Intro to Cooperation Studies (5)
By the end of part four in this series, I had introduced the role of symbiosis and other cooperative arrangements in the living world, theories about how competitive Darwinian evolution could have led to this pervasive cooperation, and talked about the notion that our species exapted our biologically evolved capabilities to create language, then to use language to create culture. A number of evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, and economists have looked at cultural evolution as a kind of Darwinian process in which problem-solving, innovation, and communication rather than mutation lead to a progression of changes that undergo a selection process in response to the characteristics of the environment.
For example, our communication media are channels for passing along to other humans discoveries about means of enhancing survival and ways of life. We don’t know a lot about the evolution of speech, but the origins of writing, the printing press, the Internet, and their effects on human life are known — all consciously created cultural equivalents of mutated genes that enhanced and expanded every human’s capability of knowing and teaching. Cultural evolution theorists (Boyd, Henrich, Richerson, Gintis, Bowles to name a few) have elaborated on how this might have happened — and will continue to happen. Those who are really serious about educating themselves about these ideas could start by reading the works listed on these scientists’ websites (linked above).
A few key concepts:
- Culture — what we learn from each other, is an exaptation of our species’ social and cognitive capabilities.
- The evolved capacity for social learning was particularly adaptive for homo Sapiens during times of radical environmental change.
- Learning capacities created processes that changed the selection environment in which genes develop: cooking meat, for example (a cultural invention) selects for those with carnivorously efficient digestive chemistry.
- Culture evolves via selection, but change grows more from design than mutation.
- Channeling of tribal instincts via symbol systems involves cultural transmission & selection that continues evolution of cooperative human capacities at a cultural ratyher than genetic level — and pace.
- “Surely, without punishment, language, technology, individual intelligence and inventiveness, ready establishment of reciprocal arrangements, prestige systems and solutions to games of coordination, our societies would take on a distinctly different cast. Thus, a major constraint on explanations of human sociality is its systemic structure.” Boyd, Henrich, Richerson
Here are a few key texts to get started on the cultural evolution of cooperation, and here is the recording of the online interactive lecture I gave on the topic.
Robert Boyd, Joseph Henrich, and Peter Richerson, Cultural Evolution of Human Cooperation: Summaries and Findings (summary)
Joseph Henrich, “How Culture Drove Human Evolution” (39 minute video — or read the transcript that accompanies it).
Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Joseph Henrich, Rapid cultural adaptation can facilitate the evolution of large-scale cooperation, (PDF)
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution Introduction and Conclusion (PDF)
Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture: The natural history of human cooperation (16 minute video)
