brian j. callahan wrote:
>
> Jay Hanson writes:
> >
> >   A few million years ago, our ancestor Homo Habilis developed
> >a hierarchical social life based on hunting and gathering.
> >Habilis males and females shared meat and produce, dividing
> >jobs by gender:  child care and gathering to females,
> >fighting and hunting to males.  Habilis originated the
> >hunter-gatherer lifestyle that was to last for millions
> >of years until the invention of settled agriculture.
>
> I don't know why you say their social life hierarchical. In fact, I've heard
> anthropologists argue that hunter-gatherer societies were not hierarchical.
> Division of labor by gender or age or anything else does not necessitate
> hierarchy.

        Right, Brian. In PEOPLE WITHOUT GOVERNMENT: An Anthropology of
Anarchy , Dr. Harold Barclay supports the contention of most other
anthropologists that hunter-gatherers and most other social organization
of humans were stateless. Any authority was the type based on merit from
the !Kung! to the Lapps (among the stateless societies).

        In addition, the idea that submitting to authority has survival
value is questionable at best. It is based on the fallacy of group
selection. Authority commonly uses group selection arguements ("do it for
the good of the race") to justify individuals giving up their individual
fitness. It is well established that selection at the level of the
individual is much stronger than group selection UNLESS they are tending
in the same direction. Then they are additive. Thus, if a "leader" claims
something is "good for society" it will also be good for individual
fitness or we can know that the "leader" is deceiving others and probably
himself or herself and that the prescribed behavior is to increase the
fitness of the leader.

        I will check up on the claims vis a vis the putative hierarchical
social organization of Homo habilis , this seems to be based on older
group selection fallacies or what Trivers criticizes as " species-level
reasoning"

                                        Howard