Abstract
This paper contributes to two debates: the debate about language evolution and the debate about the foundations of human collaboration. While both cooperation and language may give the impression of being adaptations that evolved for the “good of the group,” it is well established that the evolution of complex traits cannot be a direct result of group selection. In this paper I suggest how this tension can be solved: both language and cooperation evolved in a unique two-level evolutionary system which was triggered by a well-documented geological event—the drying out of the climate—in East Africa, which subsequently reduced the intermating between groups and thus made it possible that the mechanism that produced differences between groups (including social forms of selection such as female choice) could be the target of natural selection on the group level. If a social form of selection (e.g., sexual selection) produced differences in fitness between groups, the displacement process between groups would indirectly select those forms of social selection that produce groups that would displace all others. The main hypothesis presented in this paper is that, in this situation, a backchannel between the two levels of selection naturally evolves. A backchannel between the two levels would, for example, emerge when sexual selection (or any other form of social selection) was sensitive to the individual’s contribution to the group. Examples of systems utilizing a backchannel are nerve cells being better nourished when used more frequently, enabling them to be conducive to the survival of the whole organism, or a law firm in which all employees get paid to the extent that they contribute to the survival and success of the firm. In both cases, the selection on the higher level informs the selection on the lower level. The aim of the paper is to illuminate these rather opaque claims, to which the reader probably has many objections in this abridged form.
Highlights
What Needs to Be ExplainedCooperation and language have three things in common: (1) They are considered to be essential for being human, (2) their evolution is thought to be a puzzle or a mystery (Sterelny, 1997; Alexander, 2008; Fitch, 2010, p. 417), and (3) it is difficult to explain their emergence without assuming that humans developed these traits to survive as a species or “for the good of the group.” It is evident, Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org von HeiselerHow Language and Altruism Evolved for instance, that cooperation and altruism can benefit the group, whereas it is much less clear how they benefit individual reproduction
Since the model introduced in this paper suggests that evolution of language and cooperation in humans can be explained in terms of equilibrium selection, I shall explain how and why humans, but no other apes, became subject to such selection on two levels
Because only can instinctive and emotional reactions be led by them. (II) An innate drive to be interested in gossip: that we are fascinated by stories about people we know, especially if their behavior includes extreme forms of altruism or moral transgressions. (III) That we developed a system to evaluate our own status, which needs to be active all the time and that, on the path toward behavioral modernity, a new basic instinct, the desire for recognition
Summary
Cooperation and language have three things in common: (1) They are considered to be essential for being human, (2) their evolution is thought to be a puzzle or a mystery (Sterelny, 1997; Alexander, 2008; Fitch, 2010, p. 417), and (3) it is difficult to explain their emergence without assuming that humans developed these traits to survive as a species or “for the good of the group.” It is evident, Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org von Heiseler. This entails that a model of language evolution should explain why our ancestors developed language and why other great apes did not This claim is based on an understanding of the evolutionary process that surpasses the more conventional idea that traits always develop as an adaptation to interactions with the natural environment of a species—leaving aside all well-documented structures in which a species creates its own selective pressure, as described in concepts like cognitive niche construction (Tooby and DeVore, 1987), co-evolution of culture and brain (Deacon, 1997), sexual selection (Miller, 2000), or the social brain hypothesis (Humphrey, 1976). Call this extended founder effect, which could have played a role when groups of our ancestors split off from their parent group, when a limited territory of gallery forest and its surrounding grassland no longer provided enough resources for the whole group
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