From disorganized equality to efficient hierarchy: how group size drives the evolution of hierarchy in human societies

Perret, Cédric; Hart, Emma; Powers, Simon T.

doi:10.1098/rspb.2020.0693

Cited by 23 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 43 publications

(57 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The exact mechanism for harm, other than invoking stress or "social determinants" or "weathering", is however unclear. Stress reduction is, after all, convincingly invoked as the reason for pyramids of power and hierarchy [200]. Here we spell out how this originally happened in line with ecological and metabolic rift observations on the later effects of industrialization allowing food meccas and food ghettos and deserts [201,202].…”

Section: Cutting To the Chase: Mean About Meat Means To A Bad Endsupporting

confidence: 59%

Inequality: The Dangers of Meat Haves and Have-Nots in a Nicotinamide-Adenine-Dinucleotide World

Williams¹,

Hill²

2021

Meat and Nutrition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Our evolution and recent history can be seen as a “World Hunt” for meat as part of an omnivorous diet. Meat contains key micronutrients namely Nicotinamide (vitamin B3) and methyl-donors with deficits causing pellagra, an archetypal disease of poverty. Inequality is a leading ultimate risk factor invoked in the aetiology of common diseases let alone threats from climate change and pandemic triggered catastrophes. We hypothesize that the origin of inequality was our evolutionary and nutritional move from equal to unequal sharing of the meat supply some 10–20 thousand years ago. High meat intake may have bioengineered powerful ruling classes and lower intake the proletariat with higher fertility, but inferior (brain) health. A fairer quantity of a safer meat intake in future should moderate global variances of fertility, height, health, and prosperity. Death rates of acute infections including emergent zoonoses (such as COVID-19) and chronic infections (such as TB) should fall as might the incidence of some diseases of affluence. Meat justice by improving human capital could make redundant superficial markers, such as skin colour, used to discriminate against peoples and heal a divided world.

show abstract

Section: Cutting To the Chase: Mean About Meat Means To A Bad Endsupporting

confidence: 59%

Inequality: The Dangers of Meat Haves and Have-Nots in a Nicotinamide-Adenine-Dinucleotide World

Williams¹,

Hill²

2021

Meat and Nutrition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Although we feel it would be unlikely to dramatically affect the results of the current model, more explicitly deliberative decision-making processes may be relevant for many informal institutions, e.g. Perret et al [67] and Gavrilets et al [68] explicitly model consensus decision-making processes. It is also worth pointing out that having a recognized system for agreeing upon rules is an institutional feature itself and so our model assumes this mechanism is in place.…”

Section: (C) Model Discussion: Limitations and Future Extensionsmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Perret et al . [ 67 ] and Gavrilets et al . [ 68 ] explicitly model consensus decision-making processes.…”

Section: Developing Micro-level Models Of Institutional Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The cultural evolution and ecology of institutions

Currie

Campennì

Flitton

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Human societies are structured by what we refer to as ‘institutions’, which are socially created and culturally inherited proscriptions on behaviour that define roles and set expectations about social interactions. The study of institutions in several social science fields has provided many important insights that have not been fully appreciated in the evolutionary human sciences. However, such research has often lacked a shared understanding of general processes of change that shape institutional diversity across space and time. We argue that evolutionary theory can provide a useful framework for synthesizing information from different disciplines to address issues such as how and why institutions change over time, how institutional rules co-evolve with other culturally inherited traits, and the role that ecological factors might play in shaping institutional diversity. We argue that we can gain important insights by applying cultural evolutionary thinking to the study of institutions, but that we also need to expand and adapt our approaches to better handle the ways that institutions work, and how they might change over time. In this paper, we illustrate our approach by describing macro-scale empirical comparative analyses that demonstrate how evolutionary theory can be used to generate and test hypotheses about the processes that have shaped some of the major patterns we see in institutional diversity over time and across the world today. We then go on to discuss how we might usefully develop micro-scale models of institutional change by adapting concepts from game theory and agent-based modelling. We end by considering current challenges and areas for future research, and the potential implications for other areas of study and real-world applications. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Foundations of cultural evolution’.

show abstract

“…So far, the bulk of evolutionary game theory modeling has been devoted to study the emergence of cooperation under specific economic action situations. Much less modeling has been concerned with political change, and integrating both layers of interactions as a co-evolutionary process is a fundamental challenge for future interdisciplinary modeling work (Currie et al, 2021, for some attempts in this direction see e.g., Powers and Lehmann, 2013;Frey and Sumner, 2019;Frey and Atkisson, 2020;Perret et al, 2020;Currie et al, 2021). More generally, a number of outstanding questions remain about the emergence of intertemporal incentives in complex human societies, when regarded as outcomes of a conflictual political process that is cultural evolutionary in nature (see Box 3).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Four levers of reciprocity across human societies: concepts, analysis and predictions

2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper surveys five human societal types – mobile foragers, horticulturalists, pre-state agriculturalists, state-based agriculturalists, and liberal democracies – from the perspective of three core social problems faced by interacting individuals: coordination problems, social dilemmas, and contest problems. We characterize the occurrence of these problems in the different societal types and enquire into the main force keeping societies together given the prevalence of these. To address this, we consider the social problems in light of the theory of repeated games, and delineate the role of intertemporal incentives in sustaining cooperative behaviour through the reciprocity principle. We analyze the population, economic and political structural features of the five societal types, and show that intertemporal incentives have been adapted to the changes in scope and scale of the core social problems as societies grew in size. In all societies, reciprocity mechanisms appear to solve the social problems by enabling lifetime direct benefits to individuals for cooperation. Our analysis leads us to predict that as societies increase in complexity, they need more of the following four features to enable the scalability and adaptability of the reciprocity principle: nested grouping, decentralized enforcement and local information, centralized enforcement and coercive power, and formal rules.

show abstract

From disorganized equality to efficient hierarchy: how group size drives the evolution of hierarchy in human societies

Cited by 23 publications

References 43 publications

Inequality: The Dangers of Meat Haves and Have-Nots in a Nicotinamide-Adenine-Dinucleotide World

Inequality: The Dangers of Meat Haves and Have-Nots in a Nicotinamide-Adenine-Dinucleotide World

The cultural evolution and ecology of institutions

Four levers of reciprocity across human societies: concepts, analysis and predictions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About