Evolutionary Social Theory: The Current State of Knowledge

Abstract

BOOKS UNDER REVIEW Boehm, Christopher. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books, 2012. Print. Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. A Cooperative Species: Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP; 2011. Print. Fukuyama, Francis. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Print. --. Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Print. Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012. Print. Nowak, Martin A., and Roger Highfield. Supercooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. New York: Free P, 2011. Print. Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking, 2011. Print. Wilson, Edward O. The Social Conquest of Earth. New York: Liveright, 2012. Print. A USABLE MODEL OF EVOLVED HUMAN SOCIALITY Biocultural is an integrative research program designed to investigate the causal interactions between biological adaptations and cultural constructions. The central premise of biocultural theory is that human behavior is produced by interactions between human and culture. Human nature this usage designates a species-typical array of evolved, genetically transmitted features of anatomy, physiology, and neurology. Culture designates a collective, transmissible body of shared skills, practices, beliefs, values, and imaginative experiences (Baumeister; Carroll, Truth; Hill; Richerson and Boyd; Sterelny; Tomasello et al.). From the biocultural perspective, cultural processes are rooted the biological necessities of the human life cycle: specifically human forms of birth, growth, survival, mating, parenting, and life a social (Muehlenbein and Flinn). Conversely, from the biocultural perspective, human biological processes are constrained, organized, and developed by culture, which includes technology, culturally specific socioeconomic and political structures, religious and ideological beliefs, and artistic practices such as music, dance, painting, and storytelling. Because culture is social, biocultural theory must include a good basic model of evolved human sociality. The elements of such a model have become available only within the past few years. Those elements are scattered throughout the books here under review and a small set of recent articles. None of the books or articles fully exemplifies the whole model. After laying out the model, I shall use it to evaluate the books, describing how each contributes to it, and measuring each against it. Until very recently, most discussions of evolved human sociality turned endlessly on an inconclusive debate between proponents of inclusive fitness theory and proponents of group selection' (Alexander; Boehm, Moral Origins; Hamilton, Rule, Aptitudes; Nesse; Pinker, Allure; Sober and Wilson; Trivers; D. S. Wilson, Critique; Wilson and Wilson; E. O. Wilson, Social Conquest). Advocates of inclusive fitness reduced social motives to nepotism, direct reciprocation (mutual back-scratching), and indirect reciprocation (giving credit to people with a reputation for reciprocating) (Boehm, Bullies, Moral Origins; Nowak). Proponents of selection felt rightly that these three sources could not adequately account for human prosociality, but they usually acceded to a misleading formula: selection favors selfishness within groups and favors altruism only conflict between groups. As David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson put it, in virtually all cases, traits labeled cooperative and altruistic are selectively disadvantageous within the groups and require between-group selection to evolve (335). …