Reply #4: I agree with you about the instincts.

[TygrBright]

But a few millenia of the jefe-based social structuring is probably not enough to make a real difference in evolutionary terms. The telling factor, to me, is the parallel structures that have run for far longer: A very localized hierarchical structure (family/clan) welded to a much larger decentralized (perhaps not "distributed" in the strictest sense) set of structures based on inter-family and inter-clan relationships and resource use. You can see the echoes of these parallel tracks in some of the remaining !Kung peoples of sub-Saharan Africa and South American native populations. I am guessing that the long stretch of human pre-history has programmed us much more thoroughly in that direction. It may even be the source of the anti-hierarchical elements of human nature that seem to continually recur.

But again, you're quite right: Intuition, wishful thinking, bullshit or whatever--trying to observe human nature "objectively" is like deep-sea creatures trying to perceive water. We are too immersed in our humanity.

For me the gravamen of the argument rests in our nature as tool-making creatures, and the extent to which the tools we make have shaped our evolution and, ultimately, our history. We have now created an extraordinarily powerful tool based on the distributed, non-linear model: A vast network of communication and information exchange that is in the process of fundamentally reshaping almost every aspect of our economic structure. In that sense, the cat is already far out of the bag. Too much of the "global" economy rests on that tool to go back without an even more destructive catastrophic change.

That tool is now making deep inroads in changing our social and cultural structures as well. Our political structure lags far, far behind, but for how long?

interestedly,
Bright