Amerika

Adversity drives proficiency. Conflict powers growth. Division makes creativity. People fear these things, because what everyone secretly wants to hear is that the world is One and that this One is an extension of his own solipsistic self. Only then will he feel safe, relevant, and important enough to be comfortable.

But even socializing seems to create enough conflict to drive internal debate in bigger brains:

Researchers peered inside the brains of huntsman and crab spiders using microCT scanners and found that while spiders’ brains don’t have to be bigger for them to live in groups, social spiders are wired for better memory, recognition and collaboration.

The findings represent the first robust test of a theory called “The Social Brain Hypothesis” in non-web-building spiders, examining whether animals living in groups need bigger brains to manage complex social relationships.

Social huntsman spiders had distinctly larger brain areas called “arcuate bodies” and “mushroom bodies,” both regions of the brain that are linked with memory and cognitive processing.

Of course, this joins war and agriculture as correlates of increasing complexity and brain size:

Using this model and Seshat: Global History Databank, we test 17 potential predictor variables proxying mechanisms suggested by major theories of sociopolitical complexity (and >100,000 combinations of these predictors). The best-supported model indicates a strong causal role played by a combination of increasing agricultural productivity and invention/adoption of military technologies (most notably, iron weapons and cavalry in the first millennium BCE).

Even better, race war creates self-awareness and impels societies to develop:

A major mathematical result in multilevel selection, the Price equation, specifies the conditions concerning the structure of cultural variation and selective pressures that promote evolution of larger-scale societies. Specifically, large states should arise in regions where culturally very different people are in contact, and where interpolity competition – warfare – is particularly intense. For the period of human history from the Axial Age to the Age of Discovery (c.500 BCE–1500 CE), conditions particularly favorable for the rise of large empires obtained on steppe frontiers, contact regions between nomadic pastoralists and settled agriculturalists. An empirical investigation of warfare lethality, focusing on the fates of populations of conquered cities, indicates that genocide was an order of magnitude more frequent in steppe-frontier wars than in wars between culturally similar groups. An overall empirical test of the theory’s predictions shows that over ninety percent of largest historical empires arose in world regions classified as steppe frontiers.

In the long term of course, it would be better to have aristocrats who simply set out realistic goals of gaining proficiency and rewarded those who met them. This skips thousands of generations of grueling and grinding conflict and labor.

Tags: agriculture, socializing, warfare