Or the U.S. financial system. Or civilization in general.
The reason people work together is fundamentally the same reason you go to work - self interest. You're rarely there because you genuinely believe in the mission or product - mostly you just want to get paid and then go do your own thing. And that's basically the gears of society in a nutshell. But you need the intelligence to understand the bigger picture of things.
For instance Chimps have intricate little societies that at their peak have reached upwards of 200 chimps. They even wage war over them and in efforts to expand them or control their territory. This [1] war was something that revolutionized our understanding of primates behaviors, which had been excessively idealized beforehand. But they lack the intelligence to understand how to bring their little societies up in scale.
They understand full well how to kill the other tribe and "integrate" their females, but they never think to e.g. enslave the males, let alone higher order forms of expansion with vassalage, negotiated treaties, and so on. All of which over time trend towards where we are today, where it turns out giving somebody a little slice of your pie and letting him otherwise roam free is way more effective than just trying to dominate him.
Citation needed on that one.
> Consider that Sparta and Athens were separated by only 130 miles, yet couldn't possibly have been further apart!
They spoke the same language, shared the same literature, practiced the same religion, had a long history of diplomatic ties. When the Persians razed Athens, they took refuge with the Spartans.
> For instance Chimps have intricate little societies that at their peak have reached upwards of 200 chimps.
Again, I don't think this claim stands to evidence. The so called chimp war you mention is about a group of about a dozen and a huge fight that broke out among them. That doesn't support the idea that they are capable of 200-strong 'intricate' groupings.
I am an ex-scientist and an engineer and had a look at the books of my son who studies finance in the best finance school in the world (I am saying this to highlight that he will be one of the perpetrators, possibly with influence, of this mess)
The things in there are crazy. There are whole blocks that are obvious but made to sound complicated. I spent some time on a graph just to realize that they ultimately talk about solving a set of two linear equations (midfle school level).
Some pieces were not comprehensible because they did not make sense.
And then bam! A random differential equation and explanation as it was the answer to the universe. With an incorrect interpretation.
And then there are statistics that would make "sociology science" blush. Yes, they are so bad that even the, ahem, experts who do stats in sociology would be ashamed (no hate for sociology, everyone needs to eat, it is just that I was several times reviewer of thesises there and I have trauma afterwards).
The fact that finance works is because we have some kind of magical "local minimum of finance energy" from which the Trumps of this world somehow did not maybe to break from (fingers crossed) by disrupting the world too much.
