Cultural evolution
How culture solved collective action at scales no individual mechanism could reach.
Cultural evolution
Every jump in the size of a cooperating human group came from a cultural innovation rather than a change in individuals. Ritual, kinship, religion, law, money and the firm are all collective action technologies, and each bought another order of magnitude.
Selection
The innovations
- Ilahita — Fictive kinship and Initiation ritual
- Costly signaling, Richard Sosis, Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan
- Joseph Henrich, WEIRD, Kin networks
- Curtin et al on Zapotec cooperative institutions — two institutions in one village, different mechanisms in each
The mechanism, and its cost
- Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety, War as ratchet — Chadwick on the inevitability of the bomb
- In-group and out-group — The bill
- Agricultural revolution — cooperation at larger scale that left most people worse off
