Joseph Henrich
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Married Too Young? the Behavioral Ecology of 'Child Marriage'
social sciences $€ £ ¥ Review Married Too Young? The Behavioral Ecology of ‘Child Marriage’ Susan B. Schaffnit 1,* and David W. Lawson 2 1 Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16801, USA 2 Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: For girls and women, marriage under 18 years is commonplace in many low-income nations today and was culturally widespread historically. Global health campaigns refer to marriage below this threshold as ‘child marriage’ and increasingly aim for its universal eradication, citing its apparent negative wellbeing consequences. Here, we outline and evaluate four alternative hypotheses for the persistence of early marriage, despite its associations with poor wellbeing, arising from the theoretical framework of human behavioral ecology. First, early marriage may be adaptive (e.g., it maximizes reproductive success), even if detrimental to wellbeing, when life expectancy is short. Second, parent– offspring conflict may explain early marriage, with parents profiting economically at the expense of their daughter’s best interests. Third, early marriage may be explained by intergenerational conflict, whereby girls marry young to emancipate themselves from continued labor within natal households. Finally, both daughters and parents from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds favor early marriage as a ‘best of a bad job strategy’ when it represents the best option given a lack of feasible alternatives. The explanatory power of each hypothesis is context-dependent, highlighting the complex drivers of life history transitions and reinforcing the need for context-specific policies Citation: Schaffnit, Susan B., and addressing the vulnerabilities of adolescence worldwide. -
THE DESCENT of MADNESS: Evolutionary Origins of Psychosis
THE DESCENT OF MADNESS Drawing on evidence from across the behavioural and natural sciences, this book advances a radical new hypothesis: that madness exists as a costly consequence of the evolution of a sophisticated social brain in Homo sapiens. Having explained the rationale for an evolutionary approach to psych- osis, the author makes a case for psychotic illness in our living ape relatives, as well as in human ancestors. He then reviews existing evolutionary theor- ies of psychosis, before introducing his own thesis: that the same genes causing madness are responsible for the evolution of our highly social brain. Jonathan Burns’ novel Darwinian analysis of the importance of psychosis for human survival provides some meaning for this form of suffering. It also spurs us on to a renewed commitment to changing our societies in a way that allows the mentally ill the opportunity of living. The Descent of Madness will be of interest to those in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, sociology and anthropology, and is also accessible to the general reader. Jonathan Burns is chief specialist psychiatrist at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine. His main areas of research include psychotic illnesses, human brain evolution and evolutionary origins of psychosis. THE DESCENT OF MADNESS Evolutionary Origins of Psychosis and the Social Brain Jonathan Burns First published 2007 by Routledge 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Jonathan Burns This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. -
Raising-Darwins-Consciousness.Pdf
RAISING DARWIN'S CONSCIOUSNESS Female Sexuality and the Prehominid Origins of Patriarchy Sarah Blaffer Hrdy University of California, Davis Sociobiologists and feminists agree that men in patriarchal social systems seek to control females, but sociobiologists go further, using Darwin's theory of sexual selection and Trivers's ideas on parental investment to explain why males should attempt to control female sexuality. From this perspective, the stage for the development under some conditions of patriarchal social systems was set over the course of primate evolution. Sexual selection encompasses both competition between males and female choice. But in applying this theory to our "lower origins" (pre- hominid ancestors), Darwin assumed that choices were made by essen- tially "coy" females. I argue here that female solicitation of multiple males (either simultaneously or sequentially, depending on the breeding system) characterized prehominid females; this prehominid legacy of cy- clical sexual assertiveness, itself possibly a female counter-strategy to male efforts to control the timing of female reproduction, generated fur- ther male counter-strategies. This dialectic had important implications for emerging hominid mating systems, human evolution, and the devel- opment of patriarchal arrangements in some human societies. For homi- nid males who will invest in offspring, there would be powerful selection for emotions, behaviors, and customs that ensure them certainty of pater- nity. The sexual modesty that so struck Darwin can be explained as a recent evolved or learned (perhaps both) adaptation in women to avoid penalties imposed by patrilines on daughters and mates who failed to conform to the patriline's prevailing norms for their sex. -
Strong Reciprocity and Human Sociality∗
Strong Reciprocity and Human Sociality∗ Herbert Gintis Department of Economics University of Massachusetts, Amherst Phone: 413-586-7756 Fax: 413-586-6014 Email: [email protected] Web: http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/˜gintis Running Head: Strong Reciprocity and Human Sociality March 11, 2000 Abstract Human groups maintain a high level of sociality despite a low level of relatedness among group members. The behavioral basis of this sociality remains in doubt. This paper reviews the evidence for an empirically identifi- able form of prosocial behavior in humans, which we call ‘strong reciprocity,’ that may in part explain human sociality. A strong reciprocator is predisposed to cooperate with others and punish non-cooperators, even when this behavior cannot be justified in terms of extended kinship or reciprocal altruism. We present a simple model, stylized but plausible, of the evolutionary emergence of strong reciprocity. 1 Introduction Human groups maintain a high level of sociality despite a low level of relatedness among group members. Three types of explanation have been offered for this phe- nomenon: reciprocal altruism (Trivers 1971, Axelrod and Hamilton 1981), cultural group selection (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981, Boyd and Richerson 1985) and genetically-based altruism (Lumsden and Wilson 1981, Simon 1993, Wilson and Dugatkin 1997). These approaches are of course not incompatible. Reciprocal ∗ I would like to thank Lee Alan Dugatkin, Ernst Fehr, David Sloan Wilson, and the referees of this Journal for helpful comments, Samuel Bowles and Robert Boyd for many extended discussions of these issues, and the MacArthur Foundation for financial support. This paper is dedicated to the memory of W. -
Cinderella Effect Facts
The “Cinderella effect”: Elevated mistreatment of stepchildren in comparison to those living with genetic parents. Martin Daly & Margo Wilson Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4K1 <[email protected]> <[email protected]> Theory Parents commit a huge amount of time, attention and material resources to the care of their children, as well as incurring life-threatening risks to defend them and bodily depletion to nourish them. Why are parents motivated to invest so heavily in their children? From an evolutionary perspective, the answer is surely that natural selection has favoured intensive parental care in our lineage. Those ancestral genotypes and phenotypes that best succeeded in raising children to become reproducing adults were the ones that persisted and proliferated. If the psychological underpinnings of parental care have indeed evolved by natural selection, we may furthermore anticipate that parental feeling and action will not typically be elicited by just any random conspecific juvenile. Instead, care-providing animals may be expected to direct their care selectively towards young who are (a) their own genetic offspring rather than those of their reproductive rivals, and (b) able to convert parental investment into increased prospects for survival and reproduction. This is the kernel of the theory of discriminative parental solicitude, which (notwithstanding some interesting twists and caveats) has been abundantly verified in a broad range of care-giving species -
Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution Agustın´ Fuentes ABSTRACT A niche is the structural, temporal, and social context in which a species exists. Over the last two million years, the human lineage underwent clear morphological changes alongside less easily measurable, but significant, behavioral and cognitive shifts as it forged, and was shaped by, new niches. During this time period, core human patterns emerged, including the following: hypercooperation; lengthy childhood and complex parenting; intricate and diverse foraging and hunting patterns; novel and dynamic material and symbolic cultures; and complex communication and information sharing, eventually resulting in language. Approaches to human evolution grounded in paleoanthropology and archaeology offer fundamental insights into our past, and traditional evolutionary the- ory offers a strong grounding for explaining them. However, given the centrality of distinctive physiological, social, semiotic, and cognitive processes in human evolutionary histories, a broader anthropological approach can facilitate additional understanding of the human story. An integrative anthropology, reaching across subfields and foci, com- bined with contemporary evolutionary theory is an approach that can enhance our abilities to model and understand human evolution. [integrative anthropology, niche construction, evolution, extended evolutionary synthesis, Homo, semiosis, Pleistocene] RESUMEN Un nicho es el contexto estructural, -
Walrasian Economics in Retrospect
A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert Working Paper Walrasian Economics in Retrospect Working Paper, No. 2000-04 Provided in Cooperation with: Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Suggested Citation: Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert (2000) : Walrasian Economics in Retrospect, Working Paper, No. 2000-04, University of Massachusetts, Department of Economics, Amherst, MA This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/105719 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu WALRASIAN ECONOMICS IN RETROSPECT∗ Department of Economics University of Massachusetts Amherst, Massachusetts, 01003 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis February 4, 2000 Abstract Two basic tenets of the Walrasian model, behavior based on self-interested exogenous preferences and complete and costless contracting have recently come under critical scrutiny. -
Evolution, Child Abuse and the Constitution Christopher Malrborough
Journal of Law and Policy Volume 11 | Issue 2 Article 6 2003 Evolution, Child Abuse and the Constitution Christopher Malrborough Follow this and additional works at: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/jlp Recommended Citation Christopher Malrborough, Evolution, Child Abuse and the Constitution, 11 J. L. & Pol'y (2003). Available at: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/jlp/vol11/iss2/6 This Note is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at BrooklynWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Law and Policy by an authorized editor of BrooklynWorks. MARLBOROUGHMACROX.DOC 6/25/03 5:10 PM EVOLUTION, CHILD ABUSE AND THE CONSTITUTION Christopher Marlborough* INTRODUCTION The presence of a non-genetic parent in a child’s home is the largest single risk factor for severe child maltreatment yet discovered.1 Professor Owen Jones has used the example of stepparent infanticide to explain how evolutionary analysis in law can serve society’s goals when prevailing theories have failed.2 * Brooklyn Law School Class of 2003; B.A., State University of New York at Purchase, 1991. I would like to thank Professors Jennifer Rosato and Bailey Kuklin for their input and guidance in writing this note and my lovely wife Jennifer for her infinite patience. 1 MARTIN DALY & MARGO WILSON, THE TRUTH ABOUT CINDERELLA: A DARWINIAN VIEW OF PARENTAL LOVE 7 (1998) [hereinafter DALY & WILSON, CINDERELLA]. 2 Owen Jones, Evolutionary Analysis in Law: An Introduction and Application to Child Abuse, 75 N.C. L. REV. 1117 (1997) [hereinafter Jones, Child Abuse]. Professor Jones suggests a four-stage process to determine when evolutionary principles can be helpful to inform legal policy. -
Reciprocity and Overoptimism in Public Goods Games
Biased Beliefs and Reciprocal Behavior in Social Dilemmas Von der Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Technischen Hochschule Aachen zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften genehmigte Dissertation vorgelegt von Dipl.-Ing. Anselm Hüwe Berichter: Univ.-Prof. Dr. rer. pol. Wolfgang Breuer Univ.-Prof. Dr. rer. pol. Christine Harbring Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 21.04.2015 Diese Dissertation ist auf den Internetseiten der Hochschulbibliothek online verfügbar. Table of Contents 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1 2 Economic Experiments ........................................................................................................... 3 3 Game Theory and (Common) Belief in Rationality ................................................................ 8 3.1 Boundedly Rational Behavior ........................................................................................ 11 3.2 Biased Beliefs ................................................................................................................. 14 4 Social Preferences ................................................................................................................. 15 4.1 When Social Preferences Should Be Assumed, and When Not ..................................... 16 4.2 Evolutionary Analysis ................................................................................................... -
Canoes and Cultural Evolution
COMMENTARY Canoes and cultural evolution Stephen Shennan* Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London WC1H 0PY, United Kingdom ver the last 30 years, the idea the way in which cultural entities and cultural traits that characterize agricul- that the processes producing processes closely match Darwin’s origi- ture spread and, in some cases, subse- cultural stability and change nal formulation of the theory of evolu- quently influenced genetic evolution are analogous in important tion has recently been shown in detail [e.g., the ability to digest lactose (6)]. Orespects to those of biological evolution by Mesoudi et al. (5)]. In the most gen- An analogous process of cultural selec- has become increasingly popular. Bio- eral terms, parallel mechanisms for in- tion can also operate if individuals with logical evolution is characterized by heritance, mutation, selection, and drift certain cultural traits are more likely to changing frequencies of genes in popula- act on culture as they do on genes. be taken as models for imitation than tions through time as a result of such In the case of culture, the inheritance others, by virtue of those traits, and processes as natural selection; likewise, mechanism is social learning: People these individuals in turn become suc- cultural evolution refers to the changing learn ways to think and act from others. cessful models as a result. The traits distributions of cultural attributes in Of course, the routes through which cul- concerned will become more prevalent populations, which are affected by pro- ture is inherited are much more diverse even if they have no bearing on repro- cesses such as natural selection but also than those for genes (1), and different ductive success whatsoever and, indeed, by others that have no analogue in ge- routes have different consequences for even if they are deleterious to it, be- netic evolution. -
Evolution of Wisdom: Major and Minor Keys
EVOLUTION OF WISDOM: MAJOR AND MINOR KEYS AGUSTÍN FUENTES AND CELIA DEANE-DRUMMOND Center for Theology, Science, and Human Flourishing University of Notre Dame Evolution of Wisdom: Major and Minor Keys by Center for Theology, Science, and Human Flourishing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Copyright © 2018 Center for Theology, Science, and Human Flourishing, University of Notre Dame CONTENTS Contents v Acknowledgements vii List of Contributors viii Introduction: Transdisciplinarity, Evolution, and Engaging Wisdom 1 Agustín Fuentes and Celia Deane-Drummond PART I. INTERDISCIPLINARY WISDOM 1. Independent Reason, Faith, and a Distinctively Human Wisdom 7 Angela Carpenter 2. Re-Engaging Theology and Evolutionary Biology: The Nature of True Wisdom 15 Nicola Hoggard Creegan 3. Human Origins and the Emergence of a Distinctively Human Imagination 25 J. Wentzel van Huyssteen PART II. EVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVES 4. Technological Intelligence or Social Wisdom? Promiscuous Sociality, Things, 41 and Networks in Human Evolution Fiona Coward 5. The Palaeolithic Archaeological Record and the Materiality of Imagination: A 57 Response to J. Wentzel van Huyssteen Jennifer French 6. How did Hominins become Human? 64 Marc Kissel PART III. WISDOM AND THE MIND 7. De-Centering Humans within Cognitive Systems 83 Marcus Baynes-Rock 8. Practical Wisdom: Good Reasoning or Good Action? 89 Craig IfGand 9. Concepts of Reason and Wisdom 96 Maureen Junker-Kenny 10. Wisdom and Freedom as Reason - Sensitive Action Control 104 Aku Visala PART IV. WISDOM IN THE MINOR KEY 11. Evolution in the Minor Key 115 Tim Ingold 12. A Response to Tim Ingold: Evolution in the Minor Key 124 Karen Kilby 13. -
My Background, Research Interests, and Future Plans by Geoffrey Miller
My background, research interests, and future plans By Geoffrey Miller Miller, G. F. (2011). My background, research interests, and future plans. In X.T. Wang & Su, Y.-J. (Ed.), Thus spake evolutionary psychologists (进化心理学家如是说), pp. 320-328. Beijing: Peking University Press. After I got a B.A. in psychology and biology from Columbia University, I went to graduate school in psychology at Stanford in 1987. I intended to study cognitive psychology, but found it too boring and abstract. Fortunately, two founders of evolutionary psychology – Leda Cosmides and John Tooby – were working as post-docs with my advisor Roger Shepard. Along with David Buss, Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, and Gerd Gigerenzer – who were visiting Stanford in 1989- 1990 – they introduced me to the possibility of applying evolutionary theory to study human nature. After that, my Stanford friend Peter Todd and I knew that we wanted to join this new field of evolutionary psychology, but we weren’t quite sure what research to do. We had learned about genetic algorithms – ways of simulating evolution by natural selection in computers – and we applied them to designing neural networks for learning some simple tasks. We hoped to illustrate how evolution and learning could interact to produce adaptive behavior. Our research led to my post-doc at University of Sussex in England in the early 1990s, working on artificial life and evolutionary robotics. That was fun, but I realized that I was more interested in human psychology than in cognitive engineering. At Stanford, I also grew interested in sexual selection through mate choice. It seemed like a very powerful but neglected process, not only for explaining sex differences in bodies and brains, but also for explaining the fast evolution of any extravagant mental abilities, whether bird song or human language.