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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.

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.

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.

Mentioned by Howard Rheingold who said: Wilson is controversial, but the rarity of what he calls "eusocial" species and the coincidence of the advent of hunting-gathering in cooperative groups with the acceleration of human cognitive, cultural, and social capabilities supports his hypothesis: "The riddle of the human species."

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.

Also recommended by David Watkins re the Parable of the Tribes.  David says: In 1954 Sorokin's The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation was published. The common assumption is that love is weak in the face of power. Sorokin and his staff researched the history of war and peace. What they found was that coercion and force were given far too much credit in the headlines of our histories and the power of love not nearly what it deserved. He devotes an entire chapter to examples of how love prevailed against far superior forces. He said that he could have filled several books with the examples that they found. He covers much of the same ground as Tolstoy, Gandhi and King.

Recommended by David Watkins re the Parable of the Tribes.  Dave says: Pitirim Sorokin was no stranger to the abuses of power. He was imprisoned in his native Russia by the Czarists. Later he was sentenced to death by the Communists. Unlike many of his colleagues he survived his death sentence and in exile came to the U.S. He founded the Department of Sociology at Harvard and became President of the American Sociological Association. He directed the Harvard Research Centre in Creative Altruism. In 1937, in conflict with the then current view, he predicted WW2. In 1941 Sorokin wrote The Crisis of Our Age. In 1945 the book went to the best seller list. A sociology book on the best seller lists suggests that his ideas must have resonated with the time.

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.

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."

" 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."