Notas sobre el libro de E. O. Wilson The Social Conquest of Earth,
libro en el que este importante biólogo teoriza la importancia de los
grupos sociales en biología, y las consecuencias de la sociabilidad para
la selección natural y la teoría evolucionista. Contrasta la
sociabilidad avanzada de los insectos con la humana, estudia el papel
del altruismo y de formas de sociabilidad avanzadas como la cultura, la
moralidad y el lenguaje, tendiendo un importante puente teórico entre la
biología y las ciencias sociales.
Texto completo en SSRN:
19 Pages
Posted: 7 Aug 2025
Last revised: 24 Jul 2025
Date Written: August 14, 2012
English abstract: Notes on The Social Conquest of Earth
Notes on E. O. Wilson's book The Social Conquest of Earth,
in which this major biologist theorizes the importance of social groups
in biology, and the consequences of sociability for natural selection
and evolutionary theory. Wilson contrasts the advanced sociability of
insects with the human one; he studies the function of altruism and of
advanced forms of sociability such as culture, morality and language,
with important insights which bridge the gap between biology and human sciences.
Note: This downloadable document is in Spanish
Keywords: Biology, Sociobiology, E.O. Wilson, Natural selection, Evolution, Human origins, Sociality, Society, Altruism, Cooperation
Suggested Citation:
BioRN Subject Matter eJournals
|
Added to eLibrary
|
BioRN Subject Matter eJournals
|
Added to eLibrary
|
BioRN Subject Matter eJournals
|
Added to eLibrary
|
CSN Subject Matter eJournals
|
Added to eLibrary
|
EcoRN Subject Matter eJournals
|
Added to eLibrary
|
PRN Subject Matter eJournals
|
Added to eLibrary
|
PRN Subject Matter eJournals
|
Added to eLibrary
|
PRN Subject Matter eJournals
|
Added to eLibrary
|
PRN Subject Matter eJournals
|
Added to eLibrary
|
También aquí:
_____. "Notas sobre The Social Conquest of Earth." Notes on E. O. Wilson's book.
In García Landa, Calculated Spontaneity: Blog de notas 14 Aug. 2012.*
http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/z12-8.html
2012
DISCONTINUED 2018 – Online at the Internet Archive.*
https://web.archive.org/web/20181101093911/http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/z12-8.html
2025
Vanity Fea 14 August
2012.*
http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2012/08/the-social-conquest-of-earth.html
2012
DISCONTINUED 2025 – Online at the Internet Archive.*
https://web.archive.org/web/20241016015258/https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-social-conquest-of-earth.html
2025
Vanity Fea
15 Sept. 2012.*
https://garciala.blogia.com/2012/091501-the-social-conquest-of-earth.php
2025
_____. "Notas sobre The Social Conquest of
Earth." Net Sight de
José Angel García Landa 13
Dec. 2022, 20 Jan. 2025.*
https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/SocialConquest.html
2022
https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/SocialConquest.pdf
2025
_____. "Notas sobre The Social Conquest of
Earth." SSRN 7 Aug. 2025.*
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5364551
https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=5364551
2025
Biology &
Philosophy eJournal 7 Aug. 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Biology-Philosophy.html
2025
Ecology
eJournal 7 Aug. 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Ecology.html
2025
Zoology &
Animal Behavior eJournal 7 Aug. 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Animal-Behavior-Cognition.html
2025
Human
Cognition in Evolution & Developement eJournal 7 Aug. 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Human-Cognition-Evolution-Development.html
2025
Philosophy
of Science eJournal 7 Aug. 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Philosophy-Science.html
2025
Philosophy
of Language eJournal 7 Aug. 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Philosophy-Language.html
2025
Philosophy
of Mind eJournal 7 Aug. 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Philosophy-Mind.html
2025
_____. "Notas sobre The Social Conquest of
Earth." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 8 Aug. 2025.*
https://blogdenotasvanityfea.blogspot.com/2025/08/notas-sobre-el-libro-de-e.html
2025
https://x.com/JoseAngelGLanda/status/1953857213400838238
2025
—oOo—
Notas sobre 'The Social Conquest of Earth'
Notas sobre el libro de E. O. Wilson The Social Conquest of Earth (Nueva
York y Londres: Liveright, 2012). Una búsqueda del origen y naturaleza
de la humanidad más seria que el mito de este año, Prometheus.
Prólogo
"There is no grail more elusive or precious in the life of the
mind than the key to the understanding of the human condition" (1). Gauguin's painting D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où
Allons Nous — (Wilson
seems to present this as an analogue of our self-search and of the
persistence of what Gauguin calls "our primitive soul").
I
- Why Does Advanced Social Life
Exist?
1. The Human Condition
7: "Religion will never solve this great riddle. Since
Paleolithic times each tribe—of which there have been countless
thousands—invented its own creation myth." The dreamtime, in which
supernatural beings spoke to shamans and prophets.
8: "The creation myth was the essential bond that held the tribe
together. It provided its believers with a unique identity, commanded
their fidelity, strengthened order, vouchsafed law, encouraged valor
and sacrifice, and offred meaning to the cycles of life and death."
"The truth of each myth lived in the heart, not in the rational mind.
By itself, mythmaking could never discover the origin and meaning of
humanity. But the reverse order is possible. The discovery of the
origin and meaning of humanity might explain the origin and meaning of
myths, hence the core of organized religion. // Can these two
worldviews ever be reconciled? The answer, to put the matter honestly
and simply, is no."
To know what we are, "We need to understand how the brain evolved the
way it did, and why" (9). This is a scientific not a philosophical
question: "There is a real creation story of humanity, and one only,
and it is not a myth. It is being worked out and tested, and enriched
and strengthened, step by step" (...) "we need answers to two even more
fundamental questions the query has raised. The first is why advanced
social life exists at all, and has occurred so rarely in the history of
life. The second is the identity of the driving forces that brought it
into existence". We have learned about our identity and makeup from
worms and fruit flies: "We have no less to learn from the social
insects, in this case to add background to the origin and meaning of
humanity" (10).
Wilson es un etólogo del
comportamiento animal, y un especialista en hormigas. No sería de
sorprender que en su enfoque haya más analogías de las aceptables entre
hormigas y humanos—una vez hechas las distinciones pertinentes, quizá
no lleguen a apreciarse plenamente las diferencias cruciales.
2.
Where Do We Come From?
2.
The Two Paths to Conquest
"We are an evolutionary chimera, living on intelligence
steered by the demands of animal instinct. This is the reason we are
mindlessly dismantling the biosphere and, with it, our own prospects
for permanent existence" (13). Wilson se atiene a la noción del jet-lag
paleolítico—hemos
evolucionado demasiado deprisa, y estamos fuera de paso con el entorno
natural y con nosotros mismos: "There was no time for us to coevolve
with the rest of the biosphere. Other species were not prepared for the
onslaught. This shortfall soon had dire consequences for the rest of
life" (15). "Wherever humans saturated wildlands, biodiversity was
returned to the paucity of its earliest period half a biliion years
previously. The rest of the living world could not coevolve fast enough
to accomodate the onslaught of a spectacular conqueror that seemed to
come from nowhere, and it began to crumble from the pressure" (16). (La invasión alien somos nosotros, podría
decirse).
Los grupos humanos se basan en alianzas flexibles entre diversos grupos
y círculos:
"The necessity for fine-graded evaluation by alliance meant that the
prehuman ancestors had to achieve eusociality in a radically different
way from the intinct-driven insects. Tha pathway to eusociality was
charted by a contest between selection based on the relative success of
individuals within groups versus relative success among groups. The
strategies of this game were written as a complicated mix of closely
calibrated altruism, cooperation, competition, domination, reciprocity,
defection, and deceit" (17).
"As a result, the human brain became simultaneously highly intelligent
and intensely social. It had to build mental scenarios of personal
relationships rapidly, both short-term and long-term. Its memories had
to travel far into the past to summon old scenarios and far into the
future to imagine the consequences of every relationship" (17).
La idea central del libro es la comparación y contraste entre la
socialidad de los insectos y la humana, y sus orígenes evolutivos
respectivos:
"The insects could evolve to eusociality by individual selection in the
queen line, generation to generation; the pre-humans evolved to
eusociality by the interplay of selection at the level of individual
selection and at the level of the group" (20).
3.
The Approach
"Viewed through time from the beginning to the attainment of the human
condition, each step can be interpreted as a preadaptation" (22).
(Observo que este énfasis en la preadaptación, o
exaptación como la llama Gould, aparece también enfatizada en el
libro de Ian Tattersall Masters of
the Planet—por
fin parece que está haciendo fortuna esta noción entre los
evolucionistas más influyentes. En este capítulo se trata del
desarrollo de la socialidad en los australopitecos y primeros
homo—enfatizándose la noción del control del fuego y de un campamento
fijo como puntos de inflexión del desarrollo de la vida social).
4. The Arrival
Hay mayor frecuencia de especiación en los mamíferos que forman grupos
sociales: "social groups tend to stay apart from each other during
breeding, thus creating smaller populations, making them subject to
both quicker genetic divergence and higher extinction rates" (35)—algo
que parece compadecerse bien con la historia evolutiva de los
homínidos. Se trata aquí la adaptación a nuevos ecosistemas, nuevas
dietas, nuevos nichos ecológicos, por parte de los homínidos. El
impulso final a la evolución del Homo sapiens moderno lo proporcionó la
concentración de grupos en lugares protegidos.
5.
Threading the Evolutionary Maze
Aquí viene a convenir Wilson (sin mencionarlo) con el mismo
panorama de evolución de la socialidad que presentaba Bickerton
en Adam's
Tongue:
"The advantages of cooperation in the harvesting of meat led to the
formation of highly organized groups. The earliest societies conssted
of extended families but also adoptees and allies. They expanded to a
population as large as could be sustained by the local environment"
(Wilson 47).
6.
The Creative Forces
¿Qué fuerza evolutiva fue la que propició el surgimiento
del tipo de socialidad humano? Durante mucho tiempo el consenso
mayoritario en evolucionismo ha favorecido la teoría de la aptitud
inclusiva, basada en la selección natural de los genes pertenecientes
al individuo y a su grupo de familiares, derivando de ahí los
comportamientos altruistas que promueven la socialidad: "Unfortunately
for this perception, the foundations of the general theory of inclusive
fitness based on the assumption of kin selection have crumbled, while
evidence for it has grown equivocal at best. The beautiful theory never
worked well anyway, and now it has collapsed" (51). Ahora Wilson
defiende la selección multinivel, con gran importancia dada a la
selección grupal:
"The creation of new groups by humans, at the present time and all the
way back in to prehistory, has been fundamentally different (...).
Their evolutionary dynamics, driven by both individual and group
selection" (52).
Hay una cita de Darwin que justifica la selección multinivel y de
grupo, y la preponderancia de los grupos cohesionados y formados por
altruistas. Aunque Wilson cita esta otra de The Descent of Man:
"Now if some one man in a tribe, more sagacious than the others,
invented a new snare or weapon, or other means of attack or defence,
the plainest self-interest, without the assistance of much reasoning
power, would prompt the other members to imitate him; and all would
thus profit. The habitual practice of each new art must likewise in
some slight degree strengthen the intellect. If the new invention were
an important one, the tribe would increase in number, spread, and
supplant other tribes. In a tribe thus rendered more numerous there
would always be a rather better chance of the birth of other superior
and inventive members. If such men left children to inherit their
mental superiority, the chance of the birth of still more ingenious
members would be somewhat better, and in a very small tribe decidedly
better. Even if they left no children, the tribe would still include
their blood-relations; and it has been ascertained by agriculturists
that by preserving and breeding from the family of an animal, which
when slaughtered was found to be valuable, the desired character has
been obtained."
(Se observará que también sostiene la
cita la noción de inteligencia tecnológica: la comunicación de
tecnologías aumenta la inteligencia grupal; es "la inteligencia de las
masas" antes de David Weinberger).
Hay
una dinámica contraria irresoluble de altruismo y egoísmo en las
sociedades humanas: "Beause all normal members have at least the
capacity to reproduce, there is an inherent and irremediable conflict
in human societies between natural selection at the individual level
and natural selection at the group level" (54)—al contrario que en las
sociedades de insectos, donde falta la capacidad reproductiva de los
individuos subordinados. El nivel de selección individual promueve en
los humanos el comportamiento egoísta, cobarde, interesado; mientras
que el comportamiento generoso, virtuoso, altruista es promovido por
los valores sociales y la selección de grupo. "It was therefore
inevitable that the genetic code prescribing social behaviour of modern
humans is a chimera. One part prescribes traits
that favor success of individuals within the group. The other part
prescribes the traits that favor group success in competition with
other groups" (53).
Wilson observa que debido a la estructura poblacional y ciclo vital de
los mamíferos no puede desarrollarse entre los humanos un tipo de
socialidad como el de los insectos. (Quizá
habría que matizar, "de modo natural"—aunque quizá sea factible
mediante ingeniería genética y y el control artificial de la
reproducción semejante futuro indeseable, en parte imaginado por Huxley
en Un Mundo Feliz).
Las consecuencias de la dinámica evolutiva de los humanos, que nos hace
lo que somos:
- Intensa competencia grupal y territorial
- Inestabilidad de la composición de los grupos: conquistas,
divisiones, alianzas, etc.
- Guerra inevitable entre los valores sociales y los intereses egoístas
e individuales, productos respectivamente de la selección grupal e
individual
- "The perfecting of quick and expert reading of intention in others
has been paramount in the evolution of human social behavior" (56).
- "Much of culture, including especially the content of the creative
arts, has arisen from the inevitable clash of individual selection and
group selection" (56).
7. Tribalism is a
Fundamental Human
Trait
(El tribalismo, la tendencia a
afiliarnos a grupos, la tenemos según Wilson en nuestra propia
constitución, lo hacemos por naturaleza y compulsivamente; algo que
permite explicar las actitudes irracionales de los individuos hacia
grupos de iguales, bandas, equipos de fútbol, etnias y naciones, credos
religiosos.... donde lo que menos importa es la fundamentación supuesta
del grupo, y lo primordial en realidad es el grupo mismo y la sensación
de pertenencia e identificación): "To form groups, drawing
visceral 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" (57). "The social world of each modern human is not a
single tribe, but rather a system of interlocking tribes, among which
it is often difficult to find a single compass" (57). Experimentos
psicológicos demuestran la tendencia a la afiliación aunque sea en
grupos arbitrariamente asignados: "Strong favoritism was consistently
shown to those labeled simply as an in-group, even with no other
incentive and no previous contact" (59) (Algo que puede explicar algunos
comportamientos patológicos en la Administración, supuestamente
desapasionada, como son la
falacia democrática de los órganos o la solidaridad interna de los
comités y comisiones). Diferentes partes del cerebro regulan la
respuesta automática a la afiliación grupal: por ejemplo el racismo
instintivo y primitivo de la amígdala se modera cuando el contexto
sitúa a los miembros de otra raza como pertenecientes a un grupo
afiliado, información procesada por partes corticales del cerebro
asociadas al aprendizaje avanzado. (Una
paradoja plantea el tribalismo. Los valores humanos son en gran medida
culturales, y vienen a expresar la afiliación a un grupo. Son por tanto
limitadores con respecto a la potencial naturaleza humana—pero a la vez
ésta sólo puede manifestarse y expresarse plenamente mediante la
integración en un grupo y un entorno cultural. Hay así una tensión o
dialéctica entre comprensión de la naturaleza humana y participación en
ella. El observador de la dinámica de los grupos humanos puede sentirse
ajeno a la dinámica que observa, pero ha de integrarse igualmente en un
grupo propio).
8. War as Humanity's Hereditary Curse
(De esto hablamos algo en Somos
hijos de la guerra), llevando las conclusiones evolutivas un poco
más lejos que Wilson, en el sentido de la guerra como supervivencia del
grupo más apto... para la guerra. Ver su p. 91). También para
Wilson, la guerra ha sido una constante de la historia humana, y el
conflicto entre grupos algo que ha definido a los humanos a lo largo de
toda su historia. Las pacíficas sociedades primitivas sin conflictos no
existen. Los conflitos grupales ya existen entre los chimpancés, pero
los humanos tendemos por naturaleza a expandirnos hasta agotar los
recursos y disputarlos a los vecinos.
9. The Breakout
La emigración del Homo sapiens out of Africa se limitó a
grupos pequeños, con lo cual la variabilidad genética dentro de Africa
es mucho mayor. Hubo sin embargo un cuello de botella poblacional en
una gran sequía en el que la población de Africa descendió a unos miles
de individuos con riesgo de extinción completa. A Europa llegaron los
Homo sapiens hacia el 42.000 A.C.; a Australia y Nueva Guinea ya en el
50.000 A.C.—los aborígenes descendientes directos de los primeros
emigrantes. En America entraron hace unos 16.500 años; y las islas del
Pacífico son las más recientes, hace entre 3000 años y el año 1200.
10.
The Creative Explosion
Tres hipótesis sobre la explosión cultural: 1) debida a una
mutación cognitiva reciente en el Homo sapiens. Comparativamente con el
inmovilismo de la cultura neandertal. 2) Evolución más gradual, ya
comenzada en el Homo sapiens arcaico. 3) Teoría de alzas y bajas, con
un surgimiento inicial y una crisis debida al cuello de botella
poblacional—con recuperación a partir de 60.000 años atrás. Wilson
combina las tres hipótesis. Las mutaciones genéticas se hacen más
frecuentes al crecer la población, y ese mismo hecho produce más
innovaciones culturales. La deriva genética también actúa más durante
la expansión de pequeños grupos de poblaciones aisladas, produciendo
diversidad. 88: "As a result, skin color, height, percentages of blood
types, and other nonvital hereditary traits shifted a bit in one
direction or another over distances as short as a few hundreds of
kilometers." (Y es a esta peculiar
combinación de origen común y dispersión geográfica en pequeños grupos
a lo que debemos las "razas" humanas, o sea, la variabilidad genética
identificablemente ligada a la dispersión territorial, aunque muchos
científicos se niegan a admitir ningún concepto científicamente viable
de diferencia racial). El entorno cultural es en todo caso
mucho más influyente para el comportamiento individual que las
diferencias genéticas. Sin embargo: "A recent study has found that
variation in the number of people one person has in contacts or in
social ties, as well as variation in transitivity—the likelihood that
any two of a person's contacts are connected to each other's
contacts—are both about half due to heredity. On the other hand, the
number of other group members whom individuals view as friends is not
genetically influenced, at least not within ordinary statistical limits
of the measures taken" (90). "Bands and communities of bands with
better combinations of cultural innovations became more productive and
better equipped for competitition and war. Their rivals either copied
them or else were displaced and their territories taken. Thus group
selection drove the evolution of culture" (91). (Es el motor de lo que llamamos la
historia). La agricultura surgió independientemente en ocho
emplazamientos distintos, entre 9000 y 4000 años antes de Cristo. El
desarrollo cultural puede llevar en el futuro a un posthumanismo que
pare Wilson sería indeseable pues iría al servicio del nepotismo y el
privilegio: de la herencia biológica que tenemos no nos libraremos,
pues es lo que somos.
10.
The Sprint to Civilization
Tres niveles de civilización hay: las bandas de
cazadores-recolectores y agricultores primitivos, sociedades
igualitarias; las poblaciones con élites y jefes, que gobiernan
directamente en todos los asuntos para evitar fisión e insurrección,
suprimiendo rivales y fomentando la rivalidad con pueblos vecinos. Y
tercero, los estados, con sistema de control delegado o burocracia. Las
poblaciones tienden a la expansión y adquisición de los recursos del
vecino siempre que pueden. No hay diferencias genéticas conocidas que
demuestren diferencias entre las poblaciones en procesamiento de
lenguaje o matemáticas—pero podrían descubrirse. Los rasgos de
personalidad están notablemente bien distribuidos entre las
poblaciones, a pesar de los estereotipos nacionales. Los básicos son:
"extroversion versus introversion, antagonism versus agreeableness,
conscientiousnss, neuroticism, and openness to experience". Los rasgos
caracteriológicos son en buena proporción hereditarios. La complejidad
social se desarrolló en torno a los estados y a la escritura; Wilson
remite al análisis de Jared Diamond en Guns, Germs and Steel para explicar
el mayor desarrollo de unas áreas frente a otras y la difusión de las
innovaciones.
III.
How Social Insects Conquered the Invertebrate World
12. The invention
of eusociality
Las hormigas, evolucionadas a partir de las
avispas solitarias para constituir sociedades complejas. Hay un millón
de veces más hormigas que humanos, aunque su biomasa total viene a ser
parecida.
13.
Inventions that Advanced the Social Insects
Coincidió el desarrollo y diversificación de las hormigas con el
de las angiospermas. "Species of ants multiplied, as more and more
niches opened for them to occupy" (125). Son carnívoras, pero
herbívoros indirectos, utilizando a los pulgones que absorben savia de
las plantas. "The more elaborate and
expensive the nest is in energy and time, the greater the fieceness of
the ants that defend it. This is a concept I will later connnect
to the origin of eusociality itself." (130)
IV.
The Forces of Social Evolution
14.
The Scientific Dilemma of Rarity
"Eusociality, the condition of multiple generations organized
into groups by means of an altruistic division of labor, was one of the
major innovations in the history of life" (133). But it is extremely
rare: "Only 15 of the 2,600 families are known to contain eusocial
species." (136). "Yet of all the nonprimate mammals in the world save
the mole rats, and of all the primate species that lived across the
tropical and subtropical regions for millions of years, only one, an
offshoot of the African great apes, an antecedent of Homo sapiens, crossed the threshold
into eusociality" (138).
15.
Insect altruism and eusociality explaind
"The selfish-gene approach may seem to be entirely reasonable.
In fact, most evolutionary biologists had accepted it as a virtual
dogma—at least until 2010. In that year Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita,
and I demonstrated that inclusive-fitness theory, often called kin
selection theory, is both mathematically and biologically incorrect."
(143) Insect societies of ants and bees are superorganisms and their
origin can be explained through the selection of the reproducing
individuals: "Group selection occurs, in the sense that success or
failure of the colony depends upon how well the collectivity of the
queen and her robotic offspring does in competition with solitary
individuals and other colonies. Group selection is a useful idea in
identifying precisely the targets of selection when queens (and their
colonies about them) are competing with other queens. But multilevel
selection, in which colonial evolution is regarded as the interests of
the individual worker pitted against the interests of its colony, may
no longer be a useful concepts in which to build models of genetic
evolution in social insects" (146). (Esa
selección mutinivel, y de dinámica contradictoria entre tendencias
individuales y grupales, es en cambio la que sí se da para Wilson en
los humanos; los principios de evolución de la sociedad y el altruismo
en insectos y primates son fundamentalmente diferentes).
16.
Insects Take the Giant Leap
Explica
Wilson las condiciones necesarias para que los insectos solitarios
desarrollen un modo de vida social: a partir de una preadaptación, por
ejemplo un nido compartido con los padres, basta con una presión
ambiental determinada para dar el salto: "When all the necessary
conditions occur—namely the right pre-eusocial traits are in place, a
eusocial allele also exists in the population, even if at very low
levels, and, finally, environmental pressures exist that favor group
activity—the solitary species will move across the threshold into
eusociality. The surprising aspect of this evolutionary step is that
the eusociality gene does not need to create new forms of behavior. As
in the case of many random mutations generally, it need only silence a
preexisting behavior, thus halting the dispersal of parents and grown
offspring from the nest. // As a result of the cancellation, the family
stays home. Looking at the matter the other way, the eusociality gene
they share with the mother queen has turned them into robots,
expressing one state of her own flexible phenotype. In this sense, I
have argued, the primitive colony is a superorganism. It is essentially
a kind of organism in whivch the working parts are not the usual cells
but pre-subordinated organisms." (151). "In crossing the line to
eusociality, a single allele that disposes daughters to stya can be
fixed in the populations at large if the advantage of the little group
over solitaires outweighs the advantage of each offspring leaving to
try on its own" (153). "Although some individual direct selection may
play a role in the origin of eusociality, the force that targets the
maintenance and elaboration of eusociality is by necessity
environmentally based group selection, which acts upon the emergent
traits of the group as a whole" (155-56). "This origin of an
anatomically distinct worker caste appears to mark the 'point of no
return' in evolution, at which eusocial life becomes irreversible"
(157).
17.
How Natural Selection Creates Social Instincts
After the heyday of behaviorism and Skinner in the 1950s, "In the two
decades that followed, the idea of instinct shaped by natural selection
defeated this perception of the brain as a blank slate. At least it did
so for animals. For two more decades, however, the blank slate was kept
alive for human social behavior. Many writers in the social sciences
and humanities continued to insist that the mind is entirely the
product of its environment and past history" (158). Basic principles of
evolutionary genetics: "One of the principles is the distinction
between the unit of heredity, as opposed to the target of selection in
the process that drives evolution. The unit is a gene or arrangement of
genes that form part of the hereditary code (...). The target of
selection is the trait or combination of traits encoded by the units of
heredity and favored or disfavored by the environment" (162). "Traits
(targets) that are acted upon exclusively by selection between groups
are those emerging from interactions among members of each group. These
interactions include communication, division of labor, dominance, and
cooperation in performing communal tasks" (163). Wilson emphasizes that
the amount of phenotype plasticity is itself subject to natural
selection. Finally, "It is easy to confuse proximate and ultimate
causation in particular cases, and especially in the complex multilevel
process of human evolution" (165). E.g. bipedality etc. are important
preadaptations, but the definitive cause of human sociality is the
development of the human brain.
18.
The Forces of Social Evolution
Possible sources of altruism and sociality: Wilson favors
group selection, i.e. "that hereditary altruists form groups so
cooperative and well-organized as to outcompete nonaltruist groups"
(166). In the case of hymenoptera, "the belief that haplodiploidy and
eusociality are causally linked became standard in general reviews and
textbooks of the 1970s and 1980s" (170), now discredited, like kin
selection and inclusive-fitness theory; "there are mathematical
difficulties with the definition of r, the degree of relatedness. These difficulties render incorrect the
oft-repeated claim that group selection is the same as kin selection
expressed through inclusive fitness" (171). "Most biologists who knew
inclusive-fitness theory only from a distance were surprised to learn
that when measures are actually calculated there is no consistent
biological concept behind the 'relatedness' parameter" (173). "If there
is a general theory that works for everything (multilevel natural
selection) and a theory that works only for some cases (kin selection),
and in the few cases where the latter works it agrees with the general
theory of multilevel selection, why not simply stay with the general
theory everywhere?" (175). Wilson seems to point out that some theorist
were reaching foregone conclusions, instead from going from the problem
to a viable theory: "Almost all research in inclusive-fitness theory
has been the opposite: hypothesize the key roles of kinship and kin
selection, then look for evidence to test that hypothesis" (175).
"Kin selection, if it occurs at all in animals, must be a weak
form of selection that occurs only in special conditions easily
violated. As the object of general theory, inclusive fitness is a
phantom mathematical construction that cannot be fixed in any manner
that conveys realistic biological meaning" (20). So
we find in Wilson here a strong argument against methodological
apriorism and formalism, and a defense of multilevel selection and
group selection against the traditional "selfish gene" approach.
19.
The Emergence of a New Theory of Eusociality
In social insects: "Grouping by family can accelerate the spread
of eusocial alleles, but it does not of itself lead to advanced social
behavior. The causative agent of advanced social behavior is the
advantage of a defensible nest, especially one expensive to make and
within reach of a sustainable supply of food. Because of this primary
condition in the insects, close genetic relatedness in primitive colony
formation is the consequence, not the cause, of eusocial behavior"
(185). (Lo cual no sé si es muy
compatible con la noción anteriormente expuesta de la modificación del
comportamiento como origen: lo de las crías quedándose en el nido en
lugar de irse): "Crossing
the threshold to eusociality requires only that a female and her adult
offspring fail to disperse to start new, individual nests. Instead,
they remain at the old nest" (185)—(Y
entonces eran parientes, to begin with??). In
ants or bees, "the queen and her workers have the same genes that
prescribe caste and division of labor, although they vary extensively
in other genes. This circumstance lends credence to the view that the
colony can be viewed as an individual organism or, more precisely, an
individual superorganism. Further, insofar as social behavior is
concerned, descent is from queen to queen, with the worker force as an
extension of each in turn. Group selection still occurs, but it is
conceived to be selected as the traits of the queen and the
extrasomatic projection of her personal genome" (186). "The natural
history of the more primitively eusocial animals, and especially the
structure of their nests and fierce defense of them, suggests that a
key element in the origin of eusociality is defense against enemies,
including parasites, predators, and rival colonies" (186)—Y
es este elemento eusocial el que sí cree Wilson que es extensible a las
sociedades humanas, diferentes sin embargo de los insectos sociales en
la capacidad de reproducción de todos los individuos). In
insects, "Group-level selection drives changes in the insect colony
life cycle and social structures, often to bizarre extremes, producing
elaborate superorganisms" (187). In contrast, the human species has
achieved a "culture-based social condition" (187). How?
V.
What Are We?
20. What Is
Human Nature?
"If
raw, untransformed human nature were to be revealed, and the
philosophers's stone thus attained, what would it be? What it would
look like? Would we love it? A better question may be: Do we really
want to know?" (191). "The very existence of human nature was denied
during the last 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" (191). (En el
libro de Carlos Beorlegui La singularidad de la especie humana
aparece una discusión al respecto, y una clasificación que distingue
cuatro posiciones, biologista rígida, biologista flexible, culturalista
flexible y culturalista rígida. Wilson aparece, en una versión anterior
de su pensamiento, como biologista flexible, y Beorlegui promueve la
postura culturalista flexible, según la cual la naturaleza humana es
por la propia biología de la especie extremadamente adaptable y
moldeable por el entorno cultural. Por cierto que en el presente libro
Wilson ha modificado algunas posiciones evolucionistas genetistas de
las que eran criticadas por Beorlegui). "I believe that ample
evidence, arising from multiple branches of learning in the sciences
and humanities, allows a clear definition of human nature. But before
suggesting it, let me first explain ewhat it is not. Human nature is
not the genes underlying it. They prescribe the developmental rules of
the brain, sensory system, and behavior that produce human nature. Nor
can the
universals of culture
discovered by anthropologists be defined collectively as human nature.
(192). "If the genetic code underlying human nature is too close to its
molecular underpinning and the cultural universals are too far away
from it, it follows that the best place to search for hereditary human
nature is in between, in the rules of development prescribed by genes,
through which the universals of culture are created. // 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" (193). "The
behaviors created by epigenetic rules are not hardwired like reflexes.
It is the epigenetic rules instead that are hardwired, and hence
compose the true core of huma nnature. These behaviors are learned, but
the process is what psychologists call 'prepared'" (194). Against the
"blank-slate" brain and the promethean gene of the 1970s and 1980s:
"This biologically nondimensional view of social evolution was further
deduced from a kind of second key hypothesis, the psychic unity of
mankind. This opinion held that human culture evolved during too short
a time for genetic evolution to have occurred, at least beyond the
all-purpose promethean genotype that separates humanity from other
animal species" (197). But "The explosion of new mutations that
occurred following the breakout from Africa some 60,000 years ago
created large numbers of such potentially adaptive new genes. It would
be surprising that genetic evolution has not ocvcurred in different
populations as they colonized the rest of the world" (197-98). Genes
for milk digestion, for sickle-cell anemia, & older too: "Put
together, [such intertwined coevolutionary processes] form a class of
genetic changes different in kind from the local acquisition of lactose
tolerance. They are universal in modern humanity and also ancient,
their origins predating the emergence of modern Homo sapiens and at least in some cases even the human-chimpanzee split of more than
six million years ago. Working at the level of cognition and emotion,
their effect on the evolution of language and culture has been both
deep and wide. They make up much of what is intuitively called 'human
nature'" (198-99). E.g. incest avoidance has been theorized
by anthropologists, as a basis for human culture,
but "For the explanation of the origin of exogamy as an instinct of
profound genetic value, however, one need look no further than the
universal pattern followed by all other primate species" (200). The
example of relative universals for color terms and color perception. (A
Wilson se le escapa en sus especulaciones sobre el color la importancia
de la asociación del rojo al peligro debido al color de la sangre).
21. How Culture Evolved
"As
defined broadly by both anthropologists and biologists, culture is the
combination of traits that distinguishes one group from another. A
culture trait is behavior that is either first invented within a group
or else learned from another group, then transmitted among members of
the group" (213). (Bueno, se refiere
a comportamiento y no a genes obviamente: pero queda la duda de si las
proprensiones cognitivas no aprendidas y desarrolladas en el seno de un
grupo existen y son heredables). "The elaboration of culture
depends upon long-term memory, and in this capacity humans rank far
above all animals" (214). Culture as collective memory of a
community—Wilson remembers the culture of his childhood Mobile, most of
it now lost. "The great gift of the human brain is the capacity—and
with it the irresistible inborn drive—to build scenarios. For each
story in turn, the conscious mind summons only a minute fraction of the
brain's accumulated long-term memory. How this is done remains
controversial. One group of neuroscientists argues that fragments of
long-term memory are transformed from long-term storage and congealed
into working memory to make scenarios. A second school believes, with
the same data, that the process is achieved simply by the arousal of
long-term memory—with no transfer from one sector of the brain to
another needed" (215-16). Blank-slate theory of learning dismissed:
"the brain has a complex inherited architecture. As a consequence of
the way it was built, the conscious mind, one of the architecture's
products, originated by gene-culture coevolution, an intricate
interplay of genetic and cultural evolution" (217). Cognitive
archaeology as the reconstruction of cognitive process and complexity.
"And what of speech? A conscious mind able to generate abstractions and
piece them together in a complex scenario might, it seems, also
generate a syntactical language, with sequences of subject, verb, and
object" (218). Neanderthals and FOX2 gene, they may have had language;
their children's brains matured faster. "What was the driving force
that led to the threshold of complex culture? It appears to have been
group selection. A gorup with members who could read intentions and
cooperate among themselves while predicting the actions of competing
groups, would have an enormous advantage over others less gifted. There
was undoubtedly competition among group members, leading to natural
selection of traits that gave advantage of one individual over another.
But more important for a species entering new environments and
competing with powerful rivals were unity and cooperation within the
group. Morality, conformity, religious fervor and fighting ability
combined with imagination and memory to produce the winner." (224).
22. The Origins of Language
"The clue to the advance of Homo,
I
believe, lies in the cvritical preadaptation that had carried the few
other evolving animal species in the history of life that have managed
to cross the eusociality threshold. Every one, without exception, from
the two dozen or so insect and crustacean lines to the naked mole rats,
defended a nest from which members could forage for enough food to
sustain the colony" (225). Homo
habilis began establishing campsites: "Now they selected defensible sites and
fortified them, with some staying for extended periods to protect the
young while others hunted. When controlled fire at the camp was added,
the advantage of this way of life was solidified" (226). Tomasello et
al. "point out that the primary and crucial difference between human
cognition and that of other animal species, including our closest
genetic relatives, the chimpanzees, is the ability to collaborate for
the purpose of achieving shared goals and intentions. The human
speciality is intentionality, fashioned from an extremely large working
memory. We have become the experts at mind reading, and the world
champions at inventing culture" (226). Mind reading essential to human
social networks, they cooperate and read others' intentions better than
chimpanzees: "Humans, it appears, are successful not because of an
elevated general intelligence that addresses all challenges but because
they are born to be specialists in social skills. By cooperating
through the communication and the reading of intention, groups
accomplish far more than the efforts of any solitary person"
(227). They developed
shared attention, common cooperative goals, and a theory of mind, "the
recognition that their own mental states were shared by others" (228).
"Language as the grail of human social evolution, achieved. Once
installed, it bestowed almost magical powers on the human species"
(228). Tomasello: "What is language if not a set of coordination
devices for directing the attention of others?" (qtd. in Wilson 229). (Not
addressed by Wilson, but there is an important argument regarding the
growth of language BEFORE complex intentionality, and one tied to
socio-ecological transformations proper to the human lineage, which is
put forward by Derek Bickerton. See my summary/review of Adam's Tongue. Strange
that Wilson does not address this issue, being a specialist in
ants.
The displacement symbolism of language and the social sharing of
attention
may have converged from different cognitive roots, and given rise to
complex language through emergence). "Unlike communication in
bees and other animals, human language became capable of detached
representation, in which reference is made to objects and events not
present in the immediate vicinity—or even in existence" (230). Chomsky
vs Skinner, special module? Perhaps both right, but Skinner more so:
there is a time in early childhood with special ability to learn, but
no special brain module for grammar, although "there does appear to be
a biasing epigenetic rule for word order embedded in our deeper
cognitive structure, but its final products in grammar are highly
flexible and learned" (235); "the rapidly changing environment of
speech does not provide a stable environment for natural selection"
(235), so no inscribed language module. "It is not going too far, I
believe, to add that the failure of natural selection to create an
independent universal grammar has played a major role in the
diversification of culture and, from that flexibility and potential
inventiveness, the flowering of human genius" (235).
23.
The Evolution of Cultural Variation
Con frecuencia se entiende mal el condicionamiento
genético de la cultura y el comportamiento, como si un elemento dado
dependiese de una alternativa tajante entre determinismo y
constructivismo cultural: "What genes prescribe or assist in
prescribing is not one trait as opposed to another but the frequency of
traits and the pattern they form as cultural innovation made them
available. The expression of the genes may be plastic, allowing a
society to choose one or more traits from among a multiplicity of
choices. Or else it may not be
plastic, allowing only one trait to be chosen by all societies" (236).
"Biologists who study development have discovered that the degree of
plasticity in the expression of genes, like the presence of the genes
themselves, is subject to evolution by natural selection" (237). Small
variations like the alteration in the amount of an existing protein,
produce finely-tuned changes in structure or behavior. "Cultural
variation in humans is determined mostly by two properties of social
behavior, both of which are subject to evolution by natural selection.
The first is the degree of bias in the epigenetic rulevery low in dress
fashion, very high in incest avoidance. The second property of cultural
variation is the likelihood that individual group members imitate
others in the same society who have adapted [adopted?] the trait ('sensitivity
to usage pattern')." (Aquí
podría hablarse de los "early adopters", las modas e influencias de las
élites y vanguardias, y del principio de "dónde va Vicente, donde va la
gente").
24.
The Origins of Morality and Honor
(Este
es uno de los puntos principales del libro de Wilson, identificando la
peculiaridad del comportamiento social humano y de los dilemas morales
como resultado de una tensión entre dos principios selectivos:
selección individidual, y de grupo, que han dado forma a la especie
humana por selección multinivel). "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 towards 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" (241). (Habría que
matizar que la cuestión queda un tando desdibujada por el hecho de que
la selección individual no sólo selecciona al individuo frente a otros
individuos del grupo, sino también frente a seres o grupos de seres de
otras especies que compiten por los mismos recursos; y la selección de
grupo no sólo selecciona a un grupo frente a otros grupos de la misma
especie, sino también frente a otros seres o grupos que compiten por
los mismos recursos. Wilson tiene otras definiciones más restrictivas:)
"Individual selection, defined precisely, is the
differential longevity and fertility of individuals in competition with
other members of the group. Group selection is the differential
longevity and lifetime fertility of those genes that prescribe traits
of interaction among members of the group, having arisen during
competition with other groups" (242). (Son
definiciones que a mi entender no agotan todo el terreno de la
competencia por la vida, la reproducción y los recursos). "To
see human nature as the product of this evolutionary trajectory is to
unlock the ultimate causes of our sensations and thought. To put
together both proximate and ultimate causes is the key to
self-understanding, the means to see ourselves as we truly are and then
to explore outside the box" (242). "Group selection in its turn
promoted the genetic interests of individuals with privilege and status
as rewards for outstanding performance on behalf of the tribe" (243). (Not
quite, I think: group selection promotes the dynamics of the whole
tribe as against competitors, not the genetic interests of any
individuals. That is individual selection, which nonetheless may work
within the cultural ecosystem of the tribe in the way Wilson says,
through the promotion of ideologies and modes of behavior which have
arisen through group selection. Which may give rise to the paradox
pointed out by Wilson next, one that I further comment on in Sociobiological
Key Largo). "Nevertheless,
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 resemble ant
colonies" (243). Vs. overestimating the importance of kin selection in
groups: "Kinship influences the structure of the network, but it is not
the key to its evolutionary dynamics as is wrongly posited by
inclusive-fitness theory. Instead, what counts is the hereditary
propensity to form the myriad alliances, favors, exchanges of
information, and betrayals that make up daily life in the network"
(243). "Our instincts desire the tiny, united-band networks that
prevailed during the hundreds of millennia preceding the dawn of
history. Our instincts remain unprepared for civilization" (244). (Bueno, los de algunos más que los de
otros, será... Algunos bien que maximizan la civilización). "We
worry. We ask, to whom in this shifting global world of countless
overlapping groups should we pledge our loyalty?" (245). Social
empathy: "unless people are psychopaths, they automatically feel the
pain of others" (245). (Pero a veces
si no son de nuestro grupo no parece importar mucho, ¿no?). Pfaff:
brain's ability to "lose" oneself psychologically and transfer one's
identity a bit to another person; often in the clash of emotions; "The
brain of our Janus-like species is a supremely complex system of
intersecting nerve cells, hormones, and neurotransmitters. It creates
processes that variously reinforce or cancel one another out, accoridng
to context" (245). Meeting of cooperators will not necessarily promote
the rise of cooperation: "Only group selection, with groups containing
more cooperators pitted against groups with fewer cooperators, will
result in a shift at the level of the species toward greater and wider
instinctive cooperation" (248). (Una
cuestión quizá oscurecida aquí es con quién se coopera: no
con miembros de la misma especie, sino con miembros del mismo grupo. Si
bien la especie es en diversos contextos un grupo, en sentido amplio.
Quiero decir que lo que fomenta la selección de grupo no es sólo la
cooperación, sino también la capacidad de confrontación con otros
grupos: si no estrictamente la hostilidad hacia otros grupos, sí las
alianzas variables y cambiantes, de manera que "los nuestros" y "los
otros" se dividen según líneas muy móviles, pero una vez delimitados en
un caso dado se les aplica una norma inflexible: together we stand,
divided we fall; los nuestros siempre tienen razón; a los otros, no hay
que darles ni agua. Así, la selección de grupo fomenta, creo, la
cooperación entre el grupo, la capacidad de flexibilizar el grupo
mediante alianzas, Y LA HOSTILIDAD frente a los grupos rivales. Somos
hijos de la guerra.
También se ve esta característica humana con especial y desagradable
claridad en las escenas en que hay que elegir rápidamente bandos en un
conflicto: ya sea en las obras históricas de Shakespeare, en Juego de
Tronos, o al comienzo de la Guerra Civil española. O conmigo, o contra
mí: hasta Jesucristo lo dijo). Otra regla social es la lucha contra el
parasitismo: "Relentless ambivalence and ambiguity are
the fruits of the strange primate inheritance that rules the human
mind. To be human is also to level others, especially those who appear
to receive more than they have earned. Even within the ranks of the
elite, delicate games are played to achieve ever higher status while
steering through the succesive ranks of jealous rivals. Be modest in
demeanor, ever modest, is the necessary stratagem" (249). (Donde
hay mucha cooperación social, se potencia también mediante selección
individual el parasitismo. Parasitismo lo hay a todos los niveles:
desde el establecido por ley, privilegiando a las élites, hasta el que
se basa en sortear o vulnerar las leyes. De ahí las dinámicas
contrarias, de potenciación del parasitismo, y de las estrategias
antiparasitarias, de las que habla Wilson. Esas estrategias son por una
parte pro-sociales, y por otra antisociales, en la medida en que la
misma existencia de la sociedad fomenta el parasitismo. Quizá lo
complejo de esta dinámica no quede bien captado en la descripción de
Wilson). "Since everyone knows the game, people are always
willing to counter it if they safely can. They are acutely sensitive to
hypocrisy and ever ready to level thoseo on the rise whose credentials
are anything less than impeccable. All levelers, which means just about
everybody, have a formidable armament at their disposal. Roasts, jokes,
parodies, and mocking laughter are remedies to weaken the haughty and
over-ambitious" (249). (También lo
son la simulación de trabajar, donde el parasitismo se junta con el
antiparasitismo; el sabotaje, la hostilidad a los poderosos....). "People
gain visceral pleasure in more than just leveling and cooperating. They
also enjoy seeing punishment meted out to those who do not cooperate
(freeloaders, criminals) and even to those who do not contribute at
levels commensurate with their status (the idle rich)." (250). "In the
brain, the administration of such 'altruistic punishment' lights up the
bilateral anterior insula, a center of the brain also activated by
pain, anger, and disgust" (251). "Our species is not Homo oeconomicus. At the end of the
day, it emerges as something more complicated and interesting. We are Homo sapiens,
imperfect beings, solidering on with conflicted impulses through an
unpredictable, implacably threatening world, doing our best with what
we have" (251). Most values in human societies stand the test of
biology-based realism; others do not—"such as the ban on artificial
conception, condemnation of homosexual preference and forced marriages
of adolescent girls". Scientific knowledge of human nature will benefit
ethical reflection, even if the result seems relativistic to some.
25.
The Origins of Religion
Sobre el extraño predominio de los creyentes en un país
educado como EE.UU.: "There are historical reasons why fundamentalist
Protestants make up such a large percentage of Americans, which I leave
to historians to explain. But to those who believe that their culture
might be broken by ridicule and reason, I say think again. There are
circumstances under which intelligent, well-educated people equate
their identity and the meaning of their lives with their religion, and
this is one of them" (257). "The evidence that lies before us in great
abundance points to organized religion as an expression of tribalism"
(258). "The illogic of religions is not a weakness in them, but their
essential strength" (259). Los líderes religiosos debían con frecuencia
sus visiones a estados mentales alterados, alucinógenos o cerebros
delirantes. Por ejemplo San Juan y su Apocalipsis. "Johns dreams have
exercised a profound effect on the many millions of perfectly sane and
responsible people view the world and to a varying extent order their
lives. His declarations may be thought true, but, in my sober judgement
the image of a baleful Jesus threatening to cleave dissidents with a
first-century sword is so far out of line with the remainder of the New
Testament as to make a simple biological explanation preferable" (263).
Orígenes del la creencia en la otra vida, en las visiones de los
muertos en los sueños, y aún más en alucinaciones inducidas. ¿A quién
se dirige en realidad la obediencia jurada a las religiones? "Is it to
an entity that may have no meaning within reach of the human mind—or
may not even exist? Yes, perhaps it really is to God. But perhaps it is
no more than a tribe united by a creation myth. If the latter,
religious faith is better interpreted as an unseen trap unavoidable
during the biological history of our species. And if this is correct,
surely there exist ways to find spiritual fulfillment without surrender
and enslavement. Humankind deserves better" (267).
26.
The Origins of the Creative Arts
Brain is most aroused by patterns having c. 20% redundancy, common to
primitive art and modern design. "A quality of great art is its ability
to guide attention from one of its parts to another in a manner that
pleases, informs and provokes" (271). Universals in taste for
landscape: people "want to be on a height looking down, they prefer
open savanna-like terrain with scattered trees and copses, and they
want to be close to a body of water, such as a river, lake, or ocean"
(271-2). Conflicts in human mind due to 2 types of natural selection:
"we can expect a continuing conflict between components of behavior
favored by individual selection and those favored by group selection.
Selection at the individual level tends to create competitiveness and
selfish behavior among group members—in status, mating, and the
securing of resources. In opposition, selection between groups tends to
create selfless behavior, expressed in greater generosity and altruism,
which in turn promote stronger cohesion and strength of the group as a
whole. // An inevitable result of the mutually offsetting forces in
multilevel selection is permanent ambiguity in the individual human
mind, leading to countless scenarios among people in the way they bond,
love, affiliate, betray, share, sacrifice, steal, deceive, redeem,
punish, appeal and adjudicate. The struggle endemic to each person's
brain, mirrored in the vast superstructure of cultural evolution, is
the fountainhead of the humanities" (273-74). Scope of the humanities
described as a sum of disciplines and concerns, language, philosophy,
jurisprudence, history, etc.: "Such may be the scope of the humanities,
but it makes no allusion to the understanding of the cognitive
processes that bind them all together, nor their relation to hereditary
human nature, nor their origins in prehistory. Surly we will never see
a full maturing of the humanities until these dimensions are added"
(275). Importance of dreaming and storytelling for innovation: "In the
early stages of creation of both art and science, everything in the
mind is a story. There is an imagined denouement, and perhaps a start,
and a selection of bits and pieces that might fit between" (275).
"Science grows in a manner not well appreciated by nonscientists: it is
guided as much by peer approval as by the truth of its technical
claims. Reputation is the silver and gold of scientific careers" (276).
Picasso, "Art is the lie that helps us to see the truth" (277).
Creative explosion in the Paleolithic c. 35,000 years ago in Europe.
"From this time on until the Late Paleolithic period over 20,000 years
later, cave art flourished. Thousands of figures, mostly of large game
animals, have been found in more than two hundred caves distributed
throughout southwestern France and northeastern Spain, on both sides of
the Pyrenees" (279) (O sea, en mi
vecindario inmediato...). Complexity
of art in primitive cultures. Piraha, no numbers or concept of
counting, no terms for colors, no creation myths, do not draw, yet they
have songs. "Music is closely linked to language in mental
development and in some ways appears to be derived from language"
(283).
VI. Where Are We Going?
27.
A New Enlightenment
"Given our miserable lack of self-understanding as a species,
the better goal at this time may be to choose where not to
go" (287). "The more we learn about our physical existence, the more
apparent it becomes that even the most complex forms of human behavior
are ultimately biological." (288). "Yet, by any conceivable standard,
humanity is far and away life's greatest achievement. We are the mind
of the biosphere, the solar system, and—who can say?–perhaps the
galaxy. Looking about us, we have learned to translate into our narrow
audivisual systems the sensory modalities of other organisms. We know
much of the physicochemical basis of our own biology. We will soon
create simple organisms in the laboratory. We have learned the history
of the universe and look out almost to its edge" (288). We are the
result of multilevel natural selection, individuals competing with
individuals and collaborating in groups competing with groups: "The
opposition between the two levels of natural selection has resulted in
a chimeric genotype in each person. It renders each of us part saint
and part sinner" (289). Wilson vs. the theory of inclusive fitness and
kin selection, replacing it with "standard models of population
genetics applied to multiple levels of natural selection" (289), a
mathematical critique of inclusive fitness was developed from 2004 to
2010; "group selection is clearly the process responsible for advanced
social behavior" (289-90). "We understand too well that no one is so
wise and great taht he cannot make a catastrophic mistake, or any
organization so noble to be free of corruption. We, all of us, live out
our lives in conflict and contention" (290). "Gossip has always been
the favorite occupation, in every society from hunter-gatherer bands to
royal courts. To weigh as accurately as possible the intentions and
trust-worthiness of those who affect our own personal lives is both
very human and highly adaptive. It is also adaptive to judge the impact
of others' behavior on the welfare of the group as a whole. We are
geniuses at reading intentions of others while they too struggle hour
by hour with their own angels and demons" (290-91). Early humans
created gods in order to understand the universe, and as an analogue at
a cosmic level of their own tribal authorities. Religions have been
crucial to the identity of groups, "To question the sacred myths is to
question the identity and worth of those who believe them" (292). "Why,
then, is it wise openly to question the myths and gods of organized
religions? Because they are stultifying and divisive" (...) "Because
they encourage ignorance, distract people from recognizing problems of
the real world, and often lead them in wrong directions into disastrous
actions" (292) —they passionately encourage altruism in the group but
often confrontation with other groups. Belief will be weakened by
scientific analysis of its causes. "Another trend against the
misadventure of sectarian devotion is the growth of the internet and
the globalization of institutions and people using it. A recent
analysis has shown that the increasing interconnection of people
worldwide strengthens their cosmopolitan attitude. It does so by
weakening the significance of ethnicity, locality, and nationhood as
sources of identification" (...) Inevitably, it will weaken confidence
in creation myths and sectarian dogmas" (293). Importance of realizing
present danger of exhausting natural resources: "if we save the living
world, we will also automatically save the physical world, because in
order to achieve the first we must also achieve the second" (294).
"Another principle that I believe can be justified by scientific
evidence so far is that nobody is going to emigrate from this planet,
not ever" (295) "The same cosmic myopia exists today a fortiori in
dreams of colonizing other star systems. It is an especially dangerous
delusion if we see emigration into space as a solution to be taken when
we have used up this planet" (296). No aliens visiting us, if exist and
have achieved wisdom: "It would be enough to settle down and explore
the limitless possibilities for fulfillment on the home planet" (297).
—oOo—
