REVIVING THE GROUP MIND

In the previous chapter, I suggested that the group mind hypothesis could be understood either literally or metaphorically. Expressions of the group mind hypothesis, both in the collective psychology and superorganism traditions and in contemporary discussions, often lend themselves to the literalist interpretation, although I argued in the previous chapter that in fact many of these are better understood as somewhat confusing attempts to state a version of the social manifestation thesis. I shall begin by briefly looking at contemporary views that appear to express the group mind hypothesis, and then raise questions about how they are best understood, and what notion of mind they draw on.

David Sloan Wilson has been a key advocate of the group mind hypothesis in thebiological sciences, casting his advocacy in terms of the notion of cognitive adaptations and locating it within his broader defense of group selection and group-level adaptations. Group-level adaptations are species-specific phenotypes, including behaviors, that evolved because they conferred a selective advantage on their bearers, that is, on the groups of organisms that have them. In extending the notion of a group-level adaptation to cognitive phenotypes, Wilson says,