Cultural group selection, coevolutionary processes and large-scale cooperation

“The operational details of these learning mechanisms appear to have been 'designed' by natural selection to extract useful information from the social world—that is, from the minds of other individuals (Boyd and Richerson, 1985; Henrich and Gil-White, 2001; Henrich and Boyd, 1998).”

“In this way, the evolved capacity to feel compassion may function like a language acquisition tendency (Henrich, 2004; Richerson & Boyd, 2005) and may vary in ways that are analogous to how languages differ across cultures, according to culturally specific concepts, values, norms, and practices (Clark, 1997; Hoshchild…”

“Henrich (2004) and Sober and Wilson (1998) discuss”

“Henrich (2004) provides an overview of another promising concept, namely conformity.”

“This kind of CGS, involving competition among stable states, suffers none of the problems typically associated with application of genetic group selection to the evolution of altruism (Henrich, 2004).”

“Significantly, recent literature rehabilitates group selection in culture as a higher-level complement to individual-level selection (Henrich 2004a).”

“But ultimately, norms are shaped through the interaction of various social and evolutionary forces [33, 63].”

“…through the adaptive advantages of social foraging, collective strategies for warfare and defense, material exchange, and even the collaborative advantages of language (Boyd and Richerson 1985, Henrich 2004, Bowles 2006, 2009, Laland et al. 2010, Apicella et al. 2012, Rand and Nowak 2014).”

“The notion that culture and genes coevolve has been gaining increasing acceptance recently (see, e.g., Henrich 2004 and the responses published in the same journal issue), particularly among biological anthropologists.”

“Let us consider her discussion of cultural group selection, which draws little from more established discussions (e.g., Boyd & Richerson 2002; Wilson 2002; Henrich 2004; Smaldino 2014; Zefferman & Mathew 2015; Richerson et al. 2016).”

“The findings reviewed here, in particular those from the crosscultural experiments, support anthropological and evolutionary theories of cooperation which predict that people's social preferences are programmable and therefore culturally variable ( Henrich 2004; Henrich et al. 2005).”

“…Bowles & Gintis, 2004; Bowles et al., 2003; Boyd & Richerson, 2002; Boyd et al., 2005; Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003; Gintis, 2000; Gintis et al., 2003; Henrich, 2004; Traulsen & Nowak, 2006 Gardner & West, 2004; Lehmann et al., 2007c Cooperation Bowles, 2006; Taylor & Nowak, 2007; Traulsen & Nowak,…”

“These models permit within-group variation, and show that cultural group selection can operate even in the face of ample withingroup variation (Boyd and Richerson 2002; Henrich 2004; Boyd et al. 2003).,There are several reasons for this but three important ones revolve around: (1) the non-vertical nature of cultural i…”

“First, such critiques often fail to appreciate that cultural evolutionary models involving intergroup competition usually solve the free-rider problem using purely withingroup selective processes (not ‘group selection’), such as those built on reputation, punishment and signaling (Boyd & Richerson 1990; Henrich 2004).”

“Intergroup competition and prestige-biased imitation of more successful groups offer the mechanism (110).”

“For example, group selection on cultural variation plausibly played a leading role in the evolution of genes underpinning our unusual social systems, including cooperative breeding and cooperation among distantly related individuals (1, 30).”

“An additional puzzle arises in the face of cross-cultural data suggesting that individuals in some societies do not engage in costly punishment as much as those in Western industrialized societies (4, 5).”

“An alternate view is that humans have evolved to cooperate in ethnolinguistic groups (groups with shared cultural norms and language), comprising thousands of unrelated strangers, even without formal coercive institutions (12, 13).”

“11 Fisher (1930), Campbell (1965), Price (1970, 1972, 1995), Sober (1984), Hull (1980), Hull et al. (2001), Darden and Cain (1989), Sober and Wilson (1998), Frank (1998), Hofbauer and Sigmund (1998), Nanay (2002), Kerr and Godfrey-Smith (2002b), Henrich (2004).”

“Our approach is different since our goal is to understand a more fundamental issue—do we find evidence that comparable subjects from modern developed societies that are characterized by large-scale cooperation but differ strongly with regard to historical and cultural values behave differently in games of cooperation?…”

“Henrich (2004) makes several reasonable verbal arguments that strategic non-conformism would be difficult, and perhaps impossible, to evolve.”

“Thus, in conjunction with the punishment of norm violations andtheimitationofsuccess,conformityplaysacriticalrolein the study of how prosocial tendencies could have evolved in humansviaculturalgroupselection(Boyd,Gintis,Bowles,& Richerson, 2003; Boyd & Richerson, 1982; Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003, 2004; Fehr & Gaechter,…”

“Living in large groups requires some degree of behavioral coordination and conformity (Henrich, 2003).”

“, Henrich, J., Povinelli, D. J., Richardson, A. S., et al. (2005). Chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members.”

“See Henrich (2004) and Henrich and Boyd (2002).”

“…fitness and reciprocal altruism, and proximal forces, including tit-for-tat, altruistic punishment, and status seeking (Axelrod 1984; Fehr & Fischbacher 2003; Hamilton 1964; Hardy & Van Vugt 2006; Henrich 2004; Nowak & Sigmund 2005; Rand et al. 2009; Sober & Wilson 1998; Trivers 1971, 1972).”

“…Bentley et al. 2004; Boyd and Richerson 1985, 1987, 1995, 2002; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981, 1983; Eerkens and Lipo 2005; Hahn and Bentley 2003; Henrich 2001, 2004a; Henrich and Boyd 2002; Henrich and Gil-White 2001; Henrich and McElreath 2003; Lipo et al. 1997; McElreath et al. 2003; Shennan…”

“What might might be the evolutionary origins of such “prosocial” behavior? Henrich [114] offers an explanation based on cultural group selection.”

“It thus differs from the “dual inheritance hypothesis” in anthropology (see Henrich 2004; Richerson and Boyd 2005).”

“that punishment of norm violation is altruistic in the biological sense (Boyd and Richerson, 1992; Boyd et al., 2003; Henrich, 2004).”

“21 The argument is also presented in Henrich (2004) , which serves as the focus for 17 commentaries in a special issue (January, 2004, vol.”

“Recent models of cultural evolution suggest that weak conformist transmission can stabilize punishment and hence promotes the evolution of cooperation (Henrich and Boyd, 2001; Henrich, 2004).”

“Selection for altruism in such large groups, however, remains a controversial topic in part because it is not clear that enough between-group variation existed in human societies to make it an appreciable evolutionary force (15).”

“…cooperative behavior (e.g., Bowles, 2009; Nowak, 2006), our model is designed to capture a broad array of different types of threat and shows evolution toward strong cooperation or coordination norms without the requirement for group selection (Bowles, 2006; Henrich, 2004; Traulsen & Nowak, 2006).”

“This pattern of findings indicates that while chimpanzees’ behaviour is consistent with standard evolutionary models based on kinship and reciprocity, human cooperation and prosociality may require an emerging class of evolutionary models, rooted in the coevolutionary interaction of genes and culture (Boyd et al. 2003…”

“And, to the extent that groups of individuals may be selected for or selected against culturally, if stable and identifiable subgroups or cultures of people are not prepared to enter a world of virtual work, relatively rapid within-group evolutionary processes will quickly favor those individuals with these new virtua…”

“Concerns with fairness appear in nearly every culture in the world, even in small hunter-gatherer societies (Boehm, 2008; Gurven, 2004; Henrich, 2004).”

“However, engagement in reciprocity, particularly in the complexly cooperative social environments of human beings, requires specially designed social-cognitive abilities that are uniquely sophisticated in humans (Tooby and Cosmides, 1996; Hammerstein, 2002; Frontiers in Human Neuroscience…”

“Good predictions can be made, however, using models of biased cultural transmission (Henrich 2004).”

“…strategy, as copying can tend toward baseless decisions, whereas independent decision making may lead to a rational, collective b wisdom Q of a group (Surowiecki, 2004) and/or optimal solutions through a process analogous to natural selection (e.g., Crow & Aoki, 1982a, 1982b, 1984; Henrich, 2004).”

“Alternatively, the concept of conformity (Henrich, 2004) has been used to explain conditional cooperation.”

“This behavioral variation is attributed to culturally inherited cooperative norms and taken as support for cultural group selection models of large-scale cooperation (1, 2, 7).”

“As discussed below, this interaction may be critical for understanding some aspects of human cooperation, particularly largescale cooperation among non-relatives (Baldwin, 1896a; Boyd & Richerson, 2002b; Durham, 1991; Henrich, 2004; Richerson & Boyd, 1998, 2000).”

“26 psychology and experimental economics, as well as of group selection theory (Bergstrom, 2002; Henrich, 2004).”

“The existence of different societies at stable equilibria with different total payoffs creates the conditions for cultural group selection (Henrich 2004a).”

“…of the " needy " may be a cooperative behavior backed by third party punishment (Hill and Gurven 2004), we must consider the possibility that this cultural convention has evolved through cultural group selection (see Bowles 2006; Boyd, Gintis, Bowles, & Richerson, 2003; and Henrich 2004 ).”

“This evolutionary argument is supported by evidence from primates (De Waal, 1996, 2006) and modern evolutionary theory with a careful rehabilitation of the concept of group selection (Henrich, 2004, Hodgson, 2013a, 2014; Hodgson and Knudsen, 2010; Sober and Wilson, 1998).”

“These altruistic behaviors can survive because they enhance group fitness, and make groups composed of altruists more likely to survive environmental shocks (Henrich, 2004; Boyd et al., 2003).”

“3 Our concept of conformity is similar to the notion of normative conformity used in cultural evolutionary models and the social learning literature (see Henrich and Boyd, 2001; Henrich, 2004; McElreath et al., 2005).”

“In cultural evolution, for example, units of cultural transmission, sometimes called memes, are hypothesized to be copied through imitation by individuals until they spread to a large number of individuals of a cultural group (Blackmore 1999, 2001; Dawkins 1990; Henrich 2004).”

“This may, in turn, contribute to a theoretically predicted (Boyd & Richerson, 2002; Henrich, 2004) and empirically observed (Henrich, et al., 2004; Henrich, et al., 2006) pattern in which learning dynamics generates equilibria in beliefs about norms of social interaction that are stable and widely…”

“…have deep-seated non-selfish preferences that are unique among living animals (Bowles & Gintis 2011, Fehr & Fischbacher 2003, Fehr & Gächter 2002, Henrich 2004, Henrich et al 2001, Henrich & Henrich 2006) while varying by cultural context (Henrich et al 2010, Henrich & Henrich 2006, House et al…”

“Such devices will give groups integrities that make collective action and collective benefits possible, and make cultural group selection feasible (91, 92).”

“Summaries and further references can be found in Richerson and Boyd (2005), Boyd and Richerson (2009), Henrich (2004, 2008), and Henrich and Henrich (2007).”