The Acme of Evolution

I grew up reading Calvin & Hobbes every day in the newspaper (I graduated high school in 1989). This is one that amused me so well I've always remembered it.

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I don't have any deep thoughts about it aside from being amused by the how effectively it critiques egocentrism, I merely open with it because it mentions the topic of evolution. That is my topic today, a book all about evolution--in many unexpected ways.

It is This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution by David Sloan Wilson. And since apparently I'm motivated to write something like those recipe posts that everyone hates, telling stories about myself for a long time before every getting to the food or actual recipe, I'm going to meander my way to the book.

I'll start with a thought about the picture to the left.

The image on cover of the book reminds me of a post I wrote just over ten years ago, I Think I'm Chaotic Lawful. My haltingly articulated thoughts in that meditation mesh nicely with Wilson's thoughts in his book. The book cover shows a host of people lining up inside an upward-pointing arrow. My post was spurred by the image of an A-frame church, the congregation contained within while vowing during a baptism to be a community aligned toward a common purpose. But, I wrote, "that orientation and direction for moving forward really only works when not imposed by an authority but when negotiated and agreed upon willingly." The group decides together what is best for the group.

Religiously, politically, societally, organizationally--in all of my communities, even simply the human one--my goal reflects the experience of that community in the church: to find a way for us to negotiate the [scope and orientation of the arrow] so it is something we can all agree on without sacrificing who we are, so we find Common Purpose as a whole and all willingly choose to align our individual journeys all in the same general direction. We create the law together, so that within that we have our freedom and chaos and Autonomy to be true to who we are while being true to each other.

I think Wilson would say that my thoughts are in line with what he is proposing in his book. In fact, he has a section of his book, a section I have scanned to share with some of my groups at work, about the Core Design Principles of groups sharing common resources. The first is having a "strong group identity and understanding of purpose" and the rest are concerned about ways to regulate the functioning of the group while assuring autonomy. Individuals with a common purpose.

It is not an exaggeration to say that widespread implementation of this approach can make the world a better place--although it is important to add that relationships among groups (CDPs 7-8) must be managed in the same way as relationships among individuals within groups (CPDs 1-6). Otherwise, we are faced with the specter of groups that function well for themselves but at the expense of other groups and the larger-scale society as a whole.

The group decides together what is best for the group, and the groups decide together what is best for the groups, scaling up to eventually include everyone. Wilson's view of evolution is that individuals who make the cut of natural selection are those who work well with their groups. Evolution favors teamwork, cooperation, and alignment toward common purpose.

That is true for humans, as well as all other types of organisms. Cells, genes, plants, animals, and everything. The principle scales to all levels. His book had me go back and read Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! for the first time in a long time. That re-read confirms what I remember: an elephant hears a speck of dust speak, and comes to learn there is an entire community of microscopic people living on that speck of dust. He heeds their pleas and decides to protect them. Horton's group sees his aberrant behavior as a threat to group norms and decides to exclude him, until the tiny Whos living on the speck band together to make enough noise that everyone can hear them.

It is an excellent study in in-group and between-group dynamics, but that's not why it came to mind. No, I recalled it for it's thoughts about scale. I've long had vague, uniformed thoughts about how a close-up view of our current understanding of particle physics looks awfully similar to our view of the universe; all these physical bodies orbiting and swirling around each other, that the microscopic and the immense don't seem all that different but for scale. Each speck of dust could be a galaxy, the complexity and shape and relationships seem so similar. The universe is made of galaxies made of galaxies made of galaxies, on and on infinitely into each microparticle everywhere.

I think those ideas had their genesis in my reading of Horton Hears a Who when I was young. A person's a person, no matter how small. I don't actually know if the physics I just described plays out, but it does for biological evolution. According to Wilson, all organisms are composed of groups of smaller organisms down to the lowest level.

Every entity that is currently described as an organism, such as a bacterial cell, a nucleated cell, or a multicellular organism, is a highly regulated society of lower-level units that behave as they do only because they were selected as groups.

And:

To call a multicellular organism a society of lower-level elements is no longer metaphorical. It is literally the case that we are groups of groups of groups and that we qualify as organisms only because of our degree of functional organization.

Every speck of dust really is home to a community of Whos. Many of them.

Evolution critiques egocentrism.

The acme of evolution is cooperation.

So, finally, my review of This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution by David Sloan Wilson:

We generally think of evolution as a purely physical process, happening only at the level of genetics and DNA. Yet that is not the way Charles Darwin conceived it nor how evolutionary biologist Wilson understands it. In fact, genes and DNA were not yet discovered during Darwin’s time, and he saw heredity happening through many varied mechanisms—particularly in humans. From his Descent of Man, for instance:

There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase.

In this book, Wilson advocates an “evolutionary worldview,” applying principles from biology to all areas of knowledge. He is intentionally wide-ranging and multidisciplinary, finding examples from not only biology, but also psychology, sociology, education, economics, business, and more—examples of evolution in action—and synthesizes them into one overarching perspective. To paraphrase, evolution is groups working together to improve and grow through trial-and-error learning. From the level of genes and cells, bacteria and simple organisms, scaling up through plants and animals to humans and cultures, the lesson of evolution is “that the primary way to survive and reproduce [is] through teamwork.”

Individual bees take part in the economy of the hive in the same way that individual neurons take place in the economy of the brain. . . .

The same story can be told for the genes, cells, and organs of multicellular organisms, which are the gold standard for a well-functioning society. To call a multicellular organism a society of lower-level elements is no longer metaphorical. It is literally the case that we are groups of groups of groups and that we qualify as organisms only because of our degree of functional organization, which evolved by between-organism selection.

Early in the book, Wilson describes the functioning of our immune systems. Our bodies are constantly producing a wide variety of cells meant to combat foreign and harmful invaders. Because not all invaders are the same, different versions of the cells produced will be more successful than others. The body produces more of the successful ones, fewer of the ones that aren’t. Trial-and-error; try a lot of things, keep what works, learn from what doesn’t to make improvements in what is tried next. As a group working together. That is evolution constantly happening within our bodies every day, our immune systems continuously adapting and evolving to changing circumstances.

Some adaptive attempts are successful, but in the wrong ways for long-term evolutionary success. “Evolution frequently results in behaviors that are good for me but not you, us but not them, or all of us today without regard for future generations.” Cancer, for instance. Cancer cells are highly successful at their main goal, reproducing and growing. Yet, ultimately, they kill the organism they are a part of, leading to their own demise. They are successful in a selfish, short-term way, but over the long-range, evolutionary perspective, they are unsuccessful and don't last. Ultimately, what matters, what lasts, is not selfish success but group success. It is the adaptations that benefit the group as a whole that eventually win out.

Wilson describes an experiment with egg-laying hens divided into groups. The scientists wanted to learn how to most effectively increase egg production. At first, they took the offspring of the most productive hen from each group and grouped them. Each succeeding generation produced less, and by the fifth generation the hens were killing their groupmates. That happened because the traits that made the first generation most productive in their groups were bullying and social dominance, and as those traits passed on they magnified. The scientists also tried keeping the offspring of the most productive group as a unit. By the fifth generation, they were conclusively outproducing any of the initial groups—and getting along well, because it was the cohesive, peaceful, group traits that dominated. It is the adaptations that benefit the group as a whole that eventually win out.

Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.

That lesson scales up to humans, and heredity occurs not only at the genetic level, but at the learned, cultural level as well. Cultural evolution is just as important and influential as genetic evolution. “Individuals are products of social interactions,” and . . .

Small groups are a fundamental unit of human social organization. Individuals cannot be understood except in the context of small groups, and large-scale societies need to be seen as a kind of multicellular organism comprising small groups.

We need to change our perspective, the lenses through which we see and understand ourselves, to an “evolutionary worldview” that defines humans not as individuals, but, first and foremost, as small group members, shaped by evolution as social organisms who are successful for our cooperation and teamwork more than any other traits.

The challenge of this book is to show that policy is a branch of biology. . . . To view policy as a branch of biology means that our proposed actions must be deeply informed by evolution. Around the world, we should be consulting evolutionary theory at least as much as we consult our constitutions, political ideologies, sacred texts, and personal philosophies.

That’s a long summary, but it’s the most concise I can come up with to properly represent Wilson’s thinking. It’s a complex argument that requires a good deal of detail to move from point A to point B, since B is such a shift in orientation from the A we’re used to, so much that it is, to borrow a word from the book’s subtitle, a bit of a revolution.

Wilson’s journey from A to B in the book is, of course, even more detailed and gradual. I found it almost too slow at the beginning, as he starts with historical context and background information to correct our assumptions about evolution before digging into his proper thesis. Nevertheless, I also found it thrilling. His argument is persuasive and, to me, highly appealing. Most importantly, but the time he reaches point B he has moved on from biology as we normally think of it to applications in more relevant domains. The “policy” section.

I’ll end with this longer excerpt from the book near the end, a great example of what it means to have an “evolutionary worldview” outside of the traditional bounds of biology:

From an evolutionary perspective, failures are the current frontier of adaptation. Every failure provides an opportunity for a variation-and-selection process to go to work to improve the efficiency of the whole operation.

In the past, Toyota assembly plants had cords called “andons” hanging down from the ceiling that operators were instructed to pull whenever an inefficiency occurred at their station. These cords, which have been replaced by more sophisticated monitoring equipment in modern Toyota plants, functioned like the pain receptors of a multicellular organism or the alarm signaling systems of social insect colonies. Just as poking a hole in a termite mound results in a swarm of activity to repair the damage, pulling the andon resulted in a swarm of activity to solve the problem. Plant managers had their offices located on the shop floor, rather than in a separate location, so that they could be directly involved in working with the lower-level employees who encountered the problem. Since the assembly line workers are closest to the problem, their knowledge is often essential for coming up with a solution, so that decision-making becomes both a bottom-up and a top-down process focused on solving problems at a very fine level of detail, rather than managers issuing directives on the basis of aggregated data such as quarterly reports.

When a tiny change is made in a complex system, the consequences can be magnified by the interactions among elements of the system. This is why the weather is so unpredictable, which gave rise to the term “butterfly effect”—a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can result in a hurricane in Honduras. In an automobile assembly plant, a small improvement in one part of the system can easily disrupt other parts of the system. No one is smart enough to anticipate all of the indirect effects, so it is necessary to experiment. Toyota has learned from experience to implement only one change at a time and to monitor the effect on the whole system before adopting the change. Even making a few changes at the same time would result in interactions that are too difficult to track.

With a monitoring and improvement system in place, Toyota sets its production quotas so that failures will occur. . . . This decreases productivity in the short term but increases it over the long term by revealing and eliminating inefficiencies in the whole system.

That's the shortest I could make my official review, but since this is my blog I get to make this post as long as I want. I noted many other passages in addition to those above. Here are the extended excerpts; you could almost think of them as an abridged version of his main argument:

Darwin knew nothing about genes and formulated his theory in terms of variation, selection, and heredity--a resemblance between parents and offspring due to any mechanism. Once the science of genetics was born in the early twentieth century, however, genes came to be treated as the only mechanism of inheritance, as if there were no other way for offspring to resemble their parents. This is patently false, but the study of cultural inheritance mechanisms did not re-emerge within the biological sciences until the 1970s.

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While goodness posed a problem for Darwin, the solution was not far to seek. Social behaviors are almost invariably expressed in groups that are small compared to the total evolving population—a fish school, a bird flock, a pride of lions, or a human tribe. This means that an evolving population is not just a population of individuals but also a population of groups. If individuals vary in their propensity for good and evil, then this variation will exist at two levels: variation among individuals within groups, and variation among groups within the entire population. While goodness might be vulnerable to evil within any particular group, groups whose members are loving, honest, brave, etc., to each other will robustly outcompete groups whose members are greedy, murderous, selfish, etc., to each other. Here is one of the passages from Darwin’s Descent of Man where he describes natural selection as a two-level process and relates it to human morality:

It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase.

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Individuals are themselves groups of cells and genes. Single-species social groups such as fish schools, bird flocks, and lion prides exist in ecosystems composed of many species and a nested hierarchy of scales, ultimately making up the whole biosphere. In the human world we have genes, individuals, families, villages, cities, provinces, and nations, all nested within what Marshall McLuhan dubbed the Global Village. The tug-of-war between levels of selection that I described for individuals in groups exists for all levels. What’s good for me can be bad for my family. What’s good for my family can be bad for my clan—all the way up to what’s good for my nation can be bad for the Global Village.

In short, two-level selection needs to be expanded into a theory of multilevel selection (MLS), from genes to the planet.

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To the best of our current knowledge, our distant ancestors evolved the ability to suppress bullying and other disruptive self-serving behaviors within groups, like multicellular organisms evolved ways to suppress cancer cells, so that the primary way to survive and reproduce was through teamwork. . . .

Our moral psychology is the societal equivalent of cancer-suppressing mechanisms in multicellular organisms. The coercive side of morality is required to suppress the potential for disruptive self-seeking behaviors within groups. Once the coercive side is established, then it becomes safe for group members to freely help each other without fear of exploitation.

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If you were to ask the simple question “Are genes the only way that offspring resemble their parents?” even a novice would be able to answer “No.” Offspring speak the same language as their parents, for example, and this has nothing to do with genes (other than the role genes play in language acquisition). Myriad other traits are also transmitted culturally rather than genetically. Shouldn’t cultural inheritance mechanisms be included along with genetic inheritance mechanisms in the study of evolution?

. . .

Once we become attuned to it, the entire pageant of human history, starting approximately 100,000 years ago, can be seen as evolution at high speed, made possible by the transmission of learned information across generations. Our departure from Africa and colonization of the rest of the planet; our ability to inhabit all climatic zones and dozens of ecological niches as hunter-gatherers; our ability to grow food as farmers; the advent of writing; and the exploitation of fossil fuels were all made possible by the generational transfer of information. . . .

So transgenerational human cultural change counts as an evolutionary process, similar to genetic evolution, the immune system, and our capacity to learn as individuals.

. . .

With this perspective, you can begin to think of yourself as not just a product of your genes, and not just a product of your personal experience, but also as one of many members of your culture who collectively contain a vast repository of information learned and passed down from previous generations. This makes you part of something larger than yourself. The information has not just been passed down, but it has also been winnowed through the generations, leaving us with a set of beliefs and practices that helped us to cohere as groups.

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Multilevel selection theory tells us that something similar to team-level selection took place in our species for thousands of generations, resulting in adaptations for teamwork that are baked into the genetic architecture of our minds. Absorbing this fact leads to the conclusion that small groups are a fundamental unit of human social organization. Individuals cannot be understood except in the context of small groups, and large-scale societies need to be seen as a kind of multicellular organism comprising small groups.

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What is an individual person? The fact that we have such a clear physical boundary and that all sorts of individual measurements can be taken on each of us leads easily to the wrong answer. Consider the chickens that we met in chapter 4. Hens were housed in cages and selected on the basis of their egg-laying ability. It’s easy to count the number of eggs that emerge from the hind end of a hen and to regard it as an individual trait. Yet, when the most productive hen from each group was selected to breed the next generation of hens, egg productivity went down, not up, and after five generations the experiment had resulted in a breed of psychopaths.

The reason for this perverse result, as we saw in chapter 4, is that the most productive hen achieved her productivity by bullying the other hens. What seemed like an individual trait because you could measure it in an individual turned out to be the product of social interactions. In the parallel experiment, whole groups of hens were selected on the basis of their combined productivity. This experiment resulted in a breed of contented hens and an increase in productivity over the course of five generations because selecting at the group level favored cooperative rather than aggressive social interactions.

Thus, not only do the chickens serve as a parable for the problem of goodness, the focus of chapter 4, but also for the concept of individuals as products of social interactions, the focus of this chapter. Like the chickens, what can easily be measured about us as individuals, such as our statures, our personalities, and our physical and mental health, are not individual traits. Instead, they are the result of social processes that stretch back to before we were born—indeed, all the way back to when our distant ancestors were born if we take all evolutionary processes into account. Each person is an active participant in the social process, so there is plenty of scope for individual agency, but the idea that any one of us is “self-made” is a fiction.

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The reason that I began this trio of chapters at the group level is to emphasize the primacy of the small group as a unit of selection in human evolution. I began this chapter on individuals by stressing that individuals are products of social interactions. Just because I can measure something about you, such as your grade point average, your physical health, or your mental health, doesn’t mean that it’s an essential property of you. Jim Coan’s work shows that the human brain is wired to seamlessly integrate personal and social resources. Tony Biglan’s work demonstrates that nurturance, or prosociality, is a master variable for human welfare. Now we have learned through the work of Walton and Cohen that success in college depends strongly on a sense of belonging, a feeling that we are part of “Us” and not “Them.” If a one-hour intervention cut the minority academic deficit in half, what would a more comprehensive effort to increase a sense of belonging in marginalized students produce?

Also, it is the perception of belonging that counts. Walton and Cohen did nothing to alter the lives of the participants. They only altered the worldview of the participants, touching upon another major theme of this book: that the theory decides what can be observed.

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Individual bees take part in the economy of the hive in the same way that individual neurons take place in the economy of the brain. . . .

The same story can be told for the genes, cells, and organs of multicellular organisms, which are the gold standard for a well-functioning society. To call a multicellular organism a society of lower-level elements is no longer metaphorical. It is literally the case that we are groups of groups of groups and that we qualify as organisms only because of our degree of functional organization, which evolved by between-organism selection.

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Between-group competition can take many forms, including but not restricted to direct warfare. Darwin stressed that nature is not always red in tooth and claw. A drought-resistant plant will outcompete a drought-susceptible plant in the desert, without the plants interacting with each other at all. The same goes for selection among human groups. A good example is the respected accorded to elders and deceased ancestors. Old people could easily be dominated by younger and stronger members of a group to the youngers’ relative advantage (within-group selection), but such groups would not benefit from the knowledge possessed by older people (between-group selection). The between-group advantage could take the form of remembering the location of water holes during a drought or recalling a winning strategy in direct between-group competition.

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Evolution frequently results in behaviors that are good for me but not you, us but not them, or all of us today without regard for future generations.

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From an evolutionary perspective, failures are the current frontier of adaptation. Every failure provides an opportunity for a variation-and-selection process to go to work to improve the efficiency of the whole operation.

In the past, Toyota assembly plants had cords called “andons” hanging down from the ceiling that operators were instructed to pull whenever an inefficiency occurred at their station. These cords, which have been replaced by more sophisticated monitoring equipment in modern Toyota plants, functioned like the pain receptors of a multicellular organism or the alarm signaling systems of social insect colonies. Just as poking a hole in a termite mound results in a swarm of activity to repair the damage, pulling the andon resulted in a swarm of activity to solve the problem. Plant managers had their offices located on the shop floor, rather than in a separate location, so that they could be directly involved in working with the lower-level employees who encountered the problem. Since the assembly line workers are closest to the problem, their knowledge is often essential for coming up with a solution, so that decision-making becomes both a bottom-up and a top-down process focused on solving problems at a very fine level of detail, rather than managers issuing directives on the basis of aggregated data such as quarterly reports.

When a tiny change is made in a complex system, the consequences can be magnified by the interactions among elements of the system. This is why the weather is so unpredictable, which gave rise to the term “butterfly effect”—a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can result in a hurricane in Honduras. In an automobile assembly plant, a small improvement in one part of the system can easily disrupt other parts of the system. No one is smart enough to anticipate all of the indirect effects, so it is necessary to experiment. Toyota has learned from experience to implement only one change at a time and to monitor the effect on the whole system before adopting the change. Even making a few changes at the same time would result in interactions that are too difficult to track.

With a monitoring and improvement system in place, Toyota sets its production quotas so that failures will occur. . . . This decreases productivity in the short term but increases it over the long term by revealing and eliminating inefficiencies in the whole system.

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Humans are a product of genetic multilevel selection operating primarily at the scale of small groups, which has both positive and negative implications for creating a modern innovative society. On the positive side, we are innately prosocial and inclined to join in cooperative enterprises, which includes policing those who don’t cooperate. On the negative side, we typically confine our prosociality to small homogeneous groups, regarding outsiders with distrust.

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The right theory is based on the cultural evolution of complex systems. It notes that complex systems cannot be optimized by separately optimizing their parts. We must have in mind the performance of whole systems, which is the target of selection, and improve performance with a process of variation and selection of best practices.

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Do superorganisms exist? The answer to this question is unequivocally “yes.” An entity counts as an organism to the degree that it is a unit of selection in multilevel evolution. Every entity that is currently described as an organism, such as a bacterial cell, a nucleated cell, or a multicellular organism, is a highly regulated society of lower-level units that behave as they do only because they were selected as groups. To the degree that selection also operates within groups, these same lower-level units can evolve to be cancerous. Eusocial insect colonies qualify as organisms because they are the primary units of selection, even when the colony members are physically dispersed. The fact that these ideas apply with equal force to human genetic and cultural evolution is a scientific breakthrough of the first rank.

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We are usually so focused on our disagreements that we lose sight of our common ground. Nearly all of us think that it’s right to avoid disruptive self-serving behaviors and to cooperate with others to achieve common goals, at least within a defined moral circle. That is why I could invite you to describe a morally perfect individual in chapter 4, knowing in advance what you were going to say. We disagree on how we define our moral circles, on what needs to be done to achieve common goals, and also on the narratives that convey our moral ideals, but these are relatively superficial compared to our shared moral psychology, which is designed to help us work together in groups.
 
Not only do we have a shared moral psychology, but it is relatively easy to agree upon the whole earth as the ultimate moral circle, as strange as this might seem. The great novelist Joseph Conrad once said that he enjoyed writing books about the sea because life on a ship is so morally simple. It’s obvious to everyone on the ship that the common goal is to remain afloat. Space fantasies such as Star Trek and Star Wars have the same appeal. Get anyone to imagine the whole earth as like a single ship, and that person will start regarding the whole earth as the appropriate moral circle.

I bolded a few that seem especially key to me.

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I learned a new word at a work meeting today. Holacracy.

• From Wikipedia: Holacracy is a method of decentralized management and organizational governance, which claims to distribute authority and decision-making through a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy.
• From Investopedia: Holacracy is a system of corporate governance whereby members of a team or business form distinct, autonomous, yet symbiotic, teams to accomplish tasks and company goals. The concept of a corporate hierarchy is discarded in favor of a fluid organizational structure where employees have the ability to make key decisions within their own area of authority.
• From Holaspirit: In a Holacracy, authority and decision making are distributed among fluid “circles”. . . . Holacratic organizations have a multitude of roles that are organized in circles and all contribute to the organization’s purpose.

Groups of groups of groups. Small groups are a fundamental unit of human social organization. And circles. In the final excerpt, Wilson talks of "how we define our moral circles," advocating that we ultimately "start regarding the whole earth as the appropriate moral circle."

Just last week, someone gave me--and everyone in our workgroup at the library--a picture book. Here is the text:

The Circles All Around Us

by Brad Montague

We begin by drawing a circle

on the ground along each shoe.

A safe little place for just one person.

Nobody in the circle but you.

You could keep that circle closed

to everyone but yourself . . . 

but that would be like a library

with just one book on the shelf.

So let's draw a bigger circle

for you and your family to share.

Now you see what all can happen

in a circle full of care.

It becomes a happier circle

as more loved ones come to stay.

And wouldn't it be even better

if all your friends could come and play?

So you stretch and draw your circle

even bigger than it's been

and let a few more people know

they're welcome to come in.

In the circles all around us

everywhere that we all go

there's a difference we can make

and a love we can all show.

Yet, there are still so many outside the circle

who are different in all they do!

Though it feels slightly uncomfortable . . . 

we draw a bigger circle for them too!

It doesn't mean the circle is easy.

It can get harder the more we share.

But wonderful things can happen

when love is known and felt everywhere.

As time passes, our eyes open.

We see others we really care for.

And that's when we ask ourselves,

well, what's this circle really there for?

So let us create bigger circles

all around us for the rest of our days.

Let our caring ripple out

in a million little ways.

In the circles all around us

everywhere that we all go

there's a difference we can make

and a love we can all show.

As our circles grow and grow

and we watch them wonder-eyed . . . 

remember the first circle started

with just the love you hold inside.

Evolution critiques egocentrism.

The acme of evolution is cooperation.