    11

    11

    At first glance, the notion seems elementary, scarcely worth

    exploring further.  But it has revolutionary implications.  The

    competition between groups explains the mystery of our self-destructive

    emotions...depression, anxiety and hopelessness.  It explains our

    ferocious addiction to mythology, scientific theory, ideology  and

    religion.  And it explains one even more disturbing addiction... to

    hatred.

    Group competition solves the puzzles of the immune system

    recently uncovered by researchers in psychoneuroimmunology.   It

    answers the perceptual riddles revealed by new studies on endorphins

    and control.  And it even offers solutions to some of our most baffling

    political dilemmas.

    Individualism is a personal credo of great importance.  I, for one,

    am a passionate believer in it.  But to scientists, it has been a chimera

    leading them down a dead-end path.  Specifically, individualism has

    reared its head in science in the form of a simple proposition.  If a piece

    of physiology--a tooth, a claw, an opposable thumb, or the neural circuit

    underlying an instinct--has emerged from the evolutionary process, it

    has triumphed for a simple reason--it has helped the individual survive.

    More specifically, the physiological device has proven useful in the

    survival of a long line of individuals, each of whom maintained a

    competitive edge by virtue of the piece of biological equipment in

    question.  The problem: this basic premise is only right up to a point.

    Individual survival is not the only mechanism of the evolutionary

    process.

    Take, for example, recent research on stress.  The stress

    response--with its high levels of corticosteroids and its clammy

    manifestations of anxiety--is usually described as part of a fight or flight

    syndrome, a survival device left over from the days when men were

    fending off sabertooth tigers.  When our primitive ancestors were

    confronted with a snarling beast, the stress response supposedly

    prepared them to engage the brute in battle or to hot foot it out of the

    path of danger.

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