The Social Conquest of Earth, E.O Wilson

Part 1: Why does advanced social life exist?

Chapter 1: The human condition

• The creation myth is a Darwinian device for survival. Tribal conflict was a principal driving force that shaped biological human nature. By itself, mythmaking could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity (as it attempts to do); however, the discovery of the origin and meaning of humanity may explain the origin and meaning of myths, the core of organized religion

  Part 2: Where do we come from?

  Chapter 2: The two paths to conquest

• Human groups are formed of highly flexible alliance, in which strategies for navigating these groups were written as a complicated mix of altruism, cooperation, competition, domination, reciprocity, defection, and deceit
• This array of strategies required higher degrees of intelligence and intense socialization. The brain had to measure emotions of friend and enemy, plan strategies for social interaction, build mental scenarios of short and long-term relationships, and retrieve memories far into the past and long into the future to imagine the consequences of every relationship

  Chapter 3: The approach

  Chapter 4: The arrival

• One critical point in our evolutionary past was when our ancestors developed an omnivore diet. Hunting game requires a high amount of teamwork and cohesion, and it’s worth it: meat is pound for pound more energetically efficient than vegetable food
• Another critical point was the ability to control fire, which then led to camps (i.e., nests) which served as the nucleus for social groups. Now in close proximity to one another on a regular basis, intellectual development that enhanced one’s cohesion with the group (e.g., social intelligence, empathy, deceitfulness, etc.) was selected for, propelling our intellectual development further
  • I also remember reading that cooked food also requires less energy to consume (chewing), which may have allowed resources to be directed away from the jaw to the brain region. It seems like these factors (this one and the previous point) arose in tandem, with cooked food enabling more brain capacity and social complexities driving the cerebral growth

    Chapter 5: Threading the evolutionary maze

• The following preadaptations enabled human eusociality:
• Living on land: without land dwelling there exists no possibility for the use of fire—a critical prerequisite to social flourishing in mammals * Being large: to house a brain with enough processing power to compute the complexities of social organization requires a large enough animal to house that brain. While ants are hypersocial and design intricate architecture with custom air conditioning, they are purely instinctual. And again, insects are too small to control fire * Grasping hands tipped with spatulate finger tips * Having those grasping hands free from walking, i.e., being bipedal * A shift from vegetarianism to an omnivore diet. Meat yields more energy per gram than vegetation. The social cooperation required to hunt meat also led to select for groups who could cooperate effectively * The controlled use of fire followed, facilitating the consumption of meats; mastication and digestion of cooked meats requires less energy * Persistent fire provided a refuge for early Homo species. As such, nests were formed—a precursor to the attainment of eusociality of all other known animals * With fireside campsites came division of labor, where subgroups formed and bands organized into dominance hierarchies

  Chapter 6: Creative forces

• The outcome of between-group competition for humans was determined largely by the size and tightness of the group, and the quality of their communication and division of labor
• The genetic fitness of a human being is the consequence of both individual and group selection. These two forces tend to pull in opposite directions—I could deceive and cheat in pursuit of self-interest at the expense of the group, or I could be heroic and altruistic for the benefit of the group, but at the expense of my resources
  • If the benefit from group membership falls below that which would be had from a solitary life, evolution would favour cheating or departure from the group. If personal benefit from group membership rises high enough, the members will be prone to altruism and conformity
• Group composition is unstable because of advantageous group size increases from immigration, ideological proselytization, and conquest, pitted against the advantages by usurpation within the group and fission to create new groups
• Much of culture (i.e., the content of the creative arts) has risen from the inevitable clash between individual and group selection

  Chapter 7: Tribalism is a fundamental human trait

• People must have a tribe. It gives them their own and social meaning in a chaotic world, making the environment seem less disorienting and dangerous. Each human has a system of interlocking tribes, savouring the company of like-minded friends, and yearning to be in one of the best tribes
• Groups, regardless of how they are formed, have always been observed to rank out-group below in-group—even in experiments when they were told the in-groups and out-groups were chosen arbitrarily
• The tendency to form groups and favour the in-group members has the earmarks of instinct. Children can have an inborn propensity to learn some things swiftly and decisively, known as prepared learning. Evidence suggests that in-group preference is prepared early in development, with infants being most sensitive to the sounds of their native language, regardless of whether the meaning of the speech is fully comprehended. Later, these infants look preferentially at person who spoke their native language within their hearing
• The elementary drive to form and take deep pleasure from in-group membership translates at a higher level into tribalism. We are prone to ethnocentrism, preferring the company of others of the same race, nation, clan, and religion (or anything that can be symbolically represented—as long as I can tell who belongs to my group and who doesn’t)
• Different parts of the brain have evolved by group selection to create groupishness. Studies have observed that the amygdala (fear & anger) fires when subjects are presented an image of someone of a different race

  Chapter 8: War as humanity’s hereditary curse

• Once a group has been split off and sufficiently dehumanized, justifications can be made for horrible acts towards that group, no matter how gruesome
• As a biological reproducing species, our population approaches limits set by available food and water. We are still fundamentally the same as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, just with more food and larger territories. Yet, we blindly obey the instincts that we’ve inherited from our Palaeolithic predecessors, which in our case lead to an overindulgence of energy and material resources

  Chapter 9: Breakout

• A loose rule of island biogeography is that animals smaller than 20kg tend to evolve into relative giants (e.g., the immense tortoises of the Galapagos), and animals larger than 20kg tend to evolve towards dwarfism (e.g., the dwarf deer of the Florida Keys)
  • A cousin of Homo Sapiens, branching from Homo Erectus, are the Homo floresiensis of the island Flores, who were less than 1 meter tall and with brains of comparable size to australopithecines. This evolutionary product supports the above stated loose rules
• “We should learn to promote human biological diversity for its own sake instead of using it to justify prejudice and conflict.”

  Chapter 10: The creative explosion

• Bands and communities of bands with better combinations of cultural innovations became more productive and better equipped for competition and war. Rivals either copied them or else were conquered. Thus, group selection drove the evolution of culture

  Chapter 11: The sprint to civilization

• The chiefs of chiefdoms typically micromanaged the affairs of their domain, delegating as little authority as possible to reduce the chance of insurrection. Common tactics include the suppression of underlings and fermenting a fear of rival chiefdoms

  Part 3: How social insects conquered the invertebrate world

  Chapter 12: The invention of eusociality

  Chapter 13: Inventions that advanced the social insects

• A significant change that allowed for the flourishing of ants, and other social insects in general, was the shift in arboreal flora from mostly conifers to leafy and flowered trees. Flowered trees are more diverse and thus leave a more diverse landscape in the soil below (as the portions of the trees eventually fall to the forest floor). They also coevolved with insects, encouraging pollination, and rewarding with sugar
• This change in the tree landscape also led to a symbiosis between ants and sap sucking insects (i.e., aphids). These aphids would suck sap from trees and excrete their waste below. Ants eventually learned to consume this sugary waste, and in return the aphids wouldn’t get stuck in a pile of their sticky waste
• Now, some species of ants have intricate nests with pastures laid out for their fleet of sapsuckers, much like how humans do for domesticated animals such as cows, sheep, and so on.
• Some species of ants in more earthen regions (i.e., not so foresty) have granaries to store seeds of nearby plants
• Social complexity seems to involve at some point a species developing an ability to sustain larger energy reserves. Ants develop intricate, complex nests with a caste of workers with specialized skills, as do humans in the forms of civilizations with farmers, engineers, and medics
• “The more elaborate and expensive a nest is in energy and time, the greater the fierceness of the ants that protect it.”

  Part 4: The forces of social evolution

  Chapter 14: The scientific dilemma of rarity

  Chapter 15: Insect altruism and eusociality explained

  Chapter 16: Insects take the giant leap

• One explanation as to the rarity of eusociality is that it requires specific pre-adaptations, notably the construction of a nest in which offspring are reared. Then, there comes a point where cooperation with another member of the species, e.g., one bee produces larvae while the other defends the nest. This would require an allele change (based on external environmental cues) in the bees that suppress certain behaviours, i.e., foraging for food or producing offspring
• An allele flip of this sort happened with ants as the working caste lost their wings. The idea is that this gene switch would cause offspring that would otherwise disperse to instead stay and contribute to the nest. This would occur when cooperation of the group favours survival more than if the insect lived a solitary life
• Eusociality seems to become irreversible once an anatomically distinct worker caste is developed
• In a eusocial insect group, there must be a balance in cooperation. If too many queens, there are not enough workers to maintain the colony; if too many workers, food around the nest will fall short; if not enough soldiers, predators will overwhelm the nest; and if not enough foragers, the colony will starve

  Chapter 17: How natural selection creates social instincts

• Overarching principles crucial for understanding the genetic basis of instinct and social behaviour:
  • The distinction between the unit of heredity and the target of selection. The unit is a gene/arrangement of genes that form part of the hereditary code. The target of selection is the trait/combination of traits encoded by the units of heredity and favoured/disfavoured by the environment
  • Natural selection is usually multilevel: it acts on genes that prescribe targets at multiple levels of biological organization, such as cell and organism, or organism and colony. Selection occurring at one level (e.g., the cell) can work in the opposite direction from that of the adjacent level (e.g., the organism). A runaway cancer cell causes the organism of which it is a member to sicken and die. Conversely, the community of cells stays healthy when the growth of cancer cells is controlled
  • In colonies composed of authentically cooperating individuals (i.e., humans), selection among genetically diverse individual members promotes selfish behaviour; while selection between groups of humans typically promotes altruism among members of the colony. Colonies of cheaters lose to colonies of cooperators. The degree of cohesiveness of a colony depends on the number of cooperators and cheaters, which depends on the relative intensities of individual selection versus group selection
  • Traits (targets) that group selection acts upon emerge from interactions among members of the group (e.g., communication, division of labor, cooperation, etc.). If these interactions favour the colony over another colony who uses lesser interactions, the genes prescribing the improved group performance spreads through the population of colonies
  • Individual vs. Group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness (virtue and sin) among society members. If a colony member devoted their life to service over marriage, the individual is of benefit to the society, even though they do not have personal offspring. If a colony member is a layabout our coward who saves their energy passes the resulting social cost onto others
• Phenotypic plasticity describes how traits prescribed by genes (phenotypes) may sometimes be rigid (in the case of the number of fingers on the hand or colour of eyes) but may also be flexible based on environmental cues. There is a species of plant, the water crowfoot, who’s leaves will adopt a different style depending on the surrounding, brushed below water and broad above
• Proximate cause: how a process or structure works
• Ultimate cause: why the process or structure occurs in the first place

  Chapter 18: The forces of social evolution

• In this chapter E.O Wilson attempts to challenge the dogma of inclusive fitness theory, i.e., the notion that degrees of altruism are proportional to the degree of genetic relatedness when trying to explain the emergence of eusociality
• While there are a few examples in which kin selection holds to explain social phenomena, group selection also offers convincing arguments as well
• One example is that of an ant colony which invests more energy into virgin females than males. This was initially though to be because this particular ant species was diploidhaploid, i.e., sisters share 3/4 of their genes with one another compared to 1/2 with their mother. Female workers investing more in the virgin females compared to males seemingly confirmed inclusive fitness theory; they invested more in the females since they’re more related. However, an alternative explanation is that males are proportionally smaller and less energy intensive to produce than females, who have fatty deposits to support reproduction. If offspring were invested in based on energy equivalency, many more males would be supported than females, which would result in wasted resources (as many males would be left without a partner). As such, more investment in females is optimal for the colony in terms of resource allocation, making it a more efficient relative to colonies that do not follow this strategy (i.e., selection at the group level)

  Chapter 19: The emergence of a new theory of eusociality

  Part 5: What are we?

  Chapter 20: What is human nature?

• Human nature is the inherited regularities of mental development common to our species
• Examples of this include:
  • Incest avoidance: most social species are exogamous, i.e., their young go off to another tribe, humans are no different. Likewise, humans follow a simple rule of thumb known as the Westermarck effect: Have no sexual interest in those whom you knew intimately during the earliest years of your life. Note, this effect occurs regardless of the degree of relatedness between two individuals
  • Colour perception: when modulating the intensity of light, we can correctly perceive the continuous nature of the intensity change. However, if we do the same with wavelength, i.e., changing colours, we bin the changes into their major colour groups (red, to orange, to yellow, to green and so on). We discretize colours, even though the wavelength spectrum is continuous, likely because it was evolutionary advantageous to do so
    • Cross culturally, the language used to describe colour follows a hierarchy (known as the Berlin-Kay progression): black and white -> red -> green/yellow -> blue -> brown -> the rest. This sequence is not random, indicating some human predisposition in describing more/less important colours

      Chapter 21: How culture evolved

• Culture is the combination of traits that distinguishes one group from another
• A cultural trait is a behaviour either first invented in a group or learned from another group, and then transmitted among group members
• The driving force leading to the threshold of complex cultures appears to be group section. A group whose members could read intentions and cooperate among one another, and predict the actions of competing groups, had an enormous advantage over competing groups. Individual selection surely still played a role in intra-group competition, yet group selection acted on inter-group competition
• Morality, conformity, religious fervour, and fighting ability were keystone to generating a united, cooperative, and effective group

  Chapter 22: The origins of language

• Three particular attributes enabled our species to approach the highest level of social intelligence: shared attention; high level of awareness required to act together in achieving a common goal; and the “theory of mind”, i.e., the recognition that their mental states are shared by others
• Language is a set of coordination devices that serve to direct the attention of others
• When the conversational gaps (the pauses between one person’s speaking and the other’s answering) of ten languages were measured, all were shown to avoid overlap, and the length of turnover gaps were found to be almost the same
• In warmer climates, languages around the world have evolved to use more vowels and fewer consonants, creating more sonorous combinations of sounds; sonorous sounds carry further, in accord with the tendency of people in warm climates to spend more time outdoors and keep greater distances apart
• The genetic basis of human language acquisition did not coevolve with language but predates the emergence of language. Language has evolved to fit the human brain, rather than the reverse

  Chapter 23: The evolution of cultural variation

• In the castes of any colonies, there exist major workers (giant soldiers that perform tasks outside of the nest) and minor workers (timid workers that perform tasks in the best such as nursing majors). Majors have a higher death rate, and are thus produced at a higher per capital rate than minors, maintaining an optimum balance in numbers between the two castes
• Cultural variation is determined mostly by two properties of social behaviour: the degree of bias in the epigenetic rule (e.g., low in dress fashion or high in incest avoidance) and the sensitivity to the usage pattern (i.e., the likelihood that group members with imitate others who’ve adapted a particular trait)

  Chapter 24: The origins of morality and honour

• The conflict between the poorer and better angels of our nature stem from the conflicts arising between individual and group selection
• Individual selection is responsible for much of what we call sin; group selection is responsible for much of what we call virtue
• Group selection shapes instincts that tend to make individuals altruistic toward one another (but now towards members of other groups); individual selection shapes instincts in each member that are fundamentally selfish with reference to other members
• Iron rule of genetic social evolution: selfish individuals best altruistic individuals, and groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals
• The countries with highest quality of life (in terms of education, health, crime, collective self-interests) also have the smallest divide in wealth between the wealthiest and poorest citizens
• A naturalistic understanding of morality doesn’t lead to absolute precepts and sure judgement but warns against basing them blindly on religious and ideological dogmas. When such precepts are misguided (as they often are), it usually stems from ignorance—i.e., important factors are unintentionally omitted during formulation
• Examples of these ideological dogmas include:
  • Opposition to artificial conception (sex without the intention of conception) with the (well-intended) reasoning being that sex is made to make babies. While this is true in most species, primates included, humans are slightly different in that women have concealed genitalia as to mask their fertility. This is to encourage sexual intercourse as a bonding mechanism without the intent to necessarily conceive a child. This strengthens the partners’ bonds, which is important since raising a human child requires long term support (due their relative helpless in early years) and thus additional investment from the father
  • Homophobia: under the same guise, condemning homosexuality since sex doesn’t produce offspring is misguided. Homosexuality is heritable and occurs too frequently to be the result of mutations alone. Thus, natural selection must be acting to select for homosexuality in populations. Homosexuals occupy niches and roles that support groups more than had they been absent—hence homosexuality is natural and healthy within societies

    Chapter 25: The origins of religion

• The illogic of religions is not a weakness, but their essential strength. Acceptance of their bizarre creation myths is what binds followers together
• The core of traditional organized religions are their creation myths. Creation myths come about in part from folk memories of momentous events, like mass emigration, wars, and natural disasters; stories of devils and angels likely spawn from hallucinations invoked by sleep paralysis, mental illnesses (schizophrenia), or hallucinogenic drugs (mushrooms, fungi, hemp, etc., which were commonly consumed in the Middle East when Abrahamic religions were being crafted)
• Around the late palaeolithic era humans started to reflect on their mortality, as suggested by ritual burial sites aged around ~95000 years ago
• Thus humans would have asked where dead people go, and having still seen the dead in their dreams or hallucinations, they concluded the dead must be in some spirit realm, the same inhabited by dreams or hallucinations
• Religious faith offers the psychological security that uniquely comes from belonging to a group

  Chapter 26: The origins of the creative arts

• “Art is the lie that helps us to see the truth” - Picasso

  Part 6: Where are we going?

  Chapter 28: A new enlightenment

• On free will: we are free as independent beings, but our decisions are not free of all the organic processes that created our personal brains and minds
• The opposition of the two levels of natural selection, individual and group level, has resulted in a chimeric genotype in each person, rendering each of us part saint and part sinner
• Every person feels the pull of conscience, of heroism against cowardice, altruism against greed, truth against deception, and commitment against withdrawal. These dilemmas stem from the conflicting objectives of multilevel selection
• To question the sacred myths of a religion is to question the identity and worth of its followers, which is why skeptics (including those from other tribes with equally absurd myths) are so righteously disliked