Love, war and cultures: an institutional approach to human evolution

Abstract

Love, war and culture have all played an important role in the evolution of human institutions and they have been characterized by complex relationships. War can select unselfish groups ready to sacrifice themselves for the love of their communities that they recognize to be culturally different from the others. At the same time, horizontal cultural differentiation cannot be taken for granted. Culture is the outcome of long evolutionary processes. It requires some human specific characteristics, including a large brain, that are likely to have been influenced by sexual selection and by the peculiar structure of human love affairs. Thus, if war may have generated love, also the reverse may be true: by favoring the development of human culture, love may have produced the conditions for war among culturally differentiated groups. In turn, war may have co-evolved with group solidarity only under the prevailing social arrangements of hunting and gathering economies. In general, human relations have been influenced by the prevailing features of the goods (private, public and positional) that have characterized production in different stages of history. They have been embedded in institutions involving very different levels of inequality, ranging from mostly egalitarian hunting and gathering societies to typically hierarchical agrarian societies and to wealth-differentiated industrial societies. The perspectives of the present-day knowledge-intensive economy can also be seen through the same institutional approach to human evolution. The different nature of contemporary production processes involves a new set of alternative possible arrangements that have different implications for social (in)equality and different capabilities to satisfy basic human needs

Population thinking vs. essentialism in biology and evolutionary economics

“…A second wave of research inspired by Darwinian population thinking seeks to explain the human capacity to cooperate and to follow moral rules (e.g. Bowles and Gintis, 2011;Hodgson, 2013;Pagano, 2013;Witt and Schwessinger, 2013). The study of the making of the cooperative and moral species we call humankind is valuable per se, as a question of economic anthropology.…”

Why Have Only Humans and Social Insects Evolved a Complex Division of Labor

“…The idea that the origin of the sophisticated human and intellectual capabilities is associated with the weakening of mechanical fertility signals and the development of seductive techniques is considered in detail inBattistini Pagano (2008),Pagano (2013Pagano ( , 2014. Alternative theories are considered byBowles (2006Bowles ( , 2013,Gintis (2013) andHodgson (2013).5 With reference to the evolution of human language, Darwin observed how "some early progenitor of man, probably first used his voice in producing truemusical cadences, that is singing, as do some of the gibbon-apes at the present day; and we may conclude from a widely-spread analogy, that this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexeswould have expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph -and would have served as a challenge to rivals.…”

Property, Possession and Knowledge

“…Pagano (2013Pagano ( , 2014a argues that both sexual and group selection are important to explain the human unique evolutionary path but sexual selection can claim a logical and historical priority. Group selection is highly effective in the human species(Bowles 2014).…”