Sublime

Major transitions may be rare, but when they happen, the Earth often changes.41 Just look at what happened more than 100 million years ago when some wasps developed the trick of dividing labor between a queen (who lays all the eggs) and several kinds of workers who maintain the nest and bring back food to share. This trick was discovered by the ear

Many animals are social: they live in groups, flocks, or herds. But only a few animals have crossed the threshold and become ultrasocial, which means that they live in very large groups that have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor.44 Beehives and ant nests, with their separate castes of soldiers, sc

Power in Community Across history, many schools of thought converged on this singular truth: none of us can flourish on our own. But our cultural narrative continues to romanticize the lone hero. For example, the story of Einstein’s E = mc² as an isolated breakthrough fails to acknowledge the foundational contributions of scientists such as French

The Golden Guide to Pond Life, The Golden Guide to Stars, to Rocks and Minerals, to Reptiles and Amphibians: humans are almost beside the point.

Each of us is sewn by invisible threads into the superorganism. We are cells in the beast of family, company, and country. If those social ties are severed we begin to shrivel and die. There’s more. Hard work and the pursuit of challenge have seldom been demonstrated to hurt us, but we can be damaged powerfully by the lack of control. And without s