Open Access: a brain for a domestic economy high complementarity between male and female inputs to offspring viability the data involved in this outvotes any consensus of the opinions of people who share our pet theories and utopian dreams Hillard S. Kaplan, Paul L. Hooper, Michael Gurven, The evolutionary and ecological roots of human social organization, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (2009): 3289–3299. Like most academic papers, this is written for educated non-experts. We are supposed to have educations that equip us to read such quality research, though mostly we prefer it mediated by popularisers. There is a long delay while that process happens, and there are chinese whisper effects and ideological repackaging that happen in transmission. Im also sad to say that Christian refusal to deal with anything to do with evolution robs churches of endless science of human evolution that supports precisely the family and social ethics of the Bible. Evolution is a staggeringly powerful basis for supporting moral claims in scripture according to the pragmatism of natural law. Its not as simple as they did it, it worked, so we should do it. It shows issues and emergent solutions that underpin human society and our evolved psychology or conscience or intuition as much as concrete examples of these in ancient, medieval and modern laws. Abstract Social organization among human foragers is characterized by a three-generational system of resource provisioning within families, long-term pair-bonding between men and women, high levels of cooperation between kin and non-kin, and relatively egalitarian social relationships. In this paper, we suggest that these core features of human sociality result from the learning- and skill-intensive human foraging niche, which is distinguished by a late age-peak in caloric production, high complementarity between male and female inputs to offspring viability, high gains to cooperation in production and risk-reduction, and a lack of economically defensible resources. We present an explanatory framework for understanding variation in social organization across human societies, highlighting the interactive effects of four key ecological and economic variables: (i) the role of skill in resource production; (ii) the degree of complementarity in male and female inputs into production; (iii) economies of scale in cooperative production and competition; and (iv) the economic defensibility of physical inputs into production. Finally, we apply this framework to understanding variation in social and political organization across foraging, horticulturalist, pastoralist and agriculturalist societies. unm.edu/~hkaplan/KaplanHooperGurven2009SocOrg.pdf
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 20:57:15 +0000
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