The Underdog is King
Natural selection goes social.
Humans are a very social species. I don’t think that’s to controversial of a claim, is it? Families, friends, strangers all. We interact and we create from society. We build great works together, we learn great things together. I do not wish to diminish the individual spirit, but each and every one of us was a toddler at some point. We have had to learn from others, and gain from others, throughout all our lives. If you do great things as an individual, it will be because someone else grew your food.
Society introduces some interesting kinks in the usual models of natural selection that we think about. No longer does the strongest always win, nor the most beautiful reproduce. In a species like humanity, concession has to be given to social selection.
Think of it like this. A rat is particularly large, and quite strong as a result. Other rats are quite aware of this fact, and avoid confrontation with this big rat. Being large is quite advantageous to the rat. It has less competition for mates, can more easily defend its territory, and can attack larger prey. Good stuff.
Now, lets make the rat a human. Other humans initially avoid confrontation with the big strong guy, but eventually two of the weaker humans decide that they want their share of lovely ladies and green pastures. They band together and kill him. In terms of social selection, being big and strong was actually disadvantageous, at least in this scenario. Strength encouraged others to team up against him, resulting in less success than would have been gained if the man were distinctly ordinary.
If used properly, strength can actually be quite useful in social selection (hence why nerds are picked last in team sports), but without utilizing its social gains, strength is a significant handicap. You see this time and time again in broader society. The dominant player, as long as they are socially inept, is the first to get teamed up on. The first to lose.
Social selection creates some interesting incentives. Let’s say that three individuals, each capable of cooperation, are in competition with one another. A is the strongest, B is a middling fellow, and C is quite weak. B’s goal is straightforward, they wish to team up with C to eliminate A, leaving them as the dominant force in the area. A ideally wants either competitor eliminated, to guarantee supremacy, but also understands that a blatant attempt at elimination would result in cooperation between B and C, likely resulting in A’s elimination. C, on the other hand, wants to maintain the status quo, since elimination of any participant is to their detriment.
Converse to our typical views on natural selection, where the strongest hold the most dominant position, three-way social selection quite clearly demonstrates that the weakest holds the dominant position. B has no incentive to join A, since it directly acts against their interests, which means that both A and B court cooperation from C. A and B are both encouraged to make concessions, either in hopes of a future dominant position, or in avoidance of a future subservient one. A skilled C individual maximizes the concessions which A and B make, while still preventing either from eliminating the other. Meanwhile, skilled A and B individuals either seek to minimize their concessions, understanding that C will never allow elimination, or they push C to overplay their hand, allowing elimination by accident.
This dynamic is clearest with a three person setup, but larger groups display a similar, if more dilute, tendency. Stronger individuals encourage cooperation against them, weaker individuals encourage concessions to gain their support. The higher you are on the totem pole, the more you must give. As the group size continues to increase, this wealth redistribution tends towards a proximity based model, since cooperation becomes much harder among exceedingly large groups. In essence, any given individual wants to cooperate with the strongest person that won’t backstab them. As won’t typically recruit Bs, but will spend plenty of time and energy allying with Ds and Es. Likewise, As are unlikely to act generously towards Zs, unless the price for their cooperation is very low, but Xs act generously towards Zs all the time.
I hope all of this is starting to shed light on why human society is the way it is, but there are a few loose strings that need to be tidied. For instance, why are people so dissatisfied with living as the lowest class in society? With heavy social selection, wouldn’t we expect them to enjoy the most bargaining power? There are a number of ways to answer these questions. For starters, the weak often benefit from constantly acting as though they are about to rebel. Non-cooperation is their bargaining chip. It is how they encourage “generosity” from the strong. Talk is cheap, but lucrative, so the threat of rebellion is far more common than actual rebellion. That said, selective elimination is now a legitimate option thanks to the increased number of participants, so removing a big shot’s head isn’t always the worst idea, if he’s being stingy.
There are also issues of cooperation which arise, as societies grow to massive scale. Let’s say a king owes his ten staff members a fee of 1000 gold coins each in order to guarantee cooperation. He can’t really skimp on this fee. Any of these ten can immediately report to the others that they received too small a sum, and they can rebel as a group. Let’s say the same king owes ten thousand peasants 1 gold coin each in order to guarantee cooperation. This fee is quite easy to skimp on. Even if a thousand peasants don’t receive their gold, collaboration amongst ten thousand people is difficult and expensive, and a whopping nine thousand people need to be convinced to rebel, despite the fact that they were paid in full. Essentially, less generosity is needed when cooperation is difficult, resulting in fewer contributions towards disperse populations, as well as members of the working poor. Many astute observers have noticed that rebellions tend to happen when the poor lose their jobs, not necessarily when they lose their compensation. More leisure means more cooperation, leading to a significant bump in social selection. An increase on the social tax.
The proximity effect may also have an impact on dissatisfaction. The boss pays the middle manager, the middle manager pays you. Though you are in a scenario where generosity comes from two people, you would receive more money from the boss as a middle manager. Being closer to wealth gets you more of that wealth, so people naturally want to place themselves next to the biggest money pile they can manage, even if it requires them to pass some of it along. Plus, wealth in your pocket is more reliable than wealth from someone else’s. Should social selection ever break down, it would be prudent to sit a few rungs higher than the bottom.
Thriving within a social system encourages duplicity in a way that natural selection does not. So, to give you the baseline: In natural selection, if you are weaker than your competitor, you are incentivized to act weak. Acting strong means you get into a fight, likely resulting in injury or death. If you meet an equal, first exaggerate your strength to try and drive them off without a costly fight, and if that doesn’t work, then throw down until one of you emerges dominant. You have decent odds of winning, and the rewards are worth the risk. Finally, if you are stronger than a competitor, use that strength to scare them off. Even if you are likely to win, fights are costly. Let them know that they will suffer greatly in a fight, and you can win the rewards without those costs. So, natural selection is mostly honest. Equals tend to overexaggerate their strength, but that’s about it.
Social selection goes more like this: If you are weaker than your competitor, you are now their boss, act like it. They owe you favors, and donations, and connections, and kindness. The end goal is equality. You want anyone stronger than you to give until they are your match. For competitors that you are equal to or stronger than, the incentive is to feign weakness, and overemphasize your generosity. The weaker you appear, the less you have to give. The bigger your contribution appears to be, the less you have to give. Downplay your strength and skill, hide your coin, make a big display whenever you act generously. That way you will retain a slight advantage over your peers, despite seeming to be their equal. So, social selection encourages people to act dishonestly basically all the time. The strong act weak, the middling act weak, and the weak act strong.
Natural selection and social selection aren’t mutually exclusive within our culture, and you can see both of them in action, if you look closely. It’s actually pretty fascinating to diagnose which has more pull in any given situation, based on how people act. The effects are easiest to diagnose at the top level. When there is heavy social selection, the strong must kowtow. When there is heavy natural selection, the strong must flex.
News organizations and social media have a fairly obvious bias towards social selection, cut-throat businesses have a bias towards natural selection. Governments lean towards the social side of things, though natural selection definitely pops up, usually within the executive branch. Maybe I’m off on this, but I get the impression that scientific inquiry used to be heavily in the natural selection camp, but has drifted over the years. Not sure what the cause for that would be if I’m correct, maybe some effect of government influence on academia, or just an increase in collaborative research. Men tend towards natural, women tend towards social. It’s pretty cool. Gives you a good idea of where cooperation has the highest payouts in society, and where individual accomplishment reigns supreme.
It’s interesting to compare the costs and benefits of each system, too. Natural selection obviously has a long history of wringing the best out of any population, since it gives the most resources to the most able. But this often comes at a cost to the general welfare of the group, as weaker members struggle and starve, deprived of essentials. Social selection flattens out the wealth distribution, which is typically a good way of encouraging large groups of people to cooperate. But, this also means that your best and brightest lose most, if not all of their edge. Which seems fine, until you realize that bad hunters getting good arrows (and good hunters getting bad arrows) results in a smaller amount of food for everyone.
As with most things, the ideal balance is typically somewhere in the middle. Raise the weak enough to encourage widespread cooperation, as well as establish a workable base standard of living, but ensure that society’s best still gain substantial profit by applying their talents. Natural selection is often unkind to weak individuals bound by its rule, but social selection is in many ways just as harsh to the strong. By learning from both, perhaps we can nudge ourselves that much closer to a perfect society.