E.O. Wilson Saw the World in a Wholly New Way
by David Sloan Wilson
“Rabbi Hillel was reputedly asked to explain the meaning of the Torah while standing on one foot, and replied, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. Everything else is commentary.” The one-foot version of sociobiology Ed and I came up with was: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.” This meme has become widely known and Ed repeated it all the way up to his final publications and interviews.”
“Only after the publication of Sociobiology did evolutionary thinkers begin to take cultural evolution seriously. Ed was among them with books such as On Human Nature, and others.2 Today, Darwinian evolution is widely defined as any process that combines the three ingredients of variation, selection, and replication, no matter the mechanism. This definition is true to Darwin’s thought (since he knew nothing about genes) and can accommodate a plurality of inheritance mechanisms such as epigenetics (based on changes in gene expression rather than gene frequency), forms of social learning found in many species, and forms of symbolic thought that are distinctively human.
While human cultural inheritance mechanisms evolved by genetic evolution, that doesn’t make them subordinate, as if genes—in one of Ed’s metaphors—hold cultures on a leash. On the contrary, as the faster evolutionary process, cultural evolution often takes the lead in adapting humans to their environments, with genetic evolution playing a following role (gene-culture co-evolution).
Part of the maturation of human cultural evolutionary theory is the recognition of group selection as an exceptionally strong force in human evolution—something else that Ed got right. According to Harvard evolutionary anthropologist Richard Wrangham in his book, The Goodness Paradox, naked aggression is over 100 times more frequent in a chimpanzee community than small-scale human communities. This is due largely to social-control mechanisms in human communities that suppress bullying and other forms of disruptive self-serving behaviors, so that cooperation becomes the primary social strategy (this is called a major evolutionary transition).
Nearly everything distinctive about our species is a form of cooperation, including our ability to maintain an inventory of symbols with shared meaning that is transmitted across generations. Our capacity for symbolic thought became a full-blown inheritance system that operates alongside genetic inheritance (dual inheritance theory). Cultural evolution is a multilevel process, no less than genetic evolution, and the increasing scale of cooperation over the course of human history can be seen as a process of multilevel cultural evolution.”
“You can’t make sense of humanity without acknowledging its group-ish nature and the importance of culturally transmitted symbolic meaning systems. As Emile Durkheim wisely put it, “Social life, then, in every aspect and throughout its history, is only possible thanks to a vast body of symbolism.” Ed’s vision in Consilience is right on and its fulfillment is now in progress.”
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