David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
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The complexity of human societies of the past few thousand years rivals that of social insect societies. We hypothesize that two sets of social “instincts” underpin and constrain the evolution of complex societies. One set is ancient and shared with other social primate species, and one is derived and unique to our lineage. The latter evolved by the late Pleistocene, and led to the evolution of institutions of intermediate complexity in acephalous societies. The institutions of complex societies often conflict with our social instincts. The complex societies of the last few thousand years can function only because cultural evolution has created effective “work-arounds” to manage such instincts. We describe a series of work-arounds and use the data on the relative effectiveness of WWII armies to test the work-around hypothesis.
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Edward Slingerland (2008). The Problem of Moral Spontaneity in the Guodian Corpus. Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 7 (3):237-256.
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Mark W. Moffett (2013). Human Identity and the Evolution of Societies. Human Nature 24 (3):219-267.
Michael Alvard (2009). Kinship and Cooperation. Human Nature 20 (4):394-416.
Michael Alvard (2011). Genetic and Cultural Kinship Among the Lamaleran Whale Hunters. Human Nature 22 (1-2):89-107.
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