If you are a member of a species that has evolved to coexist in groups, then you are faced with some challenging decisions about how to spread your genes. To make sure that you have enough resources for your self and any offspring, you need to get sneaky. This is particularly true of primates who engage in deception and coalition formation, otherwise known as Machiavellian intelligence,40 after the medieval Italian scholar who wrote the rulebook about how to govern through cunning and strategy. Primates in highly social groups try to outsmart and outflank fellow competitors for both the attention of potential mates and the distribution of resources. They need the mental machinery to keep track of others and second-guess their intentions. To do that, they need big brains with large areas of cortex to keep track of all the potential complex behaviours and information that large groups generate. For example, consider the number of interactions that exist between a dozen friends. Not only do you have to keep track of every relationship between each pairing, but you also have to work out all the potential combinations between subgroups within the group.
Using analysis based on all the major primate groups, Dunbar has shown that the cortex to group-size ratio can be used to predict the optimum group size for humans. According to Dunbar’s calculations, humans should coexist best in groups of up to 150. Any larger and the demands on social skills exceed our best capacity. It is a radical claim, and still very contentious, but there does appear to be evidence to support the hypothesis, especially when one considers pre-industrial societies. Over the course of human civilization, technology and industrialization have changed the way that we form groups. But keep in mind that the post-agricultural age began around 10,000 years ago and, with it, human behaviour changed as our species shifted from roving hunter-gathers to sedentary subsistence farmers. When you consider only those remaining hunter-gather societies that did not adapt to agriculture, the analysis reveals that Dunbar’s ratio exists among traditional societies. Even early religious settlements in the United States, such as the Hutterites, seem to have been most successful when their communities contained no more than 150 individuals. When a Hutterite community grows larger than 150, a new breakaway community is formed. Finally, analysis of modern companies reveals that large workforces operate and are managed best when employees form subdivisions of around the magic 150 workers. When Malcolm Gladwell was researching Dunbar’s ratio for his bestseller, The Tipping Point, he reported that Gore-Tex, the company that manufactures the high-tech material found in many sporting clothes, expanded its operations by forming subdivisions of 150 workers each time there was a need to open a new division.41 Dunbar’s number is an intriguing idea, especially as technology develops to change the way humans interact and keep track of each other. However, what worked for earlier societies may still be operating today in the modern, socially networked world.
In line with the growing field of social cognitive neuroscience, Dunbar is correct in arguing that the human brain has evolved specialized capacity and processing capability dedicated towards social functions. We know this because why else would humans have evolved into the species that spends the longest proportion of their lives as children dependent on adults? The simple answer must be that as a species we have evolved a strategy to pass on as much information as possible from one generation to the next through our storytelling and instruction. Our ability to communicate means that our offspring can know more about the world they are to embark on by listening to and learning from others without having to rediscover everything for themselves. In short, our extended human childhood means that we do not have to reinvent the wheel with each generation.
Baby Bat Brains
Now that you know the basic architecture of the developing brain is one designed to learn from others, I expect you are wondering what it must be like to think like a baby. To answer that, let’s consider this problem from the perspective of what it must be like to be an animal.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel42 famously asked, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Most of us with vivid imaginations can contemplate being much smaller, having fur and even wings (who has not dreamed of being able to fly?), but we cannot really know what it is like to be a bat. A bat would not have the mind of a human, because its brain is different and so you cannot use your human mind to experience being a bat. As a bat, you would not be able to see in the way that humans do because your vision is so poor. You would have to rely on echolocation, which is why bats squeak when they fly as a way of mapping out the air space in front of them and identifying tasty insects to eat. A bat probably has more in common with a dolphin than a bird. The list of differences goes on, but the point is that you can never know what it would be like to be a bat for the simple reason that you have a human brain and a mind. The same applies to human babies.
The developmental psychologist John Flavell once said that he would trade all his degrees and honours to spend five minutes in the mind an infant – just to experience what it must be like to be a baby again.43 That would probably be a waste of his academic accolades. Just think about it for a moment. How could you see inside the mind of another person let alone a baby? Human babies have human minds but those minds are very different to one that we could appreciate as adults. If you had an adult mind inside the body of a baby, it would not be the same as thinking and experiencing the world as an infant. You would have to abandon all the knowledge and reasoning that you have built up as an adult. You would have to think like a baby. So you would not have an adult’s mind thinking like a baby. You would be a baby. As much as we might try, we can never get a true sense of what it is to have the mind of an infant. Every parent falls for this trick. When we stare at our infants in their cribs, we try to second-guess what they are thinking. We try to imagine what it must be like to be them, but for all our wishful thinking, they might as well be a bat.
An infant’s mind may be very alien to us but it is one that will eventually become an adult mind. Nature has built into humans the capacity to learn and to learn very quickly from others. It is not only doting adults who focus their attention on their offspring; each baby is wired to pay attention to others. It’s how our species has evolved a remarkable ability to transfer knowledge from one generation to the next and no other animal on the planet can do this as well as humans. But do babies know who they are? Babies have conscious awareness but does a baby have a sense of self yet? We cannot know for certain but I suspect not. Beginning the process of creating the self illusion requires early social interactions.
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The Machiavellian Baby
The development of the child’s personality could not go on at all without the constant modification of his sense of himself by suggestions from others. So he himself, at every stage, is really in part someone else, even in his own thought.
James Mark Baldwin (1902)
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Hitler was one – so was Mother Teresa. Every monster or messiah has been one. We were all babies once. We have all been cherub-like angels, blameless and innocent of any crimes and, in most cases, the apple of someone’s eye. But somewhere along the way, some of us lost our innocence. Some of us became evil. Some of us became good. Some of us became bankers. However we turned out, we all discovered our sense of our self along the way. How did that discovery happen?