Jukka Aakula’s Reviews > A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution > Status Update

"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.