I just read and enjoyed "Blueprint", by Nicholas A. Christakis. I learned a great deal of details of social science, esp. from an evolutionary standpoint, and am convinced of his hypotheses. This post is mostly notes for myself to help me remember some of what I learned.
The basic point is that we are individually evolved with the following "social suite" of proclivities:
- Feeling and recognizing individual identity
- Love for partners and offspring
- Forming friendship bonds
- Forming social networks
- Cooperation (with allies and strangers)
- In-group bias
- Supporting mild hierarchy (recognizing some authority, but generally egalitarian)
- Social learning and teaching.
He supports all of those being innate and universal with various clever direct and natural experiments, and goes on to show how they interact with forming larger societies, and how evolutionary pressure at the individual level can lead to them.
He doesn't talk about social evolution, whereby groups with varying cultures compete, with stronger groups surviving; that can also lead to pro-social genetics. For example, a gene for selfishness might spread through one band and totally dominate it, but then that band would be out-competed by other bands.
Some of the factlets that struck me:
- Love for mates seems to have evolved from love for offspring
- Cooperativeness in games becomes far more adaptive when players can choose whom they participate with. The friendlies pair with the friendlies, and then do much better than the cheaters.
- Female choice probably added to evolutionary pressure towards male pro-social traits.
- Friendships and social networks are a sort of social "banking"; in the long run, I can be supported in time of need because I've got friends. It goes beyond tit-for-tat because over the short run, friends don't worry about all good deeds being reciprocated. There's some signs that social networks decline as governments provide the safety net.
