Sublime

In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari explains and examines how humans cooperate in extensive systems of shared belief.

My views are consistent with those who hold that moral instincts in individuals are genetic adaptations sometimes detectable even in non-human primates;1 that social norms are products of interactions between cultural evolution and genetic evolution;2 that natural selection can act at the level of the group and not just at the level of the individu

A decade after the controversy, a biologist had a fascinating idea. The mathematical conditions for group selection overcoming individual selection were too extreme to be found in Nature. Why not create them artificially, in the laboratory? Michael J. Wade proceeded to do just that, repeatedly selecting populations of insects for low numbers of adu

Great Groups have a tendency to give rise to others.

It doesn’t require a large leap of speculative evolutionary psychology to arrive at the reasonable conclusion that Homo sapiens are well adapted to small-group collaboration.

The new king of the castle goes through a biological transformation simply because he’s moved up on the hierarchical ladder. For a monkey’s physiology, position in the pecking order is everything.

Major transitions may be rare, but when they happen, the Earth often changes.41 Just look at what happened more than 100 million years ago when some wasps developed the trick of dividing labor between a queen (who lays all the eggs) and several kinds of workers who maintain the nest and bring back food to share. This trick was discovered by the ear