The Pleistocene Social Contract: Culture and Cooperation in Human Evolution

by Kim Sterelny

Kim Sterelny here builds on his original account of the evolutionary development and interaction of human culture and cooperation, which he first presented in The Evolved Apprentice (2012). Sterelny sees human evolution not as hinging on a single key innovation, but as emerging from a positive feedback loop caused by smaller divergences from other great apes, including bipedal locomotion, better causal and social reasoning, reproductive cooperation, and changes in diet and foraging style. He advances this argument in The Pleistocene Social Contract with four key claims about cooperation, culture, and their interaction in human evolution.

First, he proposes a new model of the evolution of human cooperation. He suggests human cooperation began from a baseline that was probably similar to that of great apes, advancing about 1.8 million years ago to an initial phase of cooperative forging, in small mobile bands. Second, he then presents a novel account of the change in evolutionary dynamics of from cooperation profits based on collective action and mutualism, to profits based on direct and indirect reciprocation over the course of the Pleistocene. Third, he addresses the question of normative regulation, or moral norms, for band-scale cooperation, and connects it to the stabilization of indirect reciprocation as a central aspect of forager cooperation. Fourth, he develops an account of the emergence of inequality that links inequality to intermediate levels of conflict and a final phase of cooperation in largescale, hierarchical societies in the Holocene, beginning about 12,000 years ago.

The Pleistocene Social Contract combines philosophy of biology with a reading of the archaeological and ethnographic record to present a new model of the evolution of human cooperation, cultural learning, and inequality.

Genres: Science, Philosophy, History, Anthropology, Biology

198 pages, Hardcover

Published April 20, 2021

About the author

After studying philosophy at Sydney University, Kim Sterelny taught philosophy in Australia at Sydney, ANU (where he was Research Fellow, and then Senior Research Fellow, in Philosophy at RSSS from 1983 until 1987), and La Trobe Universities, before taking up a position at Victoria University in Wellington, where he held a Personal Chair in Philosophy. For a few years he spent half of each year at Victoria University and the other half of each year with the Philosophy Program at RSSS, but from 2008 he has been full-time at ANU.

Sterelny has been a Visiting Professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and at Cal Tech and the University of Maryland, College Park, in the USA. His main research interests are Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Psychology and Philosophy of Mind. He is the author of The Representational Theory of Mind and the co-author of Language and Reality (with Michael Devitt) and Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (with Paul Griffiths). He is Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In addition to philosophy, Kim spends his time eating curries, drinking red wine, bushwalking and bird watching.

http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/profile/ki...

Reviews

[Per Kraulis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short, well-argued book about the prerequisites and possible scenarios for the evolution of Homo sapiens, with a focus on special collaborative and cultural capabilities of said species. As part of laying out his own arguments and hypotheses, Sterelny nicely reviews the currently known facts about the evolution of hominims since 7 million years ago, and comments on uncertainties and controversies.

Unfortunately, his text is so condensed that he sometimes just assumes that the reader has background knowledge of some examples and debates he mentions. For example, he mentions the interesting anthropological case of the conflict between the Nuer and Dinka peoples, but does not explain the background. This makes the text unsuitable for newcomers to the field.

From this and other texts I have read recently, it is clear that the sparseness of hard data points makes it practically impossible to produce solid hypotheses about the mechanisms that drove the evolution of cooperation and cumulative culture.

Discussing several controversies in this area, Sterelny argues that the effects of group selection may have played some role, but that several other recent contributions to the field have oversold the case. Sterelny offers a nuanced alternative which builds a case for the evolution of cooperation, culture and tribal sociality built mainly on traditional notions of individual selection. I believe his arguments are basically valid, although not flawless.

One of his main points is that the mobile hunter/gatherer mode of life was one of fundamental equality between people, at least within the sexes. It was the gradual shift to farming that created societies with high levels of inequality. But importantly, more sedentary hunter/gatherers in the anthropological record also show examples of pronounced inequality. Sterelny provides a set of scenarios explaining the possible mechanisms of the growth of inequality, which in my mind seem eminently plausible.

In the last section of the book, Sterelny concludes that the problem of cooperation and culture is basically one of how the initial establishment of cooperation occurred. He thinks that once a basic mode of cooperation was achieved, the benefits of it were so great that it becomes easier to explain how the positive feedback loops could maintain this cooperation, and allow further evolution. Maybe. I am more impressed by the conditionality of it all. There were so many things that had to come together to create Homo sapiens. Our existence is a stochastic phenomenon.

[Piet van den Berg · Rating 4 out of 5]

A multi-step argumentation about how humans became a cooperative and cultural species. This book is short, but it's dense - I could not read more than a few passages in a single sitting because it always left quite a lot to digest. The author does not repeat himself much and does not use rethorical devices to convince his audience - he just lays out his argument in a succint and concentrated way. As the author himself notes, it is impossible to avoid that there is a lot of interpretation of evidence that could be interpreted in multiple ways and filling up of the many gaps with conjecture. But given the state of evidence that we have, I found the argument often to be convincing, and the author is often explicit about it where he enters the realm of speculation. I really enjoy how he brings together evidence from many different disciplines to come to a truly synthetic view. I was more convinced by the deeper historical story, where the argument is that modes of subsistence engendered reciprocal cooperation and cultural norms. I also liked the ideas he put forward on how this basis got transformed into more hierarchical systems in which cooperation nevertheless persisted once resource storage (and later agriculture) emerged, but I feel like there are more moving parts there so it is harder for me to be sure whether I find the arugmentation convincing. I also enjoyed his treatment of cultural group selection (close to my own field) in the story, and agree that the scope for it may be more limited than the emphasis it has often had in the field of cultural evolution. Overall an enjoyable book - small, but it took me quite some time to read it carefully and I will probably revisit some chapters later as well.

[Adam Carter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extremely dense and reads more like an extended academic essay than a book. I learnt a few things. (1) cultural adaptations preceded genetic adaptions, a cultural practice evolved and our genes then evolved to allow us to practice more efficiently. (2) teaching and learning practices of humans drove changes in our motivations. (3) cooperating and enjoying immediately in the spoils of that cooperative endeavour is difficult to achieve in the natural world but was the precondition for more advanced forms of cooperation based on reciprocation.