What creatures are we? Neanderthal and Cruans.

From Correspondence.
I strongly agree with the idea of libertarianism prevailing under evolutionary pressure. Whatever folks might say to fuss about the history of evolution, this is a matter of early anthropology, and it's reasonable to say that the more successful tends to prevail.

I'll go with the "really slow murder rate" still. I think of the issue of aggregates of advanced mammals as "pack vs. herd." Packs collide aggressively for dominance; herds just freely merge and separate. The hypothesis I offer about "Homo sapiens cruans" is that we were pack-type animals, like wolves. We see other tribes as threats, and fight them. This was the mechanism of our separation into what we later called "races." When packs aggressively collide, they would tend to act like little genetic islands.

I imagine that Neanderthals were mostly like herd animals - they were constitutionally blind towards the "us vs. them" concept, which is a big lose when colliding with people who act on the pack structure.

So, the Neanderthals were perhaps more "socialist," as the wildebeest and sheep and other grazing animals are more socialist. They are attuned to move in bulk, and have simple societies. Modern humans were more predisposed to acting in small packs; and for humans, this appears to be a huge evolutionary advantage when leaving Africa and going out into unsettled terrain, as was hypothesized to have occurred 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. Pack animals collide and separate; and when there's a whole Earth to be populated, rapidly "subspeciate" into tribal and racial groups.

When the Earth was carpeted by human settlement, the pack approach continued. The genetic predisposition towards tribalism remained. (The Neanderthals had already long ago got put out of the running.) Perpetual conflict and tribalism gave way to methods of interrelations between tribes, more so in other places. The ability to suppress the tendency to scrap with foreigners gave way to the need to trade with them. Civilization and commerce have always been intertwined.

With good or bad elements, we are left with the ultimate endpoint of tribalism - "the tribe of one," the individual. Many schemes have been put in place to aggregate humans into herds, and move them about as though they were interchangeable. This doesn't work for our species.

You cite some countries which are profoundly non-Socialist; in fact, anti-Socialist - USSR and Cuba, also North Korea - which are (or were) ruled over by absolute Alpha Males, with the power of life and death, terror over the lesser animals.

I offer that tribalism no longer acts to our benefit; and herd socialism is simply not in our animal nature, in the way that the lion cannot lie down with the lamb (or like Woody Allen said, the lamb will not get good sleep.) It is only with a new principle, which does not see us as mere elements of tribe or herd, but unique individuals, that can lead to our advancement and prosperity.

A big yes on this: "As a prediction, if there comes a new species of humans even more bent on commerce, they will eventually replace us." We're trying to prevail over genetic predispositions by intelligent behavior - and if we can hold out long enough, eventually the genetics will succumb, given a few tens of millennia.