Un pezzo di Howard Rheingold a commento-riassunto di un paper pubblicato da Cooperation 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…”We propose that group selection on cultural variation is at the heart of human cooperation, but we certainly recognize that our sociality is a complex system that includes many linked components. Surely, without punishment, language, technology, individual intelligence and inventiveness, ready establishment of reciprocal arrangements, prestige systems, and solutions to games of coordination, our societies would take on a distinctly different cast.Thus, a major constraint on explanations of human sociality is its systemic structure».
Although the Pleistocene era, with its radical climate changes, could have exerted long-term pressure on genetic group selection, the rapid evolution of social complexity over the past 10,000 years has not been long enough for significant genetic selection. […] Individual innovators can gain advantage through prestige and reputation, but only by displaying what they know, while learning and innovation enable the entire tribe to benefit from their innovations.