Abstract
Cooperation was prominent among the suite of behaviors that marked the emergence of behaviorally modern humans in Africa. Both Homo neanderthalensis and the recently discovered Homo floresiensis survived well into the Late Pleistocene and hunted large game, the latter targeting the pygmy elephants that had evolved on the island environment of Flores, off the coast of Indonesia. Price-fixing by cartels and other baleful economic effects of collusion motivated Adam Smith to advocate a competitive economic system under which such forms of antisocial collusion would unravel. Culture is an evolutionary force in its own right, not simply an effect of the interaction of genes and natural environments. Human reliance on the meat of large hunted animals and other high-quality, large package-size, and hence high-variance foods meant that our livelihoods were risky, skill-intensive, and characterized by increasing returns to scale. The distinctive human capacity for institution building and cultural transmission of learned behavior allowed social preferences to proliferate.
Highlights
The study of human cooperation today is the current state of a continuous line of intellectual inheritance from Adam Smith and David Hume, through Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, and Emile Durkheim, and more recently the biologists William Hamilton and Robert Trivers
The twentieth century was an era in which economists and policy makers in the market economies paid heed only to the second Adam Smith, seeing social policy as the goal of improving social welfare by devising material incentives that induce agents who care only for their personal welfare to contribute to the public good
While the twentieth century was an era of increased disciplinary specialization, the twenty-first may well turn out to be an era of trans-disciplinary synthesis
Summary
The study of human cooperation today is the current state of a continuous line of intellectual inheritance from Adam Smith and David Hume, through Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, and Emile Durkheim, and more recently the biologists William Hamilton and Robert Trivers. The twentieth century was an era in which economists and policy makers in the market economies paid heed only to the second Adam Smith, seeing social policy as the goal of improving social welfare by devising material incentives that induce agents who care only for their personal welfare to contribute to the public good Ethics, in this paradigm, plays no role in motivating human behavior. The resulting ‘supply function of generosity’ and other estimates made possible by experiments, are important in underlining the point that other-regarding behaviors do not contradict the fundamental ideas of rationality They are valuable in providing interdisciplinary bridges allowing the analytical power of economic and biological models, where other-regarding behavior is big news, to be enriched by the empirical knowledge of the other social sciences, where it is not. The first proposition concerns proximate motivations for prosocial behavior, the second addresses the distant evolutionary origins and ongoing perpetuation of these cooperative dispositions
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