Page 500 - Cultures and Organizations

The Evolution of Cultures 465

plentiful desert island. These thirty shipwrecked people will survive only
if all thirty are good to each other. Besides not being sociopaths, they
must consider one another to be part of the same moral circle and avoid
individual-level competition. Otherwise (keeping things simple for the
sake of the example), they would start to compete for resources, fi ght, and
eventually kill one another. Now suppose there is an archipelago of similar
islands, on each of which a random mix of people gets stranded. What will
happen now? Easy: only the people on islands where all manage to build a
common moral circle will survive. On islands where fi ghts break out, the
population will be decimated and survival chances will be reduced. This
example seems trivial, but it is profound. Natural selection among groups

will benefit peaceful, tolerant, moral-circle-building individuals, because
groups that tolerate infighting will not thrive.

While human symbolic intelligence seems to be unmatched by other
species on Earth, humans’ social skills are shared with others. Researchers
of animal behavior have pointed out that all social species of animals, such
as ants, bees, blind mole rats, dolphins, jackdaws, and wolves, to name a
few, have intricate patterns of communication and clever ways of under-
standing complex messages. This trait is in fact a prerequisite for any
social species. Bees, for instance, though having minimal brain capacity,
are nonetheless able to indicate very accurately to one another where they
should go to collect honey. There are ants that build colonies made up of
their own bodies, and others keep lice as we keep cattle, including raising
the lice larvae. Over geologic time, groups have done well in evolution:
today half the biomass of insects in the world is estimated to be from the
few insect taxa (ants, bees, termites, wasps) that developed eusociality.
Eusociality (eu is Greek for “good”) refers to the condition in which groups,
possibly numbering thousands or more individuals, have integrated so well

that they live as a superorganism capable of doing things that none of its
members could achieve individually.
In fact, the irreversible success of groups is a constant in the evolution
of life on Earth.
The bodies of humans and other multicellular organisms are made
of eukaryotic cells. These cells contain small subcellular bodies (organ-
elles, such as mitochondria) that have DNA of their own. Such eukaryotic
cells started billions of years ago as groups of simpler, prokaryotic cells
that gobbled one another up without killing one another, and they took to
reproducing as one unit. Their grouping in eukaryotic cells constituted a
change from competition to collaboration, and it proved a highly successful