The good news is that humans evolved often as cooperative and “prosocial” beings, so looking to the past and better understanding our cultural evolution as a species might help illuminate the best ways forward across the board. This is the basis of a paper published in April 2023 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled, “Multilevel Cultural Evolution: From New Theory to Practical Applications.” Rather than focusing on the genetic code and physical evolution of humans, the paper explores the advanced and groundbreaking—but seldom discussed—field of cultural evolution.
The paper’s senior author David Sloan Wilson, a distinguished professor emeritus of biological sciences at Binghamton University, New York, and the founder of the school’s Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program, told the Independent Media Institute in May 2023 that the authors of the article wrote it “to show that a synthesis, which has already taken place for the study of biological evolution, is now in progress for the study of human cultural evolution, with wide-ranging practical applications.”
One problem is that humans are prosocial in their in-groups, originally based on kinship, but competitive with out-groups, e.g., other tribes and nations in the original sense of kinship. Now that social, political, and economic issues have become more systemic as globalization unfolds, it is vital to extend prosociality throughout the system as a whole.
PrezensaWe Did Not Evolve to Be Selfish—and Humans Are Increasingly Aware We Can Choose How Our Cultures Can Evolve
April M. Short
“We didn’t evolve to be selfish”
ReplyDeleteBut if we are a product of evolution and people are selfish then where did it come from?
🤔
Art degree morons can’t even do basic logic..,
It presumably came from social conditioning.
ReplyDeletePP: "It presumably came from social conditioning."
ReplyDeleteYes, and while social conditioning is unique among humans in comparison with species of less complexity, it is not unique to evolution by any means although pre-human conditioning is mostly instinctual whereas human conditioning is only partially instinctual and partly rational. It is also complex, subject to synergy and emergence, based on learning.
Humans are highly dependent on conditioning as studies of feral children show. A great part of early conditioning is language learning, which brings in the need to integrate language and context.
Another key factor is socialization to bridle individualistic instincts, but this is also meliorated by some instinctual behavior based on degree of kinship, the family being the unit of society, which expanded into clan, tribe, and nation. Much of this is submerged in modern society, but its effects are still influential in many ways.
David Sloan Wilson argues that it is difficult to get a grasp on social, political, and economic behavior without taking evolution into account.
The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable
ReplyDeleteby William E. Rees
School of Community and Regional Planning, Faculty of Applied Science, The University of British Columbia
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32#B11-world-04-00032
We're choosing to keep going as we have, in terms of energy/resource consumption.
ReplyDeleteThe Global South wants to get in on that gravy train, and I don't blame them. They're human, they want to improve their standard of living for themselves and their children.