Maggie's Farm

The most significant development of the human mind was not logic or speech, but complex and deep social instincts. Evolution can change the behavior of a species over many thousands of years, but societies can adapt in simply decades, or less.

Social structure is so natural to us, that we often don't even realize its significance. But groups of people unconsciously start to share values, concepts, even when these are unspoken. The much maligned term 'peer pressure' is really one of our most successful adaptations. We don't need rules for everything, because a lot of behavioral restrictions and preferences come through unspoken. We can see this when someone says or does something 'gauche' in a social situation. Everyone around understands that the norms of the group have been somewhat violated, but those norms have often not ever been put into words.

Conversation is another manifestation. For most people, conversation just happens, thoughts exchanged, new ideas arise, and usually people enjoy the process. But there is no actual requirement that intelligence automatically produces the conversation instinct. Some people (high functioning autistics, for example) can be quite intelligent, but if they engage in conversation at all, it's more a case of 'faking it', constantly thinking ahead of what would be the next correct thing to say. For them conversation is a stressful exercise.

Psychopaths, also, are missing some of the core instincts that form human socialization. Again they can be very intelligent, but their actions can be highly inappropriate or even destructive. Approbations by the community whether unspoken or enforced by rules don't really affect their behavior significantly. At most, fear of punishment may be the only motivation against unsocial activity.

Without our complex social instincts, humans would never have been able to adapt to change the way we do. We would never have been able to spread around the world, to countless different climates and circumstances. We would never have been able to make use of agriculture and industry. We would have been locked into living basically as our ancestors, much the way that chimpanzees and gorillas, despite being intelligent, are stuck in the lifestyle of their ancestors.