Here’s an essay I wrote for school. They’re getting better but it’s still not quite on the point enough. I’ve read too much pulp science-fiction I guess, I can’t stay on topic. Oh, and the group selection part was outdated when I wrote it.
The Social Animal
After reading “The Lord of the Flies” by William Golding, it's easy to come away with the feeling that humans are innately evil, individualistic and self-serving, and that morality and law and society must all be thrust upon them from the top down. One could say that it was Golding's theme, considering how Ralph “wept for... the darkness of man's heart”i at the end of the novel, and it’s a popular sentiment encouraged by the Christian concept of original sin. Unfortunately, despite its appeal, this idea isn't true. Humans are not savages; on the contrary, they are the most social and civilized beings on the planet. Whether or not this makes them good or evil depends on the situation.
In Golding's book, humanity's social nature is definitely doing the devil's work. The boys, separated from the hive by miles of ocean, are driven to create rituals to bond and make them feel less alone. At first these are benign, like the assembly they form that resembles the political structures of their homeland. Then the rituals turn ugly. The children develop the bloodthirsty hunt, and then the dance and chant, to quell their insecurity at being separated from the larger society. Ralph realizes at the disintegration of his tribe that he lost followers because he was unwilling to provide rituals like Jack's hunt and dance. Upon Piggy's suggestion that his followers have only gone over to Jack's group for meat, Ralph interjects “And for hunting, and for pretending to be a tribe, and putting on war-paint”.ii While these rituals grow, so does an irrational fear of “the beast”, caused by their fulminant discomfort at being alone for the first time. It is the combination of ritual and fear of the beast that eventually causes the death of Simon.
The real world, too, has its share of problems that can be attributed to man's social nature. Schoolyard bullying and Nazi Germany are classic examples; in both, social insecurity encouraged violence. For more recent evidence you need look no further than the internet's plague of beating and fight videos. In these, people are assaulted and brutally beaten, not for one individual's amusement, but for the respect of a peer group. For example, in April 2008 eight teenage girls kidnapped and attacked another teenage girl so that they could upload the video to an internet video-sharing website.iii Such a crime would not have been committed if humans were not social creatures.
Man's sociability can't be all bad, however, or else we wouldn't have it. There are great benefits to living and cooperating in a group. The specialization of work that allows for separate potters, hunters, and builders, wouldn't be possible if you couldn't rely on others to trade food for product, meaning that none of the specialized products like pots or tools would ever be made. That is, you can't spend all your time making good spears if you're not sure there'll be someone to trade you food for them, and this is only probable in a society. Individuals are much more protected in a group than by themselves, hence the saying “united we stand, divided we fall”. Also, in cooperative groups diverse mates are readily available, and much less likely to cause genetic funny-business than incest.
There are many hypotheses about how morality and cooperation (group dependence) could have evolved. One idea is group selection, which basically says that evolution does not act solely on the level of the individual organism; once organisms have formed rudimentary social groups, change in the dominance of these groups over time is also subject to evolution's forces, and different traits will be selected for at the group level than at the individual level. Therefore, though selfishness might possibly be the ideal phenotype for an individual and thus become more prominent at the individual level in a certain group, altruism is definitely the most beneficial phenotype for members of a group to have. Individual hooligans might be selected over individual saints, but on the whole groups with more altruistic populations outlive selfish groups. Considering the preponderance of archaeological evidence for massive prehistorical tribe warfare, it's very possible that this is how our sociality came about.
An amusing example of this comes from an experiment published in, of all places, a journal called “Poultry Science”. Experimenters first tried breeding only the individual hens that produced the most eggs. After a couple of generations, the trend was clear – egg production was decreasing, and chicken hostility was increasing rapidly. However, when experimenters tried selecting for chickens at the group level, placing the chickens in small groups and letting breed only the groups that produced most, egg production skyrocketed. This shows that group selection selects for vastly different traits than individual selection, and yields incredibly different result populations. In humans the results could have included a dominant social urge that led to larger groups and higher forms of civilization, and a protective fear of separation during migration that led to the discomfort felt by the boys in Lord of the Flies.iv
One need only look around at schools, cities, and offices to see that humanity craves humanity, and group selection is one possible way that this could have come about. If we didn't have that instinct, that same frantic urge to belong to something larger than oneself that drove Jack's tribe to put on war paint in “Lord of the Flies”, both Nazi Germany and Mother Teresa’s hospices would never have existed. Our innate sociality is part of what makes us human, but as with any great power, it can be used for good or evil.
i William Golding, Lord of the Flies (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1954), 225
ii Ibid., 163
iii Susan Jacobson, “8 arrested in beating of 16-year-old Lakeland cheerleader”, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 8 April 2008
iv Muir, W.M., and D.L. Liggett, Group selection for adaptation to multiple-hen cages: selection program and responses. Poultry Science 74 (1995.) : 101