If everyone in the network is equivalent – there is no social hierarchy – then there’s an optimal size both of the whole community and of one’s personal network that allows group coordination to be reached most quickly. The question is how long it takes the whole community to coordinate their individual choices this way. It doesn’t matter what exactly the decision is in the model it’s represented simply as a choice of which direction to face. They have devised a mathematical description of that task in which a community of agents is interconnected by social links between individuals, each of whom consults its own personal network in one-to-one interactions to make a decision. After all, elephants, so far as we know, don’t have a celebrity culture.ĭavid-Barrett and Dunbar propose that these hierarchical social networks facilitate the dispersal of useful information in communities that need to coordinate their behaviour – all looking for food in the same place, say – but which are too big for everyone to consult everyone else. “I went to school with Bill Gates”, or “My cousin married a baron”, or “I once played in a band that supported U2.” Considered as an aspect of biological or cultural evolution, however, the network should serve a rather more well defined and valuable function if it is to develop and survive. That needs little explanation: we’re all familiar with, and probably guilty of, the impulse to derive status from proximity to power – or these days, to celebrity. It’s within this network that the hierarchy is expressed. Like us, they split up into subgroups – but like us, these aren’t simply little communities isolated from one another, but are interwoven networks in which individuals form and maintain social links. We’re not unique in having several embedded layers of structure – other primates, elephants and orcas do too. One can say that the social hierarchy of ants is rather flat – every worker ant is like any other in social rank, amount of knowledge and so forth – while that of humans is generally both steep (with a strong differentiation of individuals) and many-layered.
That’s because the hierarchy can make it easier for any individual to get hold of useful, reliable information – where to find food, say, or how to get a plumber – without having to ask everyone.
It shows that the existence of a social hierarchy in a community can be adaptive, in the sense that it helps the community to function more efficiently. Is this, in fact, a law of nature? A paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology by economist Tamas David-Barrett of Birkbeck College in London and anthropologist Robin Dunbar of Oxford University seems to say so. And though some might dream of utopias in which no one has any more power or importance than another, these social hierarchies always rear their head eventually. Humans, in contrast, have complex, many-tiered and overlapping hierarchical structures: only we seem to have developed the exquisitely nuanced caste of the local government officer. But in an ant society, at least you know where you stand: you’re either a queen, a worker, or a male, fit for nothing but reproducing. Indeed, if there’s one characteristic shared by almost every human society, it is inequality: the existence of a social hierarchy. Or perhaps the emphasis is on the word “respect,” recognizing the obligation to provide the rest of the world with an explanation they can evaluate for themselves.“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, declared the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence, but the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson did not seem to think they need stay that way. As British political theorist John Locke wrote: “The people have no other remedy in this, as in all other cases where they have no judge on earth, but to appeal to heaven.” The reference to a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” might be viewed as a kind of an international public opinion test.
But the ultimate judge of the rightness of their cause will be God, which is why the revolutionaries spoke of an “appeal to heaven”-an expression commonly found on revolutionary banners and flags. The Declaration is like the indictment of a criminal that states the basis of his criminality. “Declare the causes” indicates they are publicly stating the reasons and justifying their actions rather than acting as thieves in the night.
It asserts that Americans as a whole (and not as members of their respective colonies) are a distinct “people.” To “dissolve the political bands” revokes the “social compact” that existed between the Americans and the rest of “the People” of the British commonwealth, reinstates the “state of nature” between Americans and the government of Great Britain, and makes “the Laws of Nature” the standard by which this dissolution and whatever government is to follow are judged.