If human societies thrive when people cooperate and deteriorate under conflict, then after 100,000+ years of human evolution, why haven't anti-social behavioral traits been eliminated?
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Introduction
In recent weeks, two phenomena have occupied my attention. Although these phenomena seem to be unrelated, I think there is a connection. The first phenomenon is the flood of celebrity sexual misconduct allegations that have permeated the news in the weeks since the NY Times' Harvey Weinstein exposé, and the second phenomenon is the abusive self and paid voting that happens here at steemit.
Unfortunately, I don't remember where, but some years ago, I read an article that asked a question that caught my attention, and which seems to link these two types of behavior. The question was something like this:
If human societies thrive when people cooperate and deteriorate under conflict, then after 100,000+ years of human evolution, why haven't anti-social behavioral traits been eliminated?
Today, I thought I'd do some reading to gain some insight into that question. In the following sections, I'll describe some of what I found. This is definitely not exhaustive coverage of the question, just what I've managed to pull together from a couple hours of web searches and reading. Topics that I'll cover in this essay will include a brief description of evolutionary psychology, descriptions of three models which have been used to study the question, namely Chicken (the "Hawk-Dove" game), the Prisoner's Dilemma, and Ultimatum games, then I'll close with some thoughts of my own.
What is evolutionary psychology?
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According to Stanford University's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, like much of cognitive science, evolutionary psychology is a field of study that approaches cognition as the study of internal psychological mechanisms. Evolutionary psychology's distinguishing characteristic, however, is the understanding that these mechanisms were adapted through successive applications of natural selection.
Cosmides and Tooby, at UC Santa Barbara's Center for Evolutionary Psychology, provide the following principles of evolutionary psychology:
Principle 1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.
Principle 2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history.
Principle 3. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler that (sic) it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve -- they require very complicated neural circuitry
Principle 4. Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.
Principle 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.
They further claim that these principles can be used to gain an understanding of most aspects of human behavior, including: "sex and sexuality, how and why people cooperate, whether people are rational, how babies see the world, conformity, aggression, hearing, vision, sleeping, eating, hypnosis, schizophrenia and on and on." An interesting observation is that in this framework, our cognition is adapted to solve the problems of our ancestors, not necessarily our own problems.
Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy further argues that evolutionary psychology views the human mind as, "massively modular." As I understand it, this implies that the mind is not viewed as a general purpose computer, but rather a massive collection of special purpose computers that have evolved to solve specific types of problems.
Evolutionary psychology and the broader subject areas of evolutionary biology and evolutionary game theory have been used to study questions of cooperation, competition, and aggression. One way to investigate these questions is through the use of models and simulations. Some of these will be described in the next section.
You are plagiarizing @remlaps!
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