Property: The Great Leap Forward (Very TL;DR)

[Borodog]

Cliff's notes at bottom.

In The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins discusses a 40,000 year old cultural revolution that he calls the “Great Leap Forward,” after the fashion of Jared Diamond:

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Archaeology suggests that something very special began to happen to our species around 40,000 years ago. Anatomically, our ancestors who lived before this watershed date were the same as those who came later. Humans sampled earlier than the watershed would be no more different from us than they were from their own contemporaries in other parts of the world, or indeed than we are from our contemporaries. That’s if you look at their anatomy. If you look at their culture, there is a huge difference. Of course there are also huge differences between the cultures of different peoples across the world today, and probably then too. But this wasn’t true if we go back much more than 40,000 years. Something happened then – many archaeologists regard it as sudden enough to be called an ‘event.’ I like Jared Diamond’s name for it, the Great Leap Forward.
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Earlier than the Great Leap Forward, man-made artifacts had hardly changed for a million years. The ones that survive for us are almost entirely stone tools and weapons, quite crudely shaped. Doubtless wood (or in Asia, bamboo) was a more frequently worked material, but wooden relics don’t easily survive. As far as we can tell, there were no paintings, no carvings, no figurines, no grave goods, no ornamentation. After the Leap, all these things suddenly appear in the archaeological record, together with musical instruments such as bone flutes, and it wasn’t long before stunning creations like the Lascaux Cave murals were created by Cro-Magnon people. A disinterested observer taking the long view from another planet might see our modern culture, with its computers, supersonic planes and space exploration, as an afterthought to the Great Leap Forward. On the very long geological timescale, all our modern achievements, from the Sistine Chapel to Special Relativity, from the Goldberg Variations to the Goldbach Conjecture, could be seen as almost contemporaneous with the Venus of Willendorf and the Lascaux Caves, all part of the same cultural revolution, all part of the blooming cultural upsurge that succeeded the long Lower Palaeolithic stagnation . . . The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins, p.35.

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What could be the cause of this “Great Leap”? Dawkins summarizes the theories that it was the origin of language, or perhaps some particular facet of language that allowed for this cultural revolution:

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Some authorities are so impressed by the Great Leap Forward that they think it coincided with the origin of language. What else, they ask, could account for such a sudden change? It is not as silly as it sounds to suggest that language arose suddenly. Nobody thinks writing goes back more than a few thousand years, and everyone agrees that brain anatomy didn’t change to coincide with anything so recent as the invention of writing. In theory, speech could be another example of the same thing. Nevertheless, my hunch, supported by the authority of linguists such as Steven Pinker, is that language is older than the Leap . . .
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If not language itself, perhaps the Great Leap Forward coincided with the sudden discovery of what we might call a new software technique: maybe a new trick of grammar, such as the conditional clause, which, at a stroke, would enabled ‘what if’ imagination to flower. Or maybe early language, before the leap, could be used to talk only about things that were there on the scene. Perhaps some forgotten genius realized the possibility of using words referentially as tokens of things that were not immediately present. It is the difference between ‘That waterhole which we can both see’ and ‘Suppose there was a waterhole the other side of the hill.’ Or perhaps representational art, which is all but unknown in the archaeological record before the Leap, was the bridge to referential language. Perhaps people learned to draw bison, before they learned to talk about bison that were not immediately visible.

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Personally, I have no doubt that language could have arisen swiftly, perhaps stunningly so. Language provides such an enormous selective advantage on its users that I find it difficult to conceive of what mechanism could prevent “language runaway” once a species developed sentience (which I define somewhat arbitrarily as the capacity to make long term future plans, rationally deduce and weigh the likely outcomes of alternate plans and then choose among them).

However, for precisely this reason I think it is very unlikely that the Great Leap Forward had anything to do with language. Although it is likely impossible to say from the fossil record (although theoretically not impossible to say from analysis of our DNA), I think it is quite likely that language is very old indeed, precisely because I see no mechanism that can halt its runaway development once humanity became human (i.e. rational), and that evidently happened millions of years ago. How do I know this? Because humans have been making capital goods (stone tools) for millions of years that can only be used at some distant time in an individual’s future; he must plan to use the tool and then make it before he can actually do utilize it. He does this because he realizes that he can be more productive in the future with the tool than he can be in the present without it (as an aside, he must first engage in savings and/or forego present consumption while he constructs his tool; he is willing to do this again because he realizes that he values higher rates of consumption in the future for the lower rate of consumption he must endure in the present, during the tool’s production).

So if it was not language that made the Great Leap Forward possible, what was it? My strong hunch is that it was the advent of the concept of property. More specifically, the concept of inherent respect of other people’s property.

Consider this. As I have said on many an occasion, every two year old and dog has a concept of property; both inherently understand the concept of “Mine!” If a dog has a bone and you attempt to take it from him, he will snap, snarl, bite and otherwise defend his claim. Take candy from a baby and the baby will quickly let you know that he feels he has been wronged.

But what is it that dogs and babies do not have a concept of? “Yours.” Or at least, no concept of the persistence of “Yours”.

Consider specifically a pack of wolves. A wolf with a haunch of meat will defend it from aggressors who would seek to take it from him. The wolf understand “mine.” What the wolf does not understand is “yours.” This is not to say, of course, that every wolf attempts at every opportunity to violently take away the food of every other wolf; this would be very costly. Such behavior is evolutionarily penalized. Each wolf tends to avoid the risks of violent conflict and the associated costs (unless of course he is starving, since the reward (not dying of starvation) is worth the risk (possible injury or death). Note this neatly explains the behavior of various members of the pack; the alpha male is the alpha because he is the strongest. His risk during conflict is the lowest, and hence is incentivized toward conflict and will tend to steal the meat of lesser wolves at will until he is satiated. Meanwhile, lesser ranking wolves are lesser ranking precisely because they are weaker, and their risks during conflict are greater, and they will tend to avoid conflict with the Alpha male by relinquishing their claims on their property. These same incentives work all the way down the pack order, leading to a very orderly hierarchical structure in the pack.

But what happens when a wolf is distracted and his attention leaves his property? Other wolves do not respect his claim. They will dart in and steal his property at will. I see this behavior all the time in my dogs; they do not respect other’s claims on property except when those claims are being actively defended. A dog will steal a toy as soon as the other dog is not looking. A dog will steal another’s place (or yours) on the couch when you get up for a moment.

Apparently wolves and dogs can respect others’ property only so long as those claims are actively defended; i.e. they have no persistence of respect for others’ property.

The same is true for our nearest evolutionary cousins, the great apes. Gorillas and chimpanzees certainly understand “Mine”, and they seem to understand “Yours” as long as you are watching them (again, to within a hierarchical structure created by strength ratios within the group and the associated incentives to conflict and acquiescence), but they have no “Persistence of Yours.”

How then are modern humans different, at least regarding this one notion, the persistence of “yours”, than dogs and chimpanzees? Well, modern (adult) humans clearly have a concept of the “persistence of yours”, even when you are not around. This is certainly cultural to some extent, although part of it may be innate (I suspect part of it must be, and will provide a supporting argument below).

I believe that that it is impossible to deny that in general humans actually have this quality, persistence of the respect for others’ property claims even in the absence of an active defense of those claims, either to a greater or lesser extent in every culture, purely from empirical evidence alone. How many millions of empty houses on empty streets could be looted during the day by how many millions if this were not the case? Indeed I claim that modern civilization could not be possible in the absence of this quality for the following reasons.

If human beings did not in general respect property in the absence of an active defense, what would society look like? Well, there would be no incentive to produce anything that you could not carry with you at all times and defend easily from attack. Even if you could carry it, there would still be little incentive, because you must at some point sleep, at which time you can fully expect it to be stolen. Hence people might only manufacture those things that they could physically wear, or tie around themselves, or lay across while sleeping, such that they would have to at least be woken before their property could be stolen. Such a culture could never accumulate much in the way of capital beyond skins and stone tools because there is literally no incentive to do so. Does this sound familiar to you?

I suspect quite strongly that the lack of this one concept, the persistence of the respect for property in the absence of active defense, the “Persistence of Yours,” is what kept the Paleolithic culture stagnant for a million years or more. In fact, it cannot but be that there was a transition at some point from the wolflike state of affairs without this concept to the modern state of affairs with it. What exactly should we expect to see looking back at the archaeological record during such a transition?

We should expect to see a change in the culture from very minimal capital goods to more elaborate capital goods. More time would be invested in creating them if they were less likely to be stolen. The same would logic would apply for leisure goods such as art and flutes; they are more likely to be made if they are less likely to be stolen. Furthermore, as more and more elaborate capital goods are made and accumulated, productivity will rise, as will standards of living and leisure time. More time resources could be diverted to such activities as art, for example cave paintings. In short, there should be a rapid paradigm shift, a phase change from an impoverished cultural dearth to a rich and blossoming culture. This is exactly what is observed in the Great Leap Forward.

I said that I would propose an argument for why modern humanity should innately behave in this manner. This concept, like language, provides such incredible benefits upon those who practices it that it cannot help but exert powerful selection pressure. Those who practice the Persistence of Yours will gain a tremendous evolutionary advantage over those who don’t. This is why we would expect human beings to innately behave in this manner; it could not but be selected for strongly.

One might then object that, according to my earlier arguments, this phase chase, the development of the Persistence of Yours should have developed early, like language. I would argue that that is not necessarily the case at all. In the case of language, the apparatus of language was already there, the ability to grunt and vocalize and communicate that provided the raw material for evolution to work upon was already extent. But the idea of the respect for other people’s property in the absence of them actively defending it does not seem to be an evolutionarily “obvious” solution. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution point to just the opposite; taking whatever you can when you can get away with it. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious “raw material” for this behavior to develop from, which was not the case for language.

So we must then ask, how does this mechanism operate? Is it some warm fuzzy nebulous feeling that you shouldn’t take other people’s stuff? I suspect part of it is exactly that, reinforced culturally (because cultures evolve as well, and cultures that have such an ethic will outcompete cultures that do not), but I think by far the most significant thing is actually willingness of the group to back up the property owner.

Think of a small tribe of human beings. Each must consumer, and in order to consume they must produce, and none wants to have his produce stolen. However, each is also continually tempted to steal from the other members, because it is easier than producing. In other words, this society is essentially a giant set of Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemmas, without foreseeable end. The proper strategy for such a “game”, is Tit For Tat, where the “players” (members of the tribe) cooperate (do not steal from each other), until such time as one of them “defects” (steals from someone else), at which time the victim punishes him by not cooperating in the future and/or “defecting” against him in turn (stealing his stuff back, maybe and then some). Essentially, because each member of the tribe does not want to be stolen from, he should not steal.

More importantly is the willingness by other members of the group to help the wronged by acting collectively against the individual who wronged him; i.e. they got his back. This tends to negate the power differentials that incentivize conflict and theft by the Alpha males and other strong members in a wolf pack type structure, because the entire group is willing to come to the aid of the victim. I.e. when the group “backs up” the victim because they don’t want their stuff stolen. I’m not sure what the game theoretical term for such a strategy is, if there is one. I’ll call it Backed Up Tit For Tat.

The Backed Up Tit For Tat strategy is exactly what is needed for the Persistence of Yours to get going, are again there should be powerful selection pressures favoring it. The Great Leap Forward represents the inevitable result of the falling into place of the other side of the coin that is private property, bringing “yours” and “mine” together in a kind of economic yin-yang relationship.

This is not to say, of course, that human beings don’t also still have their wolflike evolutionary heritage. When people believe they can get away with it, they steal, and the likelihood of the theft goes up with the perceived reward and down with the perceived risk. As David Sklansky loves to remind us, if an Angolan can steal a billion dollars from Bill Gates without getting caught, he’ll do it, and it doesn’t even make sense to ask questions about whether or not he “should” do it. It’s just that the Backed Up Tit For Tat strategy seeks to reduce the potential rewards of theft and increase the potential risks.

Theft, by the way, tends to occur when the individual either is in a unique situation (i.e. a single Prisoners’ Dilemma and not an Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma), or in situations where an individual’s time preference is so high that he believes it to be like a single PD instead of and IPD (even if he has never heard the terms and does not understand the concepts; they still apply to him).

Lastly, I think I may have just explained an extremely important piece of human history. Where do I go from here with my theory?

Cliff's Notes: The cultural Great Leap Forward of 40,000 BC can be explained by the advent of the "respect" of other people's claims to property even in the absence of their active defense of those claims. I've just explained a crucial piece of human history. I rock. Etc.

[Shadowrun]

very intresting, do you have any sort of proof why you belief the great leap foward was the concept of "yours" other than your logic/analogy?

P.S. I did read the whole post.

[Borodog]

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very intresting, do you have any sort of proof why you belief the great leap foward was the concept of "yours" other than your logic/analogy?

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Not a whit. But my gut feeling is that it is very unlikely for it to not be correct.

[chezlaw]

Seems plausible to me. I'd call it the discovery of trust based morality but its noticable from AC discussions that this and property rights are basically the same.

Interesting stuff. Not convinced it couldn't be something else that caused the great leap forward but seems likely that morailty/property rights were neccesary at some point.

chez

[Nielsio]

Haven't read the whole thing yet, but you'll probably enjoy this one:

http://ca.geocities.com/s.molyneux@r..._causality.htm

[Borodog]

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Seems plausible to me. I'd call it the discovery of trust based morality but its noticable from AC discussions that this and property rights are basically the same.

Interesting stuff. Not convinced it couldn't be something else that caused the great leap forward but seems likely that morailty/property rights were neccesary at some point.

chez

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I would call "trust based morality" the implementation of the property right recognition. So yes, same difference.

[hmkpoker]

Excellent post [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

The Backed up Tit for Tat (this term needs some work [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]) pretty much explains how a judicial system can work independent of a state. It really answers a lot of questions that non-ACists ask.

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Lastly, I think I may have just explained an extremely important piece of human history. Where do I go from here with my theory?

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The logical conclusion of this is an advocacy of anarchocapitalism, you just got to it through a different route than Mises took.

[guesswest]

I agree this is an excellent post, I really enjoyed it. It's decidedly speculative, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't be valid.

But even if it's correct, it's a huge step to to say 'the logical conclusion of this is an advocacy of AC'. The only logical conclusion is that whatever political system results should incorporate some recognition of property rights, which more or less all of them do. That's not to say AC is desirable or not but if it is this isn't the argument that gets us there.

[Borodog]

Yeah, I don't think this article says anything at all about modern political systems, and that was not the intention.

[madnak]

I don't think property "is" the Great Leap Forward. Or language, or art. I don't know what the Great Leap Forward "is," but I think property, language, and art all moved to the next level when it "happened." And I don't think you could have one without the others. I'd liken it to the Cambrian explosion. I'm not sure there was any single trigger - more like building momentum and feedback patterns.