Category Archives: land ownership

Parochial cooperation in wild chimpanzees: A model to explain the evolution of parochial altruism

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Lemoine, S. R. T., Samuni, L., Crockford, C., & Wittig, R. M. (2022). Parochial cooperation in wild chimpanzees: A model to explain the evolution of parochial altruism. In Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (Vol. 377, Issue 1851). Royal Society Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0149

This is an exceptional paper. The authors define “parochial altruism” as taking individual costs to benefit the in-group and harm the out-group, and propose a model for the evolution of parochial altruism. The model applies to chimpanzees, but the idea is that this model might perhaps also explain how parochial altruism evolved in humans.

For this purpose, the authors review a vast number of papers in the field of cooperation and aggression in wild chimpanzees (and, to some extent, other animals) .

The model they propose is a complex one. It is relevant, for the issues we talk about in this blog, that the authors propose a positive feedback loop between aggressive encounters with external groups, on the one hand, and collaboration and cohesion within the group, on the other.

For example:

  • “In-group solidarity tends to increase in response to out-group conflict, suggesting a causal link between out-group threat and in-group cohesion” (p. 2).
  • “Evidence across taxa, including birds and mammals, demonstrate an immediate increase of in-group cohesion and affiliation following out-group threat, pointing towards the link between out-group conflicts and in-group favoritism” (p. 2).
  • “Cooperation is key in maximizing the chances of beneficial outcomes of out-group conflicts” (p. 5).
  • Group conflicts favor “the emergence and maintenance of cooperation among non-related individuals, the maintenance of strong social ties, in-group favoritism and hostility towards out-group members” (p. 7).
  • “The highly structured and collective border patrols and large coalitionary attacks observed in chimpanzees indeed suggest strong links between group-level cooperation and out-group threat” (p. 8).

All this is important and relevant for the origin of the state, as explained by my mentor, Juan Samaja. Individuals compete against each other (internal war), but the pressure of the external threats makes them unite against the common enemy (external war); this threat is one of the keys to the birth of the state, as already explained in Plato’s Republic.

Another interesting aspect is that the paper establishes a link between reciprocity and what we call “community”. “The accumulation of bonded relationships, embedded within a social network, provides a path by which group-level cooperation occurs. The hypothesis that direct reciprocity constitutes a mechanism enabling solving collective problems finds support in chimpanzees where regular social interactions within a community cement a sense of common belonging (a common affect), enabling group-level collective action and avoidance of defection” (p. 8). This of course works only for local groups and small-scale cooperation; large scale cooperation requires other normative and symbolic frameworks (a flag, a national narrative, etc.)

For those of you (readers) who follow my musings in this blog about the epistemological impact of social coordination, it is interesting to note that chimpanzees engage in border patrols, where they move along the edges of their territories to monitor and defend their boundaries. They check for signs of intruders, such as the scent of unfamiliar individuals or the sound of other chimpanzee groups in the area. If they detect signs of intrusion, they often engage in displays of aggression, such as vocalizing loudly, throwing rocks and branches, or charging at the perceived threat. Now, this behavior might be the oldest precursor of the cultural institution of “boundary”. This institution, incidentally, is the one that philosopher John Searle uses as an example to explain the very notion of “institutions” (differentiating a wall that encircles a village as a physical barrier that can’t be crossed from a symbolic stone that marks the limit of a village and shouldn’t be crossed). Once we humans learned how to play the game of boundaries on an institutional level, we started to demarcate boundaries on the epistemological level. Ancient Rhetoric is born as an exercise to argue for the property of land, to have the limits of one’s property recognized. In Plato’s Republic, the limits of the city are delineated hand in hand with the limits of the citizen (both are defined almost in the same way), as well as the boundaries of the concept (of the Good, for example). Even Kant’s transcendental deduction follows to the detail the format of a legal deductio aimed at demarcating the territory and the boundaries of a state (Kant applies this format to demarcate the limits… of pure reason).

First arrival and land ownership

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Text #12

Verkuyten, M., Sierksma, J., & Thijs, J. (2015). First arrival and owning the land: How children reason about ownership of territory. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 41, 58–64. doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2014.11.007

This is an interesting and rare article on first arrival and land ownership.

The article raises interesting questions on the role of the “first arrival” principle in disputes about land ownership. “First arrival” to a land is in a sense analogous to first possession of objects. They study this topic with children between 9 and 12 years of age and their answer is that “children believe that a person owns a particular land relatively more when that person arrived first.” Furthermore, the first arriver is considered to own the land relatively more even when she did not work the land, compared to the later arriver who did work it. In judging ownership, first arrival even outweighs the laboring of the land of the later arriver. Thus the perceived possessory right of the first arriver is not fully transferred to someone who worked the land but did not arrive first.

“Being there first seems an important consideration for deciding who owns the land and has the right to control it. This corresponds to ‘historical right’ which in political theory refers to the right to a piece of land because of first occupancy (…), and to anthropological research that has demonstrated that people use notions of autochthony as self-evident reasons to (re-)claim land and rights in territorial and other disputes (…). First-comers to a new territory have historically claimed ownership of the respective territory and the belief of ‘we were here first’ tends to trigger self-evident notions of ownership and entitlements.”

Methodologically, the paper is questionable. The researchers use self-administered questionnaires to test children about many topics during a single session. They don’t interview children; they can’t ask for justifications or dig deeper into children’s reasoning. They call their research an “experiment” and I’m not sure it can be called one. The subjects are relatively old children (9 to 12 years of age), which is convenient if one wants children to self-administer the questionnaires.

I think it would be interesting to do a similar research but targeting younger children’s ideas on land ownership and, in general their territorial ideas and behaviors (present already at 2 years of age at least).