actual weeks 1 and 2 socy200

Gombrich's "two mirrors" image

The past is like reflections between two facing mirrors: they grow smaller and fainter until you can't see the end. Yet people still use assumptions about this past to justify how society is arranged today.

Gombrich's "burning scrap of paper down a well"

Stands for memory. It lights up the past as it falls, getting fainter, until the light runs out. Written records only reach so far back.

Tracing memory back: four sources (in order)

1) Our own memory (what we personally remember); 2) older people's memories (we ask them what they recall); 3) letters from the dead (written words carry memory past one lifetime); 4) archives (buildings storing old papers, so we can find scraps written centuries ago)

Before writing: how far back can memory reach?

Letters and archives only reach so far; beyond them we catch mere glimpses. Yet even 10,000, 20,000, or 50,000 years ago, people had children to feed and shelter and could also have said "Once upon a time."

What turns "Once upon a time" into history (Gombrich)?

Asking when it happened and how exactly it happened. History is not just a story but our story, the story of the world.

Geologic time labels, broadest to narrowest

Eons → Eras → Periods → Epochs → Ages (ages are also called stages)

Why use temporal labels?

They help orient our thinking about societal time

The four eons of Earth's history (4.6 billion years)

Hadean (4600–4000 Ma), Archean (4000–2500 Ma), Proterozoic (2500–541 Ma), Phanerozoic (541 Ma–today)

Three eras of the Phanerozoic Eon

Paleozoic (541–252 Ma), Mesozoic (252–66 Ma), Cenozoic (66 Ma–today)

Periods of the Paleozoic Era

Cambrian (541–485 Ma), Ordovician (485–444), Silurian (444–419), Devonian (419–359), Carboniferous (359–299), Permian (299–252)

Periods of the Mesozoic Era

Triassic (252–201 Ma), Jurassic (201–145 Ma), Cretaceous (145–66 Ma)

Periods of the Cenozoic Era

Paleogene (66–23 Ma), Neogene (23–2.6 Ma), Quaternary (2.6 Ma–today)

Ma

Mega-annum: millions of years ago

Two epochs of the Quaternary Period

Pleistocene (2.58 million – 11,700 years ago) and Holocene (11,700 years ago – today)

Pleistocene

2.58 million – 11,700 years ago. The ice-age epoch of repeated glacial cycles; Homo sapiens appear in it. Ages: Gelasian, Calabrian, Chibanian, and the informally named "Late Pleistocene"

When do Homo sapiens appear?

About 300,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene

Holocene

11,700 years ago – today. Our current warm interglacial epoch. Ages: Greenlandian, Northgrippian, Meghalayan. We live in the Meghalayan.

Cenozoic Era

66 Ma (million years ago) to today. The frame for the basic timeline of human societies; it contains the Quaternary Period.

Oldest widely accepted deliberately made stone tools

3.3 Ma, at Lomekwi 3 near Lake Turkana in western Kenya (Neogene Period)

First known cave painting

51,200 years ago: three human-like figures interacting with a Sulawesi warty pig, Indonesia (Pleistocene)

Archaeological time: from stone to iron (in order)

1) Paleolithic ("Old Stone Age"): earliest tool use to c. 10,000 BCE. 2) Mesolithic ("Middle Stone Age"): c. 10,000 to c. 6000/4000 BCE. 3) Neolithic ("New Stone Age"): c. 10,000 to c. 3000 BCE. 4) Chalcolithic/Eneolithic ("Copper Age"): between the Neolithic and Bronze Age. 5) Bronze Age: often from c. 3300 BCE. 6) Iron Age: often from c. 1200 BCE.

Paleolithic

"Old Stone Age": from the earliest human tool use to c. 10,000 BCE

Mesolithic

"Middle Stone Age": c. 10,000 to c. 6000/4000 BCE

Neolithic

"New Stone Age": c. 10,000 to c. 3000 BCE

Chalcolithic (Eneolithic)

"Copper Age": between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age

Recent societal time: archaeological chronology (in order)

Later Iron Age (pre-Roman: Hallstatt, La Tène, Celtic, Achaemenid) → Roman-era archaeology → Late Antiquity (c. 4th–7th centuries CE) → Early Medieval (c. 5th–11th c. CE: Migration, Anglo-Saxon, Merovingian, Carolingian, Viking Age) → High & Late Medieval (c. 11th–15th c.) → Early Modern (c. 15th–18th c.) → Modern/Historical Archaeology (18th c. onward). Terms vary by region and tradition.

The 100,000-year photo album thought experiment

1,000 pages, one per century. Pages 1–500: Stone Age repetition. Around page 500: burial rituals, cave art. Around page 900: fishing, farming, taming animals. Pages 950–967: farming towns, pyramids. Last 3 pages: steam engine, jet engine, computer, TV, nuclear weapons.

Share of human time on earth without electricity

99.9%. Electricity and constant technological turnover are astonishingly new, which is why modern technology is central to the classic model.

Three basic assumptions of ecological-evolutionary theory (Nolan & Lenski)

Environment, genetic heritage, and culture. Ignoring any one of the three flaws our understanding of human societies.

Environment (ecological-evolutionary theory)

Everything external to a population that affects it. It has two parts, biophysical and social, and each brings both opportunity and threat.

Biophysical environment: opportunity vs. threat

Opportunity: soil, minerals, water, climate, plants, and animals supply life's necessities. Threat: predators, viruses, bacteria, and new problems like extinction and pollution.

Social environment: opportunity vs. threat

Opportunity: mutually beneficial exchange of goods and information (the global economy). Threat: war. In the 20th century alone, hundreds of millions were killed, wounded, or displaced.

Society as an adaptive mechanism

Society evolved independently many times because enhanced cooperation helps members survive, like wings or lungs. It is called "one of the great steps in evolution."

Examples of species with societies

Colonial invertebrates (corals, sponges, Portuguese man-of-wars), social insects (ants, termites, wasps, bees), nonhuman vertebrates (many mammals, birds, fish), and humans, who have the most complex cooperative societies

Hierarchy of living things (where societies sit)

Subatomic particles → atoms → molecules → cells → multicellular organisms → SOCIETIES → species → ecological communities → global ecosystem. Nonliving matter branches off from molecules up to galaxies and the universe.

Traits humans share with primates (Table 1.1)

Independently mobile fingers and toes; opposable thumbs and big toes; nails, not claws; omnivorous teeth and gut; semierect posture; good hand-eye coordination; stereoscopic (3-D) vision; reduced snout and sense of smell; large, complex brain for body size

Human taxonomy (class → order → suborder)

Mammalian class → primate order → anthropoid suborder (great apes and monkeys). Our closest kin are chimpanzees and gorillas.

Genetic heritage

Chemically coded information every living thing needs, from breathing to communicating. It is the product of over 3 billion years of evolution, and it uniquely lets humans create symbolic cultures.

Learning

Acquiring, through experience, information that can modify behavior. It frees an animal from depending entirely on instinct.

Learning by insight

Mentally analyzing a situation instead of relying on costly, time-consuming trial and error. Found in humans and other higher primates.

Why learning compounds in groups

Groups pool experience, so one member's discovery benefits all ("the group is the locus of knowledge"). Primates' long childhoods also give extra time to learn.

Classic-model claim about cooperation vs. the lecture's pushback

Nolan & Lenski: we cooperate and live in societies because of our genetic heritage, not by choice. Pushback: different communities choose the meanings of their symbols differently (reread pp. 15–19).

Importance of symbol systems (Nolan & Lenski)

Human culture depends mainly on symbols, not just biological signals. Animals signal: behaviors communicate useful information through sounds, scents, movements, or displays.

Why symbols have meaning

Only because people in a community collectively learn and agree on that meaning. Humans are biologically equipped to create symbols, but symbols are not genetically programmed.

What shared symbols make possible

Language, passing knowledge between generations, inventing new ideas, and creating institutions such as families, schools, governments, religions, and economies

Subsistence technologies

Store the information a society needs to obtain the energy its members require. They are key to societal growth.

Major claim about subsistence technology

Advances in subsistence technology are the evolutionary precondition for significant increases in societal size and complexity.

Three forces explaining societal evolution

Forces for continuity: preserve the existing store of information and arrangements from generation to generation. Forces for change: social innovations that produce new information and arrangements. Forces for selection: determine which elements survive and which are eliminated.

Forms of innovation

Borrowing (cultural diffusion) and creating. Creating includes alterations (less important), discoveries (fairly important), and inventions (very important).

Causes of evolutionary change (5)

1) Needs drive innovation (new ideas, tools, institutions to solve hunger and desires). 2) Innovation creates new expectations (a cycle of new wants). 3) Chance can lead to discoveries (accidents recognized by knowledgeable people). 4) The environment causes change (climate shifts, shortages, contact, trade, conflict). 5) Population growth creates pressure (met with better farming, technology, contraception, or new laws and customs).

Factors affecting rates of innovation

Informatics size, population size, social instability, social contact, systematicity, fundamentality, and being pro-adaptive

Intrasocietal selection

Selection within a society: whether and how a society chooses to change. Problem: "who" chooses for everyone (nonadaptive? maladaptive?). Key variables: quality of information and the society's decision-making structure.

Intersocietal selection

Selection among societies: whether other societies continue to exist. Problems: population and violence. Key variables: level of complexity and size of military (p. 65).

Planetary society (Nolan & Lenski)

The world system of societies, defined by contact (direct or indirect relations) and cooperation. Through intersocietal selection, traits of large, militant societies become the traits of the system (p. 70).

Societal types

Analytic categories that index how a society's type relates to the type and level of its subsistence technology, and to non-technological factors

Classifying human societies: organizing principle

Subsistence technology: what was or is the primary mode of subsistence?

Types of human societies (classic model)

Hunting and gathering, simple horticultural, advanced horticultural, and industrial societies (as listed on the slide), classified by primary mode of subsistence

Research problem of The Dawn of Everything

To "retrace some of the initial steps that led to our modern notion of social evolution" (p. 5)

Three criticisms of evolutionary accounts (Rousseau's or Hobbes's tradition)

They "simply aren't true," they "have dire political implications," and they "make the past needlessly dull"

Emerging framework's view of human history

History is not a straight line through fixed stages. Neither farming nor "human nature" automatically produced inequality and hierarchy.

Rousseau-style story

Early humans lived in small, peaceful, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands. Agriculture led to control and inequality, and "civilization" ended humanity's original freedom and innocence.

Hobbes-style story

Humans are naturally selfish, competitive, and violent. Without government, life is a struggle of "everybody against everybody," so laws, courts, police, and government are needed to restrain people.

The emerging framework's answer to Rousseau vs. Hobbes

We don't have to choose either one. Human societies have been far more varied, and inequality is not inevitable.

"Simply not true": the truth of human societies is varied

Hunter-gatherer societies weren't always small, simple, or completely equal. Some societies before agriculture had inequality and complex politics. Many early farming communities lacked rigid class divisions. Some early cities were strongly egalitarian, without authoritarian rulers, warrior-politicians, or large bureaucracies.

Inequality is not inevitable

Today's political and economic arrangements aren't the only possible ones. The authors reject the idea that history follows an unavoidable "law" of evolutionary development: societies aren't simply pushed from stage to stage by technology or population; people make choices, debate values, create institutions, and resist powerful trends.

"Dire political implications" of evolutionary accounts

If unequal systems result from evolutionary processes, they seem unavoidable. But if the evidence doesn't support evolutionary claims, something else is going on, so inequality is not a fixed outcome.

Usual (too limited) ways of discussing inequality

The richest 1%'s wealth, the Gini coefficient, whether to raise taxes or expand welfare, and how unequal is "too unequal"

Equality in the emerging framework

Shared power: people have an equal and meaningful ability to help decide how they live together. It does not mean everyone has the same amount of money.

Elemental claims of the emerging framework

Equality isn't equal money; humans have always experimented with different ways of organizing society; equality means a meaningful voice in shared decisions; some past institutions made sure everyone's needs mattered and everyone had a real voice.

Retracing the steps toward the classic frame

Indigenous thinkers should be treated as serious political and intellectual voices. European thinkers didn't create ideas about freedom, equality, government, and civilization on their own. The Enlightenment was arguably transnational: Indigenous critiques of European society raised important questions.

"Angels" or "devils" stereotype

Indigenous people should not be treated as either romantic "angels" or backward "devils"; both stereotypes silence their real ideas

The emerging frame: what it means for the future

Modern inequality, bureaucracy, and powerful governments weren't guaranteed by farming or human nature. People have repeatedly imagined and built different arrangements, so the future is open: society can be organized differently because it has been before.