The Evolutionary Continuity of Social Organisation

Abstract

Human social organisation is commonly studied through several partially separated explanatory traditions. Primatology and social ethology examine dominance, affiliation, coalition and emergent social structure; evolutionary theory examines cooperation, intergroup competition and social selection; cognitive and cultural-evolutionary approaches examine symbolic representation and external information storage; institutional theory examines persistent rule-governed organisation; and social psychology demonstrates that represented groups, causes and abstract values can acquire powerful motivational force. None of these mechanisms is proposed here as novel. This paper develops a synthesis connecting them into a continuous evolutionary architecture. In the ancestral condition, evolved extra-familial social dispositions generated socially consequential behaviour from which supra-individual organisation emerged. This organisation subsequently altered the behavioural environment of individuals and could affect collective performance, creating the possibility of evolutionary feedback upon dispositions contributing to its production. Human symbolic capacities subsequently allowed components of this organisational layer to be represented, communicated and externalised, greatly increasing their persistence, scale and informational complexity. Cultural representations and institutions could then recruit evolved motivational systems whose origins preceded symbolic institutional organisation. Three propositions follow: functional continuity between pre-human emergent social regulation and human institutional regulation; an evolutionary feedback loop connecting social motivation, behaviour, organisation and collective consequences; and an expansion in the range and abstraction of represented social objects capable of recruiting inherited motivational systems. We are not aware of an existing account integrating these established mechanisms into the evolutionary continuity proposed here. The resulting architecture is advanced as a testable theoretical synthesis.