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[JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis-this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

Why has cooperation, not competition, always been the key to the evolution of complexity? MARTIN NOWAK is a Mathematical Biologist, Game Theorist; Professor of Biology and Mathematics, Director, Center for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University; Coauthor (with Roger Highfield), SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. Martin Nowak's Edge Bio Page In July, Edge held its annual Master Class in Napa, California on the theme: "The Science of Human Nature".  In the six week period that began September 12th, we are publishing the complete video, audio, and texts:  Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; UC-Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides on the architecture of motivation; Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the history of violence; UC-Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on neuroscience and the law; and Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels on The Book of Revelations. For publication schedule and details, go to Edge Master Class 2011: The Science of Human Nature.

Transcript of fabulous presentation on the evolution of cooperation with great Q&A at the end.

Recommendation from David Watkins: I find Bloom to be a fascinating individual with incredible scope. I find myself both drawn and repelled by his ideas. I find his website fascinating. The only book of his that I've read is "Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century." I've linked it here to Amazon; he also has a section on his website. It fits very well with the material that we've covered in this course. It is about the evolution of cooperation and identifies an emerging Global Brain that is in many ways similar to Gaia. It might even lead to a global culture, beyond Us and Them, at least in some sense.

Symbiosis, the "living together of differently named organisms" is far more important in the evolution of life and the functioning of organisms and ecologies than the competition-centric views of Darwin's early defenders asserted, and may be the key driving force in the evolution of life on earth.

kin selection and it means the gene will spread.

Roland's summary of our second live session about The Evolution of Cooperation.

Teilhard developed a vision of evolution as an overarching comprehensive process encompassing cosmological, geological, biological, and cultural aspects. His genius lay in his ability to see unifying themes in processes which seem so different but which would be seen simply as differing degrees of a single process.

Innate human propensities for cooperation with strangers, shaped during the Pleistocene in response to rapidly changing environments, could have provided highly adaptive social instincts that more recently coevolved with cultural institutions; although the biological capacity for primate sociality evolved genetically, the authors propose that channeling of tribal instincts via symbol systems has involved a cultural transmission and selection that continues the evolution of cooperative human capacities at a cultural rather than genetic level - and pace.

Robert Axelrod Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Michigan, AnnArbor. Dr. Axelrod is a member of the American National Academy of Sciencesand the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His honors include a MacArthurFoundation Fellowship for the period 1987 through 1992. Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a world of egoistswithout central authority? This question has intrigued people for a longtime. We all know that people are not angels, and that they tend to lookafter themselves and their own first. Yet we also know that cooperationdoes occur and that our civilization is based upon it

90 minute video

Week 2, #COOPLIT Mark Pagel, one of the world's leading experts on human evolution and development, visits the RSA to investigate our species' capacity for culture, cooperation and community.

Human cooperation is an evolutionary puzzle. Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent. These patterns of cooperation cannot be explained by the nepotistic motives associated with the evolutionary theory of kin selection and the selfish motives associated with signalling theory or the theory of reciprocal altruism. Here we show experimentally that the altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation. Altruistic punishment means that individuals punish, although the punishment is costly for them and yields no material gain. We show that cooperation flourishes if altruistic punishment is possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out. The evidence indicates that negative emotions towards defectors are the proximate mechanism behind altruistic punishment. These results suggest that future study of the evolution of human cooperation should include a strong focus on explaining altruistic punishment.

recommended by Howard Rheingold,  He says: "Mark Elliott claims that Wikipedia is an example of how people use online media stigmergically." Mark Elliott says (from the site): "As stigmergy is a method of communication in which individuals communicate with one another by modifying their local environment, it is a logical extension to apply the term to many types (if not all) of Web-based communication, especially media such as the wiki."

Bloom's theory of why "evil" will always be with us due it's evolving as an intrinsic part of our nature.  (Maybe a corollary to the Parable of the Tribes).

LIsa Tansey: I've read bit from from Tielhard de Chardin and tried to relate it to cooperation among learners. I wonder if there are any good documentaries of his work? 

" According to the parable of the tribes, civilized peoples have been compelled to live in societies organized for the maximization of competitive power. People become the servants of their evolving systems, rather than civilized society being the instrument of its members."

Any group that attempts to manage a common resource (e.g., aquifers, judicial systems, pastures) for optimal sustainable production must solve a set of problems in order to create institutions for collective action; there is some evidence that following a small set of design principles in creating these institutions can overcome these problems.