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Holy Crap, Mike Yohe actually was on to something. There is a theory in cultural anthropology that early tribes “domesticated themselves”. You would have never found this using what Mike said, because he so misrepresented it, it became unrecognizable. The theory is, early primates and in to early hominid tribes used alpha males to keep order, might made right. But they can be really bad at ruling a group. As weapons developed, strength was no longer the only factor for leadership, denser webs of life developed, and a despotic leader could be taken out. The ability to gain a reputation became as important as being able to win a fight, bringing more genes for reasoning into the gene pool.

This is from Part II, Chapter 8. The Conservative Advantage. There are a lot of online resources for this book, sometimes whole chapters in PDF form and a variety of extensive notes on blogs and other formats. This is an article referencing the guy, Boehm, that is referenced in this chapter.