The Fallacy of Individualism

A mere 500 years or so ago, our human population on earth suddenly exploded. Why?
With 8 billion of us alive today, we like to believe our evolutionary success comes down to our intelligence. But why did we wait 200,000 to 300,000 highly vulnerable years after we'd acquired our current cognitive ability to suddenly decide to dominate our planet? For the vast majority of that time, a multitude of other comparatively unintelligent creatures dramatically outperformed us. Their more basic survival advantages like fangs, claws, armor, wings, gills, speed, camouflage, abundant reproduction, night vision, and the like turned out to be far more effective that our paltry intelligence.
In "The Fallacy of Individualism" Don Stuart makes the case that intelligence requires life experience (data) to function effectively as a survival trait. Unfortunately, each single human individual is severely limited in the amount of life experience they can acquire over their own brief lifetime. But, when a great many individuals can share their life experiences (their data), then their intelligence can become for each of them a game changer.
That is why the development of written language, then the development of a phonetic alphabet with a mere 20-30 easily memorized symbols for the basic sounds we make when speaking, and, finally, the development of the movable type printing press so staggeringly altered the course of human history.
In other words, it is NOT intelligence alone that sets we humans apart. It is intelligence AND society that makes the difference. It is when our intelligence can take advantage of well-functioning social institutions that facilitate the sharing of our experience -- of what we observe, of how we understand it, and of the strategies we use to deal with it -- that is when we humans come into our own and succeed as a species. We succeed as sharing, collaborative members of our social groups, NOT as individuals.
#psychology #humanpsychology #intelligence #darwin #humansurvival #ethics