Rob Wilson

Norming Human Individuality

In the literature on biological individuality and the major transitions, individuality is typically thought of as a state of achievement that involves an emerging “higher individual” coming to exercise control over antecedent, smaller individuals. This literature is largely focused on diachronic questions about how individuality has changed, proliferated, or consolidated over time. In general, and as a result, there is seldom the explicit application of any norms to either antecedent or consequent forms of individuality: the central accounts here are thought to be descriptive, rather than evaluative. But such diachronic investigations must rely on questions about what specific forms of individuality amount to at any given time. In human contexts, those forms are thoroughly norm-laden in ways that may well influence the diachronic issues in play. Practices of norming have in fact been prevalent in thinking about human forms of individuality and their relationship to the socially cohesive wholes that they form.

Here I want to reflect on the significance of such practices of norming for claims about the evolution of individuality in the human context. This will involve exploring some of the common forms that this norming of individuality has taken, such as norming via racialisation, norming via eugenic thinking, and norming via biological transcendence. All such norming relies ultimately on a distinction between better and worse forms that human individuality can take with the corresponding evaluations typically forming part of meliorative projects of human improvement.

In these nascent reflections, I will try to answer at least two questions. (i) How does reflection on such norming interact with the recent literature (e.g., Carmel et al. 2023) that considers whether human sociality forms an evolutionary transition in individuality? (ii) Where does norming lie on one or more spectra that range from being a distraction or even an epistemic evil to be avoided through to being a crucial or unavoidable component to thinking about the application of ETI frameworks to human sociality?

Reference:

Carmel Y, Shavit A, Lamm E, Szathmáry E. 2023 Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions: introduction to the theme issue. Phil.Trans. R. Soc. B 378: 20210397. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0397