Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), a scientist and Jesuit priest, made an observation about humankind that departed from both Christian doctrine and the scientific wisdom of his day: In some respects we are just another species, a member of the Great Ape family, but in other respects we are a new evolutionary process. That makes the origin of our species as significant, in its own way, as the origin of life.
Over immense periods of time, living processes began to rival non-living physical processes in shaping the planet and atmosphere, giving earth the unique appearance of a multicolored jewel when viewed from space.
In an astonishingly short period of time, a new skin spreads over the earth, rivaling other living processes and non-living physical processes in shaping the planet and atmosphere.
Teilhard described consciousness as a process of evolution reflecting upon itself. He portrayed the human colonization of the planet as starting with “tiny grains of thought” that would eventually merge with each other to form a global consciousness and self-regulating superorganism called the Omega Point.
Whatever we mean by the word “organism” can be applied to entities that are larger than organisms, such as a human society or a biological ecosystem.
The harmony and order that we associate with the word “organism” indeed has a movable boundary that can be expanded to include biological ecosystems, human societies, and conceivably the entire earth.
Most evolutionary biologists still associate evolution with genetic evolution, ignoring the fact that cultural change is also an evolutionary process.
There is no dividing line between “biology,” “human,” and “culture.”
Modern evolutionary theory tells us that goodness can evolve, but only when special conditions are met. That’s why we must become wise managers of evolutionary processes. Otherwise, evolution takes us where we don’t want to go.
Almost no existing culture is adaptable enough to keep pace with our ever-changing world. Conscious evolution requires the construction of a new system of cultural inheritance capable of operating at an unprecedented spatial and temporal scale. This will be a formidable task, but evolutionary theory does provide the tools to get the job done.
The concept of “organism” has a movable boundary, which must be expanded to solve the problems of our age.
Selfish and contentious people will not cohere and without coherence nothing can be effected.
The entire concept of making a scientific theory and its originator morally culpable for misuses of the theory is deeply misguided.
If the human mind is a product of natural selection, then knowledge must be based on its practical consequences rather than a God-given apprehension of objective reality.
Evolutionary theory has made enormous progress within the biological sciences while remaining almost entirely excluded from the many branches of the human social sciences and humanities and their practical applications.
To communicate as a scholar or a scientist, you must document everything that you say and your work must be reviewed by your peers before it can be published. Even minor transgressions, such as failing to cite previous relevant work, can damage your reputation. Flagrant lying, such as falsifying data, results in expulsion. In this sense, scholars and scientists regard Truth as their religion.
We each begin as a single cell, the union of a sperm and egg, which divides again and again to create and maintain our bodies. As adults, we are made up of approximately 39 trillion cells that interact in a symphony of cooperation to keep us alive.
The problem is to explain how the behaviors that people associate with goodness, which typically benefit others and society as a whole, can evolve by a Darwinian process.
The group evolves to be so cooperative that it is transformed into a higher-level organism in its own right.
The higher-level entity evolves the properties of an organism by suppressing the potential for disruptive selection from within. Even the origin of life itself might be explained in this way as groups of cooperating molecular interactions.
Higher-level selection is so much stronger than lower-level selection that we use a different word to describe the higher-level entity. Instead of calling it a society of cells, we call it an organism. This name change should not obscure the fact that a multicellular organism is nothing more than a highly regulated society of cells that evolved thanks to a very strong imbalance between levels of selection.
Unlike a multicellular organism, which has a clear physical boundary, the members of a social insect colony are physically separate from each other. On any given day, the honeybees from a single beehive can be dispersed over an area of several square kilometers. Nevertheless, their activities are so well coordinated that they invite comparison to a single multicellular organism.
Our moral psychology is the societal equivalent of cancer-suppressing mechanisms in multicellular organisms. The coercive side of morality is required to suppress the potential for disruptive self-seeking behaviors within groups. Once the coercive side is established, then it becomes safe for group members to freely help each other without fear of exploitation.
Not only must we see the fast-paced changes swirling all around us and even within us as evolutionary processes, but we must construct new evolutionary processes to adapt to our modern environments.
You can begin to think of yourself as a rapidly evolving system in your own right.
The entire pageant of human history, starting approximately 100,000 years ago, can be seen as evolution at high speed, made possible by the transmission of learned information across generations.
You can begin to think of yourself as not just a product of your genes, and not just a product of your personal experience, but also as one of many members of your culture who collectively contain a vast repository of information learned and passed down from previous generations. This makes you part of something larger than yourself.
Small groups are a fundamental unit of human social organization. Individuals cannot be understood except in the context of small groups, and large-scale societies need to be seen as a kind of multicellular organism comprising small groups.
Each person is an active participant in the social process, so there is plenty of scope for individual agency, but the idea that any one of us is “self-made” is a fiction.
If you’re going to engage in a behavior as an organism, to accrue resources, you have to invest resources that you have in store. That is a very risky business, so you need a certain amount of information about the demand of the environment and your own resource cache. That entails certain principles that get built into the genome over time about keeping an excess, having a surplus, and maintaining a surplus.
Prosociality—people nurturing other people—is a master variable. Those who are surrounded by helpful others develop multiple assets. Those who are surrounded by indifferent or hostile others develop multiple liabilities.
Our behaviors are shaped by their consequences to a large degree—and the environments that select our behaviors are in large part our social environments. As we have seen, we lived in small and highly cooperative groups for most of our evolutionary history. We received a lot of nurturance and were expected to give in return. if we tried to boss others around or do less than our share, we quickly received social feedback to mend our ways. The more we contributed to common goals, the more social approval and material benefits we received. This made succeeding at the expense of others a dangerous game and succeeding by working with others the surest way to survive and reproduce as an individual. We are genetically adapted to crave social acceptance and will do almost anything to achieve it.
All of us live in a symbolic world inside our heads in addition to an external world.
A single body is the gold standard for a well-functioning human society, as English words such as “corporation” that are derived from the Latin word for “body” (corpus) attest. Human societies have been metaphorically compared to single bodies since antiquity, from Aristotle’s Politics to Hobbes’s Leviathan, but only now has it become possible to place the metaphor on a firm scientific foundation. The first step toward viewing the whole planet as a single organism is to challenge the current orthodoxy and to adopt the right theory.
Individual bees take part in the economy of the hive in the same way that individual neurons take place in the economy of the brain.
To call a multicellular organism a society of lower-level elements is no longer metaphorical. It is literally the case that we are groups of groups of groups and that we qualify as organisms only because of our degree of functional organization, which evolved by between-organism selection.
It is remarkable that the core problem confronting America in the early twentieth century and today is the same problem that confronted the tiny Jamestown colony in the early 1600s: an extractive social organization that allows some to gain at the expense of others and the group as a whole. This is the human societal equivalent of cancer.
For any group to function as a corporate unit, it must be well regulated in the biological sense of the word. Countless processes must be kept within bounds to meet the challenges of survival and reproduction. What is true for a multicellular organism or a social insect colony is also true for a human society. Whenever I hear talk of regulations as categorically bad, I feel like shouting “An unregulated organism is a dead organism!”
The metaphorical description of 311 as the “eyes and ears of the city,” along with catchphrases such as “the pulse of the city,” indicates the intuitive appeal of thinking of a city as a single organism with a “social physiology” that receives and processes information in a way that leads to effective action. These processes seem “automatic,” “effortless,” and “self-organizing” in single organisms. We see and hear without needing to think about it—but only thanks to enormously complex mechanisms that evolved by natural selection at the level of single organisms. If something similar is going to evolve at the scale of a city, it will need to be selected as a whole system.
The reason that centralized planning seldom works is because the world is too complex to be understood by anyone.
Most people think about failure as something to be avoided. In most businesses, people are promoted for their successes, which provides a strong incentive to avoid taking risks and to conceal failures when they occur. From an evolutionary perspective, however, failures are the current frontier of adaptation. Every failure provides an opportunity for a variation-and-selection process to go to work to improve the efficiency of the whole operation.
Is it theoretically possible to expand the boundary of a superorganism to include the whole earth?
Once we become comfortable with the concept of conscious evolution, then the need to design our personal and cultural evolutionary processes becomes clear, similar to designing an evolutionary algorithm on a computer. This is what biologists call “the evolution of evolvability.” If we don’t become wise managers of evolutionary processes, then evolution will still take place but will lead to outcomes that are not aligned with our normative goals.
Every entity that is currently described as an organism, such as a bacterial cell, a nucleated cell, or a multicellular organism, is a highly regulated society of lower-level units that behave as they do only because they were selected as groups.
Can the boundary of the human superorganism be expanded, even to embrace the entire earth?
If we want the whole earth to become a superorganism, then multilevel selection theory tells us exactly what to do: make planetary welfare the target of selection.
Get anyone to imagine the whole earth as like a single ship, and that person will start regarding the whole earth as the appropriate moral circle.
The contemplatives of all major religious traditions—from Christian monks in their monasteries to Buddhist hermits in their caves—converge upon a common awareness of rich interconnectedness. Once life is seen as a vast interconnected system, certain ethical conclusions follow. Specifically, the futility of one part of the system attacking another part of the system is revealed.