...
This book argues that our civilisation depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation, on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation, ... To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection - the comparative increase of population and wealth - of those groups that happened to follow them. The unwitting, reluctant, even painful adoption of these practices kept these groups together, increased their access to valuable information of all sorts, and enabled them to be `fruitful, and
multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it' ( Genesis 1:28). This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.
...
One can hardly expect people either to like an extended order that runs counter to some of their strongest instincts, or readily to understand that it brings them the material comforts they also want. The order is even `unnatural' in the common meaning of not conforming to man's biological endowment. Much of the good that man does in the extended order is thus not due to his being naturally good; yet it is foolish to deprecate civilisation as artificial for this reason. It is artificial only in the sense in which most of our values, our language, our art and our very reason are artificial: they are not genetically embedded in our biological structures. In another sense, however, the extended order is perfectly natural: in the sense that it has itself, like similar biological phenomena, evolved naturally in the course of natural selection ...
).
