Nature is like a sculptor continually improving upon her work, but to do it she chisels away at living flesh.

the measure of the success of a web of memes—a myth, a hypothesis, or a dogma—is not its truth but how well it serves as social glue. If a belief system performs that function well enough, it can trigger the growth of a superorganism of massive size, even if its most basic tenets prove dead wrong.

But our concept of stress is a fallacy based on a persistent misreading of the medical evidence. As Kenneth R. Pelletier of San Francisco’s Langley Neuropsychiatrie Institute says, “Both researchers and clinicians have misinterpreted [the] findings.”

Then, in 1962, the Scottish ecologist V. C. Wynne-Edwards, a careful observer of his country’s native red grouse, concluded that these birds sometimes sacrificed their reproductive privileges to keep their flock from starvation. The grouse, Wynne-Edwards contended, gauged the amount of food the moors could provide each year and adjusted their behav

A strange thing happens to the memes of the superorganism that mounts the pecking order’s peak. They spread as rapidly as the germs of plague, exultantly leaping from mind to conquered mind. Today, most of the populations of Europe, South America, and North America speak languages rich in Roman words. They do their public business in buildings ador

The gang members of a bygone era also had their leaders, bullies, jokers, and nerds. Each individual had taken up a position in the superorganism’s unfolding structure. And each had shaped his personality to fit the spot in which he landed.

Research shows that predators almost invariably go for a herd animal that is acting differently from the rest.

If our actions are geared to increasing the odds that our personal genes or those of our near relatives will make it into the next generation, what is the reason for suicide’s existence? And what about the other bits of death-in-life built into the human psyche? Why do humans get depressed? Why do they sometimes feel like crawling off into a corner

Humans rally around ideas because they solve some of our problems, because they offer the biological blessings of the illusion of control, and because they are the threads that hold us together in the vast network of a superorganismic mind, weaving scattered individuals into a cooperative entity of awesome power and size.