How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies

Abstract

One contribution of 18 to a theme issue 'The evolution of cooperation based on direct fitness benefits'. What drove the transition from small-scale human societies centred on kinship and personal exchange, to large-scale societies comprising cooperation and division of labour among untold numbers of unrelated individuals? We propose that the unique human capacity to negotiate institutional rules that coordinate social actions was a key driver of this transition. By creating institutions, humans have been able to move from the default 'Hobbesian' rules of the 'game of life', determined by physical/environmental constraints, into self-created rules of social organization where cooperation can be individually advantageous even in large groups of unrelated individuals. Examples include rules of food sharing in hunter-gatherers, rules for the usage of irrigation systems in agriculturalists, property rights and systems for sharing reputation between mediaeval traders. Successful institutions create rules of interaction that are self-enforcing, providing direct benefits both to individuals that follow them, and to individuals that sanction rule breakers. Forming institutions requires shared intentionality, language and other cognitive abilities largely absent in other primates. We explain how cooperative breeding likely selected for these abilities early in the Homo lineage. This allowed anatomically modern humans to create institutions that transformed the selfreliance of our primate ancestors into the division of labour of large-scale human social organization.

When is bigger better? The effects of group size on the evolution of helping behaviours

“…Gürerk, Irlenbusch & Rockenbach, 2006;Kosfeld, Okada & Riedl, 2009;Putterman, Tyran & Kamei, 2011;Traulsen, Röhl & Milinski, 2012;Burton-Chellew & West, 2013). Crucially, however, it is hard to find actual empirical cases where group productivity increases linearly with total investment into helping.…”

“…The formation of institutions has long been studied in economics (Ostrom, 1990;Okada, 1993;Casari & Plott, 2003;Greif, 2006;Ertan, Page & Putterman, 2009;Kosfeld et al, 2009;Putterman et al, 2011), but has remained outside of the scope of the traditional literature on cultural evolution discussed in Section VI.1. This is because evolutionary models generally make the simplifying assumption that the pay-off structure of social interactions is fixed and outside of individual control.…”

Inter-group cooperation in humans and other animals

“…generally balanced. If not, expect repeated interactions and/or cultural institutions such as rituals to maintain reciprocity [16,23,24], or expect inter-group cooperation to break down into tolerance or conflict, e.g. if one group surrenders its resources [25], sometimes under duress [12] resource transfer can be strongly directional where there is variation in need [17] but donors may benefit indirectly because the resources are going to their kin [26] rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org Biol.…”

“…While human societies engage in inter-group resource exchange to a remarkable extent (probably facilitated by the ability to establish cultural institutions: [24]), in non-human animals Figure 1. Summary of inter-group interactions assuming only two groups are involved, Group A and Group B. Outcomes (net cost/net benefit) at the group level are taken to include both direct and indirect fitness benefits across all group members.…”

Evolution and Ontogenesis: The Deontic Niche of Human Development

“…Hunter-gatherers were engaging in a kind of niche construction that was strikingly new: their world was an institutional reality. Kinship was the first human institution, and for hunter-gatherers it was the only institution (Powers, van Schaik, & Lehmann, 2016;Turner, 2004). Kinship provided an informal, spontaneous, and flexible way of defining one's relationship with other people and with the environment.…”