A web of interconnected relationships is therapeutic enough to increase one’s odds

From Robin Dunbar How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks, book review by Michele Pridmore-Brown. This is consistent with the posts from Deep Survival and the idea that a big portion of survival (and perhaps by extension, success) is motivation. The essay alludes to the Donner Party.

From an evolutionary point of view, what makes the story interesting is not the cannibalism — which, in the annals of anthropology, is relatively banal — but who survived and who did not. Of the 87 pioneers, only 46 came over the pass alive in February and March of the next year. Their story, then, represents a case study of what might be termed catastrophic natural selection. It turns out that, contrary to lay Darwinist expectations, it was not the virile young but those who were embedded in families who had the best odds of survival. The unattached young men, presumably fuller of vigor and capable of withstanding more physical hardship than the others, fared worst, worse even than the older folk and the children.

For Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary biologist cum anthropologist, stories such as this one highlight how human kin networks aid survival — and, therefore, why people may take great pains to manufacture kin, via godparents for instance, or marriage, or by obscuring or playing up paternity. He points to another earlier case of extreme selection: of the Mayflower colonists who set foot on the American mainland in 1620, 53 of 103 died in the first New England winter. Here, too, mortality was disproportionately high among the unattached. To take a less dramatic example, several retrospective studies suggest that children embedded in large families get sick less often than those embedded in much smaller kin networks. Dunbar’s conclusion is not just the obvious one — that families share resources, and thus have advantages over less connected, well-endowed individuals — but also that being at the center of a web of interconnected relationships is therapeutic enough to increase one’s odds of withstanding pestilential (and presumably existential) slings and arrows.