Page 501 - Cultures and Organizations

466 IMPLICATIONS

innovation. Many millions of years later, multicellular organisms were the
next great leap. Today many species of organisms have developed euso-
cial groups of organisms as a new level of selection; in terms of biomass,
humans are the most successful of all, excepting perhaps eusocial ants,
which were estimated in 1990 to constitute more biomass than humans. 43
The success of groups at all levels, even the almost brainless social
insects, shows that big brains are not needed to form a complex, well-
communicating society. From an evolutionary point of view, brains are
just the latest invention, but excellent communication is always needed
for group success. Insects rely on visual and chemical clues as proximate
mechanisms for their communication. Through time, evolution has found
many proximate mechanisms for achieving a leap to a higher level of soci-
ality. A common element among these mechanisms, a truly evolutionary
one, is the existence of “good” and “bad” in an evolutionary sense. Being
good implies serving one’s group according to the categorical imperative
of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804): “do to others as you
would be done unto,” while being bad implies serving one’s own interests
at the expense of the group. For instance, a cancer cell is good to itself
by replicating faster than other cells, but it kills the organism to which
it belongs by stepping out of role, so it is bad for the group to which it
belongs, its organism. This means that there is strong selection against
cancer in young people: if a young person gets cancer, he or she will not
reproduce, so the sensitivity to cancer cannot be reproduced in other bod-
ies. By analogy, thieves are good to themselves but bad to their society,
whose things get stolen. Thus, what is good at a certain replicator level in
evolution could be bad one level up.
Once the next level of sociality is reached, as long as there is between-
group competition, there is no turning back unless major catastrophes

occur. There is no chance that humans will revert to solitary lifestyles. On
the contrary, the evolved tendency to include others in a common moral
circle seems to be pushing humans to ever more collaboration in ever
greater numbers.

Individuals and Institutions in the Stream of Life

If groups are so important, then what is the proper level of analysis to
study human behavior? Is it the individual or the group, and if it’s the lat-
ter, which level of grouping? This is like asking which is more important:
the sea, the rivers, or brooks—all are important, and they complement