Humans are obligately interdependent and cannot survive without groups

Evidence

From this neo-Darwinian perspective, solitary living is considered to be the primal condition. Group life is viewed as costly, so, “Without some positive advantage to grouping, groups will naturally disperse as individuals revert to the logically more primitive state of a solitary existence” (Dunbar, 1989, p. 701). There are two points we wish to make about this claim of fundamental self-interest. First, Dunbar is correct, as far as the logic of population genetics goes. But from the perspective of the phenotype, and in particular, the human phenotype, which is our object of investigation, the logic falls short. Humans are trapped into group living, which is a solution to the free rider problem (Brewer & Caporael, 2006). They are constrained by their morphology (e.g., their lack of natural defenses such as deadly incisors or tough hides, their long period of infant helplessness, and their slow bipedal mode of locomotion) and their ecology (e.g., their mode of subsistence extraction in combination with the carrying capacity of their habitat). Thus, humans are obligately interdependent: they are unable to reproduce and survive to reproductive age without a group even in technologically advanced regions. Without dismissing the significance of individual self-interest in group life, the central problem for understanding the biology of social life is coordination. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 385

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the standard gene-centered starting assumption: rather than sociality being costly and anomalous, solitary living is impossible for humans given morphology and ecology, so the real problem is coordination, not self-interest.
• XREF: Echoes the social-capital and trust literature on how institutions solve coordination problems, plus the human-uniqueness debate over obligate cooperative breeding. — connects to: Pioneer human communities, like pioneer plants, cannot sustain themselves indefinitely without reciprocal succession. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1049; Families are seen as interdependent and essential, friends interdependent, ethnic groups essential. — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 337