Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary ...

Creative Synergy between Theory and Ethnography:
Charles Darwin is the true father of sociobiology, having written two books applying evolutionary theory to human behavior---The Descent of Man (1971) and The Expression of Emotions in Animals and Man (1872). The next great contribution to the subject was Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology (1985). This quite startling hiatus of more than a century has a very simple explanation: Darwin's theory had be rather consistently interpreted in a bitterly right-wing manner by social Darwinists and later Nazi ideologues. The greatest anthropologists, including Margaret Mead and Franz Boaz, reacted by claiming that all of social life is "socially constructed" independent from the biological constitution of humans. In effect, they argued that humans had transcended their evolutionary origins through the development of culture. Edward O. Wilson's brilliant contribution set off a maelstrom of controversy, with anthropologists in the forefront of condemning both Wilson's book and any notion that biology is important for understanding human behavior---see the account of Ullica Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). However, the scientific character of Wilson's work was incontestable, and several other biologists of the highest caliber, including Marcus Feldman, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, William Durham, Richard Wrangham, and Richard Alexander, made critical contributions to what is now called gene-culture coevolution in the period leading up to Wilson's work. The long and the short of it is that the period between 1985 and the present witness a furious period of development of sociobiology, so that at present it is a key element of modern behavioral science, even though it remains a minority view in most behavioral disciplines. The reaction against sociobiology in departments of anthropology in American university led to a halt in the growth of the discipline. Anthropology was captured by an anti-scientific ideology called "post-modernism" that rejected the notion of the scientific study of society altogether. The beauty of Natalie Henrich and Joseph Henrich's book Why Humans Cooperate is that it shows that one can combine a scientific approach to studying society with a sensitive and insightful ethnographic approach to understanding real live social communities. Why Humans Cooperate could well serve as an introductory text in anthropology for undergraduates, but I recommend it to any intelligent layperson who wants to learn how modern gene-culture coevolution and evolutionary psychology elucidate and enliven the description and analysis of social groups---in this case the Chaldeans of Detroit, who are Christians from Iran who came to the United States to flee persecution, at the turn of the Twentieth century The Chaldeans are studied in detail by Henrich and Henrich. The introductory chapters, laying out basic evolutionary theory, do a fine job of showing how culture is subject to an evolutionary dynamic quite parallel to genetic evolution, and succeeding chapters show how human society provides a framework for the evolution of human genetic predisposition for altruistic and prosocial behavior. All of this is brilliantly applied to the interpretation of Chaldean culture in the remainder of the book. This book will help overcome the dead hand of post-modernism in anthropological theory, by showing how one can do serious science while taking equally seriously the marvelous and inscrutable beauty of human communities.

Good but not surprising:
This book provides a clear and informative summary of the evolutionary theories that explain why people cooperate (but few novel ideas), and some good but unexciting evidence that provides a bit of support for the theories. One nice point they make is that unconditional altruism discourages cooperation - it's important to have some sort of reciprocity (possibly indirect) for a society to prevent non-cooperators from outcompeting cooperators. The one surprising fact uncovered in their field studies is that people are more generous in the Dictator Game than in the Ultimatum Game (games where one player decides how to divide money between himself and another player; in the Ultimatum Game the second player can reject the division, in which case neither gets anything). It appears that the Ultimatum Game encourages people to think in terms of business-like interactions, but in the Dictator Game a noncompetitive mode of thought dominates.