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Collective Utility
The group equivalent of individual usefulness may be called collective utility. Some forms of knowledge benefit the collective, while being useless for an isolated individual. Languages, traffic regulations, technical standards and moral codes are examples of cognitive entities that have value only for intersubjective purposes. Such collective ideas will be selected at the group level: groups having such beliefs will be more fit than groups lacking them. This is how the supernatural cosmologies characterizing archaic civilisations discussed by Campbell (1997) have been selected.
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