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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.

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."

Here's a quit extensive synthesis of  "The Penguin and the Leviathan," in my opinion a wonderful book for anyone who is interested in improving and transforming our economic and political institutions.   Human motivation is a subject that 'makes me tick'. I really enjoyed reading "The Penguin and the Leviathan", not only because it paints a much nicer picture of "human nature" than the one used by the free marketeers, but also because it gives a glimpse of a future, higher form of society that will be much more based on human cooperation. I think it is important to see that the seeds of this future society are very much present today.

" 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."

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.

In the past four decades, behavioral economists and cognitive psychologists have discovered many cognitive biases human brains fall prey to when thinking and deciding. Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own thinking. Bayesian reasoning offers a way to improve on the native human reasoning style. Reasoning naively, we tend not to seek alternative explanations, and sometimes underrate the influence of prior probabilities in Bayes' theorem. Less Wrong users aim to develop accurate predictive models of the world, and change their mind when they find evidence disconfirming those models, instead of being able to explain anything.

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.

Dog parks are popping up everywhere. They're among the most popular urban amenities and demand for them has been steadily increasing since the first one was introduced in Berkeley, California in 1983. In 2010 there were 569 dog parks in the 100 largest U.S. cities and the popularity of dog parks continues to grow They offer dogs a place to play off-leash, get some exercise and socialize, and they're good for humans too. Dog parks provide us an opportunity to get outside, meet our neighbors and spend quality time with our pets. And it turns out that they can teach us something about the commons.

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.

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.