Completing the Darwinian Evolution

* Book: This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Evolution. David Sloan Wilson,.

URL =

"I describe my book as ‘updating The Phenomenon of Man’."

Discussion

Source: the Podcast discussion between the author and Ken Wilber

Corey DeVos:

"Things like goodness, altruism, and empathy ...only makes sense when we recognize that the group is also exerting its own selection pressures — and in fact, one of the most significant drivers of evolution is this churning back-and-forth tension between individual selection (e.g. selfishness) and group selection (e.g. selflessness) at every level.

In addition to these dual individual and group selection pressures, Ken makes yet another distinction between exterior and interior pressures, within both individuals (e.g. “conscious evolution”, or the primal interior drives of an individual, vs. exterior genetic factors of an organism) and groups (e.g “cultural evolution”, or the pressures within our shared interiors, vs. environmental pressures in our shared exteriors).

Taken all together, this otters a far more comprehensive view of human evolution, one that truly leaves nothing out or tries to minimize and reduce one set of evolutionary pressures to another. And it’s a view that you can push all the way down the evolutionary ladder if you like, even to the very first particles following the Big Bang.

Most importantly, it’s a view that suggests an evolutionary roadmap that can lead us out of this era of discord and disruption and toward a far more sane and sustainable future — especially if we can return to the same small-group strategies that have been so successful for our own species’ rise to prominence:

1. Become more mindful of your own values and goals

2. Become a member of worthwhile groups

3. Make your group strong by implementing the core and appropriate auxiliary design principles

4. Make your group a healthy cell in a multi-cellular society

It is often said that humanity represents the process of evolution becoming self-aware. We are a universe awakening to itself — and part of that awakening is a capacity to reflect upon the various core design principles and strategies that have been guiding our evolutionary emergence ever since the Big Bang, and to then consciously employ these same strategies in order to create a genuinely multi-cellular society for the human superorganism."

(https://integrallife.com/evolving-a-multi-cellular-society/)