Human Sociality Debate

Humans are both. Empathic and cooperative with their tribe, vicious and xenophobic towards other tribes. It's a perfectly cromulent survival strategy. Organized groups larger than some 200 members are a very modern thing.

Is that the natural state of the world? Seems like group cooperation is the natural state and our ability to collaborate in larger groups than any other species is what allowed us to rise to the top. Excessive individual competition leads to both combatants taking injuries and then dying of infection or being too weak to fend off predators.See: flocks of birds, ant colonies, prides of lions, shoals of fish, pods of whales, any social, religious, military or financial grouping of humans, clown

Animals are stuck in local maxima (betrayal in the Prisoner's Dilemma). A more evolved group might discover and be able to reach the global maximum (solidarity in the Prisoner's Dilemma). Imagine if tigers or sharks developed pack hunting, or the octopus became more pro-social.Also, multi-species symbiotic relationships are quite common in the animal kingdom. It would be surprising if that weren't true at other scales (and if it were limited to the sci-fi trope of "worker

Encouraging human interactions to operate along chimp-like hierarchies instead of bonobo-like co-ops is why we see this behaviour everywhere.https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Science/Study-compares-peac...

You're asking questions which have more to do with our own higher cognition instincts and how our mind factors social behavior, rather than how an ants sees it. So maybe the examples should move towards how society deals with parasites who lack critical social features like empathy, morality, honesty. And if studies are correct, it seems we let them rise to the top.

Humans are biologically non-social?

There's something more fundamental, though - humans are a "social species". Evolutionarily, we are adapted to requiring (generally) at least something of a group / tribe. Other organisms solve survival (of the species, ultimately) problems differently - incredible and 'cheap' reproductive capacity, strength and versatility enough to be much more solitary as a rule, etc. - those niches are somewhat to rather different.In any case, at this point in human history es

Yeah I'm not sure. I think ants are an extreme case, but I do think groups of humans have similar sorts of "mechanisms".The book Sapiens repeats this over and over and I tend to agree. Religion, government, corporations, etc. are ways in which we cooperate with thousands or millions of others. We don't have to have the exact same genome, and it's not perfect cooperation, but there's something there.

Competition is not the only response to being one entity among many, and it is not even necessarily the most reasonable response. Cooperation is also possible, and it is one of the necessary elements in every human organization, from the family to global cultures. We have civilization because we are to some degree able to cooperate, and if you simply turn up the dial on that trait, it is easy to imagine that other creatures could exist who were even better cooperators - and who would be collecti

Imo, one of the hallmarks of superoganism is the propensity to sacrifice ones existence for the survival of the superorganism. Humanity in this sense fails this test because of a strong sense of individualism amongst us.I do believe we do have a bunch tribal behaviour up our sleeves, but it pales in comparison to what other superoganisms have developed over millions of years of evolution.