convey simple messages to those around them. So do many humans these days. I won ’ t be surprised if human brains, which have been shrinking for the last 20k years, continue to accelerate in that trend, because, to a greatly increasing degree, you now pay attention to smaller and smaller parts of your reality, assuming that “ the cloud ” has the rest of it covered for you. Ants speak in emojis. Is that the human future? LOL. I might raise one more caution: The benefits attained by a species pursuing sociality are formidable, but progressively make the individual “ unfit ” to survive outside the superorganism. An expelled tribe member often faces death. A stranded termite has no more ability to survive on its own than a stranded hair follicle. As you race to become part of larger and dumber superorganisms as a vehicle for success, it may be prudent to reflect that this is a one-way transition, as such a vehicle has no reverse gear. Having said that, I ’ ll note that there ’ s one sort of superorganism which humans haven ’ t explicitly discussed: four-dimensional ones. By that I mean, organisms which collaborate with one another to achieve viable biomass in future deep time rather than by trying to all live at once: trans -generational eusociality. This sort cannot be intentionally produced by evolution, only by rational planning , and empathy for those who are non-contemporaneous. Looking back in a million years, will there have been trillions of human childhoods or only ~100 billion?
The Bottom Line: Sociality is a way of becoming bigger than your enemies, competitors, and prey.
Ingroup vs. Outgroup
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