British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Social Brain, Distributed Mind
Abstract
From Experiential-Based to Relational-Based Forms of Social Organization:
A Major Transition in the Evolution of Homo sapiens
Dwight Read (UCLA)
The evolutionary trajectory from non-human to human forms of social organization involves change from experiential to relational-based systems of social interaction. Social organization derived from biologically and experientially grounded social interaction reached a hiatus with the pongids due to expansion of behavioral individuation. The hiatus ended with the introduction of relational-based social interaction that culminated in social organization based on cultural kinship. This evolutionary trajectory links biological origins to cultural outcomes and makes evident the centrality of distributed forms of information for both the boundary and internal structure of human societies as these evolved from prior forms of social organization.