> Here is an attribute, shared by the _whole_ of the species (including
> most emphatically those who claim not to be indoctrinated). And it seems
> to me that the capacity to follow a leader without too much questioning,
> including too much questioning of how the leader happens to be a leader,
> is a capacity which would have had great survival value in the 100k
> years or so prior to the emergence of biologically modern humans, as
> well as during the several 10s of thousands of years during which the h.
> sapiens species would have become well established.
I wonder about this. Most hunting and gathering societies we know of today do not have the kind of formal political authority we take for granted in industrial societies (they typically do not have "chiefs" or "leaders" whose orders the others must obey). To engage in wild speculation, I see no adaptive advantage if everyone in a human tribe blindly follows some single leader. A single individual may not or may have expertise about where the water is or where the deer are; in my view, it's plausible that the reproductive advantage resided in the humans who did not blindly rely upon self-appointed leaders and instead worked together and listened to each other, recognizing that different individuals may have different knowledge and expertise. (I may be good at finding water, and so others defer to me about that, just as I might defer to you about where the tasty roots are.)
This is a common tangle in sociobiological speculation: we see political characteristics of our own society such as "leaders", and we whiggishly apply them to earlier times, assuming they must have been useful/necessary for people living under quite different material and social conditions.
Miles