In the pursuit of an ideology to explain the behavioral underpinnings of hominoid civilization and the greater arc of life from which we emerged, it seems the take away from the 20th century was one of pinning for the 19th. Intellectuals romanticized a culture of path-breaking industrialists. The zeitgeist was driven loudly by economists and biologists, among others. The dominant view lowered the value of community relative to the individual. It valued self-interest over altruistism. Competition was prized over cooperation. Economists evangelized the virtue of selfishness and warned of fatal conceptions of governing bodies. They oversold the efficacy of the price system,  took to an extreme the role of competition in markets and unrealistically assumed the conditions that would fulfill their promises of allocative efficiency. 

Biologists, for their part, doubled down on this reduction of complexity by pointing to the selfish gene as the fundamental driver of evolution, the casual force that created life and by extension, rules over humankind. Taken together it would seem humanity, along with the remainder of the biosphere, is caught in a lonely struggle to survive. Elbowing out other species and our conspecifics in an inveterate rat race. Our fate was as one of many crabs getting to the top of a barrel for a breadth of air. The dominant 20th century reduced society to the individual by economists and the biologists subsequently reduced individuals to the gene.

The 21st century may offer an alternative narrative. Listening to a series of mindscape podcasts, among other sources, allows us to clear the debris of confusion caused by this gloomy perspective. Prompting a reorientation that suggests the promising journey of life is not a simple dichotomy of selfishness and altruism, or competition and cooperation, or individual and group selection. It is the phenomenon of complex interdependent identities formed along the strong tide towards a chaotic equilibrium. A journey for informational harmony guided by the signals of skin, membranes, pheromones’, and cognitive recognition. Most importantly, these bio-shields, or blankets, are not immutable. Membranes allow for highly functional gaps. Pheromones’ and recognition can expand social units beyond kin and identity itself, turns out, can be imagined.

Hominoids unique role in this epic did involve language, it represents an optimal taming of chaos to create an information stream that can peer into the interior lives of our conspecifics, whose value can be measured in precisely the same terms as the environmental uncertainty that organisms seek to master. Yet before language our ancestors grunted with accents. These served as vocally produced audible markings used to identify in-group members, cultural compatriots who were beyond our band of intimates. Although a powerful tool in its own right, in this telling our language is a culmination of hominin distinction but followed first, not only our accents, but also our moral sentiments, and most foundationally, our imagination. Language, advanced tool use, and our civilization in its entirety is an externality. One of a species that has managed to promote a particular type of interdependence. One that balances cooperation and competition in a way that more closely resembles Starfleet’s federation rather than the villainous, Hive-minded Borg collective. This management depends on a normative framework that governs the identities of our minds’ eye.

Informational Identity

Norms are important. Everyone seems to agree. Economists view them as constraints on the behavior of an otherwise rational selfish-interested actor, promoting conformity to structures fundamental to our economic system (North 1990). Enough of them add up to the concept of institution (J. P. Henrich 2020, 68) . Political Scientists define institutions as predictable, or stable, valued, and recurring patterns of behavior. This connects the economists’ focus as predictability following from the specified constraints, however the distinction reveals each discipline’s respective bias. Political scientists take humanity’s socially organizing behavior as a given starting point for analysis, whereas economists begin with a competitive individual pursuit of welfare.

Biologists are also in the game of decoding norms, as biological agents, including us, following them at an ecological level as well. While other species follow norms, it is our mastery of them, I believe, that helps make us a particularly unique one. More specifically they point the reason for our departure from pan, i.e. our nearest living relations, the chimps and bonobos. The predictive behavioral patterns fostered by institutions, the constraints that lie underneath them, uniquely make use of our imagination.

Limits of Language

Traditionally folks point to other areas for our distinction. Our use of tools, our opposable thumbs, a popular one of course is our language. Language is a great super power indeed, no one else seems to do it quite like us. Yet as far as superpowers go it is a bit of an odd one. We have not the strengths of lions nor the speed of cheetahs nor the flight of eagles. Nor even the immutable cooperative cohesion of ants and bees. But we tout our speech. We can communicate our thoughts and feelings, and also develop rich interior lives with language. In the realm of norms it grants us the ability to manipulate norms, sharing codes of conduct and brandishing deviants as villians. We can modulate behavior for the greater good with gossip and laws, with reputation and finger wagging censures.

However it is super odd. We are genetically primed for language. We begin babbling at only a few months old. This proto speech then rapidly becomes language, stringing vocal expression with shared meaning. Although we learn language early on, few of us seem super good at it. Much better than lions and cheetahs, to be sure. But we are often at a ‘loss of words.’ Even writers allegedly struggle in front of a blank page. Conversation, when unchecked, often falls flat with little novelty. few have anything interesting to say (see McWhorter 2004). Moreover, the limits of language are truly exposed when folks are good at it. We get suspicious of the sycophants and salespeople who offer only honeyed-words. We say trust the deeds of your neighbor and not the clever words that can be used in deceit.

In terms of languages’ causal role in our distinctive phylogeny there are grave challenges. Recent studies have shown that without first establishing ourselves as predators, we would not have been able to exhibit the variety of vocalizations language requires (Jarvis 2006).

the vocal learners are, for at least amongst mammals, are near the top of the food chain. And I think if you evolve this trait, you’re producing varied sounds that predators have a hard time habituating to and you’re more likely to be eaten.

(Carroll, n.d.a, 0hr15mns52s)

In other words a gabbling primate might attract unwanted attention, an early prima donna might get swallowed before it was able to hit the high note. It’s fair to say that our line of extended kin did not begin on the top of the food chain. Moreover, we unlikely worked away up through sheer brute force, brawn was unlikely the domesticating force of our civilization and civilized behavior.

Language itself is a set of norms, applied to vocalization. A practice that first required our dominion over a ferocious environment. Thus there needs to be a fuller explanation of what would have allowed us to not only be as successful as we are without physical brawn, but what would have allowed us to be successful enough to evade predation even prior to the full vocal production capacity required to commence with our yapping.

The question then is how we became a species capable of exerting a normative framework, that came to extend over not only language, but all cultural practices, from tool making to extensive pair bonding, to alloparenting, and other both cultural universal and locally tuned constraints on behavior. To understand this we need to look beyond ourselves.  Towards other primates, the remainder of the animal kingdom, and the emergency of life itself. We need to revisit the model of competitive individualism that worked its way to the genome.

Objections to Generosity

Norms, at least the ones that are of any interest, facilitate interdependence, constraining behavior away from what might be individually preferred or arbitrarily selected by disparate elements in a manner that improves aggregate biological fitness, or well being. At minimum it tips the odds in favor of being versus not being. Norms facilitate the complexity observable both within and across biological agents. Cells communicate with other cells, the nervous system sends messages through the body, and ants service their colony by playing their specified role. The interdependence of the biosphere is born from specified ebbing of competition in favor of cooperation (see Szathmáry (2015) .

Note that this is a loaded word, for economists in particular. Hayek, the great supply sider, greatly favored competition over cooperation for economic markets and civilization broadly (Hayek et al., n.d., 19). The challenges of a rational agent engaging in cooperation is presented formally in Game Theory, an analytical tool used by economists that quantifies the decision to defect versus cooperate with a confederate. The trouble, or dilemma, is the option to cheat. It’s always rational, in other words, to rat on your co-conspirators to the cops.  Whether she tries to cooperate by keeping her mouth shut or give you up, either way you personally end up with a lesser sentence, even though you both would be better off in aggregate, if you both kept your mouths shut.  

The lessons of game theory influenced how intellectuals advised policy makers on the cold war, and seems to show up everywhere from public education, to corporations, perhaps putting in the least amount of effort on a group project and free ride of your fellow members’ hard work. Purveyors of our educational system, not to mention our criminal justice system, seem to have been convinced by this or similar analysis. I am not an expert nor well versed on the subject but I assume there was some debate about cooperation and competition before our educational system deemed cooperation a marginal focus to the otherwise myopia of the bell-curving of student populations with standardized tests, exclusionary tiered sports teams, and college ranking systems based on rates of rejection. John Von Neuman was sufficiently convinced by his own work on the subject to form what is, with the benefit at least of hindsight, an apocalyptically hawkish attitude during the cold war.

The most interesting and indeed fiery participants in this debate are biologists. Dawkins, after famously reducing the biosphere and its agents to the will of the selfish gene, made it his passion to fight (in addition to religiosity) group or multi-level selection. Group selection is the notion that evolution, in addition to favoring traits that contribute to individual fitness, may also select on the basis of group fitness. Behavior that benefits others but does not contribute to the probability of your genetic survival or replication would work if it can strengthen the group’s chances of survival. However the strength of this claim is at the center of this hotly contested debate, with Edward Wilson on one side and Dawkins on the other. Dawkins maintains that in practice altruism is only shown in nature towards genetic relations. Genes seek to favor only copies of themselves. Mothers care for their young as they share the same genes, this logic is extended even to more distant relations. We care for cousins as their genes overlap 1/16 of ours.

Reviewing Dawkins seminal Selfish Gene work in his tome on information theory, James Gleick writes:

A part of Dawkins’s purpose was to explain altruism: behavior in individuals that goes against their own best interests. Nature is full of examples of animals risking their own lives on behalf of their progeny, their cousins, or just fellow members of their genetic club. Furthermore, they share food; they cooperate in building hives and dams; they doggedly protect their eggs

Going on to poo-poo group selection on account of the dearth of data:

It is tempting to think in terms of the good of the group— the family, tribe, or species— but most theorists agree that evolution does not work that way. Natural selection can seldom operate at the level of groups. It turns out, however, that many explanations fall neatly into place if one thinks of the individual as trying to propagate its particular assortment of genes down through the future.

(Gleick 2011, 303)

Gleick acknowledges Dawkins as the winner in the debate. However there is a central ingredient omitted, or at least downplayed. An ingredient that I believe sheds light on the normative framework that governs human civilization and the biosphere and, interestingly, relates to the focus of Gleick’s book.

Mark Moffett, a tropical biologist who studies (originally under Dawkins sparring partner Edward Wilson) the social units of species’ from ants, to chimps, to humans, emphasizes the importance of societal membership across species and their implications on behavior. He notes that, by definition, societies structure enduring relations that expand beyond single generations and single broods, hence they are not confined to the simple genetic selfishness that manifests itself in familial oriented group relations. Yet he pointedly deemphasizes the focus on cooperation, noting that society members’ most ardent competitors are within their own societies (Moffett 2019, loc 434). He does concede that cooperation is an important element of social units, labeling it the rudimentary cooperation of societal compatriots, objecting in the end to a view of societies as a device to optimize cooperation. Which begs the question, what are social units optimizing?

The answer comes in another analytical tool kit, this one brought upon mainly by neuroscientists and endorsed by a range of disciplines and data-driven research. A framework that I believe offers the resolution to the tension between group and individual selection. It posits life as dynamic models of their given environs. Environs whose inveterate fluctuations give rise to the expansive complexity of the biosphere. Biological agents, under this view, are more minimizers than maximizers. They are uncertainty annihilators. Our minds, in particular, are statistical prediction machines (see Friston 2010; also Clark 2016; and Barrett 2020 ) that seek information to manage the uncertainty that permeates our days and lives.

Uncertainty clarifies the drama between individual and group selection. Taking a closer look at kin-altruism, we know that mother hens put their own well-being at risk to protect their chics against a fox attack. No one questions this, it is simply the underlying gene, acting ‘selfishly’ to protect its future existence. But what about fathers? Why are we familiar with the dead-beat father much more than the dead beat mother? Ngogo groups, unlike other chimpanzees, engage in pair bonding and hence fathers demonstr care more for their offspring than is typical of other chimps. The reason for this is that ecological conditions, including increased competition and heightened cooperation, is that male chimps spend more time with females, and gain preferential access as mating partners. As a consequence Males have the information they need to have a vested interest in paternity (J. Henrich 2016, 304).

Even if genes allegedly act selfishly in pursuit of their own replication they need to be able to recognize their own replications lurking behind their ‘lumbering receptacles.’ Moreover the tools that Ants and other eusocial insects use unique chemical secretions to detect its own family and bind its behavior to the budding colony. This social unit flourishes when these pheromones’ get hijacked to include other Humanity employs fictive kin, calling unrelated in-group members aunt, uncle, etc.

Biological agents, ourselves included, exist by reducing uncertainty between itself and its environment. However the big question remains around the motivating force. If each agent exists as a model of its environment, ensuring that its own identity exists within its ever changing environment? What constitutes identity? How mutable are the boundaries that define identity? In answering these questions, some biologists go farther and claim the selfish gene narrative is wrong-headed entirely, According to Denis Noble:

there are no genes ‘ for ’ anything . Living organisms have functions which use genes to make the molecules they need . Genes are used . They are not active causes .

Going on to stress the point:

there is no privileged level of causation

(Noble 2017, x.)

Noble stresses that the existential conditions that concern the evolution of life are along the same continuum present in the rest of the universe. Life is not ordered from molecular order. Life’s evolving complexity is a consequence of its surfing mastery over with the otherwise immutable tide towards thermodynamic equilibrium, or chaos. Biological agents are open systems that resist the tendency to disorder, just as steady state systems do in the realm of physics.

Lasso of the Individual to The Group

In accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, matter tends to move in one entropic direction. Beginning with our universes’ highly yet simply structured matter, began increasing entropy. The increase in entropy gives way to a more disorganized system, less structure and correlation. If you were a data analyst diligently tabulating and measuring the movement of matter in the arc of our universe’s existence, at the start of its journey you would find your job relatively easy. Being able to describe the universe with relative ease, diving into one part of the overall structure would quickly paint a picture of everything that’s going on in the early universe. Things would quickly become more challenging as entropy increased. This is partly because, abiding the second law, matter tends towards flux, a disorganized state. By definition making your job of uncovering patterns and structures to give your bosses and other stakeholders an intelligible redoubt of the goings on in this universe, ever more difficult.

If this was not enough, however, you would find your job exponentially more difficult but witnessing the opposite occurrences. Entropy has not, you would have found, increased uniformly across the universe, in certain pockets it actually slowed cases reversed, at least temporarily. This is complexity. Known as steady state dynamics that gives way to structured matter, but structured in bespoken ways. Ultimately you find yourself discovering structures that could self-organize, pockets that could resist the chaotic tide by replicating. They were capable of anticipating the flux, and in doing so model their own structure dynamically against their anticipation. It would appear then, that the tools you were employing as a statistical analysis, measuring correlations and evaluating structures, have been adopted by elements of the system itself.

The free energy principle is the idea that sentient life’s primary operand is one to reduce the uncertainty of its own existence and hence harness the power of prediction. The anticipation of coming flux creates the dynamic complexity of the biosphere. Each agent acquires sensory data about its own environment, its internal milieu, along with the external environment, its external milieu, and uses this data to perform a forward looking analysis. Instantiating oneself as an enduring part of an environment under constant flux. The constitution of these environmental models, these biological identities, resolves the motivation for and predominance of cooperation that we would predict or observe.

The normative framework I believe helps resolve, relying on the notion within the Free Energy or various similar theories of sentient organisms and intelligence with a focus on prediction and optimizing on uncertainty resolution, the tension between individual and group selection. Specifically the notion of Markovian blankets.

Making yourself bigger with blankets

The key to the relation of biological agents as uncertainty minimizers and cooperation lies in the boundaries of oneself. If life is a statistical model then what’s in the model? The model construction of biology it turns out, or the establishment of identity, is an ongoing process. The mutability of identity is foundational to the ordered complexity of life. It is the biological font of our hominid normative behavior. Karl Firston explains, to Sean Carrol, how the model that constitutes individual identity are Markovian Blankets:

first of all, you need a Markov blanket, otherwise there is no existence […] But if it is the case that just the part of having a Markov blanket, means there is a way of writing down the dynamics or the mechanics that makes it look as if there is a generative model. There would also have to be something in the internal states that plays the role of a generative model. And it seems quite natural that the things that endure over generations, or show that sort of attracting set with a sort of itineracy that kind of looks like reproduction

(Carroll, n.d.b, 1hr18mns)

A Markov Blanket is a statistical concept defined as the minimum number of factors or variables needed to model a system. Friston, Kirchhoff (et. al) demonstrated this concept can be applied to living systems. Doing so suggests that certain biological boundaries serve, functionally, as signals. The membrane of a cell is foundational to life not simply because it expels foreigners, but because it signals to its constituents that they are members of a cell, as a result prioritize the persistence of the collective over the varying individual interest and arbitrary reactions (Kirchhoff et al. 2018). Before ribosomes gave their labor faithfully to the cellular protein production factory which they inhabit they were independent loners. Perhaps they pine for those days like we do the wild west, or the capitalists of the 19th century, indulging films that romanticize a past of freedom but the harsh environs.

Life itself, broadly defined in Shannon-esque terms as correlations or patterns that emerge against a backdrop of a fluctuating environment, is information. Cell walls serve a vital function in the information processing that is the creation and expansion of life. Signaling an identity to its constituents by embarking them on a singular mission. These membranes also signaled its existence to other cells in its environment. This begins to illuminate how cells work with other cells to form more complex organisms, and provides insights into how one multicellular organisms built ever more complex structures.

Before we are inspired to use these insights to understand hominoid institutions and define behavior norms, we need to address the aversion to cooperation and sort out how competitive behavior exists alongside, as clearly both are fundamental to our social system. The distance of cooperation to economists, biologists and others is dealt with by defining the term analytically. With ironic assistance from Game Theory. In the end it helps demonstrate that cooperation can and must happen, if life continues to proliferate. Michael Levin demonstrates how particular biological situations can resolve prisoners dilemmas by offering a third way out, explaining, also to Sean Carroll:

We’re doing […] simulations of prisoner’s dilemma, where the agents, instead of just cooperating and defecting, they actually have a new ability, they can merge. And once you merge […] the number of agents in a prisoner’s dilemma is not constant, […] what happens is, if you don’t fix the number to be a constant and you let agents merge, you find out that cooperation doesn’t just emerge, it’s inevitable, because you can’t cheat against yourself, because yourself is now bigger.

Michael Levin explains that cells have an ability to physically merge, expanding their identity by using a gap function, a gated opening, analogous to a computer’s transistor. With this it can not only interact with other cells, signaling to fellow cells its own distinct state of being, it can combine forces with them. Sharing data about one another’s internal milieu. Carrol, however, notes there is something icky about this notion of merging. It reminds him of the Borg from Star Trek:

You must know you’re exactly describing the Borg collective from Star Trek, right, […] It’s treated as bad, that all these individuals melt into a single collective, but when it’s ourselves melting their [cellular] individuality to make us, we think it’s good

(Carroll, n.d.c)

The way we retain our star fleet membership and are not merged into the fictive, yet useful representation of the hive minded collective, is due to the way hominoids bind themselves to others.

The Moral Solution to the Game of Life

Evolving from primates, we existed in social units that depended on individual recognition. These social units themselves extended beyond our kin-groups, and even friends. We competed fiercely with in-group members, as we do today. Yet when the going gets tough we favor our own group over others. Moffett notes we parted ways with our primate relatives, i.e. pan, in exploiting symbolic labels. Audio and visual markings that signaled which group we belong to. Given that other species can adopt labels symbolically it is highly feasible that we could do this before we developed the greater cognitive capacity that is formed as a result. We existed not in separate band societies, as is often portrayed as our early hunter-gatherer life. We existed in intimate bands that interacted within a larger social context to which we identified. These multi band societies buttressed our development as a species.

Benedict Anderson , conceived of nations as “ imagined communities , ” since their populations are too numerous to allow for members to meet face to face […] Our shared imaginings bind people with a mental force no less valid and real than the physical force that binds atoms to molecules , turning them both into concrete realities . This has been the case for all time […] imagined communities holds true not just for modern societies , but for all the societies of our ancestors , likely from their remote , pre human origins. Hunter – gatherer societies, held together by a sense of common identity , did not depend on their members establishing one – to – one relationships — or knowing each other at all…

(Moffett 2019, 353–58)

However, belonging to a society that can be symbolically bound is tenuous. It depends, like all societies, on trust. Trust is a broad notion, and indeed in its most general use it can be used to explain all biological cooperation. Disparate entities, from ribosomes to ants, exhibit behavior distinct from a simpler, more competitive system. For humans, however, trust is something in addition, it has a moral component. Oliver Scott Curry, formalized the intuitions and beliefs of eons of moral thinkers and philosophers by, in a great irony of the new millennium, using Game Theory to quantify the cooperative outcome promoted by morality across cultural time and space. People do trust one another enough to engage in cooperative behavior and morality is one important, and perhaps foundational, tool humans use to do so. No one is reprimanded for trying to be more cooperative than less, all else equal, and people are judged to the extent they fail to meet cooperative expectations.

The trust solution to GT can equivalently be applied to societies, i.e. being a member of a society, even if you are competing with a social member, you generally don’t violate the cardinal rule of in-group social member, whether you are a part of ant colony, a chimp community, a Crip, Blood, or a Canadian, i.e. you don’t kill one of your own. Indeed, you should not even harm those vulnerable and undeserving among you, regardless of the selfish gain harmful behavior may offer. However, for humanity it took on a level of abstraction in our moral practice. From a constructionist perspective, one relying on a predictive mind that responds to sense data with affect, a somatic experience that subsequently motivates our movement, we were able to evangelize belief in these imagined communities sufficiently to experience the visceral feeling of indication we feel when observing others deviating from these communities.

Moral sentiments are present in infancy. We demonstrate an early aversion to unfriendly puppets, and we exhibit altruistic behavior towards others with whom we identify. We experience a visceral reaction to the pain of others and instinctively seek to punish perpetrators who bring harm onto vulnerable victims (Schein and Gray 2018). Morality is both the domain of our most complex cognitive exertion but also our earliest expression of affect and preferences. Dunbar points to morality, in gossip, as the driver of our cognitive development. The normative framework, pointing to our ability to create and fortify imaginary identities that extend us beyond our intimates, explains how we diverged from pan and become a species that abided by moral and later conventional norms. 

Audible Signals

The development of Morality follows from the ability to unite using signals, specifically the vocal symbols of shibboleth. The claim of Jarvis that the manipulation of the larynx, as is necessary for our speech, tends only to occur in predators, or a species that evolved from a former predator. This again, is because the increased variation in speech poses a potential vulnerability for species that are potentially prey (Carroll, n.d.a).

Given that we evolved under a heavily predatory environment our vocal distribution was likely limited, due to the adverse selection pressure. This vocalized constancy was likely more reliable of an identity marker than we can even imagine today, giving a clear indication of place of origin and hence, what represented as a proto-culture. It may be used, as Moffett indicates, to identify with others, rather than only relying on intimacy or other sensory signals like smell (see Moffett 2013; also Moffett 2019).

Once we established our dominance, we could give freer expression and a wider vocal range. Now that we established normative and conventional practices language followed as a tool to further bind us together. The great diversity in language and its unique ability, among the animal kingdom to interfere with conspecific communication speaks to its role in Shibboleth, serving not only to communicate with ingroup by distinguishing between the outgroup.

Wrestling Order

The phenomenon of life can be understood along the march towards disorder. Using the steady march towards chaos as an opportunity to build more interesting complex structures. Information, defined by Shannon and Weaver is roughly defined along with the probability that a given variable indicates a particular state. Every new variable, or letter in a word, or a word in a message is as useful as the amount of uncertainty it helps annihilate.

“Information is closely associated with uncertainty.” Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information. Some messages may be likelier than others, and information implies surprise. Surprise is a way of talking about probabilities.

(Gleick 2011, 219)

Shannon’s focus on messages to provide a rigorous quantitative definition of information coincides with the fundamental property of life, as a confrontation with uncertainty. The effort to gain understanding in a world, and universe, that is generally pulled in the opposite direction. It ties us to the causal forces of life’s formation and also puts a spotlight on our distinctive success. We use messages to better understand the states of the world around us, extending even to the interior lives of the conspecifics with whom we interact. The view of our civilization, our economy, and fundamentally ourselves as the harnesses of information relies on this fact (see Hidalgo 2015). Accents may have begun as what we would now classify as unintelligible gargles, early pant hooting or barking, but as we worked out way through the Pleistocene we began to exploit our vocal production ability to further build our culture.

In Life’s effort to wrest order from a cosmic tendency towards disorder hominins distinguished themselves by conjuring their own fortress. Cultural evolution is our ability to wrest the expansive informational processing system of nature into our own hands. Our shining achievement was the quiet recognition that our destiny is determined by identity, and that this need not be defined by nature alone. Skin continues to denote us as individuals, our obligation to our children follow at least partly their identity as our genetic progeny. Yet we give to more than our children and get more from elders beyond our parents. We identify with imaginary communities, whose boundaries are shared illusory figments, and have the ability to turn strangers into fictive kin. We both unite and divide using rituals and symbols that derives meaning from a shared imagination.

Language is a powerful tool kit. It does represent perhaps the apotheosis of not only ours, but life’s quest to harness information and master the drive towards chaos and uncertainty. Our journey along the trajectory that earned us this tool kit was initiated by the most powerful tool we possess, imagination. Specifically our ability to imagine an identity. We reify these shared illusions with markings, even to do this day, as embodied in uniforms. This uniform does what identities tend to do, i.e. set the bounds of identity and symbolically signal behavioral responsibilities and intentional priorities. Identity lends itself to norms, it structures behavior. Constraining how we might otherwise act given this new found sense of purpose.

Hominoid norms cover a categorical distinction, morality. We are able at a young age to distinguish between conventional norms, the dispassionate rules from those that fire our sentimental passions (Tomasello 2003).  We can modulate behavior for the greater good with gossip and laws, with reputation and finger wagging censures. I believe these steps began, first and foremost, with our ability to recognize in others, and adopt for ourselves, a sense of belonging with and hence responsibility towards others. Our moral sentiments, as exhibited today, and echo from our original partition from pan, are an expression of the imagined identities we understand and inhabit.

References

Barrett, Lisa Feldman. 2020. Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain.

Carroll, Sean. n.d.a. Erich Jarvis on Language, Birds, and People. Mindscape Podcast. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/12/14/127-erich-jarvis-on-language-birds-and-people/.

———. n.d.b. Karl Friston on Brains, Predictions, and Free Energy (Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast). https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/03/09/87-karl-friston-on-brains-predictions-and-free-energy/.

———. n.d.c. Michael Levin on Growth, Form, Information, and the Self. Mindscape Podcast. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/02/01/132-michael-levin-on-growth-form-information-and-the-self/.

Clark, Andy. 2016. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Friston, Karl. 2010. “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?” Nat Rev Neurosci 11 (2): 127–38. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2787.

Gleick, James. 2011. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. 1st Vintage Books ed., 2012. New York: Vintage Books.

Hayek, Friedrich A. von, William Warren Bartley, Stephen Kresge, and Friedrich August Hayek. n.d. The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. Reprint. The Collected Works of Friedrich August Hayek, ed. by W. W. Bartley.̤ ; Vol. 1. Chicago, Ill: Univ. of Chicago Press [u.a.].

Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species and Making Us Smarter. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Henrich, Joseph Patrick. 2020. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hidalgo, César A. 2015. Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. New York: Basic Books.

Jarvis, Erich D. 2006. “Selection for and Against Vocal Learning in Birds and Mammals.” Ornithological Science 5 (1): 5–14. https://doi.org/10.2326/osj.5.5.

Kirchhoff, Michael, Thomas Parr, Ensor Palacios, Karl Friston, and Julian Kiverstein. 2018. “The Markov Blankets of Life: Autonomy, Active Inference and the Free Energy Principle.” J. R. Soc. Interface. 15 (138): 20170792. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2017.0792.

McWhorter, John. 2004. The Story of Human Language. 3, Book: … The Great Courses. Chantilly: Teaching Company.

Moffett, Mark W. 2013. “Human Identity and the Evolution of Societies.” Human Nature 24 (3): 219–67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-013-9170-3.

Moffett, Mark W. 2019. The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. New York: Basic Books.

Muthukrishna, Michael, Michael Doebeli, Maciej Chudek, and Joseph Henrich. 2018. “The Cultural Brain Hypothesis: How Culture Drives Brain Expansion, Sociality, and Life History.” Edited by Corina E Tarnita. PLoS Comput Biol 14 (11): e1006504. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006504.

Noble, Denis. 2017. Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

North, Douglass C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. The Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Schein, Chelsea, and Kurt Gray. 2018. “The Theory of Dyadic Morality: Reinventing Moral Judgment by Redefining Harm.” Pers Soc Psychol Rev 22 (1): 32–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868317698288.

Szathmáry, Eörs. 2015. “Toward Major Evolutionary Transitions Theory 2.0.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112 (33): 10104–11. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1421398112.

Tomasello, Michael. 2003. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. 4. print. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.