Cultural group selection across time
Recently there was a discussion on Twitter in regards to group selection, and I made a few comments which I think should be familiar to readers of this weblog, but as I delete all my tweets I will repeat some of the things I said there here. First, “group selection” brackets a lot of phenomena, […]
Cultural group selection across time
Recently there was a discussion on Twitter in regards to group selection, and I made a few comments which I think should be familiar to readers of this weblog, but as I delete all my tweets I will repeat some of the things I said there here. First, “group selection” brackets a lot of phenomena, […]
Group selection survey
I don’t have time to do a detailed analysis of my group selection survey right now. So I’ve uploaded the raw results for anyone to play with (there is no personally identifying information obviously). You should be able to convert it into a…
What do you think about group selection?
I just received a review copy of E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth. One of the reasons why this book is “hot” is that Wilson has recently been revisiting the “levels of selection” debates, and significantly downg…
Monogamous societies superior to polygamous societies
The title is rather loud and non-objective. But that seems to me to be the upshot of Henrich et al.’s The puzzle of monogamous marriage (open access). In the abstract they declare that “normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses.” Seems superior to me. As a […]
Born to conform
There is a new paper in Nature, Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherers, which is very interesting. As Joe Henrich observes in his view piece the panel of figure 2 (see left) is probably the most important section. The study focuses on the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population of Tanzania. Their language seems to be an […]
Band of brothers at war
The fruits of human cooperation
The Pith: Human societies can solve the free rider problem, and generate social structure and complexity at a higher level than that of the band. That implies that much of human prehistory may have been characterized by…
The Price of Altruism
Sometimes in a narrative you have secondary characters who you want to revisit. What do to do after the story is complete? An convenient “work-around” to this problem is to find the story rewritten from the perspective of the secondary character. In broad strokes the picture is unchanged, but in the finer grained shadings different […]