Human society
Humans form effective, coordinated, division-of-labor
groupings at several levels of aggregation. At each level,
there is a problem of metasystem transition. At each level,
there is not only competition between other groupings at the
same level, but also competition between the interests of
the smaller incorporated units and the interests of the
larger encompassing unit. Primary, face-to-face, groups are
incorporated into organized city-states, and these into
nations. A plausible node of selection and inter-
organization competition can be envisaged at each of these
levels. The great majority of evolutionary biologists deny
the efficacy of biological group selection of those
"altruistic" traits in which individuals act for the
preservation of the group at the risk of their own well
being and "inclusive fitness" (i.e., the representation of
their own genes in future generations). This is not to deny
the occurrence of group selection, but rather to say that
its effects for self-sacrificial altruistic traits will be
undermined by individual-vs.-individual selection. A group
with heroically self-sacrificing altruists may thrive
better. The inclusive fitness gains from this will be shared
equally by the non-altruists within the group. For the
altruists, these gains are in part undermined by the risks
they run. The non-altruists pay no such costs, and thus out-
breed the self-sacrificial altruists in the within-group
genetic competition. (For the soldiers, etc., of the social
insects, this intra-social-organization genetic competition
has been eliminated by the sterility of each of the
cooperating castes).
Our previous position accepted the following: Individual
selection always dominates group selection at the
biological level;
"Groups are real" (Campbell, 1958) as opposed to
methodological individualism; Self-sacrificial altruism in
the service of human social groups genuinely exists; Such
altruism can only be produced by group selection.
The solution was to limit group selection to non-biological
cultural evolution and to see self-sacrificial altruism as a
result of cultural group selection of ideologies, social-
organizational traditions, moral indoctrination, and
religious cosmologies (Campbell, 1972, 1975, 1983, 1991;
Heylighen, 1992a, 1992b). This point of view had many
plausible implications, among them an explanation of why
moral commandments and lists of deadly sins contain explicit
rejections of innate human nature. There is also the obvious
group-coordination utility of beliefs in rewarding and
punishing afterlives and reincarnations, which extend
perceived self-interest into an afterlife and thus can
promote self-sacrificial acts.
This simple point of view we are now ready to substantially
modify for social control mechanisms within primary groups,
retaining its relevance for secondary groups. One influence
is the increased plausibility of biological group selection
as seen by evolutionary biologists (cf. Wilson and Sober,
1994). All along, biological evolution has been credited for
the human capacity for culture, including competent
communication of useful information between individuals. But
even in much less social animals, social communication
creates a niche for self-serving deception, and biological
group selection may be needed to keep the rate of such
parasitism low enough so that there is a net collective
communicative advantage. The resulting proximal mechanisms
would include mutual monitoring and retaliation for
"immoral" behavior (an analogue for the mutual enforcement
of sterility among the social insect castes). We humans
probably have an innate fear of ostracism, and a tendency to
find painful the signs of hostility on the part of those we
work or live with on a regular face-to-face basis. Innate
tendencies to enforce group solidarity on others would be
supported by both individual and group selection and may be
identified as prerequisite for group selection.
The route to a cultural-evolutionary group selection that
had been proposed contained several stages that built upon
biologically evolved bases (Boyd and Richerson, 1985;
Campbell, 1983, 1991). While these are presented as
advantageous at the individual selection level, they are
both plausible routes to biological group selection and
might require group selection to avoid free rider parasitism
and elimination by the negative costs of the self-
sacrificial altruism they produce:
An innate tendency to "conformist transmission" (Boyd and
Richerson, 1985) would be individually adaptive for skills
and environmental wisdom, but would also lead to primary
group homogeneity on neutrally adaptive beliefs and
behaviors. (In analogy with the role of "genetic drift" in
biological evolution, this can be called "memetic drift."😉
These ingroup homogeneities and chance-produced intergroup
differences provide the necessary setting for group
selection if some of these chance homogeneities produced
superior group-vs.-group competition.
Trivers (1971) has posited an individually adaptive innate
predisposition to joining reciprocally altruistic cliques,
and a related innate tendency for "moralistic aggression"
when such pacts are violated. (The latter might turn out to
require group selection to supplement individual selection.)
As we have noted above, this pattern may be summarized as
"clique selfishness." It would be individually adaptive to
join already existing selfish cliques. Culturally
transmitted ingroup membership may be regarded as providing
such opportunities (Brewer, 1981). Along with this
individually adaptive cultural scaffolding innate
predispositions might be selected. These would include a
tendency to join and conform to such cliques, and also to
pressure one's biological offspring to conform.
Effective ingroup or selfish clique membership is furthered
by visible and audible clues to ingroup membership. The
neutrally adaptive ingroup homogeneities produced by
conformist transmission would be available for such use.
This would further sharpen the ingroup homogeneities and
intergroup heterogeneities necessary for group selection at
the cultural or biological level
As we (e.g. Campbell and Gatewood, 1994) understand their
argument, Wilson and Sober (1994) propose that group
selection and individual selection can be concurrent,
producing an ambivalence on the group preservation vs.
individual preservation dimension. In behavioral
evolutionary jargon, this would be a "facultative
polymorphism." (For example, the males in many species of
monkeys have two incompatible innate behavioral
repertoires, one for submission, one for dominance. The
learned dominance rank determines which will be displayed
in which encounter.)
Even if biological group selection has occurred in human
evolution, the persistence of genetic competition among the
cooperators has produced a profoundly ambivalent social
animal, in sharp contrast with the sterile castes of the
social insects. For humans in social organizations,
organizational optimizing is in continuous conflict with
optimizing individual well-being and inclusive fitness. In
parallel, primary group social solidarity competes with
secondary group optimization in industrial and governmental
bureaucracies.
Reference: Heylighen F. & Campbell D.T. (1995): "Selection
of Organization at the Social Level: obstacles and
facilitators of metasystem transitions ", World Futures: the
Journal of General Evolution 45, p. 181-212. Copyright© 1995
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