Robert Boyd
Quotes From
“Large‐scale cooperation in small‐scale foraging societies” (2022)
- Cooperation becomes large‐scale when the incremental effect of a defector on the benefits of collective action is not large enough to make sanctions pay the individual imposing them.#
- Small‐scale cooperation can be sustained by the same mechanisms that give rise to cooperation among nonrelatives in other animals—reciprocity and self‐interested sanctions. Large‐scale cooperation requires something more. If there were no large‐scale cooperation in the Pleistocene, it would be possible to believe that human psychology was shaped in a world of small‐scale cooperation, and this psychology misfires to give rise to modern large‐scale, inclusive fitness reducing cooperation. If foragers did cooperate on large‐scales during the Pleistocene, additional, human‐specific, mechanisms were necessary, and this leads to quite different proposals about the psychology of contemporary human cooperation.#
- Systematic studies of contemporary foragers indicate that members of residential bands are not closely related.#
“Is the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma a Good Model of Reciprocal Altruism?” (1988)
- It is important to distinguish between mutualism and altruism because quite different selective processes must be invoked to account for the two classes of behaviors. Once common, mutualistic behavior will remain common under the influence of natural selection, even if individuals interact at random. In contrast, altruistic behavior can remain common only if some process causes altruistic morphs to interact assortatively. #
Posts About
Money’s Mutation of the Modern Moral Mind: The Simmel Hypothesis and the Cultural Evolution of WEIRDness
A great number of theories have been offered as to the root of the difference between the modern mind and the premodern mind. One neglected account comes from Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, which argues that the rise of the mass money economy in the early modern era encouraged calculative . . .