What we have argued in the preface is that there is a consensus among the academic establishment that Natural Selection has produced them as an intellectual elite in a hierarchical system, but that belief does not permit the explanation of such simple and obvious phenomena as altruism and cooperation, phenomena that differentiate Homo Sapiens Sapiens from the other primates. The academic establishment ignores ordinary human characteristics in the same way that Creationists ignore the accumulated data on geological evolution. As Michael Tomasello says, assuming that we start from Spencer's dogma, "We are still a long way from figuring out why humans evolved to do so many complicated things together: from building houses to creating universities to fighting wars", and he accepts that as a natural aspect of the science of evolution.

Luckily, if we start from Darwin's rule for natural selection, "survival of the just-barely-fit-and-fitter", cooperation, altruism, creativity, egalitarianism and ecological responsibility are easily shown to facilitate species survival. But it does leave us with one serious question: why haven't we evolved a global infrastructure that reflects those qualities?

The simple answer is that we evolved our social behavior as a "workaround" to accomodate two major technological inventions, communication by abstract mouth noises and grain agriculture. The interaction between the two produced a hierarchical system with a central myth-based ideology. The creation of that system is what we call the "Neolithic Revolution" and we are now going through an "Industrial Revolution" that, with luck, will free us from some of the myths and ideologies of the Post-Neolithic period.

The explanation of how we got through those developments and where we are now is not only fairly complicated, but it requires the use of some sophisticated mathematics. In a sense this is unfortunate because not many people are comfortable with that kind of mathematics, but a holistic theory of behavior is like quantum mechanics--it can't be done without its own kind of mathematics.

Since it is unlikely that any academic normally involved with evolution will be familiar with the mathematics of vectors and matrices it will be hard for this work to be peer reviewed. On the other hand the mathematics should be familiar to physicists even if the applications are not.

The use of vectors and matrices appears at a very elementary level. The discipline called "Behaviorism" makes the assumption that for any given stimulus there is one, and only one, response.

While this may be generally true for ponderable bodies of elemental materials, it is not generally the case where quantum phenomena are involved; and it is certainly not the case where the subject is a living entity, particularly a complex animal. Among other species Homo Sapiens Sapiens exhibits a phenomenon that we call "Free Will" in which a given stimulus may provoke any one of a number of responses. Those responses will each have a certain probability, and the set of numbers defining that probability distribution will constitute a vector. We will show, later, how to use those vectors to have a precise way to describe behavior.

The description of behavior and of the evolution of patterns of behavior using vectors and matrices will be an important part of this analysis. It will also, as far as I know, be unique to this book.

The question I was asking in 1970, why we were acting like we were crazy, was partly answered in the preface.

We were not inherently crazy: we were evolving into people who were capable of being egalitarian, cooperative, ecologically responsible, and consistent with creativity and altruism on a species-wide basis. In fact we were close to being that way in the paleolithic, when we cooperated in actions and shared our resources within the tribe, and were only really hostile between tribes because of a misinterpretation of our experiences. That was the situation described in the parable of the Garden of Eden.

However, as the parable tells us, when we went from gathering from a nature in which we were at home to using agriculture to dominate a nature perceived as hostile, we also became capable of murder. The Neolithic marked the beginning of the kind of craziness we call civilization or urban culture. What we did in the Neolithic was to invent agriculture, a leap in technology that gave us surplus food that could be redistributed to specialist craftspeople. Those specialist craftspeople created ceramics, metalwork, shelters built of wood and stone and many other tools and processes that made crowding into urban areas possible. But when we adapted tribal management techniques to the demands of the new urban situation they had unintended consequences, like social stratification, which is the root of our present difficulty.

Toynbee's A Study Of History describes the typical cycle of a civilization from about 8,000 BCE to 1500 CE. These civilizations all had their "decline and fall". In fact it would be reasonable to say that infrastructures on the post-neolithic model of an authoritarian hierarchy are inherently unstable.

Around 1500 CE we started to develop industrial technology to give us even larger surpluses than primitive agriculture did, and we started using those surpluses to provide upward mobility by the social strata associated with that technology. This worked for the Traders, the Colonial Planters, the Industrial Entrepreneurs and, at the turn of the century, the clerks and mechanics who actually operated the factories. In the 1950s we had completed what was called "The Managerial Revolution" and became a global bureaucracy. That cut off upward mobility just before women and people of color were about to be seriously upwardly mobile.

In a sense something like that was inevitable. The phenomenon of "Upward Mobility" involves the motion of an individual or group within a hierarchical system. This cannot result in an egalitarian society because the individual or group has to be mobile to a position that is superior to the stratum that they originated in. Upward mobility may mitigate the faults of a stratified society for the few who are mobile, but it depends on the continued existence of a lower stratum. If the whole lowest stratum moves up it is better termed downward mobility of the stratum they move into.

But upward mobility is still part of the ambiance of commercial art: commercial entertainment needs upward mobility in order to give their characters enough scope for their actions, marketing arts needs it to maintain the economy based on the purchase of imitation status symbols by lower level bureaucrats. The proletariat (in Toynbee's sense, those who are in or interacting with the civilization but have no status) are beginning to realize that they are not going to see any upward mobility if the establishment of Western Civilization can possibly prevent it. Naturally they resent that, especially when commercial entertainment and advertising rubs their noses in it.

There are politicians in the mideast and Latin America who are tryng to take power from that resentment, but right now their goal is personal power. There is a real possibility that this "external proletariat" will escalate the guerilla warfare (called "Terrorism" by the Western establishment) out of the control of the Westernised token leadership of the third world.

In the meantime the alienated "internal proletariat" of Western Civilization may become disillusioned as well as alienated and crash the Western economy by using their money to survive instead of buying imitation status symbols. They could do that any time under the stimulus of an attack like that of 9/11/01. They almost did it then.

To the extent that the establishment of Western Civilization uses its resources to maintain the internal and external proletariat as a lower stratum, there will not be enough resources to be wasted as a status symbol by the lower middle classes. That will cause them to see themselves as downwardly mobile into the internal proletariat. When the lower middle class sees their interests as allied with those of the proletariat rather than the establishment Western Civilization will no longer be viable.

As you might expect, explaining our evolution to the present crisis is not simple or it would have been done a long time ago. We might even have avoided the present crisis. Like modern physics as compared to 19th century physics we need to use sophisticated mathematics to handle even the most elementary aspects of our evolutionary history. Luckily the mathematics is similar to that used in modern physics (undoubtedly because my training was in physics) so if you don't understand what I'm doing you can ask your neighborhood physicist.

The first part of the text expands on the discussion of Darwin's rule in the preface. In addition to the discussion based on the graphical method I include an argument based on algebraic methods. That just provides an alternative to the graphical argument so readers who are not mathematically inclined can skip it.

The second part explains what science is about. Many people, including many professional scientists, think they understand what science is about, but they never tried to explain behavior. Since science is a kind of behavior itself, if you aren't very careful in your definitions it is easy to make assumptions that destroy all the validity of the procedure. Methods that are simply taken for granted in dealing with inanimate objects are simply inappropriate for animate objects, especially for those with "free will". I try to be very careful.

After that I apply the scientific procedure to various kinds of behavior. I found a formalism for representing scientifically observed behavior that included the possibility of "free will". This used an operator algebra that could be modeled using matrices and the representations of Paleolithic and Neolithic behavior were analogous to the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein statistics employed in quantum theory.

The matrices described the behavior of what engineers would call "black boxes". When I tried to imagine what might be in the black boxes I found that the model of a Robot that could pass the Turing Test looked like, and more-or-less acted like, something that combined the Id-Ego-Superego mind model of Freud and the semantic model of Chomsky. So what I had found was an approach to Behavioral Science that was more scientific than Classical Behaviorism and was reasonably consistent with Psychoanalysis in its various schools.

The Parable of the Tower of Babel says that in order to cooperate on projects that involve more than one individual we need to be highly conformist in the way we use abstract mouth noises for communication. Ants and schooling fish are also conformist, but they reproduce as a large number of clones who are pretty much immediately mature. That way if one individual makes a survival error, and a lot of others do the same thing, there are enough of them so it doesn't matter. Our species takes so long to mature that we can't afford to lose a lot of us to one mistake. That means that we need an unusual amount of individuality to survive childhood. That, in turn, means a lot of tension is created between the tribal need for conformity and its members' need for individuality.

This can be represented by a Van Der Waals attraction (long range attraction, short range repulsion) in the phase space defined by the behavior matrix. Alternatively it can be described by a Fermi-Dirac occupation rule (no more than one marker per cell) in a quantized behavior space. Parkinson noted that a jury of twelve reaches consensus more often than not, while a parliament larger than that seldom does unless it fissions off a cabinet of less than a dozen members. This sets at twelve the size at which the Fermi-Dirac droplet gets unstable and fissions.

When the succession of fission and migration saturate an area so that migration is no longer possible the tribe has to use population control to maintain a stable size. Using paleolithic technology the most effective method is infanticide of "monster births". Oedipus ("clubfoot") was an example of this infanticide. If there are no better reasons, infants would be killed if they didn't look like the rest of the tribe, thus generating the local similaity of appearance we call "Racial".

There are two people who have to be functionally nonconformist, the shaman and the warchief. They get permission from a proto-God or "Spirit Helper" who has the power to permit them to nonconform.

The next stage in evolution stems from our invention of agriculture. We call it the Neolithic Revolution.

Grain agriculture pins people to a particular place, and provides the surplus to feed a larger population. We needed something to replace fission and migratory gathering as a social infrastructure, so we invented civilization (urban culture). We needed a stronger "glue" than mutual conformity to hold that kind of infrastructure together, so we adapted the shaman's "spirit helper" into a God that everyone would obey. That glue was so strong that a lot of us could have the same behavior pattern. In the quantized behavior space that is described by a Bose-Einstein distribution.

There are interesting variations possible in the transition between the paleolithic gatherers and the neolithic agriculturalists. The residents of northwest North America were in a temperate rain forest whose regional resources facilitated redistribution ("potlatch") on a tribal scale. The residents of the Lesser Antilles used the topography of the volcanic islands to voluntarily maintain tribal cultures up to the 1800s, while the urban cultures of the Greater Antilles and the American continent were destroyed by disease from the colonial invaders. The residents of the area around the North Sea abandoned fish in their diets as soon as they adopted grain agriculture and had to breed themselves for very pale skins to get enough vitamin D. These, however were transient phenomena compared to the development of grain agriculture.

While Toynbee's scenario for the rise and fall of civilizations is not valid before the development of grain agriculture, and needs serious modification in light of the increased productivity of the industrial revolution, it is a useful explanation for urban societies in Eurasia between 10,000 and 500 years ago. The typical urban society, or civilization, during that period arises when a "Creative Minority" successfully meets some challenge. Once they do an establishment or "Dominant Minority" runs the society until it gets decadent and adopts the "barbarians at the gate" as a "Praetorian Guard" to defend itself from the alienated internal and external proletariat. The guard stages a coup and runs the civilization into ruin.

The pattern changed 500 years ago. The additional resources made available by the technology of sail gave an opportunity for the middle-class to be upwardly mobile into the establishment. This opportunity passed from the traders, to the colonial planters, and to the industrial entrepreneurs, who were succeeded by their clerks and mechanics in the "Managerial Revolution" of 1900-1950. The bureaucratic establishment that took control from the industrialists changed the criterion for upward mobility and absorbed the creative specialists working in information technology. Without natural successors they became decadent.

When the current establishment of neoconservatives oriented toward military domination of the globe declines it is likely to take Western Civilization with it, because there is no avenue for the alienated "Third World" proletariat to be upwardly mobile and create an egalitarian global infrastructure that is also ecologically responsible.

The academic establishment has become too decadent to provide a roadmap for the future evolution of human society. They did this by adopting Spencer's interpretation of Darwin's Natural Selection ("Survival of the Fittest") because that implies that tenured academics are genetically superior to ordinary people.

It is, however, possible that the decline and fall of western civilization will provide enough disillusion about the status quo that some intelligent people will be open to a third solution to the evolutionary puzzle.

This hope is based on the analysis of those people who (in Maslow's terms) have "transcended self-actualization" or, in my terms, are "autonomous".

If we look at the levels of personal development we note they correspond to the "mature adult" in the types of civilization we have evolved through. The levels we haven't reached yet are only seen in unique individuals like Leonardo and Einstein, Jesus and Gautama. The levels are:

1.Infancy = Pre-verbal primate
2.Compliant = "Alpha" hierarchy = "Father knows best"
3.Conformist = Hunter-gatherer tribe = Rule by consensus
4.Ideologue = Post-Neolithic Ideological Hierarchy
5.Idiosyncrat = "Age of Anxiety" = Personal ideology
6.Creative Specialist = Use of a Specialist Muse
7.Autonomy = Generalized creativity

The stages up to (5.), which is our present level, have provided examples to be studied. Stage (6.) may be represented by "bohemias" containing creative scientists or artists. These Bohemian communities are composed of artists manque or "plastic hippies" but provide a community in which creativity is tolerated.

The Autonomous individual is even less likely to be surrounded by other autonomous individuals and so tends to express him- or herself in a metaphor that has little concern with human infrastructure. Even Zen Masters seemed to be produced in small numbers, perhaps just enough to maintain their population. The people of this sort who get noticed, like Jesus of Nazareth and Gautama Buddha, are likely to use a religious vocabulary because they can't point to real examples of the human behavior they think appropriate.

It is easy to use our consolidated mind-model and the gender-free Oedipus syndrome derived from it, to describe the conditions under which a person might become autonomous. One of the possibilities is to come close to death, so it is possible that the approaching decline and fall of Western Civilization may provide enough trauma to produce a "Creative Minority" (in Toynbee's sense) that can lead the remains of the human species into a global infrastructure that is egalitarian, ecologically responsible and creative. It would appear that we have hundreds of thousands of young people suffering from post-traumatic syndrome already from the combat in the mideast, and one can presume that comparable numbers of civilians will react to terrorist incidents.

If that doesn't break our conditioning to hierarchy we will simply have to wait till the next crisis.

If you want to jump to a later section use the table on the next page.

This page last revised 3/13/07

Back; Top Next