The Cultural Evolution of Human Nature

Stanford, Mark

doi:10.1007/s10441-019-09367-7

“…People will inevitably care less about the murdering of those who do not provide some benefit to their own fitness, but may recognize that societal regulations punishing murder are worthwhile. This kind of societal-wide norm enforcement is believed to have played a crucial role in the evolution of human cooperation (Boyd 2018;Stanford 2019). Perhaps similar underlying mechanisms facilitate societal investment in the prevention of suicidal behavior.…”

Section: Integration With Bargaining Model Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, psychological aposematism may be entangled with other human tendencies that appear to have evolved through kind selection. In particular, conforming to and enforcing norms may enable societal-wide cooperation that yields otherwise unobtainable fitness benefits (Boyd 2018;Stanford 2019). To illustrate, an individual's fitness is directly impacted if family members or collaborative social partners are murdered, but a person may be indifferent to the killing of unrelated or unacquainted individuals.…”

Section: Integration With Bargaining Model Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, suicide itself may arise from a mixture of evolved traits and culturally transmitted concepts. This is not to say that the ability to engage with culturally transmitted information is not itself an evolved trait (Heyes 2018;Stanford 2019). However, culturally transmitted information is not coded within one's genetic makeup (Laland and Brown 2006).…”

Section: Integration With Bargaining Model Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Psychological Aposematism: An Evolutionary Analysis of Suicide

Wiley

¹

2020

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The evolutionary advantage of psychological phenomena can be gleaned by comparing them with physical traits that have proven adaptive in other organisms. The present article provides a novel evolutionary explanation of suicide in humans by comparing it with aposematism in insects. Aposematic insects are brightly colored, making them conspicuous to predators. However, such insects are equipped with toxins that cause a noxious reaction when eaten. Thus, the death of a few insects conditions predators to avoid other insects of similar coloration. Analogously, human suicides may increase the credibility of future suicide threats and attempts from others, conveying an evolutionary advantage to the phenotypic expression of suicidal behavior in low-fitness contexts.

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“…Furthermore, psychological aposematism may be entangled with other human tendencies that appear to have evolved through kind selection. In particular, conforming to and enforcing norms may enable societal-wide cooperation that yields otherwise unobtainable fitness benefits (Boyd 2018;Stanford 2019). To illustrate, an individual's fitness is directly impacted if family members or collaborative social partners are murdered, but a person may be indifferent to the killing of unrelated or unacquainted individuals.…”

Section: Integration With Bargaining Model Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological Aposematism: An Evolutionary Analysis of Suicide

Wiley¹

2020

Preprint

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The evolutionary advantage of psychological phenomena can be gleaned by comparing them with physical traits that have proven adaptive in other organisms. The present article provides a novel evolutionary explanation of suicide in humans by comparing it with aposematism in insects. Aposematic insects are brightly colored, making them conspicuous to predators. However, such insects are equipped with toxins that cause a noxious reaction when eaten. Thus, the death of a few insects conditions predators to avoid other insects of similar coloration. Analogously, human suicides may increase the credibility of future suicide threats and attempts from others, conveying an evolutionary advantage to the phenotypic expression of suicidal behavior in low-fitness contexts.

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“…For example, Maxwell McCombs, Donald L. Shaw, David H. Weaver point to changes in the social and political community of citizens [1], and Mark Freestone describes the problem of the risk of radicalization of society and increasing personality disorders [2]. The scientist M. Stanford highlights the positive features of cultural evolution in recent years and the possibility of "including man in a wider evolutionary synthesis" [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The problem of personal identity of man in the social and cultural world

Торубарова

¹

,

Dyachenko

²

2020

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The article is devoted to understanding the problem of human self-determination in the modern social and cultural space, in which the question of personal identity becomes a search for one's own individualization, a question of survival and preservation of man as such. The relevance of the study is determined by the process of dehumanization of modern society, a crisis of spirituality leading to the prevalence of destructive origins, to depersonalization and the destruction of the individual personal dimension of human existence. The leading approach to the study of this problem is the method of the ascent from the abstract to the concrete, which makes it possible to comprehend the being of man and the phenomena of his existence associated with it. In this study, we used the dialectical method and the hermeneutical analysis of texts by modern scholars who consider the problems of the philosophical foundations of personal identity in the modern social and cultural world. The connection between the constitution of the essential definitiveness of the human personality and the existential source of the human origin itself is shown. The influence of the social transformation processes on the methods and possibilities of self-identification of man, on his self-identity is revealed. The conducted analysis shows that the key problem of modern society is man himself as a subject of a technotronic-oriented civilization, in which his personal identity is not only a key factor in his existence, but also a fundamental link in the reconstruction of the wholeness of being.

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The Cultural Evolution of Human Nature

Cited by 14 publications

References 18 publications

Psychological Aposematism: An Evolutionary Analysis of Suicide

Psychological Aposematism: An Evolutionary Analysis of Suicide

Psychological Aposematism: An Evolutionary Analysis of Suicide

The problem of personal identity of man in the social and cultural world

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