Ever since societies have existed, bringing together ever larger groups of human beings in the pursuit of the common good, there has been a complementary and reciprocal relationship between individualistic and collective contributions. That is, within the frame of reference of any past of contemporary human civilization, overlooking either the contribution of the group or that of the individual would lead to a return to the state of nature in the former case, and a complete absence of significant progress in the latter.

Without the mold of society, any human being is indeed doomed to communicate in grunts. The potential for language he will never explore, and his communication skills shall thereby be as limited as those of his fellow animals. Furthermore, in the absence of a structured agricultural or farming system, he would spend his existence fighting for his survival.

The very notion of a human being as a sentient entity would then be almost invalid, in that most of that unfortunate creature's sensory output would inevitably be consecrated to maintenance and reproductive purposes. The edifying attributes which we like to associate with men, past and present, from the craft of poetry to the development of our understanding of the universe, would be out of reach from start to finish were it not for the solid back-up net that society provides to each of its constituent members.

A man left alone is thus destined to a hard and meaningless existence, whence the common qualification of the member of the human species as the "social animal." Ultimately, intellectual aptitudes are not as much due to one's genetic inheritance as they are a result of a continuous communal effort to sustain the group's defining traits. Yet, a drawback of this effort, although perhaps necessary to the cohesiveness of the society, is that it tends to normalize the individual's cognitive abilities with respect to those of other members of his group.

That is, as each person comes into existence within a given group and grows from continuous interactions with every member of that group, the person's developing aptitudes ought to correspond to an approximate average of every single interaction's contribution. It then seems that this learning process, while necessary to the self-realization of each of its members, also tends to erase the individuality of the single member to the benefit of a uniform whole.

It is later on, and quite rarely, that the reciprocal contribution going from the citizen to the group occasionally arises. Once the flame of knowledge has been passed down to the individual, the latter finds time to reflect on his condition and surroundings, mainly as a consequence of his partial dependence on the society to which he belongs. The aforementioned small yet nonetheless existing genetic variations, combined with a willingness to explore one's hidden potential, lead exceptional members of the group to make a breakthrough that subsequently transforms the group's functioning for the better. For example, although the Greek civilization as a whole is remembered today as one long period of democracy, it is through the contribution of a handful of individuals such as Plato and Aristotle that this society came to be the way it is nowadays perceived. Society nourishes all of its members in the straightforward goal of self-preservation, yet exceptional individuals sometimes manage to exceed the expectations, thereby positively affecting their recipient.

Perhaps most incredibly, this paradoxical combination of the group's contribution with that of the individual in the establishment of today's world as we know it is strikingly analogous to the phase which the observable universe underwent in its first three minutes, more than 14 billion years in the past. In the very first fractions of the first second of the history of our universe, everything was contained within an extremely small, very hot and dense region in which photons, particles of light, carried all of their recipient's contents in the form of pure energy. These photons constantly shared their state's information, so that the universe was in a state of thermal equilibrium: The same average temperature was shared by all of its regions.

In virtue of this hot and dense initial state, photons were able to form particle/anti-particle pairs by colliding with one another. That is, a direct application of Einstein's well-known formula E = mc² was taking place in the very early universe as pure energy was converted into matter. These particle/anti-particle pairs consisted of the building blocks of what should over time develop into heavier atoms and molecules, stars and galaxies, and eventually human beings that would be able to relate this story. The pairs consisted of electrons and positrons, protons and antiprotons, and yet other combinations, and their very existence would not be possible were it not for the coherent background temperature that allowed for these pairs to come into existence.

The "society" of photons was thus an essential catalyst in the development of individual pairs of particles of matter and antimatter. However, were all of these particles to be identical, today's universe would be no more than an accelerating flux of energy with no matter at all. Indeed, as soon as a particle/anti-particle pair is created, its corresponding components almost immediately annihilate each other in a collision that yields newly formed photons. In other words, just as human society wouldn't progress were it not for the exceptional contributions of some individuals, the observable universe would never have departed from a state of pure energy were it not for an exceptional process called Baryogenesis.

The above process describing the creation of matter from energy happens to contain a crucial detail, in that the balance between particles and anti-particles is not perfect. Once every one hundred billion photon collisions, the two photons transform not into one matter particle and its corresponding anti-matter particle, but into two particles of matter and a single anti-matter particle. Then, while one of the particles of matter will surely annihilate with the created anti-particle, the miraculous remaining particle of matter shall continue to exist in that very form which today constitutes all of us humans.

The complementary and reciprocal relationship has thus been completed: The state of thermal equilibrium allowed by the uniform structure of photons leads to the creation of matter and anti-matter particles, and a few of these matter particles in turn survive annihilation through Baryogenesis and go on to take the universe from a purely energetic state to a complex network of galaxy clusters, stars, planets, and living entities. These living entities, in turn, unknowingly reproduce the great play of the early universe through the formation and development of civilizations.