I’ve long wanted a year to ruminate and write about my notion that the bottom line for human behavior, to which almost every action can be traced, is power. As soon as a three year old wails “she doesn’t want to be my friend” we are acting out the cellular knowledge that without friends we are alone in the world, and in great danger. Sexual jealousy, high-school cliques, road-rage, consummerism, on and on, are related at not too many degrees of separation to the need to be part of groups and within the groups to attain high status — to have power. Now Natalie Angier has a short, totally interesting article, in the NY Times Tuesday Science Section about animal behavior and just such behavior built on the same basic drive.
Wherever animals must pool their talents and numbers into cohesive social groups, scientists said, the better to protect against predators, defend or enlarge choice real estate or acquire mates, the stage will be set for the appearance of political skills — the ability to please and placate, manipulate and intimidate, trade favors and scratch backs or, better yet, pluck those backs free of botflies and ticks.
Over time, the demands of a social animal’s social life may come to swamp all other selective pressures in the environment, possibly serving as the dominant spur for the evolution of ever-bigger vote-tracking brains. And though we humans may vaguely disapprove of our political impulses and harbor “Fountainhead” fantasies of pulling free in full glory from the nattering tribe, in fact for us and other highly social species there is no turning back. A lone wolf is a weak wolf, a failure, with no chance it will thrive.