Evolutionary Social Science Research Articles

Public Goods With Punishment and Abstaining in Finite and Infinite Populations

The evolution and maintenance of cooperation in human and animal societies challenges various disciplines ranging from evolutionary biology, to anthropology, social sciences and economics. In social interactions, cooperators increase the welfare of the group at some cost to themselves whereas defectors attempt to free-ride and neither provide benefits nor incur costs. The problem of cooperation becomes even more pronounced when increasing the number of interacting individuals. Punishment and voluntary participation have been identified as possible factors to support cooperation and prevent cheating. Typically, punishment behavior is unable to gain a foothold in a population, while volunteering alone can efficiently prevent deadlocks in states of mutual defection but is unable to stabilize cooperation. The combined effects of the two mechanisms have surprisingly different consequences in finite and infinite populations. Here we provide a detailed comparison of the two scenarios and demonstrate that driven by the inherent stochasticity of finite populations, the possibility to abstain from social interactions plays a pivotal role, which paves the way for the establishment of cooperation and punishment.

Institutional Economics as Social Criticism and Political Philosophy

:Institutional economists make certain philosophical assumptions that have related political and sociocultural objectives. These are outlined here and their doctrinal and behavioral implications explored. Evolutionary naturalism with its Darwinian and pragmatic roots is delineated, its significance for a left-liberal politics aimed at social engineering and a more egalitarian collectivism further developed. Social reconstruction of a non-invidious and non-emulatory kind and the political means for achieving it is suggested. The political action necessary for the renovation of existing atavistic continuities such as corporate-commercial class-based hegemony, nihilistic and anarchistic individualism, and religious conservatism is tentatively and provisionally advanced. In short, both the means and ends and much of the metatheoretical basis of institutional economics are outlined to encourage a more publicly visible and self-conscious intellectual posture on the part of evolutionary social scientists. One which focuses on its doctrinal basis, political aims and long term policy intent as well as on the personal deportment of institutionalists themselves.

Strategies for Risk Communication

This volume presents the proceedings of the symposium entitled Strategies for Risk Communication: Evolution, Evidence, Experience. The symposium was held in Montauk, Long Island, New York on May 15-17, 2006. It explored practical methods and robust theories of risk communication informed by recent research in risk perception, neuroscience, and the evolutionary social sciences. The symposium focused on what experimental, survey, and brain imaging research has uncovered about how humans process and perceive uncertainty and risks and what the evolutionary history of humans suggests about how we understand and respond to risks. The purpose of the symposium and of this collection of papers is to begin to synthesize the findings from these diverse fields and inform the development of practical strategies for risk communication.

Samuel Bowles, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution, Princeton University Press, 2004.

Microeconomics is not necessarily Walrasian economics, and it can be developed on the basis of evolutionary social science with the classical economists’ interest in the wealth and poverty of nations and people. Samuel Bowles impressively shows us an evolutionary approach to microeconomics in his book, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution, Princeton University Press, 2004. As he mentions, “the book is intended for use in graduate-level microeconomics courses, as well as courses in institutional and evolutionary economics and formal modeling courses in sociology, anthropology, and political sciences” (p.ix). Readers must see that the theoretical development of evolutionary and institutional economics is realized with such analytical techniques as evolutionary game theory , agent-based model, and multi-level selection model. Samuel Bowles has been one of the most influential American radical economists since the 1970s. He studied the education system in the US with Herbert Gintis in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he was engaged in the study of “the social structures of accumulation” in the post-war US economy with David Gordon and Thomas Weisskopf, and published an epoch-making book, Beyond the Waste Land (Bowles, S. Gordon, D., and Weisskopf, T. (1983)), which proposed a democratic alternative to economic decline. Then, he started to develop “the post-W alrasian political economy” with his seminal article, “The production process in a competitive economy: Walrasian, neo-Hobbsian, and Marxian models” (Bowles (1985)). In this new approach, he constructed the

Evolutionary Explanations for Societal Differences and Historical Change in Violent Crime and Single Parenthood

This article argues that social science can be conducted beneath the umbrella of natural science and evolutionary theory. Evolutionary social science makes four key causal assumptions: (a) that modern societies owe their character to an interaction of hunter—gatherer adaptations with the modern environment, (b) that some changes in societies reflect change in individuals, (c) that historical changes and cross-societal differences can be due to similar adaptational mechanisms, given (d) that different social contexts (e.g., food scarcity, single parenthood) modify psychological development through adaptive mechanisms. This approach is illustrated by cross-national data on violent crime and single parenthood.

Meso comes to markets: Comment on ‘Markets come to bits’

Mirowski's research programme of markomata formally sets out to model ‘the diversity of market forms by making use of the mathematical theory of automata, and then to taxonomize and organize these entities by means of a theory of evolution’ (Mirowski, this issue). This suggests a new sort of economics in which it is markets that evolve not people, systems that evolve not agents, prosthesis that evolve not preferences, and rules that evolve not information. Economies evolve; people do not. This proposition is both obvious and true, making it an excellent foundation for an evolutionary social science. So, if we are to take Mirowski's program seriously as a general framework for economic analysis, which we think we certainly should, then it is important to recognize that although Mirowski's unified rubric of markomata elides agency and is instead based upon John von Neumann's theory of automata as a model for the study of social institutions, the separate lines of research into markets as computational entities are all still very much but a microeconomics. Markomata is a theory of the core microeconomic building blocks of an economic system as well as a theory of their evolutionary principles (i.e. a microeconomics) but it is not yet a theory of the whole economy. Yet, it is our view that Mirowski's markomata program can indeed be the basis for such a general theory when analytically expounded in terms of the new evolutionary economic framework of micro meso macro (Dopfer et al., 2004 and Dopfer, 2005) in which market automata (Mirowski and Somefun, 1998 and Potts, 2001) are abstracted as a special, central instance of generic meso rules (Dopfer and Potts, 2004). Which is to suggest that the Mirowski framework of markomata can be yet further developed

Varieties of Scientific System: From Veblen to the Postmoderns

(2006). Varieties of Scientific System: From Veblen to the Postmoderns. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 673-691.

Evolutionary social science and universal Darwinism

How should social scientists, inclined to an evolutionary theory of aspects of human culture like science, technology, business organization and practice, react to proposals that they embrace a “Universal Darwinism”? The most prominent variety of Universal Darwinism argues for close counterparts between the variables and mechanisms of cultural evolution and biological evolution, for example proposing the concept of “memes” as units of culture. Other Universal Darwinists propose, more flexibly, that human culture and biological species both change over time through a process that involves variation and selection, but that the details of the processes may be very different. This essay argues that the narrower form of Universal Darwinism should not be acceptable to social scientists. The differences in the details of cultural evolution and biological evolution are considerable. On the other hand, if Universal Darwinism provides a roomy intellectual tent welcoming scholars studying a variety of topics, with the unifying element being a dynamic theory involving variation and selection, but with the key variables and mechanisms being recognized as perhaps differing greatly between biology and human culture, we can be happy in that camp. Evolutionary Social Science and Universal Darwinism.

Educational and ecological correlates of IQ: A cross-national investigation

The new paradigm of evolutionary social science suggests that humans adjust rapidly to changing economic conditions, including cognitive changes in response to the economic significance of education. This research tested the predictions that cross-national differences in IQ scores would be positively correlated with education and negatively correlated with an agricultural way of life. Regression analysis found that much of the variance in IQ scores of 81 countries (derived from [Lynn, R., & Vanhanen, T. (2002). IQ and the wealth of nations. Westport, CT: Praeger] ) was explained by enrollment in secondary education, illiteracy rates, and by the proportion of agricultural workers. Cross-national IQ scores were also related to low birth weights. These effects remained with national wealth, infant mortality, and geographic continent controlled (exception secondary education) and were largely due to variation within continents. Cross-national differences in IQ scores thus suggest that increasing cognitive demands in developed countries promote an adaptive increase in cognitive ability.

Screen Images and Concepts of Sexual Agency in Science and Social Science

This article contributes to studies of how inequities of power are naturalized in culture through the idea of “screen images,” a form of shared projective thinking. Screen images develop when socioeconomic reality contradicts shared cultural values and thus produces moral anxiety. The screen images we trace are those of the Lady and the Whore in bourgeois Victorian cultures, which we believe represented compromised versions of female sexual agency. Although these images originated in Victorian models of sexual difference, we show that they continue to shape models in 20th-century medicine, primatology, and evolutionary social science. These screen images reveal a historically persistent denial of agentive sexuality in women and have served as a defense through which people have avoided confronting the socioeconomic bases of gender inequality.

Evolutionary Explanations for Societal Differences in Single Parenthood

The new research strategy presented in this paper, Evolutionary Social Science, is designed to bridge the gap between evolutionary psychology that operates from the evolutionary past and social science that is bounded by recent history. Its core assumptions are (1) that modern societies owe their character to an interaction of hunter-gatherer adaptations with the modern environment; (2) that changes in societies may reflect change in individuals; (3) that historical changes and cross-societal differences are due to the same adaptational mechanisms, and (4) that different social contexts (e.g., social status) modify psychological development through adaptive mechanisms. Preliminary research is reviewed concerning historical, societal, and cross-national variation in single parenthood as an illustration of the potential usefulness of this new approach. Its success at synthesizing the evidence demonstrates that the time frames of evolutionary explanation and recent history can be bridged.

An Evolutionary Social Science? A Skeptic’s Brief, Theoretical and Substantive

So-called grand or paradigmatic theories—structural functionalism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, rational-choice theory—provide their proponents with a conceptual vocabulary and syntax that allows for the classification and configuring of wide ranges of phenomena. Advocates for any particular “analytical grammar” are accordingly prone to conflating the internal coherence of their paradigm—its integrated complex of definitions, axioms, and inferences—with a corresponding capacity for representational verisimilitude. The distinction between Theory-as-heuristic and Theory-as-imposition is of course difficult to negotiate in practice, given that empirical observation and measurement are not entirely “theory neutral” or independent of prior analytical conceptualization. Nonetheless, the scientific cogency of any theory is ultimately evaluated by the substantive realism of its foundational assumptions and categorical designations; that is, the accuracy with which it identifies and tracks the determinant properties and processes of the phenomena to be explicated. The paradigm of sociocultural evolutionism—despite extensive revamping by contemporary proponents—does not carry warrant in this regard, as its recourse to an analytical grammar fashioned and derived from another discipline raises doubts about its empirical veridicality. This article revisits the contentious issue of remodeling social phenomena in accordance with biological categories and offers both a theoretical and a substantive critique of the “selectionist” paradigm. The transdisciplinary program of historical social science is affirmed by way of counterpoint.

Evolution and the American social sciences

American social scientists rarely ever use evolutionary concepts to explain behavior, despite the potential of such concepts to elucidate major social problems. I argue that this observation can be understood as the product of three influences: an ideologically narrowed political liberalism; a fear of ''Social Darwinism'' as a scientific idea, rather than a scientific apostasy; and a widely believed criticism of evolutionary thinking as deterministic, reductionistic, and Panglossian. I ask what is to be done to encourage social scientists to learn and to apply evolutionary lessons. I answer with four solutions. First, evolutionary social scientists should more effectively educate their non-evolutionary students and colleagues. Second, they should publicize, even popularize, accessible refutations of perennially misleading criticisms. Third, they should more credibly assure skeptics that evolutionary theory not only keeps the ''social'' in social science but better explains social behavior than can any individual-level theory, such as rational-choice theory. Fourth, they should recall that biology took generations to become Darwinian, and they must understand that the social sciences may take as long to become evolutionary.

A natural history of rape: biological bases of sexual coercion

A biologist and an anthropologist use evolutionary biology to explain the causes and inform the prevention of rape. In this controversial book, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer use evolutionary biology to explain the causes of rape and to recommend new approaches to its prevention. According to Thornhill and Palmer, evolved adaptation of some sort gives rise to rape; the main evolutionary question is whether rape is an adaptation itself or a by-product of other adaptations. Regardless of the answer, Thornhill and Palmer note, rape circumvents a central feature of women's reproductive strategy: mate choice. This is a primary reason why rape is devastating to its victims, especially young women. Thornhill and Palmer address, and claim to demolish scientifically, many myths about rape bred by social science theory over the past twenty-five years. The popular contention that rapists are not motivated by sexual desire is, they argue, scientifically inaccurate. Although they argue that rape is biological, Thornhill and Palmer do not view it as inevitable. Their recommendations for rape prevention include teaching young males not to rape, punishing rape more severely, and studying the effectiveness of chemical castration. They also recommend that young women consider the biological causes of rape when making decisions about dress, appearance, and social activities. Rape could cease to exist, they argue, only in a society knowledgeable about its evolutionary causes. The book includes a useful summary of evolutionary theory and a comparison of evolutionary biology's and social science's explanations of human behavior. The authors argue for the greater explanatory power and practical usefulness of evolutionary biology. The book is sure to stir up discussion both on the specific topic of rape and on the larger issues of how we understand and influence human behavior.

Sociobiology and Moral Discourse

In the intellectual lineage of sociobiology (understood as evolutionary social science), this article considers the place of moral discourse in the evolution of emergent systems for mediating behavior. Given that humans share molecular systems, reflex systems, drive systems, emotional systems, and cognitive systems with chimpanzees, why is it that human behavior is so radically different from chimpanzee behavior? The answer is that, unlike chimps, humans possess symbolic systems, empowering them to override chimplike default morality in favor of symbolically mediated moral codes. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the power of religious symbols to influence moral behavior by reprogramming emotional systems.

Nestling cuckoos, Cuculus canorus, exploit hosts with begging calls that mimic a brood

Nestling cuckoos, Cuculus canorus , eject host eggs or young from the nest and are then raised alone by the hosts. Using reed warblers, Acrocephalus scirpaceus , as hosts, we investigated how the single cuckoo chick can command the same provisioning rate as a whole brood of host young. Large size alone is not sufficient to stimulate adequate provisioning because single blackbird, Turdus merula , or song thrush, T. philomelos , chicks of the same mass as a cuckoo were fed at a lower rate. Our experiments show that the key stimulus is the cuckoo chick9s rapid begging call (‘si, si, si, si ...’), which sounds remarkably like a whole brood of host chicks, and which it matched in calling rate. When single blackbird or song thrush chicks were accompanied by loudspeakers that broadcast either cuckoo begging calls or calls of a brood of reed warblers, the hosts increased their provisioning rate to that for a cuckoo chick. We suggest that the cuckoo needs vocal trickery to stimulate adequate care to compensate for the fact that it presents a visual stimulus of just one gape.

Evolutionary Social Science and Transcultural Psychiatry

Evolutionary principles can explain many aspects of human social behaviour. Despite important contro versies concerning the theory of sociobiology, evol utionary models offer cogent explanations for social phenomena such as altruism and parental investment. Evolutionary social science also has an important relevance for transcultural psychiatry, in that it is consistent with a biopsychosocial model for the etiology of psychiatric disorders, and points to the universals which underlie cultural variations in psychopathology.