  We present three major transitions that occur on the way to the elaborate and
diverse societies of the modern era. Our account links the worlds of social
animals such as pigtail macaques and monk parakeets to examples from human
history, including 18th Century London and the contemporary online phenomenon
of Wikipedia. From the first awareness and use of group-level social facts to
the emergence of norms and their self-assembly into normative bundles, each
transition represents a new relationship between the individual and the group.
At the center of this relationship is the use of coarse-grained information
gained via lossy compression. The role of top-down causation in the origin of
society parallels that conjectured to occur in the origin and evolution of life
itself.
