Ultrasociality: The Key to Human History?
The concept of “ultrasociality” is becoming increasing popular as a tool to understand the characteristics and the evolution of human society. It is a concept taken from evolutionary biology that describes how some species attain evolutionary success by means of collaboration among individuals. The extreme form of this idea is found with social insects; ants and bees, whose behavior is usually termed “eusociality” (“the good sociality”). Humans don’t arrive at the degree of hyperspecialization of some insect societies, but they are more socially specialized than most mammals, hence the term “ultrasociality”.
The idea that collaboration is a fundamental factor in evolution is becoming more and more popular in biology. We are seeing the decline of some rather restrictive concepts that described evolution strictly as the result of individual competition alone. In the past, these concepts led to the idea that life was a battle of everyone against everyone else and the idea spread from biology to other economics and to politics. The consequence was a series of egregious disasters; for instance, the development of a style of management that encourages people in engaging in cutthroat competition with their coworkers. An example of how disastrous this idea can be is that of the management of Enron by Jeff Skilling, presently in jail for various felony charges (as described in Turchin’s book).
