Sickness is an advantageous structural evolutionary feature of social dominance hierarchies

My 2011 claim to this radical idea, for the record on substack

I have searched the scientific literature of so-called “evolutionary medicine” and I have not found this idea expressed by others.

I think I may be the original inventor of this idea, described below, and first stated in my blogpost of 20 December 2011 subtitled “A social and evolutionary theory of human disease and chronic pain”.

I also expressed the idea in my free 2013 book in the chapter (pages 68-72) entitled “Human Biology is such that People Make and Inhabit Dominance Hierarchies”, reproduced below.

The idea is this:

Social-dominance-hierarchy oppression makes us sick, which has a large evolutionary advantage in that this permits and stabilizes the said hierarchy, thereby making the species competitive in its harsh environment. Therefore evolution selects mechanisms of biological-stress-induced ill-health. There is necessarily a health gradient tied to the social-status gradient in a social hierarchy.

Here is the particular chapter from my 2013 book (the book has many ideas drawn from several of my essays and blogposts). I hope you enjoy this adventure from more than a decade ago:

Human Biology is such that People Make and Inhabit Dominance Hierarchies^[1]

No characteristic of human societies is more evident or defining than the fact that human societies are hierarchical. Groups of humans spontaneously form hierarchies. This truth is as self-evident as the statement that humans are social animals.

Here, I propose a known biological process present in animals including humans as a mechanism that drives spontaneous development of human dominance hierarchies. This explains the prevalence of hierarchies and their dominance focus in human societies.

In the following sections, I describe how growing hierarchical dominance is kept in check via a constant conflict between the aggressive impositions of the control structure and the natural political impulse of the individual for control and influence over his/her social environment.

Regarding our societal organizations, we like to nurture a species self-image where we are radically different from ants and bees. The idea goes like this. Ants and bees are automatons completely governed by chemical and physical signals and each individual in the colony has its place which determines its physical body characteristics, adapted to the function of its class.

We distinguish these colony insects from mammals which we project have much higher degrees of individuality. We like to think of herds or packs of mammals as individuals who “choose” to come together and cooperate with each other. We generally don’t admit body characteristics of individuals as being associated with class in societal dominance hierarchies.

But humans, primates and ants and bees may be much closer than we care to admit, then we are easily able to perceive.

There is an area of scientific research which points to just how wrong we may be. It is the study of the effects of a dominance hierarchy on the health of the individual. It turns out that in mammals and birds, for example, the health of the individual, barring accidents of nature, is primarily due to the individual’s position in the society’s dominance hierarchy^{[2] [3] [4]}. Here, one needs to stress “primarily”, as in by far the greatest determining factor—having a direct bio-chemical and physiological impact.

The dominance hierarchy in packs of monkeys, for example, determines fertility, resistance to disease, vigour, and longevity of the individual.

Now the dominance hierarchy as individual health determinant discovery is a paradigm-establishing discovery in medicine (if medicine is ever able to recognize it!), akin to plate tectonics in the Earth sciences, Newtonian mechanics in physics and evolution in biology, but it naturally leads to a follow-up question: Why?

Is there an evolutionary advantage, for mammals say, to suffer severe individual health effects from the intra-species dominance hierarchy? Otherwise, how has individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy survived on the evolutionary time scale? Is there a use or a need for individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy in terms of species survival, or is it simply a remnant of pre-insect-divide or colony-forming cells evolution?

A first glance would suggest that the human species, for example, cannot possibly benefit from having individual health materially and negatively affected by society’s dominance hierarchy. But is this the correct conclusion?

I think not.

What is the most successful nervous-system-bearing animal species on Earth, in terms of both number of individuals and total biomass, and in terms of its transformative impact on the biosphere? Answer: Ants^[5]. And the most successful large mammal? Humans^[6]. Both live in highly hierarchical societies.

What is the sustaining biology of a highly hierarchical society of mammals? The individual must accept his/her place. All-out competitiveness of equal individuals (like a bar fight) is a recipe for disaster and does not lead to a highly stratified hierarchy. Pumped individuals who are and feel equally strong do not spontaneously organize into a stratified dominance hierarchy.

The built-in individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy is the biological (bio-chemical-metabolic) mechanism that sustains a positive feedback able to spontaneously generate a highly stratified dominance hierarchy.

If you are and feel sick from being dominated, you are not going to fight back. You are going to accept your place. The species is happy to have hoards of unhealthy individuals who will die young having spent their days doing the grunt work. What better way to stratify a successful species?

The impact on individual health also plays another key role, in addition to providing the feedback for stratification. It provides a needed mechanism of self-destruction for individuals who grow out or fall out of docility and compliance.

In a highly stratified society, individuals who cannot function must be eliminated, or they become a destructive force against the hierarchy. The police and jails would never be enough to achieve this without the built-in individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy.

As soon as the individual wants out and senses that there is no out, the individual self-destructs—rather than go on a destructive rampage, most of the time. This is called cancer and heart disease. It prevents the destructive rampage of the disillusioned individual and provides a natural end at the completion of the individual’s cycle of utility to the hierarchy, to the species.

No wonder anarchists are so few and far between! But as with any positive feedback-driven system, it is inherently unstable^[7].

In conclusion, the main bio-chemical determinant of individual health liability is one where the direct effects of society’s dominance hierarchy on the individual’s metabolism enable persistence, resilience, and continued development of the dominance hierarchy. There is a strong bio-chemical positive feedback, involving individual health, which drives the development of dominance hierarchy.

Put simply: the boss makes and keeps you sick such that you are less able to resist his/her excesses. He rewards and promotes you, and that makes you less sick, to the extent that you are able to serve him/her.

---

[1] This chapter is partly taken from an article entitled A Theory of Chronic Pain—a social and evolutionary theory of human disease and chronic pain first published on the author’s “Activist Teacher” blog on December 20, 2011. https://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2011/12/theory-of-chronic-pain.html

[2] The influence of social hierarchy on primate health, Review, Robert M. Sapolsky, Science, vol.308, p.648-652, 2005. (and references therein) https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1106477

[3] Anti-smoking culture is harmful to health—On the truth problem of public health management, Denis G. Rancourt, 2011. http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2011/04/anti-smoking-culture-is-harmful-to.html

[4] Is establishment medicine an injurious scam?, Denis G. Rancourt, 2011. http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2011/11/is-establishment-medicine-injurious.html

[5] Is the burning of fossil fuel a significant planetary activity?, Denis G. Rancourt, 2010. http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2010/08/is-burning-of-fossil-fuel-significant.html

[6] Collective intelligence does not imply individual intelligence—Technology does not come from geniuses, Denis G. Rancourt, 2011. http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2011/11/collective-intelligence-does-not-imply.html

[7] Institutions build hierarchy between politico-cultural re-normalizations, Denis G. Rancourt, 2011. http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2011/11/institutions-build-hierarchy-between.html

Please subscribe, and consider becoming a paid subscriber.