Advanced Communal Intelligence: A Look at Jewish Religious Communities

What is intelligence?  At its most basic level, intelligence involves problem-solving (planning, adapting, etc).  And what is the basic problem of existence?  Survival.

Of course there's more to it than that.  But ability to survive is a handy indicator for group intelligence because it is observable.  So conclusions may we make from this observation?

As the oldest surviving (though constantly evolving) traditional community, religious Jewish communities seem to have a profoundly advanced group intelligence.  Dawkins talks about memes as the fundamental units of culture and memeplexes as a meme-collective (e.g. a religious community), a synergy of culture units, a perfect recipe for cultural transmission.  So it's kind of like how the human brain, a conglomeration of functionally-differentiated neural systems, is able to produce the remarkable by-product known as consciousness.  Jewish communities have found a functional grouping uniquely adapted to life on this planet and particularly within human society.

Of course there are other, non-Jewish, religious communities that have demonstrated survivability (though none have had the longevity of the religious Jewish communities) and so communal intelligence doesn't really tell us a whole lot about whether a religion is True.  It's just...interesting.