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Charlotte Pierce

HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION | Edge.org - 0 views

www.edge.org/...-culture-drove-human-evolution

shared by Charlotte Pierce on 02 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information,
  • important selection pressures over the course of human evolution are the things that culture creates
  • fire and cooking is that they're culturally transmitted
  • ...61 more annotations...
  • whole bunch of downstream effects
  • status you get from being particularly knowledgeable or skilled in an area
  • possess resources
  • From this we've argued that humans have two separate kinds of status, dominance and prestige, and these have quite different ethologies.
  • Dominance [ethology] is about physical posture, of size
  • attracted to prestigious
  • long period of interaction between genes and culture.
  • culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments.
  • created a selection pressure for lots of cultural learning.
  • environment starts to fluctuate
  • for cultural learning to really take off, you need more than one model
  • trying out different techniques
  • humans are strangely good at long distance running.
  • only humans have it.
  • culturally transmitted
  • affected our anatomy
  • evolution of societal complexity
  • after the origins of agriculture, there was an intense period that continues today of intergroup competition, which favors groups who have social norms and institutions that can more effectively expand the group while maintaining internal harmony, leading to the benefits of exchange, of the ability to maintain markets, of division of labor and of higher levels of cooperation. Then you get intense competition amongst the early farming groups, and this is going to favor those groups who have the abilities to expand.
  • religions of modern societies are quite different than the religions we see in hunter gatherers and small scale societies
  • galvanize cooperation in larger groups and sustained cooperation amongst non relatives
  • mergence of high-moralizing gods
  • concerned about exactly the kinds of things that are going to be a problem for running a large-scale society, like how you treat other members of your religious group or your ethnic group
  • kinds of things you need to make a market run to have a successful division of labor
  • remind believers of their god, believers cheat less,
  • attending a ritual, you elevate the degree of belief in the high-moralizing gods or the priests
  • credibility-enhancing displays
  • animal sacrifice
  • circumcision
  • large sum of money
  • akes the observers more likely to acquire the belief
  • conformist transmission
  • self-perpetuating cycle
  • tap our cultural transmission abilities to deepen the faith
  • risk in developing specialization
  • culture is information stored in people's heads that gets there by some kind of social learning
  • we don't see amongst other animals is cumulative cultural evolution.
  • importance of population size and the interconnectedness for technology
  • case study in Tasmania
  • cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia
  • technological downturn
  • number of minds working on the problem gets small enough, you can actually begin to lose information
  • rates of innovation should continue to increase, especially with the emergence of communication technologies, because these allow ideas to flow very rapidly from place to place.
  • incentive to hide your information
  • monogamy
  • reduces male-male competition
  • discount the future less and engage in productive activities
  • trade freedom off against other social ills
  • widely varying amounts of wealth, especially among males
  • promote high levels of polygyny
  • stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution
  • distinguish genetic evolution and cultural evolution
  • epigenetic evolution
  • Cognition and our ability to think are all interwoven
  • genetic programs is to be able to acquire ideas, beliefs and values and weave them into our brain such that they then affect our biolog
  • Ultimatum Game seemed to provide evidence that humans were innately inclined to punish unfairness
  • make a large-scale society run you have to shift from investing in your local kin groups and your enduring relationships to being willing to pay to be fair to a stranger
  • if you're going to be fair to a stranger, then you're taking money away from your famil
  • adherence to a world religion matters
  • relationship between market integrations using measures like distance from market and people's willingness to build impartial institutions
  • rule of law.
  • when you have risk managing institutions these impartial norms can spread.
  • Charlotte Pierce on 02 Feb 13
     
    [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.
Lisa Tansey

The Evolution Of Cooperation Edge Master Class 2011 | Conversation | Edge - 0 views

web.archive.org/...evolution-of-cooperation-nowak

cooplit evolution cooperation population Novak edge

shared by Lisa Tansey on 01 Feb 13 - No Cached
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  • In this beautiful book by Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is, he points out very elegantly, loosely speaking, ‘we talk about the evolution of genes, the evolution of species, the evolution of the brain, but none of these things actually carry the evolutionary process.  The only thing that really evolves are populations.’
  • There is one thing that I have learned in my studies of cooperation over the last 20 years: there is no equilibrium. There is never a stable equilibrium. Cooperation is always being destroyed and has to be rebuilt. How much time you spend on average in a cooperative state depends on how quickly you can rebuild it. The most important aspect is really how quickly you can get away from the Always defect again.
  • What is very important for efficient indirect reciprocity is language.  Indirect reciprocity leads to the evolution of social intelligence and human language.  In order to evaluate the situation, you have to understand who does what to whom and why.  And we have to have a way to talk about what happened, to gain experience from others.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • for Indirect reciprocity you need a name
  • I cooperate with the people in the set and I try to join sets of successful individuals
  • five mechanisms for cooperation:  kin selection: the idea is cooperation with genetic relatives; direct reciprocity: I help you, you help me; indirect reciprocity: I help you, somebody helps me; spatial selection: clusters of cooperators or neighbors to help each other; group selection: groups of cooperators out compete other groups.
  • they must be generous, hopeful and forgiving.
  •  If we need to imagine some other entity that we're playing the game against in order to cooperate in a larger group than before.
  • In principle there would be an equilibrium when I say that I start to defect as soon as one person defects. It then would actually force everybody to cooperate with Nash equilibrium, but the problem is, this is not realized by people.
  • What defines in the US and Western Europe is many people use punishment to punish defectors. But in Eastern Europe, in the Arab world, in essence, defectors punish cooperators, and this is called antisocial punishment.
  • In the US, reward works amazingly well.  Reward leads to efficient cooperation. The reward that we gave was the following; we play the public goods game, and afterwards we can have bare base productive interaction. We can play repeated Prisoner's Dilemma, and that ends up being good for us in private, and in public. People who cooperate in public will also get his private deals.
  • What does strike me as quite plausible is that at any given time there's some state of equilibrium within a population of, say, psychopaths and saintly ascetics and probably the largest percentage of generous tit-for-tat-ers who keep track but also show a big generosity, probably some firm but fair people who stick by the rules.
  • NICHOLAS PRITZKER: I'm kind of like cooperate, but keep a loaded gun under my belt. That'd be me. In other words, cooperate but watch your back.  I find if you get away from simple A versus B you get to a situation where it's fine to cooperate but it pays to be cynical, you know, trust and verify, something like that. I find in the real world, for me, maybe outside of kinship relationships, or maybe even with, I have to really watch the nuance.  You're not going to defect immediately but you want to keep your running shoes on.
  • Charlotte Pierce on 01 Feb 13
     
    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.
  • Lisa Tansey on 07 Feb 13
     
    Transcript of fabulous presentation on the evolution of cooperation with great Q&A at the end.
Lisa Tansey

James B. Glattfelder: Who controls the world? | Video on TED.com - 1 views

www.ted.com/...er_who_controls_the_world.html

global cooperation control power economics complexity TED Glattfelder cooplit

shared by Lisa Tansey on 15 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Lisa Tansey on 15 Feb 13
     
    Glattfelder follows the chain of transnational corporate ownership to determine "who controls the world" economically-speaking.  I.e., our economic commons. He defines the rather tight network of control as an emergent property rather than some global conspiracy.
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