Fight Like An Animal

In this episode, we examine not how biology pervades politics, but how politics pervades biology: how the course of evolution has been shaped by millions of years of what can only be described as political struggle. We examine two types of ethnogenesis in human ancestors and other primates, fissioning events and internal changes in social structure, and how the formation of new cultures is sometimes equivalent to what we call in the modern world political revolution. Along the way, we see the evolutionary trajectory away from certain forms of hierarchy and aggression in humans and bonobos as the result of conscious agency exerted by ancestors of those species, present a bimodal view of aggression, and examine how even in despotic species (and human social arrangements) power is ultimately highly distributed. Finally, we examine more evidence for the inverse relationship between aggression and social cognition, framing egalitarian political struggle as a struggle for comprehension.