The concept of meritocracy is a direct outcome from an understanding of Evolution. Meritocracy means:
ABILITY + EFFORT = MERIT [REWARD]
To date it appears that democracy is the most efficient way to embed meritocracy into our cultural gamodeme. From an evolutionary viewpoint democracy can be considered the process and meritocracy the mechanism for development of the cultural gamodeme.
Ethical guidelines promoting democracy are based upon consensus seeking and argumentation [rhetoric]. These provide a good strategy for creating harmony and coexistence amongst the world populations. However, because such guidelines rely upon cooperation, both amongst groups and individuals, within a framework imposed by Rules for Order, the method cannot work when confronted with uncompromising groups. Evolution is brutal in such situations: leading to the extinction or one or the other group.
The Achilles heel of the democratic process is that it is not clear how it can defend itself when rhetoric fails. What happens when a cultural gamodeme fails the democratic test [i. e. the golden rule that an individual or group can live its own way of life provided it does not physically interfere with other individuals or groups]? Militant democracy holds a clean slate view that asserts it is acceptable to temporary abandon the democratic process to establish a democratic system. The arguments used for applying militant democracy are not moral arguments; but are ethical ones that must be ratified by the controlling political system. At its worse an active attempt to impose democracy can develop into totalitarianism. At its best it can allow a population to evolve with relative peace and harmony. From the viewpoint of evolution militant democracy imposes a high selection pressure. Translated to the national level this leads to interfering inter-cultural gamodeme conflicts, such as what happened when Great Britain declared war on Germany when that latter nation invaded Poland in 1939. In modern times the United States invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein is a prime example of militant democracy at work.
Most wars are fought, not between nations, but between sub-groups within a cultural gamodeme. The fundamental evolutionary processes operating are the same as at the National level. Tribal conflicts within Africa, religious conflict within Northern Ireland, and pre-1970 racial conflict within the United States of America all yield to an analysis using the Theory of Evolution. In all cases the solution rests in applying the mechanism of meritocracy.
Some basic scientific truths have emerged from science about our species that directly bear upon understanding the ethics operating within the cultural gamodemes. These must be incorporated into the fundament of society if humankind is eventually to define its own humanity. Quite important amongst these are the following.
All modern humankind is genetically closely related despite slight physical differences.
Race is best viewed as a concept associated with social history. Race does have a biological basis in the population [Sarich and Miele, 2004] but differences are trivial and superficial when viewed within the context of both genetics and modern democracy [Graves, 2004]. Evolution shows us how to define species and varieties, within nature, based upon a unison of characteristics existing within the physical gamodemes. Paleobiology has long used this methodology, which relies on the small number of differences rather than the large number of similarities, to define a group [genus, species, variety or whatever]. I personally believe that the best way to handle racial issues is to avoid all direct and indirect references to race except in the context of past social history, where to avoid it is futile and foolish.
Ethnicity based on its associated cultural and social conditions is the real basis upon which we physically separate the major groups within Homo sapiens.
Even amongst the diverse ethno-cultural groups there is unison of characteristics that can define a global concept of humanity. This emphasizes the unity of humankind. Without accepting that such a fundamental unified nature exists defining all humankind it is unlikely that our phylogeny will fulfill a destiny that makes it a galactic species. Neither will it have a lasting significance in the universe.
To capture the essence of humanity, humankind must adopt ethical and moral guidelines that transcend the ethnicity factor, reject the covert tools of racism, and follow a trend that consistently applies a system of meritocracy within society.