Statistical Mechanics of Social Hierarchies: A Mathematical Model for the Evolution of Human Societal Structures

Physics • Vol/Iss. 6(2) • MDPI • • Published In • Pages: 629-644 •
By Caticha, Nestor, Calsaverini, Rafael S., Vincente, Renato

Abstract

For thousands of years, scholars have been theorizing about why human groups structure themselves the way they do, allowing more power and freedom to certain individuals and less to others. This article takes an evolutionist approach to that question, using a variety of mathematical models to predict changes in social organization throughout the evolutionary history of humanity and its ancestors, accounting for changes in brain size and global human populations. The authors validate their models using data from the ethnographic record. In general, they find that tendency towards hierarchy decreases with bigger brain size but increases with global population growth.

Samples

Sample Used Coded Data Comment
Ethnographic Atlas (EA)Other Researchers'Group size, hierarchy and climate information for 248 cultures

Hypotheses (2)

HypothesisSupported
While social organization among humans and our evolutionary ancestors has tended to shift towards more egalitarian modes as encephalization occurred over the last few million years, it has generally been shifting back towards more hierarchical modes in the last several thousand years following the global population explosions of the Holocene.Supported
Modern non-literate humans tend to exhibit an intermediate degree of social hierarchy in mild climates, while in harsher climates the degree of social hierarchy tends to be correlated to the group size (with groups of less than 100 people tending to be more egalitarian, and those with more than 1000 members tending to be more hierarchical).Supported
Documents and Hypotheses Filed By: seb.wanggaouette