Notes on Social Baseline Theory

Laughter is mediated strongly by social context: we are 30 times more likely to laugh if we are with someone else than if we are on our own (Scott et al. 2014: 1).

High quality social relationships correspond with longer, happier, and healthier lives—facts that hold true, as far as anyone knows, regardless of geography or culture (Coan and Sbarra 2015: 1)

I have long been an advocate for collectivism. My basic argument for collectivism is evolutionary rather than political: humans are an obligatorily social species; we evolved over millions of years to live in groups (small and large); and almost every feature of humanity only makes sense in this social perspective.

Moreover, one can see rudiments of the same social structures and processes in our great ape cousins, as well as in elephants, dolphins, and dogs. We also see them in some social birds. Nothing about the evolution of social species says that master-servant relationships are natural. Indeed, humans are the only mammals that enter into such relationships. If social species had a general motto, it would be:

"All for one and one for all.
United we stand, divided we fall."

I learned a great deal about this from Frans de Waal (1948 - 2024), the primate ethologist who regretted ever coining the widely misunderstood term "alpha male" (See this TED Talk video where he explains what it really means). More specifically, de Waal's book The Bonobo and the Atheist sketches out an evolutionary theory of morality as a feature of evolving to live socially (outlined in another TED Talk).

As the saying goes: "It takes a village to raise a child". This is not hyperbole. Apart from a handful of outliers, humans live in communities. Our genes generally get passed on within an extended community. The alternative, individualism, tends to be a pathology in a social species since individualism weakens the group and leaves individuals vulnerable to predators. Moreover, social isolation is known to cause both mental and physical health problems.

More recently, I have picked up on the idea of allostasis. I learned about this from Lisa Feldman Barrett's book How Emotions Are Made, but it also crops up in Karl Friston's free energy principle. I keep meaning to write something about the free energy principle, but haven't gotten to it yet. 

In this essay, I want to explore a newish idea that combines evolutionary perspectives on social lifestyles with allostasis. This new theory correlates extremely well with Frans de Waal's account of primate sociability and the evolution of morality. It also correlates well with Robin Dunbar's account of human evolution and the evolution of religion. These kinds of correlations with existing explanations (that I already find useful) are what I look for in a new idea. The best explanations are those that cover the broadest range of topics with the smallest number of assumptions.

I begin with some background on allostasis and the free energy principle, before outlining social baseline theory as it appears in the literature.

Homeostasis and Allostasis

We have long known that certain bodily processes are governed by feedback mechanisms that keep our bodies within specific limits, a goal known as homeostasis. The study of feedback in this sense is called cybernetics.

An obvious example of homeostasis in humans is body temperature, which ideally stays in a 1 °C range: 36.5–37.5 °C. That is, we ideally keep our body temperature to within half a degree of 37 °C. Prolonged periods of too low or high temperatures may be fatal. If we go below 36.5 °C, we get goosebumps and shiver, which warms us; if we go above 37.5 °C, we start to sweat, pant, and/or fan ourselves, which cools us. In this way, we can survive in air temperatures of roughly -50 °C to +50 °C. 

However, it soon became apparent that something more active was also going on, especially in the brain. Rather than relying entirely on reactive homeostasis, the brain is actually predicting what will happen next and preparing for that. Predictions are based on expectations formed from past experience. This process, which has the same goal as homeostasis, is called allostasis.

Allostasis is often likened to Bayesian inference, and for some, it is functionally similar to the idea of the Bayesian brain (although see also Mangalam (2025) for a critique). In Bayesian inference, we try to find the most likely outcome by iteratively improving our knowledge and using that knowledge to assess the likelihood of various possible outcomes. This is also similar to the scientific method more generally. We can take it to refer to a process of updating our expectations based on the available knowledge.

Karl Friston's free energy principle suggests that biological systems, right down to the level of individual cells, have Bayesian-like processes that minimise unexpected results, by either refining predictions or changing something (internal or external to the cell). There is a kind of intelligence here that is evident even in single-celled organisms. And Friston proposes that this process is driven by physical processes analogous to thermodynamics.

I should add that this "intelligence" is in no way connected to being aware or self-aware. The fact that we can see it in single-celled organisms means that it's a purely mechanistic process, albeit one of dazzling complexity (even at that scale). That said, it's difficult to watch, say, an amoeba pursuing its prey without imagining some kind of agency. However, this reflects a limit on the human imagination, not a statement about nature generally. Humans have a strong tendency to see agency where none exists, as explained by Justin L. Barrett in Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (which I have cited many times over the years).

We've probably all experienced "getting up top fast", where, rising from sitting to standing, we briefly get light-headed and dizzy. This is a minor failure in allostasis. What usually happens is that the desire to stand up occurs and the body automatically begins to prepare for it by, for example, raising your blood pressure. Better to be prepared and then not need it than to pass out from lack of blood in the brain every time you stand up in a hurry.

We need to be clear that the brain is not acting like a little person in this scenario. The brain, per se, does not know what's going on. The brain, per se, is not aware separately from our first-person perspective. At the end of the day, all the brain does is accept inputs and generate outputs. In human self-awareness, the functioning of the brain is entirely transparent to our first-person perspective. The brain was not even suspected to be where thinking goes on until the late 19th century. 

To date, we can only describe the functioning of the brain as a kind of "black box". The brain receives millions of inputs from nerves and its own neurons, it weighs and evaluates those inputs, and it then produces a variety of outputs, including actions such as changing the balance of substances in our blood, changing our respiration, and moving our body around. A movement like walking involves thousands of signals per second, going to hundreds of muscles, which must contract and relax in a very specific sequence, or we simply fall over. Balancing on two legs is an incredibly complex process, which is only made more difficult by moving around. However, such processes are also entirely transparent to our conscious mind, because conscious coordination on that scale would be far too slow to be useful, if it were possible at all.

As well as coordinating nerve inputs and outputs, the brain also coordinates energy inputs and outputs in the body. The brain tries to anticipate energy expenditure and tries to ensure that the body has sufficient resources. And this part is generally not under our conscious control. It involves feelings like hunger and satiation. It makes sense that the brain would seek to minimise or at least optimise energy expenditure when seeking any goal.

For example, we walk most places rather than sprinting at full speed. Sprinting requires very intensive use of resources that cannot be sustained over more than about 15 seconds, usually with a recovery time of several hours, which limits how often one can sprint. Fanny Blankers-Koen (Netherlands) won four sprint races in one day at the 1948 London Olympics, running a total of 580 m. Although note, she also went on a celebratory shopping spree before the final relay, arriving back at the stadium with only 10 minutes to spare. Blanker-Koen might have run in other races that day, but the organisers limited her to three individual races and one relay. Still there are limits. 

By contrast, humans can easily walk for several hours every day, day after day. Energy budgeting turns out to be a very powerful way of thinking about what the brain does. Slow and steady does win the race over long distances.

One of the striking features of Karl Friston's free energy principle is that cells, brains, and organisms use the same basic architecture to optimise energy expenditure. Hence, the incredible explanatory power of the free energy principle.

Friston says that optimising energy expenditure is based on making accurate predictions, or in other words, based on minimising surprises. Discrepancies between expectation and reality (aka surprises) are dealt with in one of two ways: change the prediction or change the input (i.e do an action). The less we have to change predictions or take unexpected actions, the better we can manage our energy expenditure.

I am still a bit vague about the next part of the argument. As I understand it, at present, Friston's most important contribution has been to mathematically describe this process of minimising surprise. This enabled him to show that minimising surprise is mathematically the same idea as minimising free energy in information theory. Moreover, both are mathematically equivalent to Bayesian inference.

If you watch interviews with Friston, he tends to switch between three approaches: his own mathematical description of surprise, information theory, and Bayesian theory. In order to follow his train of thought, one needs to know these topics quite well. And, honestly, I don't.

Another important concept is allostatic load, a term coined by Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar (1993). I have written about this before without knowing what it was called (see Rumination, the Stress Response, and Meditation. 22 January 2016). McEwen and Stellar (1993: 2093) define allostatic load as:

...the cost of chronic exposure to fluctuating or heightened neural or neuroendocrine response resulting from repeated or chronic environmental challenge that an individual reacts to as being particularly stressful.

Allostatic load has measurable consequences, such as changes in blood pressure and cortisol levels. It is a physiological process whereby an organism can become depleted by constant stress. I first observed this in a biology class in 1982 while studying earthworms. I especially noted that fight or flight responses rapidly drain our resources (especially in the endocrine system), which take some time to recover. For example, physiological arousal causes our adrenal glands to secrete adrenaline (aka epinephrine). The adrenaline is released in milliseconds, but it takes several hours to replenish. While we try to keep some in reserve, chronic arousal depletes the store. If our store of adrenaline is exhausted, the body tries to become aroused, i.e. ready to fight or flee, but it cannot respond. 

Repeated stimulation of these responses without time to recover leads to responses of diminishing intensity until we become unable to respond. In my earlier essay, I made a connection from this to what doctors in the UK call major depression (aka clinical depression). And I characterised depression as a collapse of our ability to respond to stimuli as the result of hyper-stimulation or what I would now call allostatic overload. Many have noted that the symptoms of depression are as much physical as mental.  Physical exhaustion is a common symptom of depression, consistent with adrenaline depletion. A recent review of many studies (Gou et al 2025) confirms my suspicion:

High [allostatic load] is positively associated with increased risks of depression, anxiety, and suicide, highlighting its potential as a predictive tool in mental health.

With this preamble complete, we can now explore an idea that applies this same kind of insight on a higher level of organisation: the social group.

Social Baseline Theory

Social Baseline Theory was first proposed by Lane Beckes and James A. Coan in 2011. With subsequent contributions from David A. Sbarra and others. I should emphasise that social baseline theory is still relatively new. While it emerges from considering patterns in neuroscience evidence, it is still somewhat speculative. I'm enthusiastic because what has emerged to date is very consistent with ideas that I've been writing about for a decade or more. To me, it makes good sense, and I find it a useful addition to how I think about humanity.

The basic insight of social baseline theory is that, having evolved to live in groups, one of the things we expect in our optimisation of energy expenditure is social input. In this view, having good social connections is part of the baseline of being social. Our social group is perceived by the body as a resource that it can draw on. A corollary of this is that not having those connections is actually a drain on us.

As noted, Friston sees the same kind of allostatic mechanism operating in both cells, brains, and organisms. Here, Beckes and Coan extend this same reasoning to social groups. The abstract from the original paper is an excellent (if jargon-heavy) summary:

Social proximity and interaction attenuate cardiovascular arousal, facilitate the development of non-anxious temperament, inhibit the release of stress hormones, reduce threat-related neural activation, and generally promote health and longevity. Conversely, social subordination, rejection and isolation are powerful sources of stress and compromised health. Drawing on the biological principle of economy of action, perception / action links, and the brain’s propensity to act as a Bayesian predictor, Social Baseline Theory (SBT) proposes that the primary ecology to which human beings are adapted is one that is rich with other humans. Moreover, SBT suggests that the presence of other people helps individuals to conserve important and often metabolically costly somatic and neural resources through the social regulation of emotion. (Beckes & Coan 2011)

This might be too technical for some, so let's unpack it by working through their argument. In this view, then, humans require the presence of other humans to help regulate our bodies.

...the human brain is designed to assume that it is embedded within a relatively predictable social network characterized by familiarity, joint attention, shared goals, and interdependence. (Beckes and Coan 2011: 976-977)

The brain was not "designed". I would say that the brain evolved to expect being socially embedded. Other than this quibble, this part of the explanation seems reasonably clear. The fact that we evolved to live in communities means that the presence of a community is something that we expect to be present. It would be weird not to. It also makes the absence of a community notable. In short, evolution has optimised our bodies and minds for living in close-knit communities. And as Frans de Waal noted, social animals have two capacities in common: empathy and reciprocity. We respond emotionally to our community and they to us. 

The presence or absence of a supportive social environment is evident in our blood, especially during stressful events. Individuals carry the whole load of the stress, communities distribute it. 

What Beckes and Coan are saying is that allostasis which we can see operating in cells and brains, can also be seen to operate at the level of communities. 

Moreover, Beckes, Coan and others have observed that when social support is available, the parts of the brain believed to be involved in self-regulating emotions are less active. Which suggests that the regulation of emotions in social situations works by a different mechanism. This leads to socialised awareness:

When proximity [to a supportive community] is maintained or reestablished, the brain is simply less vigilant for potential threats, because it is embedded within the social environment to which it is adapted. (Beckes and Coan 2011: 977)

There are specific biological mechanisms that make being in a social group more energy efficient for all the individuals involved. 

Both social baseline theory and the free energy principle assume that one of the main roles of the brain is optimising the body's energy use. And many studies in both humans and animals support this conclusion (Beckes and Coan 2011: 978).

There are two principal benefits to this: risk distribution and load sharing.

Even though group living can be costly in terms of resource competition, overall fitness is enhanced in groups by decreasing the risk of predation, injury, and other potential threats (Krebs & Davies, 1993)... Thus, social groups typically settle into sizes that optimize access to food against the distribution of risk across group members. (Beckes and Coan 2011: 978)

Risk distribution is more or less just safety in numbers. If the task is spotting predators, for example, then having a dozen pairs of eyes is more efficient than just one. This means that when someone "has your back", you are able to use energy more efficiently.

Loading sharing is a distribution of effort towards common goals (Coan & Sbarra 2015: 2). This takes on more significance in the light of allostatic load. Sharing the allostatic load decreases the cost of responding to stress, by distributing it across the group.

Load sharing means that the activities of other group members provide benefits to the individual, whether the individual participates or not. For example, in foraging societies, we often see men focused on hunting and women focused on gathering (and sometimes cultivating) plants. Women benefit from having meat, and men benefit from having vegetables. And both benefit from the specialisation that leads to enhanced expertise. 

We feel less threatened by surprising stimuli when we are in the presence of someone with whom we share a bond. In this view, our social network becomes an extension of our self. Normally, the presence of other people helps us to regulate our emotions in ways that are more efficient than simple self-regulation.

Many theorists have suggested that the self is “expanded” by relationships with others [26]. This may be literally true at the neural level. For example, the brain encodes threats directed at familiar others very similarly to how it encodes threats directed at the self—but no such similarity obtains for strangers [27]. (Coan & Sbarra 2015: 3)

This appears to be consistent with the idea that identity in some societies is more social than amongst industrialised Europeans and colonists. Indeed, the rampant individualism associated with the Neoliberal Revolution can be seen as a pathological state for a social species. We cannot survive alone, much less attain our broader aims in life.

An extension of social baseline theory involving the concept of allostatic load was proposed by Saxbe et al (2020). They proposed that allostatic load has a social analogue. This makes sense. In a social group characterised by the capacities for empathy and reciprocity, we might imagine that emotional contagion generalises.

Robin Dunbar (2014, 2023) has observed that group bonding in non-human primates is strongly based on one-to-one activities, especially grooming. Grooming stimulates endorphins, which mediate our sense of well-being. Grooming calms both the individuals involved and creates a sense of bonding (or attachment).

However, Dunbar points out that human groups have grown too large for one-to-one grooming to be efficient. We simply don't have time for ~150 individuals to spend enough time grooming each other for this to work. What we have instead are group activities that achieve the same end. Notably, collective practices such as singing and dancing together have the same effect on our sense of well-being as grooming does in other animals.

The idea of social allostatic load is that our relationships help us to regulate our emotions. And the loss of relationships then puts additional stress on the individual.

Conclusion

None of this seems surprising or counterintuitive. It is entirely consistent with the idea that we evolved, over millions of years, to live in social groups. It is also consistent with the idea that we employ both homeostatic and allostatic processes at a variety of scales.

...the brain manages energy and behavior by making predictions about outcomes given (i) the current situation (particularly constraints, risks, and opportunities), (ii) the predicted possible future situation(s), (iii) situational goals, (iv) current energy states, and (v) expected future energy states (Beckes and Coan 2011: 980-981).

Or as Coan and Sbarra (2015: 1) put it:

... the human brain assumes proximity to social resources—resources that comprise the intrinsically social environment to which it is adapted. Put another way, the human brain expects access to relationships characterized by interdependence, shared goals, and joint attention.

My comment here is that the human brain is like this because we evolved to live in communities.

Beckes and Coan also make the link from Social Baseline Theory to another popular model: Attachment Theory. This is a topic for another essay, I just wanted to note the connection. 

Some readers may recall that I often cite Ariel Glucklich (1997) when talking about magic. In his book The End of Magic, he says

Magic is based on a unique type of consciousness: the awareness of the interrelatedness of all things in the world by means of simple but refined sense perception... magical actions... constitute a direct, ritual way of restoring the experience of relatedness in cases where that experience has been broken by disease, drought, war, or any number of other events. (1997: 12)

However, in refreshing my memory of that first citation in 2008, I noticed something that I usually forget. The next part of the story is:

[Magic] is a natural phenomenon, the product of our evolution as a human species and an acquired ability for adapting to various ecological and social environments. (1997: 12)

As I say, I find an idea more compelling when it fits with other explanations I find useful. One idea that explains numerous phenomena is more compelling than an idea that explains one phenomenon in isolation. We could now say that "magic" exploits the effects described by social baseline theory. A sense of being securely connected to our social environment is essential to health and well-being.

And thus the general sense of alienation and isolation that pervades British and (more so) US culture is a symptom of a deep malaise. The Neoliberals sought to downplay "society" in order to foster extreme forms of individualism (including libertarians and billionaires), which have been all too clearly detrimental to both Britain and the USA.

Stressed by constant change, constant threats to our livelihood, and threats to our communities, we begin to experience allostatic overload. Depression and anxiety are some of the most obvious results. Given the pace of change in my lifetime and the disruptions caused by the Neoliberal revolution, we might expect to see sharp increases in mental health problems after the 1980s. And we do. 

And this leads me to one last connection. In an article that dramatically changed how I see modern politics, Karen Stenner (2020) describes how and why some people opt to support authoritarian leaders. In Stenner's terms, people with the authoritarian disposition make up around 30% of the population. They are characterised by low scores on IQ tests and low scores on the Big 5 criterion of openness to experience. Such people want sameness (group conformity) and oneness (group authority). When that expectation is denied and combined with, say, perceived economic hardship (such as a decline in living standards), then they support the first authoritarian ruler who comes along promising a return to the "good old days". Thus, we can see the rise of fascism in the 21st century as a response to social allostatic overload caused by the neoliberal revolution. 

As I say, social baseline theory is relatively new still. More research needs to be done to establish it in the scientific community. That said, the idea that we rely on other people is a no-brainer. We do. Of course we do. What we are doing here is not stating some new and hitherto unsuspected truth. Rather, we are finessing and "putting the eyebrows on" something that everyone knows. 

Social baseline theory emphasises that, for an obligatorily social animal, the lack of a social context prevents us from optimising our energy expenditure and is detrimental to our health and well-being.

~~Φ~~

Bibliography

Barrett, Justin L. (2004). Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Altamira Press.

Beckes, L., & Coan, J. A. (2011). "Social baseline theory: The role of social proximity in emotion and economy of action." Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5(12), 976–988. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2011.00400.x

Coan, J. A., & Sbarra, D. A. (2015). "Social Baseline Theory: The Social Regulation of Risk and Effort." Current Opinion in Psychology 1: 87–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2014.12.021 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4375548/

Dunbar, Robin. (2014). Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Pelican.

Dunbar, Robin. (2023). How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures. Penguin.

Glucklich, Ariel. (1997). The end of magic. New York, Oxford University Press.

Gou, Y., Chenga, S., Kanga, M. et al. (2025). "Association of Allostatic Load With Depression, Anxiety, and Suicide: A Prospective Cohort Study." Archival Report 97(8): 786-793. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2024.09.026

Mangalam, M. (2025). "The myth of the Bayesian brain." European Journal of Applied Physiology, 125(10), 2643–2677. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-025-05855-6

McEwen, B.S. & Stellar, E. (1993). "Stress and the individual. Mechanisms leading to disease". Archives of Internal Medicine 153(18): 2093–2101. doi:10.1001/archinte.153.18.2093.

Saxbe, D. E., Beckes, L., Stoycos, S. A., & Coan, J. A. (2020). "Social Allostasis and Social Allostatic Load: A New Model for Research in Social Dynamics, Stress, and Health." Perspectives on psychological science: a journal of the Association for Psychological Science 15(2): 469–482. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619876528

Scott, S. K., Lavan, N., Chen, S., & McGettigan, C. (2014). "The social life of laughter." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18(12): 618–620. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2014.09.002

Stenner, Karen. 2020. "Authoritarianism." Hope Not Hate. https://hopenothate.org.uk/2020/11/01/authoritarianism/

Togetherness

Twenty years ago, on this day—26 November 2005—I posted the first essay on this blog. Today's post is the 647th essay (and the first one not posted on a Friday). Jayarava's Raves amounts to some millions of words. If you had told me twenty years ago that I would go on to write well over 600 essays, I would not have found that plausible. And yet, here we are.

These essays reflect my self-education not only in Buddhism, but in all the allied disciplines and fields that are required to understand religion, religieux, and religious phenomena, including: history, philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, axiology), general linguistics, socio-linguistics, translation theory, sociology, and social psychology (none of which were included in my formal education). I've also maintained an interest in science and written about that from time to time. I've been trying to make sense of Buddhism in rational terms. 

Perhaps the most profound thought I have come across in the last 20 years is that we are not only social animals, but each individual is also a community of cells. And our surfaces—inside and out—are coated with numerous symbiotic microorganisms that make a significant contribution to processes such as digestion and immunity to pathogens. Moreover, our eukaryote cells are themselves symbiotic communities of what used to be separate organisms.

Whether we know it or not, every one of us is a community of communities. And if we go up the taxonomic hierarchy, we find humans in dependent relationships within ecosystems at every turn. Ultimately, all ecosystems contribute collectively to Gaia, the Earth's biosphere conceived of as a single (if complex) self-organising and self-regulating system.

Everywhere we look in nature, at whatever scale we choose, we see communities, cooperation, symbiosis, interdependence, and co-evolution. I find this thought both profound and beautiful. Yes, there is some conflict and competition, but Darwinian approaches to evolution massively over-emphasise conflict and almost completely ignore cooperation.

In this essay, I want to dwell on togetherness. It is, ironically, something I have seldom experienced for myself, and less and less as years go by. Nonetheless, I recognise it as the acme of human existence.

Social Animals are Moral Animals

What do you think of this slogan? Does this sound evil to you? Is this a recipe for tyranny?

All for one, and one for all;
United we stand, divided we fall.

What about these?

• There's no 'I' in team.
• A problem shared is a problem halved.
• It takes a village to raise a child.
• No one gets left behind.—US Military
• Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.—Helen Keller
• Even the weak become strong when they are united.—Friedrich von Schiller
• We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.—Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.—Henry Ford
• "Monks," said the Bhagavan, "you have no mother and no father to care for you. If you don't care for each other, then who will care for you? If you would care for me, then tend to the sick."—Vin I 301

In The Road to Serfdom (1944), Friedrich Hayek argued that all forms of collectivism inevitably lead to tyranny. Only robust individualism, especially in commerce, can save us from tyranny and deliver us to an individualist liberal utopia. If Hayek was right, then these collectivist slogans that emphasise cooperation, community, and togetherness ought to be seen as a threat.

To me, this attitude is almost incomprehensible, but Hayek is probably the most influential intellectual of the last century. Along with other prominent neoliberals—like Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman—Hayek's views have shaped every capitalist society on the planet. Virtually all modern politicians and businessmen are neoliberals. Revolutions around the world in the late 1970s and early 1980s aimed to implement Hayek's utopian (neo)liberal view of a society of self-sufficient individuals engaged in commerce. While these men were promoting self-interest to intellectuals and economists, mad old Ayn Rand became the patron saint of self-interest amongst technologists (thus validating the neurodivergence that made them somewhat alienated from society). Alan Greenspan, who was a central figure in US monetary policy ca. 1974 to 2006, was a personal disciple of Rand. Making Rand one of the most influential intellectuals of all time.

Of course, the anti-collectivists were helped by the horrific excesses carried out in the name of Karl Marx in the USSR and China. Stalin and Mao were undoubtedly brutal tyrants. But in terms of socialism, Hayek and company seem to ignore all of the democratic socialist nations and the very high standard of living and freedom they attained. Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, and even post-War Britain all had democratic socialist governments and free people.

The fact is that humans are social; we live in societies. Our sociology determines our psychology, not the other way around (sociology is more fundamental than psychology). And ideological individualism is a pathology for a social animal.

Some birds and most mammals have adopted a social lifestyle. I won't comment here on social insects since they work on different principles. The social lifestyle is one of the most successful evolutionary strategies in the 3.5 billion-year history of life on Earth. Certainly, the success of humans as a species is directly related to our ability to work together in large numbers for a common cause. We actually enjoy working together.

Amish men raising a barn together.

By the way, I don't cite animal examples to drag us down: "we're no better than animals". I cite animal examples to emphasise the universality of these observations about morality and togetherness. I also want to emphasise that no supernatural explanation of morality is needed. 

As the late, great, Frans de Waal pointed out, a social lifestyle minimally requires two capacities: empathy and reciprocity.

Empathy is the capacity to use physical cues to internally model how other people are feeling. Which means we don't just know what others feel, we also feel it in our own bodies. This is why emotions are contagious. As social animals, we monitor how the group is disposed, i.e. who is feeling what towards whom. This allows us to accurately judge the potential and actual impacts of our actions on others, and to moderate our behaviour accordingly. This is morality in a nutshell. But we don't just respond in the moment. We also keep track of and respond to how people have acted towards us, which requires the capacity for reciprocity.

Reciprocity is the capacity to form relationships of mutual obligation. It is keeping track of these obligations that creates a limit on the size of groups. The famous "Dunbar Number"—150—was derived by comparing primate group sizes with the volume of their neocortex. Robin Dunbar showed there is a strong correlation between these. Humans can keep track of the history of how members of the group interact in groups up to around 150, though there is considerable individual variation. Beyond 150, we can still form groups, but the sense of mutual obligation is more tenuous as the group size increases. With strangers, we typically do not feel a sense of obligation, except where it is imposed on us by nature: for example, the culture of hospitality common to many desert-dwelling societies.

However, reciprocity only holds a group together if there is some tendency for generosity. Someone has to start sharing, or no one would share. Social animals have to be prosocial, or sociality per se doesn't work. At the very least, mammalian mothers have to be willing to care for newborn infants, or they don't survive.

Anyone who reneges on the obligations of reciprocity has created an unfair situation. De Waal and other animal ethologists showed that social mammals are keenly aware of fairness (see especially his TED Talk). We intuitively understand that unequal rewards are unfair. We know it, and we also feel it deeply. Since the survival of the group relies on maintaining the integrity of the network of mutual obligations, we are highly motivated to be fair and to re-establish fairness when it breaks down. We call the latter "justice".

So our concepts of morality, fairness, and justice all emerge naturally from our having evolved social lifestyles and large brains. The rudiments are all visible, at least to some extent, in all social animals, suggesting universality. What may be unusual in humans is ethics, understood as abstract principles on which more concrete moral rules can be based. It is abstract ethics that allows us to adapt moral rules to new situations, for example (note that Buddhism lacks any ethical discourse, so Buddhists generally take a conservative view—no new rules—or they draw on the ethics of the surrounding culture for making ad hoc rules).

Being a member of a social species is not the only form of biological interconnection that we participate in. Let's now look at some others. 

Evolution and Exosymbiosis

I have long been a fan of Lynn Margulis (1938 – 2011). Margulis got a few things spectacularly wrong, especially later in life (notably her views on HIV were badly wrong). But her overall contribution to biology was pivotal for modern science and for my own views.

Notably, Margulis discovered endosymbiosis in 1966, which I will deal with in the next section. Margulis also advocated, in scientific and popular publications, for much greater awareness of the role of symbiosis in biology and evolution.

Margulis, Lynn. (1998). The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. Basic Books.

When I first studied biology, over 40 years ago, symbiosis was presented as something rather rare and unusual. Some organisms, such as lichens, enter into very close relationships in which two or more species rely on each other to survive. Lichens are the classic example. Lichens are a distinctive form of organism, but they are actually made of at least one fungus and one bacterium. Some species of lichens include both a filamentous (or hyphae-forming) fungus and a single-celled fungus (or yeast).

From quite early on, Margulis argued that symbiosis was much more common than allowed by traditional biology. Indeed, Margulis was critical of Darwin's (and the Darwinian) focus on competition and violence amongst animals (a view that Frans de Waal also rebelled against early in his academic career). 

According to Margulis, this jaundiced view was heavily influenced by the preoccupations of Victorian ruling-class men, i.e. patriarchy and imperialism. That is to say, representing nature as "red in tooth and claw" suited the ruling class men of Europe—of which Darwin was a member—because they were busy trying to conquer, appropriate, and exploit the entire world. Darwin was able to spend 20 years developing his ideas on natural selection because he was never burdened by having to work for a living. Nor did he have to accept patronage. Having inherited enough wealth to live on, he could simply focus on his gentlemanly pursuit of science and volunteer work for learned societies. And this was the norm at the time. There were no working-class scientists.

Nor was this the end of the trend. Richard Dawkins, arguably the most prominent biologist of the twentieth century, applied Hayek's neoliberal worldview to biology to come up with the "selfish gene". Cooperation, communities, symbiosis and all that were simply explained away as being "motivated by self-interest". The conclusion is too obviously ideological rather than objective. Later in life, Dawkins is famous for two things: (1) apologetics for his own unreasonable views and (2) unreasonably picking fights with religious people using arguments that are guaranteed not to change anyone's mind. Dawkins, the biologist, never even tried to understand the phenomenon of "belief".

From the time of Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679), liberals have seen humans not as prosocial, empathetic, and reciprocating but as vicious loners, forced by circumstances to live together, creating endless conflict and violence. Note that Hayek is clearly Hobbesian in outlook, and it is no coincidence that both of these ruling-class men lived through periods of all-out war and political chaos in Europe. They both attributed the violence of their own class and gender to the common people and argued that their own class provided stability. In psychological projection, a person projects alienated aspects of their own personality out into the world, in order to try to come into relationship with themselves. 

Liberals see competition as the great winnower of species and individuals (social Darwinism has always been part of the liberal schtick). Competition takes on a moral character in which succeeding in competition equates to moral goodness. Hence, liberals expect "winners" in any competition to be moral role models. 

According to liberalism, the apotheosis of competition means that we naturally adopt a kill-or-be-killed attitude. However, liberals also believe in Hobbes' Leviathan. This is linked to the Christian idea that God placed the ruling class in a superior position to other people, i.e. that of gamekeeper or farmer. The ruling class are the only ones who can impose order on the common people, who are otherwise nasty, brutish, and violent, but also lazy.

These views are all too obviously ideas that the ruling class of imperial Britain used to justify imperialist brutality towards societies, including their own. When a society routinely commits genocide in order to steal resources, it has to have some discourse that legitimises this. And liberalism was one of these. 

In fact, symbiosis turns out to be ubiquitous in nature, with humans themselves providing one of the most striking examples.

The "human gut microbiome" is now a household concept. We all know that many beneficial bacteria, fungi, and protists live in our gut. They very obviously contribute to digestion, for example, by breaking down cellulose, which we cannot do without them.

We now know, for example, that when a baby mammal suckles milk from its mother, it is also swallowing bacteria that will become its gut microflora. And that this is vital for the normal development of the gut and the immune system.

I suspect that part of the reason that so many modern people have "allergies" and "sensitivities" is the trend since the 1960s to bottle-feed newborns. Of course, sometimes there is no choice, so demonising bottle-feeding is counterproductive. But there must be a way to introduce bottle-fed newborns to "good bacteria", some other way, rather than leaving it to chance. I suspect that the massive rise in morbid obesity may be related to aberrant gut microflora as well, although eating to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system (and thus reduce physiological arousal) is a huge factor. That is to say, we eat to calm down because we are hyperstimulated most of the time and have not learned any better ways. 

So beneficial are our gut symbionts that one can now receive a "faecal transplant" in which faecal matter from a healthy person—said to contain "good bacteria"—is introduced to the bowel of an unhealthy person, with a view to restoring their health. Apparently, this can work. Various foods with "good bacteria" are also popular, though whether these survive passing through the stomach is moot. Stomach acids kill the vast majority of microorganisms. 

Another very striking example of ubiquitous symbiosis is the mycorrhizal fungi that grow in and around tree roots. The fungal filaments (hyphae) live partly in the tree roots and partly in the soil. They break down the soil and transport nutrients into the roots, thus nourishing the tree. 

There is some suggestion that mycorrhizal fungi form underground networks in forests that link trees together and allow them to share resources. From what I've read, the full-on clickbait version of this story is to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, we can say that symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi are very important to the thriving of many plants.

All animals have extensive symbiotic relations with gut bacteria. But our outer surfaces are also an ecosystem. Not only are we constantly covered in microorganisms, but we also play host to organisms such as eyebrow mites that live in hair follicles. We are an ecosystem for such critters. 

Margulis also notes that bacteria evolve rapidly. They have generations of about 20 minutes. Every bacterial cell can, at least in principle, share genetic material with any other bacteria, regardless of species. Indeed, Margulis sometimes argued that one can take this to mean that bacteria are all one species. In any case, bacteria are highly promiscuous and routinely swap genes. This is how a trait like antibiotic resistance can spread rapidly in a population of bacteria.

Another feature of evolution that the Darwinists downplay is hybridisation. Again, when I was studying biology, hybridisation was presented as an exception. Fast forward 50 years, and it turns out that all humans are the result of the hybridisation of more than one human species. Most Homo sapiens carry some genes from one or more of Homo neanderthalensis, Homo naledi, Homo longi (aka Denisovans), and/or Homo floresiensis. Possibly others as well.

Margulis pointed out that where organisms fertilise eggs externally, hybridisation is very common. Some 20% of plants and 10% of fish routinely hybridise.

Finally, we can point to many examples of coevolution in which two species evolve a dependence on each other. The most obvious examples are plants and their pollinators. Some of these relationships are so specific that only one species of insect is capable of fertilising a particular flower. The plant puts considerable resources into attracting appropriate pollinators, and pollinators expend considerable resources collecting and distributing pollen. Each benefits more or less equally from the relationship, and they come to rely on each other to survive. This is surely the very opposite of competition. If the dynamic here were competitive, one of the partners would lose out. It would become a form of commensalism or parasitism.

Even parasitism is considerably more complex than it seems. For example, there is a widespread belief, backed up by robust evidence, that eradicating common human parasites in the modern world has led to the immune system being poorly calibrated, which contributes to the rise in autoimmune diseases and "allergies" in modern times. This is sometimes called the "hygiene hypothesis". We evolved to deal with common parasites and, ironically, not having them, which would intuitively be seen as wholly good, is actually a disruption of the normal order of things and leaves us maladapted. Just as faecal transplants are a thing, some doctors have tried infecting patients with relatively harmless roundworm parasites as a way of correcting an immune system imbalance. The jury is still out, but the idea is not completely mad.

While competition is certainly a factor in evolution, it is far from being the only one. Lynn Margulis convinced me that cooperation, communities, symbiosis, hybridisation, and co-evolutionary dependencies are every bit as important to evolution. Species not only diverge, but they also converge, creating evolutionary leaps. Margulis also alerted me to the ideological nature of some scientific conclusions regarding nature and evolution, especially the influence of patriarchy and neoliberalism. The story of how important symbiosis is to evolution is brought into focus by Margulis's 1967 breakthrough article.

Endosymbiosis

In the mid-1960s (around the time I was born), an early career scientist, then known as Lynn Sagan (married to celebrity scientist Carl Sagan), sent a novel paper to a series of science journals. After many rejections, the paper was eventually published as

Sagan. L. (1967). "On the origin of mitosing cells." Journal of Theoretical Biology. 14(3):255-74. Available online in numerous places.

Part of the abstract reads:

By hypothesis, three fundamental organelles: the mitochondria, the photosynthetic plastids and the (9+2) basal bodies of flagella were themselves once free-living (prokaryotic) cells. The evolution of photosynthesis under the anaerobic conditions of the early atmosphere to form anaerobic bacteria, photosynthetic bacteria and eventually blue-green algae (and protoplastids) is described. The subsequent evolution of aerobic metabolism in prokaryotes to form aerobic bacteria (protoflagella and protomitochondria) presumably occurred during the transition to the oxidizing atmosphere.

This hypothesis was subsequently tested and found to be accurate. This process, in which one single-celled organism ends up permanently and dependently living inside another, is now called endosymbiosis. In the meantime, Sagan remarried and changed her name again to Lynn Margulis, which is how I refer to her throughout.

In 1967, endosymbiosis was a radical theory, though some precedents in Russian microbiology were largely ignored in greater Europe because it was the height of the Cold War. Sixty years later, and this idea that organelles within eukaryote cells were once "free-living" is normative. This radical discovery is now such a commonplace that many modern discussions of endosymbiosis do not even mention Margulis or her role in it. Nick Lane, for example, who is at the forefront of abiogenesis research, has repeatedly downplayed the contributions of Margulis. 

It's fair to say that Margulis thought radically differently from most other people and that she was outspoken about her views. For a woman in the 1960s and 1970s, being outspoken (especially towards men) was seen as a serious character flaw. Many men were (and are) intimidated by a strong, intelligent woman. And, unfortunately, Margulis wasn't always right. However, she was right about endosymbiosis, and this is one of the most profound discoveries in the history of science. It is every bit as important as discovering DNA in terms of understanding how life and evolution work.

The prokaryotes are largely represented by bacteria and archaea (previously known as "extremophile bacteria"). Prokaryote cells have no nucleus and little internal structure. Their nuclear material is in a loop rather than a linear chromosome. 

The eukaryotes are fungi, plants, and animals. Eukaryote cells have a nucleus, with chromosomes, and many other internal structures, such as mitochondria.

Prokaryote organisms are far more numerous in biomass and variety. Animals are relatively unimportant to life on Earth; if we all disappeared, the prokaryotes would hardly notice, except those that specialise in living in/on us. Some plants rely on animals for reproduction. But not all, by any means. 

We can diagram the process by which combinations of prokaryotes led to the various eukaryote "kingdoms".

In the standard, neoDarwinian account of evolution, separated populations of a species subjected to differing environmental pressures will slowly diverge over time and become two distinct species. This has now been observed both in the lab and in nature. Evolution, per se, is a fact. Evolutionary theory is our explanation of this fact. Evolutionary theory is taught as a monoculture, at least up to undergraduate level. 

Darwin himself diagrammed the process of evolution as a branching tree, i.e. as a series of splits. This is still by far the most common way of representing evolution. I wrote a critique of this view in an essay titled: Evolution: Trees and Braids (27 December 2013). My suggestion that that we needed to represent evolution as a braided stream, since this allows for convergence and recombination.

I've already commented above on the ubiquity of exosymbiosis and hybridisation in nature. What I want to emphasise here is that endosymbiosis doesn't fit the neoDarwinian view of evolution at all because it is evolution by addition and recombination, rather than an accumulation of mutations. This alone tells us that the Darwinian view is incomplete.

In terms of my view of the world, the fact that our very cells began as small communities of cells within cells is a profound confirmation of the importance of communities and cooperation in nature at every level.

Similarly, our genome can be seen as a community of cooperating genes. The idea of individual genes, let alone "selfish" individual genes, makes little sense. Genes are always part of a genome. Even when bacteria swap genes, they incorporate new genes into their genome. We can talk theoretically and abstractly about individual genes, and we methodologically identify the corresponding function of the gene. But this is an abstract concept. In reality, genes only occur in genomes. A gene simply cannot function outside of a genome and the associated infrastructure.

The concept of the "selfish gene" is nonsensical, even as a metaphor.

So far, I've been delving down the taxonomic hierarchy into the microscopic. This is all too familiar in a reductionist environment and might have passed without comment. However, I am very critical of ideological reductionism. I believe that structure is also real and that structure anti-reductionism is a necessary counterpart to substance reductionism.

In the last section of this essay, therefore, I want to look up.

Gaia

I've already noted that social animals almost invariably live in family-oriented communities (with occasional solitary outliers). But we can also observe that each extended family exists in a network of inter-familial relations, often linked by intermarriage. 

Every human community is part of a network of communities embedded in an environment. We are also part of the local ecosystem. And the local ecosystem is part of the global ecosystem, also called the biosphere or more poetically, Gaia.

The Gaia hypothesis was first proposed by chemist James Lovelock (1919 – 2022) in 1975, with help from none other than Lynn Margulis. The classic statement of the idea appeared in book form in 1979.

Lovelock J (1979). Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press.

The Gaia hypothesis says that the biosphere as a whole is a complex feedback mechanism that "works" to keep the surface of the earth suitable for life, i.e. at maintaining homeostasis. Lovelock introduced the idea of "daisy world" as a simple cybernetic model of how life might achieve homeostasis on a planetary scale.

Interestingly, the Gaia hypothesis emerged after Lovelock was commissioned by NASA to help them figure out how to detect extraterrestrial life. Gaia maintains surface conditions that definitely could not occur in the absence of life. For example, high levels of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere require constant replenishment by living things. So any planet with high oxygen is a candidate for harbouring life.  

Life causes our planet to exist in a state that is very far from the (chemical) equilibrium that we see on planets with no life, like Mars or Venus.

In order to understand life, we have to take a holistic view. Rather than reducing everything to its base substance and calling that "reality", we have to see that reality includes structure. Everything we can see with human eyes is a complex object with numerous layers of structure, lending it many structural properties (sometimes vaguely referred to as "emergent properties"). To say that complex objects are "not real" or "just illusions" is not helpful (or true).

When it comes to life, every structure is embedded in larger structures, up to Gaia, which is the ultimate living structure for life on Earth. Reality is substantial, but it's also structural and systematic.

From the lowest level of description to the highest, life is structures made of structures and systems within systems. Nothing living ever exists as a standalone or independent entity. Everything is dependent on everything else. The Hobbesian, lone-wolf version of humanity really only applies to sociopaths and psychopaths (who seem to be over-represented in the ruling/commercial class). 

Biologists are generally in a better position to see this than physicists. A biologist may well dissect (or even vivisect) an organism to see what it's made of. They may well quantify what elements are found in an organism. We're mainly carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen. But clearly, elements like iron and magnesium play essential roles in our metabolism, as well as being potential toxins. I grew up in a region that was low in cobalt, and this meant that farmed animals would not thrive on our pastures without cobalt supplements. 

However, if a biologist wants to really understand some organism, they have to observe how it interacts with its physical and social environment. That is to say, how an organism reacts to physical stimulus, how it relates to others of its own species, and how it interacts with other species. And since the local environment is a product of the bulk environment, in the long run, we have to see all life on Earth in terms of its contribution to Gaia.

A common misconception about life is that it breaks the second law of thermodynamics. This law states that in a closed system, physical entropy always increases. The misconception stems from ignoring the words "closed system". A cell is not a closed system, since molecules are constantly entering and leaving. An organism is not a closed system. Gaia is not a closed system.

However, even if we stipulate that the second law might apply, the overall effect of Earth having a biosphere is a local increase in entropy. Visible and UV photons from the sun impact the Earth, where they are absorbed by rocks, water, and living things. Eventually, the incoming energy is radiated back out into space as infrared photons. And for every visible-UV photon arriving on Earth, twenty infrared photons are radiated back into space, with a net increase in entropy for Earth and its environment. So, if the second law applies (doubtful), then it is not broken by life. 

However, simple cybernetic feedback does not give us a complete explanation of life. For this, we have to change up a gear.

The Free Energy Principle

It's apparent, for example, that if the brain operated purely on homeostatic feedback, it would not be able to respond at the speed that it does. For this, we need to introduce the idea of allostasis. And allostasis leads us into the final big idea that is essential for understanding life: the Free Energy Principle. 

The idea of allostasis is that the brain constantly predicts what will happen next based on the present inputs and past experience. And if the expected input does not match the actual input, then the brain has two options: (1) change the prediction, i.e. update the expectation based on the new input; or (2) change the input, i.e. make some change in the world. And this enables a faster, more adaptable response.

Anyone familiar with the concept of Bayesian statistics should already recognise this paradigm. Bayesian statistics is a mathematical formalism that allows a statistician to quantify how their expectations change as new information comes in, as part of an iterative process. And this, in turn, has strong connections to information theory.

Enter Karl Friston, who primarily works on making information gleaned from medical scans into meaningful images. This involves expertise in statistical analysis and information theory.

Making these connections led Friston to propose the free energy principle. There is, as yet, no popular account of the free energy principle and the explanations that are available all rely on background knowledge of statistics and information theory that I don't have. 

See, for example:

Friston, K., et al. (2023) "The free energy principle made simpler but not too simple." Physics Reports 1024: Pages 1-29.

It is not "simple" at all unless you have the appropriate background knowledge.

This is something I'm still trying to understand, and I'm hoping to write an essay on it in the near future. But my intuition tells me that this idea is hugely important. Listening to Friston talk about it, I feel that I glimpse something significant. It's important enough to try to offer some impressionistic notes and encourage readers to follow up.

The free energy principle says that any self-organising system—living or non-living—that has a permeable boundary separating it from the general environment and that persists over time, will appear to take actions that can be mathematically described in terms of Bayesian statistics or in terms of "free energy" (a concept from information theory). Friston has shown these to be mathematically equivalent.

Where a prediction fails to match an input, Friston calls this "surprise". This is mathematically related to the informational property "free energy". Hence, "the free energy principle". It turns out that minimising surprise with respect to predictions is mathematically equivalent to minimising free energy (I suppose we might also relate this to the idea of the "path of least action" from classical physics, but I need to look into this). 

Rather than describing life as simply reacting to the environment, we can now describe all living things as iteratively predicting the future and testing predictions and optimising their responses to minimise surprise, resulting in changing predictions or changing inputs (external actions). Living systems involve both homeostasis and allostasis. 

In a sense, all the brain does is receive millions of input signals, process them in ways that are not fully understood, and generate millions of output signals, most of which are internal and only affect expectations. In her book How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman-Barrett notes that 90% of the incoming connections to the visual cortex are from other parts of the brain, rather than from the eyes. 

This principle turns out to be an incredibly useful way of modelling and thus understanding living systems. It can be used to explain how even simple bacterial cells are apparently able to act intelligently (i.e. move towards food, move away from waste, or join up to form a colony). Whether there is some abstract "intelligence" behind this intelligent action is moot, but it's not an obvious conclusion, and it's not required by the free energy principle. 

I have never been a fan of panpsychism, which says that all matter is "conscious" (by degrees). It's such obvious nonsense that I find it hard to imagine why anyone takes it seriously. The free energy principle makes some broad claims, but it doesn't commit to metaphysical nonsense. The fact is that all living organisms do have a range of behaviours that they employ intelligently, without any evidence of being "conscious" or "intelligent". Intelligent behaviour is universal in living things. Being conscious of the world or self (or both) is rare. And, prior to the advent of the free energy principle, we were at a loss to explain this. This left huge gaps for "gods-of-the-gaps" style arguments for the supernatural. The free energy principle appears to plug those holes. 

I believe that, in the long run, the free energy principle will stand alongside the concepts of natural selection, symbiosis, and Gaia in terms of the history of understanding life. It offers a powerful, but also deflationary, account of the mechanisms that underpin life and mind.

Conclusion

The idea that "there is no society, there are only individuals and families" is arse-about-face. Rather, there are no individuals; there are only societies (and a family is a microcosm of a society). The individual is a mythological figure. We can talk about them in theory, but we rarely meet them in person. As Oscar Wilde said,

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Me too, for the most part, but I do at least try to give credit where it is due. 

We are social animals. We evolved to live in social groups. Which means we evolved the capacity for empathy and the capacity for reciprocity. We evolved to be prosocial and moral. We evolved a sense of fairness and justice. Assuming we have not completely suppressed these capacities, we don't need anyone to tell us how to be moral. 

Competition is certainly a feature of life, but we have massively over-emphasised it for ideological reasons (patriarchy and imperialism). Consider the case of collectively making music. Music-making is not a competition, and turning it into one does not enhance it in any way. Making music actually requires selfless cooperation and is at its best when the egos of the players are not evident at all. And playing music, in an appropriate non-competitive context, brings out the best in people. It is no surprise, then, that in capitalist societies, the collective elements of music get reduced to passive consumption. And competition is enforced on musicians in ways that only detract from the music. 

Sociology is more fundamental than psychology, in the sense that we may be born with an individual temperament and/or personality that is relatively unchanging, but we develop in response to the environment we find ourselves in. We learn to be a member of the local social group in more or less the same way that we learn the language of the group we find ourselves in. 

Looking down the taxonomic hierarchy, our cells—our very genomes—are tiny, symbiotic, cooperative communities in which every component member prospers together. Looking up, we always live in families embedded within communities, embedded in societies, embedded in ecosystems, embedded in the biosphere as a whole, or Gaia.

At every level, living things are generally collectivist. And, left to their own devices, humans are naturally collectivist. Nothing could be more normal than socialism. Every group of friends I've ever been part of was leaderless. We just organised ourselves without much effort. 

I do not deny that individuals and species compete with each other, sometimes violently. However, I emphatically believe that the incidence and importance of competition has been grossly overstated by scientists with ideological—reductive, patriarchal, and imperialist—views.

We might even say the togetherness is what gives human lives meaning and purpose. The many modern people who say that they lack meaning and purpose are inevitably disconnected or alienated from society. What we all need (except for psychopaths) is a sense of connection. And it is precisely this connectedness that modern political discourse—neoliberalism and capitalism—seeks to replace with the ideas of ownership, control, and competition. This is aberrant and abhorrent in a social species. 

We are social.
We are social.
We are social.

~~Φ~~

On the Evolution of the Heart Sutra

The evolution of the Heart Sutra has been largely obscured by the historically dominant narratives and by the reluctance of Buddhist Studies to go beyond description and seek explanations. Watanabe Shōgo (1990) and Jan Nattier (1992) showed that the historical narratives about the Heart Sutra are pious fictions and pointed to another, rather unexpected history: the Heart Sutra was composed in China in the mid-seventh century. Their insights were subsequently confirmed by Huifeng (2014), and then I started publishing on this topic in 2015, both confirming the existing observations and adding a few of my own. While the field of Buddhist Studies (and the Buddhist world) has yet to catch up, it is now certain that the Chinese origins theory is correct.

Part of my contribution has been to step outside the usual descriptive mode of Buddhist Studies and propose explanations for the origins and evolution of the Heart Sutra. To date, my main focus has been on origins since this seemed to be the most urgent problem. More recently, I have begun to look at how the text evolved once it appeared ca 656 CE. In particular, I published an article on the varieties and relationships between the extended versions (Attwood 2021a).

In this essay, I will present a first attempt at an overview of the origins and the evolution of the Heart Sutra. I will explain why the variant texts on the Heart Sutra were produced and why they took the form that they did. In particular, I will argue that all of the major variants were created to bolster the perceived authenticity of the Heart Sutra. That the Heart Sutra appeared to lack authenticity in some eyes is hardly surprising given what we now know about its origins.

The centre of this argument is a simplified version of the stemma (or genealogy) of the Heart Sutra that I published in 2021. This diagram shows the relationships between the main inputs to the Heart Sutra and the five main versions that subsequently appeared.

Here a solid arrow represents the lines of descent, and the dotted arrow reflects the fact that Chinese extended versions repeat the text of Xīn jīng (T 251) where they overlap. Vertical spacing reflects relative chronology.

There are two processes to consider: an initial convergence in the Xīn jīng and a subsequent divergence into numerous versions of the text.

As much as the Xīn jīng reflects a convergence of texts, it also reflects a convergence of Indian and Chinese Buddhism. This may not be obvious since writing about Indian Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism tends to happen in different academic contexts that don’t communicate very well. This is sometimes referred to as “the silo mentality”. Even when there is some crossover, such as when scholars of Pāli literature study Chinese translations of Āgama texts, they see the Chinese translations as reflecting Indian culture rather than Chinese culture. Little or no attempt is made to read translated Āgama texts as Chinese texts.

This may be understandable in the case of Āgama texts but it doesn't work in the case of the Heart Sutra. The text was created in a Chinese Buddhist milieu and this is important for understanding it. However, the principal ideas in the text—Avalokiteśvara bodhisatva, Prajñāpāramitā, and dhāraṇī—all come from, and must understood in terms of, Indian Buddhism as well. Understanding the Heart Sutra requires us to have a foot in both camps, which may explain why the text has been so neglected and many of the articles that appear in print are low quality.

Convergence

The late Stefano Zacchetti (2005: 32) says that Kumārajīva's translation of Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā (Pañc) occurred during the period 29 May 403–13 Jan 404 CE. The Móhē bānrě bōluómì jīng «摩訶般若波羅蜜經» (T 223; Móhē) was completed with the help of several expert assistants and was a significant improvement on previous translations. In parallel Kumārajīva and his team translated the *Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa an extensive commentary attributed to Nāgārjuna. The Dàzhìdù lùn «大智度論» was completed on 1 Feb 406 CE.

During the process of translating the commentary, it became clear that Móhē required some revisions. Zacchetti says that these were complete by 18 May 404, but also says in a footnote (128) that one of Kumārajīva's principal assistants, Sengrui (僧睿; 371–438 CE), in his preface to the sutra, mentions revisions continuing to be made throughout the process of producing the Dàzhìdù lùn. The commentary and its text have guided the Chinese understanding of Prajñāpāramitā from that time onwards.

While we still don't know for sure who composed the Xīn jīng, it seems increasingly likely to have been Xuanzang. His name is associated with the earliest mention of the text, he is named in the oldest artefacts, and the earliest commentaries were by some of his close associates. My thorough exploration of this evidence has been submitted for peer review and with luck will be published in 2024. In this essay, after long and detailed consideration of the evidence, I assume that Xuanzang was the author. This is a provisional conclusion that may be subject to revision if some plausible refutation appears (implausible refutations already exist, but can be safely ignored).

Sometime between 654 CE and 26 December 656 CE, Xuanzang composed the Bānrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng «般若波羅蜜多心經» (T 251; Xīn). The earlier date reflects when the dhāraṇī was translated in the Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經» (T 901) by Atikūṭa. Since dhāraṇī transcription in China was never standardised, where we see an identical transcription in two different texts it is highly likely that one copied from the other. Given the nature of Xīn, which is mainly copied passages, I provisionally assume that Xuanzang copied the dhāraṇī from the Tuóluóní jí jīng. This means that Xīn could not have existed before this date. Note that Watanabe Shōgo (1990) definitively refuted the idea of Heart Sutra texts existing prior to the composition of the Xīn.

The later date is when the text is first mentioned in Buddhist literature, i.e. in the Biography of Xuanzang, Dà Táng dà Cí’ēnsì sānzàng fǎshī chuán xù «大唐大慈恩寺三藏法師傳序» (T 2053), composed by Yàncóng 彥悰 in 688 CE. The best translation of the Biography is Li (1995), but see also remarks on its historicity in Kotyk (2019).

There is no evidence of the Heart Sutra, of any kind, from any place, before 654 CE. From that date onwards, evidence in the form of inscriptions, manuscripts, catalogue entries, and commentaries proliferated and began to spread to neighbouring polities in Tibet, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. There is no evidence of any kind from India and it now seems extremely unlikely the Heart Sutra was ever known there. The so-called Indo-Tibetan commentaries are better thought of as Tibetan commentaries attributed to Indian authors (a legitimising strategy).

Xin consists of some copied passages from Móhē, to which Xuanzang added some touches of his own (notably some novel "spellings" and the figure of Guanyin) and the dhāraṇī. Xīn became the standard Heart Sutra from that time onwards in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. It is Xīn that people refer to when they say "The Heart Sutra is the most popular Mahāyāna text".

This part of the stemma also emphasises that passages from Pañc found in Hṛd did not arrive there directly. Contra the historically dominant narrative, the copied passages arrived via a Chinese intermediary, i.e. Móhē. That is, the passages copied from Pañc were not copied directly in Sanskrit from a Sanskrit source. Rather they were selected from Móhē, and only later were they (inexpertly) translated back into Sanskrit.

As Jan Nattier (1992: 170) pointed out, Hṛd bears all the hallmarks of a "back-translation". These include “unmatched but synonymous equivalents” for some Sanskrit terms and “incorrect word order, grammatical errors that can be traced to the structure of the intermediary language, and incorrect readings (due to visual confusion of certain letters or characters in the intermediary language)”.

Thus the Heart Sutra can be explained as the the result of a series of convergent processes and reflects also a convergence of Indian and Chinese Buddhist cultures. However, the text soon began to diverge into numerous versions and it is to these that that we now turn.

Divergence

From the Xīn we see three main lines of development that, as yet, cannot be precisely dated.

1. The creation of the Dàmíngzhòu jīng (T 250) and its attribution to Kumārajīva
2. The creation of the Sanskrit text titled Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya.
3. The creation of two extended texts.

Note that the dotted line from Xīn to the Chinese extended sutras (T 253, 254, 257) reflects the retention of the Chinese text of Xīn where they overlap. The phrase "two extended texts" refers to (1) the Chinese text of T 252, and (2) the Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśatikā-prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya nāma dhāraṇī “Dhāraṇī named The Heart of the Perfection of Insight in Twenty-five [Lines]”. The Pañcaviṃśatikā was subsequently translated into Chinese (T 253, 254, 257).

I will take each of these versions in turn and try to show that each adds something that was perceived to be missing from the Heart Sutra. I don’t argue that there was any coordination between the three processes and, indeed, they seem to have occurred independently and over quite a long timeframe. However, together with the hagiographic stories about Xuanzang, they were embraced into the established myth of the Heart Sutra as an Indian Buddhist text.

1. Dàmíngzhòu jīng

The Heart Sutra was associated with Xuanzang from the outset and this might have been enough to ensure its place as an authentic Indian Buddhist sutra. The four early Chinese commentaries, however, still exhibit some anxiety on this score. The commentaries are:

• Bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng yōuzàn «般若波羅蜜多心經幽贊» “Profound Explanation of the Sutra of the Essence of Prajñāpāramitā”, by Kuījī 窺基 (T 1710)
• Fú shuō bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng zàn «佛說般若波羅蜜多心經贊» “Explanation of the Sutra of the Essence of Prajñāpāramitā” by Woncheuk 圓測 (T 1711)
• Bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng shū «般若波羅蜜多心經疏» “Commentary on the Sutra of the Essence of Prajñāpāramitā” by Jìngmài 靖邁 (X 522)
• Bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng lüèshū «般若波羅蜜多心經略疏» “Brief Commentary on the Sutra of the Essence of Prajñāpāramitā” by Fǎzàng 法藏 (T 1712).

Fǎzàng's commentary is traditionally dated to ca. 702 CE and he died in 712 CE. The other four are not dated, but Kuījī and Woncheuk died in 682 and 696 CE respectively. Jìngmài’s precise dates are unknown but he was roughly contemporary with Xuanzang. Thus they all date from the late seventh or early eighth centuries, and span perhaps twenty years (682–702).

Each commentator notes that the Heart Sutra lacks the expected introduction and conclusion of an authentic sutra. They also note that it consists of extractions from Prajñāpāramitā, which at that point in history seems to have been a reference to Móhē. All four men went ahead and composed their commentaries, but they left some ambiguity. Each of the subsequent developments in the Heart Sutra seems to address this ambiguity.

One approach to securing the authenticity of the text was to create the impression that previous translations existed, notably a translation attributed to the greatest of all the Chinese translators, Kumārajīva, i.e. Móhē bānrě bōluómì dàmíngzhòu jīng «摩訶般若波羅蜜大明呪經» (T 250; hereafter Dàmíngzhòu jīng). Note the title does not include the word xīn 心 "heart". Many of Kumārajiva's translations from the early fifth century are still in use today.

The idea of a Kumārajīva translation and the title it was given (Dàmíngzhòu jīng) were used to make links to another story about an even earlier translation, titled Móhē bānrě bōluómì shénzhòu 摩訶般若波羅蜜神呪. This created the myth of the "lost translation" by Zhī Qiān 支謙 (fl. 3rd century).

Watanabe (1990) thoroughly debunked this story, pointing out that it relies on a two-step process: (1) the false attribution of the shénzhòu text to Zhi Qian—in the catalogue Lìdài sānbǎo jì «歷代三寶紀» (T 2034), compiled by Fèi Chángfáng 費長房 in 598 CE—and (2) the conflation of this shénzhòu text with Dàmíngzhòu jīng. The debunking of this story (some 34 years ago) has not stopped commentators from continuing to use the idea of the "lost translations" to push back the date of translation and assert the validity of the claim that the text is Indian in origin. To be clear, neither Kumārajīva nor Zhi Qian translated the Heart Sutra. This is a false trail, deliberately laid.

In fact, the first evidence of the Dàmíngzhòu jīng, of any kind, is a mention in the Dàtáng nèidiǎn lù «大唐內典錄» "Catalogue of the Inner Canon of the Great Tang" (T 2149), published in 730 CE. As far as I can tell there are no physical texts of Dàmíngzhòu jīng before the eleventh century. The idea that a translation by Kumārajīva could be lost and then rediscovered some three hundred years after his death is extremely far-fetched and scholars have long doubted this attribution, starting with Matsumoto (1932).

That a text produced after Xīn might be retrospectively attributed to Kumārajīva to bolster its perceived authenticity is entirely plausible. It is not merely theoretical to say that Dàmíngzhòu jīng might have been used this way since this is exactly the use that has been made of it in practice. Indeed, we may say that legitimising Xīn is more or less the only use that has been made of the Dàmíngzhòu jīng. In stark contrast to Xīn, there are no commentaries on Dàmíngzhòu jīng, for example, and no prominent inscriptions or famous manuscripts. To my knowledge, Dàmíngzhòu jīng was never transmitted outside of China or translated into another language.

Dàmíngzhòu jīng, then, seems to have been created with the intention of making Xīn appear to be more authentic by pushing back the date of its composition.

2. Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya.

In the historically dominant view, Xīn, the main text used in China, is a translation of this authentic Sanskrit version of the text. What some scholars still call "the Sanskrit original" proves that the Heart Sutra is an authentic Indian Buddhist sutra.

This view is spoiled by a detailed analysis of the text which shows that Hṛd definitely could not have borrowed its copied passages directly from Pañc. Rather the passages were clearly copied into Xīn from Móhē and then translated back into Sanskrit, leaving numerous telltales of the "back-translation" process. This was the gist of Nattier (1992) but has been confirmed numerous times by Huifeng (2014) and yours truly (see especially Attwood 2021b). The Sanskrit text is a translation of the Chinese. As such, it is not a stretch to refer to it as a "Chinese forgery".

It seems that the Sanskrit text was produced at around the same time as Dàmíngzhòu jīng was being created, i.e. in the late seventh or early eighth century. To date, we have no information on who did the translation or when. There is an ambiguous reference to "a Sanskrit text" (fàn běn 梵本) in Woncheuk's commentary (T 1711), though he does not name Hṛd and might have been referring to Pañc, since he says:

The reason there is no introduction or conclusion is that [this text] selects the essential outlines from all the Prajñā texts. It has only the main chapter, without an introduction and conclusion, just as the Guānyīn jīng is not composed of three sections (Adapted from Hyun Choo 2006: 138: emphasis added).

The Guānyīn jīng «觀音經» being originally the twenty-fifth chapter of the Miàofǎ liánhuá jīng «妙法蓮華經» (T 262; Skt. Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra), where it is titled Guānshìyīn púsà pǔmén pǐn 觀世音菩薩普門品 “Chapter of the Universal Gate of Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva”.

I assume that a manuscript of Hṛd was forged for this purpose, and passed off as an Indian “original” since later copies of a Sanskrit text do exist (such as the famous Hōryūji manuscript). A Sanskrit manuscript is the sine qua non of authenticity for a Buddhist text in China.

Now that it has been revealed to be a back-translation, Hṛd has little philological value. Those existing studies that treat this text as "the Sanskrit original" have to be deprecated. In a forthcoming article in Asian Literature and Translation, I revise Conze's unparsable Sanskrit edition of Hṛd to make it parsable. But even this was perceived as a dead end by one of the reviewers. Study of the Sanskrit text is now quite pointless except as a unique historical artefact from early Tang China.

It is not that rare for a Chinese Buddhist text to turn out to have been composed in Chinese. Examples of this have been well documented, even in antiquity. It is exceedingly rare for a Chinese text to be translated into Sanskrit. A few examples of this have been noted. To my knowledge, the Hṛd is unique for having been successfully passed off as an authentic Indian text.

The single most important sign of the authenticity of a Buddhist text in Tang China was precisely the existence of a Sanskrit manuscript. Once again, Hṛd appears to have been created to fill a perceived gap in the authentication of Xīn.

3. Extended Texts

All of the early commentators on Xīn comment on—and attempt to explain—the absence of the usual introduction and conclusion that we expect in Buddhist sutra (I cited Woncheuk on this above; the others make similar comments). The extended text is an attempt to supply exactly these missing sections and this appears to have happened at least twice.

The first extended text appears to be Pǔbiàn zhì cáng bānrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng «普遍智藏般若波羅蜜多心經» (T 252). This text has an introduction and conclusion that are substantially different from all other extended Heart Sutra texts. The introduction is much longer and has specific details —like the presence of 100,000 bhikṣus and 70,000 bodhisatvas—that are absent in all the other texts. At the same time, the conclusion of Pǔbiàn is much shorter and more perfunctory. It is quite striking that the significant differences here have been almost entirely overlooked by other scholars. For more, though still incomplete, detail see Attwood (2021a).

All the other extended texts are clearly from one source, probably in Sanskrit, though with Tibetan and Chinese translations. The Chinese versions of the extended text (i.e. T 253, 254, 257) appear to be genuine translations from Sanskrit. That said, all the Chinese versions, including Pǔbiàn, retain the text of Xīn and only retranslate the extensions.

Ben Nourse (2010) has noted several variant extended texts in the Dunhuang cache. He suggests that these may be hybrids of standard and extended texts, but an alternative explanation might be that they are additional attempts at creating an extended text. More work needs to be done on the Dunhuang texts.

So for a third time, we see the Heart Sutra being modified to better fit a Chinese preconception about authenticity, in this case, that a real sutra has an introduction and conclusion. Only here, however, do we see two (or possibly more) attempts at the same modification.

Conclusion

I have been engaged in explaining the origins of the Heart Sutra for around twelve years. It already seems like old news to me and I find it frustrating that no one in Buddhist Studies seems willing or able to keep up with my oeuvre. At some point, the textbooks will have to change and I only hope I live long enough to see this. How this affects Buddhists is anyone's guess, but I suspect that they will continue to resist all attempts at a deflationary explanation.

The evolution of the Heart Sutra beyond its origins has been of even less interest to the field (and of no interest to Buddhists). The existence of multiple versions is, of course, well known. However, the dates of these versions have been obscured by presuppositions and this has hampered any attempts to understand how the text evolved. Watanabe (1990) debunked the attributions to Kumārajīva and Zhi Qian, making it clear that Xīn is the earliest version of the text. But his work has largely been ignored (including by me until 2023). The dhāraṇī tells us that Xīn cannot have existed before 654 CE, when Atikūṭa transcribed it in Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經» (T 901). This is our starting point.

As we have seen, Xīn diverged into four other versions—ie. Dàmíngzhòu jīng, Hṛd, Pǔbiàn, and Pañcaviṃśatikā. I have argued that we can see these versions as the result of three processes:

1. One attempt to push back the date of composition
2. One attempt to create a "Sanskrit original"
3. Two attempts to provide the missing introduction and conclusion.

In other words, the evolution of the Heart Sutra was driven by conscious attempts to make the origins of the Heart Sutra fit preconceived notions of authenticity in China. These attempts largely succeeded and the associated ideas were incorporated into the historically dominant narratives of the Heart Sutra as an ancient Indian sutra text.

What my work shows is that the Heart Sutra was never ancient, Indian, or a sutra. It was created in the mid-seventh century, in China, and is modelled on a chāo jīng 抄經 "digest text" (a Chinese genre of Buddhist text). And this created anxieties related to authenticity that were addressed in a variety of ways.

I hope that it is becoming clear to my readers that the historically dominant narrative, the myth of the Heart Sutra, is largely a fiction, created quite consciously (thought without much coordination) by Chinese Buddhists. If the Heart Sutra had been merely another ancient Indian sutra, it would have been quite prosaic, notable only for its popularity in East Asia. The idea that it was composed in China and deliberately (and successfully) passed off as an ancient Indian sutra is far more interesting (even a little exciting for a textual scholar).

While I am still not an expert in Chinese Buddhist texts, if I am right about this, it makes the Heart Sutra unique amongst Buddhist texts. Moreover, I think I am right because my approach has a great deal more explanatory power than the historically dominant narratives: expanding on existing work, I have explained the origins of the text in detail. I hope this essay shows that my approach can also explain subsequent developments in the Heart Sutra as well.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

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——. (2021b). “The Chinese Origins of the Heart Sutra Revisited: A Comparative Analysis of the Chinese and Sanskrit Texts.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 44: 13–52.

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