Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [77]
Fletcher applied to be master of the Bounty, but John Fryer was already appointed by the admiralty, so he mustered as master’s mate, along with William Elphinstone, so at most Christian coshared third in command. During the voyage, however, Bligh promoted him to acting lieutenant, which made him second in command over Fryer. So Bligh wasn’t the only officer on board with social status ambitions. For Christian, a successful Bounty mission might net him even more than a couple of higher notches up the naval hierarchy; within his family niche he stood to gain status among his already successful older brothers.
In this Bligh and Fletcher were following their evolutionary impulse to gain status. The overwhelming evidence from anthropologists is that most social mammals, all social primates, and every human community ever studied show some form of hierarchy and social status. While it is true that hunter-gatherer communities are much more egalitarian than modern state societies, sans such a dramatic comparison one can find subtle but real forms of social hierarchy in all peoples. The African pygmies called Aka, for example, are relatively egalitarian, but they recognize a leader, called a kombeti, who is typically a highly skilled hunter with prestige and power within the group, who is rewarded with more food, women, and children. In the South American Ache peoples, meat is distributed and consumed equally among all members of the community, but the most successful hunters have more extramarital affairs and more children—legitimate and illegitimate—than less successful hunters; and those children survived better than the offspring of other hunters. Anthropologist Donald Brown even includes social hierarchy on his list of human universal, meaning there are no exceptions.
Note, as well, the association of bonding and attachment with hierarchy and status. The higher your status and hierarchy, the greater your opportunity for bonding and attachment. As Darwin observed in The Descent of Man:
The strongest and most vigorous men,—those who could best defend and hunt for their families, and during later times the chiefs or head-men,—those who were provided with the best weapons and who possessed the most property, such as a large number of dogs or other animals, would have succeeded in rearing a greater average number of offspring, than would the weaker, poorer and lower members of the same tribes. There can, also, be no doubt that such men would generally have been able to select the more attractive women. At present the chiefs of nearly every tribe throughout the world succeed in obtaining more than one wife.
Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon documented just such an effect among the Yanomamö people of Amazonia, in which the most successful warriors fathered the most number of offspring.
If you take men who are in the same age category and divide them by those who have killed other men (unokais) and those who have not killed other men (non-unokais), in every age category unokais had more offspring. In fact, unokais averaged 4.91 children versus 1.59 for non-unokais. The reason is clear in the data on the number of wives: unokais averaged 1.63 wives versus 0.63 for non-unokais. This was an unacceptable finding for those who hold the ideal view of the Noble savage. “Here’s Chagnon saying that war has something good in it.” I never said any such thing. I merely pointed out that in the Yanomamö society, just like in our own and other societies, people who are successful and good warriors, who defend the folks back home, are showered with praise and rewards. In our own culture, for example, draft dodgers are considered a shame. Being a successful warrior has social rewards in all cultures. The Yanomamö warriors do not get medals and media. They get more wives.
It’s not that one is consciously seeking status in order to attract more mates and intimidate competing males; the effect is