1.3.1.4. Mechanistic Paradigm

Mechanism took shape in the 16th-17th century in Europe as an alternative to both natural philosophy and medieval theology. The advocates of this paradigm, including philosophers (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes) and scientists (for example, Borelli, Silvius, and Hoffman), compared living organisms to automatons, machines, or mechanisms (hence, the term mechanism was applied to the whole philosophical paradigm). An exception was made for humans who had a dual status. The human body was a mechanism (“the extended thing,” or res extensa, in Rene Descartes’ words), but the mind enabling man to think was res cogitans, or “the thinking thing.”

Accordingly, comparisons between humans and other forms of life confined themselves to anatomy and primitive physiology. Descartes and other mechanicists admitted that animals and humans displayed common primitive behavior forms (that were later termed reflexes) such as withdrawing the hand from a hot object. Descartes assumed that, like the cardiovascular system, the nervous system consists of tubes containing “fluids” and a central “pump.” He also attempted to manufacture a “mechanical duck.” J. Borelli sought to explain the locomotive behavior of animals in terms of mechanical statics.

In contrast to Aristoteles, Thomas Hobbes asserted that comparing human society with animal communities (e.g., an ant colony) made no sense. He argued in his work called Leviathan that animal communities function according to natural laws (unconsciously obeyed by all animals), whereas the functioning of human society depends on agreements reached by people concerned about their interests. Unlike animals, humans are reasonable, selfish, and calculating beings. In order to make them cooperate for the benefit of the whole society, contracts between them should be reinforced by a strong political power (the Leviathan).

By criticizing Aristotle, Hobbes’ made an important contribution to the trend of thought that contrasted nature with nurture and the natural sciences with the humanities. This trend of thought is still sufficiently popular with natural scientists and scholars in the humanities alike. They still doubt the validity of comparisons between humans and other creatures, forcing biopoliticians to keep their powder dry.

Although the natural-philosophy paradigm seems to be more consistent with biopolitics than the mechanistic paradigm, mechanism also contributed to preparing the ground for biopolitics. Descartes’ comparisons of humans and animals with respect to primitive behavioral responses and nervous “fluids” actually foreshadowed more recent comparative research on human and animal neurology. This laid the foundations for a large number of biopolitical studies. A prerequisite for understanding human behavior is research on the operation of the central behavior-controlling unit, i.e., the brain. The subfield of modern biopolitics dealing with neurology is, therefore, related to the originally Cartesian concepts of “fluids” and “reflexes.”

In various historical periods, some biologists revived the natural-philosophy paradigm. For example, a natural-philosophy school of thought flourished in Germany in the late 18th and the early 19th century (including Schelling, Herder, Goethe, Oken, Treviranus, etc.). Herder regarded the history of human society as a part of the history of nature as a whole. In his opinion, humans and apes were just two stages of the same process. Not surprisingly, he emphasized the similarity of the brain structure in humans and orangutans.

Importantly, he compared the whole nature to one living organism. John Hutton, one of the pioneers of geography, wrote in 1788: “I consider the Earth a superorganism, and it should be studied by physiologists” (quoted from: Corning, 2003b). Interestingly, the term “superorganism” is still in use. For example, it was revived by William Wheeler (1926) in his work on social insects. More recently, the American biopolitician Peter Corning extensively used the term in his publications.

In the 19th century, the German scientists Theodor Schwann and Matthias Schleiden suggested the cellular theory maintaining that an animal or plant organism is a congregation of cells, the elementary units of life. Within its framework, Rudolph Wirchow compared a multicellular organism to a political body, a “cell state.” This idea was discarded as mere natural-philosophy speculation and ignored by most scientists, until quite recently.

However, the attitude toward Wirchow’s metaphor changed in the previous decades. The contemporary cytologist Yu. Vasiliev (2000, p. 189) points out that “each cell in our body and in all other multicellular organisms is… part of a highly complex society. As early as 100 years ago, the famous German pathologist R. Wirchow termed our organism ‘a cell state.’ In a state, as well as in an organism, the behavior of an individual (a human or a cell) is reasonable and normal as long as he adequately responds to social signals emitted by other society members. A person who fails to respond to social signals often becomes a criminal. A cell that inadequately responds to signals may give rise to a tumor” (Fig. 1.2).

Despite its limitations (and protests against it), we should admit that mechanism was a sufficiently fruitful scientific paradigm for its epoch. Moreover, it opened up new potentialities for “pre-biopolitical” comparative studies of human beings and animals. Of particular importance was the 18th century idea that the capacity to respond to stimuli, “to perceive” them, is a universal property of life. Apart from “reflexes,” more sophisticated forms of behavior and mental phenomena—including human thinking—were reconsidered in mechanistic terms, thanks to the works by the French enlightenment school. These mechanistic views were sometimes driven to the extreme. Cabanis likened the brain to the stomach. The “food” was provided by the sensory organs, while thoughts, in his mind, were analogs of “feces.” La Mettrie compared the psyche of humans and of various animals. He argued that the boundary between the realms of animals and humans was somewhat unclear and arbitrary. Reaumur, in his Natural History of Insects, viewed animals as reasonable beings whose social organization resembled that of human society.

It should be emphasized that the German philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz believed that not only the human body (according to Descartes) but also the soul resembled an automaton. From this idea, it seemed to follow that it was possible to create artificial intelligence systems, “thinking automatons,” or Homme Machine in French. These views were promoted, for instance, by La Mettrie, and they inspired Jacques de Vaucanson to design an automaton that could play a flute. Thus, the mechanistic approach to life gave rise to the idea that it was possible to intentionally create living organisms and even artificial intelligence. This foreshadowed the recent Foucauldian interpretation of biopolitics as biopower that enables modifying the human body on purpose.

Holbach, in the work entitled The System of Nature and originally published under the name of de Mirabaud (1st English edition: 1820), stated that man is a product of nature, he exists in nature, obeys its laws, and cannot go beyond nature even in his imagination. This statement contains the main idea of naturalism that views humankind and human society as part of nature.

1.3.1.5. Evolutionary Paradigm

Carl Linnaeus, the 18th century Swedish scientist who provided the foundations for modern biological systematics, believed that biological species do not change in time because they all were once created by God. Nevertheless, it was in the 18th century that the idea took root that species undergo radical changes during the history of life on the Earth. The supporters of this idea, such as B. de Maillet, were originally called transformists.

Evolutionism per se took shape by the beginning of the 19th century. It centered on evolution as the directional, progressive historical development of life that resulted in the formation of the Earth’s bio-diversity and the emergence of humankind. The great evolutionist Jean Batiste Lamarck considered the inherent drive of living organisms to perfection one of the major driving forces of evolution. The other factor was “inheriting acquired traits”: if a giraffe constantly stretches its neck, its offspring have longer necks.

Some biopoliticians (Thorson and Cauthen) draw on Lamarck’s “perfection-seeking” principle in their own concepts.

Nevertheless, the theory of evolution based on natural selection, as suggested by Charles Darwin, is of more interest from the biopolitical perspective. A modified updated version of Darwin’s theory, known as neo-Darwinism, is at the core of a large number of recent biopolitical studies. Darwinism is characterized by overt sociomorphism. This means that Darwinism regarded biological systems as analogs of human society. The central tenet of Darwin’s theory that “the fittest” survive during “the struggle for existence” was related to earlier ideas suggested by the political economist Thomas Malthuys. Malthuys, in his treatise called “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” first published in 1798, emphasized the struggle for limited resources in human society that was caused by population growth and could be slowed down by epidemics, wars, or birth control measures. Subsequently (in the late 19th and early 20th century), sociomorphism was widely used in the life sciences. For instance, ecology and, still later, sociobiology, imported a large number of concepts and notions from economics and other social sciences.

Darwin paid attention to the complex social organization of ants, bees, and wasps. Complex insect societies that bear some similarity to human social (political) systems still receive attention in works in the field of sociobiology or biopolitics per se (see, e.g., Wilson, 1975; Arnhart, 1994; Corning, 1983, 2003a).

In the late 19th century, Herbert Spencer asserted that, in organizational terms, the complex societies of higher animals were the direct precursors of human society. Sumner and Ward also made their contributions to comparative studies of human political life and its animal analogs.

Political systems were also compared to living organisms by Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Emile Durkheim, reviving medieval comparisons of the same kind. Woodrow Wilson, a political scientist and the President of the USA at the beginning of the 20th century, claimed that the government “is not a machine, but a living thing. It conforms not to the theory of the Universe, but to the theory of organic life. It follows not Newton’s laws, but Darwin’s laws” (quoted from: Somit, 1972, p. 10). The 1908 address of the President of the American Political Science Association, A.L. Laswell, was entitled The Physiology of Politics.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Russian scholar and revolutionary Peter A. Kropotkin put forward his own theory of evolution. In contrast to Darwin, he emphasized cooperation and not competition as the main driving force of biological evolution. Kropotkin, in 1902 (see edition: Kropotkin, 1972), also applied this idea to the evolution of human society. He preached a new type of social organization based on voluntary work, anarchism, and complex interactions among “diverse groups and federations of all sizes and ranks.” This concept was corroborated by facts concerning animals that are capable of “unconscious mutual aid.”

Disciples of a famous scientist often take his ideas to extremes. This happened to Darwin’s ideas. Some of his followers straightforwardly explained human social behavior on the basis of the natural selection theory. This attitude was particularly characteristic of Social Darwinism, which actually promoted racism and eugenics. At the practical level, the eugenic movement aimed to create favorable conditions for individuals possessing socially valuable hereditary traits (e.g., talents) and to prevent those possessing negative hereditary traits, including colored people in America, from reproduction. In accordance with these views, Madison Grant called for a “decision of Congress of the United States to adopt discriminatory and restrictive measures against the immigration of undesirable people and races” (Grant, 1923, p. xxviii; quoted from: Somit & Peterson, 2011, p. 4). Eugenics was founded by Francis Galton in 1883. He was Darwin’s cousin, who studied pedigrees of talented people in an attempt to prove the heritability of their talents.

Theory of evolution was used to justify harsh competition, the “might-is-right” principle, and warfare. Social Darwinists regarded Homo sapiens as an ordinary representative of the animal kingdom. For example, they claimed that humans, like other animals, were predisposed to shed blood of their conspecifics. The obvious shortcomings of Social Darwinism discouraged a large number of scholars in the early 20th century from drawing any comparisons between human society and animal groups and communities. Our species was regarded as unique. Humankind was not considered part of the Earth’s bio-diversity.

However, the evolution-molded features of human beings (in behavioral and psychological terms) were re-emphasized in the 1960s and 1970s. This was due to the development of ethology, ecology, neurology, genetics, and biopolitics per se.

1.3.1.6. Sociocultural Paradigm in Biology

In the second half the 20th century, some biologists accentuated the similarity, relatedness, or comparability of humans and other life forms, of human society and animal communities (biosocial systems). Biology was enriched with concepts borrowed from the humanities and social sciences and, vice versa, biological concepts found their way into these areas.

Recently, this new trend has been supported even by some microbiologists. Although dealing with invisible and seemingly primitive organisms, they are presently using terms like “bacterial behavior,” “microbial sociality,” or even “bacterial altruism,” which are no longer perceived as irrelevant.

A number of primatologists tend to think that there was no break in continuity in the evolution of monkeys, apes, and humans, particularly with respect to behavior. Certain precursors of moral norms and social rules are likely to exist in ape/monkey groups (Goodall, 1994; de Waal, 1996b, 1997, 2001, 2006).

The new developing sociocultural paradigm in biology is currently gaining in importance. It influences, apart from the life sciences per se, the humanities and social sciences, changing the dominant attitudes to human nature, society, and culture. The idea that humans are unique in many important respects still stands unchallenged. Nonetheless, some of the apparently “specifically human” features, including cognitive capacities, the sense of beauty, and the sense of justice, are presumably based on archaic behavioral traits shared with those of the higher animals. For example, recent comparative research on cognition in animals and humans has provided the foundations for the new interdisciplinary research area termed evolutionary epistemology (pioneered by K. Lorenz, D. Campbell, H. Vollmer, and others). This field focuses on cognitive capacities with emphasis upon their development in the course of biological evolution (see Shul’ga, 2011).

The biobehavioral/ethological subfield of biopolitics deals with concepts of evolutionary biology for improving “the understanding of the political behavior of humans” (Somit and Peterson, 1998, p. 555). The subfield concentrates on the impact of the archaic behavioral repertoire on political processes and events. This subfield lies at the core of biopolitics as interpreted by the APLS. In fact, the influence of genetic and neurological factors on politics, the subject of two other areas of biopolitics, is exerted via their impact on behavior. The subfield of biopolitics is based upon the knowledge supplied by the “biobehavioral” sciences including, in the first place, ethology (particularly social ethology), sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology. It is closely linked to evolution theory.

Ethology originally “emphasized observation of animals in their natural habitats. Through direct observation, ethologists seek to identify rules of behavior vital to the survival and reproductive success of the species under study. Of particular interest in biopolitical terms is the distinction between ultimate and proximate causes of behavior. If we are interested in the physiological mechanisms that carry out behavior, involving the animal’s sense organs and the nervous system, then we deal with its proximate mechanisms. For instance, we can measure hormone levels or record impulses on nervous cells during the behavior under study (e.g., aggression of a vervet monkey male directed at a conspecific). However, we can address the question how a particular kind of behavior developed in evolution, why it was selected, and what its adaptive value was, i.e., what advantages had the animal as a result of acquiring the behavior. The second question relates to the ultimate causes of the behavior. They can be elucidated by, e.g., investigating the behavior’s influence on survival or reproductive success (i.e., number of offspring).

Social behavior in the animal kingdom can be defined as the whole spectrum of behavioral interactions among individuals belonging to the same local group/community (Deryagina and Butovskaya, 1992, 2004). The social behavior of diverse biological species is based upon unitary, evolutionarily conserved principles coexisting with species-specific features. In particular, the uniqueness of human sociality is indisputable, although ethologists extend their concepts and methods to human society. However,“… human sociality is distinctively human in the extremely high degree of complexity to which it has evolved in our lineage” (Rosenberg, 2009, p. 32).

Despite the important differences, social behavior in both animals and humans is classified into (a) agonistic behavior involving conflicts between individuals or groups (see Dewsbury, 1981) and (b) loyal behavior including the totality of friendly interactions among living beings that consolidate their groups, families, colonies, or other biosocial systems.

Since biopolitics is the main subject of this work, we give special attention to the application of the ethological approach to humans, i.e., to human ethology. It is assumed that “evolutionary theory after all is the basic theory of all manifestations of life and basic, therefore, for any understanding of human behavior, including those facets of human behavior which are the subjects of the various humanities” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1997, p. 13). The Institute for Human Ethology was founded by Eibl-Eibesfeldt in Munich in 1970, and this, roughly, could be considered the date of human ethology’s birth. Human ethologists also established the International Society for Human Ethology (1972).

Human ethologists often study everyday behavior, and Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s associate Hans Haas “developed for this purpose an unobtrusive method of filming, using a mirror lense which afforded a view at an angle of 90° to axis of the camera” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1997, p. 14). A goal of this ethological research is to reveal the human species-specific ethogram (also called biogrammar), i.e., human behaviors that exist regardless of culture, period, and the individual peculiarities of the humans involved. Human ethologists emphasize behaviors more universal than the species-specific ethogram, i.e., identical or comparable in humans and higher animals (e.g., primates).

Human ethologists, therefore, conduct cross-cultural studies: they compare different cultures in behavioral terms, concentrating on identical/similar behavior patterns and whole repertories that are referred to as behavioral universals such as the smile that is common to Bushmen, Papuans, and Europeans.

Other universal expressive motor patterns include, e.g., the eyebrow flash, an involuntary behavior pattern displayed when encountering a new individual. It is characteristic of people, irrespective of their culture. However, the eyebrow flash is considered inappropriate in Japan. Therefore, the Japanese are taught to suppress it (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1975). The eyebrow flash is not displayed by schizophrenics whose ethogram is changed by their mental disorder. This example demonstrates how the ethological approach can be used in psychiatry to make a diagnosis (Samokhvalov et al., 2002).

Glendon Schubert (1981) described, in a humorous manner, an attempt of American biopoliticians to investigate decision-making by the judges of the Federal Tribunal of Switzerland from the ethological perspective. The Americans with their VCRs were requested to leave the courtroom some two minutes after starting their observations (Schubert, 1981).

Social technologies are practiced by politicians that deliberately or spontaneously use ethological laws and the human ethogram for, e.g., gaining and maintaining a high social/political status. In this situation, impressive dominance cues (elevated body posture, raised head) in conjunction with loyal behavior-related messages (e.g., an appeasing smile) that stimulate the subcortical structures of the brain are used both by chimpanzees and humans.

Communication between living organisms is usually construed in the literature as information exchange between individuals and/or their groups. It is an essential component of any kind of social behavior because it is hard to imagine social behavior without information exchange. It is similarly difficult to conceive of an information transmission system that would not be social. For example, individuals in a chimpanzee group communicate to one another information concerning new objects (are they food items, enemies, or neutral objects?), the distance between the objects and themselves, and the objects’ number (Deryagina and Butovskaya, 2004).

Communication is characteristic of various vertebrate and invertebrate animals. It is often interpreted as follows: “If an animal performs an action that changes another individual’s behavior, this can be called communication” (Reznikova, 2004). In the literature, the term “communication’ is also used with respect to plants, fungi, and microorganisms, as well as cells and tissues inside an animal/plant organism. For example, nervous cells in an animal organism exchange signals known as neurotransmitters (neuromediators) and so do cells inside a plant organism that behave in a neuronal-like fashion. Microorganisms such as bacteria engage in quorum-sensing communication, i.e., they change their activities in response to receiving a signal, termed the quorum-sensing pheromone, or autoinducer, from other cells (Shpakov, 2009).

Irrespective of the kind of the biosystem involved, communication can be described in terms of a modified Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver (SMCR) model, originally suggested by David Berlo (1960), who expanded on the earlier linear model of communication (Shannon and Weaver, 1949). Communication includes the following (Fig. 2.1):

• Sender

• Message

• Channel (or medium)

• Receiver

• Code

During communication, the sender and the receiver can repeatedly swap their roles and even perform these two roles simultaneously—in terms of Barnlund’s (2008) transactional model of communication. Communication is, therefore, bilateral, even if it is called “communication with multiple or indefinite receivers.” For instance, the media distribute information to all citizens of a country, and each of them can, at least theoretically, send his/her response to a TV studio or a media center; in the biological realm, there are similar messages addressed to nobody in particular. They are characteristic of anonymous groups of some birds, reptiles, fish, and invertebrates.

Communication between individuals involves several evolutionarily conserved channels:

• Communication based on direct contact between living organisms (between cells if the organisms involved are unicellular)². In animals, this communication channel is termed the tactile channel. In particular, primates actively communicate by touching, hugging, kissing, and grooming one another (de Waal, 1996b, 1997, 2001, 2006; Deryagina & Butovskaya, 2004).

• Distant communication involving chemical signals. This channel plays a major part in both micro- and macroorganisms. In animals, exchanging chemical signals is referred to as olfactory communication. Animals mark their home ranges with odorous substances. They use their sense of smell to distinguish their own offspring from other young individuals and determine an individual’s social status, rank, and physiological state including, e.g., readiness to copulate. The role of olfactory communication in primates, especially in apes, is limited by the operation of the visual and acoustic communication channels. Nevertheless, olfactory communication is of indisputable importance even in humans. It is involved in male-female relationships and, in all likelihood, in the interactions between a leader and his subordinates.

• Visual communication is particularly important in animals with advanced nervous systems, such as squids and other cephalopod molluscs, birds, and mammals including primates. Chimpanzees display, e.g., visual signals associated with friendly behavior, exemplified by the play face (Gaspar, 2006). The evolutionary development of facial expressions and gestures in apes is of considerable interest in terms of speech development, because these nonverbal cues probably evolved in conjunction with verbal communication during human evolution.

• Distant communication by means of sounds (the acoustic channel). Using sounds, animals signal danger (e.g., birds produce the alarm call), regulate male-female relationships, and make it possible for individuals to “keep in touch.” For instance, if a young mammal is alone, it keeps producing a special call until located by the parent. Communication with sound waves is apparently not limited to the higher animals. A bacterial culture treated with a lethal dose of an antibiotic sends a message that stimulates the growth of another culture that is separated by a glass partition (Nikolaev, 1992; Matsuhashi et al., 1996). Presumably, the message is transmitted by ultrasound waves. In vervet monkeys, sound signals denoting a leopard, a snake, and an eagle were detected (see Gaspar, 2006). Sound signals perform important functions in ape communication, and this primitive “protolanguage” has not been deciphered yet. There is evidence that chimpanzees can produce analogs of some human sounds (such as vowels). Nevertheless, the structure of the throat and the brain cortex in nonhuman apes apparently prevents them from using human verbal language. However, they memorize and adequately use hundreds of words in Amslan, the language of deaf people in the U.S., and they can also communicate messages by means of computer lexicograms.

All these communication channels are sufficiently important in terms of human society and politics.

Although the main focus of this book is upon biopolitics, it has already been pointed out that the bio-humanities (see 1.1.3) also include a number of other fields. One of them is biosemiotics, which can be defined as an interdisciplinary field of theoretical and empirical research that deals with communication and signification in living systems (Hoffmeyer, 1997). Biosemiotics is at the interface of biology and semiotics that is concerned with sign systems including human languages, nonverbal signals, artificial means of communication, and various cultural artifacts.

It follows from the above that communication in biosystems involves information-transmitting signs/signals. A sign, whether excrement pile on the boundary of the territory belonging to a badger, or a red circle with the word STOP on a road, has a meaning, i.e., it denotes something different from itself. A sign has three elements: (1) the sign carrier (the object endowed with a meaning); (2) the meaning of the sign; and (3) the interpreter that understands the sign’s meaning. As for the road sign mentioned above, the red circle with the word STOP is the sign carrier, the prohibition to use the road is the meaning, and a driver or a traffic police officer is the interpreter (Fig. 2.3).

The central idea of biosemiotics is that signs are produced and interpreted not only by human beings, but also by all other forms of life; moreover, the capacity to generate and use signs and meanings is considered a distinctive feature of living systems. For instance, dominance and territorial claims are signaled using specific cues that are partly universal as far as primates are concerned.

Biosystems communicate using analogs of

• Texts composed of strings of letters, such as the DNA code;

• Hieroglyphs exemplified by small-size signal molecules including hormones and neurotransmitters; each signal conveys a complete message, like a Chinese hieroglyph that may represent a complete word;

• Cultural artifacts such as sculptures and architectural ensembles. The surface of a living cell has sophisticated patterns, protrusions, indentations, and other “architectural details” that enable other cells to identify its functional type (Sedov, 2009).

The indisputable political importance of human communication including its archaic, evolutionarily conserved elements provides for a close relationship between biopolitics and biosemiotics.

The term “agonistic behavior” comprises all conflict-related forms of social behavior and includes (a) aggression and relevant signals accompanying aggression or preceding it, i.e., aggressive/threatening displays; (b) conciliatory (buffer) behavior; and (c) avoidance/ isolation. In other words, a conflict between individuals may result in (a) physical violence and, in human society, also verbal aggressive behavior; (b) reconciliation that is attained by establishing either hierarchical or horizontal relations between former opponents; or (c) avoidance behavior and isolation of the opponents from each other.

Agonistic behavior was investigated in classical studies with mammals, birds, fish, and invertebrates, conducted by Lorenz, Tinbergen, Frisch, and other prominent ethologists. The notion of “agonistic behavior” can be extrapolated from animal species to Homo sapiens and used in terms of political behavior. Interestingly, analogs of agonistic behavior were detected in microorganisms. If two microbial cultures contact, they start producing elevated amounts of antibiotics. These chemical substances destroy competitors, stop their growth or inactivate them in a more subtle way. Allelopathy in plants, i.e., the production of substances that are toxic for other plants, can also be considered as an analog of animal agonistic behavior.

Unfortunately, agonistic relationships are inevitable in human society. Moreover, wars, conflicts, riots, and coups used to be major political issues in diverse countries and various historical periods. Even relatively peaceful historical periods are marked by constant disagreements between different states, strife between political parties and pressure groups, and conflicts between different branches of the government as well as between political leaders or activists.

Aggression is the most important form of agonistic interactions in both ethological and political terms. Lorenz, Krushinsky, Leuhausen, and others have conducted detailed studies on various forms of aggression with special attention to its driving forces. “Research on aggression has been a ‘hot topic’ in scientific investigations for more than five decades as it has been a target for many specialists from different disciplines, ranging from anthropology, behavioral biology to psychology, genetics, social sciences, neurosciences and zoology” (Francesco Ferrari et. al., 2005, p. 260). Research on aggression is of special interest in biopolitical terms because it is closely related to the socially and politically important concept of violence that “comprises a subset of injuries associated with the use of force and broadly encompasses assault, homicide, self-inflicted injury and suicide” (Mawson, 1999).

A classical ethological definition of aggression given by Tinbergen (1968) is “approaching an opponent and inflicting damage on him or at least generating stimuli that cause him to submit.” With respect to humans, the social psychologist Myers (2010) emphasized, in a similar fashion, that aggression is physical or verbal behavior aimed at causing damage. In human society, an important subtype is relational aggression, i.e., “intentional harming others via manipulation of social relationships” (spreading rumors, gossip, social exclusion, see Reed et al., 2008).

Human aggression undoubtedly has important unique features, due to the uniqueness of the human species in general. The ability to act with injurious intent is one of these features. Nevertheless, human beings and their aggressive behavior are under the indisputable influence of evolutionary factors. To this extent, it can be considered a specific variation on the biobehavioral theme of aggression in its ethological meaning. Ethologists use the term “aggression” with respect to various vertebrates, invertebrates as well as plants, fungi, or microorganisms.

Aggression is a heterogeneous phenomenon in terms of motivation and function, including a wide variety of forms and subtypes. Takahashi et al. (2011, p. 184) emphasize that aggressive “behaviors occur in the context of competing for food and other resources that are important to an individual’s survival and reproduction (resident-intruder aggression), defense of a territory or offspring (territorial and maternal aggression), or in response to fear or frustration.” Other scholars or scientists distinguish intermale (or, alternatively, interfemale), predatory, maternal (paternal), instrumental, sexual, fear-induced, and aversive stimulus-caused aggression. It is also possible to single out typical situations in which aggression is likely to break out, including interactions involving dominance; protection of infants by adults; killing and eating animals of other species; a painful injury; crowding of relatively unfamiliar animals competing for highly valued resources, etc. (reviewed, van der Dennen, 2011, p. 58). Different aggression types often involve different neural mechanisms and depend on different genes.

It should be re-emphasized that one should discriminate between (i) the ultimate level that deals with the evolution-molded behavioral tendencies and (ii) the proximate level comprising immediate physiological and psychological mechanisms that trigger aggressive behavior.

On the ultimate level, aggressive behavior can be analyzed in terms of functions performed by it for hundreds of millions of years of biological evolution. The following is a brief discussion of aggression roles in terms of these typical functions.

1. Survival-oriented aggression that is carried out by an individual for the purpose of (i) protecting the individual’s life (defensive aggression) or (ii) obtaining resources (competitive aggression). In terms of ultimate causation, both aggression types cope with the problem of securing an individual’s survival. However, the difference between them is that competitive aggression is generally characterized by “ritualized” attacks as animals are usually restrained in using lethal weapons at their disposal; this limits the likelihood of causing serious injuries to their rivals (Lorenz, 1966). Territorial aggression aimed at capturing a certain area and defending it from rivals can be regarded as a subtype of competitive aggression. Some ethologists consider a predator’s attack food-seeking/nutritive behavior and not aggression. Lorenz only admitted that the term aggression applies to the prey’s counterattack. This is exemplified by a gaggle of geese that can attack (mob) a fox.

2. Reproduction-related aggression involved in mating behavior and parent-offspring interactions. Special emphasis should be placed upon male-male aggression that is to a considerable extent ritualized, similar to competitive aggression aimed at obtaining individual resources. It is exemplified by black-cock mating displays and other contests related to competition for females (interfemale aggression is also possible). The prowess of each of potential opponents may be estimated from their traits that perform a symbolic function. They demonstrate their strength and courage and make other males surrender. This is exemplified by the size of rooster crests: the bigger the size the higher the social status. Lorenz (1966) considered men’s outfits a result of the selection pressure exerted by women. Intergeneration relationships may also involve aggression in animals. Female house mice become highly aggressive while engaging in parental care, and this is maternal or post-partum aggression (Francesco Ferrari et al., 2005). As ethologists emphasize, aggressive displays may form part of more complex rituals involved, e.g., in mating behavior exemplified by courtship in pigeons. In coral fish, only male courtship is compatible with aggression; female mating behavior cannot be carried out if the female fish is aggressive. This is an example of the incompatible behavior motivation law that applies to a variety of other species and can be to some extent extrapolated to Homo sapiens.

3. Aggression stabilizing an individual’s social status. Aggressive behavior is frequently involved in establishing dominance-submission hierarchies, even though dominance may be attained without aggression. In an established hierarchy, aggressive or threatening behavior prevents individuals from violating social norms, e.g., disregarding social ranks. This is called disciplinary aggression. Apart from human society, it occurs in nonhuman primate species including the chimpanzee (de Waal, 1996b). Aggressive father-child interactions in the context of play behavior—rough-and-tumble play (RTP)—decrease child aggression toward peers provided that the father plays the dominant role (Flanders et al., 2010). In ape groups, disciplinary aggression prevents actions that could be termed “illegal” if performed in human society. For example, it is used to discipline a male attempting to attack a female or an infant. This punitive behavior is also called moralistic aggression. It has been suggested that such aggression is related to the evolutionary roots of human ethics and even law (Gruter, 1991; McGuire, 1992; de Waal, 1996b).

4. Aggression involved in securing the existence of the whole biosocial system despite threats posed by outgroup individuals. Loyal behavior within a social group is enhanced by intergroup hostility (Lorenz, 1966), i.e., by ingroup-outgroup discrimination that, in light of available data, seems to occur in most kinds of living beings ranging from unicellular creatures to mammals including primates. Aggression towards other human groups (aliens) is one of the focal points of present-day biopolitical research. Our close evolutionary relatives chimpanzees, as well as other primates, engage in collective intergroup fighting. One of the goals is obtaining food concentrated, e.g., in the form of garbage by humans. The modern human species, Homo sapiens, represents a single, genetically homogeneous species, but the subpopulations (nations, races, etc.) of this species are markedly different in terms of cultural traditions. During wars or conflicts, people belonging to other cultures are treated almost as if they were representatives of other species (cultural pseudospeciation, Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1998). Outsiders (“aliens”) are dehumanized, i.e., excluded from the human species (Homo sapiens). This may result in quasi-predatory behavior carried out during wars or ethnic conflicts. Such behavior lacks restrictions that are typical of most intraspecies interactions. Likewise, in often fierce intergroup aggressive encounters in chimpanzees, individuals of other chimpanzee groups are “dechimpized” (van der Dennen, 2011) and treated like common prey, such as colobus monkeys hunted and eaten by chimpanzees. Aggression between members of the same group is often mitigated by conciliatory behavior, particularly in apes (see the end of this subsection). But, as emphasized by Adang (1999a), “there is no—never—reconciliation after episodes of intergroup violence in chimpanzees” (quoted in: van der Dennen, 2011, p. 62). The severity of conflicts between groups (compared to intragroup clashes) is also characteristic of humans and has relevance to ethnic conflicts.

While the above classification deals with ultimate causes of aggression, it can also be classified in a different way, based on its proximate mechanisms. The issue is what factors cause a human or an animal to behave aggressively. In these terms, aggressive behavior can be subdivided into (Hinde, 1992; Myers, 2010):

• Impulsive (hostile, injurious) aggression. This aggression may break out spontaneously. However, it is often instigated by an attack, a threat, or a stimulus including heat, overcrowding, and other stress factors. In human society, such aggression may be caused by an insult. To a certain extent, aversive aggression may be regarded as self-rewarding behavior, “aggression for aggression’s sake,” exemplified by the behavior of sadists or maniacs. Male chimpanzees form “killing parties” attacking other chimpanzee groups. They seem to enjoy their raids. “The chimpanzees express their anticipatory excitement behaviorally and physiologically, and during the actual acts of killing they emit pleasurable vocalizations and postural displays that may have parallels in human psychopathology” (Francesco Ferrari et al., 2005, p. 261). A subtype of impulsive aggression, aversive aggression, usually involves severe stress often accompanied by anger and rage. In a human, stress induced by frustration, annoyance, or provocation results in arousal (Zillman, 1983) and often anger (Berkowitz, 1962), but this emotional state does not necessarily cause aggression (Bandura, 1973). In terms of the stimulation-induced behavioral inhibition theory (Mawson, 1999), stress- (frustration-)related arousal causes the individual involved to seek sensory stimulation associated with intense perceptions and colorful stimuli. Sensory stimulation can be attained in different ways: eating spicy food, having sex, or establishing new friendly relationships. Physical violence is just one of the possible strategies of attaining sensory stimulation (Mawson, 1999).

• Instrumental aggression, i.e., aggression aimed at obtaining an object such as a food item or a toy in a kindergarten. It is to a lesser extent accompanied by emotional stress or even associated with positive emotions. In biosocial systems (groups, herds, flocks) of animals, such aggression is often ritualized and ordinarily non-lethal. Most male deer do not strike their opponents with deadly horns while fighting for females. However, if the aggressor meets with strong resistance, aggression may change from instrumental to aversive, resulting in characteristic stress. R. Hinde (1992) singled out status-seeking adolescent aggression. Social status and prestige as well as leadership in a social group are specific resources that are directly or indirectly related to reproduction. In fact, dominance and leadership attract the attention of representatives of the opposite sex and, therefore, promote reproductive success. Revelers in British night cafes or pubs that are notorious for their aggressive behavior typically prefer aggression to flight only if this is necessary for them to retain their social status—to “save face” in the eyes of other young people, particularly girlfriends (McNally, 2004).

In his bestseller, Aggression, Lorenz (1966) considered human and animal aggression from a unitary perspective in terms of his “hydraulic theory” of aggression. Lorenz admitted that external stimuli can trigger off aggressive behavior but believed that aggression is ultimately based upon an innate drive. He compared aggressiveness to an incompressible liquid that gradually accumulates in an animal’s organism; therefore, the term “hydraulic theory.” The pressure of the “liquid” gradually increases if there is no outlet, i.e., no chance to engage in aggressive behavior. An individual starts to display attacking behavior towards inappropriate or even imaginary objects. A caged starling attacked nonexistent flies in the air (Lorenz, 1966).

It is currently accepted that Lorenz’s “hydraulic theory” has serious limitations. Empirical studies did not confirm the catharsis hypothesis that seems to follow from this theory. The catharsis hypothesis predicted that aggressive episodes in movies would decrease the aggressiveness of people watching them because the “aggression liquid” is released and its pressure is decreased while taking in the aggression shown on the screen. Conversely, evidence was presented that children and teenagers increase their aggression after watching violent TV programs, also in combination with pornographic scenes (Myers, 2010). In the literature, status-related competition is considered one of the main incentives for aggression. “Rather than conceiving aggressiveness as a trait, it is more properly seen as a byproduct of dominance-striving among males (Nicholson, 1997, p. 1071).

The social learning theory suggested by Albert Bandura (1973) as well as its modification, the social cognition theory (Eron, 1994) place emphasis on instrumental aggression. In human society, a young individual learns to behave aggressively. Aggressive behavior is encouraged by useful results of aggression, including trophies taken from the loser, elevated social status, and sexual/reproductive success. It is inhibited by sanctions imposed on the aggressor (Bandura, 1973; Eron, 1994; Myers, 2010). Even frustration-induced aversive aggression gradually converts into reward-dependent, i.e., instrumental, aggression. The issue concerning the ratio between aversive and instrumental aggression in humans and animals awaits further sociological and ethological research. It has significant biopolitical implications that are linked to the political consequences of aggression manifesting themselves during wars, terror acts, or ethnic conflicts.

Even though psychologists and sociologists tend to explain human aggression mainly in terms of social/cultural factors, aggression can also be considered from a biobehavioral perspective, as the following points indicate:

• Aggressive facial expressions, gestures, or postures have common features in human and nonhuman primates (and, in some cases, even other groups of mammals). These pre-existing behavior patterns are creatively combined and integrated into a coherent behavior style, like a jigsaw puzzle, during a child’s development, which is heavily influenced by experience including social learning.

• The importance of evolutionary roots of human aggression is highlighted by the fact that it is age-dependent. Aggressive behavior is characteristic of young individuals both in human society and in a group of monkeys or apes. Most hooligans among football fans are 15 to 25 years old (Adang, 1999). In general, human males are statistically more aggressive than females. The aggression level in males is correlated with the concentrations of testosterone (Myers, 2010), the male sexual hormone, as well as of the stress hormones epinephrine (adrenalin) and norepinephrine (noradrenalin).

Hence, in order to understand human aggression, we should pay sufficient attention to both biobehavioral (evolutionary) driving forces and relevant social/cultural factors.

Aggressive/agonistic displays are signals that precede or accompany aggressive behavior. In diverse animal species including coral fish investigated by Lorenz, a complex sequence of increasingly intense aggressive signals is displayed before the outbreak of aggression as such. Thus, the parties involved in conflict have a chance to avoid inflicting damage on each other. A conflict in human society usually undergoes a number of escalation stages before it reaches its culmitation, i.e., the all-out aggression stage. Before an armed conflict between two states breaks out, the potential enemies are expected to exchange messages followed by an ultimatum. Even after the aggression outbreak, messages communicated between opponents may stop or at least mitigate it (conciliatory behavior).

Recently, much research has been conducted on reconciliation in animals that often involves aggression-buffering behavior (Deryagina and Butovskaya, 1992, 2004) revealed in variety of mammal species. For instance, a wolf losing a fight lies on its back, and this posture usually signals submission. Complex conciliatory rituals are characteristic of primates. Reconciliation was initially revealed in captive chimpanzees (de Waal and van Roosmalen, 1979). It was defined as “as a form of affiliative interaction between former opponents which interact affinitively shortly after an agonistic event” (quoted according to: Palagi et al., 2005, p.280). Subsequently, various forms of reconciliation were documented in about 30 primate species including lemurs. Such aggression buffers include touching the opponent with fingers or lips, assuming the copulation posture, inviting him/her to play, kissing, and moving various objects. In field studies with brown capuchin monkeys, “reconciliation was more likely to occur between opponents that supported each other more frequently and that spent more timew together (van der Dennen, 2011, p.61-62). In this situation, agonistic interactions seem to be overridden by pre-existing loyal relationships that are discussed in more detail in the following subsection (2.1.4).

Aggression-inhibiting conciliatory behavior may be initiated by the aggression victim, the aggressor (aggression autoinhibition), or third parties particularly if they are high-ranking individuals, such as the leader of a primate group. Aggression autoinhibition is of particular importance for socially living primates. Individuals in their groups “must learn not only to recognize social cues of aggression but also to restrain and control their own impulses whenever necessary. In fact, achieving high dominance staus within a troop may depends on inhibiting aggression as much as on expressing it” (Higley, 2003, quotation from: van der Dennen, 2011, p.59-60).

Complex and effective aggression buffers are typical of our closest evolutionary relatives, i.e. the chimpanzee and the bonobo. The functions of conciliatory behavior include relationship repair, benefits associated with friendly bonds with important individuals, a decreased probability of future conflict, and stress mitigation in the victim and possibly other individuals involved (Palago et al., 2005).

Individuals with equal social ranks may engage in conciliatory behavior to inhibit aggressive drives. Alternatively, reconciliation may be initiated by a low-ranking individual attempting to pacify the higher-ranking aggressor by displaying submissive behavior. In primitive human societies, a similar function was performed by group/tribe leaders exemplified by “leopard skin-wearing leaders” in Africa.

Isolation (avoidance behavior) is a subtype of conflict-related behavior that does not directly involve aggression and can often be considered a peaceful alternative to it. Isolation implies avoiding the potential opponent. In the animal kingdom, it often results in marking the boundaries of one’s own territory. This makes it possible to establish relatively peaceful relations with former opponents, as long as the boundaries are acknowledged by the parties involved. Good fences make good friends.

Avoidance behavior is characteristic of a wide variety of biological species, occurring both on the individual and the group level. For instance, two groups of animals of the same species avoid each other, and their isolation is a prerequisite for the consolidation of each of these groups. Even microbial colonies growing on one petri dish do not merge (Budrene, 1985; Novikova, 1989). An insect society cannot exist without separating from other societies. (Zakharov, 1991).

Territorial behavior occurs in primates. However, it is not characteristic of some primate species such as rhesus monkeys, langurs, baboons, and our closest evolutionary relatives chimpanzees and gorillas that defend not individual but group territories (Deryagina and Butovskaya, 2004).

Isolation takes a large number of different forms in human society. People are isolated from one another in their caves, apartments, or palaces. They draw national, regional, or other boundaries and divide spheres of influence, competence fields, and levels of political structures.

Modern humans have individual territories subdivided into (a) the social zone (~92 centimeters in Australia: Pease, 1992) characteristic of communication between people who are not close friends; (b) the friendly communication zone that is accessible to sufficiently close friends; (c) the intimate zone related to intimate relationships; and (d) the superintimate zone that cannot be entered without touching the individual’s body.

The term “loyal behavior” refers to the totality of friendly interactions among individuals that cement a biosocial system. Of particular importance for both humans and animals are the forms of loyal behavior denoted as affiliation and cooperation.

Aristoteles once suggested that loyal forms of social behavior, even though they may be targeted at unrelated individuals, descended from nurturant behavior of parents towards their young offspring. This suggestion has been confirmed in recent ethological works (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1998, 1999) in studies on grooming, food sharing, and other kinds of loyal behavior in animal groups. In human society, friendly relationships among people within a band, tribe, or ethnic group are related to ethologically prototypical interactions among members of one family (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1998). Political leaders often use words like brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters when addressing their citizens. If the goal is to motivate the people to work hard or to fight on the battlefront, these emotionally appealing words prove more effective than terms referring to non-familial relationships such as friends (Salmon, 1998).

Loyal relationships among individuals that enable them to form alliances and establish increasingly coherent (bio)social systems are of paramount importance in terms of the synergy concept developed by Peter Corning (1983, 2003a, 2003b, 2005, 2007). He emphasizes individual bonding and “labor distribution” (or combination) as important prerequisites for the formation of increasingly complex organism-like systems during the evolution of both animal biosocial structures and human society.

Cells engage in cooperative interactions to form multicellular systems referred to as cell states by the 19^th century nature philosopher Rudolf Wirchow. In their turn, whole organisms form biosocial systems denoted as superorganisms (Corning, 1983, 2003a,b, 2005). In this situation, competition and agonistic behaviors only take place at the level of interactions between whole superorganisms, e.g., ant families, not between individuals (worker ants) that tend to help one another.

An important form of loyal behavior is play behavior, which is widespread, apart from humans, in nonhuman mammals and birds, especially as far as young individuals are concerned. Playing may involve mitigated agonistic interactions exemplified by the rough-and-tumble play in children. Nonetheless, play behavior in animals/humans is unlikely to result in a real conflict and usually promotes loyal not agonistic behavior. Politicians should be familiarized with the idea that some political conflicts can be mitigated by converting them into sporting games. Of much promise in this respect are International Olympic Games, including the still unrealized Bios-Olympics suggested by Agni Vlavianos-Arvanitis and the Biopolitics International Organisation (Vlavianos-Arvanitis, 2003).

Affiliation is defined as a form of social behavior involving an individual animal's tending to approach and remain near conspecifics (Dewsbury, 1978), particularly those belonging to the same family or social group Experiments with animals, e.g., dogs indicate that they are ready to do a difficult job if their only reward is meeting another individual of the same group. In humans, affiliation is associated with feelings of physical comfort, safety, and belonging.

Affiliative relationships involve information exchange (communication). In human society, a typical form of affiliation-promoting communication is gossip whose analogs appear to exist in nonhuman primates. “Gossip — communication about other people and their actions—is a necessary art to update our intelligence about complex and subtle shifts in power, kinship relations, resource supply, and the like... Gossip also has a more direct instrumental value as social “grooming”; i.e , as a form of display, networking, for mate selection and social advantage. Being the recipient of gossip is a sign of inclusion, and to be able to give it is a mark of social power” (Nicholson, 1997, p. 1065).

A delicate balance is maintained between affiliation and avoidance behavior. The trade-off between these two behavioral tendencies fluctuates in accord with individual biological rhythms. For instance, marmots actively socialize in the morning: they greet, groom, and play with, one another. In the afternoon, they tend to disperse to individual holes (Barash, 1989). “Microbial behavior is also characterized by interaction of isolation and affiliation. Like animals, microorganisms shift from one behavior pattern to another, depending both on external influences and internal rhythms. However, these patterns occur in more primitive forms, so that the underlying driving forces are more clearly manifested. Thus, cell isolation is characteristic of a D. discoideum culture supplied with sufficient nutrients. cAMP release and aggregation represent a response to starvation” (Oleskin, 1994b, p.428).

Apart from avoidance behavior, affiliation combines with other forms of agonistic behavior including aggression. Affiliation and aggression can be directed at different individuals/groups. Aggression towards members of a different group often strengthens affiliative bonds among members of your own group. However, aggression can be directed at ingroup members despite affiliation. A conflict inside a group may help clarify each individual’s social status and rank, establish the group hierarchy, and delimit individual territories. Stabilizing the spatial structure and the hierarchy is a prerequisite for the dominance of friendly relations over agonistic interactions.

Agonistic and affiliative behaviors also form part of complex rituals. Lorenz conducted classical studies of mating rituals that combine courtship with seemingly threatening displays and even fake fighting.

Combining affiliative and agonistic behaviors is also characteristic of interactions between whole groups or communities (“superorganisms”). International relations that used to be a hot topic both in mainstream political science and, more specifically, biopolitics were considered by the American scholars T. Wiegele, S. Peterson, and G. Schubert in terms of loyal and agonistic interactions among the actors involved. For instance, the relations between the USSR and China in the 1960s—1980s were characterized by the prevalence of agonistic interactions that resulted in several border conflicts. However, the relations between Russia, the successor to the USSR, and China started to improve in the 1990s, and this positive trend has persisted up to now. Apart from business contacts, the Russia—China relationship presently involves mutual interests, good will, and friendliness (affiliation). Among other reasons, this development seems to be due to the unjustifiably long conflict in the past that apparently exhausted the aggressive potential of both parties involved (cf. Lorenz' hydraulic theory of aggression). During the long disagreement, the issues debated by the two parties were apparently losing their importance. In contrast, opportunities for cooperative interactions were gradually gaining in importance. In addition, third parties posed serious threats to both Russia and China. Hence, the ties between them indesputably were strengthened by the fact that they had common potential enemies, which is in conformity with ethological views concerning ingroups supporting each other while dealing with dangerous outgroups.

Affiliation and avoidance behavior can be displayed by animals in spatially separate zones. For example, gerbils and other rodents defend only a part of their home range ­-- the individual zone -- from other individuals. They allow others to enter the other part, the contact zone. This biopolitically important fact gives political leaders food for thought: some conflicts between states or ethnic groups could be mitigated by creating buffer zones in which the parties involved can establish friendly contacts with each other.

Affiliation promotes the formation of groups (biosocial systems, “superorganisms”) of animals or humans. A group in human society is defined as two of more individuals that interact with one another, know each other for more than several instants, and consider themselves as “we” (according to Myers, 2010, modified). This definition can be extended to animal groups. Integration into a group may result in drastic changes in the behavior of individuals; they partly lose their individuality (the deindividuation effect). Individual locusts do not engage in long-distance flights and plant-destroying raids that are characteristic of their large aggregations. People in groups perform deeds, such as lynching, that they would never perform alone.

The number of individuals belonging to a group cemented by affiliative interactions is limited. If an ant family becomes too big, it tends to separate into several autonomous families, the process referred to as sociotomy. In apes, especially in the chimpanzee and the bonobo, most groups do not count more than several dozens of individuals (Butovskaya and Fainberg, 1993). With respect to humans, Dunbar (1992) estimated ”that the size of the neocortex predicts a value of around 150 for the size of a community about whom one would need to retain social intelligence—near the upper limit of hunter–gatherer clan size” (quoted from Nicholson, 1997, p.1065). Despite this upper limit estimate, humans typically tend to prefer significantly smaller groups approximating the size of an extended family unit (Nicholson, 1997).

Affiliative interactions among high-ranking individuals result in the formation of close-knit coalitions. They are characteristic of primates and particularly of apes. Coalitions formed by political actors in human society played an important role in various periods of history.

Importantly, affiliation is selective. “Birds of a feather flock together”: both humans and animals tend to deal with those who are similar to them. Animals as well as, in all likelihood, human individuals possess innate mechanisms enabling them to estimate the degree of similarity between them and others, based upon appearance, body proportions, and odors. Chimpanzees and, according to recent data, wasps can recognize related individuals by examining their “facial features”. Wood lice recognize their mates and offspring using the sense of touch (Reznikova, 2005).

However, while selecting friends, partners, or spouses, people widely use culturally determined criteria including language, customs, religion, and political views. It is an open question to what extent relationships between humans depend on (i) biological (heritable) traits and (ii) cultural factors.

With respect to human society, affiliation has both positive and negative consequences. It facilitates group consolidation and efficient collective work. Nevertheless, affiliation also promotes cliquishness, group favoritism, nationalism, and chauvinism. It encourages repulsion of “others”, “aliens”, or “out-groups”.

Cooperation denotes interactions between two or more individuals for the purpose of solving a problem or carrying out a task. An alternative, although in principle similar, approach to defining cooperation involves considering it from the viewpoint of a whole group (community). In these terms, cooperators are contrasted with cheaters (free riders): cooperators contribute to the collective good within a distinct group at an individual cost, and cheaters exploit it (Hochberg et al., 2008, p.3, modified). With respect to human society, “a collective good is any good or service provided to the members of some collective (coalition, village, organization, nation, etc.) through the efforts of some or all of its members… Examples include large game that is widely shared, a community irrigation system, defense against enemy attack, a wide variety of rituals and ceremonies, and scholarly journals. Other social species produce collective goods as well” (Smith, 2010, p.232).

A classic example of cooperation is provided by social insects such as ants whose societies are characterized by advanced cooperation and “labor distribution” patterns. All worker ants know “their duties assigned to them depending on the nature of work and the worker’s skill” (Zakharov, 1987, p. 122 ).

Cooperation occurs even in microorganisms. For instance, myxobacteria coordinately move over the surface of the nutrient medium and pursue their prey, i.e. other bacteria they feed upon. Inside a multicellular organism, immune cells such as lymphocytes and macrophages engage in cooperation during an immune response. Macrophages bind the extraneous agent that has penetrated into the organism and present it to T lymphocytes. They assume an active state and interact with B lymphocytes that produce antibodies neutralizing the agent. In the course of biological evolution, cooperation among free-living cells resulted in the formation of multicellular organisms; this process underwent the stage of relatively loose groups of cooperating cells. It is exemplified by the colonial alga Volvox. The scenario of multicellularity evolution may implicate creating conditions favoring the dispersal from the system of all noncooperating cells (free riders, Hochberg et al., 2008).

Cooperation mitigates rigid hierarchical structures if they form, e.g., in primates. Cooperative behavior manifests itself in collective hunting or gathering, rearing the offspring, and food sharing. In some situations, cooperation and affiliation prevail over agonistic behavior in apes, especially chimpanzees and bonobos.

Cooperation within a group promotes affiliation among its members and helps consolidate this group in the face of agonistic relations to other groups. In line with this, noncooperators (cheaters) are more severely punished if they belong to the same group as the punishers; in an experimental situation ingroup punishers display negative emotions such as anger and moral outrage (Shinada et al., 2004).

The connection between affiliation and cooperation is characteristic of the political realm. Even though Britain was unfriendly to the USSR before June 22, 1941, these two countries were necessitated to help each other fight Hitler after this point. The two nations took an interest in each other’s culture, and their contacts went beyond the military goals of the alliance. For example, British radio stations broadcast Russian (and Soviet) music.

Cooperation is facilitated by specific communication signals. It has been established in studies with human subjects that “face-to-face conversation prior to actual experimental interaction will enhance cooperation dramatically” (reviewed, Smith, 2010, p.237).

T

Fig. 9

he silent bared teeth (SBT) display promotes loyal behavior including cooperation in a number of primate species, e.g., in the Tonkean macaque and the chimpanzee. The exact meaning of the SBT display and some details of the display vary depending on the primate species involved and the concrete situation. “In some species such as the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) and the hamadryas baboon (Papio hamadryas), the SBT display is shown exclusively by subordinates to appease dominants in aggressive contexts” (Mehu et al., 2007, p.415). Nevertheless, the general function of this signal is to promote social bonding, similar to the human smile (Waler and Dunbar, 2005; Gaspar, 2006). Social bonding is also facilitated in primates by the relaxed open mouth face (the play face), an apparent homologue of the human laughing face that also performs this function.

Lorenz and other ethologists emphasized that affiliation and avoidance behavior as well as cooperation and competition are intertwined during interactions between individuals and groups, similar to love and hate in William Shakespeare’s tragedies. Loyal and agonistic relations often presuppose each other because (i) friendship often implies the existence of a common enemy and (ii) agonistic and loyal displays directed at the same partner(s) may form part of a more complex behavior pattern/ritual. Marmots greet each other if they meet, and this is affiliative behavior. If the greeting period is too long it may be followed by fighting and avoidance behavior.

In general, agonistic and loyal behaviors are two overlapping zones of the social behavior continuum. Social technologies aimed at overcoming or mitigating agonistic behavior in human society should be developed taking into account the complex interplay and interdependence of loyal and agonistic interactions.

Cooperation is often interpreted in the literature in systemic terms. In this meaning, cooperation denotes interactions between systems that result in their forming more or less integrated alliances or even merging into a single higher-order system. The process is referred to as self-assembly (Franchuk, 2001, 2005). From the beginning of evolution, bios (life) on the planet did not represent a totality of individual organisms; the Earth was probably inhabited by highly integrated associations of organisms as stromatolites, the oldest microfossils, demonstrate (Zavarzin, 2002). The self-assembly process manifested itself in the joining together of several bacterial cells, resulting in the formation of more complex eukaryotic cells; subsequently, eukaryotic cells combined to form first a colony (e.g., the colonial alga Volvox) and then a multicellular organism. Alternatively, bacterial cells formed multicellular mats that were coherent multispecies associations whose layers had differentiated functions. As for multicellular eukaryotic organisms, they used the self-assembly principle to produce integrated communities of multicellular organisms (biosocial systems).

Some of these systems behave as coherent “organisms of organisms” (colonies of coelenterates and bryozoans) or “superorganisms” (ant/termite societies). Naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) are envisaged as mammalian superorganisms.

“The mole-rat is an African rodent species that lives in large underground colohies (usually numbering 75-80 but sometimes over 200). They subsist by eating plant roots and succulent tubers. Affectionately dubbed “sabre-toothed sausages” because they are hairless and have two outsize front teeth used for digging, the naked mole-rats represent a particularly significant model of a division/combination of labor in mammals. In fact, these odd-looking animals utilize specialized worker “castes” and a pattern of breeding restriction that is highly suggestive of social insects. Typically (but not always) the breeding is done by a single “queen”, with other reproductively suppressed females waiting in the wings. The smallest of the non-breeders, both males and females, engage cooperatively in tunnel-digging, tunnel-cleaning, and nest-making, as well as transposting the colony’s pups, foraging for food, and hauling the booty back to strategic locations within the colony’s extensive tunnl system” (Corning, 2003b, pp.39-40; see also Corning, 2004, p.191).

Human society can also be considered a superorganism-like entity. Such complex (bio)social systems are “more than the sum of their components”, i.e. they possess systemic properties that are lacking in their components per se. Peter Corning (1983, 2003a,b, 2005, 2007) widely uses the term synergy that refers to “the combined (interdependent) effects produced by two or more parts, elements, or individuals… and is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature and human society alike” (Corning, 2000, p.133). The following are biopolitically important kinds of synergies: