25,180 research outputs found
Social Evolution: New Horizons
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary
thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced
in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring
cooperation to its proper place. In this contribution, the most important
controversies and open research avenues in the field of social evolution are
reviewed. It is argued that a novel theory of social evolution must integrate
the concepts of the science of Complex Systems with those of the Darwinian
tradition. Current gene-centric approaches should be reviewed and com-
plemented with evidence from multilevel phenomena (group selection), the
constrains given by the non-linear nature of biological dynamical systems and
the emergent nature of dissipative phenomena.Comment: 16 pages 5 figures, chapter in forthcoming open access book
"Frontiers in Ecology, Evolution and Complexity" CopIt-arXives 2014, Mexic
Pathways to social evolution: reciprocity, relatedness, and synergy
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit
plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive
ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized
that all of these factors can lead to different selection pressures but has
only recently attempted to synthesize how these factors interact. Using models
for both discrete and continuous phenotypes, we show that analyzing these
factors in a consistent framework reveals that they interact with one another
in ways previously overlooked. Specifically, behavioral responses
(reciprocity), genetic relatedness, and synergy interact in non-trivial ways
that cannot be easily captured by simple summary indices of assortment. We
demonstrate the importance of these interactions by showing how they have been
neglected in previous synthetic models of social behavior both within and
between species. These interactions also affect the level of behavioral
responses that can evolve in the long run; proximate biological mechanisms are
evolutionarily stable when they generate enough responsiveness relative to the
level of responsiveness that exactly balances the ecological costs and
benefits. Given the richness of social behavior across taxa, these interactions
should be a boon for empirical research as they are likely crucial for
describing the complex relationship linking ecology, demography, and social
behavior.Comment: 4 figure
Social Evolution
It is a mater of dispute how far back evolutionary explanations of social order should be traced. Evolutionary ideas certainly appear in the work of the ancient Greek philosophers, but it seems reasonable to identify the origins of modern evolutionary thinking in the eighteenth century natural histories of civil society such as Rousseauâs Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1750, Part III), Adam Fergusonâs An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), and Adam Smithâs Wealth of Nations (1776, Book III). In these eighteenth century works, the explanation of current social institutions as an unplanned and generally adaptive development out of earlier and simpler arrangements gained traction. Germany too had a tradition of Naturphilosophie employing general evolutionary ideas, as well as Hegelian-influenced thinking on the development of societies. In 1863, four years after Darwinâs Origins of the Species August Schleicherâs Die Darwinscbe Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaf, drew on these traditions as well as Darwinâs Origins of the Species to present an evolutionary account of the development of families of languages (Taub, 1993), an endeavor that was carried on by a number of scholars in the later part of the nineteenth century.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/philosophy_books/1012/thumbnail.jp
Coastal hunter-gatherers and social evolution: marginal or central?
General accounts of global trends in world prehistory are dominated by narratives of conquest on land: scavenging and hunting of land mammals, migration over land bridges and colonisation of new continents, gathering of plants, domestication, cultivation, and ultimately sustained population growth founded on agricultural surplus. Marine and aquatic resources fit uneasily into this sequence of social and economic development, and societies strongly dependent on them have often been regarded as relatively late in the sequence, geographically marginal or anomalous. We consider the biases and preconceptions of the ethnographic and archaeological records that have contributed to this view of marginality and examine some current issues focusing on the role of marine resources at the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition of northwest Europe. We suggest that pre-existing conventions should be critically re-examined, that coastlines may have played a more significant, widespread and persistent role as zones of attraction for human dispersal, population growth and social interaction than is commonly recognised, and that this has been obscured by hunter-gatherer and farmer stereotypes of prehistoric economies
Learning From Early Attempts to Generalize Darwinian Principles to Social Evolution
Copyright University of Hertfordshire & author.Evolutionary psychology places the human psyche in the context of evolution, and addresses the Darwinian processes involved, particularly at the level of genetic evolution. A logically separate and potentially complementary argument is to consider the application of Darwinian principles not only to genes but also to social entities and processes. This idea of extending Darwinian principles was suggested by Darwin himself. Attempts to do this appeared as early as the 1870s and proliferated until the early twentieth century. But such ideas remained dormant in the social sciences from the 1920s until after the Second World War. Some lessons can be learned from this earlier period, particularly concerning the problem of specifying the social units of selection or replication
Human social evolution inception
The article deals with correlation of manâs thinking and speech inception, first phrases as first speech units and general problems of speech development consequences (proper names, cave art)
Social evolution in JĂŒrgen Habermas: Towards a weak anthropological naturalism between Kant and Darwin
ProducciĂłn CientĂficaIssues concerning naturalism have increasingly become the subject of philosophical reflections involving ontological,epistemological, and even ethics affairs. The most popular topic for contemporary philosophy has been the relationship between ontological results of Darwinism and epistemology. Despite the varied circumstances of its establishment, natural-ism almost always produces recommendations that reflect a world view muchâweakerâ(as in the case of Habermas) than the strong one more common among scientism. There are good structural reasons for this difference. The aim of this paper is to elucidate some of distinctive social features of Habermasâs conception of the human being and its implications in the Theory of Communicative Action(1982). Therefore, it is shown that his anthropology takes a naturalistic and Darwinist perspective in the weak naturalism perspective. In the first part, DarwinÌs legacy is analysed as a research program, and HabermasÌ s studies on biological anthropologyare compared with the latest research in genetics and palaeontology. In the second part, we will show Habermasâs proposal to confront an epistemological dualism through aweak non-reductionist naturalism as a critique of modern metaphysics, which structures a new pragmatic realism
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Social evolution in mammals
Long-term, individual-based field studies, the application of genetic techniques and phylogenetic reconstructions have led to substantial advances in our understanding of the diversity and evolution of mammalian breeding systems and their consequences. They show how contrasts in ecology, life histories and phylogeny affect the distributions of breeding females and breeding males; how the distributions of both sexes affect the evolution of breeding systems and the composition and kinship structure of social groups; how contrasts in breeding systems and the social environment that individuals encounter affect the selection pressures operating on both sexes and the evolution of their behavior, physiology and morphology; and how these differences affect the demography and dynamics of populations and their responses to variation in density, climate and human impact.European Research Counci
Morphological and population genomic evidence that human faces have evolved to signal individual identity.
Facial recognition plays a key role in human interactions, and there has been great interest in understanding the evolution of human abilities for individual recognition and tracking social relationships. Individual recognition requires sufficient cognitive abilities and phenotypic diversity within a population for discrimination to be possible. Despite the importance of facial recognition in humans, the evolution of facial identity has received little attention. Here we demonstrate that faces evolved to signal individual identity under negative frequency-dependent selection. Faces show elevated phenotypic variation and lower between-trait correlations compared with other traits. Regions surrounding face-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms show elevated diversity consistent with frequency-dependent selection. Genetic variation maintained by identity signalling tends to be shared across populations and, for some loci, predates the origin of Homo sapiens. Studies of human social evolution tend to emphasize cognitive adaptations, but we show that social evolution has shaped patterns of human phenotypic and genetic diversity as well
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