DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (11)

By: Tana Sirois
May 9, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.

COLLECTIVE (R)EVOLUTION

I browse my mental catalogue of forgotten cultural phenomena, seeking an appropriate topic for a series exploring “rediscovery” but find it difficult to focus. My attention flutters — my mind is distracted, as it attempts to grasp the consequences of these new policies that perpetuate discrimination, violence and greed. I think about how our evolutionary success is often attributed to the existence of a “selfish gene” — how we live in a world that champions “the survival of the fittest” at the expense of those less “fit,” and I wonder if efforts to build a more equitable world are doomed. I think about how this justification for selfishness has contributed to rabid capitalism and I wonder if an oligarchy was always inevitable.

It is this line of thought that leads me to my current fixation: the “rediscovery” of collaborative evolution. The “battle of life” narrative continues to dominate earth’s memoir, but perhaps a glimmer of hope can be restored if we reframe our narrative as one of collaboration.

From genomes, to multicellular organisms, to insects, to humans, it is the act of cooperation, not competition, that is responsible for the most significant advances in evolution. Look at the endosymbiotic partnership between eukaryotes and mitochondria, or at ants who exhibit non-kin cooperation, building colonies spanning 3,700 miles without an authority figure. Through cumulative cultural evolution, humans rapidly transmit and accumulate cooperative traits, and subsequently, the genes with prosocial motives prevail. According to biologist Lynn Margulis, “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking. Life forms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing them.” Collaborative environments permit humans to refine their unique skills, enhancing diversity of personhood and cultivating greater complexity within the group — these are signals of evolutionary progress.

It is not built into our nature to be ruthlessly selfish, nor is greed the bedrock of evolution. The interconnected web of life is non-linear, symbiotic and complex. Through epigenetics, we’ve seen how behavioral and environmental factors affect how our genes express themselves. Since our genomes have plasticity, we might ask, “To what extent are our traits being influenced by the sociopolitical structures we live within?” Could an awareness of ecology’s profound integration embolden us to prioritize generating systems of collaboration?

We have been fed the wrong narrative, and the domination of capitalistic ideology has upended the natural balance between competition and cooperation. An acquiescence to the illusion of a dog-eat-dog world, where selfish genes triumph as the primary driver of evolutionary success, has had disastrous effects on our collective moral framework.

Now, more than ever, we need a renaissance of collaborative action — a resurgence of generosity, empathy, and cooperation.

It is a tall order, but if I had to pick one forgotten cultural phenomena to resurrect, collaborative evolution would be it. If that is not possible, I suppose I would choose to rediscover Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm from the 1950s, in the hopes that it could provide some inspiration for a more interconnected world.

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DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (11)

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