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Introduction
To The GroupsRus Essays
Man
is not alone. Sorry, Woman is not alone. Anyway, both are
part of a group. Men are a group. Women are a group. People
are a group. Man-hating women are a group. Women-hating men
are a group. Cat-lovers are a group. Chinese chefs are a group.
There are a lot
of groups, and I belong to lots of them. So do you.
How many groups
do you belong to? What part of you doesn't belong to a group?
Ah, stop!
You are a unique
individual. Absolutely. You believe it, I believe it, everyone
believes it. Of course. But again, what part of you doesn't
belong to a group?
You are a Canadian
(group) woman (group) and you are married (group) with children
(group). You drive a car (group) but you also have a bicycle
(group) and sometimes you even walk on the sidewalk (group).
You have pets (group), you play netball (group), you are a
lawyer (group), your family came from Kiev (group), you are
a fan of Eminem (group), you are a lapsed (group) Orthodox
Christian (group), you paint water-colours (group). You have
a summer house (group) and it is on the lake (group).
But you are unique.
It's true that
nobody else has exactly the same combination of group memberships
as you do, you can easily agree, but of course that has got
nothing to do with uniqueness. It is more a question of personality,
perhaps, or of other, less definable characteristics. Eventually,
for many people, it is a matter of 'soul'.
From an evolutionary
point of view, there is no reason to suppose that individuals
with distinct personalities would have any reason to exist
in the absence of a forum in which individuality has value,
meaning, that it somehow increases the 'inclusive fitness'
(jargon for evolutionary adaptiveness) of its possessor.
In our evolutionary
history, individual separateness in a physical sense is of
very long standing, although some other types of animal never
developed it, or even abandoned it. So also is the division
of individuals into two kinds, male and female. Other, physical
distinctions exist among us, and play a role in mating or
in survival, such as eye or skin colour, strength, height,
and so on. Some mental attributes also go way back, perhaps,
such as courage and propensity to nurture kin (most often
children). Such attributes can be observed in many other species.
But humans are unique among species in having developed a
wide range of 'social' emotions and behaviours which are nonetheless
genetically encoded just as much as height or eye colour.
Some of the more
basic of these social emotions or behaviours also evolved
among other species, such as ants or wolves, which are often
termed 'social' species as a result; but the range and depth
of human social emotions and behaviours far outstrips anything
to be observed elsewhere, even among non-human primates, who
evidently began on the road we humans later followed.
There is a fair
degree of consensus among evolutionary biologists and in related
disciplines that these complex human behaviours - which one
can see as the foundation of 'personality' - evolved during
the period that humans began to live in social groups. Other
things that happened during the same period (roughly speaking
between 2m and 250,000 years ago) were the arrival of bi-pedality,
the rapid enlargement of the human brain, the expansion of
consciousness, and the development of language to supplement
and then largely replace physical grooming as a means of social
interaction. All of these innovations are tied together in
a complex web of cause and effect, whose details are much
debated. But each one is eventually necessary to all the others;
that too is not disputed.
Of course it
seems to make sense that a wide repertoire of facial expressions
(only humans have such complex facial muscles), emotional
displays and meaningful sounds would have developed as part
of living in a larger group of people, and especially so as
that group began to display complex social behaviours such
as those of the 'hunter-gatherer' group.
It is the next
step that has people sucking their teeth (facial emotional
display). And the next step is to assert that human individuality
as it is experienced by modern humans could not have existed
(and could not have been perceived either by the individual
or others) until this battery of social attributes had emerged.
It might be fairer to call them 'cognitive' attributes, but
on this group-oriented site they are going to be treated as
if they are indissolubly linked to social situations.
Social situations
are of course not limited to those that might have existed
during the evolution of early homo sapiens, and the later
history of human societies encompasses a host of 'cultural'
innovations which are to be thought of as being passed from
generation to generation through education or by being recorded
outside the brain, in books, paintings or nowadays on the
Internet.
The thesis of
the Groups R Us site is that those genetically encoded human
attributes that are expressed through 'individual personality'
evolved largely in a group environment, and that human individuality
as it is experienced by a person has to be understood, and
can mostly be described, in terms of group memberships. Put
in another and more blatant way, individual personality is
a tool of groupishness (or groupedness) and developed because
it had adaptive benefit.
As seen from
the perspective of a believer in the central importance of
groups to human individuality, the message of this site is
an immensely hopeful one for humans, because it provides both
an explanation of the anomie or social divisiveness that is
the curse of modern society and at the same time provides
a cure for this social disease.
One disclaimer
needs to be mentioned right at the outset: this is not a group
selectionist site. We are strictly Darwinian! (Group selectionism,
very popular during the second half of the 20th century, proposes
that evolution can take place at the group level. It is discredited,
but can still be found here and there.) GroupsRus accepts
that genetic evolution takes place in the individual, although
it is perfectly feasible that it may be influenced by a group
environment, as was the case with language.
Cultural evolution
is a different matter: once humans began to be able to transmit
their social constructs to succeeding generations through
education and written records, evolution began to operate
at the level of society. But a human born away from that education
or those records would be no more evolved than his forbear
tens of thousands of years ago.
The Groups R
Us site has three main purposes:
- To present
the evidence from evolutionary biology and other disciplines
that leads to a 'groupish' view of modern humans. This is
the goal of a number of essays in the Resources section,
particularly:
- To speculate
on how a return to 'groupish' ways might take place and
what it could achieve for humanity. Other essays in the
Resources section address this topic, particularly:
- To present
nand comment on relevant news stories from disciplines such
as evolutionary biology and anthropology.
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