The Social Field: Vertebrate Life and the Architecture of Alignment: Afterthought: Why inclination dominated in vertebrate sociality

1. Ability becomes too diffuse at large biological scales

In Volvox, corals, insects, etc., ability is a colony-level aperture:

flagellation, phototaxis, division of labour, nest-building, foraging networks.

But in vertebrates, especially mammals and primates, ability is no longer a collective aperture. It is:

• distributed across individuals

• opportunistic

• context-sensitive

• constantly reorganised by movement, threat, food availability, seasonality, and social dynamics

There is no stable, collective “ability manifold” like in eusocial insects or colonial organisms.

Collective ability is not pre-given; it is emergent and temporary.

So as soon as you move to herds and primate alliances, ability ceases to be the main explanatory frame.

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2. Social behaviour in vertebrates is shaped overwhelmingly by local positional biases

Vertebrate groups operate through:

• dominance gradients

• kinship gradients

• spatial gradients

• perceptual gradients

• affective attunement gradients

• personality biases

• rank, role, proximity, affiliation, estrangement

These are all inclination-fields.

Nothing like this exists in a colony of ants or a Volvox sphere, where bias is internal to the system architecture.

In vertebrates, inclination effectively is the structure.

Collective behaviour is patterned by how these gradients align (or clash) at the moment of coordination.

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3. Vertebrate individuality is too strong for ability to be predictive

In insects, individuals don’t “decide” not to perform their caste role.

In Volvox, somatic cells don’t negotiate whether to beat their flagella.

In corals, polyps don’t dispute who’s doing the calcification today.

But gazelles? geladas? humans?

Individuals have their own:

• tendencies

• histories

• strategies

• constraints

• attentional habits

• relational positions

• motivational landscapes

The collective ability is not a precondition. It is a result of how inclinations momentarily align.

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4. Human symbolic life pushes ability above the social scale

By the time we get to humans:

• collective ability is not biological at all

• it is symbolic, institutional, representational

• and realised by language and culture

Which means that human collective ability lies above the biological organism entirely, in the symbolic stratum.

So at the vertebrate scale, ability becomes:

• too low-resolution for the social

• too high-resolution once humans arrive

Inclination remains the only tractable middle.

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5. Inclination represents the key evolutionary transition between solitary and social vertebrates

Inclination is where:

• gaze

• vigilance

• conflict avoidance

• prosociality

• dominance

• coalition formation

• empathy

• threat assessment

• mating competition

all operate.

The pivot from “many individuals in proximity” to “a coherent social group” is entirely about the alignment of inclinations.

Every vertebrate social innovation is perspectival, not architectural:

• herding → orientation biases and synchrony

• primate multi-tier units → relational biases and alliance patterns

• humans → symbolic biases and narrative alignment

Ability only re-enters at the symbolic level.

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Summary

Inclination dominated the vertebrate series because:

• collective ability dissolves at ecological scales

• inclination is the primary structuring force of vertebrate social fields

• individual organisms have too much autonomy for ability to be predictive

• human symbolic life relocates ability into the semiotic order

• the entire problem of vertebrate sociality is perspectival, not architectural

We essentially discovered a natural break:

Colonial organisms → ability

Eusocial insects → ability + inclination

Vertebrates → inclination

Humans → inclination + symbolic ability (semiotic)