The Social Conquest of Earth

From the most celebrated heir to Darwin comes a groundbreaking book on evolution, the summa work of Edward O. Wilson‘s legendary career.

Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? In a generational work of clarity and passion, one of our greatest living scientists directly addresses these three fundamental questions of religion, philosophy, and science while “overturning the famous theory that evolution naturally encourages creatures to put family first”. Refashioning the story of human evolution in a work that is certain to generate headlines, Wilson draws on his remarkable knowledge of biology and social behavior to show that group selection, not kin selection, is the primary driving force of human evolution. He proves that history makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology. Demonstrating that the sources of morality, religion, and the creative arts are fundamentally biological in nature, Wilson presents us with the clearest explanation ever produced as to the origin of the human condition and why it resulted in our domination of the Earth’s biosphere.

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Babies know what’s fair

“We think children are born with a skeleton of general expectations about fairness,” explains Sloane, “and these principles and concepts get shaped in different ways depending on the culture and the environment they’re brought up in.” Some cultures value sharing more than others, but the ideas that resources should be equally distributed and rewards allocated according to effort are innate and universal.

Other survival instincts can intervene. Self-interest is one, as is loyalty to the in-group — your family, your tribe, your team. It’s much harder to abide by that abstract sense of fairness when you want all the cookies — or your team is hungry. That’s why children need reminders to share and practice in the discipline of doing the right thing in spite of their desires.

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Read also: Babies Show Sense of Fairness, Altruism as Early as 15 Months

Are Humans Hardwired For Fairness?

Human evolution: Who are we becoming?

According to Graves, humanity is indeed making a momentous leap in consciousness, which is characterized in part by the re-emergence of archaic themes. One of these themes is tribalism; not a regression to ancient tribalism, but the emergence of one global tribe.

Graves described human development as ‘an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process’ marked by progressive movement upwards through increasingly complex stages. This upward movement is an adaptive response to our changing life conditions. So as our lives become more complex, we are prompted to develop higher, more complex thinking and behaviors in order to cope.

One of the special gifts Dr Graves brought to the field of developmental psychology was his ability at pattern recognition. He discovered that the same change process and the same stages of development can be seen in the evolution of our species, from hunter-gatherer to the present day; in the development of an individual from infant to adult, and also in the development of social groups. Like a fractal, the same pattern shows up at all scales.

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Democracy Is In Our DNA: The Science Behind The Protest

Democracy is ingrained in our DNA, because it has helped us to survive. We have lived for most of our evolutionary history in small bands, and this has shaped our psychology today. Upstarts would occasionally try and dominate others — dominance is part of our primate heritage — but our ancestors had a number of effective means to keep these irritants under control. Traditional societies still use these techniques – we call them STOPS or strategies to overcome the powerful — with much success. The most effective weapon that a group can deploy is to desertion, by simply leaving a dominating leader behind.

Not only do we naturally organize ourselves into democracies but we are a social species – and disaffection is contagious.

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How Humans Became Social

Look around and it’s impossible to miss the importance of social interactions to human society. They form the basis of our families, our governments, and even our global economy. But how did we become social in the first place? Researchers have long believed that it was a gradual process, evolving from couples to clans to larger communities. A new analysis, however, indicates that primate societies expanded in a burst, most likely because there was safety in numbers.

It’s a controversial idea, admits anthropologist and study author Susanne Shultz of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. “We’re likely going to cause a bit of trouble.”

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