A question of scale?

Do small groups of people, irrespective of their identity tend to survive better?

For the moment, lets abandon the existing textbook theory about our origins - starting out as primitive, wild, hunter gatherers who progressed over time to settle down as farmers, those who domesticated animals and the grain, multiplied rapidly and went on to establish the earliest civilizations, laws, military and on and on. That linear oversimplified timeline begins to fall apart, when we read about the new discoveries made in archeology, anthropology, the earth sciences and the history of the Holocene and the last Ice Age. As a species, for more than 150,000 years we have learned to work in ‘small teams’. The larger a community became, the more complex its needs, needing more teams and rules, for it to function in a stable manner.

Teamwork thrives, yet mostly as a small group. Since the dawn of human beings, kinship and friendship has served us tremendously in an evolutionary sense, and even today we barely remember more than a hundred names, of people that we formed relationships with (the good, the bad and the boring). Even in the biggest social organizations, containing hundreds of thousands of people, like the army, police, government, institutions of science, technology, information and large business corporations, we still apply teamwork. Hence it’s a question of scale, that works. Precisely because of working together in lesser numbers, we tend to succeed with the given challenge. To hunt a huge wooly Mamoth in Siberia or getting a breakthrough cure for a deadly disease. 95% of our time as a species, has been spent within groups of a few dozen individuals. So the question being, do small groups of people, irrespective of their individuality and identity tend to survive better and longer?

The world’s population was approximately 5 million at the beginning of the Holocene. Ah! what a paradise it must have been, as imagined by so many of us today. Human population had swelled to 900 million by 1810. Skyrocketing to 5 billion in 1987 and in 2022 we reached 8 billion. At the helm of the Great Acceleration is human population. The human pressure on the planet! No doubt human population has gone out of control, way beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Yet there is no undoing the numbers, not now and not so easily. The question of scale, points to biophysical limits and human relationships. The scale can be seen in the number of birds, animals, fish and many organisms hanging out together, in any given ecosystem. In other words, the number of stable relationships people are cognitively able to maintain at once, remains the same today as it did thousands and thousands years ago. Nothing much changed about us in that aspect. Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, puts the limit to about 150 people!

For a moment, all the big organizations we see today may fall apart like a deck of cards, into many tiny bands, units, platoons or “teams” who can maintain “group cohesion” to meet any given objective. Is it reasonable to say that every large group of people leads to centralized power and command. Not so when we look at past societies, but as of now there seems less and less options. So what keeps all those thousands of people, stuck together, to feed and resemble a given organization?

As proposed by Robin Dunbar, and now known as the ‘Dunbar's number’, the theory posits that there exists a cognitive limit, on human groups, of about 150 individuals. “To maintain group cohesion, individuals must be able to meet their own requirements, as well as coordinate their behavior with other individuals in the group” (Royal Society Publishing) The given clan, tribe, group or community, while remaining within the 150 limit, is also be able to defuse the direct and indirect conflicts that may happen during it’s existence. So why 150? and not 100 or 200 you may ask? Dunbar has been repeatedly criticized, on the grounds that most of his experiments were based on Chimpanzees, Bonobos and very few human beings (tribes). Obviously because Dunbar’s initial experiments were about “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates”. In the long run, tested by many organizations, the results were indeed substantiated with very few exceptions. “As expected, the maximum group size been substantiated by observations of human communities with group sizes ranging between 100 and 200. The groups were diverse, including hunter–gatherer communities in Africa and South America, military units, businesses, medical colleges, 18th-century and Neolithic villages…”(https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-003-1016-y)

‘Dunbar's number’ shows up in popular culture, inspiring writers such as Malcolm Gladwell in the Tipping point. Environmentalist and ecophilosopher Derrick Jensen has cited ‘Dunbar’s Number’ as good pointer, for sustained communal harmony and its limits. In The Dawn Of Everything, authors David Graeber and David Wengrow cite Dunbar’s theory as a vital aspect of our evolutionary formation, as “Achieving higher autonomy for individuals and families, within a small clan was precisely linked to their size and scale of commitment. Even today, big social organizations, which require high levels of social commitment, such as military brigades to church congregations, still gravitate towards the figure of 150 relationships. Ancient hunter gatherers societies left us with the knowledge and utility of socially scaled relationships.”

Dunbar’s theory may not validate itself in numbers, yet it is a strong reference point of our personal capacity - for kinship, to belong and build stable relationships which are mutually beneficial. ‘Dunbar's number’ is a concept still lacking empirical support. But the dispute amongst the experts, does not take away from the fact, that kinship as an evolutionary role, was most successful within small groups of people scattered allover the earth. Since birth we learn, that family forms the first circle of kinship, with mom, dad, brother, sister, daughter, son, grandchildren, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles etc (say about 20 to 30 people) that we gravitate towards in terms of nurture, protection and care, through our lives. This primary circle also confines us.

Not saying that everyone remains checked within circles, defined by family, nativity, geography, language, religion etc. Often many escape these confines, to form new clans or join an existing one. Today we live in a world where people from different parts of the planet form kinship, solidarity, sisterhoods, brotherhoods, associations, organizations etc motivated by common values and concerns, connected by technology - a ‘wild’ advantage which ancient hunter gatherers did not have at their disposal. Instead, the advantage which our ancestors possessed was their small (and effective) size. Scale of operations. They remained so small in numbers, simply because it worked very well in their favor, at the evolutionary race, to eventually place us as the dominant species on the planet. That initial advantage of small scale, made early human beings more grounded and efficient. As modern humans numbering billions, we have no idea of ‘scale’ in it’s natural sense. Nor did we retain the ability of our ancestors, to survive for longer with less. Instead we opted for surplus production, infinite economic growth, leading to a enormous population with a grim future, blown way out of scale and not scope. A natural collapse in population, seems more like a “correction”.

So how many connections can humans keep up? Five hundred, a thousand or more? And what good is the number beyond our cognitive limits? We do endlessly expand our circles during our lives, yet beyond a point the horizon disappears and we find ourselves visibly alone, in spite of ‘knowing’ so many people. A small circle offers better trade-offs as well as natural rewards over a period of time. I feel, it is a good idea to reduce human population on earth, but not just by reducing the number of people, but also reducing the circles or clans that we belong to, that we identify with, and wish to nurture in the future. Small is good. Being small, and staying small, lets us give more than we take, always working with natural laws and limits. Make your kinship of scale, and carefully and wisely!