The Secret of Life: A review of David Sloan Wilson's "Atlas Hugged" — Glenn Geher

There is, in fact, much reason to believe that the natural state of human social ecologies is much more egalitarian than it is hierarchical (see Bingham & Souza, 2009). As Wilson and others in the field have argued, social inequality, which is so dominant across many modern economies, is, in fact, not the modal form of wealth distribution that our ancestors evolved to experience. In his newest book, Atlas Hugged, David Sloan Wilson (2020) makes a compelling case that hyper-individualistic, free-market approaches to the economy have the capacity to cause all kinds of adverse consequences and, in fact, do not follow from an evolutionary approach to understanding the human condition....

The answer, of course, is both: Humans are both other-oriented and selfish. In fact, as I made the case a recent post titled The Fundamental Human Conflict, given our unique evolutionary history, humans have a powerful combination of adaptations that benefit the self along with adaptations that benefit others, often at an immediate cost to oneself. And navigating this balance can be thought of as the fundamental human conflict.…

The ancients called this the struggle between reason (universality) and passion (individuality) for supremacy in the human personality. This is the basis of ethics and moral philosophy, which underlies cultural and institutions, particularly positive law. Many of not most of these issues have been debated for millennia. 

18th century liberalism was an attempt to reconcile these factors in the absence of theology. This gave rise to naturalism in opposition to supernaturalism. This developed into scientific method in opposition to "magical thinking."

Psychology Today
The Secret of Life: A review of David Sloan Wilson's "Atlas Hugged"

Glenn Geher | professor of psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz and founding director of the campus’ Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program

See also

Fresh Economic Thinking
Merit doesn't cause income
Cameron Murray | | Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Henry Halloran Trust at The University of Sydney