Sublime

We’ve been drilling deep into social dynamics, and we finally get to that one deeply human quality that makes all this possible. It’s called empathy. The ability to feel what another human being is feeling. All this complicated social psychology does not need to be explicitly understood. For high-empathy people, all this is natural. By participatin

The large societies found in some other species, such as ants and bees, are stable and resilient because most of the information needed to sustain them is encoded in the genome.

In a chick, you can take a cell that was about to develop into a wing feather and move it to the location that’s destined to be a foot. If you perform the maneuver in time, the former wing-feather cell will turn into a perfectly normal piece of claw. The process is called cellular differentiation.169 The same thing happens in the all-worker and all

If evolution chanced upon a way to bind people together into large groups, the most obvious glue is oxytocin, a hormone and neurotransmitter produced by the hypothalamus. Oxytocin is widely used among vertebrates to prepare females for motherhood. In mammals it causes uterine contractions and milk letdown, as well as a powerful motivation to touch

proposed that monkeys and apes had larger brains than other mammals because they lived in socially much more complex groups, a suggestion they termed the ‘Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis’

Some of these Hymenoptera are lazy and sit around all day doing very little; others work their tails off in the interest of the community. But try separating the ne’er-do-wells from the industrious and setting them up as two new colonies—one composed exclusively of layabouts and the other made up entirely of nose-to-the-grindstone types. A strange

The problem at the root of such calamities is that humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals.