Member-only story
We are a species with unprecedented cooperation between unrelated individuals, even total strangers; mushroom colonies are green with envy at the human ability to make a wave in a soccer stadium.
We work collectively as hunter-gatherers or IT executives.
The same is true when we go to war or help disaster victims in other parts of the world.
We work in teams to hijack planes and fly them into buildings or to award a Nobel Peace Prize.
Rules, laws, contracts, punishments, social conscience, an inner voice, morality, ethics, divine retribution, nursery rhymes about sharing — they are all driven by the third pillar of the evolution of behavior, namely the fact that it is evolutionarily advantageous when non-relatives cooperate.
Sometimes.
One manifestation of this strong human tendency was recently appreciated by anthropologists.
The standard hunter-gatherer view was that their cooperative, egalitarian nature reflected a high degree of kinship within the group, i.e., kin selection.
According to the “man-the-hunter” version of hunter-gatherers, this was due to patrilocality (i.e., a woman moves into her new husband’s…
