptations of Early Homo: What Archaeology Tells Us.” pp. 135-147. In: Grine, F.E. et al (eds). The First Humans: Origin and Early Evolution of the Genus Homo, Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer. p. 142.
“This limited view of Oldowan tool use [for carnivory] ignores contrary arguments in favor of a more functionally diversified early hominin stone tool technology.
“First, the edges of ethnographically documented knapped stone tools are used for many other purposes than butchery, including woodworking, preparing leather from animal hides, and processing soft plant matter. Inasmuch as chimpanzees regularly shape tools out of wood and soft plant matter, it seems reasonable to suppose that early hominins would have appreciated the benefits of carving wood with stone tools, rather than with their teeth and fingernails…. Such increased work rates would have substantially lowered the costs involved in technologically-assisted foraging, potentially leading in turn to a broadening of early hominin subsistence strategies.
“Second, the prominence of the link between stone tools and butchery is plainly a function of preservation bias…. In view of the wide range of uses our near primate relatives make of wooden implements, stone-tool-assisted Plio-Pleistocene carpentry is difficult to dismiss out of hand.” Roche, Helene, R. Blumenschine & J. Shea. 2009. “Origins and Adaptations of Early Homo: What Archaeology Tells Us.” pp. 135-147. In: Grine, F.E. et al (eds). The First Humans: Origin and Early Evolution of the Genus Homo, Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer. p. 142.
“The particular focus of Oldowan technology may have varied widely through time, across space, and among the one or more hominin species responsible for it. Some sets of Oldowan tools may reflect increasing emphasis on carnivory, others increased production of wooden tools, others both these things, and still others combinations of tool uses whose nature remains unknown. Oldowan stone tools are found over such a long period of time, and so wide a range of contexts that any hypothesis linking their appearance to a one-time-only behavioral shift among a single hominin species is almost certainly wrong.” Roche, Helene, R. Blumenschine & J. Shea. 2009. “Origins and Adaptations of Early Homo: What Archaeology Tells Us.” pp. 135-147. In: Grine, F.E. et al (eds). The First Humans: Origin and Early Evolution of the Genus Homo, Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer. p. 143.
“Even in butchierng kangaroos, heavy stones, especially with good angular edges, were often used to snap off the ribs from the vertebral column once the ventral cavity had been opened.” Hayden, Brian. 2015. “Insights into early lithic technologies from ethnography.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 370:20140356. Dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0356. p. 2.
“… unretouched primary flakes were generally used for most activities including scraping wood, creating sharp points and butchering, and these were replaced when dull by other primary flakes (usually after less than 15 min use).” Hayden, Brian. 2015. “Insights into early lithic technologies from ethnography.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 370:20140356. Dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0356. p. 2.
“One specific flake type that was commonly used but rarely resharpened or retouched was right angle breaks. These were extremely effective for working shaft tools such as spears but have almost never been recorded or analysed by archaeologists.” Hayden, Brian. 2015. “Insights into early lithic technologies from ethnography.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 370:20140356. Dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0356. p. 2.
“… I suggest that using direct percussion to produce flakes from cobble cores is far from the optimal solution for the production of flakes used in butchering. A much more likely effective and economical strategy would have been to produce flakes using bipolar reduction on smaller, more ubiquitous raw materials, especially pebbles of quartz or highly metamorphosed quartzite. Bipolar reduction is essentially a battering technology. Its distinctiveness as a reduction strategy was initially brought to the attention of archaeologists by White using ethnographic observations from New Guinea, but has since been prehistorically documented on all inhabited continents. It consists of placing a core on a hard surface or anvil and striking with a hammerstone from above (usually repeatedly) to produce flakes that have distinctive characteristics including low edge angles which are especially suited for cutting hides. This technique is more effective than standard hard hammer removal of flakes from hand-held cores because the flakes produced are often very flat and even lack pronounced bulbs of percussion. The edges therefore tend to be thinner and correspondingly sharper than standard core flakes. The use of bipolar technology is more economical than standard core reduction because it can use much smaller pieces of raw material for the production of flakes, down to the size of pebbles. In Australia, such material, especially quartz, is much more widespread over the landscape and more easily available than the large pieces of raw material required for standard core reduction, besides which quartz can produce cutting edges second in sharpness only to obsidian. In addition, very little skill is required for bipolar reduction in contrast to at least a modicum of skill required to get a very sharp-edged flake off a standard core.” Hayden, Brian. 2015. “Insights into early lithic technologies from ethnography.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 370:20140356. Dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0356. p. 5; reference: White, J. 1968. “Fabricators, outils ecailles or scalar cores? Mankind. 6:658-666.
“In the context of early hominin stone use, accidentally chipped edges and/or fragments presenting freshly opened surfaces certainly provided novel configurations that could have been contemplated at first, and then found to be useful for a range of percussion-related activities….” Carbonell, Eudald, D. Barsky, J. Bermudez de Castro & R. Ramos. 2018. “Archaic lithic industries: structural homogeneity.” Journal of Historical Archaeology & Anthropological Sciences. 3(2): 199-203. p. 200.
“The success of hominin stone knapping specifically requires:
“(1) an understanding of the fracture mechanics of the available stone raw materials, and most preferable sizes and shapes of the initial blocks for knapping;
“(2) sensorimotor control over the force and accuracy involved in the percussive gestures required to strike off flakes from the stone block, and;
“(3) a visuo-spatial understanding of the locations and angles at which to strike the core and detach flakes such that each removal doesn’t alter the core’s morphology in such a way that further detachments are not possible.” Lewis, Jason & S. Harmand. 2016. “An earlier origin for stone tool making: implications for cognitive evolution and the transition to Homo.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371:20150233. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0233. p. 2.
“Analyses on the Oldowan artefacts from the sites of Gona (2.6-2.5 Ma), Hadar (2.36 +/- 0.07 Ma) and Omo (2.34 +/- 0.04 Ma) in Ethiopia, and especially Lokalalei 2C (2.34 +/- 0.05 Ma) from West Turkana, Kenya, demonstrate that Pliocene hominin knappers already had reasonable abilities in terms of raw-material selectivity, planning depth and manual dexterity.” Lewis, Jason & S. Harmand. 2016. “An earlier origin for stone tool making: implications for cognitive evolution and the transition to Homo.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371:20150233. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0233. p. 2.
“… these replication experiments suggest that the LOM3 [Lomekwi 3 dating to 3.3 Ma on western side of Lake Turkana in Kenya] knappers were predominantly using both the passive hammer technique in which the core is held in both hands and struck downwards onto an anvil; and the bipolar technique, in which one hand stabilizes the core on the anvil and the other strikes the hammer down vertically onto the core. These techniques have rarely been identified in the Oldowan. These replication experiments have shown that Lomekwian tool manufacture using these two techniques does not require human-like manipulative capabilities.” Lewis, Jason & S. Harmand. 2016. “An earlier origin for stone tool making: implications for cognitive evolution and the transition to Homo.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371:20150233. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0233. pp. 2-3.
“A synthesis of new discoveries and results, given below, points towards a common conclusion: cranial, post-cranial and behavioural diversity in early Homo was much wider than previously thought, emerging from similarly high diversity in Pliocene genera and earlier than previously thought.” Lewis, Jason & S. Harmand. 2016. “An earlier origin for stone tool making: implications for cognitive evolution and the transition to Homo.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371:20150233. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0233. p. 3.
“Given the large size of the cores and anvils and percussion marks on the cortical surfaces of the tools, along with what is known of primate percussion behaviours seen among chimpanzees and capuchins, it may also be likely that the LOM3 artefacts were used to process plant food. These converging lines of evidence could suggest the earliest stone knapping developed within Pliocene hominins naturally from pre-existing pounding behaviours, rather than more punctually and directly to flaking for cutting edges.” Lewis, Jason & S. Harmand. 2016. “An earlier origin for stone tool making: implications for cognitive evolution and the transition to Homo.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371:20150233. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0233. p. 5.
“Instead of the conventional narrative described above, evidence is quickly amassing that stone tool-making behaviours are not necessarily limited to Homo; cranial, post-cranial and behavioural diversity in early Homo is much wider than previously thought; emerging from similarly high diversity in Pliocene genera and earlier than previously thought; and these evolutionary changes may not have been directly related to living in savannah grassland environments. To search for the roots of our genus and for the behaviours characteristic of what it means to be human, palaeoanthropologists must now focus on the time period between 4 and 3 Ma.” Lewis, Jason & S. Harmand. 2016. “An earlier origin for stone tool making: implications for cognitive evolution and the transition to Homo.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371:20150233. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0233. p. 6.
“A strong link seems to exist between tool use and causal cognition. It has been suggested that non-human, tool-using primates understand basic associations between a tool and its effects, but are unable fully to comprehend the physical principles on which a technology relies.” Lombard, Marlize, A. Hoegberg & M. Haidle. 2018. “Cognition: From Capuchin Rock Pounding to Lomekwian Flake Production.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 29(2): 201-231. p. 204.
“Grade 3 [of 1-7 grades of causal cognition] therefore includes early forms of mental time travel, basic episodic memory, basic working memory and priority scheduling (planning depth or extended perception-and-action sequences).” Lombard, Marlize, A. Hoegberg & M. Haidle. 2018. “Cognition: From Capuchin Rock Pounding to Lomekwian Flake Production.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 29(2): 201-231. p. 205.
“Sometimes we do not perceive another’s presence, but only the traces of them. This grade [4] depends on the capacity to entertain two mental representations at the same time, that is, the current perceptual state of seeing a trace with the imagination of who/what left the trace. This seems to be the grade where humans separate from other species. Being able to reason from effects to non-present causes seems to be unique to humans, even though some observations suggest that great apes are at the bring of Grade 4.” Lombard, Marlize, A. Hoegberg & M. Haidle. 2018. “Cognition: From Capuchin Rock Pounding to Lomekwian Flake Production.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 29(2): 201-231. p. 205.
“Hominin flake production and the subsequent use of the flakes might imply technological modularity. To avoid repetition and the inflation of cognitive interpretation, we encode [in making a cognigram for use of flakes for cutting meat] flake use as a discrete module, especially since naturally occurring sharp rock slivers or accidentally produced flakes might have been used as tools.” Lombard, Marlize, A. Hoegberg & M. Haidle. 2018. “Cognition: From Capuchin Rock Pounding to Lomekwian Flake Production.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 29(2): 201-231. p. 211.
“Some self-awareness (Grade 3 causal understanding) is necessary for the bimanual manipulation of objects and for assessing the correct amount of striking force. Duke and Pargeter demonstrated that this basic knapping technique requires skill to perform, and that it is not possible to master without being taught by an experienced knapper.” Lombard, Marlize, A. Hoegberg & M. Haidle. 2018. “Cognition: From Capuchin Rock Pounding to Lomekwian Flake Production.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 29(2): 201-231. p. 217; reference: Duke, H. & J. Pargeter. 2015. “Weaving simple solutions to complex problems: an experimental study of skill in bipolar cobble-splitting.” Lithic Technology. 40(4):349-365.
“… the comparison of the different percussive techniques reveals more differences than previously described. Still, there is no apparent qualitative leap. Rather, based on our approach, a gradual extension of the different aspects of expert cognition can be recorded. We suggest that our analysis demonstrates the increasing pressure on effective memory chunking and chaining as techno-behaviours became expanded through time and across space.” Lombard, Marlize, A. Hoegberg & M. Haidle. 2018. “Cognition: From Capuchin Rock Pounding to Lomekwian Flake Production.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 29(2): 201-231. pp. 223-226.
“If our interpretation is correct, then the inferred variations in Grade 3 causal cognition reflect a steady increase in episodic memory, working memory and priority scheduling. Increasing efficiency by using techno-behaviours such as bipolar knapping and modular performances could have helped stimulate the gradual evolution of these key cognitive elements in hominins.” Lombard, Marlize, A. Hoegberg & M. Haidle. 2018. “Cognition: From Capuchin Rock Pounding to Lomekwian Flake Production.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 29(2): 201-231. p. 227.
“At many early sites that have provided HDS [heavy-duty scrapers] morphotypes, traces on fossil bones suggest the use of heavy-duty tools for percussion-related meat and carcass processing activities. But massive stone implements could also have been used for other purposes, such as woodworking or grinding plant fibres.” Barsky, Deborah, J-M. Verges, S. Titton, M. Guardiola, R. Sala & I. Toro Moyano. 2018. “The emergence and significance of heavy-duty scrapers in ancient stone toolkits.” Comptes Rendus Palevol. 17:201-219. p. 215.
“It is, in fact, during the Oldowan that there seems most often to be disagreement in the classification – or not – of HDS as tools…. Indeed, the fact that this matter has not been resolved after fifty years of research demonstrates that establishing strict classificatory systems, especially within the Oldowan, is not a fitting work methodology. That said, the existence of a HDS morphotype cannot be so easily dismissed given the homogeneity of the observations provided from numerous sites and the evidence presented from different assemblages over time. It should be recognized, therefore, that the HDS morphotype – no matter its technological or functional origin – maintains its place as one of the oldest morphotypes known in the world.
“Certainly, as Toth and others have maintained, many of the Oldowan core tool forms are likely knapping by-products, and there is no clear-cut way to differentiate ‘tools’ from ‘cores’ in Oldowan occurrences.” Barsky, Deborah, J-M. Verges, S. Titton, M. Guardiola, R. Sala & I. Toro Moyano. 2018. “The emergence and significance of heavy-duty scrapers in ancient stone toolkits.” Comptes Rendus Palevol. 17:201-219. p. 215; reference: Toth, N. 1985. “The Oldowan reassessed: a close look at early stone artifacts.” J. Archaeol. Sci. 12:101-120.
“We argue that the fact that the repetition over time of objects fitting within a specific formal range is clearly task-related. This is the case of HDS: the flat, convex surface with an abrupt, nosed extremity obviously corresponds with some – yet to be determined – activity that has persisted over time.” Barsky, Deborah, J-M. Verges, S. Titton, M. Guardiola, R. Sala & I. Toro Moyano. 2018. “The emergence and significance of heavy-duty scrapers in ancient stone toolkits.” Comptes Rendus Palevol. 17:201-219. p. 215.
“This fragmentation and the transfer of a large number of flakes off-site [at FLK North Bed I Olduvai Gorge (1.79 mya)] are at odds with intensive butchery activity at the spot. On the other hand, percussion tasks seem to have taken place on-site, so hominins were actively performing the processing of undetermined materials, other than bones. Vegetal tissues, nuts, roots and plants, could be candidates for these alternative activities. Our study of the lithic sample would favor this hypothesis of plant exploitation through battering activities, as we are convinced that the array of percussion damage observed in hammerstones and nodules cannot be related exclusively to the possible knapping activities undertaken at the spot.” Diez-Martin, F., P. Sanchez Yustos, M. Dominguez-Rodrigo, A. Mabulla, H. Bunn, G. Ashley, R. Barba & E. Baquedano. 2010. “New insights into hominin lithic activities at FLK North Bed I, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.” Quaternary Research. 74:376-387. p. 385.
“Bipolar knapping consists of placing a core on a stationary anvil and striking it in perpendicular planes from the top with a hammerstone. Proceeding this way, the applied loading produces two opposing points of impact and fracture directions. The bipolar technique, then, differs substantially from the freehand technique in terms of fracture mechanics.” Diez-Martin, F., P. Sanchez, M. Dominguez-Rodrigo, A. Mabulla & R. Barba. 2009. “Were Olduvai Hominins making butchering tools or battering tools? Analysis of a recently excavated lithic assemblage from BK (Bed II, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania).” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. 28:274-289. p. 281.
“The maximum edge length has been measured in bipolar and freehand flakes. The latter show good natural sharp edges, ergonomically placed and potentially selectable for use. A total of 50% of all freehand flakes retrieved at BK [bed II, Olduvai Gorge, 1.2 mya] show potentially usable sharp edges, while this trait has only been observed in 7.25% of all bipolar detached pieces… The mean lengths show that, at the same location of the edge, freehand blanks always produce higher amount of edge. This again suggests that bipolar reduction produces a high amount of chunky positives and a much smaller amount of blanks with sharp edges.” Diez-Martin, F., P. Sanchez, M. Dominguez-Rodrigo, A. Mabulla & R. Barba. 2009. “Were Olduvai Hominins making butchering tools or battering tools? Analysis of a recently excavated lithic assemblage from BK (Bed II, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania).” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. 28:274-289. p. 284.
“Interestingly, no food-getting or other activity conducted by modern chimpanzees appears to require a reliance on cutting activities, and this may be the primary reason that a culture of flaked stone technology has apparently not developed among chimpanzees.” Toth, Nicholas & K. Schick. 2009. “The Oldowan: The tool Making of Early Hominins and Chimpanzees Compared.” Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 38:289-305. p. 297.
“Our first bonobo subject, Kanzi, learned both the flaking and the cutting tasks through observing a human tool maker, began using flakes the first day of the experiment, and made his first tool within a month of the onset of the experiment. He has now been flaking stone for 18 years, and his sister Panbanisha is now also a practiced stone tool maker….
“The apes in this study, however, are not as proficient in stone tool making, even after many years of experience, as were the early hominin tool makers.” Toth, Nicholas & K. Schick. 2009. “The Oldowan: The tool Making of Early Hominins and Chimpanzees Compared.” Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 38:289-305. pp. 297, 298.
“… given that, for now, no archaeological sites have been documented in the time interval between the Lomekwian at 3.3. million years ago and the earliest Oldowan at 2.6 million years ago, it is tempting to picture a scenario where stone tool flaking was (re)discovered once and again by, perhaps, several hominin species. To some extent, the Oldowan record earlier than 2 million years ago, for which we have only a handful of sites, could be interpreted in a similar manner, although it is still unclear whether the discontinuity of the early Oldowan record represents real gaps or whether it is just an artefact of entropy and the nature of the sedimentary record.” De la Torre, Ignacio de la. 2017. Commentary on: Tennie, Claudio, L. Premo, D. Braun & S. McPherron. “Early Stone Tools and Cultural Transmission: Resetting the Null Hypothesis.” Current Anthropology. 58(5). October.
“Nonhuman primates do not make ‘tools’ per se; their technology is task oriented, not tool oriented…. The artifacts that archaeologists find are the detritus of these procedures. They were not themselves targets or goals.” Wynn, Thomas. 2017. Commentary on: Tennie, Claudio, L. Premo, D. Braun & S. McPherron. “Early Stone Tools and Cultural Transmission: Resetting the Null Hypothesis.” Current Anthropology. 58(5). October.
“Homogeneity is at the roots of the system and is defined as a phase wherein stones were simply used but there was no formal modification. This phase is followed by the discovery of effective unidirectional and orthogonal stone flaking strategies, presenting some morpho-technological Variability. Within this pool of variability, typically referred to as ‘Oldowan’, some of the more innovative techniques (notably bifacial and multifacial strategies) were selected to be developed and standardized. Hominins were thus led to create the Diversity of forms and techniques that are the hallmarks of the Acheulian. In the final, Multiplicity phase, the capacity to effectively manufacture ever more complex toolkits continued to progress and the exponential development of human technology was underway.” Carbonell, Eudald, D. Barsky, R. Sala & V. Celiberti. 2015. “Structural continuity and technological change in Lower Pleistocene toolkits.” Quaternary International. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.04.008. p. 2.
“Early research at Olduvai Gorge also entrenched a long-standing hypothesis that Homo habilis was the first hominin in Africa to systematically knap stone, and that this would have occurred some 2 Ma. Notwithstanding, over the years, both robust and gracile Australopiths have been discovered in possible or probable association with stone tools in various East and south African sites. For example, in Member 5 at Sterkfontein, evidence is documented of stone industries associated with Paranthropus robustus fossils dating to between 2 and 1.7 Ma.” Carbonell, Eudald, D. Barsky, R. Sala & V. Celiberti. 2015. “Structural continuity and technological change in Lower Pleistocene toolkits.” Quaternary International. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.04.008. p. 2.
“It now seems a likely setting that the earliest known industries such as those from Gona would have been preceded by a less sophisticated phase of technical experimentation and discovery wherein stones were simply thrown or used for pounding, but were not formally modified. This kind of behavioral scheme, situated chronologically just prior to the onset of the Quaternary (~3.5-2.5 Ma), could have been practiced by any or all of the hominin species present in the landscape.” Carbonell, Eudald, D. Barsky, R. Sala & V. Celiberti. 2015. “Structural continuity and technological change in Lower Pleistocene toolkits.” Quaternary International. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.04.008. p. 3.
“For the first time [beginning of the Diversity phase at about 2 mya] in the archeological record, form took on importance relative to function and the repeated production of specific, morpho-types illustrates the strengthening of the concept of tradition.” Carbonell, Eudald, D. Barsky, R. Sala & V. Celiberti. 2015. “Structural continuity and technological change in Lower Pleistocene toolkits.” Quaternary International. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.04.008. p. 5.
“This situation [“chronologically equivalent emergence of analogous technical systems” in India to those in Africa] lends credence to the convergence hypothesis, especially given that hominins were also present in Pakistan and China prior to around 1.8 Ma. But different modes of cultural transmission are not mutually exclusive and more than one scenario is possible, depending on the region considered. The case for replacement or exchange, however, appears unlikely for vastly separate geographical regions (Africa and India, for example) where contact and cultural transmission within a relatively short time-span are implausible (1.75-1.5 Ma).
“We propose that populations existing in these regions could have achieved analogous expressions of techno-morphological diversity when structurally similar models were developed out of potentially viable morpho-types latent in their existing technical systems. This hypothesis provides an alternative explanation to how similar developments could have occurred diachronically in different areas of the globe.” Carbonell, Eudald, D. Barsky, R. Sala & V. Celiberti. 2015. “Structural continuity and technological change in Lower Pleistocene toolkits.” Quaternary International. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.04.008. pp. 6-7.
“Emergence and consolidation of new technologies are not therefore revolutions but rather bifurcations inside systemic continuity. The proposed branching model explains both why earlier morpho-types persisted into new technical systems as well as how parallel technological developments could have occurred in spatially distant areas of the globe.” Carbonell, Eudald, D. Barsky, R. Sala & V. Celiberti. 2015. “Structural continuity and technological change in Lower Pleistocene toolkits.” Quaternary International. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.04.008. p. 10.
“Simple Oldowan-like stone technologies continue to be found through time in many parts of the Old World, even into the Holocene in some cases, but the Oldowan sensu stricto is usually applied to these simple core/flake industries older than one million years or so.” Toth, Nicholas & K. Schick. 2018. “An overview of the cognitive implications of the Oldowan Industrial Complex.” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa. 53(1):3-39. p. 4.
“At Kanjera South, Kenya, toolmaking hominins were highly selective regarding raw material procurement, bringing in stone from distant conglomerate sources often in much greater proportion that their presence in those conglomerates, while conversely often avoiding and largely leaving some rock types that were quite abundant in those distant sources. Moreover, they transported some of these rocks up to 10-13 km from sources to the excavated sites between 1.95 and 2.3 Mya. This is well outside the range of carrying stone seen in modern apes, which is usually much less than one kilometre.” Toth, Nicholas & K. Schick. 2018. “An overview of the cognitive implications of the Oldowan Industrial Complex.” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa. 53(1):3-39. p. 15.
“One such study, by Moore and Perston, conducted experiments to examine whether Oldowan core and Acheulean handaxe morphologies require higher order planning strategies, or can result from randomised flaking due to constraints imposed by nature of fracture mechanics. They argue that random selection of flaking platforms (from a set assessed by experienced knappers, judging appropriate places to strike to remove an optimal, maximum-sized flake) produce both simple Oldowan-like cores (as well as ‘proto-bifaces’) with no predetermination or ‘intent’ on the part of the knapper.” Toth, Nicholas & K. Schick. 2018. “An overview of the cognitive implications of the Oldowan Industrial Complex.” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa. 53(1):3-39. p. 21; reference: Moore, M.W. & Y. Perston. 2016. “Experimental insights into the cognitive significance of early stone tools.” PLoS ONE 11(7):e0158803.
“The ape copying social learning hypothesis continues to be pervasive in the literature as a null hypothesis, despite growing evidence that many species of apes (and monkeys) can acquire behavioural forms without requiring any copying variants of social learning, and despite the lack of evidence for copying variants of social learning–especially regarding behavioural forms (Footnote: We define ‘behavioural forms’ as the specific action component(s) of a behaviour, including their organization in a linear and/or hierarchical relationship over time. We define ‘artefact forms’ as the physical component(s) of an artefact, including their organization in a linear and/or hierarchical relationship over time.)–in unenculturated/untrained apes. Thus an alternative account is needed to explain ape culture.
“In 2009, Tennie et al., proposed such an alternative account: the zone of latent solutions (ZLS) hypothesis.” Tennie, Claudio, E. Bandini, C. van Schaik & L. Hopper. 2020. “The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:55. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09769-9. pp. 2-3; reference: Tennie, Claudio, J. Call & M. Tomasello. 2009. “Ratcheting up the ratchet: on the evolution of cumulative culture.” Philo Trans R Soc B. 364:2405-2415. doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0052.
“These non-copying social learning mechanisms still matter–at the right time and in the right circumstances–as they can facilitate individual reinnovation and, by doing so, regulate (and potentially encourage) the frequencies of behavioural forms in populations but without leading to (or requiring) copies of behavioural form. Within this account, socially-mediated individual learning of forms drives the likelihood of individual acquisition and behavioural forms.” Tennie, Claudio, E. Bandini, C. van Schaik & L. Hopper. 2020. “The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:55. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09769-9. p. 3.
“Thus, social learning is dispensable for the acquisition of behavioural forms, but it can greatly increase the individual likelihood of even specific form reinnovation and, with it, help produce and maintain the observed frequencies of particular latent solutions in populations.” Tennie, Claudio, E. Bandini, C. van Schaik & L. Hopper. 2020. “The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:55. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09769-9. p. 4.
“Apes have culture, but the effect of social learning is not on the copying of the behavioural form but on the frequency in which these forms appear.” Tennie, Claudio, E. Bandini, C. van Schaik & L. Hopper. 2020. “The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:55. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09769-9. p. 9.
“Other factors can keep certain forms in check, as they may counteract copy error. For example, there is a type of bone tool still in similar form-use today as it was many thousands years ago by Neandertals [so called lissoirs], where it seems difficult, even today, to further improve their form and use. That is, there can be environmentally prescribed/channelled optima that prevent form modifications from cumulating, which may at times mask a potential presence of form-copying abilities.” Tennie, Claudio, E. Bandini, C. van Schaik & L. Hopper. 2020. “The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:55. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09769-9. pp. 9-10.
“Lastly, it is worth noting that sometimes a behavioural form shown to be a latent solution (because it is reinnovated by naive subjects) can also be expressed by a species that does not practice it in the wild…. Indeed, latent solutions can also appear whenever a new situation presents itself to a species, for example if a problem appears to a species capable of solving it (e.g. no bird species evolved to open milk bottles by pecking at them, yet several species can do so, without the need to copy the behavioural form).” Tennie, Claudio, E. Bandini, C. van Schaik & L. Hopper. 2020. “The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:55. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09769-9. p. 12.
“More generally, a behavioural form is ‘latent’ in any interplay between genetic setup and environment (excluding form-copying). Therefore, to be very clear: the ZLS includes everything within this interplay, from what may be called ‘hardwired’ behaviours (e.g. yawns) to those at the very edge of individual learning/innovativeness of a species (e.g. nut-cracking in apes, which can be reinnovated but relatively rarely). In other words, the ZLS ranges from what some may still call instinct to complex physical cognition–so long as none of the resulting forms are copying-dependent. ‘Solution’ relates to a repeatable form across individuals (often, not always, a literal solution to a problem), and ‘latent’ relates to a lack of need for form-copying to produce the form.” Tennie, Claudio, E. Bandini, C. van Schaik & L. Hopper. 2020. “The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:55. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09769-9. pp. 12-13.
“Reindl et al. (2018) explain that the ZLS should be regarded as the largely phylogenetically derived ‘baseline’ version of a different one of Vygotsky’s zones: the zone of actual development (ZAD). This ZAD can be best described as the current skill level reached by a human. Note that the addition of a (baseline) ZLS contrasts with Vygotsky’s originally envisioned ZAD concept. Vygotsky, perhaps because he worked exclusively on human children and not apes, dismissed the necessity of a ZLS-like ‘baseline zone’ for humans. Yet, there is empirical evidence that this zone also exists for humans: Reindl et al. (2016) provide data on some of the tool-use behavioural forms that are within human children’s ZLS that do not seem to require copying (as they can be reinnovated by task-naive children. This finding has now been replicated and extended cross-culturally, which further demonstrates that it does not depend on specific cultural-including form-backgrounds. Thus, the ZLS hypothesis completes Vygotsky’s original ZAD and ZPD concepts by providing a missing third Zone: the ZLS (as the largely phylogenetically-based and form-copying-independent baseline of the ZAD).” Tennie, Claudio, E. Bandini, C. van Schaik & L. Hopper. 2020. “The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:55. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09769-9. p. 13; references: Reindl, E., S. Beck, I.A. Apperly & C. Tennie. 2016. “Young children spontaneously invent wild great apes’ toool-use behaviours.” Proc Biol Sci. 283(1825):20152402. doi. org/10.1098/rspb.2015.2402; Reindl, E., E. Bandini & C. Tennie. 2018. “The zone of latent solutions and its relation to the classics: Vygotsky and Koehler.” In: Di Paolo, L.D. & F. Vincenzo (eds). Social cognition in non-human primates and early Homo. Springer.
“For example, in 2010, Tennie and colleagues tested naive, captive, ecologically relevant chimpanzees with the floating peanut paradigm, in which subjects have to spit water into a vertically fixed, top-open tube until it is sufficiently full to allow for a shelled peanut to float into reach. The chimpanzees were tested in two conditions; a full demonstration condition where spitting action forms were demonstrated, and a control demonstration condition, in which no spitting actions were demonstrated (instead, here, water was poured into the tube from a bottle; as a socially mediated cue). Tennie et al. found that, after these varying demonstrations, observers in both conditions used spitting actions at comparable rates to solve the task. The use of spitting actions did not differ, regardless of whether subjects had seen the form of these specific actions or not. The most parsimonious explanation of this finding is that subjects individually reinnovated the action form that was necessary (spitting) in both conditions. Note that it had been previously shown that chimpanzees can also innovate the spitting solution entirely from scratch. Taken together, the copying of action forms, as well as any copying in general, proved unnecessary to reinnovate the action forms in this task in accordance with the ZLS hypothesis and in contrast to the copying hypothesis.
“Modest differences between individuals in general motivation, luck and/or even skill to produce target forms can thus be bridged by non-copying social learning, even if sufficiently large inter-individual differences would eventually require social learning via copying.” Tennie, Claudio, E. Bandini, C. van Schaik & L. Hopper. 2020. “The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:55. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09769-9. pp. 16-7; reference: Tennie, Claudio, J. Call & M. Tomasello. 2010. “Evidence for emulation in chipnanzees in social settings using the floating peanut task.” PLoS One. 7(8):e10544. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010544.
“We also can expect to see convergent evolution of latent solutions in species that do not have a proximal shared ancestry but have instead faced similar evolutionary pressures and/or trajectories (a possible candidate here might be nut-cracking across primate species: found currently in chimpanzees, in capuchins, and in long-tailed macaques. Note, however, that latent solutions are not restricted to adaptations; they can also be exaptations or any mix between adaptations and exaptations. Problem-solving cognition could even be re-described in this context as an exaptation generating machinery.” Tennie, Claudio, E. Bandini, C. van Schaik & L. Hopper. 2020. “The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:55. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09769-9. pp. 23-4.
“We can safely–and empirically–assume that human form phenomena are not always pure copies and not always derived entirely from individual constructors.” Tennie, Claudio, E. Bandini, C. van Schaik & L. Hopper. 2020. “The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:55. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09769-9. p. 27.
“A general effect of cultural background, especially in the case of humans, is now widely accepted. In other words, the view that constructors influence culture, and culture influences constructors has become widespread. For example, Muthukrishna and Henrich point out that the seemingly independent development of the idea (or, perhaps best described as the ‘idea form’) of natural selection by Wallace and Darwin was dependent on culture. Yet, the form of the idea was not directly copied between these two men. Instead, the development of this idea might have depended on what we here called indirect copying of form. In particular, both instances of the idea expression relied on the specific cultural background that was available to both Wallace and Darwin.” Tennie, Claudio, E. Bandini, C. van Schaik & L. Hopper. 2020. “The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:55. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09769-9. p. 31.
“According to the ape ZLS approach, individual and social learning work in conjunction to create an illusion of a spread in ape cultures, where the resulting forms remain individually derived and lack cultural evolution…. Indeed, a growing number of studies continue to demonstrate that naive, ecologically relevant apes, are capable of reinnovating the same behavioural forms as their wild counterparts, without copying of these forms.” Tennie, Claudio, E. Bandini, C. van Schaik & L. Hopper. 2020. “The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.” Biology & Philosophy. 35:55. doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09769-9. p. 33.
“Our study found that the majority (at least 11 out of 12) of the investigated wild great ape tool-use behaviours are individually re-inventable by human children and that there is a close relationship between the difficulty level of these behaviours and individual discovery rates for both humans and great apes.” Reindl, E., S. Beck, I.A. Apperly & C. Tennie. 2015. “Young children spontaneously invent wild apes’ tool-use behaviours.” Proc. R. Soc. B. 283:20152402. doi.org.10.1098/rspb.2015.2402. p. 5.
“Chimpanzees use about 40% fewer hits on average, which suggests that their use of stones, which are harder and heavier than the women’s wooden clubs, compensated for any advantages that the cutting anvils provided.” Boesch, Christophe, D. Bombjakova, A. Boyette & A. Meier. 2016. “Technical intelligence and culture: Nut cracking in humans and chimpanzees.” Am J Phys Anthropol. 2017:163:339-355. p. 347.
“Our comparison revealed a large overlap in the solutions adopted by the two species as well as notable differences. Mbendjele women often cooperated during nut-cracking, including by performing complementary tasks, while chimpanzees mostly cracked nuts individualistically, and the women can exploit more types of nuts because they use more specialized tools. However, chimpanzees crack nuts equally or more efficiently by some measures.” Boesch, Christophe, D. Bombjakova, A. Boyette & A. Meier. 2016. “Technical intelligence and culture: Nut cracking in humans and chimpanzees.” Am J Phys Anthropol. 2017:163:339-355. p. 348.
“Remembering one’s past (autobiographical memory), imagining one-s future (prospection), and imagining the thoughts and feelings of others (theory of mind) are similar in that they all involve simulating an experience that is distinct from stimulus-driven behavior. Two domains, autobiographical memory and prospection, have shown substantial behavioral and neural overlap….
This trio of abilities emerges at the same time developmentally, at about 3.5 years of age.” Spreng, R. Nathan & C. Grady. 2009. “Patterns of Brain Activity Supporting Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, and Theory of Mind, and Their Relationship to the Default Mode Network.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 22(6):1112-1123. p. 1112.
“The results provide the first direct evidence to support previous independent observations that projection of the self into the past, the future, or the minds of others engages a common set of brain regions largely overlapping with the DMN [highly interconnected core set of brain structures known as the default mode network].” Spreng, R. Nathan & C. Grady. 2009. “Patterns of Brain Activity Supporting Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, and Theory of Mind, and Their Relationship to the Default Mode Network.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 22(6):1112-1123. p. 1121.
“There is also the fact of what we shall call, quite grandly, ‘iterative distalization’, extending the example of simple distalization where the end-effector, or locus of control, moves outward from the body to the end of the screwdriver blade. To iterate this, we may consider that the screw is the endeffector. As our skill increases, we repeatedly distalize our visual attention from the hand to the blade of the screwdriver to the progress of the screw head toward becoming flush with the surface into which the screw is advancing, while at the same time the haptic feedback to our hand becomes associated with the object of our visual attention.” Arbib, Michael, J. Bonaiuto, S. Jacobs & S. Frey. 2009. “Tool use and the distalization of the end-effector.” Psychol Res. July. 73(4):441-462. doi:10.1007/s00426-009-0242-2. p. 443.
“In some cases we may speak of goal state equivalence rather than motor equivalence, whereas in other cases the machine may carry out actions that are unavailable to the non-augmented human.
“To clarify this distinction, consider the goal of writing a cursive lower case letter ‘a’. As is well known, one can use a long pole with a paint brush on the end to write on a wall in what, despite little skill, is recognizably one’s own handwriting even if one has never attempted the task before. The ‘secret’ is that we have an abstract effector-independent representation in terms of the relative size and position of marker strokes which is highly automatized in the case of a pen or pencil but which can be invoked to control the novel end-effector of the pole-attached paintbrush, using visual feedback to match this novel performance against our visual expectations. This, the generic goal of writing the ‘a’ will invoke an automatized effector-specific motor scheme if the tool is a pen or pencil, but can control other tools via an ‘effector-independent’ representation.” Arbib, Michael, J. Bonaiuto, S. Jacobs & S. Frey. 2009. “Tool use and the distalization of the end-effector.” Psychol Res. July. 73(4):441-462. doi:10.1007/s00426-009-0242-2. p. 444.
“Our findings show that from 2 to 3 years of age children [from San Bushmen of S. Africa and from a large city in Australia] are capable of inventing tool use behaviours and applying them correctly on their own. Across both cultural groups, children at all ages were equally likely to use a tool in the correct way–using the tool 74% of the time on high-frequency tasks [based on their occurrence in wild great ape populations] and 64% of the time on low-frequency tasks. This closely replicates the rates of invention observed in children from another cultural group, and supports previous research demonstrating that from a young age children are adept tool users, and typically perform similarly to great apes on tests of physical cognition. This suggests an inbuilt capacity for recognizing and using tools that may establish within children at 2-3 years of age.
“However, as in Reindl et al, the ability of children [from two European locations – a UK city and a small German town] to succeed on the task improved with age, and did so across both cultures–older children retrieved the sticker using a tool far more often than younger children. This suggests that while very young children may possess the cognitive capacity to recognize the value of a tool and apply it correctly, their physical capabilities in executing the tool using behaviouir may still be developing. Fine motor control is refined throughout childhood as children gain experience manipulating tools, and is necessary for accurate application in tool using tasks. Similar improvement occurs in juvenile primates as they gain experience using tools and their physical strength and coordination improves.” Neldner, Karri, E. Reindl, C. Tennie, J. Grant, K. Tomaselli & M. Nielsen. 2020. “A cross-cultural investigation of young children’s spontaneous invention of tool use behaviours.” R. Soc. Open Sci. 7:192240. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.192240. p. 10; reference: Reindl, E., S. Beck, I.A. Apperly & C. Tennie. 2015. “Young children spontaneously invent wild apes’ tool-use behaviours.” Proc. R. Soc. B. 283:20152402. doi.org.10.1098/rspb.2015.2402.
“Curiosity is such a basic component of our nature that we are nearly oblivious to its pervasiveness in our lives. Consider, though, how much of our time we spend seeking and consuming information, whether listening to the news or music; browsing the internet; reading books or magazines; watching television, movies, and sports; or otherwise engaging in activities not directly related to eating, reproduction, and basic survival. Our insatiable demand for information drives a much [sic] of the global economy and, on a micro-sale, motivates learning and drives patterns of foraging in animals. Its diminution is a symptom of depression, and its overexpression contributes to distractibility, a symptom of disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Curiosity is thought of as the noblest of human drives but is commonly denigrated as dangerous (as in the expression ‘curiosity killed the cat’).” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. p. 449.
“… much research that is directly relevant to the problem of curiosity does not use the term curiosity and, instead, focuses on what are considered to be distinct phenomena. These phenomena include, for example, play, exploration, reinforcement learning, latent learning, neophillia, and self-reported desire for information.” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. p. 449.
“Psychologist Daniel Berlyne is among the most important figures in the 20th century study of curiosity. He distinguished between the types of curiosity most commonly exhibited by human and non-humans along two dimensions: perceptual versus epistemic and specific versus diversive. Perceptual curiosity refers to the driving force that motivates organisms to seek out novel stimuli, which diminishes with continued exposure. It is the primary driver of exploratory behavior in non-human animals and, potentially, also in human infants as well as a possible driving force of human adults’ exploration. Opposite perceptual curiosity was epistemic curiosity, which Berlyne described as a drive aimed ‘not only at obtaining access to information-bearing stimulation, capable of dispelling uncertainties of the moment, but also at acquiring knowledge. He described epistemic curiosity as applying predominantly to humans, therefore distinguishing the curiosity of humans from that of other species.
“The second dimension of curiosity that Berlyne described is informational specificity. Specific curiosity referred to desire for a particular piece of information, whereas diversive curiosity referred to a general desire for perceptual or cognitive stimulation (e.g., in the case of boredom). For example, monkeys robustly exhibit specific curiosity when solving mechanical puzzles, even without food or any other extrinsic incentive. However, rats exhibit diversive curiosity when, devoid of any explicit task, they robustly prefer to explore unfamiliar sections of a maze.” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. p. 450; reference: Berlyne, Daniel. 1954. “A theory of human curiosity.” Br. J. Psychol. 45:180-191.
“A common contemporary view of curiosity is that it is a special form of information-seeking distinguished by the fact that it is internally motivated.” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. p. 450.
“Therefore, for the moment, we favor the rough-and-ready formulation of curiosity as a drive state for information. Decision-makers can be thought of as wanting information for several overlapping reasons just as they want food, water, and other basic goods. This drive may be internal or external, conscious or unconscious, slowly evolved, or some mixture of the above.” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. p. 450.
“Although information is intangible, it has real value to any organism with the capacity to make use of it. The benefits may accrue immediately or in the future; the delayed benefits require a learning system.” Kidd, Celeste & Benjamin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. p. 450.
“They [Kang et al.] found that curiosity about the answer to a trivia question is a U-shaped function of confidence about knowing that answer. Decision-makers were least curious when they had no clue about the answer and when they were extremely confident. They were most curious when they had some idea about the answer but lacked confidence.” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. pp. 450-1; reference: Kang, M.J., M. Hsu, I. Krajbich, G. Loewenstein, S. McClure, J. Wang & C. Camerer. 2009. “The wick in the candle of learning epistemic curiosity activates reward circuitry and enhances memory.” Psychyol. Sci. 20:963-973.
“Even very simple organisms trade off information for reward…. For example, C. elegans is a roundworm whose nervous system contains 302 neurons and that actively forages for food, mostly bacteria. When placed on a new patch (such as a Petri dish in a lab), it first explores locally (for about 15 min), then abruptly adjusts strategies and makes large, directed movements in a new direction. This search strategy is more sophisticated and beneficial than simply moving toward food scents (or guesses about where food may be). Instead, it provides better long-term payoff because it provides information as well. It maximizes a conjoint variable that includes both expected reward and information about the reward. This behavior, although computationally difficult, is not too difficult for worms.” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. p. 451.
“For example, if the information relates to future events that may not happen, then it ought to be discounted. Therefore, the horizon (the number of trials available to search the environment before it changes dramatically) matters. Humans can adjust appropriately to changes in horizon. With longer horizons, subjects were more likely to choose an exploratory strategy than an exploitative one.” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. p. 452.
“Infants enter the world with some simple, low-level heuristics for guiding their attention toward certain informative features of the world. Haith argued that these organizing principles for visual behavior are fundamentally stimulus-driven. For example, an infant’s gaze is pulled toward areas of high contrast, which is useful for detecting objects and perceiving their shapes, and motion onset, which is useful for detecting animacy. Infants also have an innate bias to orient toward faces, which relay both social informmation and cues that guide language learning.” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. pp. 454-5; reference: Haith, M.M. 1980. Rules That Babies Look By. L. Erblaum Associates.
“Under Dember and Earl’s theory of choice/preference, learners seek stimuli that match their preferred level of complexity, which increases over time as they build up mental representations and acquire more knowledge. Similarly, Berlyne noted that complexity-driven preferences could represent an optimal strategy for learning. Such processing-based theories of curiosity predict that learners will exhibit a U-shaped pattern of preference for stimulus complexity, where complexity is defined in terms of the learner’s current set of mental representations. The theories predict that learners will preferentially select stimuli of an intermediate level of complexity–material that is neither overly simple (already encoded into memory) nor overly complex (too disparate from existing representations already encoded into memory).” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. p. 455; references: Dember, W. & R. Earl. 1957. “Analysis of exploratory, manipulatory, and curiosity behaviors.” Psychol Rev. 64:91-96; Berlyne, D.E. 1960. Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity. McGraw-Hill.
“Related findings show that children structure their play in a way that reduces uncertainty and allows them to discover causal structures in the world… If curiosity aims to reduce uncertainty in the world, then we would expect learners to exhibit increased curiosity to stimuli in the world that they do not understand. In fact, this is a behavior that is well attested in recent developmental psychology studies,… which demonstrates that children prefer to play with toys that violate their expectations.” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. pp. 455-6.
“In line with the idea that the function of curiosity is to reduce uncertainty, children exhibit increased interest in situations with high degrees of uncertainty, such as preferentially playing with toys whose underlying mechanisms are not yet understood.” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. p. 456.
“The idea that children structure their play in a way that is sensitive to information gain is further bolstered by a recent study by Cook et al. They manipulated the ambiguity of various causal variables for a toy box that played music when certain–but not all–beads were place [sic] on top of it. A researcher initially demonstrated how the box worked by placing a pair of connected beads on top, thereby making it ambiguous which of the two beads was causally responsible for the music playing. Children were effective at both selecting and designing informative interventions to figure out the underlying causal structure when it was unclear from the demonstration. When given ambiguous evidence, children tested individual beads when possible, and–even more impressively–when the bead pair was permanently stuck together, children held it so that only one side was touching the box to isolate the effect of that particular bead on the box.” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. p. 456; reference: Cook, C., N. Goodman & L. Schulz. 2011. “Where science starts: spontaneous experiments in preschoolers’ exploratory play.” Cognition. 120:341-349.
“Children appear to structure their play to deconfound variables when causal mechanisms at play in the world are unclear and also make efficient use of information that they encounter in the world to learn correct causal structures.” Kidd, Celeste & Benjaminin Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Cell Press: Neuron Perspective. 88:449-460. November. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. p. 456.
“A key challenge of lifelong learning is how embodied agents can discover the structure of their environment and learn what outcomes they can produce and control. Within a developmental perspective, this entails two closely linked challenges. The first challenge is that of exploration: how can learners self-organize their own exploration curriculum to discover efficiently a maximally diverse set of outcomes they can produce. The second challenge is that of learning disentangled representations of the world out of low-level observations (e.g. pixel level), and in particular, discovering abstract high-level features that can be controlled independently.” Laversanne-Finot, Adrien, A. Pere, P-Y. Oudeyer. 2018. “Curiosity Driven Exploration of Learned Disentangled Goal Spaces.” 2nd Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2018), Zurich. p. 1.
“Discovering autonomously a diversity of outcomes that can be produced on the environment through rolling out motor programs has been shown to be highly useful for embodied learners. This is key for acquiring world models and repertoires of parameterized skills, to efficiently bootstrap exploration for deep reinforcement learning problems with rare or deceptive rewards, or to quickly repair strategies in case of damages. However, this problem is particularly difficult in high-dimensional continuous action and state spaces encountered in robotics given the strong constraints on the number of samples that can be experimented. In many cases, naive random exploration of motor commands is highly inefficient due to high-dimensional action spaces, redundancies in the sensorimotor system, or to the presence of ‘distractors’ that cannot be controlled.” Laversanne-Finot, Adrien, A. Pere, P-Y. Oudeyer. 2018. “Curiosity Driven Exploration of Learned Disentangled Goal Spaces.” 2nd Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2018), Zurich. pp. 1-2.
“Several approaches to organize exploration can be considered. First, imitation learning can be used to take advantage of observations of another agent acting on the environment. While observing the environment changing as a consequence of other agent’s actions can often be leveraged, there are many cases where it is either impossible for other agents to demonstrate how to act, or for the learner to observe the motor program used by the other agent. For these reasons, various forms of autonomous curiosity-driven learning approaches have ben proposed, often inspired by forms of spontaneous exploration displayed by human children. Some of these approaches have used the framework of (deep) reinforcement learning, considering intrinsic rewards valuing states or actions in terms of novelty, information gain, or prediction errors.” Laversanne-Finot, Adrien, A. Pere, P-Y. Oudeyer. 2018. “Curiosity Driven Exploration of Learned Disentangled Goal Spaces.” 2nd Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2018), Zurich. p. 2.
“I use observations made over an 11-year period to document all known opportunities for scavenging encountered by chimpanzees at Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda, and describe all cases of scavenging. I also review data on scavenging from other chimpanzee research sites. Chimpanzees at Ngogo encountered scavenging opportunities only about once per 100 days and ate meat from scavenged carcasses only four times…. However, chimpanzees ignore relatively many opportunities to obtain meat from such carcasses.” Watts, David. 2008. “Scavenging by chimpanzees at Ngogo and the relevance of chimpanzee scavenging to early hominin behavioral ecology.” Journal of Human Evolution. 54:125-133. p. 125.
“Food could be extracted by four different techniques, two of them involving tools. Initially all four options were available to the subjects. Once they [New Caledonia crows and kea] reached criterion for mastering one option, this task was blocked, until the subjects became proficient in another solution….
“The kea were faster in discovering multiple solutions and showed more individual variation than the naturally tool-using NCCs….
“The kea showed more haptic exploration while the crows, probably due to their higher level of neophobia, seemed to explore more in a visually guided manner…. The kea’s higher readiness to manipulate i.e. act on novel objects, may help them to detect functional affordances. In their naturally low-risk, variable environment, neophilia may reflect low predation risk.” Auersperg, Alice, A. von Bayern, G. Gajdon, L. Huber & A. Kacelnik. 2011. “Flexibility in Problem Solving and Tool Use of Kea and New Caledonian Crows in a Multi Access Box Paradigm.” PLoS One. 6(6):e20231. pp. 1, 5.
“But one way to learn a surprising amount of grammar, as work in machine learning clearly demonstrates, is to try repeatedly to predict the next word in a sentence, adjusting your future responses in the light of past patterns.” Clark, Andy. 2018. “A nice surprise? Predictive processing and the active pursuit of novelty.” Phenom Cogn Sci. 17:521-534. doi:10.1007/s11097-017-9525-z. p. 522.
“The core idea is that there are two ways for brains to match their predictions to the world. Either find the prediction that best accounts for the current sensory signal (perception) or alter the sensory signal to fit the predictions (action). If I predict I am seeing my cat, and error ensures, I might recruit a different prediction (e.g. ‘I am seeing the computer screen’). Or I might move my head and eyes so as to bring the cat (who as it happens is right here beside me on the desk) into view. Importantly, that flow of action can itself be brought about, PP [predictive processing] suggests, by a select sub-set of predictions – prediction of the (trajectory of) proprioceptive consequences that would ensue were the desired action to be performed. This turns out to be a computationally efficient way of implementing motor commands. Action here results from a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in which predicting a select subset of the sensory consequences of an action serves to bring the action about. Notice, however, that action also provides a potent means of testing the current hypothesis, for example disambiguating between equiprobable hypotheses. The resulting picture is one in which perception and action are complementary manifestations of a single adaptive regime, whose core operating principle is the reduction of precise, organism-salient prediction error.” Clark, Andy. 2018. “A nice surprise? Predictive processing and the active pursuit of novelty.” Phenom Cogn Sci. 17:521-534. doi:10.1007/s11097-017-9525-z. pp. 523-4.
“More generally still, agents that inhabit complex, changing worlds would be well-served by a variety of policies that drive them to explore those worlds, even when no immediate gains or rewards are visible. This kind of ‘epistemic foraging’ is itself mandated by the pressure to reduce prediction error across longer and longer stretched [sic] of time.” Clark, Andy. 2018. “A nice surprise? Predictive processing and the active pursuit of novelty.” Phenom Cogn Sci. 17:521-534. doi:10.1007/s11097-017-9525-z. p. 529.
“For present purposes, what matters is just that by designing and repeatedly re-designing our own environments, populating them with new books, paintings, theories, games, and practices, we humans continually move the goalposts for our own prediction-based learning. In this way cultural processes deliver new environments that set new targets for the same old prediction error minimizing machinery to cope with – much as if an animal were repeatedly to alter the niche with respect to which long-term prediction error needs to be reduced.” Clark, Andy. 2018. “A nice surprise? Predictive processing and the active pursuit of novelty.” Phenom Cogn Sci. 17:521-534. doi:10.1007/s11097-017-9525-z. p. 531.
“Predictive agents immersed in these kinds of designer environment learn to value (assign high precision to) states that make available wide ranges of new moves and outcomes, enabling scientists and designers to discover ideas that bring rewards that register in basic forms of neural circuitry. Our evolving cultural practices thus piggyback upon ancient reward systems in ways that enable human populations to continuously seek out new ideas and perspectives.” Clark, Andy. 2018. “A nice surprise? Predictive processing and the active pursuit of novelty.” Phenom Cogn Sci. 17:521-534. doi:10.1007/s11097-017-9525-z. p. 532.
“Most baboons live in multimale, multifemale groups that typically include eight or nine matrilineal families, a linear dominance hierarchy of males that changes often, and a linear hierarchy of females and their offspring that can be stable for generations. Daily life in a baboon group includes small-scale alliances that may involve only three individuals and occasional large-scale, familial battles that involve all of the members of three or four matrilines. Males and females can form short-term bonds that lead to reproduction, or longer-term friendships that lead to cooperative child rearding.” Cheney, Dorothy & R. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. U. of Chicago Press. pp. 11-12.
“One of the most difficult aspects of finding food arises from the fact that as many as 100 other individuals in your group also want the food for themselves. And the best way to avoid being taken by lions, leopards, crocodiles, or pythons is to live in a group, with all of the opportunities and compromises that group life entails. Any way you look at it, most of the problems facing baboons can be expressed in two words: other baboons.” Cheney, Dorothy & R. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. U. of Chicago Press. p. 12.
“Convinced, like Aristotle, that all animals were fundamentally different from humans on intellectual grounds, Classical scholars ignored both the anatomical evidence and Aristotle’s argument for continuity in emotions. Instead, they adopted a kind of ‘reverse Darwinism’ in which the more an animal resembled a human, the more it was shunned, made into an object of ridicule, and declared to be fundamentally different…. As an unworthy pretender to human status, a grotesque caricature of man, the ape became the prototype of the trickster, the sycophant, the hypocrite, [and] the coward,’ as well as the symbol of extreme physical ugliness. Or as Plato put it, ‘The most beautiful of apes is ugly compared to man and the wisest of men is an ape beside God’….
“… in the European Middle Ages the image of monkeys and apes took a decided turn for the worse. Their downfall coincided with the rise of Christianity. Western theologians now used monkeys and apes as living examples of what man would become if he turned away from God and gave way to his baser instincts. Monkeys and apes were no longer just devious sycophants–they now became creatures completely at the mercy of emotions, sadistic impulses, and lust. In the most extreme characterizations, they were depicted as the devil himself (or at least the devil’s agents) sent from out of the land of darkness (usually Egypt) to perform Satan’s work and lead people–particularly women–into sin.” Cheney, Dorothy & R. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. U. of Chicago Press. pp. 19, 21; reference, subquotes: Janson, H. W. 1952. Apes and Ape Love in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Warburg Institute, London.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged in baboon society that, while success in the male world is determined by sex, fighting, and posturing, success in the female world depends on family, social networks, and intrigue.” Cheney, Dorothy & R. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. U. of Chicago Press. p. 62.
“To recognize that some relationships are defined by close spatial proximity and others not, and that some relationships are enduring and others not, a monkey must take note of a variety of different patterns of aggression, reconciliation, grooming, and proximity. There is no threshold or simple-defining criterion for a ‘close’ social bond.” Cheney, Dorothy & R. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. U. of Chicago Press. p. 114.
“To solve the problem of large numbers, natural selection may have favored animals that are predisposed to search for ways to arrange their companions into rule-governed classes. For baboons, these classes are based largely on matrilineal kinship and a transitive rank hierarchy. The formation of such classes is an adaptive strategy because it reduces memory load and allows the individual to make quick, accurate judgments of social relationships and predict other individuals’ behavior. Put somewhat differently, natural selection has favored individuals who develop theories of social life.” Cheney, Dorothy & R. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. U. of Chicago Press. p. 117.
“Consider the predicament of a young immigrant male whose reproductive success depends almost entirely on his ability to rise rapidly in the male hierarchy. His likelihood of success will depend not just on his fighting skills but also on his ability to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible about relations among his male rivals, the bonds among females, and current male-female friendships and sexual consortships. He could, of course, learn all of these things by painstaking observation: by watching, for hours on end, what each individual does with every other and committing it all to memory. But his task would be eased considerably if he could tackle the problem armed with theories–about matrilineal kinship, transitive rank relations, kin-based alliances, the different causes of dominance rank in males and females, sexual consortships, and friendships.” Cheney, Dorothy & R. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. U. of Chicago Press. p. 118.
“Humans have become intrinsically different from apes by becoming, in a very limited but real sense, artefacts of their own artefacts.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 3.
“The adaptation of technology mimics adaptation in evolution, in that every improvement or refinement of a tool enables it to proceed faster or take in a wider arc than its predecessors. It is commonly said that early humans broadened their niche; instead it might be truer to represent the invention of each new technique as the acquisition of a new niche and its addition to the others already possessed. The effect of this multiplication was to exclude and eventually replace a succession of other species.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 11.
“Seeing what a large troop of baboons, a herd of elephants, or a locust swarm can do to the countryside leaves no doubt that any animal can be immensely, if momentarily destructive. The fundamental difference between them and the human animal is the latter’s possession of technology. In a climate of much sentimentality about ‘natural people’, I have sought to explore the way humans are technology. That is what distinguishes us and always has. To be ‘at home’ in this world has long been impossible without some level of technology, and the duality of home-maker and alien is present in every one of us.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 11-2.
“In an extraordinary mimicry of natural adaptations, these primates began to manipulate elements and use materials in a way that rapidly multiplied the number of ecological niches they could invade. Each new tool opened possibilities that were formerly the prerogative of very specialised animals. Where diggers had needed heavy nails, now there were stone picks, cats no longer had the monopoly of sharp claws, spears mimicked horns, porcupine quills or canine teeth and so on. Here, for the first time, was an animal that was learning a multiplicity of roles via the invention of technology.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 37.
“The more skills or ‘niches’ that humans have appropriated, the more versatility and flexibility has to be learnt. This is in marked contrast to any other animal. All the lower animals are rigidly programmed to perform their genetically predetermined roles.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 40.
“Because Homo is an animal that has specialised in slowing down growth, the presence of children permeates human society as no other…. Prolonged involvement of Homo with their children would have eased the diffusion of childish innovation into adult practice.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 41.
“If the main characteristic of our lineage has been to extend childhood, then analysis of early stages in the development of an individual should be a real guide to our intrinsic nature. I call this evolutionary dimension, this concealed entity, the unknown child. It is a condition every one of us has been through.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 42.
“In lightning-prone regions early hominids would have followed other scavengers to natural fires for the pickings they provided. Not only could fleeing animals be caught in more concentrated numbers, but the aftermath would have been richer still. In the embers could be found scorched pythons and adders, tortoises cooked in their shells and innumerable blackened lizards and insects….
“A host of scavengers, pirates, scroungers, call them what you will, have evolved to take advantage of these natural calamities of life. Before our ancestors out-competed them and appropriated all the major sources of free food there were a lot more various now extinct hyaenas and jackals, bears, marsupial carrion eaters, giant lizards, condors and other carrion birds. Like the kills of large carnivores, natural fires have always created an important resource for such animals and the more omnivorous hominids became, the more they would have joined the throng of scavengers at any natural disaster, led by circling flocks of kites, storks, vultures and rollers. In fire-prone regions hominids would have been acquainted with and perhaps benefited from fire for a million years or more before they attempted to control it for their own ends.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 55-6.
“The most likely first intervention by early hominids would have involved no more than furthering the natural utility of the fire to the individuals that were hanging about for the goodies it offered. Clusters of prey sheltered in clumps of bush that the fire had bypassed could be routed by no more than fetching a brand and renewing the blaze. An ability to keep upwind of a fire and maintain close observation of its progress would have had to precede the first act – but it would have been the easiest and most immediate initiative that would enhance a natural and well-used continuum. The act of renewing the fire would have first revealed that fire could be manipulated like a dangerous ally.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 56.
“Early hominids were social, opportunistic, vulnerable to large carnivores and biting insects and relatively night-blind. Fire therefore had several attractions.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 56.
“If familiarity with fire was scattered and sporadic, it is likely that different hominid populations flirted with the various potentials of fire for many thousands of years before its control and creation became systematic and routine.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 57.
“Sea cows, moas and dodos are very recent extinctions but the sequence of events in New Zealand has illustrated a process that would have operated during earlier colonisations of continents and islands. Fauna and flora that were innocent of previous contact with ex-African hominids are commonly called ‘naive’. Long before the New Zealand cycle, naive communities in Australia, the Americas and Madagascar fed the first few generations of healthy, fertile human pioneers. The ecological upheavals that followed always precipitated a series of changes….
“For the over-numerous descendants of those who exploited a naive fauna and flora so carelessly many cultural and economic changes became necessary once the naives were gone. Later human settlers, like the Maori, fell back on farming but the earlier colonists of America and Australia had to turn to less naive endemics and more difficult, usually smaller foods. At this stage necessity may have forced people to learn complex processes of washing, leaching, fermenting and parboiling otherwise poisonous foods.
“On most islands the sharp drop in resources meant a corresponding decline in population and the agents of that decline were often cruel. For some there was migration, for others starvation or cannibalism and warfare but most likely of all was poor health, disease and many deaths. The stone Moai statues on barren Easter Island stand witness to the abundant energies of new colonists on a once forested subtropical island. Their solitude on windswept steppelike slopes speaks of the consequences.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 87.
“The sudden appearance of a new technology need not be matched by any strikingly novel form of human. Indeed, it is not necessary to expect that progressive changes in anatomy (notably, the thinning bones, lighter build and more ‘childlike’ heads that are typical of Modern humans) need always be associated with Middle Stone Age tools. If my basic hypothesis of ‘self-making’ is correct these changes could have been the products of a new technology and its associated behaviour. Should this be the case, gross anatomical changes could have trailed well behind the technical achievements of a genetically and intellectually unique population.
“If the new technology and associated changes in the social system were the prime cause of further alterations in genetic and anatomical make-up, their influence was unlikely to be very fast. Furthermore, the physical results of that influence might have been quite irregular in appearance. This irregularity in the pattern of change and the trailing of biological adaptation behind technological innovation could go a long way towards explaining the variety of human ‘races’. Where locally adapted technologies dominated the existence of a distinct people, they became a major influence on the further evolution of that population.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 95-6.
“… a coordinated pattern of attack and capture could have been a prime hominid advance over the techniques of other savanna predators. Any structured and consistent improvement in the efficiency of group hunting or foraging would handicap less well organised competitors. At first those competitors were carnivores but, with the passage of time, the main competition began to be between different hominid populations. The proliferation of different human types and regional demes would have been accompanied by significant differences in technical sophistication, if for no other reason than differences in the type, abundance, distribution and ecology of resources in different regions.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 98.
“…‘new frontiers’ are very much a matter of matching up techniques to resources. Efficient small-game and plant gatherers view the vast territories of mega-hunters as ‘wasted’. Colonising farmers of every description have always viewed the land of foragers as ‘unused’ and moved in on it.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 114.
“In the Andaman Islands, for example, where wild yams are the main vegetable staple, harvesting of them before they mature is prohibited by religious sanction….
“It can be assumed that early hominids observed ecological processes and patterns, remembered events and reserved their action until later. Thus individuals could have found their way back to already known plants in order to harvest them and companions might very well have gone along too. Where the Andaman Islanders differ from this simple delayed response is in their manipulation of group behaviour so as to maximise a predictable recurrent benefit. For this, both complex speech and the socially manipulative mechanisms of beliefs and sanctions are necessary.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 142-3.
“Wherever feeding grounds were especially choice and concentrated there would have been strong incentives to catch other competing animals. One effective method would have been to corall the area, interrupting the brushwood fence with traps and snares on every incoming path. In this way one resource was better protected and another gained. It is possible that some of the earliest ‘fields’ and ‘farms’ began in this way.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 144.
“Since a convergence between the plants’ needs and the dispersers’ convenience was implicit in the beginning of the association [from influences of prehistoric people on plants], it is reasonable to suppose that soon after they first arrived in Southeast Asia Erect humans began to influence the ecology of their food plants. The very great age of plant-human relationships here is evident from the fact that domestic strains of banana and breadfruit have lost viable seeds in their fruit and have come to rely on vegetative reproduction from cloning or cutting.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 147.
“Because information, beliefs and skills were handed down by means of one-to-one word of mouth and by demonstration, and could refer only to small, well-known localities, most of the accumulated ecological knowledge was non-transferable; it was expressed in a highly localised and ‘ancestralised’ format. Even if their knowledge of a strictly biological calendar found expression in esoteric symbolism, all foraging peoples followed life plans that integrated society into an ecological matrix.
“Inasmuch as ‘planning’ could be separated from an existence that was wholly subordinate to natural rhythms and events, the fireside discussion of what would be done ‘tomorrow’ or ‘soon’ would have served to reinforce inherited knowledge. It may also have revealed who had the most acutely observant eyes, the most deductive minds and the best memories. During times of abundance when there was a wider choice of things to harvest, tradition would have been invoked to ease decision-making and direct people’s energies. ‘Planning’ was essentially a discussion of tradition, in which those best able to read auspicious signs were the most likely to shape group-decisions.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 162.
“The premier multipurpose tool is the Australian spear-thrower, or woomera. The flat blade of this implement has its spear-throwing wedge mounted at one end. On the tip there may be a sharp flint embedded in mastic which can cut, bore or chisel as required. At the other end the hardwood blade or its point may help provide the friction to ignite tinder, as well as serve as a club or rhythm stick; the flat can be used as a small palette or miniature mixing platter. Markings on the spear-thrower can be a personal passport, a recording slate, a ‘map’ or a message board. Similar multipurpose tools would have been widespread throughout prehistory and the spear-thrower itself is likely to be of great antiquity. The woomera was effectively the first ‘gun’. When it is used properly with a perfectly balanced spear, it can project that missile with great force, steadiness and accuracy over distances of 100 metres.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 177.
“Very widespread in the Old World tropics is the Karaya (Sterculia), which was particularly suited to the early canoemaker. Many Sterculia species are fast-growing, riverine, forest-edge and glade colonists; they send up a long, clear and symmetrical bole up to 30m tall and one or two metres wide; their bark is often smooth and pale. Since colonising trees tend to be short-lived and because some Sterculia species prefer to grow on river banks, they become casualties of floods, so that river-borne Sterculia trunks would have been familiar to prehistoric hunters. Their heartwood is soft and rots easily, whereas the cylinder around this central pithy core is harder and more durable. Fungus and insects often attack hollow logs on their damp side and it is not uncommon to find natural ‘dugouts’ in the forest, wholly made by natural forces. During floods, such ‘opened’ hollow logs are among the debris that floats downstream.
“Quite apart from the shelter that a large floating log can afford against crocodiles or fatigue, there is its role as a pontoon for food and implements. Foragers in shallow water have to carry what they find or throw it on to a bank. When several people are collecting food in any quantity, such as molluscs, fish, turtles, flood victims, the squabs of water birds or lily roots, floating containers for their booty become real assets…..
“Sterculia trees and palm trunks are still used for dugouts in widely separate parts of the world [implying southeast Asia]…. The more rudimentary the tools the more the craftsman is dependent on being helped along by the natural properties of his material. Instead of the carver having a preconceived notion or model in his mind, the early canoe-digger may very well have had differences in wood texture as his primary guide in shaping the canoe. Instead of the model of a canoe existing in the mind of the tree-hunter, the canoe existed within the tree much as a ration of meat existed within the skin and frame of a prey animal.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 190-1.
“That petite chin and those small white teeth are the direct bequest of ancestors who slowly but steadily emancipated jaws from their original multiple functions. Their cooking fires burning a million years ago, their knives, pounders and grinders began to relieve our built-in processors, teeth, of their heavier duties.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 224.
“As more and more islands were reached, the populations that developed there differed fundamentally from any previous ones based on land. Further contact between island and island or island and mainland depended upon watercraft. These not only broke physical links with the mainland, they were the artefact, the one and only technical device that would then serve to maintain the genetic distinctness of islanders. The invention of watercraft introduced an entirely new contact isolation mechanism into the course of human evolution and adaptive radiation. Genetic change was now directly dependent upon a single technological invention.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 237.
“The problem with early Africans is that there are still too few specimens to establish the limits of variation but the early fossils do tend to bear out a presumption that the earliest populations diverged rather slowly, only gathering momentum and becoming more distinct as they multiplied in numbers and adapted to ever more variable habitats over an ever larger range.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 263.
“For many, many generations we have had a third, ever more powerful parent to shield us from the many cruelties of nature. Drawn further and further out of our biological matrix we have become more and more dependent on an all-embracing but loveless technology to see us through.
“Under this impassive influence we have become orphans of our own technology. Although it is a neutral and neutered parent, technology has warded off starvation, disease and the rigours of climate. It has been left to our biological parents to reproduce. They have been relieved more and more of the personal costs of having children. Many technological societies have gone so far that parents can diminish, shed or even renounce their responsibilities as parents altogether. This cuckoo syndrome is a luxury that can only be temporary.” Kingdon, Jonathan. 1993. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? NY: John Wiley & Sons. p. 316.
“An L-shaped ‘rake’ tool fashioned of 1/4 inch threaded steel rod was then attached by a chain to a bar of the cage front. The chain was 81 cm long, the shaft of the tool was 84 cm long and the hook of the tool was 11.5 cm long…. The farthest extent of reach through the bars of any animal in the group [6 baboons who had not been previously used in experiments] was 45.7 cm and the tool was positioned within this limit…. The pan was filled with items from the basic daily diet and with such novel and highly preferred items as…. The group was then allowed to secure the pan with the tool for a total of 602 minutes over seven afternoons …. As the food was not secured during this time, the pan was moved in so that its edge was only 50.8 cm from the cage front.” Beck, Benjamin. 1972. “Tool Use in Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Primates. 13(3):276-296. p. 280.
“… the pan was initially placed 81.3 cm from the cage and, at this distance, no animal succeeded in getting the food with the tool in 602 minutes of exposure. The pan was then placed 50.8 cm from the cage and, after a total of 74 minutes and 35 seconds, M2 [male 2 – subadult and oldest offspring of M1 and F1, followed in age by offspring F2, F3, and infant M3] succeeded in getting the food by using the tool on 28 October. Since 60 minutes of this time had elapsed in one unsuccessful trial on a previous day, the actual elapsed time in the first successful trial was 14 minutes and 35 seconds.
“For the first five minutes of this trial, only M2 manipulated the tool. This consisted of underhanded pushing, sliding and throwing the tool toward the pan with one or both hands, each time retrieving the tool by pulling it in directly or by pulling on the chain. Additionally, he several times stood the tool on end with the hook end up and dropped or pushed it out and down. He had exhibited all of these behaviors before but there was a noticeable increase in the persistence with which they were oriented toward the pan. Five minutes into the trial he hit the pan, actually moving it away from the cage. He then looked intently at the pan, pushed the tool out but pulled it back without contacting the pan again. He resumed the underhanded pushing, sliding and throwing actions and shortly after nine minutes, the tool fell behind the pan; in retrieving the tool he moved the pan in toward the cage. He continued the same actions without hitting the pan again but at 14 minutes and 35 seconds he reached out with his hand and secured the pan. The movement at nine minutes actually had gotten the pan within reach although he did not successfully reach it until more than five minutes later.” Beck, Benjamin. 1972. “Tool Use in Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Primates. 13(3):276-296. pp. 281-2.
“The opportunity to manipulate and investigate novel objects is reinforcing and, especially in primates, high rates of manipulation can be maintained with no other reinforcement. M2 manipulated the tool persistently throughout the experiment.” Beck, Benjamin. 1972. “Tool Use in Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Primates. 13(3):276-296. p. 282.
“In the course of this manipulation [throughout the experiment], one animal was by chance bound to move the pan within reach and the most frequent manipulator had the highest probability of doing so. Once the food is secured, it will act as a reinforcer which would support higher rates of manipulation, lead to alternations in the topography of the manipulative behavior so that it is more accurately directed toward securing the pan and, consequently, cause decreased time to solution in subsequent trials until an asymptote is reached.” Beck, Benjamin. 1972. “Tool Use in Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Primates. 13(3):276-296. p. 283.
“Trials occasionally had to be discontinued because the pan was upset or pushed off the board.” Beck, Benjamin. 1972. “Tool Use in Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Primates. 13(3):276-296. p. 283.
“When F1 sat near the display, M2 would not work. Her dominance precluded his occupying the area from which the tool could be used successfully…. At asymptote [lowest time for retrieval by M2 after many successful trials], F1 sat at the far end of the cage watching M2 attentively while he worked. M2 glanced toward her intermittently. Both engaged frequently in ‘nose-wiping’ which seems to indicate excitement or agitation. When M2 got the food within reach, she rushed over and ate. Thus not only had M2 learned to use the tool but F1 had learned not to approach the display until M2 had moved the pan within reach. F1’s behavior represents a simple operant discrimination in which she was not reinforced for staying near the display (because she displaced M2 thus preventing him from getting the food) and was reinforced for staying at the far end of the cage (because only then would M2 work and get the food).” Beck, Benjamin. 1972. “Tool Use in Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Primates. 13(3):276-296. pp. 284-7.
“M2 was the recipient of grooming more often than he was before his tool use and he also initiated more grooming events. However, the same trend was shown by every group member. M2 groomed M1 almost four times as frequently in the ‘post-tool mastery’ phase and M1 groomed F1 almost three times as often. These increases were disproportionately large [but no explanation was given].” Beck, Benjamin. 1972. “Tool Use in Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Primates. 13(3):276-296. p. 289.
“M2 became a facile and effective tool-user. He acquired this behavior through instrumental trial-and-error learning; there was no evidence of insight.” Beck, Benjamin. 1972. “Tool Use in Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Primates. 13(3):276-296. p. 290.
“Eventual acquisition of the food resulted from the increasing probability of success with continued self-reinforcing manipulation of a novel object, the tool.” Beck, Benjamin. 1972. “Tool Use in Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Primates. 13(3):276-296. p. 290.
“In general, exploratory and manipulative responses, like play, decrease in frequency upon sexual maturity. F1 and M1 rarely touched the tool. One would expect, then, that most innovative behaviors would be initiated by young animals….. In a situation like the present one, where the young animals are ordered in a dominance hierarchy and there is only one manipulandum, the most dominant immature animal is most likely to be an innovator because he gets most access to the manipulandum.” Beck, Benjamin. 1972. “Tool Use in Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Primates. 13(3):276-296. p. 290.
“It should be emphasized that in setting up the tool problem, the tool was positioned between the cage and the pan; no portion of the tool was behind the pan which would allow the animal to get the pan simply by pulling the tool in. Rather, the animal was responsible for mechanically connecting the tool and pan in a way necessary to secure the pan. Caged primates immediately pull in toward themselves any attractive or non-fear-producing object… This tendency can be considered a response set and the ‘pull in’ set dominated the group’s pre-solution manipulation of the tool. This, of course, would not allow acquisition of the pan and the animals had to reverse this set to get the pan, i.e., they had to push the tool away from themselves so as to get it behind the pan. M2 was the first to exhibit such behavior consistently and he did so on the day preceding solution. The ‘throwing’ component of his asymptotic solution behavior was essentially pushing the tool away from himself. Successful use of the tool, then, involved a reversal of response set, from ‘pull-in’ to ‘push-out.’” Beck, Benjamin. 1972. “Tool Use in Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Primates. 13(3):276-296. pp. 290-1.
“Hamadryas baboons have the sensory, motor and cognitive attributes sufficient to use tools but do not do so until their environment contains those structural elements and reinforcement contingencies which make such behavior possible and adaptive.” Beck, Benjamin. 1972. “Tool Use in Captive Hamadryas Baboons.” Primates. 13(3):276-296. p. 291.
“At Jerimalai shelter in East Timor, evidence exists for systematic pelagic fishing from 42 ka, showing the high level of maritime capacity possessed by early colonists moving into, and through, the islands of Wallacea.” O’Connor, Sue, R. Ono & C. Clarkson. 2011. “Pelagic Fishing at 42,000 Years Before the Present and the Maritime Skills of Modern Humans.” Science. November 25. 334:1117-21. pp. 1117-8.
“The long process of 700 years [of European movement away from feudalism]Tocqueville describes as purely destructive. Democracy has come about as one after another of the great sources of authority crumbled, without being replaced by anything else. We no longer take kings seriously, we deem every aristocratic claim fictive, but nothing has been put in their place. Tocqueville turns to America as the place where the task of destruction has been completed–there was never much to destroy in those lands untouched by civilization–and where the growth of a new democratic form of life can now begin.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 29.
“His [Tocqueville’s] failure is a failure of imagination. He can conceive of America as the end point of European culture and politics, the denouement of a historical commandment, but he cannot see that America is meant to outgrow Europe and create its own distinctive path. He praises the energy and vitality of American life and yet fails to understand that this energy and vitality cannot be satisfied by imitating an older civilization. His book is a book about Europe, not a book about America, the very last of the European visions of the New World, written just before the prophetic words of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and Whitman announcing that America was a beginning rather than an end.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 35.
“Tocqueville is never able to free himself from the perspective of European civilization; he studies it as the final political form in human history, and looks for its development in America, which is given the role of resolving democracy’s contradictions. It does not occur to him that both Europe and America are individual stories developing within a much larger history of different political civilizations, an empty space with no predefined paths: the game of civilization. At the bottom of the gulf in perception separating them is the way Emerson sees America as a beginning, Tocqueville as an end.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 42.
“When he [William James, in the context of recalling the vividness of his experience in the 1906 earthquake while he was a guest lecturer at Stanford] wants to give a final character to reality, he finds it not in objects or in consciousness but in the way all the parts of experience hang together from one to the next. Experience has its own concatenated or continuous structure. Whether something is true of false depends on whether it can be lived or experienced. Stories make up the ultimate ground of reality. James argues, for example, that if one takes a single moment, nothing can be distinguished from everything else. Once we release the flow of time, however, different realities go on their separate paths. I stop writing on the desk and move on to other dealings, while the desk may be carried off by someone else. My identity and the identity of the desk consist of these separate stories and nothing else.
“Up to about 1850 James says, everyone, believed that science expressed truths that were exact copies of reality. But suddenly there were so many geometries, so many logics, so many physical and chemical hypotheses, so many classifications, each one of them good for so much and yet not good for everything, that the notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal copy has dawned upon us. Which are true? Those that work, those that can go out into the world and fare well in dealing with reality in all its aspects. Other truths will be created and they too will struggle to survive. Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one. Reality genuinely grows. Truth is life on the frontier.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 45.
“As modern society grew in complexity and organization, the role for each person was increasingly specialized. Division of labour dictated that the individual assume his or her place in a gigantic organism…. Instead one made a virtue of conformity, the trained disposition to look for our dedicated role in the vast social organism and be successful at it. By success, of course, was meant collective success–think of the way a single figure for economic growth becomes the core of public policy. The fact that we were all parts of the same organism, cogs of the same machine, ensured a very high level of coherence and uniformity. Functionally distinct, we might never acquire the independence from which genuine individuality could grow….
“Modern man experienced these conditions as a prison, one all the more intolerable as it seemd to be the only prison left. Religion, tradition, the privileges of birth, and the tragedies of disease had largely been eliminated. In their place, society emerged as the great immovable power to which one must submit–or be damned. Europeans and Americans faced the same problem in an equally desperate and urgent manner, but they inclined to different and opposite solutions. While Europeans concluded that society had to be rebuilt on better foundations, Americans despaired of the task–which seemed to them to sink the individual into deeper and deeper forms of social control–and opted to look for ways in which one might simply escape from reality rather than embark on the risky venture to change it.
“It was a solution with deep roots in American history. When the economist Werner Sombart tried to determine why the American working class could have become the ‘peaceful citizens that they are’–why, in brief, socialism had never taken root in the United States–he found the main cause in the peculiar ability that American capitalism had shown to offer workers ‘an escape from the orbit of the capitalist economy.’…
“Each time the force of the storm was broken because those suffering most grievously from what Sombart calls ‘the nexus of capitalist organization’ could leave for the free land in the West and did so in massive numbers. More important than leaving, though, was knowing that you could leave:… ‘One tolerates any oppressive situation more easily if one lies under the illusion of being able to withdraw from it if really forced to.’ Sombart thought that in the new century this escape route would disappear. He could not imagine that many more–the infinite roads of the imagination from Kerouac and Updike’s Rabbit and Richard Yates to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fight Club–would replace the old West.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. pp. 62-3, 64; reference and subquotes: Sombart, Werner. 2019. Why is There no Socialism in the United States? Oxon. p. 118.
“Americans see the world as an action movie, Europeans as a documentary.
“Kagan wrote: ‘Americans are quicker to acknowledge the existence of threats, even to perceive them where others may not see any, because they can conceive of doing something to meet those threats.’ It is a curious formulation, almost suggesting that the whole point of the exercise is to be able to do something, and that one works back from the desired actions to the threats that may provide them with logic and force.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. pp. 67-8; subquote: Kagan, Robert. 2007. Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. p. 60.
“The collective sense in Washington–and it is by no means limited to Trump–is that Western idealism has become unmanageable.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 69.
“Perhaps Americans no longer think of society as a home. Perhaps they regard it as a theme park or an obstacle course; an arena.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 73.
“Jackson Pollock inaugurated the first genuinely American art and it was a lot more about the gesture, the act of creation, than the finished product. The American penchant for action was combined with intellectual knowingness. The canvas suddenly started to appear to one American painter after another as a stage on which to act rather than a space in which to reproduce or even to transform reality. What was to happen on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The painter had become an actor, and in this transformation the usual catching up with European art forms came to a halt. Americans were playing by a different set of rules.
“The gravitas was fading, the centre of gravity shifting away from New England and New York to the dream world of California. By 1955 America could feel pride in a young coterie of writers and artists it might finally call its own. Would anyone every mistake Jack Kerouac or Elvis Presley for Europeans? It was the year Disneyland opened.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 75.
“Americans have been leading a double life, Normal Mailer suggested in 1960, and American history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground. There has been the history of politics, which is concrete, factual, practical and dull, and also a subterranean river of romantic desires, the dream life of the nation. The springs of this underground river he located in that moment when the frontier was finally conquered and the expansion turned inward, becoming part of an agitated, overexcited, superheated dream life.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 76.
“The weak hold of traditional social structures, the ideal of invention and creativity, the love of modern technology–these were all traits that America inherited from European modernity and that prepared it for its final turn towards fictional structures. Hollywood, Disneyland and Vegas were perhaps the earliest manifestations of this ideal, but it is only recently that artificiality invaded all spheres of life and society, breaking the barrier between fact and fiction.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 88.
“A society of stories, if it wants to live up to its ideal, cannot be a society of fully resolved conflicts and contradictions…. Trouble and fiction are connected, violence is locked with creativity. Reduce the constraints on individual desire and satisfaction, eliminate danger and suffering, build the world upon eternal love, banish all forms of hatred and violence–and you may end up with very weak stories and very poor material on which to build them. Could Romeo and Juliet take place in a liberal society where class divisions and family ties have been weakened? Of course not.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 89.
“… today the fantasy has become more important than reality because reality strives to organize itself according to the fantasy.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 90.
“Berlusconi or Schwarzenegger used their fame and the technics of entertainment to appear as more genuine and more appealing politicians than they really were. They made an effort to become politicians or at least to project the image of a politician. Trump is the opposite. As Stephen Duncombe puts it, he does not use the tricks of entertainment to appear a better politician, he uses politics as a better stage for his performance as an entertainer–a paradigm shift, a Copernican turn. When asked if he would accept the results of the election, Trump ended the final presidential debate with a classic cliffhanger: ‘I will keep you in suspense.’” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 91; reference: Duncombe, Stephen. 2019. Dream or Nightmare: Reimagining Politics in an Age of Fantasy.
“In any event, the Russia collusion story is far from the only example of how Trump symbolizes a new way to look at reality–or to avert your gaze from reality. How did he get elected in the first place? We all remember how the possibility was openly laughed at by every expert, and not long before it became reality. But in a world where voters want to be entertained, the story was not devoid of appear. A property developer who lived his life perfecting an image of boisterous vulgarity, could he actually win the highest political office in the country? Perhaps not, but as a story it could work. It was easy to imagine a large audience tuning in every evening to watch a political series with exactly that plot. At this point something interesting happens because an audience interested in a fictional plot is by definition interested in seeing the next twists and even in carrying it to the end. The psychological urge to see what happens next and even to see a story through to the end seemed already at play in the election of Barack Obama eight years earlier. Viewers will not abandon a good storyline before the end, provided it is able to sustain their interest. As for voters, perhaps they are now better understood as viewers than as citizens or consumers, categories once used but no longer apt.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 93.
“When Europeans are told that Americans are predominantly religious, they assume that the term means the same in Europe and America. In that case, America would indeed be a traditional society, ruled by a fixed moral code and essentially at odds with many of the structures of the modern world. It would be a society founded on a revealed and more or less indisputable set of truths ruling over individual conduct and beliefs.
“But we know that this is not how Americans experience religion. To understand that, we first need to realize that there are other reasons one might choose to be religious other than belief in the truth of revelation. Many religious men and women in modern times had no doubts that religion was false, that it could only be false–modern science had taught them that much–but still thought that a religious life was superior to every alternative. Not because it was true but because it was more interesting. The categories of religious experience were conducive to an intensification and deepening of everyday life….
“The centre of gravity of religious experience in America shifted once and for all when it became, before all else, a television affair…. On television there are commercials, promos for popular shows, there are all the other shows one flick of the switch away, so that the main message of the screen itself is a continual promise of entertainment.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. pp. 98-9.
“The enormous attention to language, the use of the thesaurus for political ends, the endless battles to control grammar–these are not preludes to political battles for power and resources, but the literary drive to shape the stories Americans tell each other. Political correctness stands for the shift whereby social actors become increasingly less concerned with the way they live and more with the way they are portrayed in the narratives about their lives.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 100.
“It [television] was the first modern technology to be entirely shaped by American culture and American ambition, and to take the American way of life to its fullest development.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 103.
“Take the much-noticed case of The Simpsons. Over the years the animated sitcom has shown an eerie ability to predict the future. Many times one of its episodes contained outlandish and unusual events that ended up becoming reality a few years later. Trump as president, which appeared in a Simpsons episode twenty years ago. The discovery of the Higgs boson equation…. … but the explanation is not difficult to find. The brilliant writers working for the show, the artists and politicians it depicts, the media and even the American public, all invest their energy in looking for interesting and unexpected corners of the possibility space. They are all scriptwriters. It is hardly surprising that they sometimes come upon the same or similar ideas. If the future is a movie or television script, scriptwriters are its prophets.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. pp. 107-8.
“Democracy may be redefined as the ability to get the show we want. Even those who would never vote for Trump seem thoroughly entertained.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 109.
“Or perhaps the true connoisseur of reality television is not one to be deceived by the show. The pleasure of watching comes from being able to detect the artifice and the editing while thinking that many others are not as savvy.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 118.
“In the American liberal tradition, the office of the president is placed under strict constitutional limits created in order to constrain power and ambition. Once entertainment takes over, once politics becomes genre, all this is bound to change. If the purpose is to develop the kind of conflicts and drama that keep an audience hooked, limiting what each contestant can do is the last thing you want.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 119.
“Predictably, the logic of the reality show did not end when the impeachment enquiry was launched. This time, as opposed to Watergate, no one was interested in finding out the truth. The question of how much the president knew and when did he know it was replaced with the question of how serious he was and how serious should everyone else be….
“If Watergate happened on television–already a momentous change in itself–the Trump impeachment was television.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 122.
“The problem was that liberalism had been so extraordinarily effective at specifying the conditions of a free society that it could produce an answer to every political question. It could produce that answer by itself, with no need to revert to the actual people living in a liberal society. Gender relations, the workplace, abortion, religion, technology, money: liberal theory could tell you how to think about each of these and many other difficult questions. You almost forgot the whole point of a free society was to let people decide important questions in their own lives. Unfortunately but unavoidably, it turned out that, by the point an individual was ready to start living, every important question would already have been decided. Not on substantive grounds but as part of a detailed specification of what needed to be the case if people were to be free to decide how they wanted to live. The paradox could drive you mad.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 130.
“Liberal society is based on a principle of freedom: the only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it… The new America is founded on a different principle. I call it the principle of unreality: everyone can pursue his or her own happiness so long as they refrain from imposing it on others as something real–as something valid for all.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 136.
“The principle of unreality is an answer–a specifically American answer–to the shallowness of life in a modern liberal society.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 138.
“I worry that an overbearing concern with fostering a sceptical attitude towards existing ways of life has already produced a detached attitude preventing many people from directly engaging with life. We risk creating individuals whose contact with lived experience is at best shallow and at worst nonexistent. The contemporary European culture of café life and momentary sensation is a greater risk than the dangers of Westworld. I believe the quest for total immersion is the holy grail of modern politics. A society of stories would be able to create new experiences and genuine feelings and thoughts in a completely artificial environment.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 139.
“The European will say: there is no truth; the American: there is no truth, so everything is true. The difference between Europeans and Americans is that the former see the great narratives of nation, religion or money as fictions to be abandoned while the latter embrace them all the more for being fictions.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 139.
“The traditional state was founded on a set of revealed truths. The liberal state affirmed that truth does not exist, but, in what seemed a contradiction, actually took this statement as a new kind of truth. The post-truth state takes things to their logical conclusion. The whole world is a stage.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 142.
“The main contradiction in contemporary liberal society is that between a politics that prizes routine and a culture in love with the extraordinary event.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 142.
“My claim is that these two extremes [technology imposed from above to rule a single vision as in China or technology regulated by society as in Europe] approximate the political models being pursued in China and Europe, respectively. The middle path–is a middle path possible?–is represented by Silicon Valley.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 149.
“The Valley tech elite is so enamoured of the eureka moment of pure insight that it resists coming back to Earth in order to give a final shape to social relations. Technological possibilities are reveries rather than realities.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 149.
“We should not be too surprised that a growing number of Silicon Valley luminaries, … have come out in support of a universal basic income…. Rather, basic income aims to create a fluid society where a growing number of people can pursue their visions of personal and collective happiness, even if only a tiny number of them can be expected to succeed. Again, the liberty the state must defend is the liberty not to be trapped within ways of life. In code: trapped, then exit.
“But the people released from their chains are not only or not even primarily the recipients of a universal basic income. The reluctance to deal with social reality means that the tech elite in the United States will try to blunt the impact of technology–half of all existing jobs may son be put at risk by artificial intelligence and automation–by providing each person with a minimum payment, regardless of income or need. The idea is to remove the most divisive social questions from the technological equation. Not only would a universal basic income insulate future workers from poverty, it could also quell social unrest and deflate the demands for regulatory oversight. A universal income could provide the tech elite with the freedom it so desperately needs. It is as if we were trying to create a safe playground where every technological dream can be freely pursued because no one will be seriously damaged or harmed by it. The principle of unreality: everything is possible, but nothing is true.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 150.
“Babbitt already understood that if America was to escape from both revolutionary turmoil and deadly conformity, only one way remained: the American dream, taken more literally than ever before.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 155.
“We need a second principle. For someone to lose interest in reality it is first necessary that he has tried to change it without success. He has to give up on reality. Power and powerlessness: the two tempos of American fantasy.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 156.
“After September 11 threatened to dislodge the dominant narrative of the United States as the global superpower, a response had to be found that could supersede the terrorist attacks, create an even larger historical event, and reinterpret their meaning on American terms. The struggle for meaning–rather than concerns about weapons of mass destruction or the spread of democracy–explains the decision to go to war.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 168.
“Today the goal [for a US balance of power view of the world] is to find a place for Russia in the Eurasian balance of power–an independent pole between Europe and Asia–while preserving the ability to keep it in check and, when necessary, force it to respect that balance.
“As for India and Japan, the strategic goal should be clear: to allow the two countries to grow more confident and outward-looking, capable of marshalling their abundant resources to play an active global role….
“Were all these steps to be adopted and a coherent strategy developed, the United States would slowly emerge as a great balancer. Its role would remind one of the role played by Great Britain in nineteenth-century Europe: with one foot in the continent and the other one outside, perpetually balancing every European power against each other, determined to avoid a future where Europe fell under the domination of a single power. Its strategists knew that Great Britain would remain more powerful than each of the European states individually, but inferior to their combined strength.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. pp. 175-6.
“The United States already regards the future of the world order as a great narrative whose main plot lines are written in Washington. What I am advocating is to replace the epic with the novel:…
“The chief characteristic of the modern novel is the plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own perspective; the organized coexistence and interaction of spiritual diversity, not stages in the life of a unified spirit. The narrator should not pick sides, and that is why he and not the characters is ultimately in control. A great novelist allows the different characters to develop multiple relationships between themselves and does not reserve for himself the ability to judge every event from his perspective.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 177.
“A global superpower should play at the level of world politics the role that the state plays in domestic politics: allowing for the coexistence of many different ways of life, while stopping all of them from becoming dominant or endangering the balance.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 177.
“The goal [of what US foreign policy should be] is to make the world safe for America without making it look like America.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 178.
“I can detect three distinct stages in the way America has approached the pandemic; three distinct strategies or three kinds of escapism….
“The strategy of oblivion was pursued to the limit, but by the first week of March it was becoming obvious that it could not be sustained… At that point, a new strategy was silently envisaged. Americans would no longer ignore the virus. They would turn it into high drama….
“Comparing the reaction in the United States to that in other countries, what strikes me is how the virus is almost irrelevant. What matters is what the different characters think, say and do. The clash between those characters and between the characters and the world. Their mental conflicts. The narrative digressions: whether Trump will fire his chief medical advisor, for example. Just as in a disaster movie or television series, the epidemic provides a backdrop for action….
“When America turned from the virus to protest, it also revealed that the fight against the pandemic was after all a story–not a necessity–which could be replaced by a better story…. It was a development impossible to imagine anywhere else in the world….
“The third way to escape from biological reality–the third stage of escapism–is also the most promising. The belief here is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from fantasy….
“The coronavirus can accelerate the development of digital payments and delivery robots because they minimize the risk of spreading the disease. The same applies to telecommuting and telemedicine, to collective virtual platforms where people can share cultural and entertainment experiences, and to online education.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. pp. 181, 182, 183, 189.
“The permanent conflict between reality and fantasy is the defining mark of the contemporary world. I believe that fantasy is destined to win, but that does not change the fact that we must live with the conflict for many decades to come.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 191.
“Ultimately, we need to bring the internet down to the physical world, to enhance our ability to understand physical processes in real time. But total virus awareness is not enough. One needs to be able to act on that intelligence. The key will be the development of technologies to dramatically speed up the creation of new vaccines. With new exascale supercomputers, a billion times faster than our smartphones, it should be possible to run simulations of materials, including biochemical materials, in hours rather than days. Soon one may be able to realistically model all biology and simulate interventions for diseases without the need for human trials. New vaccines could be developed in weeks.
“If the system works, America will be one step closer to its manifest destiny. Separated from reality by an impenetrable barrier–having pushed reality back into an ever narrower strip–it will return to the belief that the American dream has no other limits than those of the imagination. The coronavirus pandemic may then be remembered as a famous battle in the long war between America and reality.” Macaes, Bruno. 2020. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Oxford UP. p. 201.
“If a chlorophyll solution is kept in a vial, the chlorophyll is excited by photos, emits electrons, and this energy is dissipated as heat and light. The solution glows faintly and warms up. In a chloroplast, instead of the energy being dissipated as light, it is harnessed via an electron transfer chain, and ATP is produced. This is classic photosynthesis. In dragonfish eyes, the chlorophyll emits a lower-energy photon, which is transferred to a cis-retinal molecule, changing it to an all-trans form, and this conformational change initiates in some sense, a whole visual signal transduction cascade. (Interestingly, dragonfish to not synthesize chlorophyll like plants do; they did not evolve chlorophyll genes that were selected for. Rather, chlorophyll that dragonfish get through their diet is incorporated into the eyes.)
“These look like very similar processes. Yet, sensing and metabolism are often conceived of as very different….
“The intuition that ‘information exists intrinsically and is transferred between things without itself being changed is part of what both creates and perpetuates the idea of sensing as ‘not assimilation.’ For example, when is light considered ‘energy to be used,’ and when is it considered information about the state of the external world? The chlorophyll example illustrates that there is no inherent distinction between ‘the use of light energy to perform work’ and ‘the use of light as information’ or ‘the use of light to guide behavior.’” Sharma, Kriti. 2015. Interdependence: Biology and Beyond. Fordham UP. pp. 53, 54, 56.
“… we say that there are changes in the forms of energy–from light energy to chemical energy in this case–but continuity of energy itself. This is analogous to the idea that an object can change form, but remain the same object. It is assumed that energy can change form but remain the same energy. If energy is considered a substance, then this is a kind of essentialism. However, if energy is considered a number, there is no essentialism. The number is contingently existent, dependent on an observer to bound the system a certain way.” Sharma, Kriti. 2015. Interdependence: Biology and Beyond. Fordham UP. p. 59.
“If we see the world as things, objects will be ‘the same substance over time undergoing changes in form,’ and energy will be ‘what causes changes in object forms.’ If we see the world as energy, energy will be ‘the same substance over time undergoing changes in form’ (for example, energy changing from its light-energy form to its chemical-energy form), and objects will be ‘what cause changes in energy form’ (for example, retinal molecules or solar panels which change light energy to chemical energy). In either case, the confusion is created by thinking of energy and form as separable from one another, when they are not.” Sharma, Kriti. 2015. Interdependence: Biology and Beyond. Fordham UP. p. 59. [Not clear where subquotes come from]
“The organism, sensing apparatus, and external object do not interact with or react with one another (that is, they do not cause changes to each other by virtue of some intrinsically existent causal power). Neither do they remain the same objects that change (or are transformed) over time. Rather, they arise new in each instant.” Sharma, Kriti. 2015. Interdependence: Biology and Beyond. Fordham UP. p. 68.
“As strange as dreams might seem, they are not nearly as strange as we might expect them to be if we believed that all physical laws and physical constraints were truly inherently external to thoughts. That is, in a dream world completely unencumbered by physical laws as experienced in waking life, one still dreams physical laws…. In waking life, we are likely to attribute the tight patterns and thoroughgoing natural order we experience to Nature itself. We tend to believe that mind is supple and matter is recalcitrant. Dreams reveal that even in situations where matter is supple, mind can be quite recalcitrant.” Sharma, Kriti. 2015. Interdependence: Biology and Beyond. Fordham UP. p. 89.
“Anthropology, as a product of Western civilization, has simultaneously pursued two antithetical but complementary goals: to demonstrate that people everywhere are biologically much the same and to celebrate the extent of cultural variation found throughout the world.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 4.
“This study compares seven early civilizations that developed in different parts of the world: Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt (2700-1780 B.C.), southern Mesopotamia from Early Dynastic III to Old Babylonian times (2500-1600 B.C.), northern China in the late Shang and early Western Zhou periods (1200-950 B.C.), the Valley of Mexico in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries A.D., the Classic Maya (A.D. 250-800), the Inka kingdom during the early sixteenth century A.D., and the Yoruba and Benin peoples of West Africa from the mid-eighteenth century to the beginning of the colonial era in the late nineteenth century.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 28.
“The Aztec king was selected, often amidst considerable rivalry, from among the brothers or sons of the dead king by a council made up of the four highest officers of the state….
“Kingship [for the Yoruba] frequently rotated among two or more lineages or branches of the royal family, so that a king was rarely succeeded by his own son.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 77.
“Only Mesopotamian kings did not normally claim descent from the gods.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 86.
“Some early civilizations emphasized possession of supernatural powers [by kings] more than others. Those that most stressed such powers tended to be ones in which states were larger and kings more remote from most of their subjects.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 87.
“City-states were relatively small polities, each consisting of an urban core surrounded by farmland containing smaller units of settlement. In territorial states a ruler governed a larger region through a multilevelled hierarchy of provincial and local administrators in a corresponding hierarchy of administrative centres.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 92.
“Early city-state civilizations consisted of a network of adjacent, self-governing city-states. City-states rarely occurred in geographical isolation in early civilizations, although in later periods in the Middle East isolated cities such as Petra and Palmyra developed along trade routes.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 94.
“In having a more dispersed population and therefore more secondary centres, Maya states resemble Yoruba ones more closely than they do the compactly settled city-states of the Valley of Mexico and Mesopotamia.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 99.
“At the same time [as farmers having to produce larger surpluses], especially in the highlands, the Inkas’ suppression of local conflicts meant that people could often abandon their hilltop forts and settle near richer valley bottoms, where a wider range of crops could be grown.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 107.
“The late Shang rulers led a peripatetic life, travelling with their courts from one part of their kingdom to another. In the course of their journeys, they transacted business, sacrificed to local deities, hunted, feasted, and joined regional officials in putting down local rebellions and waging war against foreign groups, behaviour typical of the rulers of territorial states. Rulers of hegemonic city-states required the kings of tributary states to attend their courts periodically but did not visit tributary states, which they rightly regarded as dangerous enemy territory.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 109.
“On the basis of the evidence from the early civilizations of Egypt, northern China, and the Inka, it is possible to identify features that territorial states had in common and that distinguished them from city-states. First, the total areas controlled by territorial states tended to be larger than those occupied by city-state systems….
“Second, the cities of territorial states were considerably less populous than those of city-states. Territorial states were held together by an upper class whose top stratum consisted of the royal family and the leading families of the core group that had created and governed the state….
“Third, the rulers of territorial states had at their disposal much larger surpluses than did those of city-states and were therefore able to create works of art and architecture on a more massive scale….
“Fourth, in territorial states the exercise of royal power required maintaining a considerable degree of centralized control over the economy….
“Fifth, there was much more continuity in agricultural life in territorial states [farmers dispersed over a greater territory]….
“As a result, in territorial states there was a much larger economic gap between the upper classes and farmers. The upper classes used goods that were made by highly skilled, full-time artisans, often from valuable, imported materials. The rural population continued to use goods that part-time craft workers manufactured from traditional, locally available materials.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 110, 111, 112.
“Confusion has been compounded by historians and political scientists applying the term ‘empire’ to two very different sorts of domination: integrated (or direct) and hegemonic (or indirect).” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 113.
“While the Inka state was terminated by European conquest, the territorial states in Egypt and northern China evolved into regional states that, as the result of a process of convergence, shared many features with the urbanized regional states that had developed out of a city-state system in Mesopotamia. In Egypt this development began to occur in the late New Kingdom, when the central government lost control over foreign trade and the production of luxury goods. Administrative centres were transformed into loci of independent trade, manufacturing, and the exchange of manufactured goods with a rural hinterland. As a result, the number of urban dwellers increased. Rulers had to rely increasingly on the use of military force and develop the ability to tax an economy that they no longer directly controlled to any significant degree.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 118-9.
“The key defining feature of an urban centre is that it performs specialized functions in relation to a broader hinterland.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 120.
“Despite endemic warfare among city-states, walled cities were much less common in the Western Hemisphere…. For the most part, however, highland Mexicans built walls around their ritual centres, other major buildings, and houses rather than around the city as a whole.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 125.
“By comparison with city-state capitals, the primary cities of territorial states tended to lack clearly marked centres or boundaries. While massive structures provided impressive displays of royal power, in territorial states it was the king and his court, wherever they might be, rather than any specific features of urban architecture that constituted the heart of the state.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 139.
“In early civilizations and other complex preindustrial societies, inequality was regarded as a normal condition and injustice as a personal misfortune or even an individual’s just deserts rather than as a social evil.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 142.
“In territorial states there was a tendency for the distinction between the upper and commoner classes to be more overt, complex, and symbolically marked than in city-states. The upper classes were also more likely to be explicitly divided into multiple grades or ranks.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 146.
“In each of the five early civilizations considered so far, there appears to have been a hereditary upper class, although in Egypt the importance of that group was eclipsed to a considerable degree by a ranking system based on honorary titles bestowed on individuals and personally achieved positions in the government administrative hierarchy…. In two early civilizations, however, Mesopotamia and that of the Yoruba, there was an upper class but no hereditary nobility.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 152.
“There is no evidence of formal ranking within the Mesopotamian upper class. Power was both shared and contested by kings, temple administrators, and private and collective landowners.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 152.
“In territorial states upper-class status tended to be both hereditary and formally defined.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 153.
“Among the Aztec, debt slaves could accumulate earnings, own property, purchase their freedom, and marry, and their children were born free. The descendants of prisoners of war remained slaves for three generations and those of people enslaved as punishment for treason for four.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 159.
“Thus in the three early civilizations where slavery was entirely absent [Inka, Shang China] or limited in extent [Egypt], the bonding of commoners to the service of upper-class people appears to have placed some free persons in an analogous situation of servitude. All three civilizations in which this happened were territorial states.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 160.
“Social mobility was limited in early civilizations by the slowness of technological and social change and by a general lack of opportunity to gain access to knowledge from outside the social group into which a person was born.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 160.
“In the early civilizations the upper classes relied principally on the productive capacity of free farmers, using slaves only as an auxiliary source of labour. Under these circumstances, the best way to control and motivate slaves was to keep their expectations of freedom relatively high. It is the limited utility of slaves as a source of labour that accounts for their frequent manumission and relatively small numbers.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 165.
“All early civilizations had class systems. Yet, among early civilizations, there were significant variations in the extent to which class replaced kinship as the framework of social relations.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 165.
“While these [kin] relations were intimately connected with family life, residence patterns, marital practices, and the nurturing of children, they were also associated with broader sociocultural practices such as land-holding, agricultural production, craft organization, inheritance of property, political and economic activities, value systems, and religious beliefs. They also constituted the primary sphere in which gender roles were defined, although class differences also affected these roles.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 167.
“Yoruba spouses were forbidden to inherit from one another. This arrangement protected the collective possessions of a patrilineage against alienation.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 176.
“Csilla Dallos has argued that, as individual identity had to be formulated in more communal and hierarchical terms as societies grew more complex, both men and women were forced to sacrifice their personal autonomy to serve the interests of the domestic group that was increasingly being pressured by society and state… It was as a result of these trends that the household and the nuclear family came to be viewed as a miniature kingdom, with its male head as its ruler and women, children, and dependents as his subjects.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 188; reference: Dallos, Csilla. 1997. “Identify and Opportunity: The Gender and Politics of Decision-Making among the Lanoh, Peninsular Malaysia.” MS, McGill U.
“The most expedient way to reduce administrative costs was to delegate decision making from higher to lower levels in administrative hierarchies. In all early civilizations, families, wards, and small communities were permitted and even encouraged to manage their own affairs to a much greater degree than is characteristic of developed industrial societies…. The most common limitation on the power of such groups was the requirement that death sentences be approved by higher officials and perhaps ultimately the king.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 196.
“A hierarchical approach is essential for studying territorial states, in which leaders had to create effective ways to keep regions and localities linked to the central administration…. It is less useful, however, for describing political processes in city-states where the population was largely concentrated in a single urban centre, political power was not strongly centralized, and the main problem was producing consensus among competing groups or interests.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 196, 197.
“In delegational systems responsibility for all the affairs of a region located beyond the royal capital district devolved upon a single high-level official and his staff…. The great attraction of such a wholesale delegation of plenipotentiary powers to regional and local leaders was that it constituted a relatively inexpensive way to administer a large state….
“The alternative arrangement in territorial states was a bureaucratic administrative structure, in which central, provincial, and local governments were managed by officials who were individually responsible for specific aspects of administration. A province might be administered by separate military, legal, and fiscal officers, each of whom was assigned a particular sphere of responsibility and resisted encroachment on his domain.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 208, 209.
“The ideal was for an administrator to occupy a series of posts of ever higher rank that would take him from one part of Egypt to another. He might in succession be a minor tax collector, in charge of a temple estate, manager of the food supply for the army, and then the civil administrator in charge of a province. His ambition was eventually to secure a high-ranking position in the central administration at Memphis and be buried near the pyramid of the king or the tomb of an important ancestor (near an older royal tomb)….. Egypt achieved the extreme in bureaucratic organization among early civilizations.
“The civil service hierarchy was remodelled repeatedly during the Old Kingdom.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 211.
“The strongly delegational nature of Shang territorial administration seems to have been linked to the important role played by patrilineal kin groups in Chinese society. The strength of such lineage structures may have inhibited the rapid development of bureaucratization such as occurred in Old Kingdom Egypt and appears to have been happening in the Inka state. Chinese rulers eventually succeeded in replacing a delegational state organization built around lineage structures with a bureaucratic form of administration, but this transformation required more than a millennium.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 216.
“Laws were a means by which human society was not only regulated but also aligned with a cosmic order that was profoundly hierarchical.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 221.
“The early Chinese legal system already seems to have anticipated the later distinction between punishment (xing), which was used to control the lower classes, and etiquette (li), which regulated relations among the gentry.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 228.
“Aztec law, however, punished drunkenness in members of the upper classes more harshly than it did drunkenness in commoners.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 235.
“Far from being a means of securing justice for the weak, the upper levels of the legal system were a powerful instrument of intimidation and control in the hands of the upper classes…. This account of the use of legal systems conforms to Aztec descriptions of the law as a wild beast, a trap, or a snare, an overpowering force to be feared because people could be punished by it for crimes they did not commit.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 238.
“The legal systems of early civilizations appear to have grown out of the seemingly universal legal practices of smaller, more egalitarian societies. These practices involved the recognition of local authorities as having the right to hear disputes and render verdicts in accordance with generally accepted principles, which in turn were enforced by public opinion. With the development of early civilizations, these arrangements were transformed into multitiered, hierarchical legal systems staffed at the higher levels by upper-class judges whose decisions were enforced by the power of the state.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 238-9.
“Chinese law appears to have differed from that of other early civilizations only in that, in theory as well as in practice, litigation was possible only between equals. No efforts were made to idealize the legal system as a means by which justice was provided for all.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 239.
“In addition to wars of conquest, highland Mexican city-states engaged in xochiyaoyotl (flowery wars), which consisted of carefully prearranged, ‘friendly’ battles between rival states. Soldiers were killed in these battles and prisoners taken, but military action was restricted to the battlefield and the overt political status of the participants was not altered, at least in the short run, by the outcome. The rationale for these contests was to capture prisoners for sacrifice to the gods. Flowery wars were said to be waged when not enough wars of conquest were occurring. In addition to training soldiers and permitting individuals to win military honours, these contests served to deflect formidable nearby rivals while states were expanding elsewhere and to reduce the strength of rival states too powerful to be conquered in a single campaign. The Triple Alliance repeatedly challenged the Tlaxcalans, east of the Valley of Mexico, to flowery wars in an effort to weaken them, but they were unable to incorporate them into their tributary system.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 244.
“Mesopotamian city-states fought over water rights, agricultural land, and trade routes….
“Egyptian kings fought wars to defend their borders, control foreign trade routes, and obtain prisoners to augment agricultural production….
“The Inka state resorted to large-scale warfare to extend its control over the peoples of the Central Andes. Later expansion appears to have aimed mainly at gaining control of more remote areas that were rich in natural resources, especially metals, and at securing defensible boundaries….
“The Yoruba waged war to control trade routes and obtain slaves.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 244, 245, 246, 247.
“Archaeological evidence makes it clear that neither the ancient Egyptian nor the Inka territorial state evolved from a city-state as defined here. Egypt’s development involved the political unification of a series of chiefdoms or small early states, and the Inka united a large number of chiefdoms. In China, the Yellow River floodplain was probably a zone of chiefdoms resembling those found in Predynastic Egypt and the central Andean highlands rather than of city-states prior to the emergence of territorial states. Nor did the city-states in our sample eventually become territorial states. Mesopotamia moved toward a definitive regional unification in the mid-second millennium B.C., but large urban centres continued to play a crucial role in the economic, cultural, and religious life of the region rather than coming to resemble the administrative centres of early territorial states. In Egypt after the New Kingdom and in late Zhou China, territorial states evolved more populous and economically more important urban centres, economies that were less controlled by the central government, and administrations that were increasingly based on the centralized control of military power. Rather than city-states’ evolving into territorial states (or, alternatively, developing from the breakup of such states), in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China civilizations of both types evolved into a single later form: the urbanized regional kingdom.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 266-7.
“In city-states, rich landowners, powerful lineages, temple corporations, merchants’ associations, and influential voluntary groups had their own forms of self-government and were represented in various ways on councils at village, ward, or city levels. These councils, which exercised both legislative and judicial functions, shared power with or organized their activities around a king. Administrative procedures were less formal than in territorial states because communication could be more direct and decision making more decentralized….
“In territorial states and hegemonic city-states, high-level administration appears to have originated within the royal household, and a distinction between the royal household and the state developed only slowly. From Old Kingdom times on, the Egyptians differentiated between the officers and revenues of the royal court and those of the various branches of government, but into the New Kingdom royal estates were used to support both the royal family and the state. This reluctance to distinguish clearly between the royal household and the state was reflected in a similar reluctance to assign mutually exclusive and precisely defined duties to individual officials.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 269.
“While delegational states were harder to hold together, bureaucratic ones were often less efficiently governed, especially when officials were moved at frequent intervals not only from one province to another but also from one branch of administration to another, unfamiliar one.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 270.
“Patrilineal extended families could be interpreted as encouraging the development of a delegational form of government in Shang and Eastern Zhou China and of a more heterarchical form of government among the Yoruba. Conversely, the most bureaucratized form of government emerged in ancient Egypt, where there was no extended family. Nevertheless, the growing military power of kings among the Aztec and the Mesopotamians made it possible for them to construct modest bureaucracies that operated without sharing power with extended families or endogamous landowning groups.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 271.
“The desire of Andean groups to be economically autonomous led them to support the Inka state in return for the state’s protecting arrangements that enabled them to control dispersed eco-niches extending from high-altitude grazing lands to the tropical forests.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 299.
“Thus the pressure of population on the relatively small amount of arable land in the Central Andean highlands and the danger of crop failures led to the elaboration of a complex and intensive system of agriculture. The Inka state greatly benefited highland farmers by abolishing local warfare, thus permitting them to leave their hill-forts and resettle near the thirty-five hundred-metre line where they could grow the widest possible array of crops. In addition, the Inka state made it easier for highlanders to establish agricultural colonies in lowland regions, which had come under Inka rule.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 300.
“Within the Vallue of Mexico, however, because of the development of chinampas and forms of irrigation that were less susceptible to salination than those of Mesopotamia, developed land acquired high, long-term value, and its owners became increasingly subject to political control.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 309.
“By encouraging the development of more intensive food production, denser populations increased the vulnerability to political coercion of all those who possessed land with potential for development. The primary basis of centralized power was the ability of rulers to punish uncooperative landholders by confiscating their land. The principal differences between more centralized and heterarchical city-states thus appear to relate to the presence in hierarchical states of higher overall population densities and the ability to cultivate plots of land intensively and on a long-term basis.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 310.
“Collectively owned land was common in some early civilizations. In the Valley of Mexico, the most extensive category of land was calpollalli, which belonged jointly to members of calpollis. Calpollis were, first and foremost, landholding groups.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 316.
“The alienation of land possibly began through the fiction of adopting a potential buyer into a family. He could then purchase a piece of land on the same terms as a single family member might have bought the rights of multiple heirs to a plot that had become too fragmented for further subdivision.
“As a result of these processes, collectively owned land was transformed into institutionally and privately owned estates. Land ownership became concentrated in the hands of an ever-smaller number of institutions and individuals. In the course of this transformation, leaders of some extended families may have become the heads of major institutions or wealthy estate owners.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 319.
“In most early civilizations collectively owned land could not be bought or sold; it was the common and inalienable possession of a kinship groups or an endogamous community.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 320.
“Differences in the size of collective landowning groups influenced attitudes towards land and surplus production. Small-scale units generally strove for group self-sufficiency, while their members enjoyed relative economic equality and were committed to supporting one another. In larger units, the land and labour of the group tended to be treated more as a resource belonging to the group’s leaders. Inequality was justified as necessary for representatives or leaders to be able to perform essential acts of hospitality and worship on behalf of their followers.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 320.
“… it [institutionally owned land] was set aside to provide revenue for the state, religious cults, office-holders, and socially privileged individuals. Conceptually it was closely related to those portions of collectively owned land that were cultivated by the whole group to support its leaders and finance group activities.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 321.
“While officials received income from royal estates as payment for the work they did for the government, the successful transfer of specific official positions and associated lands from father to son over several generations blurred the distinction between office land and land that may have belonged privately to officials.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 330.
“At the beginning of this transformation, leaders of landowning patrilineages were probably in a privileged position to transform collective holdings into private estates. The senior branches of these lineages may have accumulated wealth and power at the expense of junior branches, and eldest sons may have bought out the inheritance rights of younger siblings either while their fathers were alive or after their deaths. Initially the transfer of land to non-family members probably required fictional adoptions and the consent of the extended families of the sellers. Such legal fictions grew less necessary as the pawning, buying, and selling of the use of land and then of land itself continued. eventually land came to be treated like other forms of private property.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 332.
“Yet, as the amount of institutional and privately owned land increased, the number of people who possessed land constantly declined,….” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 333.
“The long-term survival of collective and institutional ownership of land in all early civilizations and the relatively limited development of private ownership in all but one early civilization [Mesopotamia] suggest that all three forms of land ownership were compatible with early civilizations as a general type of society.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 336.
“The Chinese preferred to wear smooth, cool stones, such as jade, believing that they promoted calmness; because of its association with fire, direct contact with metal was considered disturbing.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 340.
“There is no evidence that the Classic Maya worked or had significant access to metal, although imported metal figurines are occasionally found in ritual caches. That they erected impressive stone buildings and carved magnificent limestone stelae employing only stone and bone tools demonstrates that metal tools were not a prerequisite for creating or sustaining an early civilization.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 341.
“In most city-states the decentralized nature of political power encouraged the development of intercity trade as an independent enterprise. Because city-states were often at war with one another, major economic advantages were also derived from conducting such trade at arm’s length from political authority. In territorial states, government control of long-distance trade and of exotic goods generally was an important source of power for rulers.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 342.
“The Aztec believed that social mobility or confirmation of high status was legitimate only as a reward for outstanding military service. The profits merchants derived from peaceful, long-distance trade, usually with real or potential enemies, were stigmatized as ignoble. Whereas individual warriors proclaimed their high status publicly and proudly, however rich a merchant became and however close his semiclandestine dealings with the palace and the king, he was required to appear in public as a simple commoner, barefoot and dressed in maguey-fibre clothes….
“Despite their wealth, the pochteca were effectively deprived of an autonomous public role in Aztec political and community life.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 349, 350.
“Long-distance traders [in Mesopotamia] had close relations with temple administrators and palace staffs, but they worked and may have lived in walled-off ‘harbour’ areas located along the outer walls of cities rather than inside the city proper. These ‘harbours’ were centres of foreign trade, where visiting merchants from other city-states and foreign lands were lodged. They had separate legal status and their own courts and enjoyed a degree of administrative independence under an ‘innkeeper of the harbour’ who looked after and may have been held responsible for the behaviour of foreign traders.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 350.
“In city-states merchants were able to acquire wealth but were to varying degrees politcally constrained in territorial states, long-distance traders were largely replaced by government officials.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 355.
“Important as intercity trade may have been in some city-state systems, it did not encourage the development of complex transportation and communications systems. The value of such systems for trade was counterbalanced by the fear that they would facilitate attack by neighbouring states. Only a hegemon seeking to unify a region might attempt to construct a more efficient road system. In contrast, government activities in ancient Egypt and China and especially in the Inka kingdom led to considerable investment in the construction and maintenance of transport systems. In the Andes, the controlled movement of people and goods was essential for maintaining the unity of the state.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 357-8.
“It is estimated that about three hundred people had to cooperate to cast an eighty-seven-kilogram ritual vessel.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 372.
“If the quality of the luxury goods produced in city-state systems rarely matched the best that was created in territorial states, the overall quality of goods available to everyone was higher.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 374.
“Economists commonly define wealth as the stock of goods and claims that individuals or corporate groups can give away or use to purchase goods and services. In modern industrial societies, where almost everything can be bought and sold, any sort of asset constitutes wealth.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 375.
“Subjects of the Inka ruler were unique in our sample in that they paid all taxes in the form of labour rather than goods…. By accumulating resources only through the appropriation of labour, the Inka monarch avoided having anything given to him by his subjects, which would have implied that he was inferior to the givers.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 378, 379.
“It is possible that no greater effort was made to collect harvest taxes because yams and other Yoruba crops could not be stored for as long as the grain crops of other early civilizations.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 384.
“There is no evidence that even states which developed elaborate systems of food storage, such as those of ancient Egypt and the Inka, assumed major responsibility for public welfare in times of famine. The Egyptian government may have lowered taxes on grain when harvests were poor, and local officials occasionally claimed to have shipped food from areas of plenty to nearby areas where people were starving. There is, however, no indication that food was stored with the specific intention of eventually using it for famine relief.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 387.
“That it was less important who owned land than who had a right to appropriate agricultural production and control surplus agricultural labour explains why a variety of landowning and landholding practices and many different techniques for taxing goods were able to support systems characterized by generally similar levels of sociopolitical inequality.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 388.
“While dominant city-states interfered to varying degrees in the internal government of tributary states, for the most part weaker states were allowed to remain self-governing. This meant that, if hegemonic power declined, a tributary system could disintegrate very quickly. When either a hegemonic ruler’s wealth or his power started to diminish, the feedback loop linking the two unravelled and hegemonic status was gravely threatened.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 390.
“The nearest states [to Aztec center] also provided labour for building projects as well as stone and gravel, which were in short supply in the marshy setting of Tenochtitlan. States within an eighty-kilometre radius of the valley supplied large amounts of maize, which had to be carried to Tenochtitlan and Texcoco by human bearers… Beyond that radius some states did not pay regular tribute but were required to provide military service and present Triple Alliance leaders with gifts at irregular intervals…. Other city-states were forced to pay tribute in amounts that varied according to their political relations with the Triple Alliance. Weaker states located near the centre of the tributary network tended to be taxed more heavily than stronger or more distant ones that could rebel more easily. States that had submitted without fighting might pay only token tribute, while other states paid larger amounts according to how hard they had resisted the alliance or how often they had rebelled.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 390-1.
“A question rarely asked in studies of early civilizations is why the acquisition of greater political power was always accompanied by the appropriation of a disproportionate share of surplus wealth by the upper classes. It can be argued from a functionalist viewpoint that effective decision-making in early civilizations required that a small number of leaders possess sufficient political power to ensure that the orders that were necessary to regulate large-scale societies were carried out. To do this, leaders needed to control a disproportionate share of resources to be able to pay for police and military backing and reward loyal supporters with generous gifts and hospitality.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 405.
“In each early civilization people viewed deities as a series of manifestations of the forces of nature, which, whether or not they assumed human form, were aware of human beings, as people in industrial societies believe the physical universe is not. Deities possessed individual personalities which inclined them to treat human beings well or badly. Yet human beings could never be certain of a particular deity’s continuing goodwill, even if that deity were a benevolent one and they had served it assiduously.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 414.
“K’ul [cosmic power or soul-force of the Maya] has been described as a vital, impersonal, natural force that animated all things, including the gods. It was the power that made plants grow, animals reproduce, and people live and it kept the cosmos functioning. It also sustained objects that human beings had made, including ceramic vessels and sacred buildings, and enabled those objects to perform their social functions…. Yet only in certain instances did those supernatural powers come together to form deities.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 415.
“The concept of an abstract supernatural force represented an attempt to describe the power that animated the universe, including human beings. The idea of deity sought to identify and establish relations with delimited manifestations of that force that were vital for the survival and welfare of human beings.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 417.
“In all early civilizations the universe appears to have been conceptualized as a manifestation of supernatural power, which supplied it with life and activity. The most potent manifestations of that energy were deities of varying degrees of importance who pervaded different aspects of the natural world and made them function.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 433.
“Only the Mesopotamians, at least by the time the creation epic Enuma Elish was composed during the Old Babylonian period, saw relations amongst the gods as governed by considerations that fundamentally resembled those prevailing in human societies. The slaying of the primordial deity Tiamat and her confederates by younger gods symbolized the triumph of social values over older, natural ones.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 436.
“While the deities of the early civilizations possessed human-like personalities, they often dealt with human beings in ways that seemed to be more inherent in the natural world they animated than part of the social realm. In many myths their behaviour was transparently that of natural forces: floods, storms, droughts, and volcanic eruptions afflicted humanity without warning.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 438.
“In early civilizations as in earlier small-scale societies, the natural, supernatural, and social realms were not categorically distinguished.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 442.
“As society expanded and kinship declined in importance as a factor unifying social life, religion replaced kinship as a source of concepts for analysing and discussing the social order.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 443.
“In transcendental religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, where the omnipotence of a single god renders that god’s existence totally independent of his creation, sacrifice becomes merely a token of individual or collective human gratitude for the deity’s favours. In early civilizations, individual deities were not viewed as being sufficiently powerful to render them independent of human support. On the contrary, deities and humans were regarded as depending on each other.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 473.
“In all the early civilizations human beings offered nourishment to the gods in the form of sacrifices.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 475.
“While, especially in Mesoamerica, human sacrifice was represented as an honour for the victim, upper-class adults rarely if ever freely volunteered themselves. Human victims were mostly prisoners of war, criminals, strangers, and children.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 476.
“The Aztec sacrificed the largest number of prisoners to their patron solar deity, Huitzilopochtli, in the belief that their blood and hearts would sustain the sun and delay the end of the present creation. This belief provided an ideological justification for the wars that had created and sustained the Aztec tributary system, representing Aztec aggression as altruistic and self-sacrificing.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 483.
“In Egypt and Mesopotamia, human sacrifice appears to have been rare even in the earliest periods and soon all but disappeared. In the five other early civilizations, human sacrifices were a regular occurrence, although their number and frequency varied.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 484.
“It is frequently suggested that human sacrifice was common in warlike societies where there was little need for extra labour, human sacrifice being a way of disposing of prisoners of war. While this might account for the frequency of human sacrifice in the Valley of Mexico, with its high population density, or among the Shang Chinese, who seem to have resorted to territorial expansion to keep their population density low, it does not explain the situation in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, where large numbers of male prisoners appear to have been slaughtered but not sacrificed. Nor does it account for the Inka, who either killed or freed prisoners of war and collected most human sacrifices from among their subject population’s children.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 484-5.
“Commoners seem to have tacitly acknowledged that, without the domestic peace and order and the defense against foreign attack that the state provided, everyday life would have been far worse for them. Taxes and labour were the material compensation that commoners paid to the upper classes for these benefits. It was therefore easy for people in these civilizations to imagine all human beings performing the same role in relation to the gods that farmers and labourers performed for the upper classes. Sacrifice was the equivalent of paying taxes or tribute to the supernatural.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 489-490.
“The cosmos was conceptualized as a kingdom, but it was a kingdom in which the powers of the upper classes were based more on the consent of the governed and less on the exercise of coercion than in many later preindustrial societies. Early civilizations stressed not only the dependence of farmers on kings and gods but also the dependence of gods and kings on farmers.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 491.
“Segments of Yoruba society could, however, criticize the actions and pretensions of their kings and other leaders in seemingly non-political contexts. During major religious festivals, the king, townspeople, officials, and lineages all asserted their respective rights vis-a-vis one another and questioned claims made by others by means of praise songs and ritual performances. Such behaviour permitted political struggles to be waged without directly challenging the actions or authority of the monarch, thus preserving a precarious balance between centripetal and centrifugal tendencies….
“Similarly, no human was permitted to criticize the behaviour or policies of the Inka ruler directly, but objections to his policies could be expressed by his royal ancestors and by wakas throughout the kingdom speaking through their oracle priests.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 492.
“Thus in early civilizations the struggle to protect local and individual rights of subjects against increasing exploitation by kings, government officials, and individual members of the upper classes was conducted primarily in a religious idiom. Misbehaviour by the upper classes was believed to infringe first and foremost on the rights of local dieties. Undue appropriation of resouces by kings and members of the upper classes for their own use endangered the cosmic order by restricting or threatening the food supply of the gods. Religious concepts thus supplied a constitution phrased in terms that were intelligible to people in early civilizations. These concepts did not overtly control or limit the powers of the king or the upper classes but assigned mutual responsibility to workers, the upper classes, and deities for promoting their common welfare and ensuring their joint survival.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 493.
“Far from being theocracies, the early civilizations were societies in which checks and balances were preserved and ordinary people were understood to have de facto rights. These ideas were expressed in a form that was appropriate for political discourse in societies in which religious concepts had replaced kinship as the principal way of understanding society and the universe.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 494.
“In none of these societies does there appear to have been an overall religious hierarchy paralleling or overreaching the political order.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 508.
“In small-scale societies fear of witchcraft, in combination with gossip and ridicule, was a powerful force encouraging generosity and modesty….
“In early civilizations the fear and practice of witchcraft must have continued to function in this manner among ordinary people, while members of the upper classes also practised witchcraft against each other, often with the help of specialists. Yet the most urgent concern about witchcraft among the rich and powerful in early civilizations was their dread that lower-class people might use it to avenge insults, injustices, or mistreatment that they had suffered at the hands of their superiors….
“To some degree such fears may have helped to curb the exploitative behaviour of the rich. Their main effect, however, was probably to make rulers fear their subjects more than they would have done otherwise, and this encouraged a determined effort to uncover and punish watches and sorcerers who might be seeking to harm them… Thus accusations of witchcraft, which in smaller-scale societies had served to promote social and economic equality, became in early civilizations a means by which the powerful could intimidate their subordinates.
“The Inka state construed all crimes, regardless of the social status of the victims, as acts of sorcery and treason. Every form of misconduct threatened the well-being of the kingdom and the health of the king by angering the gods.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 518.
“Because political and religious roles were not clearly distinguished, there was no opportunity for serious political competition between priests and secular rulers.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 521.
“For the people in the Valley of Mexico, a human being made sense only in this world. After death, the elements that made up an individual had only a short and uncertain existence separate from one another before they were reabsorbed by the gods and recycled to form new human beings or were transformed into birds, butterflies, spirits, or demons, none of which recalled their human identity.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 531.
“Morality appears to have been generally viewed as a communal matter rather than as a personal or religious one.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 539.
“In early civilizations, art and architecture were no less vehicles for managing sacred powers and conducting relations with the supernatural than they were social-regulatory statements.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 542.
“It is not surprising that what many art historians judge to be the finest art of early civilizations was produced in the two territorial sates that endured the longest: the stone sculpture and relief carving of Old Kingdom Egypt and the bronze ceremonial vessels of Shang China.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 562.
“Despite architecture’s symbolic role only a few functional types of buildings were constructed. Temples, royal palaces, and upper-class residences existed in all early civilizations and elaborate upper-class tombs in many of them. Palaces often combined royal residences with administrative centres, meeting places for the upper classes, storehouses, workshops, and barracks…. Temples were the dwelling places of deities or places where contact could take place on a regular basis between the supernatural and designated representatives of human communities rather than places for congregational worship. Temples, palaces, and tombs were not as clearly differentiated in all early civilizations as they are in modern nomenclature. Aztec and Maya temples were often the burial places of rulers. Most Maya temples seem to have been constructed for the cults of dead rulers as well as for the worship of cosmic deities. Yoruba palaces contained important public shrines, and Inka palaces became the tombs of dead kings. Maya ‘palaces’ were ritual as well as residential and administrative in function. In early China, temples for the veneration of royal ancestors were located inside palaces. Temples, palaces, and royal tombs appear to have been clearly distinguished from one another only in Egypt and Mesopotamia.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 565.
“Archaeologists have observed how, in successive pyramid construction projects, better solutions were found to problems of ensuring the stability of the building blocks and preventing the collapse of inner chambers under the weight of the heavy masses erected above them. Over the course of a few reigns, builders learned that it was more efficient to work with large stone blocks, that horizontal courses were more stable than courses aligned obliquely to the face of a pyramid, and that heavy structures needed to be sited on firm bedrock.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 571.
“The palace of Mochtezuma II was described as a rectangular structure 220 metres long, with blank outer walls and few entrances. Its rooms were arranged around three courtyards, with the apartments of the king and his family being located on the second storey. The ground floor contained council halls, law courts, guest rooms, meeting rooms for warrior societies, dining halls, servants’ quarters, kitchens, a jail, arsenals, accounting rooms, and storerooms. Nearby palaces of former rulers, considered too small or old-fashioned to be lived in, were used as storerooms and perhaps offices.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 573.
“The chief aim of monumental architecture in territorial states was to facilitate and glorify royal authority.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 580.
“A limited range of engineering options restricted the structure and hence the shape of buildings. No large domed buildings were erected in any early civilization, and tall buildings consisted mainly of solid platforms.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 583.
“Monumental buildings belonged to a limited range of types: palaces, temples, tombs, fortifications, and various combinations thereof. The first three were thought of as different kinds of houses.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 583.
“Early recording systems served at least three different functions. One function was commemorating kings and their deeds….
“The second major function was administrative….
“Finally, early recording systems were used for religious purposes.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 587.
“There is also no evidence that the political integration of the Inka kingdom, which lacked writing, was any less effective than that of ancient Egypt or Shang China, despite the importance that these two kingdoms attached to writing as an instrument of bureaucratic control.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 597.
“The major shifts towards more phonographic writing occurred when scripts were adopted by foreign peoples, who were not constrained by firmly established cultural traditions of literacy and by pedagogical and professional interests that were tied to an existing script. Increased phonoticization occurred when the early Sumerian writing system was adapted to write Akkadian.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 602.
“Notably absent in the surviving records of literate early civilizations are documents relating to their extraordinary architectural and other technological achievements. While Egyptian school texts contain formulae for calculating the approximate volumes of pyramids, no manuals describe how a real pyramid was planned and built. Nor are there early Chinese texts dealing with bronze-casting. Either these operations were carried out by non-literate craftsmen or such records and instruction guides as existed were insufficiently numerous or appreciated to have survived…. Much more documentation is available concerning calendrics, medicine, divination, and magic, which routinely combined what we would interpret as rational practices with magical and religious ones.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 610.
“Herbs were often used as medicines, but other frequent ingredients included blood, animal faeces, and fingernail dirt. The use of these substances reflected the belief that the best way to purge noxious substances was to accumulate more of them in the body.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 620.
“The most important upper-class intellectual activities in early civilizations were concerned with improving relations with the supernatural powers that animated the cosmos.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 623.
“The Egyptians’ idealization of the quiet, self-controlled official could perhaps only have developed in a society that had no significant external enemies. The similar values of the Chinese mandarinate did not acquire ascendancy until after the Chinese state came to control so much of East Asia that it no longer had any serious rivals;….” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 632.
“The conceptualization of sacrifice in the early civilizations must have developed from earlier beliefs concerning reciprocity and exchange between human beings and the supernatural.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 642.
“Sacrifice projected the taxation system into the cosmic realm.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 643.
“The concept of sacrifice thus supplied the equivalent of political constitutions for early civilizations. While farmers and other lower-class people were explicitly excluded from decisions about how society was to be governed and denied the right to criticize the actions of the upper classes overtly, their duty to ensure the continuity of the political and cosmic orders by feeding the upper classes and the gods was balanced by the need for the upper classes to make sure that farmers had the social peace and resources they needed to produce enough food to sustain the cosmic order. The failure of either farmers or the upper classes to respect and sustain the other threatened the functioning of the universe.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 643.
“By assigning farmers, rulers, and gods significant roles in maintaining the cosmic order, this view imposed moral limitations on the exploitative behaviour of the upper classes that enhanced the viability of society. Since there had been no need for religious beliefs of this sort prior to the development of larger, class-based societies, their cross-cultural uniformity in early civilizations suggests that they were products of practical reason as it related to some universal forms of self-interest.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. pp. 649-650.
“In all early civilizations, farmers produced modest agricultural surpluses, of which a disproportionate amount was appropriated by the upper classes. All of them had generally similar class hierarchies, one of two basic types of political organization (city-states and territorial states), and three types of administration (heterarchical, delegational, and bureaucratic). Their religious beliefs did not distinguish the natural, the supernatural, and the social any more than those of smaller-scale societies.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 661.
“Unlike some later preindustrial civilizations, early civilizations opted for a low-force/low-yield [low pressure on farmers to produce more which would have required more management and expense to force higher production] solution.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 661.
“Perhaps the most important distinction in the organization of social hierarchies was between early civilizations that had hereditary nobilities and those that lacked them.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 665.
“The most potent source of power for the upper classes was probably the pervasiveness and hence the seeming normality of inequality. Hierarchical relations pervaded almost every aspect of life. Relations between a ruler and his subjects provided a model for relations between male heads and other members of extended or nuclear families, as well as between adults and children, teachers and pupils, employers and employees, and masters and slaves. All such relations tended to be construed as father-son relations….
“Thus the experiences of everyday life in early civilizations encouraged obedience to authority figures. These relations contrasted dramatically with what was found in small-scale societies, where social control was enforced by public opinion and children were rarely, if ever, physically coerced or punished.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 668.
“By assigning responsibility for nourishing the gods to the king and the upper classes, religious beliefs in early civilizations imposed strict limitations on the upper classes’ exploitation of farmers. If food production faltered as the result of mistreatment of commoners by the upper classes, not only the stability of human society but the cosmic order was threatened.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 671.
“There is no sector of early civilizations that did not display a significant combination of cultural idiosyncrasies and cross-cultural regularities. Such findings do not correspond with the expectations of either neoevolutionists or cultural determinists.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 674.
“The most important factor relating to agriculture that encouraged the development of early civilizations appears to have been the investment of labour in the long-term improvement of land, which created a need for protection against predation.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 676.
“By contrast [to diversity of subsistence patterns to local ecologies], early civilizations possessed one general form of class structure, only two main forms of sociopolitical organization, and one set of key religious beliefs.” Trigger, Bruce. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge UP. p. 684.
“Ecological medicine shifts the emphasis from the individual to public health; from nutrition to the food web and farming systems; from a human-centered viewpoint to one of biodiversity and the ecosystem services that are the foundations of health and healthy economies. It is founded in the precautionary principle, and it calls for a new social contract with both the human family and the web of life.” Ausubel, Kenny. 2012. Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. p. 61.
“Futurist and economist Hazel Henderson has characterized conventional economics as ‘a form of brain damage.’ It rationalizes the insatiable predation of nature and people, while disappearing environmental and social costs from the balance sheet.” Ausubel, Kenny. 2012. Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. pp. 65-6.
“Ecological regime change demands political regime change. As the environmental analyst and founder of the Worldwatch Institute Lester Brown wrote, ‘Socialism collapsed because it did not allow prices to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow prices to tell the ecological truth. We are in a race between tipping points in nature and our political systems.’” Ausubel, Kenny. 2012. Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. pp. 66-7.
“This book is about what I term the ‘Roman dilemma’: the way in which peaceful commerce is frequently seen as a way of building a stable, prosperous, and integrated international society. At the same time, the peaceful liberal economic order leads to domestic clashes and also to international rivalry and even wars. The conflicts disturb and eventually destroy the commercial system and the bases of prosperity and integration. These interactions seem to be a vicious spiral, or a trap from which it seems almost impossible to escape. The liberal commercial world order subverts and destroys itself.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 1.
“The Roman Empire assimilated new areas into its imperial rule by incorporating the local theologies into a pluralistic religious universe. More gods could simply be added to the capacious Roman pantheon, and local deities would sit alongside the imperial gods without rivalry or clashes. Polytheism was based on a deep but politically motivated respect for difference and local tradition….
“The twenty-first-century equivalent, in a world in which the central culture is no longer religious, is multiculturalism: the encouragement of a broad diversity of cultures with a call for mutual tolerance and comprehension….
“Yet it involves the suspension of a particular human facility, that of judgment. Diversity means the enthusiastic acceptance of other practices, and a restraint on judgment about differences or ‘the other.’” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 22.
“The stage is then set for another ‘Roman predicament’: either there is disintegration because of a proliferation of values, or disintegration because the imposition by force of one set of values provokes an inexorable and violent backlash.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 23.
“Many readers will feel that it is possible to see both the world views presented here at the same time: that in the spirit of Empire Lite, rules without enforcement are bound to be ignored, and enforcement without fixed rules is likely to be widely rejected as arbitrary or tyrannical. Therefore both rules and an enforcer are needed to stability and order.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 30.
“The ‘imperialism’ and the ‘globalization’ models are overall interpretations of such power for their respective adherents that the other perspective simply disappears….
“Sometimes these views seem to coexist with each other within the confines of a single institution: say, in the complex structure known as the modern state. Defense ministries are likely to be stuffed with ‘realists,’ who view power in terms of a zero-sum game, in which one’s own gains must correspond to losses of power elsewhere. Finance or foreign ministries are likely to have many globalists, so much so that they sometimes run into the hackneyed criticism that the foreign ministry is the ministry representing foreigners. The inhabitants of these quite different policy worlds surprisingly rarely engage in any debate with the other side. They simply slug it out for relative institutional influence, in a struggle that really is a zero-sum game: one side either wins or loses.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. pp. 34-5.
“If the competition among European states [just after the French Revolution] made for more dynamic business life, the constitutional ordering of the popular will made life more certain. Previous monarchical borrowers had been prone to sudden bankruptcy, and the Habsburg and Valois dynasts regularly turned on their creditors and used force (the threat of execution for usury) to renegotiate on better terms.
“The business response to this was one of grateful relief…. By the early nineteenth century, some large-scale lenders such as the Rothschilds began to insist that their customer states introduce constitutions or representative assemblies, because this made the repayment of credit more secure.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 55.
“In a sort of cyclical development, the modern corporation [that became international organizations with offices and interests spread around the globe] looked as if it had the same problems of overreach and at the same time the global vulnerability of the early modern trading companies. Thus the same issues about regulation that arose in the national context of pre-French Revolutionary Europe appear on the international level.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 60.
“Disputes about different codes of corporate governance, about accountancy rules, and about the applicability of commercial law codes drawn from different national legislative traditions, all are struggles in which there are muscular demands for the assertion of power interests. Instead of legal stability, a clash of different legal cultures and traditions of corporate regulation has begun to be treated as simply part of the grand bargaining of international politics [conflict between national rules for corporations vs. international trading rules]. So rules look quite arbitrary or indeed ruleless.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 63.
“The central belief of the order [the gold standard around the nineteenth century] was also not at all concerned with any international rule or mechanism: no one would want to defend gold or discount policies by stating that ‘the international system requires us to do this.’ Instead, the core psychological belief worked because enough people believed that gold was the most obvious and the most appropriate store of value….
“The operation of the gold standard occurred on the expectation that it might be suspended in certain circumstances, as in armed conflict between the great powers, but that gold would be restored again at the end of the conflict. The model for this was the British experience of suspending and restoring gold during and after the Napoleonic wars. When the gold standard was restored in the 1920s, however, the experience was destabilizing and unsatisfactory,…. The 1920s system, unlike the prewar order, did depend on attempts at systematic international rule-making. The critical meeting was the Genoa Monetary Conference of 1922, at which Britain above all laid out the desirability of a generalized return to gold, to be achieved by a substantial degree of international cooperation and harmonization. The recommendations instantly aroused suspicions: did they not very obviously favor British financial interests, and were they not intended to pry open foreign markets for the activities of British banks?” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. pp. 66-7.
“There is a growing tendency, especially where trade, corporate governance, and monetary issues are concerned, to reinterpret the world in power political terms–to see through the imperialism lens rather than that of globalization.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 70.
“In the earlier age of worries about globalization–at the turn of the nineteenth century–a backlash began, which in the end produced restrictions on migration and high levels of trade protection. When national protection became the major priority of most countries, in the 1920s and 1930s, the world became both poorer and less safe.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 75.
“Trade problems are in fact routinely dealt with by shifting the emphasis to the monetary arena. The world has developed its institutional arrangements in the setting of globalization by making them harder in the trade arena and softer in the monetary one. In the future the offloading of adjustment problems to monetary policy will be more difficult because of widespread Asian exchange rate pegging and because of the new informal and largely privatized character of the international monetary system…. The lesson is clear: the world trading system will consequently be more vulnerable.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. pp. 76-7.
“One apparently odd fact makes the deficits more sustainable than most analysts believed they should be: the yield on U.S. assets for foreigners–the price paid by the United States for its borrowing–is substantially lower than the yield for Americans on their foreign holdings. This is the reason why the balance on investment income continues to be so surprisingly resilient and large. The yield difference reflects not miscalculation or stupidity on the part of foreign investors, but a calculation in which they buy security in return for lower yields. The primary attraction of the United States as a destination for capital movement is the unique depth of its markets (which generate a financial security) and the political and security position of the country. This is why inflows to the United States may increase after global security shocks (as they did after September 11). Such a conclusion emphasizes the extent to which the world monetary order is driven more and more by political considerations.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 80.
“The ability of the United States to finance its deficits therefore depends on the continued perception that it is a high-growth and high-productivity economy and that it is politically and militarily secure. Conversely, the security of the United States depends on the continued inflow of capital, as a sudden adjustment would be unbearably painful and intolerable politically.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 80.
“The deterioration of the fiscal position in the beginning of the millennium was a general and transnational phenomenon: the average general government fiscal balance for all the advanced industrial economies in 2000 was exactly in balance, while in 2004 the figure had slid to a deficit of 3.9 percent…. Fiscal problems thus pose a long-term threat to the capacity of the United States to sustain growth and hence capital inflows.”James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 82.
“The more rational anti-globalization figures insisted that they wanted a better or more just globalization, a unification of people rather than of capitalistic interests. Both the pro-globalizers and the anti-globalizers were overconfident about the stability of the globally integrated economy.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 86.
“All of these previous globalization episodes ended, almost always with wars. Bad policies can obviously wreck individual economies in a whole range of different ways: but systemic collapse is a product of militarized conflict. Globalization as an economic phenomenon depends on the movement across state boundaries of goods, labor, and capital. Security concerns produce heightened worries about all these kinds of mobility.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 87.
“There are obvious analogies in some of these past experiences to some of the threats to the economic order and to economic integration posed by the war on terror. Trade, financial flows, and labor movements are all vulnerable in the post-September 11 world. After September 11, every part of the package that had previously produced such unprecedented economic growth in many countries–the increased flow of people, goods, and capital–now seem to contain obvious threats to security. Students and visitors from poor and especially from Islamic countries might be ‘sleeper’ terrorists; or they might become radicalized through their experience of Western liberalism, permissiveness, or the arbitrariness of the market economy. It soon became apparent that customs agencies scarcely controlled the shipment of goods any longer, and that explosives, or even ABC (atomic, biological, chemical) weapons might easily be smuggled. The free flow of capital, and complex bank transactions, might be used to launder money and to supply funding for terrorist operations.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. pp. 87-8.
“There are two major ways in which war undermines globalization. The first, most obvious, is simply the consequence of the cost of war considered in a broad sense: the problem of financing unproductive military activity, the disruption of commerce, the suspension of migration, and the freezing of capital movements because of security priorities. The second is the way in which armed conflict, even when its scope is quite small, provokes the emergence of new issues that produce international discord that then affects other areas of international interaction.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 88.
“The frontier is useless from the economic viewpoint, but vital from the political and psychological perspective.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 101.
“It was only in the fading days of European empire, in the interwar years of the first half of the twentieth century, that empires were really called on to redress the economic deficiencies of the Old World. Britain and France tried to make up for their war-induced problems by expanding trade with and investment in their colonies. Colonies would supply raw materials, markets, as well as military manpower to mother countries that had been overstrained.
“It was at this stage that colonial planning developed to its fullest extent, with bad effects on both the metropol and the subjects of imperialism. It is certainly possible to make an argument that in some initial phase of empire the extension of European rule brought some benefits: a more stable legal order, the provision of transportation networks (canals, railroads, telegraphs, road improvements), supplies of capital, and improved education.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. pp. 104-5.
“Price controls and rationing may have represented a valid attempt to deal with the specific circumstances of wartime mobilization during the World War II; but these lessons were widely misinterpreted as a demonstration of the superiority of plans and controls. In particular, the post-colonial policymakers then drew the inappropriate conclusion that prices should be controlled to make a new political bargain: to impoverish the economically backward rural producers of commodities and to benefit a new urban class that would be the political driving force of the newly independent states. In doing this, the new rulers were simply preserving the legacy of a particular and effective technique of colonial rule: it was essential to make a compromise with powerful groups that were politically concentrated. More peripheral (and usually poorer and weaker) elements could be held in check by the occasional display of force….
“After Indian independence, the raj gave way to the regulation raj, in which all the panoply of colonial controls were used to promote the construction of a Soviet-style heavy industrial sector supposedly to modernize India and drive out rural backwardness. In west Africa, marketing boards wrecked the hopes of African farmers.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. pp. 105-6.
“Given this experience [colonial imitation of controlled economies], it is hardly surprising that the concept of imperialism was deeply discredited by the second half of the twentieth century. Yet the problems and tensions, the volatile frontier regions, and the urge to stabilize and extend existing control and markets, that had given rise to the imperial solution in the first place still existed….
“The need could be conceived in the following way: most of the world was covered by a global economic space with flows of goods, capital, and labor stimulating a more productive use of resources, but this space was surrounded by areas barely touched by the process of ‘globalization’ and in which ideas actively hostile to it could develop. The non-globalized world was capable of not merely surrounding but also penetrating into the globalized core and of disrupting and potentially destroying it. The definitive demonstration of this possibility came on September 11, 2001, when what had originally been a dispute over American troops in Saudi Arabia, that had escalated out to remote mountainous areas in Afghanistan, now spilled back into the center of the globalized world–New York and Washington, D.C.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 106.
“Vulnerability, rather than interest, is the way empires usually rationalize their expansion.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 107.
“One of the most frequent arguments for why Western states and financial institutions should offer generous aid to self-styled reformers was that this was the only practical way of stabilizing a dangerous nuclear arsenal. Russia successfully presented itself for a few years in the early 1990s as a special case. It was a polity that was ‘too nuclear to fail.’ At the same time, China, though growing very rapidly, was still by far the largest recipient of World Bank development support, and China based its claim on world attention in large part on its military power and its potential to destabilize the region.
“The Russian and Chinese examples inevitably produced a large number of imitators. The acceleration of the nuclear weapons program in both India and Pakistan was driven by the belief that nuclearity was a prerequisite for being considered seriously by the international community. North Korea, a desperate state with a failing economy, first applied nuclear blackmail in 1994….
“There is at present no institutional way of deterring nuclear blackmail. Security thinking takes place in one international forum, while economic assistance fits into the domain of the Bretton Woods institutions, which are charged to be apolitical. Though there might be a logic to combining these discussions, such a change would require a radical alteration of international rule.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 110.
“The European Union has played as similar role with respect to the stabilization of politics in Central and Eastern Europe in the wake of the collapse of communism…. Former communists embraced the market and democracy, while nationalists such as Slovakia’s would-be strongman Vladimir Meciar were pushed out. There is clear evidence of a simple geographic causality: the nearer physically to the European Union, the greater the stabilization effect of political life. The European Union may also be able to take a similar role in regard to North Africa. Where big regional powers do not take on a stabilizing funciton–as is the case for such powerful and potentially rich oil producers as Nigeria in West Africa or Saudi Arabia in the Middle East–failed states quickly develop around the periphery.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 115.
“By a peculiar sort of historical reincarnation, the modern self-image of the European Union reproduces the discussion that took place around the curiously divided sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire. The result of its odd constitution was that the old Holy Roman Empire did not think about military expansion, and it fostered social networks that reached out across territorial divisions. Its attractions depended on what would now be termed ‘soft power,’ offering institutionalized forms of collaboration and identity. It appears breathtakingly modern, or perhaps even postmodern.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 120.
“The differences about whether the European pre-occupation with slow change is desirable clearly reflect alternative ways of managing the cost of change. Taking off from an argument derived from psychological observation that the cost of losing something is much higher than the value of acquiring the same object, Europeans conclude that it is better to restrict change for the sake of stability rather than purposely create instability to make more wealth and generate economic growth.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 120.
“For Central Europeans, the Holy Roman Empire is what preceded the modern state, which was brought about in part by and in part as a reaction against the French Revolution and Napoleon. It remained a mental map or template against which the present could be judged.
“This ideal was revived at moments when the nation-state was felt to be inadequate. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many commentators started to argue that the nation-state was the product of a particular moment of social organization, when the ideas of the French Revolution established national citizenship, and when railroads created national markets. But as people moved across national frontiers, and as markets became broader, in short as the very powerful late-nineteenth-century form of globalization developed, the nation-state looked confining, and ambitious planners looked to wider areas.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. pp. 121-2.
“The early makers of Europe conceived of their project in redemptive and quasi-theological terms: Germany, the source of the Nazi evil, could only be redeemed by an association with the countries that had been the victims of its policies. Charles de Gaulle later saw France as having a unique role, because France had suffered most: only in France had a legitimate government remained and collaborated with the German occupiers. Consequently only liberated France could ‘lift Germany up from her decadence.’” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 124.
“Yugoslavia is such a damning indictment that it is easy to think that the European story of the 1990s is nothing but a failure. Yet the surprising transition of almost all the other European former communist dictatorships to a new and more-or-less liberal political order, and to market economics, is a stunning success (and an obvious contrast with the isolated disaster cases of Cuba or North Korea). The avoidance of clashes in the ‘velvet divorce’ between Czechs and Slovaks, the peacefulness of Slovenia, the stability of the Baltic states despite large ethnic Russian populations who might be expected to be unhappy with their new subordinate status in linguistically quite nationalistic states–these are all a testimony to the power of the European magnet.
“Modern Europe is, in other words, a sort of empire that has a clear momentum to continuous expansion, which clearly changes quite dramatically as a consequence of the absorption of new members. It is empire by invitation, though, not by military conquest. Again, there are Habsburg overtones: it was always said that Habsburg expansion took place not through war, but as a consequence of dynastic marriage.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. pp. 130-1.
“Thirdly, Europe can probably most easily be defined by what its makers think it is not. It is not empire and it is not America.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 132.
“The politicians who are sometimes cynically referred to as the ‘saints’ of European integration–Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi, Robert Schuman–came from border regions that had a problematical relationship with the nation-state. Adenauer as Mayor of Cologne after World War I had flirted with Rhineland separatism, Schuman was a Lorrainer, and de Gasperi had grown up in the Habsburg empire and had written his doctorate in Vienna. They all thought that the social doctrine of the Catholic church, as stated in Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, was a better guide to twentieth-century politics than the secular debates of the nation-state.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 137.
“If the United States is an empire in denial, as Niall Ferguson has neatly termed it, the European Union is the Holy Roman Empire in denial. The point made by [former cardinal and pope] Lambertini’s correspondent, Voltaire, that the Holy Roman Empire was not Roman, not an empire, and not holy, might be still more apposite in reference to the European Union. Even in denial, it represents a continuation, long drawn out through time and tradition, of the alternative to cycles of empire-building, overstretch, reactions against imperialism, and the long story of imperial decline and disintegration.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 140.
“The principal argument of this book is that there is a continual contest between two ways of seeing the world–as a system of rules, or as a series of exercises or application of power. Globalization fundamentally depends on an acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, but that legitimacy is challenged in particular when inequalities develop (as they do in the course of globalization), and when even small-scale conflicts polarize the international community (as also occurs frequently in globalization episodes). The result is a continual oscillation between internationalization and pacification on the one hand, and between violence and the breakdown of international and domestic order on the other hand.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 141.
“The two sets of problems for the political order interact: the more people are worried about inequality, the more they demand clear rules about what distribution of property is right, and the more they find the idea of mutual toleration of various and different lifestyles immoral and repulsive. The demand can produce a single ideology (in the Roman case, the rise of Christianity). It can also produce a demand for a single source of order to deal with the threats of violence, that emerge especially in the periphery of the empire.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. pp. 142-3.
“The rule-based order is strained when it has to deal with inequality, and also when it has to deal with rapid change. The two challenges are likely to come in combination with each other. Dealing with both questions requires constant regulatory and rule-making innovation, in the course of which rules are likely to become more complex, less transparent, and thus more open to the charge of masking concrete and particular interests. In reality, most attempts to produce rules for global order are messy, they are often quite specific, and they are very complex.
“The result is to produce a suspicion of the international order, which increases with more international contacts….
“The complexity, messiness, and untransparent character of the international order generates conflicts, and conflicts increase the proclivity to see issues in the terms of power and arbitrariness rather than of rules.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. p. 143.
“Scarred by World War II, Europeans had decided that economic interaction could produce common interests and thus peace. This was a regional version of the old liberal internationalist argument that commerce makes for peace as well as prosperity. It is attractive to beat swords into plowshares. Yet it would be a mistake to leap to the conclusion that if we become very efficient and successful at making plowshares, this will automatically eliminate swords.
“Discussions of international order based on the prevalent functionalist logic ignore the ethical foundations that are needed to build legitimacy in the longer run.” James, Harold. 2006. The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. Princeton UP. pp. 145-6.
“The ka is one of the most important dimensions of the human being in Egyptian thought, yet there is no easy translation. It is written with the sign of upraised arms, bent perpendicular at the elbows. Perhaps the most succinct translation is ‘life force’. The ka is associated with ‘food sustenance’, kau, and therefore with the food offerings in the tomb….
“If the ka is the generic life force, the ba is a person’s individual renown or distinctive manifestation – the impression made on others. The ba has often been translated as ‘soul’ and considered a part of the total human being along with the ka and akh. But detailed studies indicate that the ba and akh are entities in their own right. The ba seems to have been a fully corporeal mode of existence with the ability, for instance, to eat, drink, travel and copulate….
“The akh is the fully resurrected, glorified form of the deceased in the Afterlife. Akh is also a word for ‘effective’, ‘profitable’, ‘useful’. The reunion of the ba with the ka is effected by the burial ritual, creating the final transformation of the deceased as an akh.” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. pp. 23, 24.
“As the kings ascended and re-established their courts in the Afterlife, generations of Egyptians moved as cohorts across death’s threshold to live again as a ‘community of kas’, focused on the pyramid and its surrounding necropolis. Burial rituals enacted at the pyramid ensured the transfer of kingship from the dead pharaoh to the living one.” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. pp. 24-5.
“If the mortuary temple was not the stage for the royal funeral, what did it represent. At least one of its aspects was as the deceased king’s eternal residence, its parts corresponding broadly to the palace of his lifetime.” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. p. 27.
“To continue an effective life beyond the grave, the dead required living household members to attend to the services of the tomb. In return for this, the living requested that their dead relatives use their influence to maintain the household, of which the tomb was a part…. Maintenance of the household and transfer of the estate were the real motives behind the burial rituals, the tomb and all the weird imagery of the Netherworld. The one who buried the deceased head of the household inherited the estate; the prince who buried the dead king in his pyramid inherited the kingship. The most immense tombs – the pyramids – made the head of the entire Egyptian household supremely effective (akh) in the Netherworld. With the surrounding tombs of members of the court and royal family, the pyramid necropolis was a stone simulacrum of ‘That City’. Its role was to carry the king as head of the living kas, and therefore the entire community with him, to the new life after death.” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. pp. 29, 30.
“In one sense the pyramid may have been a gigantic reflector, a stone simulacrum of sunlight and a window to the sky, as though we were inside the mass of stone looking out at the sunlight, exactly as the eyes of Amenemhet III are doing on his pyramidion. If we could look through the ‘picture-window’ of the pyramid, its temples and its underground apartments, we would better appreciate the pyramid complex as a royal house, with its gate house (valley temple), entrance corridor (causeway), vestibule, courtyard, portico and reception room (court and statue chamber), antechamber to the private quarter, dining (offering) hall, and, furthest back, the most intimate apartment where the king sleeps in death only to be reawakened, bathed, and clothed before reappearing in the celestial court.
“What makes the arrangement unlike any house is the pyramid itself, towering above the most intimate rooms. It is the pyramid that merges this eternal house with that of the gods – the cosmos. The pyramid is a simulacrum of both the mound of primeval earth and the weightless rays of sunlight, a union of heaven and earth that glorifies and transforms the divine king and ensures the divine rule of the Egyptian household.” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. p. 35.
“It is ironic that with the massive French [following Napoleon] effort at accurate documentation began the era of plunder and destructive, non-systematic excavation that was a hallmark of Egyptian archaeology and pyramid exploration in the 19th century.” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. p. 47.
“The small step pyramids [small pyramids along the Nile most built by Huni three generations after Djoser’s first step pyramid and just before the big pyramids of Giza] may mark the locations of royal residences near, but outside, major religious and political centres. They would have been temporary residences occupied during visits of the king or his representatives during a journey through the land to collect taxes and give judgments. The pyramids spaced out along the provinces of Upper Egypt might also be connected with the early organization of the country into nomes (provinces).
“These pyramids may therefore have been symbols of living sovereignty, hinting that the step pyramid stood for more than the royal tomb, the marker of a dead king. It is interesting that Huni took the pyramid to the provinces just before people and produce would be brought from the provinces to the core of the Egyptian nation for building the largest pyramids of all time.” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. p. 96.
“Rainer Stadelmann, in his study of the reigns of the early pyramid builders, concludes that, like his father Sneferu, Khufu reigned longer than the 23 years given him in the Turin Papyrus, compiled some 1,400 years later. Even with a reign of 30 to 32 years, the estimated combined mass of 2,700,000 cu. m for his pyramid, causeway, two temples, satellite pyramid, three queens’ pyramids and officials’ mastabas [tombs], means that Khufu’s builders had to set in place a staggering 230 cu. m of stone per day, a rate of one average-size block every two or three minutes in a ten-hour day. If Khufu did not equal the total mass of his father’s monuments, he came close in his single pyramid and far surpassed his father’s pyramids in size and accuracy.
“The Great Pyramid contains about 2,300,000 blocks of stone, often said to weigh on average c. 2.5 tons. This might be somewhat exaggerated; the stones certainly get small towards the top of th pyramid, and we do not know if the masonry of the inner core is as well-cut and uniform as the stone courses that are now exposed. On the other hand some of the casing stones at the base may weigh as much as 15 tons, and the large granite beams roofing the King’s Chamber and the stress-relieving chambers above it have been estimated to weigh from 50 to 80 tons….
“As for accuracy: the base is level to within just 2.1 cm [on a base of 230 m]; the average deviation of the sides from the cardinal directions is 3’6′ of arc; and the greatest difference in the length of the sides is 4.4 cm. Why such phenomenal precision? For the royal designers such exactitude may have been imbued with symbolic and cultic significance that now eludes us. A more practical explanation is that it may have been a response to the architectural disaster at the Dahshur Bent Pyramid [poor foundation, need to reduce the slope towards the top; built by his father].” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. pp. 108-9; reference: Stadelmann, Rainer. 1990. Die grossen Pyramiden von Giza. Graz.
“Whenever the Egyptian kingdom expanded to the full extent of traditional territory – from the Delta to Elephantine – the royal tomb removed itself further from the local cemetery. We have seen this at Umm el-Qa’ab in Abydos, where the 1st-dynasty royal tombs move away from the crowded predynastic cemetery. The giant pyramids of the early Old Kingdom achieve exclusivity by sheer size as well as location and by the axial layout of the temples and causeways.” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. p. 189.
“It is most likely that a copper drill or saw was employed [to drill/cut stone] in conjunction with an abrasive slurry of water, gypsum and quartz sand. The copper blade simply acted as a guide while the quartz sand did the actual cutting.” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. p. 210.
“Our calculations suggest that Khufu’s pyramid could have been built by two crews of 2,000. Of course many others were required besides quarrymen and stone haulers and setters. A crew was probably necessary just for building ramps and construction embankments. Also needed were carpenters to make tools and sledges; metal-workers to make and sharpen cutting tools; potters to make pots for use in food preparation and for hauling up water to prepare mortar; workers to carry the water; as well as bakers; brewers – and no doubt others. It is possible that the numbers building and maintaining the infrastructure of Khufu’s pyramid rose to 20,000, perhaps even 25,000.” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. p. 225.
“The king was the ‘ka of the living’ and the entire community shared a life force passed from creator god to king, from parent to child. The social reflection was a hierarchy of households, the ‘greatest house’ being that of the pharaoh.” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. p. 233.
“However, we gain a clearer understanding of the pyramid temple if we realize the importance of a title like Coiffeur – one who actually touched the divine body of the god-king. Royal coiffeurs had a special importance in the intimate parts of the temple. The fact that those who touched the king’s person and prepared his meals had significant roles in the innermost part of th pyramid temple fits with our understanding of the pyramid chambers as the eternal equivalent of the private rooms of the palace. When the king emerges from death each morning, his servants attend him before he strides forth as the statues in the front part of the temple….
“In death pharaoh’s palace moved from the valley up to the pyramid – the primeval mound at the centre of the sun’s rotation. The deceased king would awake each day, be coiffeured, dressed and prepared to meet (or be) the lord of heaven – so long as the daily ritual was conducted by those who serve.” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. pp. 234, 235.
“The ancient Egyptians conceived and developed the pyramid in a programme of architectural simulation. They made mudbrick and then stone simlacra of wood and reed-mat shrines, following the ‘false door principle’, whereby a door or structure is efficacious in the netherworld to the extent that it is a replica or simulacrum in this world. Thus the pyramid was a simulacrum of both the immaterial rays of the sun and the primeval mound – a giant version of the ben-ben [Egyptian word for conical bread loaf which was the meaning of Greek word pyramis that was used to name the pyramids, ben-ben is also the capstone of pyramids and the icon of the oldest temple at Heliopolis, the center of the sun cult] symbol in the sun temple at Heliopolis.
“Each pyramid was the central icon towering above a composition of simulacra, signs and symbols comprising an architectural narrative on the scale of acres.” Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. p. 240.
“The advantage of self-organizing architecture, despite its huge energetic cost, is that it confers a great deal of plasticity without compromising on stability. It allows cells to respond rapidly and adaptively to external perturbations and other critical events that would otherwise jeopardize their systemic integrity.” Nicholson, Daniel. 2019. “Is the cell really a machine?” Journal of Theoretical Biology. 477:108-126. p. 112.
“… the methods traditionally used to probe the interior of the cell conceal the dynamic nature of its architecture because they have to incapacitate it in order to render it visible.” Nicholson, Daniel. 2019. “Is the cell really a machine?” Journal of Theoretical Biology. 477:108-126. p. 112.
“More broadly, the transition from a structural to a processual conception of the cellular architecture implies shifting our attention from matter to form. Due to its dynamic nature, what persists in a cell over time is its form, not its matter: the individual molecules that make up a cell come and go, but its overarching organization remains.” Nicholson, Daniel. 2019. “Is the cell really a machine?” Journal of Theoretical Biology. 477:108-126. p. 112.
“I have argued in this paper that molecular biology is currently undergoing a fundamental shift in its theoretical conceptualization of the cell. The conventional mechanical, reductionistic, and deterministic view is gradually giving way to an understanding of the cell that emphasizes its fluidity, plasticity, and stochasticity…. Cells are empirically revealing themselves to be inherently dynamic, self-organizing systems that respond stochastically and nonlinearly to environmental stimuli.” Nicholson, Daniel. 2019. “Is the cell really a machine?” Journal of Theoretical Biology. 477:108-126. p. 122.
“The inescapable conclusion that follows from the analysis I have presented is that the cell can no longer be unproblematically conceptualized as a machine. Over the course of the paper, it has become apparent that cells lack all four characteristic properties of machines that were identified in the introduction First, once the crucial role that self-organization plays in shaping the cellular architecture is acknowledged, it is difficult to uphold the idea that the spatiotemporal arrangement of the parts of a cell obeys a predetermined blueprint or design, as it does in a machine. Second, the conformational flexibility of most cellular constituents and the functional promiscuity they exhibit shows that a cell’s operation is not as tightly constrained by its structural configuration as it is in a machine. Third, whereas a machine performs its function by precisely following a predefined sequence of steps, a cell can arrive at a particular end in a variety of ways: it can recruit different kinds of molecules to the same function–or the same kind of molecule to different functions–depending on the conditions it finds itself in. And fourth, a cell cannot be broken down into parts without jeopardizing its structural integrity in the way that every machine can. Cellular components form deeply intertwined, ever-changing networks of interactions that cannot be individually dissected without sacrificing the organization of the whole. ‘Cells are not engineered systems of discrete, interacting computational components, naturally yielding to compositional analysis,’ which is why they cannot be fully explained reductionistically: and neither do they operate deterministically, which is why their behaviour cannot be perfectly predicted.” Nicholson, Daniel. 2019. “Is the cell really a machine?” Journal of Theoretical Biology. 477:108-126. pp. 122-3; subquote: Melham, T. 2013. “Modelling, abstraction, and computation in systems biology: a view from computer science.” Prog. Biophys. Mol. Biol. 111:129-136. p. 134.
“The cell is not a machine, but something altogether different–something more interesting yet also more unruly. It is a bounded, self-maintaining, steady-state organization of interconnected and interdependent processes; an integrated, dynamically stable, multi-scale system of conjugated fluxes collectively displaced from thermodynamic equilibrium.” Nicholson, Daniel. 2019. “Is the cell really a machine?” Journal of Theoretical Biology. 477:108-126. p. 123.
“Given its precarious nature, the cell is constantly having to negotiate a trade-off between structural stability and functional flexibility: too much rigidity compromises physiological adaptability, and too much promiscuity compromises metabolic efficiency. The cell accomplishes this by continuously turning over and reorganizing its constituents into different macromolecular complexes with diverse functional capabilities, which assemble and disassemble in order to meet the ever-changing demands of the environment. The permanent stochastic shuffling of molecules inside the cell and their opportunistic associations to form transient functional ensembles in response to intracellular and extracellular cues provides fast and robust solutions to the adaptive problems faced by the cell in a way that strikes an optimal balance between efficacy and plasticity.” Nicholson, Daniel. 2019. “Is the cell really a machine?” Journal of Theoretical Biology. 477:108-126. p. 123.
“We argue here that … philosophy can have an important and productive impact on science.
“We illustrate our point with three examples taken from various fields of the contemporary life sciences…. These and other examples show that philosophy’s contribution can take at least four forms: the clarification of scientific concepts, the critical assessment of scientific assumptions or methods, the formulation of new concepts and theories, and the fostering of dialogue between different sciences as well as between science and society.” Laplane, Lucie, P. Mantovani, R. Adolphs, H. Chang, A. Mantovani, M. McFall-Ngai, C. Rovelli, E. Sober & T. Pradeu. 2019. “Why science needs philosophy.” PNAS. March 5. 116(10):3948-52. www2.pnas.org/cgi.doi/10.1073/pnas.1900357116. pp. 3948-9.
“The managed-metabolism hypothesis demonstrates that particular kinds of self-producing organizations can emerge that are not restricted by the cooperation barrier….
“The managed-metabolism hypothesis shows how this can be achieved through the emergence of ‘management’ which can govern self-producing cooperative proto-metabolisms. This management is constituted by self-replicating RNA or similar self-replicating polymers. Management can overcome the cooperation barrier which besets self-producing proto-metabolisms. It can do so by using its catalytic power to suppress free-riders and to support cooperative molecular species that would not otherwise persist in the proto-metabolism. Ideally management is able to catalytically support beneficial co-operators at whatever levels are optimal in order to achieve stability and effectiveness as circumstances change.” Stewart, John. 2019. “The Origins of Life: The Managed-Metabolism Hypothesis.” Foundations of Science. 24:171-195. doi.org/10.1007/s10699-018-9563-1. p. 175.
“But why would self-replicating RNA use its power to manage self-producing proto-metabolisms in ways that tend to overcome the cooperation barrier? Why would it not just use its power to plunder from metabolisms whatever resources it could use to facilitate its own replication? The managed-metabolism hypothesis suggests that RNA which could harvest an on-going stream of benefits from a particular proto-metabolism could do better in some circumstances than RNA that plundered and moved on. Importantly, this stream of benefits could be greatly enhanced if the RNA used its power to overcome the cooperation barrier, thereby increase the productivity of the proto-metabolism. In this way, selection operating on the RNA could favour the emergence of managers that ‘farm’ a metabolism and use their power to enhance its productivity.” Stewart, John. 2019. “The Origins of Life: The Managed-Metabolism Hypothesis.” Foundations of Science. 24:171-195. doi.org/10.1007/s10699-018-9563-1. pp. 175-6.
“The storage of information is incidental to the primary function of the DNA/RNA apparatus which is to manage. Effective management requires memory.” Stewart, John. 2019. “The Origins of Life: The Managed-Metabolism Hypothesis.” Foundations of Science. 24:171-195. doi.org/10.1007/s10699-018-9563-1. p. 186.
“… if a molecular system is to manage proto-metabolisms comprehensively, it must have at least two characteristics:
“(a) In principle, it must have the potential to generate a relatively unlimited range of interventions in the organization it manages.
“(b) The success of any given variant intervention must depend only on its contribution to the organization as a whole and not, for example, on its ability to compete internally with other variants.” Stewart, John. 2019. “The Origins of Life: The Managed-Metabolism Hypothesis.” Foundations of Science. 24:171-195. doi.org/10.1007/s10699-018-9563-1. p. 188.