Animal and Human Grouping

We humans have a strong propensity for forming groups.  This grouping need ultimately comes to us from the vision-based cognition (right brain) that we share with animals.  However, we have added considerable speech-based (left brain) complexity to group behavior.

Animal groups

We emerged from the animal world in which grouping behavior is very strong. Animal grouping is instinctual (right brain) and demonstrated by the herding instincts of grazing animals, the instincts that allow some animals to be domesticated, the family units of many animals, and the special organizational qualities of ants and bees.  These are instincts that are based upon the vision based world of the right brain.  These instincts go back to the fundamental Cambrian concept of “group” that developed around the sense of vision.

Many lower animals do not have any clear relationships with one another beyond mating.  This is certainly true for lower forms of animals such as amoeba, worms and probably most insects. Nonetheless many animals bond with one another and have the concept of groups and families.  Mate and family relationships are observed in many mammals.  Herding is a common instinct among many mammals; this behavior is also seen in fish and birds.  Some animals like bees and ants have very complex group behaviors and relationships that enable them to build impressive colonies.  These relationships largely serve to protect the species and/or to further its propagation.

None of the collective relationships in the animal world compare in size or complexity to the groups created by humans.  There is a major distinction between animals and humans in terms of their respective abilities to create something that is greater than the sum of the parts.  While animals may bond together in order to improve protection or food gathering capabilities, humans have been able to develop civilizations that serve the greater good in much more complex ways. Humans have demonstrated an amazing ability to work with one another – an ability unmatched in the animal world (even bees and ants!).  This is because humans have been able to use their speech-based cognitive abilities to establish “group thinking”.

Human Groups

The earliest humans were hunter-gatherers – i.e. we relied on hunting animals and gathering food that nature provided to us.   We lived in small groups and each group had to totally provide for itself.  Considerable cooperation was required to provide protection and sustenance for the group and its propagation.  We needed one another for protection and survival.  This sense of community originated from our vision-based cognition coming from the world of animals.   Each individual had a right-brain feeling of “group”, shared with other humans, and tied to the survival instinct embedded in the right brain.  However, we also knew that both individually and collectively we were different from the other animals around us.  We had separated ourselves from nature with our left brain thinking – both as individuals and as groups. We became reliant upon one another.  We also knew or sensed that we had mental prowess that exceeded any that existed elsewhere in the animal world – a world from which we had become inherently different.  Collectively we were much stronger than we were individually. 

In those early days, we were surrounded by a harsh and dangerous world.  Commitment to the group was strong and emanated from the right-brain sense of “self” within our selves.  Survival of each human and their individual ego was dependent on the group.  Individuals within the group began to acquire knowledge or skills that could benefit the group.  This information was shared with others and became part of the verbally-based “group think” that was overlaid on the right brain sense of “group” that is a fundamental part of human and animal cognition.  Some humans became more skilled at hunting, others at food preparation, child rearing, or jewelry making.  A group identity developed and each human felt commitment to the group. 

The social organization of humans has progressed from small groups of individuals largely based upon family, to small bands of dozens of people, to tribes with hundreds of people, chiefdoms with thousands, and states with hundreds of thousands.  Beyond the development of city-states and nations is the development of larger civilizations.  Small bands and tribes of people still exist in what we consider the lesser-developed areas of the world. (Today we can also see small bands and tribes within larger groupings – such as Girl Scouts, Yankees fans, Porsche owners, etc.)

The early “group-think”, or the collective knowledge base of humans was considerably less than today.  The collective knowledge, or at least portions of it, became the common knowledge of all humans.  It becomes part of the base knowledge that we are taught as children.  Each individual might not know everything in the collective data base, but today we can Google it.  We can easily see the advance of the collective knowledge base even within the span of one or two current generations - today’s children are much more knowledgeable than we were at their age.  This is because the knowledge developed and acquired by each generation is added to the collective database that is passed along to the next.