Category: Social Evolution
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Selection of and in groups
Eric Michael Johnson has an excellent round-up of and commentary upon recent debates about “group selection” (also, a decent primer on the basics). If there is one major issue I might take with the narrative outlined, it is the idea that E….
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We stand on the shoulders of cultural giants
In reading The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation in PNAS I couldn’t help but think back to a conversation I had with a few old friends in Evanston in 2003. They were graduate students in mathematics at Northwes…
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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…