“Evolutionary competition among ants is best understood not at the individual level but at the level of the colony, a superorganism acting as an extension of the queen’s genome, waging a battle of fitness against other hives. For humans, Wilson argues, the situation is more complex. We’ve become genetically hard-wired to be tribal, to join groups ‘and, having joined, consider them superior to competing groups.’ Our groups — tribes, societies, nations — compete with one another for dominance, but as individuals, we also compete for survival and reproduction within groups via individual selection. Selfish individuals might beat altruistic ones, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish people.The human condition, Wilson concludes, is largely a product of the tension between the two impulses.”

Can you be selfish and collaborate? How can we unite the selfish sectors into an altruistic group?