Believing in each other

The apt above drawing by 'Shout' goes with Natalie Angier's Times review of David Sloan Wilson's Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives.

It's a pretty thought-provoking review; doesn't waste much time jabbering about religions, instead has paragraphs like this:

Wilson explores the many fascinating ways in which humans are the consummate group-thinking, team-playing animal. The way we point things out to one another, for example, is unique among primates. “Apes raised with people learn to point for things that they want but never point to call the attention of their human caretakers to objects of mutual interest,” Wilson writes, “something that human infants start doing around their first birthday.” The eyes of other apes are dark across their entire span and thus are hard to follow, but the contrast between the white sclera and colored iris of the human eye makes it difficult for people to conceal the direction in which they are looking. In the interdependent, egalitarian context of the tribe, the ancestral human setting, Wilson says, “it becomes advantageous for members of the team to share information, turning the eyes into organs of communication in addition to organs of vision.” Humans are equipped with all the dispositional tools needed to establish and maintain order in the commons. Studies have revealed a deep capacity for empathy, a willingness to trust others and become instant best friends; and an equally strong urge to punish cheaters, to exact revenge against those who buck group rules for private gain.

Of course, even as humans bond together in groups and behave with impressive civility toward their neighbors, they are capable of treating those outside the group with ruthless savagery. Wilson is not naïve, and he recognizes the ease with which humans fall into an us-versus-them mind-set. Yet he is a self-described optimist, and he believes that the golden circles of we-ness, the conditions that encourage entities at every stratum of life to stop competing and instead pool their labors into a communally acting mega-entity, can be expanded outward like ripples on a pond until they encompass all of us — that the entire human race can evolve the culturally primed if not genetically settled incentive to see our futures for what they are, inexorably linked on the lone blue planet we share.