Why just these four ways of coordinating, and how Homo sapiens got them

Why just these four ways of coordinating, and how Homo sapiens got them Alan Page Fiske 1 78 Page 2 of 26 Theory and Society (2026) 55:78known species to use these schemas for social coordination, as such.It may have taken tens of millions of years or more for early organisms to have evolved the neurocognitive capacities to use these four mathematical structures to function nonsocially, but it need not have taken nearly so long for some early Homo species to borrow, reuse, and perfect them for social coordination.The reuse of existing systems is a universal feature of evolution.Aquatic mammal flippers and avian wings evolved from limbs whose function was terrestrial ambulation, which had previously evolved from the flippers of their aquatic ancestors.Reuse is pervasive in neurocognitive evolution (Anderson, 2010(Anderson, , 2021)).In all cases, it is far simpler, far more feasible, and far more reliable to borrow an existing functional system than it is to make an entirely new system from scratch.Then natural selection can copy the borrowed system, allowing the copy to evolve further specializations for its new functions.This is especially relevant to social coordination, where the prospective coordinators need to use the same schema to organize their respective actions, understandings, plans, motives, emotions, and evaluations.No matter how wonderful a new coordination scheme a person comes up with, it is of no use unless others 'get' it.This means that the starting point for social coordination must be a schema that the participants share, and can be certain that they share, and can be certain that they all know that they share.Synchronizing the further elaboration of the coordination schema -even in small increments that are easy to convey and to grasp -is still a challenge, but a surmountable one.Cultural evolutionary processes can generate, explore, and test beneficial uses of the scheme, and then generate, explore, and test improvements to the scheme.Those coordination schemes that work can be observed and learned by successive generations, then genetically assimilated through a Baldwinian process (Baldwin, 1896; Morgan, 1896; Osborn, 1896a, b; Weber & Depew, 2003; see below).Perhaps the population of Homo tried out other coordination schemes, but those other schemes failed.They failed either because the other cognitive schemas were too messy, insufficiently determinate, or too computationally burdensome.Moreover, to function well, a social coordination schema should be robust under many likely transformations, because different participants inevitably implement a schema in different ways.Technically, this sort of robustness is called 'uniqueness,' meaning that the relations that are defined remain unchanged by the relevant transformations.For equivalence sets, uniqueness means that, for example, giving each set a new name leaves unchanged the equivalence relations within each set.For linear orderings, uniqueness means that the asymmetric differences between any pair are unchanged if what each person gets is transformed by any positive monotonic function.For relations in an ordered Abelian group, after adding a constant to what each person has, those who were even beforehand remain even, a person A who owes two turns to person B still owes person B two turns, and so on.For relations in an Archimedean ordered field, uniqueness means that ratios, rates, and proportions remain unchanged if each person's stuff is multiplied by a constant.For example, in pure currency inflation.The uniqueness of a coordination structure means that it can be adapted to new circumstances; it can remain functional despite certain transformations in the activity being coordinated, or in the state of that activity.Uniqueness also means that there Page 3 of 26 78