Dr. Jim reads About Bowen's Differentiation of Self, Part 1

            In 1975 Wilson wrote about three key properties of social organization: cohesiveness, altruism, and cooperativeness. In the animal kingdom only four groups of animals have been able to significantly develop these properties: (1) colonial invertebrates—coral/the Portuguese man-of-war; (2) social insects (ants, termites, certain wasps and bees), (3) nonhuman mammals (particularly the elephants, chimpanzees, and African wild dogs), and (4) humans. It's important to recognize that high levels of social integration are not inherently "good" for the adaptiveness of a species.

            The key to the "level of complexity" of our social organization involves our capacity for abstraction in the service of win-win social groupings and self-government. This capacity enables us to "establish long-remembered contracts and to profitably engage in acts of reciprocal altruism that can be spaced over long periods of time, indeed over generations." Our communication capacities allow us to "far exceed" the colonial invertebrates, social insects, and nonhuman mammals in social organization. This capacity combined with differentiation of self in our families of origin "have reversed the downward trend in social evolution that prevailed over a billion years of the previous history of life." 

References

Kerr, M. & Bowen, M. (1988). Family evaluation: An approach based on Bowen theory. New York: W. W. Norton & Company at p, 91

Wilson, E. O. (1975) Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press at p. 380 

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