[ A new paper on multilevel cultural evolution shows how looking
to our cultural evolutionary origins might help us improve society.]
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WE DID NOT EVOLVE TO BE SELFISH  
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April Short
August 19, 2023
Indpendent Media Institute [[link removed]]

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_ A new paper on multilevel cultural evolution shows how looking to
our cultural evolutionary origins might help us improve society. _

, Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

 

Ours is a critical time in the cultural evolution of humanity that is
likely to shape our long-term future, or lack thereof. As a species,
we have been on a self-destructive trajectory that has led us to our
current polycrisis
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unlivable economic conditions, worsening climate disasters, and the
potential of an unspeakably devastating war, as the World Economic
Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023
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it. The changes we all need to make, if we want subsequent generations
to enjoy life, will most likely require big shifts toward improving
connections with each other and the planet, and away from extraction
and individualism.

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
[[link removed]] 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
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distinguished professor emeritus of biological sciences at Binghamton
University, New York, and the founder of the school’s Evolutionary
Studies (EvoS) program [[link removed]], told the
Independent Media Institute in May 2023 that the authors of
the article
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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.”

Looking at humanity through a lens of cultural evolution shows that
“we are neither cooperative nor selfish,” Wilson says. “We are
capable of both—so becoming cooperative requires providing the right
environmental conditions. Also, cultural evolution helps us to
recognize the common denominators that apply across all contexts of
our lives—our families, neighborhoods, schools, businesses, and so
on, and at all scales, from small groups to the planet. This is very
empowering.”

He shared the example of a program
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at-risk high school students that he helped to design in 2010 at
Regents Academy in Binghamton, New York.

“By providing the right social environment, kids who flunked three
or more of their classes during the previous year [2010] performed as
well as the average high school student in the district [in 2011],”
he says.

Wilson explained in an article
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on the Binghamton University website in April 2023 that evolutionary
science is made up of a triad: variation, selection, and
replication—and that triad is also visible in the evolution of
culture, “from economics and business, to engineering and the arts,
and the functioning of society at all levels.” He added
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“knowing how cultural evolution happens also means we can harness it
for the larger good, creating a more just and sustainable world.”

While evolution has been at the core of biological sciences over the
last century, evolutionary science is rarely part of the conversation
when it comes to understanding culture and the modern-day problems of
society.

As Steven C. Hayes, co-author of the paper, psychologist,
and professor
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University of Nevada, Reno, told the Independent Media Institute in
May 2023, multidimensional and multilevel evolutionary theory “is
now at a level of knowledge and sophistication where it’s ready to
step forward and be part of that broader cultural conversation.”

However, he says that if you pick almost any area that might be
important in our society, “from immigration to climate change, or
economic justice, or the opiate crisis, or the impacts of the
pandemic, or suicide in young people—and on and on it goes—”
seldom will behavioral sciences and the behavioral aspects of the
evolutionary sciences even be mentioned. The authors of the paper
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multicultural cultural evolution sought to remedy this.

Hayes says that while he acknowledges the real atrocities humans have
committed (like slavery, climate destruction, and much else), it’s
imperative that people are able to see that humans have also done
better, and are capable of doing better, going forward.

“It strikes me in doing this work that the narratives we tell
ourselves about our history as a species are powerful in shaping the
future,” he says. “We’ve created an economic system that is
destroying the Earth. Think seriously about what we’ve supported
just over the last 50 to 100 years, and how hard it is for us to step
up to the challenges of just climate change, never mind economic
disparities—we can do better.”

Hayes says as a species it is time for us to choose to “evolve on
purpose,” and he believes “we can use the tools of evolutionary
science to do that.”

Humans Evolved as Prosocial—Not Individualistic

One key point the paper
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humans evolved most often through cooperation and we are, at our
foundations, prosocial—meaning that we’ve evolved to care about
the welfare of others and behave in ways that support the greater
good.

The paper
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three hallmarks of cultural evolution that include: 1) prosociality,
2) social control that enforces prosocial behavior, and 3) symbolic
thought, which includes an adaptable catalog of symbols with shared
meaning.

Hayes, who is also president of the Institute for Better Health
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new behavioral science approach called Contextual Behavioral Science
and studying how to ease human suffering by empowering them to live
values-based lives.

“We did not evolve as selfish primates,” Hayes says. “We evolved
as social primates, we reined in selfishness, we fostered community,
and we made sure that every voice matters.”

He notes that from his perspective, having researched cognitive
functioning and psychology there is an “alternative view of human
functioning that will foster human beings who are whole and free.”

From a psychological perspective, which evolutionary science supports
and the paper
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individualism is simply not good for us.

“Thriving… almost always means collaborating with others,” Hayes
says, noting that one point that should give people hope is that when
one moves in an individualistic way, toward selfishness and
narcissism, they move toward unhappiness.

“Narcissists are not happy,” he says. “People who lie, cheat,
and steal are not happy. There’s a deep-down yearning for love,
connection, and belonging that is there at birth.”

Hayes sees the cultural biological evolution toward traits that
benefit the common good over individual gain show up not just in human
history, but in today’s world, by way of his work as a clinical
psychologist. The afflictions that are most prominent today of
narcissism, loneliness, and actions that harm others, and how they are
intertwined with negative impacts of social media, for one example,
all could be said to varying degrees to have a solution to focus more
on building interpersonal relationships and communities. And
individuals who partake in this positive socialization often have
better mental health as a benefit.

“It’s time for us as mental health professionals and scientists to
speak about the importance of relationships and of empowering our
young people to learn how to have relationships that matter.”

An Alternative to the “Greed Is Good” Paradigm

The “Economics and Business” section of the paper
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ways multilevel cultural evolutionary theory can provide an
alternative to the “greed is good” economic narrative. It expands
upon the Nobel Prize-winning work of political scientist Elinor
Ostrom, which proved that groups can effectively self-manage
common-pool resources like “forests, pastures, fisheries, and the
groundwater,” without falling into self-serving behaviors when they
follow a specific set of design principles she puts forth. Ostrom’s
work disproved the well-known economic myth of the “tragedy of the
commons [[link removed]]” that insists
privatization and top-down regulation are necessary to manage
resources.

The paper proposes that Ostrom’s concepts have the potential to be
effective across “contexts and scales” rather than being confined
to the discipline of economics. And the paper predicts
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by using cultural evolutionary theory, “[v]irtually all functionally
oriented groups can benefit” from implementing the principles Ostrom
laid out for economics.

Expanding the Conversation

Hayes says that if readers were to take one thing away from the paper
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would want it to be an understanding that modern evolutionary science
is not just what you learned about in high school.

“My message to people would be: When you know how to evolve on
purpose, who knows what your ceiling may be? You as an individual, you
as a couple, you as a family, you as a company, you as a community, us
as a world.”

While individualism and “survival of the fittest” were the
takeaways from the study of evolution that were widely upheld in
modern culture, Hayes notes that Charles Darwin was among the first to
talk about the role of multilevel selection and cooperation in
evolution.

“There are economic and social forces that took advantage of the
competitive view, and it started very early on in the field [of
evolution],” he says. And Hayes says that it wasn’t long after
Darwin shared his theory of evolution, along with other prominent
thinkers at the time, that corporations began to take hold of the
narrative.

Hayes says he thinks society has been slow to adopt a more realistic
understanding of human evolution because doing so would not appeal to
certain economic and social interests. The paper on multilevel
cultural evolution offers that alternative perspective, Hayes says.

“This paper says, modern, multidimensional, multilevel evolutionary
science is ready to step forward as both a basic and applied field. It
has a number of successes it can point to right now,” he says. “It
is on sound ground that we can begin to think about how to evolve on
purpose… in the real way that culture, companies, individuals,
couples, communities, neighborhoods, and fields of study have always
done: through healthy variation that’s selected, retained, and
fitted to context in a multidimensional and multilevel way.”

Hayes notes that a principled alternative way of culture
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“one in which we begin to see that it’s our obligation as
citizens, as family members to create a context in which trust sharing
and cooperation can grow,” he says. “That isn’t namby-pamby,
it’s not weak, it’s not Pollyanna, it’s not anything goes.
It’s the salve on the wounds that are created by selfishness, and a
vision that we can live out.”

We humans do our best, he notes, when relationships, families,
businesses, and groups cooperate.

“Why wouldn’t you want to scale that? Why wouldn’t you want a
model for how to do that? The problem is that our models have been
mostly part of [colloquial] wisdom and spiritual traditions, and
they’ve been sliced and diced by the modern world,” Hayes says.
“People with narrow interests have stepped forward and have sold
humanity a bill of goods that is false.”

_This article was produced by __Local Peace Economy_
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project of the Independent Media Institute._

_APRIL M. SHORT is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and
producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy
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project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as
a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff
writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has
been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon
and many others._

* human evolution
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* cooperation
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* collaborations
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