Eusocial Group is a new social network dedicated to science, technology, and the future. Eusocial Group draws its name and many ideas from the realm of social biology, where the term is applied to certain types of hyper-cooperative organisms such as ants, bees, and, interestingly enough, blind mole rats. Each of these species is comprised of numerous individuals, but amazingly, the individual behaviors of these individual beings collectively interact in such a way that a “meta-organism” emerges. Like these remarkable creatures, Eusocial Group seeks members who have prominent altruistic characteristics and who are interested in helping each other out. Like ants, by working together we can do things otherwise impossible.

An important hypothesis of Eusocial Group is that—not possessing the special degree of genetic relatedness of the above mentioned eusocial organisms—the critical ingredient for generating emergent properties amongst humans is social technology. Social technology has a long history as a tool which humans use to make their lives better. Although it is invisible and transmitted memetically, it nevertheless exists and can be passed down from one generation to the next. The world we live in today is rapidly changing, however, and some of the social technologies which have been passed down to us by our ancestors are out of date, and in several cases, maladaptive in a modern context. Eusocial Group seeks to remedy this situation by creating new social technologies to carry us into the future.

Eusocial Group, as a part of the transhumanist movement, posits that in the not too radically distant future—who knows, but perhaps within the next three hundred years—humans will evolve out of human form. While natural evolution could never work so quickly on its own, by applying science and technology to their own evolution, there is reason to believe that humans will be able to significantly accelerate this process. Eusocial Group sees this as a good thing and seeks to promote this process to the greatest extent possible.

From the moment of the Big Bang, evolution has been shaping our universe. Our universe today is absolutely unrecognizable from the one which existed fourteen billion years ago, and yet it is obviously the same universe. Tracing back, we see there were stages which had to be gone through before we could get to where we are now. Energy “cooled” and clumped into matter, matter clumped into stars, early generation stars lived and died and created new elements and new generations of stars, these new elements clumped into planets and interacted with the new stars to begin the formation of life, life progressed from simple replicators, to cells, to multi-celled organisms, and here we are today. It has been a remarkable journey, but the even more phenomenal thing is, this process has not stopped!

There can be little doubt that the process of evolution will continue to shape our world, but the particular way in which it goes about doing so looks like it is about to change forever. We believe we are on the verge of a sea change brought about by the rise of science and technology. The process of observing nature, making deductions from it, and then designing experiments to test those deductions is an incredible tool which has allowed humankind to improve our material condition in life, but this is just the tip of the iceberg—ultimately, we are convinced science and technology will allow humans to transcend their animal origins altogether. Natural selection is about to become a little less natural, so to speak, which is to say that evolution will proceed in the future based not on random gene mutations of the past but by humans taking control of their own evolution. Behold the rise of sci-tech evolution!

But this brings us full circle back to social biology. How are humans going to be able to deal with the incredible changes which are coming? How will they apply science and technology to themselves without evolutionary war ripping them apart? Might they accidentally bring about their own extinction in the process, or at least destroy modern civilization? We believe that insights from fields such as sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and game theory can be productively applied to creating new social technologies to help mediate this process. Through altruism and cooperation, the specter of evolutionary war and destruction—if it cannot be completely eliminated—can at least be toned down. Nobody can say for certain what the future holds, but we throw our lot in with the optimists who believe that humanity will ultimately make it to the other side.

If being part of a social network dedicated to science, technology, and the future is something you’re interested in, please consider joining the Eusocial Group emailing list. To do so, simply send an email to getconnected@eusocialgroup.com with the subject line “Add this address”. Get connected to a group of the future today!