Survival of the Fittest Societies

A very interesting article in the November, 2011 issue of The Atlantic on the socio-biologist E. O. Wilson fits closely with a theme I tried to develop in The American Family: From Obligation to Freedom.  Socio-biologists used to be much denigrated by historians and other social scientists, as they were understood to be saying that biology was essentially destiny, that, for example, men were hard wired to be sex-crazed jerks and women had better just deal with it.  But over the years there has been a rapprochemont between the two sets of scholars, with each admitting that our genetic history and evolution greatly shape, without determining, our behavior.  It helps that more and more scholars of human evolution have been pointing out that human survival has depended not so much on survival of the fittest individuals but on the fittest societies, that effective and durable societies require lots of members willing to sacrifice their individual needs for the good of the group.  As Wilson puts it: "in competition between groups, groups of altruists are more likely to succeed."  In other words, we are hard wired to cooperate, as societies of cooperators are much more likely to survive (and reproduce) than are societies of individualists.  This helps to explain, as I argue in my own book, why American hyper-individualism contributes not only to the dissolution of families but to rising rates of individual unhappiness, such as rates of depression, and national decline, such as an unwillingness to accept the need for taxes and regulation.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/e-o-wilson-rsquo-s-theory-of-everything/8686/