Social Evolution Theory Research Articles

Drivers of sociality in Gobiodon fishes: An assessment of phylogeny, ecology and life-history

What drives the evolution of sociality in animals? Many robust studies in terrestrial organisms have pointed toward various kinship-based, ecological and life-history traits or phylogenetic constraint which have played a role in the evolution of sociality. These traits are not mutually exclusive and the exact combination of traits is likely taxon-specific. Phylogenetic comparative analyses have been instrumental in identifying social lineages and comparing various traits with non-social lineages to give broad evolutionary perspectives on the development of sociality. Few studies have attempted this approach in marine vertebrate systems. Social marine fishes are particularly interesting because many have a pelagic larval phase and non-conventional life-history strategies (e.g. bi-directional sex-change) not often observed in terrestrial animals. Such strategies provide novel insights into terrestrially-derived theories of social evolution. Here, we assess the strength of the phylogenetic signal of sociality in the Gobiodon genus with Pagel’s lambda and Blomberg’s K parameters. We found some evidence of a phylogenetic signal of sociality, but factors other than phylogenetic constraint also have a strong influence on the extant social state of each species. We then use phylogenetic generalized least squares analyses to examine several ecological and life-history traits that may have influenced the evolution of sociality in the genus. We found an interaction of habitat size and fish length was the strongest predictor of sociality. Sociality in larger species was more dependent on coral size than in smaller species, but smaller species were more social overall, regardless of coral size. Finally, we comment on findings regarding the validity of the species G. spilophthalmus which arose during the course of our research. These findings in a group of marine fishes add a unique perspective on the evolution of sociality to the excellent terrestrial work conducted in this field.

THE ANTINOMIES OF HABERMAS'RECONSTRUCTION OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

There are few attempts to reformulate the historical perspective of classical sociological theory comparable to that of Jürgen Habermas’ reconstruction of historical materialism. Habermas considered historical materialism to be principally a theory of social evolution and he sought to revise its conception of historical development. In Habermas’ opinion, the logic of the development of normative structures, social identities and cultural understandings differs from that of material production and the organizational complexity of social systems. My analysis reveals how the major innovation of Habermas’ reconstruction of historical materialism is the ensuing conceptualizations of the social relations of production as forms of social integration and the function of systematically distorted communication in their historical institution. Despite the significant implications of this supplementation of the paradigm of production with a theory of communication, Habermas’ reconstruction of historical materialism is shown to be limited by its inflexible logic of development and disengagement from the conflicts internal to processes of material production. It is proposed that the historical perspective of other strands of contemporary social theory may rectify these limitations through their concern with social creativity, institutional variations and the dialectics of social struggle.

Jürgen Habermas and the democratization of world politics

This article consists of a review of Jurgen Habermas’s discussions of the dilemma posed by human global interdependence to the possibility of democratic politics. According to Habermas, since the Second World War, and in a process that has become only more pervasive since the end of the Cold War, human societies have been brought into increasingly tighter and more complex political, social and economic networks of interdependence that have ultimately undermined the capacity of state-based democratic publics to have some degree of influence over their conditions of existence. From a critical international theory perspective, Habermas’s argument highlights the fundamental contemporary challenge faced by the social sciences in general, and International Relations (IR) in particular. From that perspective, the fundamental task of IR is not only to explain world politics, but also to orientate social and political practice towards an expansion of democratic control over them. The purpose of this article is to show how Habermas’s work makes a fundamental contribution to improve that critical orientating role of IR. The article connects Habermas’s more recent political writings on the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN) with his earlier work on the development of a theory of social evolution. In doing so, it shows how Habermas’s work can constitute the basis for an approach to the study of world politics that both understands how the present dilemma between global complexity and democracy came to be the defining feature of the present stage of human development, and that discloses the immanent potential gathered by modernity for a radical expansion of democratic politics to the level of world politics.

The descent of nations: social evolutionary theory, modernism and ethno‐symbolism

AbstractThis article explores the use of a revised conception of social evolutionary theory towards an understanding of nationalism. First, I review the debate between ethno‐symbolism and modernism, through the lens of the Warwick Debate between Gellner and Smith, arguing that both are partly right. Secondly, I outline what the revised conception of social evolution is looking first at its traditional conception before outlining a Darwinian view of social evolutionary theory. Finally, I examine how Darwinian social evolutionary theory can help fruitfully bring the ethno‐symbolic and modernist perspectives together. This is done by a sustained engagement primarily with the theories of Anthony Smith and Ernest Gellner pointing to how Darwinian social evolutionary theory can provide a link between the two theories that makes them mutually supportive rather than opposed.

Historical-Sociological Notes on “Foreword” written by Pitirim A. Sorokin to F. Tönnies’ “Community and Society”

This article presents an introduction to the publication of “Foreword” (1940) — prepared by P.A. Sorokin (1889–1968), a Russian and American sociologist — for the first American edition of “Community and Society” (1887) by F. Tönnies (1855‒1936), a German sociologist. “Foreword” is examined as a standalone theoretical piece in order to complete the historical-sociological facts and circumstances of its creation and publication, the ideological connections of the text in question with any other theories, and above all — with the sociology created by F. Tönnies. In “Foreword”, which is filled with references to ideas by major representatives of Chinese, European and Arab cultures and to the social values in their ideological heritage, P.A. Sorokin established the universal character of the social organization types introduced by F. Tönnies — “community and society” (“Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft” in German) — and stated his ideological affiliation to this dichotomy. Thus, the project for the theory of society and social evolution by P.A. Sorokin has been shown to cover both social forms introduced by F. Tönnies. The identified social values, which constitute an independent foundation for Sorokin’s theory of society and social evolution, help in developing the gnoseological aspect of his sociology. The writing of F. Tönnies, as well as P.A. Sorokin’s “Foreword”, defined their era. They include multiple points for incorporating new ideas in order to expand and evolve the theory of modern society.

All My Relatives: Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual by David C. Posthumus

Reviewed by: All My Relatives: Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual by David C. Posthumus Lupe A. Flores Keywords David C. Posthumus, Lupe Flores, Lakota, ontology, animism, Sioux, Viveiros De Castro, Philippe Descola, Indigenous Studies, ethnology david c. posthumus. All My Relatives: Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Can a twenty-first-century comparative anthropology, in the style of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas, compel us so-called moderns to live in less ecologically destructive and more spiritually enriching ways that go beyond binaristic understandings of nature and culture? In All My Relatives: Lakota Ontology, Belief and Ritual, David C. Posthumus seeks to accomplish this by presenting a reinterpretation of nineteenth-century Sioux ontology through a “Descolian animist perspective” (15). His intention is to resituate Lakota ethnometaphysics within a long-standing practice of multispecies coexistence and to complicate dogmatic understandings of spirituality among the Sioux. Informed by participant-observation, interviews, and analyses of ethnohistorical literature, including writings by Ella Deloria and Alfred Irving Hallowell, along with more contemporary works by Vine Deloria, Jr., Tim Ingold, Eduardo Kohn, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro among others, Post-humus delves into the complexities of Lakota spirituality, belief, and ritual. Lakota life and worldviews, both historically and contemporarily, encompass human and more-than-human worlds, and Posthumus attempts to show how these beliefs and practices have persisted and changed over time. In the introduction, Posthumus discusses how English terms such as “religion,” “spirituality,” and “society” do not necessarily capture Lakota (Western Sioux) understandings of their religious phenomena and experiences. As an English writing anthropologist, he nevertheless settles uncomfortably with his use of the terms in order to analyze and interpret, through a new animist framework, Lakota ontology, spiritual belief, and ceremonial practices. For the Lakota, spirituality, society, and the environment, as well as conceptions of humans and their nonhuman counterparts, are not considered as separately bounded categories, as is often imagined in Western, Cartesian understandings of self and the natural world. Thus, Posthumus’s analysis considers human persons, nonhuman persons, and the spirits and belief systems that underlie their entire cosmology and, borrowing from Ingold, the multiple and idiosyncratic Lakotan ways of being-(alive)-in-the-world (31). One of the objectives of his study, in addition to a reinterpretation, is to make readers appreciate Indigenous lifeways, including their relation to other-than-human life-forms, and to show how we might move toward the future in less destructive ways than those brought on by modernized and Christianized practices that position humans as supreme beings with dominion over all living species. According to the Sioux, despite the human-like [End Page 297] qualities and awareness of nonhuman persons and spirits, human beings themselves are the less powerful entities in the natural state of things (98). In other words, in Sioux cosmology, human beings are simply a strand in the web of life that includes nonhuman persons (i.e. animals and stones) and otherworldly entities and spirits. Posthumus situates himself, a white male, as an ethnographer and anthropologist of the Lakota (with the help of his friends and interlocutors), and in the introduction justifies his “old-school” approach through utilizing Phillipe Descola’s own “cleansing” and reformulation of early structural anthropology, sans the social evolutionary theory that characterized early understandings of animism (40). The nine chapters that follow articulate the various ways in which Lakota beliefs and practices are manifest through rituals and in kinship systems that are foundational to the very essence of their worldview, and in particular, enact and reproduce human/other-than-human entanglements in Lakota life. Contrary to widespread assumptions, the Lakota, like many other Native American peoples, do not necessarily believe that everything found in the world has a spirit. What they call wak’a, or “an incomprehensible, mysterious, nonhuman instrumental power or energy” (36) that circulates through both human and nonhuman persons and bodies (rocks, trees, waterfalls, humans, animals, medicine bags) through specific actions and at specific moments, is what potentially animates both human and nonhuman persons. Rather than a rock or some other form inherently having life in its being, it becomes animated through personal and/or collective relations with it. Everything...

Differences in adolescents' motivations for indirect, direct, and hybrid peer defending.

Adolescents’ defending of peers who are being bullied—or peer defending—was recently found to be a heterogeneous behavioral construct. The present study investigated individual differences in adolescents’ motivations for executing these indirect, direct, and hybrid defending behaviors. In line with the literature on bullying as goal‐directed strategic behavior, we adopted a social evolution theory framework to investigate whether these peer‐defending behaviors could qualify as goal‐directed strategic prosocial behaviors. A sample of 549 Dutch adolescents (49.4% boys; M age = 12.5 years, SD = 0.6 years) participated in this study. Their peer reported defending behaviors (including bullying behavior as a control variable) and the following behavioral motivations were assessed: (a) agentic and communal goals (self‐report), (b) prosocial and coercive social strategies (peer report), and (c) altruistic and egocentric motivations for prosocial behavior (self‐report). The outcomes of hierarchical linear regression analyses suggest that adolescents’ motivations for executing the different subtypes of peer defending partially overlap but are also different. While indirect defending was fostered by genuine concerns for victims’ well‐being, direct defending was more motivated by personal gains. Hybrid defending combined favorable aspects of both indirect and direct defending as a goal‐directed, strategic, and altruistically motivated prosocial behavior. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Evolutionary transitions to cooperative societies in fishes revisited

AbstractUnravelling the evolution of complex social organization in animals is an important aim, not least because it helps to understand the evolutionary roots of human sociality. Recent advances in comparative methods allow to approach this question in a phylogenetic context. The validity of such comparative approaches depends strongly on the quality of information regarding the behaviour, sociality, and reproduction of animals in natural systems, and on the quality of the phylogenetic reconstruction. Applying a novel comparative approach, a recent study of Dey et al. (, Nature Ecology & Evolution, 1, 137) concluded that evolutionary transitions to cooperative breeding in cichlid fishes were not associated with the social mating pattern. Here we argue that this result was adversely affected by equivocal classifications of mating patterns, and inadequate phylogenetic data. In order to illustrate the impact of the mating system misclassifications, we scored mating patterns as reported in the original literature and re‐analysed the dataset based on Dey et al.’s tree topology. The result suggests that the mating system does in fact significantly explain the evolutionary transition to cooperative breeding in lamprologine cichlids, but we submit that a reliable conclusion cannot be reached before improving the behavioural information and the underlying phylogenetic reconstruction. The problems identified in this case study are not unique and we urge caution in the interpretation of results from comparative phylogenetic studies in general. We do agree with Dey et al. () though that the lamprologine cichlids of Lake Tanganyika may constitute a fundamental test case for the theory of social evolution, but better information on their behaviour and phylogenetic relationships is needed to allow meaningful analyses.

Demography, life history and the evolution of age-dependent social behaviour.

Since the inception of modern social evolution theory, a vast majority of studies have sought to explain cooperation using relatedness-driven hypotheses. Natural populations, however, show a substantial amount of variation in social behaviour that is uncorrelated with relatedness. Age offers a major alternative explanation for variation in behaviour that remains unaccounted for. Most natural populations are structured into age-classes, with ageing being a nearly universal feature of most major taxa, including eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms. Despite this, the theoretical underpinnings of age-dependent social behaviour remain limited. Here, I investigate how group age-composition, demography and life history shape trajectories of age-dependent behaviours that are expressed conditionally on an actor and recipient's age. I show that demography introduces novel age-dependent selective pressures acting on social phenotypes. Furthermore, I find that life history traits influence the costs and benefits of cooperation directly, but also indirectly. Life history has a strong impact not only on the genetic structure of the population but also on the distribution of group age-compositions, with both of these processes influencing the expression of age-dependent cooperation. Age of peak reproductive performance, in particular, is of chief importance for the evolution of cooperation, as this will largely determine the age and relatedness of social partners. Moreover, my results suggest that later-life reproductive senescence may occur because of demographic effects alone, which opens new vistas on the evolution of menopause and related phenomena.

Multilevel selection and Tomasello’s A Natural History of Human Morality: A translation manual

ABSTRACTTomasello’s view of comparative primatology and human evolution is part of an emerging paradigm and his main empirical contribution has been the comparative study of great apes and human children. He has also contributed to the overall theoretical framework, but his rendering of the major theories of social evolution – such as kin selection, reciprocity, and levels of selection – is problematic. To correct this problem, I briefly review the concept of equivalence (theories that invoke the same causal processes from different perspectives) and provide a “translation manual” so that the thesis of Tomasello’s book can be seen more clearly and better related to the work of others who are helping to develop the same paradigm.

Diferensiasi Metode Penentuan Awal Bulan Hijriyah: Kajian Perspektif Teori Evolusi Sosial Herbert Spencer

THE -- method of determining the beginning of the month of Hijrah is constantly differentiated. Several approaches have been made by experts to understand the phenomenon, both the socio-cultural comparison approach between the conditions of the Prophet Muhammad's time and the current conditions as well as the astronomical-normative approach to verses that have been the root of these differences of opinion. In contrast to previous studies, this paper tries to find the pattern of the differentiation phenomenon and the background of the occurrence with the perspective of Social Evolution Theory proposed by Herbert Spencer. This study shows that the phenomenon of differentiation is a natural process that sequentially follows the following patterns and stages. (1) the stage of increasing the size, (2) the stage of the complexification, (3) the differentiation stage, and (4) the integration stage.

Evolutionary Dynamics of Coordinated Cooperation

In social evolution theory, unconditional cooperation has been seen as an evolutionarily unsuccessful strategy unless there is a mechanism that promotes positive assortment between like individuals. One such example is kin selection, where individuals sharing common ancestry and therefore having the same strategy are more likely to interact with each other. Conditional cooperation, on the other hand, can be successful if interactions with the same partners last long. In many previous models, it has been assumed that individuals act conditionally on the past behavior of others. Here I propose a new model of conditional cooperation, namely the model of coordinated cooperation. Coordinated cooperation means that there is a negotiation before an actual game is played, and that each individual can flexibly change their decision, either to cooperation or to defection, according to the number of those who show the intention of cooperation/defection. A notable feature of my model is that individuals play an actual game only once but can still use conditional strategies. Since such a negotiation is cognitively demanding, the target of my model here is exclusively human behavior. I have analyzed \revise{cultural} evolutionary dynamics of conditional strategies in this framework. Results for an infinitely large population show that conditional cooperation not only works as a catalyst for the evolution of cooperation, but sustains a polymorphic attractor with unconditional cooperators, unconditional defectors, and conditional cooperators being present. A finite population analysis is also performed. Overall, my results provide one explanation of why people tend to take into account others' decisions even when doing so gives them no payoff consequences at all.

Globalization and Higher Education: Exploring Holistic Learning Through Sri Aurobindo’s Thought

The challenge for scholars in higher education is to explore globalization as not only a social problem but also to explore visionary ideas from which to conceptualize globalization. This challenge requires that we construct new prescriptive models for a global studies agenda that advances a more subjective humanitarian existence; consistent with research of today’s college students learning dispositions. The proposition presented here is that Indian philosopher Sri Ghose Aurobindo's (1881-1955) Neo-Hindu evolutionary theory of human, psyche and social evolution can provide the foundation for augmenting a new Holistic model of contemplative learning of globalization as meaningful Ultimacy.

THE DOUBLE MOVEMENT IN POLANYI AND HAYEK

Karl Polanyi’s double movement is a dialectical process characterized by a continuous tension between a movement towards social marketization and a movement towards social protectionism. Notably, Polanyi condemns the former movement while defending the latter. Without using the term “double movement”, F.A Hayek’s theory of social evolution acknowledges the same phenomenon but reaches different normative conclusions. While for Polanyi the marketization of society is a utopia with dystopian consequences, Hayek’s evolutionary explanation of this dialectical process asserts that there is no alternative to a market oriented society. Both authors defend that their favoured movement is the one that truly supports the continuity of life. This article compares the authors’ normative readings of the double movement and concludes that, from an evolutionary perspective, Polanyi’s conclusion possesses a robustness that Hayek’s postulate lacks.

La recepción del pensamiento de Marx en el joven Habermas

Se analiza la influencia del pensamiento de Marx en la formulación temprana de la teoría habermasiana. Para ello, se parte de las críticas de Albrecht Wellmer y Jürgen Habermas a la autocomprensión marxiana del materialismo histórico. Luego se estudia la reconstrucción de algunos postulados del marxismo llevada a cabo por Habermas en términos de una renovada teoría de la evolución social. Con ello salen a la luz algunos supuestos básicos de la teoría de Marx que aparecen trasformados en la conceptualización de Habermas y que constituyen una base ineludible para comprender el posterior pensamiento de este autor.

IMAGINARIOS DE DESARROLLO URBANO: ATISBOS DE COOPERACIÓN LOCAL EN UNA METRÓPOLIS NEOLIBERAL Y COMPETITIVA

La ciudad y la sociedad urbana materializan en el tiempo y el espacio un sistema de relaciones de poder y de mecanismos de intercambio, que evoluciona a través de cambios valóricos en el imaginario colectivo, transformación de las instituciones y reestructuración material de las ciudades. Este artículo propone un marco teórico que integra estas perspectivas con el objetivo de comprender cómo se articulan procesos contradictorios de urbanización en Chile, identificando similitudes y disputas relacionadas con políticas públicas y movimientos sociales, desde la última dictadura hasta hoy. Este estudio integra y extiende teorías de evolución social e institucional para problematizar la discusión de fuentes secundarias, observación participante y análisis cartográfico. La evidencia obtenida respalda la tesis de que las transformaciones recientes en el Gran Santiago han sido tensionadas por políticas neoliberales que han establecido incentivos dominantes para la competencia, negando imaginarios sociales basados en un principio complementario de cooperación y desmantelando las estructuras de incentivos correspondientes. Argumentamos que esta contraposición ideológica puede superarse, para lo cual es necesaria una reforma institucional que genere una estructura de incentivos para fomentar políticas participativas e intersectoriales, lo que no impide que los incentivos a la competitividad ya establecidos sigan operando. Diversos programas participativos implementados en la última década, que tienen en común un fuerte componente urbano o territorial, han generado un importante aprendizaje que podría contribuir a diseñar instituciones que fomenten de forma más equilibrada las prácticas competitivas y cooperativas.

Sociovirology: Conflict, Cooperation, and Communication among Viruses

Viruses are involved in various interactions both within and between infected cells. Social evolution theory offers a conceptual framework for how virus-virus interactions, ranging from conflict to cooperation, have evolved. A critical examination of these interactions could expand our understanding of viruses and be exploited for epidemiological and medical interventions.

The Rise and Fall of Electoral Democracy: A Social Evolutionary Approach to Direct Election Experiments in Local China

This paper analyzes the emergence and evolution of direct elections (DE) for officials at township-level government in China using social evolutionary theory. The explanations provided by existing research using modernization theory or rational choice theory are not sufficient for fully understanding innovation and change of grassroots democratic institutions across China as a whole. This paper argues that the experiment of DEs at the township level is an institutional reform driven by external forces. Under the pressure of financial crisis, a small number of county-level political elites challenged existing thinking and initiated this institutional innovation. The diffusion, continuation and subsequent breakdown of this innovation was the result of the interactions between the external actors of local political elites, the central government, and public opinion led by media and scholars following major fiscal structural changes. Our research finds that during the period of continuation, it is the central government who plays the most pivotal role amongst the external actors and continues to determine the future evolution of this institutional innovation. This paper concludes that a social evolutionary approach has strong explanatory power regarding analyzing institutional changes around local elections.

From Pleistocene to Holocene: the prehistory of southwest Asia in evolutionary context

In this paper I seek to show how cultural niche construction theory offers the potential to extend the human evolutionary story beyond the Pleistocene, through the Neolithic, towards the kind of very large-scale societies in which we live today. The study of the human past has been compartmentalised, each compartment using different analytical vocabularies, so that their accounts are written in mutually incompatible languages. In recent years social, cognitive and cultural evolutionary theories, building on a growing body of archaeological evidence, have made substantial sense of the social and cultural evolution of the genus Homo. However, specialists in this field of studies have found it difficult to extend their kind of analysis into the Holocene human world. Within southwest Asia the three or four millennia of the Neolithic period at the beginning of the Holocene represents a pivotal point, which saw the transformation of human society in the emergence of the first large-scale, permanent communities, the domestication of plants and animals, and the establishment of effective farming economies. Following the Neolithic, the pace of human social, economic and cultural evolution continued to increase. By 5000 years ago, in parts of southwest Asia and northeast Africa there were very large-scale urban societies, and the first large-scale states (kingdoms). An extension of cultural niche construction theory enables us to extend the evolutionary narrative of the Pleistocene into the Holocene, opening the way to developing a single, long-term, evolutionary account of human history.

Stags, Hawks, and Doves: Social Evolution Theory and Individual Variation in Cooperation.

One of the triumphs of evolutionary biology is the discovery of robust mechanisms that promote the evolution of cooperative behaviors even when cooperation reduces the fertility or survival of cooperators. These mechanisms include, kin selection, reciprocity, and direct benefits to cooperation that are often nonlinear. Though they have been extensively studied separately, investigating the joint action of these mechanisms has been more difficult. Moreover, how these mechanisms shape variation in cooperation is not well known. Such variation is crucial for understanding the evolution of behavioral syndromes and animal personality. Here, I use the tools of kin selection and evolutionary game theory to build a framework that integrates these mechanisms for pairwise social interactions. Using relatedness as a measure of the strength of kin selection, responsiveness as a measure of reciprocity, and synergy as a measure of payoff nonlinearity, I show how different combinations of these three parameters produce directional selection for or against cooperation or variation in levels of cooperation via stabilizing or diversifying selection. Moreover, each of these outcomes maps uniquely to one of four classic games from evolutionary game theory, which means that modulating relatedness, responsiveness, and synergy effectively transforms the payoff matrix from one the evolutionary game to another. Assuming that cooperation exacts a fertility cost on cooperators and provides a fertility benefit to social partners, a prisoner's dilemma game and directional selection against cooperation occur when relatedness and responsiveness are low and synergy is not too positive. Enough positive synergy in these conditions generates a stag-hunt game and diversifying selection. High levels of relatedness or responsiveness turn cooperation from a fitness cost into a fitness benefit, which produces a mutualism game and directional selection for cooperation when synergy is not too negative. Sufficiently negative synergy in this case creates a hawk-dove game and stabilizing selection for cooperation. I extend the results with relatedness and synergy to social groups and show that how group size changes the effect of relatedness and synergy on selection for cooperation depends on how the per capita benefit of cooperation changes with group size. Together, these results provide a general framework with which to generate comparative predictions that can be tested using quantitative genetic techniques and experimental techniques that manipulate investment in cooperation. These predictions will help us understand both interspecific variation in cooperation as well as within-population and within-group variation in cooperation related to behavioral syndromes.