I’m sympathetic to that line of thinking in general, but this specific argument strikes me as suspiciously available. For the selection pressures against low-status independent action in combat to generalize to things like entrepreneurship or research, styles of group combat where those selection pressures dominate would have to have maintained for evolutionarily significant periods of time, and the psychology of group combat would have to be sufficiently close to that of the domains we’re discussing for the same instincts to kick in. Perhaps more importantly, they’d have to be common enough not to get lost in the noise of everyday life; “act independently” versus “wait for instructions” is a very general question, and a heritable tendency towards one or the other would have measurable effects on just about every domain.
That’s a lot of prerequisites, and I can think of evidence both for and against just about all of them. In the absence of clever and well-designed research into the question, I’d hesitate to draw strong conclusions about its evolutionary roots.
I’m sympathetic to that line of thinking in general, but this specific argument strikes me as suspiciously available. For the selection pressures against low-status independent action in combat to generalize to things like entrepreneurship or research, styles of group combat where those selection pressures dominate would have to have maintained for evolutionarily significant periods of time, and the psychology of group combat would have to be sufficiently close to that of the domains we’re discussing for the same instincts to kick in. Perhaps more importantly, they’d have to be common enough not to get lost in the noise of everyday life; “act independently” versus “wait for instructions” is a very general question, and a heritable tendency towards one or the other would have measurable effects on just about every domain.
That’s a lot of prerequisites, and I can think of evidence both for and against just about all of them. In the absence of clever and well-designed research into the question, I’d hesitate to draw strong conclusions about its evolutionary roots.