This imposes a natural ceiling on human giant size-and therefore on human power itself.Įxcept I’m currently sitting in an eight-million-person city that’s inside of a 325-million-person country.
When a loose tribe held together by weak glue grows bigger and bigger, it also gets looser and looser until it can’t hold itself together anymore, and it splinters. Now if all of you are immersed in a rivalry with your evil third-cousin tribe in the neighboring settlement, everyone will probably stay united, Bedouin proverb style, 2 bonded together as a single life form by the threat of an equal size rival life form.īut what if there is no evil third-cousin tribe? Without the binding force of a common enemy, if you’re the alpha character in your clan, you may decide you don’t like the status quo and either go to battle with the other clan or break off into your own tribe. So if the chief is your second cousin, it may feel a bit like they’re part of a different clan from yours altogether.Īnd the way things are now, the head of the one clan is the chief of all three clans-leaving his clan with higher status and special privileges. Your second cousin is equally related to you, your siblings, and your first cousins-to them, you’re all equivalent second cousins. But how about the chief’s second cousins-like the orange family? Or the green family?įor these families-and all the other 16 families in that ring-the tribe feels like this:Īnd remember how the cousin system works. To this yellow family, the tribe feels like this: Let’s focus in on the chief’s sister and her family. The problem is that no one else views the tribe this way-because everyone is at the center of their own circle. For the chief and his family, this is what the tribe feels like: With that in mind, let’s imagine a big extended family made up of 27 immediate families-the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of a single couple-living together as an ancient tribe. Haldane puts it: “I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.” As the distance between blood relations grows, the glue thins. Genes also have us selfishly caring about the well-being of siblings and nieces and nephews because a very similar version of themselves lives in them-but we don’t care quite as much about these people as we do about our children. That’s why today, people are so willing to make huge sacrifices for family members.įamily glue is strongest between parents and children, because genes “know” that copies of themselves live in their container’s direct progeny. Kinship is an obvious natural glue because animals are programmed to be interested in the immortality of those with genes most similar to them-so humans are more likely to cede individual self-interest to a group when that group is family. This is partly why complex animals like wolves, gorillas, elephants, and dolphins tend to roll in groups with under 100 members.Įarly tribes of humans were probably similar to tribes of other apes-glued together mostly by family ties. A human tribe is held together by weaker glue than an ant colony, and the bigger the tribe, the harder it is for that glue to hold up. So as tribes grew in size, the benefits of strength and capability would be accompanied by the cost of increasing instability. But unlike ants, humans are more than just cells in competing giants-they’re competing individuals too.
Given the powers of emergence, large human giants would be forces to reckon with. A human tribe was more than the sum of its parts, in physical power, in productivity, and in knowledge. We talked about emergence and how the giant is what humanity looks like a few floors up the tower from the individual.īuilding giants was a necessity for ancient humans. In the last chapter, we met the human giant.
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