Sublime

It doesn’t require a large leap of speculative evolutionary psychology to arrive at the reasonable conclusion that Homo sapiens are well adapted to small-group collaboration.

The problem, of course, was that the students were playing against strangers and the people in ethnographic societies were playing against folk with whom they had well developed relationships.

La sélection au niveau des groupes crée un mélange d’adaptations génétiques et culturelles qui augmente la paix, l’harmonie et la coopération à l’intérieur du groupe dans le but précis d’améliorer la capacité du groupe à rivaliser avec d’autres groupes. La sélection au niveau des groupes ne fait pas disparaître les conflits, elle les déplace au niv

Most economists now accept the need for more realistic assumptions in economic theory; and methodologies such as network analysis, heterogeneous agent models, evolutionary game theory, and economic lab experiments are becoming standard.

The polygyny in our evolutionary past shouldn’t surprise us—none of the other extant great ape species are monogamous.

Social capital refers to a kind of capital that economists had largely overlooked: the social ties among individuals and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from those ties.38 When everything else is equal, a firm with more social capital will outcompete its less cohesive and less internally trusting competitors (which makes sen

Clubs

given a long list of things you might share with someone – beliefs, attitudes, hobbies, interests – and asked which they shared with specific people in their social circles (a named family member and a friend of each sex in each layer of the social network), and, as a measure of altruism, how likely they were to lend this person a sum of money or d