The Social Conquest Of Earth

Edward O. Wilson “The Social Conquest of Earth: An exploration of the Biological origins of the human condition”  Liveright Pub Corp., 2012, 297 pp.

Edward O. Wilson, one of the world's preeminent biologists, is the author of more than twenty-five books.  He is currently a professor emeritus at Harvard University. 

Wilson begins this book with a statement: Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? He addresses these three fundamental questions of religion, philosophy, and science and maintains that kin selection is not the only determinant of natural selection; rather, group selection is the primary driving force of human evolution.  He demonstrates that the sources of morality, religion, and the creative arts are fundamentally biological in nature. His position on  group selection is currently a controversial subject among biologists.

My Notes:

Pg. 7:  We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.  Consciousness was not designed for self-examination; it was designed for survival and reproduction. Conscious thought is driven by emotion; to the purpose of survival and reproduction. 

Pg. 15:  Homo sapiens emerged through evolution in the last several hundred thousand years and spread around the world out of Africa during the last sixty thousand years.  Homo sapiens are one of the few species that are what biologists call “eusocial,” meaning group members containing multiple generations and prone to perform altruistic acts as part of their division of labor.  In this respect, they are technically comparable to ants, termites, and other eusocial insects.  Of course, there are major differences between humans and the insects even aside from our unique possession of culture, language, and high intelligence.  The most fundamental among them is that ALL normal members of human societies are capable of reproducing and that most compete with one another to do so.  Also, human groups are formed of highly flexible alliances, not just among family members but between families, genders, classes, and tribes.  The bonding is based on cooperation among individuals or groups who know one another and are capable of distributing ownership and status on a personal basis.

Pg. 20:  To summarize on the two social conquerors of Earth, the physiology and life cycle in the ancestors of the social insects and those of humans differed fundamentally in the evolutionary pathways followed to the formation of advance societies.  The insect queen could produce robotic offspring guided by instinct; the prehumans had to rely on bonding and cooperation among individuals.   The insects could evolve to eusociality by individual selection in the queen line, generation to generation; the prehumans evolved to eusociality by the interplay of selection at the level of individual selection and at the level of the group.

Pg. 21:  For the entire course of evolution leading from our primitive mammalian forebears of a hundred million years ago to the single lineage that threaded its way to become the first Homo sapiens, the total number of individuals it required might have been one hundred billion.

Pg. 45:  It is now possible to provide a reasonably good explanation of why humans evolved as they have and why it has occurred only once and took so long in coming.  The reason is simply the extreme improbability of the preadaptations necessary for it to occur at all.  Each of these evolutionary steps has been a full-blown adaptation in its own right.  Homo sapiens is the only species of large mammal—thus large enough to evolve a human-sized brain—to have made every one of the required lucky turns in the evolutionary maze.  These preadaptations are:

• ·        control of fire
• ·        a large body to accommodate a large brain
• ·        grasping hands to hold and manipulate detached objects
• ·        walking entirely on hind legs
• ·        shift in diet to include a substantial amount of meat
• ·        fireside campsites and division of labor

By the time of Homo erectus, all of the above preadaptations that led humans to eusociality, save the use of controlled fire, had also been followed by modern chimpanzees and bonobos.  Thanks to the human’s unique preadaptations, they were ready to leave these distant cousins far behind.  The stage was now set for the biggest-brained of African primates to make the truly defining leap to their ultimate potential.

Pg. 57:  To form groups, drawing comfort and pride from familiar fellowship, and to defend the group enthusiastically against rival groups—these are among the absolute universals of human nature and hence of culture.

Pg. 62:  Our bloody nature, it can now be argued in the context of modern biology, is ingrained because group-versus-group was a principal driving force that made us what we are.  In prehistory, group selection lifted the hominids that became territorial carnivores to heights of solidarity, to genius, to enterprise. Each tribe knew with justification that if it was not armed and ready, its very existence was imperiled.

Pg. 80:  Only around 60,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens broke out of Africa and began to spread around the world, did they acquire the complete skeletal dimension of contemporary humanity.  (About 40,000 years ago they reached Europe).

Pg. 98:  The ascent to civilization, from egalitarian band and village to chiefdom to state, has occurred through cultural evolution, not through changes in genes.

Pg. 187:  In briefest terms, a full theory of eusocial evolution will consist of a series of stages, subject to experimental verification, of which the following may be recognized:

·        The formation of groups.

·        The occurrence of a minimum and necessary combination of preadaptive traits in the groups, causing the groups to be tightly formed.  In animals at least, the combination includes a valuable and defensible nest.  The nest-dependent condition predetermines the likelihood that primitively eusocial groups will be a family—parent and offspring in insects and other invertebrates, and extended families in vertebrates.

·        The appearance of mutations that prescribe the persistence of the group, most likely by the knockout of dispersal behavior.  Evidently, a durable nest remains the key element in maintaining the prevalence.  Primitive eusociality may emerge immediately due to spring-loaded preadaptations—those evolved in earlier stages that by chance cause groups to behave in a eusocial manner.

·        In the insects, emergent traits caused by either the genesis of robot-like workers or the interaction of group members are shaped through group-level selection by environmental forces.

·        Group-level selection drives changes in the insect colony life cycle and social structures, often to bizarre extremes, producing elaborate superorganisms.

Pg. 191:  The very existence of human nature was denied during the 20th century by most social scientists.  They clung to the dogma, in spite of mounting evidence, that all social behavior is learned and all culture is the product of history passed from one generation to the next.  Leaders of conservative religions, in contrast, have been prone to believe that human nature is a fixed property vouchsafed by God—to be explained to the masses by those privileged to understand His wishes.  Paul VI, in his 1969 encyclical Humanae Vitae, for example, explained, “Man cannot attain that true happiness for which he yearns with all the strength of his spirit, unless he keeps the laws which the Most High God has engraved in his very nature.”  In particular, he said, the divine laws of human nature forbid any use of artificial contraception.

Pg. 193:  Human nature is the inherited regularities of mental development common to our species. They are the “epigenetic rules,” which evolved by the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution that occurred over a long period in deep prehistory.  These rules are the genetic biases in the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we automatically open to ourselves, and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make. 

Pg. 198:  The textbook example of gene-culture coevolution occurring in recent millennia is the development of lactose tolerance in adults.  In all previous human generations, the production of lactase, the enzyme that converts the sugar lactose into digestible sugars, was present only in infants.  When children were weaned, their bodies automatically shut down further production of lactase.  When herding was developed 9,000 years ago, variously and independently bin northern Europe and East Africa, mutations spread culturally that sustained lactase production into adult life, allowing the continued consumption of milk. The advantage to survival and reproduction in utilizing milk and milk products proved enormous.  Four independent mutations have been discovered by geneticists that prolong lactase production, one in Europe and three in Africa.

Pg. 217:  By new methods of analysis and experimentation, researchers have been able to conclude: abstract thought and syntactical language emerged no later than 70,000 years ago. 

Pg. 221:  Neanderthals are fascinating as another human species parallel to Homo sapiens. The most interesting thing about them is that virtually no progress occurred in their technology or culture during their two hundred millennia of existence.  No tinkering with tool manufacture, no art, and no personal decoration—at least none exists in the archaeological evidence we have so far. 

Pg. 241:  The dilemma of good and evil was created by multilevel selection, in which individual selection and group selection act together on the same individual but largely in opposition to each other.  Individual selection is the result of competition for survival and reproduction among members of the same group.  It shapes instincts in each member that are fundamentally selfish with reference to other members.  In contrast, group selection consists of competition between societies, through both direct conflict and differential competence in exploiting the environment.  Group selection shapes instincts that tend to make individuals altruistic toward one another (but not toward members of other groups).  Individual selection is responsible for much of what we call sin, while group selection is responsible for the greater part of virtue.  Together they have created the conflict between the poorer and the better angels of our nature.

Pg. 243:  An iron rule exists in genetic social evolution.  It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals.  The victory can never be complete the balance of selection pressures cannot move to either extreme.  If individual selection were to dominate, societies would dissolve.  If group selection were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies.

Pg. 253:  Heredity-influenced homosexuality occurs in populations worldwide too frequently to be due to mutations alone.  Population geneticists use a rule of thumb to account for abundance at this level: if a trait cannot be due solely to random mutations, and yet it lowers or eliminates reproduction in those who have it, then the trait must be favored by natural selection working on a target of some other kind. 

Pg. 287:  Our lives are restrained by the two laws of biology: all of life’s entities and processes are obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry; and all of life’s entities and processes have arisen through evolution by natural selection.

Addenda:

Westermarck Effect – The Westermarck Effect, named after Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck, was discovered almost a century ago. It is the basis for incest avoidance in humans. When two people live in close domestic proximity during the first 30 months of the life of either one, both are desensitized to later close sexual attraction and bonding. The Westermarck Effect has been well documented in anthropological studies. Non-human primates whose sexual behavior has been closely studied, with reference to behavioral development, all display the Westermarck Effect.