The Three Cultures That Create Civilization

The Three Cultures that Create Civilization
Preface
Tight and loose cultures - farmer vs hunter-gatherer minds
A theory of culture based on evolved temperament
Mapping the human cultural landscape
Settlers, Prospectors and Pioneers
The evolutionary psychology of the myside bias
Evolutionary Ethics - The Origins of our Moral Foundations
Herders, Warriors, And Traders - The Origin of Social Stratification
What the Griffin Warrior and the biblical King David can tell us about early state formation
A General Theory of Culture and Cultural Dynamics
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and
Particularly Prosperous
The evolution of Western Culture and what we can learn from subsistence culture
Three very different corporate cultures: Google, Microsoft, Apple
How the West got even WEIRDer than we could ever have imagined
Ishmael’s Takers and Leavers and the forager vs farmer hypothesis
Cultural learning, science deniers, and scientific evolution
Divided We Stand: Making Sense of Three Psychological Regions of the United States
The Eleven American Nations
The fight between farmer and forager types (conservatives and progressives)
The Medical Profession as a Micro-Model for Mankind
Casualties of Civilization
And in my mind, in my head
This is where we all came from
The dreams we have, the love we share
This is what we're waiting for
- Gigi D’Agostino
Dedicated to my beloved children: Missy, Sophie, Sashka and Andrej
Preface
A couple of years ago I had the idea that neurodiverse people (ASD, ADHD, gifted, etc.)
have hunter-gatherer vs farmer-herder minds. I did a lot of research on the idea and so far
only found a single source that would directly confirm this idea. That was Thom Hartman’s
hunter in a farmer world hypothesis about people with ADHD. However, ADHD wasn’t the
single defining characteristic. As I will show in this book ADHD is very much a forager &
herder phenomenon, both characterised by a nomadic lifestyle. The single most defining
characteristic is probably Elaine Aron’s idea about highly sensitive people (HSPs) when it
comes to hunter-gatherer minds. However, even Aron got a lot of things wrong, especially
that HSP has got nothing to do with neurodiversity, probably because she sees a
pathologizing aspect in neurodiversity that isn’t there in HSPs, even though she says that
patients in psychotherapy are overwhelmingly HSPs.
If I were autistic (which I am not, but I do have ADHD) I would say that this topic has become
my “special interest”. And indeed it has been my obsession for the past years, not a day
going by on which I thought about this hypothesis. And I have read dozens and dozens of
books in order to find any hints towards our different kinds of minds. Most books have
provided me with enough material for a single blog post, some, like Joe Henrich’s WEIRDest
People in the World (2020) have become more pervasive in my writing.
This book is a collection of blog posts, which I have reordered and partially re-written for the
convenience of the reader. However, there is a lot of repetition in this book I could only have
avoided if I had written it from scratch. My apologies to the reader.
Tight and loose cultures - farmer vs hunter-gatherer
minds
May 23, 2020
Similarly to people, cultures have a “personality”. A distinction that has recently become
popular is “tight vs loose” cultures by Michele J. Gelfand, who investigated 33 nations
regarding their tightness. The distinction itself is quite similar to conservative vs liberal. In
tight cultures, people are made to follow the rules in a more stringent way. School uniforms
are an example. It is not a coincidence that the UK and Japan score quite high on Gefland’s
tightness scale, both at 6.8 vs the Netherlands at 3.3. On the upper end of tightness
countries like China and Malaysia, where smoking in restaurants can be punished with up to
half a year of imprisonment. While most people in European countries wouldn’t approve of
smoking in restaurants, they wouldn’t approve of such harsh punishments, either.
How come cultures are so different from each other? The strongest link is to our ancestral
mode of subsistence. Hunter-gatherer societies emphasized individual achievement, i.e.
self-reliance, whereas high food accumulating societies reinforced compliant behaviour,
obedience and responsibility to optimise collective achievement. From an evolutionary point
of view, we can assume that genes fostering compliance were selected for in agricultural
societies.
One area where this becomes obvious is child-rearing. Farmers had strict child-rearing
practices (authoritarian) to make the children help with the daily and prepare them for their
adult routine. Hunter-gatherers, on the other hand, have a permissive parenting style and
children are not required to do adult work until grown-up.
Later research indeed showed that agricultural societies (e.g., the Temne of Sierra Leone),
which require strong norms to foster the coordination necessary to grow crops for survival,
had strict child-rearing practices and children who were high on conformity. Hunting and
fishing societies (e.g., the Inuit) had lenient child-rearing practices and children who were
low on conformity (from Gefland et al. 2011)
It is therefore hardly surprising that the San hunter-gatherers are among the loosest
societies with ambiguous norms and greater permissiveness for norm violation.
Of course, nowadays most societies are a mix of people carrying hunter-gatherer, pastoralist
and farmer genes. Even so, modern hunter-gatherer minds can still be identified due to
assortative mating (hunter-gatherer minds and farmer minds don’t mix easily!):
hunter-gatherer farmer
High on personality trait “openness”, low High on personality trait

on “conscientiousness” “conscientiousness”, low on “openness”
Strongly (actively) egalitarian status-seeking
Tendency towards out-group sociality, Tendency towards in-group sociality

more accepting of diversity (e.g. different (identifies more strongly with a core group,
sexuality, refugees, etc.) like family, religious group or sports team)
More liberal ideology More conservative ideology
Less sexual dimorphism More (display of) sexual dimorphism
Later onset of puberty Earlier onset of puberty
More monogamous tendencies Less monogamous tendencies
Tendency to wanting fewer children Tendency to wanting more children
Relaxed child-rearing attitude Authoritative child rearing, “helicopter

parenting”
Night owls Early risers
“Lazier” (when it comes to physical work More hard-working

and chores)
highly rebellious when feeling personal individualistic, but also more conformist
freedom and values are threatened and highly loyal to their core group
Less interest in small-talk and gossip Higher interest in small-talk and gossip
One of the most significant hallmark of hunter-gatherer minds is their openness. This
personality trait has been shown to be diminishing in Western societies Jokela (2012). I have
argued that hunter-gatherer minds prefer to have fewer or nowaday often no children at all.
The disappearance of hunter-gatherer genes will inevitably lead to tighter societies. With
each visit to the United Kindom, I have the feeling it has been a little bit more “farmerized”
since my last stay. Of course, it is important that people respect rules and each other, but
hunter-gatherer minds like me get very uneasy when everything is overregulated. What’s
more, there seem to be many more rules nowadays, but less respect among people for each
other. In hunter-gatherer societies, people get along just fine, with a minimum of rules:
egalitarianism is the main principle to go by.
A theory of culture based on evolved temperament
August 15, 2020
Around 10.000 years ago there were basically three types of human subsistence economies:
hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists (herders). There is genetic evidence that these
“tribes” didn’t mix initially. People in modern Sardinia, for example, are primarily the
descendants of early farmers migrating into Europe who replaced the local population of
hunter-gatherers. The people in Sardina show little admixture from hunter-gatherers or
herders.
There might have been many reasons for not interbreeding, like tribalism and differences in
mentality (hunter-gatherers are more egalitarian than farmers) and even physical differences
(farmers may have evolved more endomorph, physically stronger body types adapted to the
hard routine work of farming).
This kind of assortative mating can still be seen today and has been investigated by Helen
Fisher on dating sites and by people working within the framework ob Myers-Briggs
personality types, like David Keirsey. Hunter-gatherer types usually mate with each other,
whereas pastoralists and farmers tend to mate within their own group.
One culturological difference that results from differences in temperament is the distinction
between tight farmer cultures (conservative, duty-oriented, very in-group loyal) and loose
hunter-gatherer cultures (allowing for more freedom and demanding less compliance). This
difference has likely evolved because early farmers required higher levels of cooperation for
survival than hunter-gatherers. This also required taking on subordination to authority as the
work often needed to be hierarchically organized. Hunter-gatherers generally would not be
willing to take orders from authority and be content with inferior positions in a social
hierarchy.
Early civilizations, i.e advanced agricultural societies usually had tripartite social
stratification. This separation of classes cannot be merely explained by less egalitarian
farmer organization, as a hierarchy (alpha to omega) itself does not entail a division into
classes. What seems more likely is that these classes were at least initially based on tribal
affiliation and assortative mating.
Upper class: early farmers (SJ) king, priests, landowners, high-ranking

soldiers
Middle class: pastoralists (SP) warriors, artisans, and merchants
Lower class: hunter-gatherers (N) labourers, slaves
The history of civilizations can be understood by these temperaments or “forces” acting on

each other. Farmer types are highly productive, but also tend to conserve the status quo as
they are programmed for routine, love of tradition, conformism and dislike of change.
Hunter-gatherer types usually struggle in a farmer world, they, therefore, have tried to make
a life for themselves easier by technological (reducing hated routine work) and social
(reducing inequality, social tension, etc.) innovation. These two opposing forces have been
the driver of historical progress.
Historical places that have brought a lot of progress were driven by farmer productivity
paired with hunter-gatherer leadership. Athens is such an example: it brought democracy,
philosophy as well as a host of other cultural innovation. Sparta, on the other hand, seems to
have been dominated by a mix of herders (fearless warriors) and farmers (highly organized).
Herders cultures in history were generally not able to scale up and remain sustainable
without the help of farmer types. Their empires (Huns, Mongols, Vikings, etc.) often
disappeared as quickly as they appeared on the historic scene.
Wherever hunter-gatherer types became dominant, peace, science and the arts flourished,
like in Florence during the reign of the Medicis. The American Revolution was mostly led by
hunter-gatherer types and the Declaration of Independence was drafted and signed mostly
by hunter-gatherer types too.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness.
This isn’t just a declaration of political independence, it’s also a declaration of
hunter-gatherer values and universal human rights. Most of the early American presidents,
from Jefferson to Lincoln, where hunter-gatherer types. America has increasingly become
farmerized, more in-group social and conservative in recent times. Building walls and fences
is something that appeals to farmers, but not hunter-gatherers.
Even though most populations nowadays represent a mix of the three “tribes”, there are
occasionally groups that tend towards the predominance of one type. The Amish are typical
for the farmer type, they are very in-group centred and have been resisting change for
centuries. They are hard-working people, who could make their lives easier by adopting
modern technology. They don't, because they see it as threat to their community and values.
Mapping the human cultural landscape
November 17, 2021
One of the most consistent findings of political orientation is that while conservatives tend to
be heavily invested in their local communities, liberals are not only open to foreign cultures,
they are often even fascinated by them. These opposite values are captured by the Big 5
traits of conscientiousness C and openness O, respectively.
This distinction already represents the first and most important axis on our cultural
landscape. It is what is very close to what Michele Gelfand calls tight vs loose cultures in her
highly influential book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our
World (2018). Tight cultures have strict norms and require a high level of conformity,
whereas loose cultures have few rules but allow for a lot of personal freedom and
individuality. Most people wouldn’t want to live in a country of extremes, as there are
trade-offs: tight cultures usually have few rule-breakers and little crime (e.g. Japan), whereas
loose cultures have more diversity and fun, but also higher crime rates and are more
disorganized (e.g. Italy)
Where do those cultural differences come from? A great part is due to our innate tendencies
as personality traits like conscientiousness and openness are highly heritable. Research has
shown that the tightest cultures are the ones with a history of irrigation farming which
required a highly collaborative effort, social hierarchies and conformity. Another factor
Gelfand explored is threat, the higher the threat in the past was the higher the tightness of
an area. Again I argue that threat has a lot to do with sedentary farming as opposed to
nomadic foraging and herding: farmers had to face many threats: starvations, raiding, higher
levels of pathogens (sedentism) and natural disasters from which they just couldn't move
away easily as they would have lost their livelihood.
Tightness is therefore an evolutionary product of collectivist farming and looseness is
connected to individualist nomadic foraging and herding. Foragers, like the Inuit and Hazda,
score highest on individual freedom and looseness on Gelfand’s scale. Here is a
representation with Myers-Briggs personality types:
However, foragers also live in a kind of communist sharing society and countries with a long
history of pastoralism, like Pakistan, score extremely high on tightness. Tightness and
collectivism are therefore only moderately correlated and do not represent the same axes.
Scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel took a slightly different approach in creating
a cultural map of the world Their map depicts closely linked cultural values that vary
between societies in two predominant dimensions: traditional versus secular-rational values
on the vertical y-axis and survival versus self-expression values on the horizontal x-axis.
There is a different way of seeing this map, however. Traditional and survival values are for
the reasons mentioned above both mostly farmer values. Self-expression is very much a
herder trait and even in tight, conservative Muslim cultures, there are often surprising
“liberal” cultural phenomena such as belly dancing.
If we plot the above evolutionary profiles onto the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map, we get a
great match with the different values and associated HEXACO traits:
Protestant Europe is mostly in individualist hunter-herder space. Compared with a genetic
map of Europe we get a good match (Protestant reformation in green):
Catholic Europe should be located mostly in Southern Europe as it Catholicism shows
mostly conservative farmer traits (deep hierarchy, tradition, obedience). Collectivist early
Christianity started out in gatherer space and moved increasingly into farmer space, hence
the opposition from hunter-herder space that led to the Reformation.
Communism is very similar to early Christianity a product of a gather-farmer alliance. Many
libertarians (hunter-farmer) regard socialism as a form of corrupted conservatism due to its
collectivist tendencies, whereas many liberals (gatherers-herders) consider libertarians
(hunter-farmer) as a form of corrupted conservatism due to its emphasis on competitive
materialism.
The combination of herder-farmers can lead to the tightest cultural manifestations as seen in
countries like Pakistan and Mafia organizations (herder competitiveness plus farmer
hierarchical organization). Likewise, Sparta can be seen as located in herder-farmer space,
whereas Athens was located in farmer-hunter space.
Collective farming (kibbutzim, Soviet kolkhoz) works best with highly agreeable (caregiving)
farmer A profiles and humble gatherer H profiles as there wouldn’t be too much competition
and a shallow hierarchy. Switzerland and Japan are both highly conscientious/tight (farmer)
and somewhat open (hunter). Italy, with its love for fashion and good and diverse foods,
corresponds most closely to the extraverted caregiving herder profile (X).
In order to represent culture accurately, we would need three or four dimensions according
to our evolutionary subsistence strategy. However, a two-dimensional map works quite well,
as people often have one dominant type due to assortative mating and a secondary type due
to actual historic mating. A lot of personality systems recognized primary and secondary
types. A country’s or culture’s personality is the result of its historic dominance of primary
and secondary types, very much like genes determine our primary and secondary types to a
large extent.
Settlers, Prospectors and Pioneers
November 07, 2021
What Makes People Tick: The Three Hidden Worlds of Settlers, Prospectors and
Pioneers (2011) by Chris Rose details how the values mapping system developed by
Cultural Dynamics Strategy and Marketing (CDSM), enables us to look beneath the
fog of argument and opinion, and cut through the confusion of behaviours being
undertaken for different reasons, to lay bare the 'social DNA' which lies beneath and
drives much of our individual behaviour, relationships, politics and social dynamics.
These three worlds are hidden from us because they are not physical but
psychological: yet what divides them are our most deeply held beliefs about what is
‘really important’. For Settlers, the deep forces draw people to seek out safety, security,
identity and belonging is for new ideas, the quest for connections waiting to be made,
and living a life based on ethics.
The graphic below provides a glimpse of how each type ticks:
One example Rose gives that is close to my heart as a pioneer is solar panels, which are
now ubiquitous but which were fringe in my youth:
In the 1980s and 1990s in a country like the UK, solar panels were peculiar, fringe
technology. Just about the only people putting solar on their roofs were committed
environmentalists motivated by a desire to take personal action against the threat of
climate change. As we will see later, these activists were almost all Pioneers. A belief
that to make the world a better place you have to be a better person, a willingness to
engage in actions that others might think odd, a readiness to innovate and embrace
change, and a sense that you can change the world by what you do yourself are all
characteristics of the Pioneers much more (for example ten or one hundred times
more) than they are of Settlers or Prospectors.
Where do our value maps come from, evolutionarily speaking?
Settlers, as the name suggests are evolutionary farmer types, driven by securing
their produce and property, a lot of routine work (tradition), delayed gratification
(discipline) and loyalty towards their in-group. Obedience, duty and rules feature high
as farming (especially irrigation farming) was a highly cooperative effort that
required a hierarchical leadership structure.
Prospectors: are evolutionary herder types. They are more novelty-seeking,
dominance seeking and risk-taking than farmer types due to a nomadic life-style and
as a faster life history strategy (life expectancy among pastoralists is lower than
among agriculturalists). Pastoralists often raided each other and fought for group
dominance.
Pioneers: are evolutionary forager types, not motivated by material goods or status
(egalitarian), they are motivated by ideas and it is them who are typically innovators,
be it technologically or socially.
The majority of people are typically more motivated by practical utility and status,
than potential use (ideas for future use). (People who never adopt are pioneers again
because they can be neither motivated by status nor the need to conform).
The majority of people in history who lived (and sometimes died) for their ideas on
the other hand were pioneers.
Is there any proof that pioneers are evolutionary forager types? Hunter-gatherers are
famous for their egalitarianism, that includes an universalist stance, i.e. caring also
for people who are not part of your immediate in-group. In the graphic below
(source) it can be seen that pioneers care most about egalitarianism and
prospectors least.
The split in our value maps happened around 10.000 years ago with the advent of
agriculture and pastoralism.
The merging of these three tribes in Europe, for example, happened with the invasion
of Anatolian farmers and steppe pastoralists.
The findings of Cultural Dynamics Strategy and Marketing were basically already published
in the ancient Ayurvedic texts, describing psychological disposition as well as bodily
constitution (adaptations to foraging, herding and farming):
The evolutionary psychology of the myside bias
October 26, 2021
The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking (2021)
by Keith Stanovich is a fascinating book that illustrates impressively how both the political
left and right are prone to the myside bias, a special case of the confirmation bias.
When it comes to the myside bias, people are quick to detect logical errors in the opponent
side argumentation, but not in their own:
In fact, each side in our partisan debates often argues—convincingly—how positions on the
other side are inconsistent and aligned in a seemingly incoherent manner, and such
arguments are often quite effective. In the abortion debate, it is common for pro-choice
advocates to point out the inconsistency of the pro-life advocates who want to preserve the
life of the unborn but not the life of someone on death row. This argument is often effective
and compelling, but so is the counterargument by pro-life advocates, who point out the
inconsistency of their pro-choice opponents in opposing the death penalty but supporting
abortion—in seeming to find the deaths of criminals—but not the deaths of the
unborn—unacceptable. When pro-choice advocates argue that many innocent people have
been executed, the pro-life advocates counter that all of the unborn are innocent. Thus,
when it comes to inconsistency on the part of their opponents, both pro-choice and pro-life
advocates seem to have compelling arguments.
I am a liberal, and indeed I find it strange that I might find myself arguing for abortion of
innocent lives and against the death penalty for a serial killer. As a liberal, I also tend to find
conservatives too ingroupish and anti-science. Again Stanovich teaches me a lesson:
When, however, Chambers, Schlenker, and Collisson (2013) measured the degree of
tolerance and warmth liberal subjects displayed toward groups whose values conflicted with
liberal values (businesspeople, Christian fundamentalists, the wealthy, the military), they
found that liberal subjects displayed as much out-group dislike as conservative subjects did.
Ideological similarity strongly predicted group liking, with correlations greater than .80.
Stanovich does a good job in presenting a balanced view: Both sides can be equally
● Irrational
● In-groupish
● Anti-science
Being an ardent proponent of Evolutionary Psychology I have seen liberal often attacking
research on the differences between the genders, for example.
However, I think Stanovich falls into the same trap he argues against: he is trying to be too
politically correct. While it’s true that we all fall prey to the myside bias, we aren’t the same
and there are some fundamental differences Stanovich downplays. Moreover, he doesn’t
really come up with any ideas for the origins of our “sides” and downplaying the differences
only prevents finding any.
Anticipating Mercier and Sperber (2011) in some ways, Klayman (1995, 411) argues that
“when other people lack good information about the accuracy of one’s judgments, they may
take consistency as a sign of correctness”; he points to the many characteristics of myside
argumentation (e.g., consistency, confidence) that can bootstrap social benefits to the
individual and group. Dan Kahan’s discussions of his concept of identity protective cognition
(Kahan 2013, 2015; see also Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, and Braman 2011; Kahan et al. 2017)
likewise suggest other potential mechanisms for myside bias to confer evolutionary benefit
by facilitating group cohesion.
If group cohesion (or tribalism in its original sense) was the driver of the myside basis, we
wouldn’t be seeing the same pattern all over the world. It would be village against village,
country against country. Tribalism has been getting worse due to globalization, not because
one community is up against another as it was true mostly in the past, but because trends in
either direction have been globally amplified.The contents of our personal values would
matter less than the values of our group. What we see, however, is the reverse pattern:
people actively FINDING their tribes, rather than siding with the one they were born into.
Stanovich writes about the liberal bias in academia:
A survey of 500 arts and science faculty members at Harvard (Bikales and Goodman 2020)
found that less than 2 percent identified themselves as conservative or very conservative,
compared to more than 38 percent identifying themselves as very liberal and almost 80
percent as liberal or very liberal.
If liberals and conservatives are equally rational and science-loving, where does this bias
come from? The answer is simple, they aren’t equally interested in science and their
rationality may really be following a different evolutionary logic. As a liberal living in the
countryside, I have found other people of myside far more often online than in my
neighbourhood. Liberals tend to clusters in certain areas and liberal biases exist in:
● Science and universities

● Journalism
● Literature
● Arts in general, including Hollywood
● Environmentalism
● Cities (vs. suburbs and countryside)
● Non-mainstream online communities (e.g. Reddit, Quora)
● Some hi-tech companies, especially in Silicon Valley
Apart from some key political issues like gun control, abortion and taxation, liberals and
conservatives differ in many traits and lifestyle choices, such as travelling, learning foreign
languages, interest in foreign cultures, and even food preferences. Studies have shown that
our political preferences already manifest in childhood and are partially genetic.
Conservative children are more obedient and cautious, whereas liberal children are less
obedient and more explorative.
So, where do our tendencies come from? Looking at different cultures around the world, we
can see that liberal values can be found in most hunter-gatherer societies and conservative
values can be found in most agricultural societies.
liberals conservatives
egalitarian hierarchy
anti-authoritarian authoritarian
universalist localist (patriotic, etc.)
value freedom strict adherence to rules, conformism
In fact, researchers have found that the longer history of agriculture an area had the more
conservative (or “tight” in Michelle Gelfand’s terminology) the population is, whereas
hunter-gatherers like the Inuit or Hazda tend to be “loose”, i.e. low in rule enforcement and
high in personal freedom.
So, our myside bias is at least partially rooted in our evolutionary history. Returning to the
example above: hunter-gatherers have fewer children (4-year intervals) than farmers (2-year
intervals) as additional children would threaten the survival of the other children. Infanticide
(the forager equivalent of abortion) is therefore not uncommon. Most foragers have sex
taboos after the birth of a child to avoid further offspring in quick succession. Punishment
among farmer societies also tends to be much more severe than among hunter-gatherers.
When there is conflict, hunter-gatherers leave their band and join a new one. Farmers on the
other hand tend to enforce conformism and adherence to rules. Farmers tend to live with the
same community for all of their lives, whereas changing bands is very common in foragers.
Our myside biases stem from our different evolutionary histories at least as much as siding
with our tribes. As interesting as reading Stanovich’s book is, claiming that liberals and
conservatives show now fundamental differences would be doing a disservice to science
and humanity. It is better to investigate those differences and then find compromises that
don’t make both sides try to kill each other. Stanovich did, however, convince me not to
support higher taxes on petrol. So far I have always considered it a necessary measure to
protect the environment. Stanovich says that liberals like me should think twice because it
would hurt poorer people and hardly affect the behaviour of richer people. Not necessarily an
outcome liberals do intend.
Stanovich’s book does have important lessons to teach. In a world that gets increasingly
polarized, we do have to rethink our positions more often. If we like it or not, we should listen
to the other side, they are often better at spotting the flaws in our logic. Universities are
doing a disservice to science and their own reputation if they ban researchers who find
differences in cognition between men and women. The scientific method is trying to replicate
empirical findings, not firing scientists for producing results that are considered politically
incorrect.
There is even more to be learned from hunter-gatherer societies. According to the

Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers (1999) these are:
● social security
● environmental sustainability
● gender equality
● cultural diversity
● communal decision making
Oh yes, these are my values as a liberal and reflects a myside bias. Do I care? No, I don't,
because I think these above points are important for a better world and for all people, no
matter if forager or farmer type.
Evolutionary Ethics - The Origins of our Moral
Foundations
January 04, 2022
Jonathan Haidt found in his research that liberals and conservatives have different moral
foundations, with liberals caring mostly about fairness and harm and conservatives
additionally about authority, sanctity (purity) and ingroup loyalty.
He later added liberty to the liberal foundation. Haidt’s research makes it seem that
conservatives are more moral than liberals. However, that is misleading. I will argue that
liberalism has its origin in hunter-gatherer evolved minds whereas conservatism has its
origin in evolved farmer adaptations.
Michelle Gelfand has found that cultures tend to be tight when they have a long history of
farming, especially irrigation farming, whereas hunter-gatherer cultures are generally loose
with a lot of personal liberty. In between foragers and farmers, there are pastoralists, who
are generally egalitarian within their group but tend to feel superior to other groups (social
dominance orientation). We get the following evolutionary profiles (with MBTI types):
I have assigned one HEXACO value to each profile (e.g. openness to the male hunter
profile) as each profile likely represents an evolutionary maximum on this value. The female
(caregiving) farmer profile therefore would be the most agreeable one, the male
(provisioning) farmer profile the most conscientious (industrious, etc.) one.
If we plot these profiles onto Solomon Schwartz’s map of values, we get a good match with
values that would have been adaptive for the respective modes of subsistence, e.g.
novelty-seeking for semi-nomadic pastoralists and security, conformity and tradition for
sedentary farmers.
Research by Cultural Dynamic calls farmer space the “morality area” and (hunter-)gatherer
space the “ethics area''. Indeed, gatherer types are called “idealists” in Myers-Briggs.
What we get from combining all this is that farmer types like many rules whereas
hunter-gather types like freedom and ethics and will therefore try to reduce the number of
rules to few or even one principle. This principle has various versions, like the Golden Rule.
It’s the ethics of fairness or reciprocity. Its evolutionary basis is reciprocal altruism. Gatherer
types only make up about 15% of the general population and that is why many evolutionary
psychologists (typically hunter types) doubt reciprocal altruism is a real biological adaptation.
“Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed,” wrote Michael Ghiselin. Of course,
complete altruism without any selfishness is a biological impossibility. However, many
evolutionary psychologists are wrong in assuming that altruists are hypocrites. What is true,
altruists struggle with living in a non-altruistic world and remaining authentic to themselves.
Gatherer types have the highest rates of suicide. This fact can be seen in the high suicide
rates (especially among women) of forager populations, e.g. among the Inuit who have the
highest suicide rates in the world.
Gatherer types were also typically prophets and founders of religion in history. Jesus is a
typical example of a hunter-gatherer religious revolutionary. His god is 180 degrees from the
god of the old testament:
The rules are reduced to the principle: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (altruism). It’s
a strong version of the golden rule, which is usually about fairness (negative formulation:
don’t do unto others…).
Hunter-gatherer type people can typically be recognized by this approach to morality.

Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative and Maria Montessori’s approach to education (few
rules, but respect for others is one rule that has the highest priority).
Herders, Warriors, And Traders - The Origin of Social
Stratification
September 08, 2022
While the origin of inequality clearly lies in the transition from foraging to food-producing
(farming and herding), the origin of social stratification is less clear. It is typically associated
with farming. However, considering that agriculture started some 12,000 years ago, we see
little in terms of stratification for the first 6,000 years. What agricultural societies typically
produce is differences in administrative hierarchy and status, however social stratification is
something completely different as it divides society into strata with higher and lower prestige,
often with strict marriage rules. Stratification and hierarchy represent a dual layering of
society and social status.
If egalitarian hunter-gatherers would certainly resist stratification by voting with their feet
(leaving) and farmers “merely” produce an administrative hierarchy, where does social
stratification come from? There is a third mode of subsistence: semi-nomadic pastoralism
and it has presented anthropologists with a lot of puzzles regarding a political tendency, as
pastoralists can be almost as egalitarian as hunter-gatherers and resist state integration, but
they are also frequently stratified.
In ethnographic studies of nomadic and semi-nomadic herding communities in Africa,
including Nuer, Fulbe, Baggara, Turkana, Borana, Somali, pastoral polities have been
seen as intrinsically egalitarian and "acephalous", literally "headless", or without
centralized authority. Schneider (1979) suggested that there were political entailments
to the fact that livestock wealth - being self-reproducing and mobile - cannot be
monopolized, for in the absence of any other factor of production which can be
centrally controlled, pastoralism will make possible, indeed will stimulate diffusion of
wealth and thus decentralization of power. This argument is most applicable to East
Africa, where most pastoralists are organized in relatively discrete herding sections, in
which community leadership is exercised through local councils or age-groups.
In order to understand the role herders play in creating stratification the African
Interlacustrine Kingdoms (see map above) are highly interesting, as we can historically see
all kinds of centralised organisations ranging from simple chiefdoms to complex kingdoms. In
Herders, Warriors, And Traders: Pastoralism In Africa (1991) John G. Galaty presents us
with an interesting picture stratification that is is almost ubiquitous in the area and that is
highly dependant on subsistence economy:
In the Intralacustrine cases presented by Bonte, "aristocratic" Tutsi or Hima,
associated with a symbolic monopoly on cattle, were attributed honor and labor by
Hutu agricultural commoners and Twa forager/serfs within an ideology of intrinsic
"ethnic" difference, despite a common Bantu language and culture.
For Rwanda the approximate percentages are as follows:
1. Tutsi pastoralists about 15% of the population

2. Hutu agriculturalists about 84% of the population
3. Twa hunter-gatherers about 1% of the population
What we see is a small aristocratic pastoralist elite who dominates commoners and
the lowest class made up of foragers (serfs). This social make-up is very similar to
Mycenaean Greece, for which geneticists found similar ratios:
1. Steppe pastoralists (Yamnya): 10%
2. Anatolian farmers (descendants): 88%
3. Balkan hunter-gatherers and others: 2%
As the vast majority of Mycenaean aristocratic graves are graves of warriors with
steppe ancestry, we can assume that the social order was very similar to the one in
Interlacustrine Kingdoms. What’s more, while the specific percentages and
importance of pastoralism may vary a lot in those kingdoms, wealth and power are
always associated with the possessions of cattle.
How can relatively egalitarian pastoralists come to create stratified societies? The
answer lies in their attitude towards outgroups:
Intense pride is frequent in the pastoral character, with egalitarian ideology seen to
obtain primarily between pastoralists, with non-pastoralists frequently deemed of
lesser honor and quality. [...] However, even the most assertively egalitarian
pastoralists - such as the Maasai or Fulani - harbor notions of the superiority of
livestock ownership and husbandry over other metiers and indulge themselves in
discourse regarding the inferiority of non-pastoralists, laborers, and women (Galaty
1982). In effect, attributes of value, including strength, courage, restraint, animal
wealth, and honor, on which the equal worth of pastoralists is based, are predicated on
the existence of symbolic "others" who exemplify the negation of pastoral value and
esteem.
I argue that this pastoralist attitude is the same as social dominance orientation
(SDO). SDO represents an individual's tendency to endorse group-based dominance
and inequality. Due to the inherent in-group egalitarianism, this tendency also leads
to decentralised forms of government: oligarchy, feudalism or mafia-like protection
racketeering. We therefore arrive at the four political orientations as evolutionary
instincts or of past subsistence modes: anarcho-communism (hunter-gatherers),
authoritarianism (farmers) and SDO (herders).
Only in combination with centralised authoritarianism (farmers) can SDO (herders)
produce a stratified social system, that is initially based on subsistence and ethnicity
and later based on occupation (e.g. warriors, traders and craftsmen would tyspically
have been herder types). The mall percentage of hunter-gatherer admixture to each
polity would eventually become crucial in the development of a polity into a
civilisation. Hunter-gatherer types would instinctively reduce the tribalism inherent in
food producers and foster democracy. “All the evidence suggests that our ability to
sustain peaceful and thriving democracies depends, to a large extent, on how we
handle humanity’s powerful instinct toward tribalism” (Yascha Mounk). It would only
take a lot of time for them to rise from the bottom of a chiefdom to the top.
In many African pastoral societies, one finds endogamous caste groups, artisans,
blacksmiths, hunters, fishermen, and even bards and diviners, who are marked by
notions of pollution and inequality and viewed ambivalently. In such cases, it appears
that internal egalitarianism is acquired at the price of external hierarchy.
The time of the hunters had gone, but hunter-gatherer types were still able to rise in
status as bards, diviners, artisans, shamans or druids, people formerly considered of
“impure blood” due to their hunter-gatherer origin or admixture.
What the Griffin Warrior and the biblical King David can
tell us about early state formation
August 29, 2022
One of the most exciting things about modern genetics is how it can illuminate and rewrite
history. A spectacular new study has just been published in Science, led by David Reich and
Iosif Lazaridis of Harvard University, who worked with archaeologists and linguists, gathering
thousands of skeletal samples and extracting and analysing DNA, mostly from the dense
petrous bone of the ear, over nearly 4 years.
One thing the research is starting to uncover is how state formation happened. The
Yamnaya, pastoralist steppe nomads, arrived in Greece during the Bronze Age, bringing
along their language that would change into Greece when coming into contact with the local
farming population. They also established themselves as a ruling elite. They could do so by
replacing the Minoan big men who were at the top of the hierarchy the a farming community,
which was not stratified yet. Stratification arrived with the steppe pastoralists.
However, this itself did not lead to the famous city states we would see during the Iron Age. I
have argued that the reason is that pastoralists are relatively egalitarian regarding their own
tribe and lacked the hierarchical organisation farmers did. Their evolutionary programming
could be described as social dominance hierarchy, egalitarian within the clan, but feeling
superior to other tribes. This is probably the reason why there were never any pastoralist
states and that pastoralist conquests that led to new states (e.g. the Mongol empire) never
endured for long. What likely happened was that the Yamnaya established themselves over
the local farming population in the decentralised fashion that can be seen in Mafia clans
(protection racketeering) or feudalism. This is, in fact, what we see in burials, an aristocratic
or oligarchic elite. The genetic ratio of Yamnaya pastoralists vs local Minoan farmers is 1:10,
which means that the original group of Yamnaya was most likely even much smaller as the
ruling elite is more likely to leave more offspring. Their conquest had been made possible by
the horse, chariot and above all bronze weapons.
Yamnaya were buried in elite tombs after they moved into the region north of Greece,
suggesting a link between ancestry and social status. But during the later Mycenaean period
in Greece—the time Homer mythologized—the new data suggest Yamnaya descendants
had little impact on Greek social structure. Evidence comes in part from the spectacular
Mycenaean burial of the Gryphon Warrior, a man who died in 1450 B.C.E. near Pylos,
Greece. He carried no traces of steppe ancestry, though dozens of both elite and humbler
graves in Greece did. University of Cincinnati archaeologist Shari Stocker, who helped
excavate the tomb in 2015 and collaborated on the new studies, says the lack of correlation
between social status and steppe ancestry is no surprise—and a welcome dose of nuance
from geneticists. (source)
The question is, how the Gryphon Warrior or his ancestors managed to establish a kingdom?
It is one thing if a state conquers another state and grows, this merely happens through the
takeover of pre-existing hierarchical structures. The absence of such structures makes it
incrementally harder to create a united kingdom. Merely killing one clan leader does not do
much, except conjure up the risk of blood feuds. Neither would one clan leader have had the
resources to start feuding with multiple clans. State formation is much less a military
operation than a diplomatic one. In fact, the Gryphon Warrior was much more than just a
military leader, he was also a religious leader and a unifier of clans:
“He was a young man, and wealthy, who served different functions: a religious or sacred
function, as an outstanding warrior and as leader of his people,” Stocker said.
“He was one of the first kings of Mycenaean Pylos. Until then there had been competing
aristocratic families, which explains why there were multiple tholos tombs,” Stocker said.
“But the Griffin Warrior was one of the first individuals to unite all of these functions within
society.”
In order to fulfil all those functions, the Griffin Warrior must have been unusually wise, just
and impartial in order to have gained widespread acceptance.
We can see this kind of state formation again and again during the Bronze and Iron Ages
and even beyond that. Muhammad played a very similar role in unifying the Arab tribes and,
once again, religion played an important part in the story. Nowadays we often see religion,
especially religious fundamentalism as a cause for tribalism, however it was likely that it
often had a unifying function in ancient times, i.e. enlarging a community beyond tribal ties.
Let’s have a look at the Bible, it tells a very similar story: It’s the story of a pastoralist tribe
(Abraham’s God) that conquers the promised land and establishes a kind of feudalistic
system via clan leaders (the biblical judges). We know that at least some of the judges were
so extraordinarily fair and impartial that their authority was recognized beyond their tribal
lineage. I have argued that such people had a higher admixture of hunter-gatherer genes
(forager types). In fact, this is what we see in King David and King Solomon (the wisest and
most just of all kings). David isn’t only a warrior, he is humble, interested in the arts and
literature and above all, he is highly spiritual and pious. He is certainly not the typical warrior
aristocrat we see in the Yamnaya.
Here is the general pattern:
1. Nomadic pastoralism with trading and occasional raiding

2. Conquering a settled farming population (“promised land”)
3. Establishment of feudalism (protection racketeering)
4. A personality with a low tribalistic instinct and a high sense of justice and
egalitarianism unifies clans and becomes king
Here is an overview of personality types plotted on Shalom Schwartz’s universal values. The
dynamic between these four tendencies has historically been the driver of centralisation,
decentralisation, unification and splitting of societies.
We do see traits of egalitarianism and universalism in almost all great unifiers in history. Joe
Henrich highlighted the role of the mediaeval church in reducing endogamy and with it
tribalism. However, it has never been a single institution that made such laws, but always
single visionary individuals. Genghis Khan, who united the Mongol tribes discouraged
tribalism and promoted meritocracy as well as women’s equality (even though he didn’t
seem to have been a particularly nice person apart from that).
The great mixing of the Bronze Age led to stratified societies which were absent in the
Neolithic. One visible remnant is the Hindu caste system. We know that the Yamnaya
originally represented the highest caste in the warrior class (Kshatriya), the feudal lords. We
then see the rise to the top of another class, the priestly class (Brahmins).
A General Theory of Culture and Cultural Dynamics
November 20, 2021
I have argued in “A General Theory of Personality” that personality can be seen as an

adaptation to a social environment with traits that were both socially and sexually selected
because they were highly advantageous in that environment. In a simplified model, I assume
three different survival and subsistence strategies with two major roles for each: a providing
(most frequently males) and a caregiving (most frequently females). The resulting six profiles
represent the extreme points (maxima) in the HEXACO model:
A community with individuals adapted to a specific environment represents a culture that can
be shifted more towards providing or caregiving. A specific culture is determined by the
specific makeup of the group members and in particular the dominant forces within it.
Forager (hunter-gatherer cultures) are usually highly egalitarian and loose (in Michele
Gelfand’s terminology), whereas farmer cultures are usually hierarchical and tight. The
higher the collaborative effort (e.g. irrigation farming) and the higher the external threat (e.g.
raiders, natural disasters and pathogens) the higher the levels of in-groupishness,
conformity, authoritarianism and psychological need for security.
We can plot the three/six cultural tendencies onto Shlomo Schwarz’s value map and we get
a perfect match:
Farmers types/cultures value safety, high in-group loyalty (conformism), rules and
closedness, whereas the opposite hunter types value self-direction(individualism),
universalism and openness. The individualist-collectivist distinction does not completely
coincide with the loose-tight axes. As hunter types are somewhat closer to individualist
herder types and gatherer (caregiving/prosocial) types share collectivist tendencies with
farmer types. If we project the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world onto this map we
get another good match for different countries/cultures in the world:
Early civilizations often show a tripartite class division; NB: not merely a hierarchy, but
classes defined by hierarchy and endogamy. The ruling/dominant classes were mostly
farmer types, the middle class was made up by pastoralist artisans, traders and worriers and
the lowest class was made up by foragers who were neither adapted to a farmer nor herder
culture. Nomadic pastoralists aren’t adapted to the sedentary farmer lifestyle (routine work)
and therefore made natural soldiers and traders. The connection with artisans is less
obvious, however, historically metallurgy is closely tied to pastoralist people (e.g. in the
Pontic Steppe) as well as the spread of Bronze Age cultures.
From a cultural theoretic point of view we can now postulate the following principles:
The more homogeneous a culture is,
● the more likely it consists of mostly individuals of one “tribe”

● the less likely it is to change as the individuals are adapted to the culture
The more inhomogeneous a culture is,
● the more likely it consists of individuals of all “tribes”

● the more likely it is to change as the individuals not completely adapted to the culture
The main driver of cultural change is therefore diversity. This is exactly what farmer types
dislike most as conformity was the way to survive. The farmer position, therefore, represents
the conservative force of a culture. Hunter-gatherers who value freedom would be most
open to diversity and therefore make up the most progressive force inside each culture.
Hunter-gatherer types are least adapted to a farmer lifestyle (routine 9-5 jobs, hard physical
work, hierarchy, etc.), therefore change will be most likely initiated by hunter-gatherer types
in any mixed culture. Revolutions (the French and American revolutions, for example) are
therefore typically started by hunter-gatherer types. The motto of the French Revolution was
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
Clearly hunter-gatherer values, freedom, equality and solidarity. It is fraternity that is
stressed where farmer types would stress the benefits of the patriarchy (safety, protection,
rules), as siblings represent a more horizontal (egalitarian) level of organization rather than a
vertical (hierarchical) one that parents and elders represent.
As farmer culture tends to be conservative, the direction of change is also typically:
hunter-gatherer > pastoralist > farmer.
As farmer types conform to the new culture the new culture finally becomes the norm.
However, farmer types would slowly work on changing the new culture so that it fits their
evolved needs, i.e. making it safer, more hierarchical, more structured and certainly more
normative. Centuries may pass before another hunter-gatherer revolution may take place.
Here we can find another principle of a cultural theory:
The change from forager space to farmer space is typically top-down driven (by
authorities).
The change from forager to farmer space is typically bottom-up driven (by the people).
These cultural constellations and dynamics are equally applicable to
● Small communities
● National Character
● Corporate Culture
● Institutions
My model provides the tools to analyse a culture according to its values and traits (e.g.
risk-taking, conservative, egalitarian), to locate it on the cultural map and to trace its
changes.
Christianity is a good example. Early Christianity was very much an egalitarian gatherer
movement with a shallow hierarchy and a lot of hunter-gatherer liberalism (cf. Jesus Christ’s
attitude towards work, money, inequality, children’s rights, capital punishment and
prostitution). Catholicism increasingly “farmerized” (deep hierarchy) Christianity and the
Reformation can be seen as a hunter-gatherer revolution. One of its basic tenets: back to the
Christianity described in the Bible. As evangelical Protestantism is itself now associated with
conservative values, we can see a change from hunter-space into farmer space.
A modern company like Red Bull may serve as yet another example. Its values are fun,
novelty, adventure and risk-taking (they sponsor a lot of extreme sports). It is clearly located
in herder space. Its consumers are mostly pastoralist types, as is founder and CEO Dietrich
Mattheschitz. Due to this homogeneous grouping and firm location on the culture map, Red
Bull is unlikely to change significantly. However, they do experiment with new flavours
(novelty seeking) a lot.
A culture is therefore not like an atom, but like a molecule, with attracting and opposing
forces, which tends to be more or less stable. In our Western World we are moving
increasingly towards instability after a long period of stability.
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West
Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly
Prosperous
December 16, 2020
Particularly Prosperous (2020) is the title of a highly interesting book by Joseph Henrich. It
tries to account for why the West has gained its technological and cultural achievements,
which are often far ahead of other parts of the world. The acronym WEIRD here stands for
"Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic". Henrich compared different kinds
of cultures and highlights the traits of WEIRD cultures that made it so successful.
One of these traits is that WEIRD cultures rely less on kinship ties and nepotism than
traditional farmer and herder cultures, in which nepotism is usually considered something
good as you get a reliable employee, for example. The stronger those kinship ties in a
culture are the higher are the levels of violence against outgroup members. As Heirich
states, cultures with tribalistic tendencies are high in the dominance hierarchy and at the
same time faith in authority. Culture with lower kinship ties on the other hand tend to hold
(universal) fairness and care as high values, but value obedience and adherence towards
kin and clan less. The weird thing about WEIRD cultures is that they are much more like
ancient hunter-gatherer societies than more recent farmer-herder societies, that
outcompeted (high reproductive rates) and assimilated more ancient hunter-gatherer
societies.
Here I continue to connect Henrich’s ideas to my own. I have been arguing a lot that our
modern society with its 9-5 jobs, status-orientation and focus on materialism is very much a
“farmer” society. However, it’s exactly in the areas that Henrich highlights that WEIRD
societies are really more like ancient hunter-gatherer societies. These include:
● Looser kinship ties
● Less conformism required (loose hunter-gatherer vs tight farmer societies)
● Emphasis on individual growth and competence rather than group adherence
● More monogamous (in farmer and herder society the alpha males often monopolize
dozens of females)
Henrich summarizes the findings thus:
Mobile hunter-gatherers, who possess extensive (not intensive) kin-based institutions, are
field independent. Consistent with this, anthropologists have long argued that, compared to
farmers and herders who have more intensive kin-based institutions, hunter-gatherers
emphasize values that focus on independence, achievement, and self-reliance while
deemphasizing obedience, conformity, and deference to authority.
Of course, also people in WEIRD societies often conform. Only about 25% of people are
never influenced by their peers. I have argued before that these people have
“hunter-gatherer” genes that managed to survive living inside farmer-herder societies. These
people are often liberals, who value universal human rights, democracy, meritocracy (as
opposed to nepotism) and education as a means of personal growth (vs education as a
means of conformism). On the flip side, these people value kinship ties, traditions and
authority less.
These hunter-gatherer types have been trying to make farmer societies more like
hunter-gatherer societies by introducing democracy, more egalitarian religions and
enlightenment. Moreover, it has been hunter types who have been responsible for most of
the scientific and technical innovations (Newton, Edison, etc.) thus made industrialization
possible. Only the “rich” part of WEIRD has been mainly due to status competition among
mostly farmer and herder types. Even so, almost all economists and a lot of entrepreneurs
(Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.) are “hunter types”
WEIRD societies have thus arisen due to farmer productivity and hunter-gatherer type
influence. The last can be clearly seen in the American Declaration of Independence or the
Enlightenment, for example.
The evolution of Western Culture and what we can
learn from subsistence culture
August 22, 2022
We often tend to believe that tendencies in cultural evolution are generally improvements
that are often inevitable given enough time. However, in the past decades, we have seen
trends that many of us would consider cultural deterioration, like increasing desecularization
in many places all over the world and taking away women’s rights. People inside a given
culture have different values and tendencies (e.g. conservatives and liberals) and any given
culture can dynamically shift between different poles. Where do our polarities come from? I
have argued that they come from the evolutionary tendencies we have inherited from our
subsistence strategies: foraging, farming and herding. In order to understand which direction
change is taking, we have to understand the elements of these subsistence strategies in our
own culture.
All civilisations develop from farming societies, so let’s start by comparing what Western
cultures and farming cultures have in common when compared to hunter-gatherer (HG)
cultures:
● Hierarchies in institutions (school, etc.) and jobs

● Religion is organised and hierarchical
● Most jobs are routine (e.g. 9-5) and repetitive
● More working hours (hunter-gatherers (HGs) don’t work more than 20
hours per week)
● Striving for wealth and status is a good thing (discouraged in HGs)
● Gender roles are more clearly defined
● High need for security and defence
In general, Western culture does not share a lot of features with farming cultures. As Joseph
Henrich put it, it is an outlier in the anthropological record or WEIRD (Western, Educated,
Industrialised, Rich and Democratic). Of course, people in subsistence cultures are not
highly educated, industrialised or rich. However, when it comes to being democratic we are
easily beaten by egalitarian hunter-gatherers. So, let’s compare now what Western culture
shares with foraging cultures as opposed to farming cultures:
● High degree of egalitarianism

● Less nepotism
● Less endogamy
● Women have equal rights
● Higher degree of mobility
● More varied and balanced diet
● Lower fertility rates
● More permissive child reading
● No child labour
● Fatherers are typically more involved in parenting (alloparenting in HGs)
● Less routine work (work is less and more irregular in HGs)
● More cognitive work (e.g. tracking = detective work)
These are a lot of admirable traits that our Western culture shares with foraging cultures and
in fact a lot of cultural progress has been due to making our Western culture more like a
foraging culture and less like a farming culture. I have argued that most of Henrich’s
WEIRDness actually comes from strong historic foraging movements in our Western Culture:
education, democratisation and innovation were mostly driven by this forager element or
forager types. These were all important factors in making the West rich, even though
material wealth itself is not a forager value but was driven by farmer industriousness and
herder competitiveness.
The Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map (see above) can in fact be understood as deriving its
dimensions from farming (tradition/safety), foraging (secular) and herding (self-expression)
cultures.
South East Asian and many African countries lean heavily towards farming cultures,
whereas Latin America tends towards the extraversion of herder cultures. Of course, no
country really represents a foraging culture, however, we can see it in many movements.
Buddhism, for example, is a culture that is highly influenced by forager values.
Three very different corporate cultures: Google,
Microsoft, Apple
November 21, 2021
Apple, Microsoft and Google are the three most valuable companies as of 2021. They have
very different corporate DNA or culture. I have argued that culture can be seen as a product
of three different evolutionary dispositions depending on the ancestral mode of subsistence
and have different, often opposing values. The following “map” contains Scharz’s values,
HEXACO maxima and MBTI types:
Being a geek I have always had a love for diverse tech toys and followed not only the
different developments but have also been fascinated by corporate cultures. One of the
greatest eras in technology was the Open Source movement that has become somewhat
fringe with the advent of mobile and cloud computing. Giving away stuff for free is
inconceivable in the materialistic world of farmers and herders and its location is right at the
bottom in hunter space. Two central figures in the Open Source movement are Richard
Stallman (who launched the GNU project) and Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux).
The open-source movement is characterized by 100% hunter values: openness,

self-direction, creativity, and last but not least: free for all. Due to the idealistic and egalitarian
nature of hunters, no corporation could grow out of this model, as that would have
contradicted the very nature of the project. If someone is a Linux user, chances are high that
they are hunter types. In 2006 Munich’s municipal government moved from Microsoft to
Linux. Unfortunately, the project failed due to most people’s unfamiliarity with the OS and
free software and the familiar Windows OS became omnipresent again. In 2020 Munich
decided to re-introduce Linux once again. Fingers crossed for this renewed effort.
Google
Google is a company that started out firmly in hunter space and moved somewhat towards
farmer space over the years, moving into hardware and more profit-orientation. Google’s
founders are firmly hunter types who avoid the limelight and the nitty-gritty details of CEO
tasks and who love to focus on the big picture and moonshot projects instead.
Google started out very idealistically with the aim to make the world’s knowledge accessible,
its motto “Don’t be evil” (for which it has been mocked many times). The idealism of their
founders is often in contrast with the reality of shareholder accountability, which of course
entails profit orientation. Despite that, Google is still very much committed to the idea of
openness, making their Android OS and Chrome Browser open source. I am a diehard
Google fanboy because I have been able to customize my devices the way I want. I
appreciate the openness and the ability to run Android apps as well as Linux software on my
Chromebook.
Google also has many other hunter traits: it started out with a very shallow hierarchy,
healthcare benefits (care), no marketing department (hunter humility) and a corporate
culture that is completely in line with hunter-gatherer adaptations: healthy food and snacks,
as well as offering many ways out of 9-5 farmer routine (20% time, fitness facilities, etc.)
Google became such an attractive workplace not only for hunter types that it even spawned
the movie “The Internship”. Many conservative farmer types as well as moderates consider
Google too wokeist and supported James Damore, who was fired by Google in 2017
because of a memo that was bordering on sexism. In general, however, Google’s corporate
culture is what Michele Gelfand calls “lose” and stands in stark opposition to Apple’s very
tight corporate culture.
A leaked video shows Google’s leaders responding in dismay at an all-hands meeting after
the 2016 presidential election.
“Myself as an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find the selection deeply offensive and I
know many of you do too,” Brin, Alphabet’s president, says near the outset of the meeting. “I
think it’s a very stressful time and conflicts with many of our values.”
While many people fear Google’s power, its personality is still firmly located in hunter space,
with openness, self-direction, (gender) egalitarianism and environmental concern at its heart.
Microsoft
Microsoft also started out in nerdy hunter space, with its founders Bill Gates (his specific
MBTI type is hotly debated and Paul Allen. Microsoft soon adopted a profit-oriented farmer
culture with its advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage of Microsoft’s farmer
orientation was standardization (conformity), which made it possible for the software to run
on almost any hardware and be compatible with virtually any components and peripherals.
The downside of Microsoft’s “farmerism” is that MS repeatedly tried to limit competition using
its power, which culminated in an antitrust lawsuit. Worse for Microsoft, it lost its vision
(seeing possibilities) and missed out a lot on the Internet age. When they slowly started
catching up they lost out almost everywhere, most notably in the browser wars. Study after
study found that only people who were very low in being tech-savvy used Internet Explorer.
Mosaic, Firefox (open source) and Chrome (open source) all easily beat Internet Explorer,
which stood for a world resistant to change. Only 25 years after the beginning of the browser
wars did MS finally come up with a competitive browser: the new Edge which is based on
Google’s Chrome browser. The situation only got worse when Steve Ballmer, a farmer type,
became CEO. He was famous for mocking his competitors and launching a lot of failed
copycat products. Microsoft placed too much value on tradition, i.e. its past assets.
Only Satya Nadella managed to turn the company around, giving it a vision for the future.
Even though the company has taken a lot from its competitors' playbooks, it has become an
innovative company again. Despite its recent focus on the cloud, MS is still very much a
traditional “desktop” company. When I got my first Chromebook in 2011 I moved completely
into the cloud and I have seen MS users do so only very reluctantly. In any case, MS just
caught up in time to profit from the COVID pandemic. MS Teams was one of the most used
tools in European schools, as Google classroom is virtually unknown in Europe.
Apple
Apple is very different from MS and Google again. Even though Steve Jobs is often typed as
a visionary hunter (ENTJ) type, the company has a lot of herder (SP) DNA and Jobs is just
as often typed as ISTP. It is a cliche that only intuitive types are visionary. Besides, Jobs fits
the description of an explorer, artisan and “master” or “virtuoso” (frequent labels for ISTPs)
quite well. One thing that Jobs lacked if he was a hunter type, is openness. He headed one
of the most secretive tech companies in the world - a very stark contrast to the open-source
movement. He also showed typical traits of a herder personality, like in-group favouritism. He
was known to be very generous with select people and giving them expensive presents, like
luxury watches.
What makes Apple itself a herder culture company? If we check our value map above, we
are firmly located in herder space with visible success, fun, adventure and creativity. Jobs
wanted Apple to be the most successful/best brand. Market share and productivity (farmer)
and making the world a better place (hunter) were much less important to him. Cultural
Dynamic did a survey using Schwartz’s value map and positioned luxury shoppers firmly in
herder space. Another sign of Apple being a herder type culture: designers have the highest
status inside a tech company (Jony Ive, ISFP), something that would be unthinkable for
more pragmatic farmers and hunters.
All this leads me to the conclusion that Steve Jobs was primarily an ISTP and only
secondarily a hunter type. In 2017 Apple fired one of its engineers after his daughter posted
a video of the iPhone X before the official launch, thus leaking the product. This is in stark
contrast with the Google firing of an engineer for being supposedly anti-egalitarian. It is a
retaliatory culture that is typically found in pastoralist society.
Since Steve Jobs’ death, Tim Cook has been CEO and again changed the corporate culture.
Being a farmer type, Tim Cook has placed the highest priority on Apple’s cash cows, even
trying to make the iPad a substitute for laptops. Apple has become markedly
farmer-coloured, with a lot less innovation, minor changes to its iterations (conservative) and
a focus on family-friendliness and security. All values are located firmly in farmer space.
Apple has also slowly given in to standardization, e.g. slowly replacing its proprietary
connectors with USB-C connectors. It still is very tight, both regarding its products and
internal company culture. Unlike Google, and more recently Microsoft, Apple hasn’t made
any steps into open source yet, for example. This shouldn’t be surprising as Apple is located
on the opposite end of hunter space.
Apple loves to go over the top with its luxury products, charging surreal prices for its
accessories. Elon Musk recently made fun of the Apple Cloth (for cleaning screens,
compatible with all Apple products) which is priced at 20$. For comparison, Amazon sells its
family-oriented Fire tablets at 40$ on Black Friday.
Plotting the four companies onto a culture map we get the following picture.
This map also shows possible future directions. It is unlikely that Apple will move into open
hunter space any time soon, just as it is unlikely that Amazon will produce luxury technology
any time soon. Microsoft, being somewhere in the middle of the map, has the most space for
change in different directions. Microsoft and Apple are running a neck and neck race for the
top spot. My guess, Microsoft will win, due to higher flexibility. One of Apple’s most limiting
factors is its positioning as a luxury brand. Luxury brands tend to lose their attractiveness
once they produce for the masses.
How the West got even WEIRDer than we could ever
have imagined
April 06, 2022
Particularly Prosperous (2020) is the title of a highly interesting book by Joseph Henrich. The
central hypothesis is that Western institutions, like the mediaeval Christian church made
Europe WEIRD, i.e. Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic by reducing
endogamy and thus loosening the traditional clannish kinship ties that typically led to
nepotism. Henrich notes time and again how the only other people who show typical WEIRD
traits are hunter-gatherers:
emphasize values that focus on independence, achievement, and self-reliance while
I have argued that it wasn’t those institutions themselves, but the people behind the changes
who were hunter-gatherer types (also called intuitives or visionaries in the Myers-Briggs
inventory).
Henrich has most likely overstated the importance of the institutions he thinks are
responsible for making the west WEIRD. A Guardian reviewer criticises exactly that:
I confess that when reading these pages I couldn’t help remembering that Donald Trump
gave his son-in-law responsibility for Middle East peace, and that Boris Johnson has made
his brother a lord. [...] Historians will find plenty to dispute here. Scholars of the medieval era
will point out that the effects of the church’s “marriage and family programme” (the “MFP”, as
Henrich inevitably terms it) were wildly uneven across time and space. Historians of the early
modern era will note that the Protestant church was far less hostile to cousin marriage than
its Catholic rival. (The Reformation received a crucial boost from Henry VIII’s determination
to marry his former wife’s cousin.) Modern historians will argue that cousin marriage
increased across many European societies in the 17th and 18th centuries before it was
stigmatised again in the 19th century. They might also recall that, despite a consummately
“weird” enthusiasm for innovation, both Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein married their first
cousins. Historians of the world beyond Europe will find a thousand exceptions to Henrich’s
confident stereotyping of non-“weird” societies as hopelessly retarded by kinship and its
developmental dead-ends. (The Guardian)
While I agree with the reviewer that Henrich overestimated the influence of the church's
marriage and family programme, the reviewer seems to be throwing out the baby with the
bathwater. Well, it’s true that Einstein and Darwin did marry their first cousins and people
can’t be much WEIRDer than Einstein and Darwin, both of who are typed INTP in MBTI, so
the examples were well-chosen. However, they represent only two examples, plus one has
to consider that they were hardly considered “hot guys” by their female contemporaries and
didn’t have many candidates to choose from. Basically nerds, Elon Musks, sans billions and
his reputation as a tech genius.
The Guardian couldn’t be more wrong and Henrich couldn’t be more right. It is amazing how
much more like hunter-gatherer societies than early farmer or herder societies the WEIRD
(and certainly not wild) West ist. My guess is that even Herich hasn’t become fully aware of
that. Let’s see according to Henrich the West is:
● Less nepotistic (clannish)

● More egalitarian (democratic)
● More affluent
● Freer and less conformist
than traditional societies.
Now, let’s turn to reproductive biology. In the West people have
● Later marriage
● Fewer offspring
● And are freer to divorce
than in traditional farmer/herder societies. Even in hunter-gatherer societies that have

arranged marriages, women are free to leave a marriage at any time if they are unhappy.
What’s more, women also decide if they want to have a baby or not (infanticide). This is
basically a pro-choice attitude and a very strong one at that.
These points may seem banal as we have gotten used this:
The basic paradox here is that Evolutionary Psychology (EP) would predict affluent people to
have more offspring than poorer people, what we see is that, at least on a global scale, the
reverse is true. Most people don’t get the central tenets of EP because what we see does
not conform with what we see: the (biological) meaning of all (including human) life is to
reproduce. Therefore, higher affluence should translate into more offspring. This
counter-trend should therefore not be dismissed light-heartedly.
What we saw in the transition from foraging to farming was an approximate doubling of
female fertility. Hunter-gatherers do not only reproduce more rarely (around every 4 years vs
2 years for farmers), but they actively kill offspring in case the survival of an existing child
should be threatened.
So, not only our social institutions have become more egalitarian, universalist, less nepotistic
and exogamous like hunter-gatherers, but basically our reproductive behaviour despite a
trend towards earlier puberty, probably fuelled by abundant food. You may object that the
trend of having later offspring is really caused by an increase in educational years. This is
perfectly true, however, more education is again a product of WEIRDization (the E in
WEIRD). While in traditional farmer-herder societies teenagers typically know all they need
to know and are often considered adults or tasked with adult work, in hunter-gatherers it is
typically the older hunters who are most successful, not the younger and fitter hunters.
What’s more, children aren’t expected to do any work and teenagers typically don’t hunt
before age 18.
Now, I ask you once more, is the west more like traditional farmer/herder societies or more
farmer-herder societies? We have so accustomed to our cultural norms that we are blind to
see how WEIRD the following absence of characteristics is:
A society without slavery? A Roman citizen would certainly have considered that WEIRD,
just like in those WEIRD savages we call foragers nowadays, but certainly no advanced
civilization could exist without slavery, right?
What about the Rich part in WEIRD? Well, as Henrich notes, universalism opened trust and
trade. Something he left out: there are NO POOR people in hunter-gatherers. Few people
still believe in the capitalist mantra of everyone getting richer when the rich do. I consider it
much more likely that hunter-gatherer types made everyone better with institutions such as
universal welfare. To many people it may come as a surprise that rich tech entrepreneurs
like Bill Gates and Elon Musk are in favour of universal basic income. I am not, because I
know they are WEIRD.
We are WEIRD yes, and it’s a good thing. Let’s hope we’ll remain WEIRD, many signs are
showing in the other directions, unfortunately.
So, how is the West way weirder than the average society anthropologists have studied? We
are less nepotistic, more meritocratic, less endogamous, more curious, and we are even
more mobile than traditional farming societies.
Ishmael’s Takers and Leavers and the forager vs farmer
hypothesis
September 11, 2021
The literary work that is closest to my forager vs farmer hypothesis is Ishmael, a 1992
philosophical novel by Daniel Quinn. A captive gorilla who has learned to communicate with
people teaches the narrator about human Takers and leavers, with the former being
represented by farmers and the latter by foragers:
The Leavers were chapter one of human history—a long and uneventful chapter. Their
chapter of human history ended about ten thousand years ago with the birth of agriculture in
the Near East. This event marked the beginning of chapter two, the chapter of the Takers.
It’s true there are still Leavers living in the world, but these are anachronisms,
fossils—people living in the past, people who just don’t realize that their chapter of human
history is over.
Ishmael declares that the distinction is one of cultural narrative (myth) with the takers having
a different culture than the leavers. They believe:
● Humans are the pinnacle of evolution.

● The world was made for humans, and humans are thus destined to conquer and rule
the world.
● This conquest is meant to bring about a paradise, as humans increase their mastery
over-controlling nature.
● However, humans are always failing in this conquest because they are flawed
beings, who are unable to ever obtain the knowledge of how to live best.
● Therefore, however hard humans labor to save the world, they are just going to go on
defiling and destroying it.
● Even so, civilization—the great human project of trying to control the whole
world—must continue, or else humans will go extinct.
Their whole economy is based on growth:

That’s what the Takers have been doing—and are still doing. That’s what their agricultural
system is designed to support: not just settlement—growth. Unlimited growth
The takers, in contrast to every other living thing (including human foragers), take more than
their fair share of nature and by doing so continuously destroy whole ecosystems. This story
of forager sustainability and farmer unsustainability is hardly an exaggeration. James
Suzman write in Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots (2020):
Genomic data suggests that through much of their history ancient African forager
populations were characterized by a surprising level of demographic stability. This in turn
implies that they lived very sustainably. Indeed, it suggests that if the measure of a
civilization’s success is its endurance over time, then the direct ancestors of southern
Africa’s Khoisan are the most successful civilization in human history—by a considerable
margin. Genetic diversity in Africa as a whole is much higher than anywhere else in the
world, and the genetic diversity of the now tiny 100,000-strong population of Khoisan is
higher than that of any other regionally established population anywhere in the world.
Even the longest-lasting empires in history, Byzantine and Rome pale in comparison to the
millennia of sustainable living of the Khoisan.
Daniel Quinn’s narrative and mine diverge in two points. Quinn inconsistently names
pastoralists (a third “tribe'') as Leavers too as he thinks they live more sustainably than
farmers. Ishamael assumes (correctly IMHO) that the story Adam and Eve was written by a
Leaver. The story depicts the advent of agriculture as a fall from paradise and not as a gift of
the Gods (from the point of view of Takers). However, he then goes on to misattribute the
authorship to a pastoralist tribe, the Semitic herder ancestors of the Hebrews. The evidence
he provides is that Cain (farmer) killed his brother Abel (pastoralist). However, the historic
evidence points very much in the other direction, farmers being the victims of herders.
The second, more important point of divergence: Ishmael portrays the differences between
Takers and Leavers as a cultural one, whereas I have argued that it’s very much a genetic
one involving genes related to the serotonin and dopamine receptors. The story of Adam
and Eve was very likely ideated by a Leaver/forager type, who was the progeny of foragers
(slaves or foragers who turned into laborers not finding enough food).
Can we find any evidence of such forager types in our society? Well, I would argue that most
people who are fascinated by Quinn’s novel are such forager types. There is even a hint of
such people in the novel itself:
In such places (he went on at last), where animals are simply penned up, they are almost
always more thoughtful than their cousins in the wild. This is because even the dimmest of
them cannot help but sense that something is very wrong with this style of living.
There are humans who behave very similarly to animals in capacity: philosophers, scientists,
novelists and others who spend a considerable amount of their time thinking. Thinking
because the environment they live in (a farmer world) is not the environment their minds
were programmed for (a forager world). A traditional dichotomy divides people into doers
and thinkers, or sensors and intuitives in Jungian psychology. This comes very close to
Takers (farmer and herder types who act in accordance with their evolutionary programming)
and Leavers (forager types who often hesitate and need time for thinking as their
programming is off). When I tell such people that they are evolutionary forager types they
are highly skeptical, arguing that they wouldn’t have survived as foragers (too
scatterbrained, too fearful, etc.) However, that is exactly what we often see with animals in
captivity, they become neurotic, show weird behaviour and often even refuse to breed. So
many forager type women have told me that they never felt the wish to have children or
would even find it irresponsible to have children in a world like ours.
Yes, sadly the Leavers are leaving (becoming fewer and fewer) this planet. It’s not only sad
for forager types, but also for humankind in general. It has been precisely the
Leavers/forager types who have been trying to make a farmer world sustainable since
almost the beginning of farming. This farmer world has been starting to crack, making the
lack of Leavers visible. Those who are still fighting as environmental activists are often
ridiculed. And yes, Greta Thunberg is one of those Leavers.
Cultural learning, science deniers, and scientific
evolution
September 21, 2022
People like me are often flabbergasted by people who deny science like Darwinian evolution
when the evidence is basically all around us. There are lots of good books on science
deniers and we have a fairly good picture about the psychology of science deniers, but we
still know little about the evolutionary origins of this phenomenon. Science deniers tend to be
low in openness, have a high need for cognitive closure, hate ambiguity and change and
tend to rely on tradition and authority. A lot of researchers have pointed out that they fit the
profile of politically and socially conservative people, also termed authoritarian personality.
From the point of view of evolutionary psychology we might assume that such people who
are slow to update their view of reality may be evolutionarily disadvantaged as they should
drop out in the evolutionary rat race. Actually, the opposite may be true for evolutionary
reasons. Before we can resolve this paradox we have to take a look at Homo Sapiens as a
cultural species. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich writes in The WEIRDest People in the World
(2020):
[...] we do know something about cultural learning among Congo Basin hunter-gatherers
and have explored the implications of different learning strategies for cumulative cultural
evolution. The evidence suggests that aspiring hunters first learn from their fathers how to
make arrow poisons. About a third of these foragers then update their fathers’ recipes with
insights from others, probably from the most successful and prestigious hunters. When
transmission patterns like these are placed into cultural evolutionary computer simulations,
or carefully manipulated in experiments with real people trying to learn new things, the
results reveal how cultural evolution can assemble highly adaptive and complex recipes,
procedures, and tools over generations without anyone understanding how or why various
elements are included.
Cultural transmission is an amazing thing that allows us to create smartphones even though
no single person involved may understand how a smartphone works in all its details. We rely
a lot on traditional knowledge, knowledge that has been handed down to us that we simply
accept as true. We may question a lot about this knowledge (e.g. is the smartphone’s
memory enough to guarantee a great user experience), but once we reach a certain level of
complexity we can’t simply start questioning everything.
This brings us to the question of when learners should rely on cultural learning over their
own experience, personal information, or instincts. The answer is straightforward: when
problems are difficult, situations are ambiguous, or individual learning is costly, people
should rely more heavily on learning from others. To put these ideas to the test, my favorite
experiments manipulate both the difficulty of a task and the size of cash payoffs for correct
responses. Participants, for example, might be paid different amounts of money for correctly
identifying which of a set of curvy lines is the longest. They can rely on their own direct
perception or on cultural learning—on the decisions of others. The harder the task is—i.e.,
the closer the curvy lines are in length—the more people rely on observing other people’s
decisions and aggregating this information into their own judgments.
What Henrich writes about cultural complexity makes total sense from the point of view of
evolutionary psychology. What we need now is to spot the relevant selective pressures in
order to find out why some people rely more on tradition and authority than on individual
learning. I argue that this happened with the transition from foraging (hunting and gathering)
to food-production, in particular agriculture. Agricultural technology requires generations and
generations to optimise and can never be achieved by a single individual who would rely on
personal learning. People who would have relied more on personal learning (and would only
have reinvented the wheel) were likely to have been disadvantaged than those who
increasingly relied on cultural learning.
The conclusion is that people who have more ancestral farmer than forager heritage are
more likely to rely on traditional knowledge and trust authority. Early farming communities
would also have been more endogamous and more closely related to each other than
foragers who are more exogamous and change bands frequently. Authorities, like a father,
uncle or head of the community would therefore have been invested in the survival of its clan
and following authority without questioning it too much would have had an evolutionary
advantage.The trouble with this instinct is, that nowadays it can be hijacked by populist
politicians who do not have a vested interest in the survival of the genes of their voters.
People with more forager heritage would in contrast be more wary of authority and less
conformist:
emphasise values that focus on independence, achievement, and self-reliance while
This genetic difference is visible from early childhood on, where you have children who are
more obedient and conforming on the one hand, and children who are more questioning and
rebellious on the other hand. A typical example would be children who keep “nagging” their
parents with their many “why?” questions, or students who question the authority of a
teacher, as is often the case with neurodiverse children.
Looking at science itself from the perspective of cultural evolution, we can understand it as
the product of increased cultural learning (farming type) that tends to be conservative and its
antagonistic force, a questioning element based on personal learning (foraging type). I have
argued before that hunter-gatherer types are frequently better at self-directed learning
(autodidacts) than formal and repetitive learning in the classroom.
The distinction between forager and farmer types resembles very closely that between
mappers and packers (or pattern vs rote learners). Mappers are able to update their maps or
knowledge webs more quickly in the light of new and conflicting information, whereas
packers are more likely not to know how to integrate paradoxical information and just ignore
it. Forager types, on the other hand, would be attracted to paradoxes, exactly because they
may provide a lot of new information and insight. In our evolutionary history, these two
strategies would have been ideal for hunters (tracking animals, updating information on the
go) and farmers trying to learn a single optimal method. Forager types are more likely to
drop out of formal schooling but more likely to be high achievers when it comes to
innovation.
Sometimes we find some geographic clustering of forager or farmer types. In the US the
liberal West Coast is very high in innovation, individuality and creativity, whereas the
Midwest/South are high on tradition, authority, conformism and hard work, farmer values. As
farmer types tend to have more offspring than forager types, we can only expect an increase
in resistance to new scientific findings. Indeed, this is what we have been seeing for a while
now. Farmer types are not inept at understanding science, though, they are just slower at
updating their belief system and as they tend to be conformist this usually happens once a
critical threshold of people who have already done so is reached.
Divided We Stand: Making Sense of Three
Psychological Regions of the United States
July 31, 2022
In my research regarding the evolutionary origins of personality, I have come across the
work of Peter J. Rentfrow again and again. “Divided We Stand: Three Psychological Regions
of the United States and Their Political, Economic, Social, and Health Correlates” is a 2013
article of his and his collaborators regarding the differences within the United (or
Not-So-United) States:
Results from cluster analyses of 5 independent samples totaling over 1.5 million individuals
identified 3 robust psychological profiles: Friendly & Conventional, Relaxed & Creative, and
Temperamental & Uninhibited. The psychological profiles were found to cluster
geographically and displayed unique patterns of associations with key geographical
indicators.
The Big Five personality inventory was used to derive these three clusters. Cluster 1 is
highly correlated with conscientiousness and agreeableness, Cluster 2 with openness and
Cluster 3 with neuroticism and, as we can see from the maps above, with extraversion. In
the study it was correlated slightly negatively with extraversion, however, which is really
strange for a cluster called temperamental and disinhibited as extraversion, as extraverts
generally are more temperamental and less inhibited than introverts. The three different
psychological profiles are associated with a number of other correlations. Cluster 1 is likely
to vote conservative, belong to an Evangelical Christian group, have low social tolerance
and have low violent crime rates. They basically correspond to what Michele Gelfand calls
“tight”. Clusters 2 and 3, on the other hand, are more likely to vote democrat, more tolerant
of social diversity and be more innovative, what Gelfand calls “loose”.
Three years prior to the 2016 elections, this research could have predicted Trumpland (red)
and Clintonland (blue) in the upcoming elections. Trumpland is made up mostly of Cluster 1
and Clintonland correlates with Cluster 2. Cluster 3 is pretty mixed, which may be an
indication that Cluster 3 isn’t very homogeneous after all.
The presence of such clusters can in principle be explained by two different kinds of patterns
a) evolutionary
b) migratory
In the case of the United States we know that evolutionary partners play a neglectable role
as most of the people involved in the study are offspring of migrants. So, what we are
looking for are migratory patterns that would explain the distribution. Selective migration is
the concept that people choose to move to places that are compatible with their personalities
and needs. For example, a person high on the agreeable scale would likely want to live near
family and friends, and would choose to settle or remain in such an area. In contrast,
someone high on openness would prefer to settle in a place that is recognized as diverse
and innovative such as California.
For Cluster 1, they assume that family values are important in choosing where to live:
For people with Friendly & Conventional psychological profiles, settling near family and
friends helps them to preserve and maintain intimate social relationships that can bring
fulfillment and support throughout life.
This would certainly explain why Cluster 1 tends to flock together, however it hardly explains
the geographic distribution. Why should they settle in the Midwest and South?
Cluster 3, high in neuroticism, may not have migrated a lot and therefore represent a lot of
the genome of the original settlers (New England), according to the authors. This makes a
lot of sense as neurotic people are more anxious and would not venture out into the Wild
West. However, that would not explain the presence of Cluster 3 in Texas. Perhaps another
indication that Cluster 3 There isn’t that much similarity between Texans and New England
Yankees.
Cluster 2 shows an extremely interesting pattern:
To explore the possibility that frontier settlement might have contributed to the emergence of
this psychological region, we examined the association between the Relaxed & Creative
profile and the year in which states were founded as an index of frontier settlement and
obtained some support for this hypothesis. This finding suggests that the Relaxed & Creative
psychological profile is more common in frontier regions.
Nobody will be surprised to learn that the high openness profile will flock to places with
universities and places with a high level of innovation, like Silicon Valley and Seattle.
However, what frontier regions suggest in the first place is that Cluster 3 simply moves away
from civilization. When Cluster 3 migrated, for the most part there simply was nothing out
there in terms of material culture, least of all a Silicon Valley. Exploring new places is in
accordance with openness, but living in the wilderness, far away from civilization sounds
extremely odd. What kind of people are they, being both interested in the latest innovation in
tech and apparently wanting to be left alone? In order to make sense of these patterns, let’s
compare them to other clusters found by researchers.
The migratory patterns we can see so far are:
Cluster 3: original immigrants who didn’t migrate further (high neuroticism)
Cluster 1: immigrants who migrated further, but tend to stay near their families and
communities of origin (high agreeableness, low openness)
Cluster 2: migrates to the frontiers, where initially there is nothing but wilderness (high
openness, low neuroticism)
The British think tank Cultural Dynamic has found three different groups regarding their basic
values rather than personality in Britain: pioneers, prospectors and settlers:
Cluster 2 obviously corresponds to the pioneer group. Think of them as the Henry David
Thoreaus, living at Walden Pond, both yearning for a different (authentic to them) way of life
and interested in new ideas.
Cluster 3 may superficially appear like the settler group, however reading their defining traits
it quickly becomes clear that the settler group really corresponds to Cluster 1. Cluster 3 may
be somewhat correlated with the prospector group, who tend to be swing voters.
DeYoung has found two metatraits in the Big Five inventory: stability (agreeableness,
conscientiousness, negative neuroticism) and plasticity (extraversion and openness). I have
argued that these metratraits can be seen as evolutionary adaptations to sedentism
(stability) and nomadism (plasticity), with nomads being split into herders (extraversion) and
foragers (openness).
Using Shalom Schwartz’s universal values and HEXACO values, I have plotted our
evolutionary heritage onto a “map”:
Cluster 1 is associated with evolutionary farmer types. This also explains the geographic
distribution of Cluster 1 in the US areas (past and present) most closely associated with
farming: the South and Midwest.
Cluster 2, forager types would have headed west mostly for finding freedom, autonomy and
nature rather than gold. The level of high openness lead secondarily to highly prestigious
universities (e.g. Stanford), innovation (Silicon Valley) and became a magnet for people high
in openness in general (e.g. hippies).
Cluster 3, the most inhomogeneous one, can be associated with herding in Texas. San
Antonio is the place where the American cowboy culture is said to have originated. It is
certainly a culture that deserves the label Temperamental & Uninhibited.
The Eleven American Nations
September 25, 2022
The US is nicknamed the “Land of the Free”. However, its early history presents a very
different picture with different cultures differing in their degrees of freedom. I learned in
school that the first American settlers came to seek freedom from the oppressive European
regimes they fled. Of course, this is true to some extent, however, the US was also
characterized by slavery, feudalism, high levels of conformism and authoritarianism and it
took America a long time to become truly a land of the free and perhaps it’s not an
overstatement to claim that the only truly free people in American had been the native
foragers before the arrival of the Europeans.
Nowadays we see the US polarised to an extent that is reminiscent of the Civil War.
However, seeing America as Red vs Blue states only is a gross oversimplification. Colin
Woodard traces eleven different, often opposing, “nations” and cultures in his 2011 book
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (see
map above). The eleven cultures had very different origins to begin with:
While Tidewater was settled largely by young, unskilled male servants, New England’s
colonists were skilled craftsmen, lawyers, doctors, and yeoman farmers; none of them was
an indentured servant. Rather than having fled poverty in search of better lives, the early
Yankees had traded a comfortable existence at home for the uncertainties of the wilderness.
Seventy percent came as part of an established family, giving early Yankeedom far more
typical gender and age ratios than those of the other nations.
While the culture of origin would be passed on to the next generations, I would go further
and claim that the differences between the eleven nations weren’t merely cultural, but also
partially genetic. Each culture is made up of people and geneticists in the past decade
discovered that a population tends to be made up of three ancestral populations that had
very distinct environmental and social adaptations: hunter-gatherers, farmers and herders.
Shalom Schwartz has analysed cultures according to universal human values. I have argued
that his system has a high correspondence with values created by foraging, farming and
herding, respectively.
Using these values we can see the US north, the Yankeedom was dominated by
hunter-gatherer values, whereas the south was more dominated by herder-farmer values. Of
course, this is only a rough approximation and counterexamples can be given.
According to a central myth of American history, the founders of Yankeedom were
champions of religious freedom fleeing persecution at home. While there is some truth to this
in regard to the Pilgrims—a few hundred English Calvinists who settled Cape Cod in
1620—it is entirely false in regard to the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, who would soon
bring Plymouth and the other colonies of New England under their control. The Puritans left
England en masse in the 1630s—25,000 in just twelve short years—because of their
unwillingness to compromise on matters of religious policy. While other colonies welcomed
all comers, the Puritans forbade anyone to settle in their colony who failed to pass a test of
religious conformity. Dissenters were banished. Quakers were disfigured for easy
identification, their nostrils slit, their ears cut off, or their faces branded with the letter H for
“heretic.” Puritans doled out death sentences for infractions such as adultery, blasphemy,
idolatry, sodomy, and even teenage rebellion. They fined farmers who tended their cows,
raked hay, or hunted birds on the Sabbath.
From our circle of values, we can see that authority and conformism are farmer values,
which are moreover in direct conflict with the forager and herder values of self-direction and
freedom as well as with hunter-gatherer egalitarianism. Herder types, while valuing their own
freedom often aren’t this egalitarian when it comes to outgroups. This is an attitude we find
in the Tidewater aristocrats, which is not surprising for someone who values achieving social
status above all:
While they were passionate in defending their liberties, it would never have occurred to them
that those liberties might be shared with their subjects. “I am an aristocrat,” Virginian John
Randolph would explain decades after the American Revolution. “I love liberty; I hate
equality.”
Herder types can be associated with colonialism, often establishing feudalism,
aristocracy/oligarchy, slavery and a caste system, which did actually exist in the El Norte
region (whites vs indigenous people), but had to be abandoned due to high genetic
intermixture. Herder types are also the ones who would avoid being dominated and therefore
also state-integration and who are often borderlanders. This is clearly the case with the last
of the nations to be founded in the colonial period, Greater Appalachia
A clan-based warrior culture from the borderlands of the British Empire, it arrived on the
backcountry frontier of the Midlands, Tidewater, and Deep South and shattered those
nations’ monopoly control over colonial governments, the use of force, and relations with the
Native Americans. Proud, independent, and disturbingly violent, the Borderlanders of
Greater Appalachia have remained a volatile insurgent force within North American society
to the present day.
While I can’t discuss all eleven cultures here, it should have become clear why the US has
never really become a single unified culture. Cultural identity can change more easily than
genetic identity. In this sense, the US has never been united and probably never will be and
if the US wants to remain a single country there is a lot of work and compromise ahead for it.
The fight between farmer and forager types
(conservatives and progressives)
April 30, 2021
The fight between farmer and forager types is a fight about work and values and not a
physical one. Ever since the agricultural revolution, there have been two types of forces in
human societies: a conservative one (farmer types, who love routine, hard work, tradition
and value conformism and law and order) and a progressive one (foragers types, who love
novelty, are less into hard work and value freedom and individualism). People may be
somewhat mixed, but their genetic makeup will most likely pull into one direction depending
on what genetic makeup they got to inherit.
The antagonism between farmers and foragers has always been about several bones of
contention, like how egalitarian society is. However, one of the most prominent ones is work.
Farmers have the ability to do sustained rote work, which foragers do not have (they are
typically the people who suffer from burnout first nowadays). Farmers therefore not only
represent conservatism, but also productivity, whereas foragers have always been the
creative forces in human history, carving out their niches and inventing new methods to
make labour easier (necessity is the mother of invention).
Forager types have since been the driving force behind all major social revolutions:
● Urbanization
● The social egalitarianism of the Axial Axe
● The great monotheistic religious revolutions
● The enlightenment and industrial revolutions
These revolutions typically tried to bring about a more equal society (e.g. religions fostering
charity) and easier work for forager types. This may be more obvious for some forager
movements than others. Urbanization isn’t an obvious candidate, and yet it was a means to
escape drudgery in the fields for forager types. In fact, James Suzman writes in Work, A
Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots (2021)
Interestingly, the oldest almost-urban settlement discovered so far, Çatalhöyük in Turkey,
was probably similarly materially egalitarian too. But it was not like any of the other ancient
towns and cities that followed. Its ruins are made up of hundreds of similar-sized domestic
dwellings clustered tightly together, almost like cells in a beehive, suggesting no one was
measurably richer than anyone else. There were also no obvious public spaces like markets,
squares, temples, or plazas and no public thoroughfares, paths, or roads, leaving
archaeologists to conclude that people got from one place to the next by scrambling across
rooftops and entering their and others’ homes through the ceilings.
Çatalhöyük may not have been the only egalitarian urban settlement. Of course, the
egalitarian period only lasted as long as status-oriented farmer types didn’t populate these
settlements, as this would have meant the end of an unstratified society as farmers would
have worked much more and harder to accumulate material wealth.
John Maynard Keynes [...] predicted in 1930 that by the early twenty-first-century capital
growth, improving productivity, and technological advances should have brought us to the
foothills of an economic “promised land” in which everybody’s basic needs were easily
satisfied and where, as a result, nobody worked more than fifteen hours in a week. We
passed the productivity and capital growth thresholds Keynes calculated would need to be
met to get there some decades ago.
John Maynard Keynes was obviously a forager type. He actually loathed the farmer’s work
ethic or greediness (depending on from which side you see it) as it meant an obstacle to his
prediction. And an obstacle it was. His affluent 15-hour work-week societies so far can only
be found in forager groups - mostly of the past as modern foragers usually live like
third-class citizens in the countries where they have survived. His vision was, like Karl Max’s
communist vision, an unrealistic utopia. The majority of people in the world are farmer types
who are instinctively averse to communism and who will work more if it helps them increase
their status.
John Maynard Keynes might have known. The Industrial Revolution brought so many
improvements in easing labour. Forager types really worked hard to decrease hard work and
farmer types really worked hard to undo all that with their greed. Life for many people
became harder, slaving away 15 hours a day (instead of a week). As much as we marvel at
the inventions of the Industrial Revolution, as easily we tend to forget the misery it brought to
many people:
For many, the industrial revolution of the 19th century and the rise of consumer capitalism
brought the promise of greater wealth and freedom of choice in all aspects of life. But this
same period also witnessed a dramatic rise in suicide. (source)
I have no doubts that most of those suicides were committed by forager types. Modern
foragers like the Intuit, Aborigines and many Native American tribes have the highest suicide
rates in the world.
The fight between foragers and farmers goes on today. With robots increasingly doing our
work, it is increasingly becoming harder to become rich with hard work. In many companies
nowadays creative talent is more highly valued than hard work. A lot of countries are,
however, making it increasingly harder for this creative talent to ever reach the workforce.
Schools are increasingly demanding more work from their students in order to be
competitive in the modern world of work. Inadvertently they are filtering out the creative
talents, typically foragers types who are the first to drop out of high school. The most
horrifying version of this phenomenon can be seen in farmer Japan, where almost half a
million Hikikomori (doubtlessly forager types) have decided to drop out of academic and
work life.
The Medical Profession as a Micro-Model for Mankind
May 15, 2022
The oldest specialised profession in the world is…, no, not that one, it’s the medicine man,
witchcraft woman, shaman and holistic healer (which probably predates the other one by
millennia). While our forager ancestors had little specialisation - even hunting and gathering
is often done by both sexes - the holistic healer with both knowledge in herbal remedies and
spiritual well-being sticks out in many forager societies as a specialisation, which otherwise
only came much later after the agricultural revolution.
Like many other institutions, the medical profession has taken a dive in general trust during
the COVID pandemic, even though it has been historically one of the most honourable and
prestigious ones. Ever since Hippocrates doctors have sworn an oath that commits them to
the highest ethical standards. What’s more, for a large part of history doctors were the
embodiment of the polymath. Apart from being a physician, Galen was a surgeon,
philosopher and psychologist. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) was an astronomer, philosopher, and
psychologist apart from being a physician.
Doctors today are still often seen as heroes, like the Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors
Without Borders, an international humanitarian medical non-governmental organisation.
However, as often our faith in our healthcare system is waning rather than waxing. When a
dentist extracts a tooth, I often feel he wants to extract a monthly salary rather than being
concerned about my health.
Joking aside, let’s try to learn something about humankind from doctors. I recently read a
German book about highly sensitive people, that claimed that most doctors used to be highly
sensitive people (HSPs), who are extremely good at perceiving stimuli and patterns other
people miss, but that our modern high-stress environment (long shifts, huge hospitals, etc.)
has led to non-HSPs taking over the medical profession as HSPs are disadvantaged (to
compete) in such environments. Now, this may sound somewhat esoteric, but makes a lot of
sense. We can assume that Hippocrates and Ibn Sina were all HSPs and often would be
outcompeted by non-HSPs if they wanted to go into the medical profession nowadays, and
not only because these two were introverts who easily feel overwhelmed and not feel at
ease in a modern extroverted work environment.
At college, I had to take some anatomy and physiology classes for linguistics (phonetics),
which I really enjoyed, but at the same time, I was relieved that I didn’t study medicine,
which would have taken me many more years to complete and much more stuff to learn by
heart. We HSPs tend to be intuitive big picture thinkers and we hate memorising stuff. For
professional programmers, a distinction was made between mappers (pattern-recognizers)
and packers (memorising in packages). It should be clear that most pioneers in medicine
were mostly mappers, whereas most people who go through years of medical training are
more likely packers. Another similar distinction would be the Big 5 traits of “openness to new
ideas'' (O) and consciousness (including industriousness). These two traits correlate highly
with liberalism and (social) conservatism.
Let’s see if there is anything meaningful about doctors we can find out in this regard. I found
the following two statistics very interesting:
As you can see, there is a solid correlation between high-paying jobs and medical
professions dominated by conservative Republicans. Now I am going to make some horribly
gross generalisations to make the patterns clearer and divide doctors into two distinct
categories:
I have argued that these tendencies come from our evolutionary history, in particular our
modes of subsistence in foraging vs farming. If we substitute group A and B with foragers
and farmers respectively, we get matching patterns.
Now, let’s imagine, for simplicity’s sake that people were “un-mixed”, that the world consisted
only of forager and farmer types. Two socioeconomic classes would quickly emerge if
everyone had the same occupation. In a farmer society, foragers would be highly
disadvantaged and would, therefore, be hard-pressed to diversify. Say, becoming a doctor
would be a viable alternative. Doctors soon would have higher prestige and income than
farmers, which would motivate farmer types to move into medical professions. They can only
do so insofar as the required skills can be acquired by packing, i.e. with more formal
schooling and less intuition. Psychiatry remains highly intuitive to this day and is, therefore, a
poor field for famer types as ready-made and tried and true techniques are often not very
useful. Once sequential learning opens up paths into the new profession, farmer types can
follow provided these occupations bring status and wealth. In a transitional phase where
most people are “doctors” there is relatively high socioeconomic equality. Once the
high-income occupations are filled with farmer types, socioeconomic classes start to form
again and forager types have to pioneer new areas that require a lot of mapping rather than
packing, say programming computers. The skills become more formalised again and farmers
can start to move in again.
WEIRD as this sounds, this in a nutshell has been the driving force in economic
development since agriculture. Each industrial revolution was basically a move away from
physical work to more cerebral work.
Foragers are highly unwilling to take up farming, they find it too troublesome. You can call
them work-shy or lazy if you will. Put a forager into a competitive and stressful area and they
will naturally try to increase efficiency and reduce the routine workload.
This is a very abstract model and doesn’t tell you not to have faith in conservative/farmer
physicians. In fact, the physician my wife trusts most highly is a highly conservative one who
- to our horror - expressed his support and admiration for Putin (before the war in Ukraine).
Even if this is totally against our liberal conviction, it doesn’t make him worse at his job. In
fact, each type may have very different strengths, like farmer types being able to cope with
higher work-loads. Moreover, forager types like me often are absent-minded or suffer from
ADHD. I can picture myself totally as the surgeon who left the scalpel inside the patient.
No, it’s not about individual people, but where we are headed to as a society. The trend is
that medicine is more and more about making money and it’s here where it is starting to
become unethical. It’s not accidental that almost 70% of surgeons are conservative. I have
nothing against surgeons, but there is a danger it becomes unethical, especially in plastic
surgery. Plastic surgery does not help an individual’s health in any way, on the contrary, it
has considerable health risks. I guess Hippocrates would say that every plastic surgeon
should really try to dissuade his patients from having plastic surgery. What’s more, this whole
plastic surgery has led to a superficial beauty craze that is bad for society on a large scale.
And it’s not only plastic surgery. Prescription drugs are one of the biggest industries and
doctors are often bribed by the big pharma companies. As a patient, I have come to trust
doctors who are reluctant to prescribe drugs more than those who are quick to describe
them. Last, but not least, the health of a country’s healthcare system may in itself be a good
indicator of how healthy its political-beautrocratic system is.
Casualties of Civilization
September 24, 2022
Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress is a 2019 book by Christopher Ryan that is very
close to my forager-farmer framework. As a proponent of cultural pessimism, Ryan stands in
a long tradition that is at least as old as antiquity (the myth of the Golden Age and
subsequent decay). Ryan sets out to prove neo-Hobbesians like Steve Pinker and Matt
Ridley (The Rational Optimist ) who continue to perpetuate the Narrative of Perpetual
Progress (NPP): human life used to be misery until civilization took off to come to humanity’s
rescue. Ryan equates uncivilised with foraging and civilization with agriculture, which Jared
Diamond called “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”.
Ryan provides countless examples of problems that civilised societies have that simply didn’t
exist in forager populations, from the well-known tooth-decay due to a high starch diet to
some lesser known examples, like the prevalence of breast cancer due to a drastically
increased amount of menstrual cycles as compared to forager women. Of course, our
problems don’t stop at physical health like obesity, hypertension, cancer and autoimmune
diseases, but extend to mental health, decreased self-determination and freedom and
happiness. Suicide was virtually unknown among foragers, it’s foragers like the Inuit that
have the highest rates of suicide when forced to live in civilization.
Ryan quotes Benjamin Franklin’s famous passage in which he writes if you bring a native
American child up in a city and show them all of the benefits of life that modern society can
bestow, and then they spend a week back with native Americans, they won’t want to return
to ‘civilisation’. But the reverse doesn’t hold. Non-native American children brought up by
native Americans need to be physically restrained from escaping back to their tribe when
they are finally ‘saved’ by their ‘civilised’ own kind.
This phenomenon is certainly something that should make people who believe in the
wonders of civilization and in narratives like Steve Pinker’s make reflect their ideas. The past
couple of years have certainly shown that we are not on an inevitable trajectory of progress
and a better world.
One thing I find flawed about Ryan’s thinking is the equation of civilised with agriculture and
uncivilised with foraging. First of all, it’s historically incorrect, civilisations only took off
thousands of years after the beginning of agriculture and Ryan acknowledges implicitly that
foragers are often more civilised than civilizations. Depending on your definition of
civilisation, you would consider foragers, who have no slavery, no dictators, no child labour,
no prisons, no poverty, no inequality, a liberal attitude towards child rearing, equality for
women, pro-choice, divorce initiated by women and free health-care much more civilised
than the Ancient Greeks, Romans or Egyptians, for example.
I have been arguing that a lot of what we call civilised has been historically brought about by
forager types whose ancestors were incorporated into farming societies sometime around
the Copper Age, after a long period of typically avoiding farming societies by taking refuge in
areas less adapted for agriculture. Ever since that time forager types have been trying to
adapt a farmer world to their psychological needs. Chris Ryan outs himself as a
hunter-gatherer type when he writes at the end of the book:
What if we strategically bring hunter-gatherer thinking into our modern lives by, for
example, replacing top-down corporate structures with peer progressive networks and
horizontally organized collectives and building an infrastructure of nonpolluting locally
generated energy? If Homo sapiens sapiens were to divert spending on weapons,
redirecting resources into a global guaranteed basic income that incentivizes not having
children, thus reducing global population intelligently and without coercion, we would be
taking steps toward acceptance. Once we start down this road, every step would lead us
closer to a future that recognizes, celebrates, honors, and replicates the origins and nature
of our species. This is, as far as I can see, the only road home.
My hunch is, that our ancestors were happier in the past, when they were allowed to live in
the environments they evolved in, be it as hunter-gatherers, farmers or pastoralists. There is
no way back, only a way forward and we have to work towards a society in which everyone
feels at home. Most of us forager types have been feeling like aliens on this planet since the
beginning of civilisation.

The Three Cultures That Create Civilization

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The Three Cultures That Create Civilization

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The Three Cultures that Create Civilization

Tight and loose cultures - farmer vs hunter-gatherer minds

A theory of culture based on evolved temperament

Mapping the human cultural landscape

Settlers, Prospectors and Pioneers

The evolutionary psychology of the myside bias

Evolutionary Ethics - The Origins of our Moral Foundations

Herders, Warriors, And Traders - The Origin of Social Stratification

A General Theory of Culture and Cultural Dynamics

Three very different corporate cultures: Google, Microsoft, Apple

Ishmael’s Takers and Leavers and the forager vs farmer hypothesis

Cultural learning, science deniers, and scientific evolution

The Eleven American Nations

The Medical Profession as a Micro-Model for Mankind

Dedicated to my beloved children: Missy, Sophie, Sashka and Andrej

High on personality trait “openness”, low High on personality trait

Strongly (actively) egalitarian status-seeking

Tendency towards out-group sociality, Tendency towards in-group sociality

More liberal ideology More conservative ideology

Less sexual dimorphism More (display of) sexual dimorphism

Later onset of puberty Earlier onset of puberty

More monogamous tendencies Less monogamous tendencies

Tendency to wanting fewer children Tendency to wanting more children

Relaxed child-rearing attitude Authoritative child rearing, “helicopter

Night owls Early risers

“Lazier” (when it comes to physical work More hard-working

Upper class: early farmers (SJ) king, priests, landowners, high-ranking

Middle class: pastoralists (SP) warriors, artisans, and merchants

Lower class: hunter-gatherers (N) labourers, slaves

The history of civilizations can be understood by these temperaments or “forces” acting on

● Science and universities

There is even more to be learned from hunter-gatherer societies. According to the

additionally about authority, sanctity (purity) and ingroup loyalty.

Hunter-gatherer type people can typically be recognized by this approach to morality.

1. Tutsi pastoralists about 15% of the population

1. Nomadic pastoralism with trading and occasional raiding

I have argued in “A General Theory of Personality” that personality can be seen as an

The more homogeneous a culture is,

● the more likely it consists of mostly individuals of one “tribe”

The more inhomogeneous a culture is,

● the more likely it consists of individuals of all “tribes”

Henrich summarizes the findings thus:

● Hierarchies in institutions (school, etc.) and jobs

● High degree of egalitarianism

The open-source movement is characterized by 100% hunter values: openness,

● Less nepotistic (clannish)

than traditional societies.

Now, let’s turn to reproductive biology. In the West people have

than in traditional farmer/herder societies. Even in hunter-gatherer societies that have

● Humans are the pinnacle of evolution.

Their whole economy is based on growth:

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