Social Darwinism argues that altruistic behavior among socialized animal groups arises through natural selection, favoring the development of a gene pool which promotes subordinate interactions among members of the same clan, to gain a survival niche for the larger group. In this evolving structure, the survival of the individual is achieved through their commitment to a role within the socialized unit. This may seem counter-intuitive to anyone who views evolution as the simplistic “survival of the fittest.” It is certainly true that a more socialized gene pool makes individuals within the clan more subordinate and less likely to survive on their own. But, as the adaptive success of the social group becomes increasingly established, it serves as the best and perhaps the only means by which the species can survive. Extreme examples are found among socialized insects where you could not imagine a bee or an ant going out and surviving on its own. They need the social unit fed by their submissive function, just as the social unit, which, in reality is a bunch of DNA, needs membership submission for its survival. Thus, counter-intuitive though it may be, it is the selfish gene pool that strives to survive and the individuals who carry the genes are only the temporary vassals of the DNA that is always striving for a better outcome. In a way, you might think of the words of Samuel Butler “a hen is only the egg’s way of making another egg.” In a more scientific light, the organism is DNA’s way of making more DNA, as Edward O. Wilson has stated in his book: “Sociobiology.” Victims of our DNA? Absolutely, but enjoy the ride!
So let’s take our newly emergent knowledge of Social Darwinism 101 and apply it to the evolutionary origin of modern Democrats and Republicans in America. Surely this kind of analysis is crying to be done. If we stretch our imaginations far back into an earlier, evolutionary stage of our ancestral development, at a time when we were a group of tree dwelling primates, we can appreciate some of the pressures that might exist for natural selection to favor one type of clan organization over another. Let’s imagine our distant ancestors in an environment where food was plentiful, with a vast carpet of fruit trees amidst a plush jungle of vegetation, rich enough to support a lavish lifestyle of eating at will and living continuously above the ground, safely removed from most predators. This environmental nirvana of abundance put little pressure on social unit formation and allowed for wide variance of individualistic behavior, even though early social units were also evolving into place, through a process known as genetic drift. Through this mechanism, multiple behavioral motifs were evolving simultaneously in the same species and developing in parallel and within the same general geographical area. It was as if nature was experimenting and probing in a variety of ways to optimize and specialize in the anticipation of future changes that could not be foreseen. But at this moment in time, these differences seemed to offer no obvious benefit and no identifiable clues for any survival value.
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