A Story of Stories

In the last chapter, we met the human giant.

We talked about emergence and how the giant is what humanity looks like a few floors up the
tower from the individual.
Building giants was a necessity for ancient humans. A human tribe was more than the sum of its
parts, in physical power, in productivity, and in knowledge.

Given the powers of emergence, large human giants would be forces to reckon with. But unlike
ants, humans are more than just cells in competing giants—they’re competing individuals too. So
as tribes grew in size, the benefits of strength and capability would be accompanied by the cost
of increasing instability. A human tribe is held together by weaker glue than an ant colony, and
the bigger the tribe, the harder it is for that glue to hold up. This is partly why complex animals
like wolves, gorillas, elephants, and dolphins tend to roll in groups with under 100 members.

Early tribes of humans were probably similar to tribes of other apes—glued together mostly by
family ties. Kinship is an obvious natural glue because animals are programmed to be interested
in the immortality of those with genes most similar to them—so humans are more likely to cede
individual self-interest to a group when that group is family. That’s why today, people are so
willing to make huge sacrifices for family members.

Family glue is strongest between parents and children, because genes “know” that copies of
themselves live in their container’s direct progeny. Genes also have us selfishly caring about the
well-being of siblings and nieces and nephews because a very similar version of themselves lives
in them—but we don’t care quite as much about these people as we do about our children. As the
distance between blood relations grows, the glue thins. As evolutionist J.B.S. Haldane puts it: “I
would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.”

With that in mind, let’s imagine a big extended family made up of 27 immediate families—the
grandchildren and great-grandchildren of a single couple—living together as an ancient tribe.1

Say the red guy is the tribe’s chief. For the chief and his family, this is what the tribe feels like:
Pretty nice setup. The problem is that no one else views the tribe this way—because everyone is
at the center of their own circle. Let’s focus in on the chief’s sister and her family.
To this yellow family, the tribe feels like this:
Not ideal, but not the end of the world. But how about the chief’s second cousins—like the
orange family? Or the green family?
For these families—and all the other 16 families in that ring—the tribe feels like this:
And remember how the cousin system works. Your second cousin is equally related to you, your
siblings, and your first cousins—to them, you’re all equivalent second cousins.