Status Updates From A Cooperative Species: Huma...

"why would people, internalize norms if taking a norm on board leads one to act in ways that reduce fitness?
1. the capacity to internalize fitness-enhancing norms, might evolve even if the capacity to internalize is costly.
2. when the capacity to internalize a norm has evolved and societies have developed socialization practices to do this, people will be susceptible to internalizing norms that also reduce fitness"

Solving the problem of high costs for punishers when rare using “quorum sensing,” like by bacteria and other organisms, in which the bacteria do not become (“turn on”) active until there are enough of them.

Our Punishers, when they are rare, demur and so bear only the minor cost of signaling their willingness to punish. They thus avoid the cost of punishing when they do not sufficiently outnumber their targets."

Idea of gene-culture coevolutionary evolution.

It makes sense to discuss evolution of instititutions like reproductive leveling by food sharing and evolution of individual traits like altruism together and not separately.

See also my blog post in Finnish https://jukkaaakula.wordpress.com/202...

"The genetic data thus make it unlikely that a predisposition of family members to cooperate explains group-level common projects such as hunting, predation and defense, except in cases of extraordinarily high ratios of benefits to costs. ... These data also cast further doubt on any explanation relying solely on reciprocal altruism."

-> I should learn population genetics to understand the whole argument behind this

"But when knowledge is imperfect or private and the choices of the other players are not known, surely the most plausible assumption, players will not implement the Nash equilibria whose existence is guaranteed by the folk theorems. ... While there are several models in which individuals “learn” over time to play a Nash equilibrium , the conditions under which these models apply are limited to simple one-shot games."

what can be known ... from genetic, archaeological and other data about ... ancestral human conditions suggests that neither helping close family members nor reciprocal altruism provides an adequate account of the emergence of this cooperative species. In subsequent chapters we will show that multi-level selection models based on gene culture coevolution contribute substantially to a convincing explanation.

what can be known ... from genetic, archaeological and other data about ... ancestral human conditions suggests that neither helping close family members nor reciprocal altruism provides an adequate account of the emergence of this cooperative species. In subsequent chapters we will show that multi-level selection models based on gene culture coevolution contribute substantially to a convincing explanation.

Punishment is often not strategic but based on a social preference. People enjoy punishing those who break norms. This may cause group beneficial institutions to flourish in context of public goods provisioning.

Pretty good argument and lots of evidence.

Have read 1-3, 5 and 9

Sapolsky in his book Behave discusses behavior on many levels "why it does make evolutionary sense", "how does it work in the human brain" etc.

Bowles discusses cooperation both on proximate and ultimate level. For evolutionary economy proximate level is naturally the preference level (e.g. "Does a human have social preferences or not") and the ultimate level the question is "how did social preferences evolve".

Started re-rereading.

One assumption of Bowles's and Gintis's model probably fails - wars became frequent first after humans became sedentary. Mobile hunter-gathers probably did not have war. How does this affect the theory.

Altruistic punishment is discussed in Chapter 8. The second-order free-riding problem (free-riding in altruistic punishment) can be solved.

War increases trust among ingroups according to an Israeli study. Genocide against a village increases altruism towards the ingroup in the village according to a study carried out in Ruanda - and contribution to the community e.g. by participation in community organizations.

The coevolution of genes for altruism and institutions (culture) like food sharing was probably important in the Pleistocene.

Interestingly, the coevolution in practice causes cyclicity in the level of altruism and in the level of food sharing. (The assumption was "resource sharing may reduce incentives to acquire the resources to be shared.")

"Ember and Ember (1992) conclude that a “history of unpredictable natural disasters strongly predicts more war . . . people, particularly in non-state societies, may try to protect themselves against future disasters by going to war to take resources from enemies.”"

More war meant stronger group selection.

"Modeling the complex processes that sustain human cooperation is a major challenge of contemporary science. Economic theory, favoring parsimony over realism, has sought to explain cooperation without reference to social preferences, and with a minimalist or fictive description of social institutions. This research trajectory, as we have seen, has produced significant insights. But it may have run its course."

Started rereading.