Social behavior—attachment, individuation, altruism, cooperation, division of labor—can be seen in ant colonies or even in groups of organisms as basic as bacteria, today’s representatives of life’s beginnings. In social species, a survival guidance system evolved, not only at the level of the individual but at the level of the social group as a unit.
The guidance system for the colony, or family, as a single unit, was discovered by psychiatrist Murray Bowen. Bowen believed that a way forward from the constraints of the human’s evolutionary past lay in a scientific study of the human, based on observable facts. He integrated the research of ethologists and evolutionary biologists with his long-term observation of behavior within entire families. Bowen called the group-level guidance system that he observed in families the emotional system. An uneven distribution of stress that benefits some at the expense of others may occur to the degree that an individual is pressed by emotional/instinctive group cues to function with the group as a single, undifferentiated unit.
Is using some individual organisms as parts of the social unit for the good of the whole, especially under periods of stress or threat, hard-wired in the human, or even in life itself? If so, is it possible for a family, a group, or a society to preserve and further itself without exploiting some, or most, of its own members?