In 1987, Gus Speth—a founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council—believed that climate change, ecosystem collapse, and biodiversity loss were the greatest threats to the planet. Thirty years later, he changed his mind. The real problem, he realized, wasn’t environmental at its core. It was human: selfishness, greed, and apathy. Addressing those required something deeper than science—something spiritual, cultural.
For those of us immersed in evolutionary biology, Speth’s realization rings true. Modern society has severed its relationship with the natural world, operating under a philosophy of mechanistic reductionism that fails to account for the complex, interdependent nature of life. But this was not always the case. Indigenous societies—rooted in kinship with the land—have long organized themselves around principles that modern evolutionary science is only now beginning to validate.
Multilevel Selection (MLS) Theory, a framework pioneered by biologist David Sloan Wilson and others, argues that evolution operates at multiple levels of organization—genes, individuals, and groups—depending on which level best fosters survival. In doing so, MLS challenges the hyper-individualistic dogma of modern Western thought, which treats competition as the primary evolutionary driver. Instead, MLS suggests that cooperation is not just a social nicety—it’s an evolutionary necessity. And here’s where things get interesting: Indigenous worldviews have been making this argument for thousands of years.
A Selfhood Beyond the Self
Indigenous ontologies often conceptualize identity as extending beyond the individual. This isn’t just poetic abstraction—it has real consequences for social organization and ecological sustainability. Many Indigenous traditions recognize a tripartite selfhood: an individual identity, a communal identity, and an ecological identity.
Among the Ojibwe, for instance, the concept of ‘kincentric ecology’ frames all living beings as relatives. This isn’t metaphor; it’s a mode of existence. It mirrors the evolutionary insight that selection can favor cooperative behaviors when individuals see their survival as bound up with that of their community or ecosystem. Biologists now understand that many cooperative species—including humans—have evolved through a process of selection at the group level. Simply put: groups that worked together survived, while those that prioritized individual gain collapsed.
This perspective is a far cry from the social structures that dominate modern industrialized societies, where selfhood is often reduced to the individual alone. Paul Shepard, an anthropologist and ecopsychologist, once argued that Western identity structures are historically flimsy, leading to social fragmentation, escapism, and a pathological relationship with nature. He wasn’t wrong.
The Evolutionary Mismatch of Modernity
For 95% of our species’ history, humans lived in small, cooperative groups where social bonds were reinforced by shared responsibilities and mutual dependence. This wasn’t utopian—it was pragmatic. If you alienated your group, you starved.
Then came agriculture, urbanization, and, eventually, the nation-state. While these advancements brought undeniable material progress, they also eroded the small-scale social structures that had long acted as a filter for moral behavior. Without intimate, interdependent communities, prosocial behaviors are no longer reinforced, and individualism runs rampant. The result? A society that elevates competition over cooperation, economic gain over communal well-being, and mechanistic control over ecological balance.
MLS Theory provides a scientific framework to understand this shift. When selection pressures act primarily at the individual level—as they do in competitive, atomized societies—self-serving behaviors outcompete cooperative ones. But when selection occurs at the group level, cooperation is rewarded because it enhances collective survival.
Indigenous societies understood this intuitively. Many traditional communities operate through consensus decision-making, elder councils, and systems of reciprocal exchange—mechanisms that prevent power from concentrating in the hands of a few. These social structures align remarkably well with Elinor Ostrom’s Core Design Principles (CDPs) for sustainable governance, which Wilson and others have argued mirror the evolutionary conditions that foster prosociality.
Toward a New Conception of Humanity
Perhaps the most profound implication of MLS Theory is that it introduces a new layer to human identity: a species-level selfhood. We now know that certain evolutionary pressures—like the maintenance of sexual reproduction—operate at the species level, shaping our shared genetic heritage. This insight has the potential to reframe human ethics. If we recognize ourselves not just as individuals or even as members of particular nations or tribes, but as an interdependent species with a collective evolutionary trajectory, we may be able to construct a global ethics aligned with our biological reality.
This, I believe, is where the real challenge lies. How do we resurrect the wisdom of Indigenous worldviews, reintroducing communal and ecological identity structures that have been eroded by modernity? And how do we integrate those insights with cutting-edge evolutionary science to forge a new ethical paradigm for the future?
The answer is neither regression nor nostalgia. We can’t simply return to pre-industrial lifeways, nor should we idealize the past. But we can learn from the deep time-tested social structures of our ancestors—structures that MLS Theory, in many ways, is only now beginning to understand.
If Speth was right, and our greatest problems are spiritual and cultural, then the way forward is not merely technological. It is, as Indigenous traditions have long argued, relational. It requires us to redefine our conceptions of selfhood, governance, and survival—not as atomized individuals battling for resources, but as kin, woven into the fabric of life itself.
