Biological Markets, Cooperation, and the Evolution of Morality

Abstract

Biological market theory has in recent years become an important part of the social evolutionist’s toolkit. This article discusses the explanatory potential and pitfalls of biological market theory in the context of big picture accounts of the evolution of human cooperation and morality. I begin by assessing an influential account that presents biological market dynamics as a key driver of the evolution of fairness norms in humans. I argue that this account is problematic for theoretical, empirical, and conceptual reasons. After mapping the evidential and explanatory limits of biological market theory, I suggest that it can nevertheless fill a lacuna in an alternative account of hominin evolution. Trade on a biological marketplace can help explain why norm-based cooperation did not break down when our Late Pleistocene ancestors entered new, challenging social and economic environments. 1Introduction 1.1Conditions for biological markets2Modelling the Cooperation Market 2.1Cooperation markets and the evolution of equitable divisions2.2Markets without market dynamics?3Markets and Evolutionary Continuity4Markets, Reputation-Escalation, and Fairness 4.1The target of reputational concern5An Alternative Scenario 5.1Fairness before markets5.2Markets and the reciprocation crisis

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“…Both those proposals need additional assumptions to make them work. As one example, scaling up BMT to account for the evolution of cooperation in hominins would presuppose starting from already very advanced cognitive-normative capacities for tracking the relative prices of numerous kinds of commodities across different timeframes (Witteveen, 2021). In turn, reputations based on relevance are vulnerable to the winner-take-all effect, that is, the entire group converging on a single or a few most relevant speakers (contemporarily best illustrated by social media celebrities), unless additional constraints are in place, such as constraints on the accessibility of social links (Dessalles, 2020).…”

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“…Both those proposals need additional assumptions to make them work. As one example, scaling up BMT to account for the evolution of cooperation in hominins would presuppose starting from already very advanced cognitive–normative capacities for tracking the relative prices of numerous kinds of commodities across different timeframes (Witteveen, 2021). In turn, reputations based on relevance are vulnerable to the winner-take-all effect, that is, the entire group converging on a single or a few most relevant speakers (contemporarily best illustrated by social media celebrities), unless additional constraints are in place, such as constraints on the accessibility of social links (Dessalles, 2020).…”