Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T15:10:36.591Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Disengaging from the ultrasocial economy: The challenge of directing evolutionary change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2016

John Gowdy  and
Lisi Krall
John Gowdy
Affiliation:
Department of Economics and Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180. johngowdy@earthlink.nethttp://www.economics.rpi.edu/pl/people/john-gowdy
Lisi Krall
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, State University of New York (SUNY) at Cortland, Cortland, NY 13045. krallm@cortland.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We appreciate the depth and breadth of comments we received. They reflect the interdisciplinary challenge of our inquiry and reassured us of its broad interest. We believe that our target article and the criticisms, elaborations, and extensions of the commentators can be an important contribution to establishing human ultrasociality as a new field of social science inquiry. A few of the commentators questioned our definition of ultrasociality, and we begin our response with an elaboration of that definition and a defense of our argument that human ultrasociality began with agriculture. We then respond to the second major area of controversy, namely, our use of group selection to explain the economic drivers behind the agricultural transition. We then focus on the issue of human intentionality raised by the phenomenon of collective intelligence. The intriguing question is to what extent can an entire culture change its own destiny? We then address the issue of the division of labor raised by a number of commentators. The complex division of labor was both a driver and a defining characteristic of ultrasociality, even though it was present in simpler forms in earlier societies. The remaining issues addressed include energy and complexity, expansion and sustainability, and the accelerating evolution of human ultrasociality. These were raised by only a few commentators, but their importance warrants further elaboration.

Type
Authors' Response
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 39 , 2016 , e119
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baumeister, R. F., Ainsworth, S. E. & Vohs, K. D. (2016) Are groups more or less than the sum of their members? The moderating role of individual identification. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39. doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X15000618 Google Scholar
Bettencourt, L. M. A., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kuhnert, C. & West, G. B. (2007) Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 104(17):7301–306.Google Scholar
Betzig, L. (2014) Eusociality in history. Human Nature 25:80–99.Google Scholar
Brown, J., Burnside, W., Davidson, A., DeLong, J., Dunn, W., Hamilton, M., Mercado-Silva, N., Nekola, J., Okie, J., Woodruff, W. & Zuo, W. (2011) Energetic limits to economic growth. BioScience 61:19–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Childe, V. G. (1936) Man makes himself. Watts & Company.Google Scholar
Clark, G. (2014) The son also rises. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Crabtree, G. (2013a) Our fragile intellect. Part I. Trends in Genetics 29:1–3.Google Scholar
Crabtree, G. (2013b) Our fragile intellect. Part II. Trends in Genetics 29:3–5.Google Scholar
Culotta, E. (2013) Latest skirmish over ancestral violence strikes blow for peace. Science 341:244.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fiske, A. & Rai, T. (2015) Virtuous violence. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fourcade, M., Ollion, E. & Algan, Y. (2015) The superiority of economics. Journal of Economic Perspectives 29:89–114.Google Scholar
Fry, D. & Söderberg, P. (2013) Lethal aggression in mobile forager bands and implications for the origins of war. Science 341:270–73.Google Scholar
Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1977a) Inequality, limits, and growth from bioeconomic viewpoint. Review of Social Economy 35:361–76.Google Scholar
Gordon, D. (2007) Control without hierarchy. Nature 446:143. (Published online March 7, 2007). doi:10.1038/446143a.Google Scholar
Gowdy, J. & Krall, L. (2013) The ultrasocial origins of the Anthropocene. Ecological Economics 95:137–47.Google Scholar
Gowdy, J. & Krall, L. (2014) The transition to agriculture and the evolution of human ultrasociality. Journal of Bioeconomics 16(2):179–202.Google Scholar
Hamilton, M. J., Lobo, J., Rupley, E., Youn, H. & West, G. B. (2014) The ecology and energetics of hunter-gatherer residential mobility. Santa Fe Institute Working Paper 2014-09-034. Available at: http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/14-09-034.pdf Google Scholar
Hou, C., Kaspari, M., Vander Zanden, H. B. & Gillooly, J. F. (2010) Energetic basis of colonial living in social insects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 107(8):3634–38.Google Scholar
Jablonka, E. & Lamb, M. (2014) Evolution in four dimensions. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Karmin, M. et al. (100 other authors) (2015) A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture. Genome Research 25:459–66 doi: 10.1101/gr.186684.114.Google Scholar
Kesebir, S. (2012) The superorganism account of human sociality: How and when human groups are like beehives. Personality and Social Psychology Review 16(3):233–61.Google Scholar
Kirch, P. & Yen, D. (1982) Tikopia: Prehistory and ecology of a Polynesian outlier. Bernice P. Bishop Museum (Honolulu), Bulletin No. 238. Bishop Museum Press.Google Scholar
Klitgaard, K. & Krall, L. (2012) Ecological economics, degrowth, and institutional change. Ecological Economics 84:247–53.Google Scholar
Krall, L. & Klitgaard, K. (2011) Ecological economics and institutional change. Ecological Economic Reviews 1219:185–96.Google Scholar
Kuznets, S. (1953) Shares of upper income groups in income and savings. National Bureau of Economic Research.Google Scholar
Landes, D. S. (1969) The Unbound Prometheus: Technological change and industrial development in Western Europe from 1750 to the present. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Leach, H. (2003) Human domestication reconsidered. Current Anthropology 44:349–68.Google Scholar
McDaniel, C. & Gowdy, J. (2000) Paradise for sale: A parable of nature. University of California Press.Google Scholar
Michod, R. & Nedelcu, A. (2003) On the reorganization of fitness during evolutionary transitions in individuality. Integrated Computational Biology 43:64–73.Google Scholar
Morell, V. (2014) Wolves cooperate but dogs submit, study suggests. Science News, August 19, 2014. Available at: http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/08/wolves-cooperate-dogs-submit-study-suggests Google Scholar
Nekola, J., Allen, C., Brown, J., Burger, J., Davidson, A., Fristoe, T., Hamilton, M., Hammond, S., Kodric-Brown, A., Mercado-Silva, N. & Okie, J. (2013) The Malthusian-Darwin dynamic and the trajectory of civilization. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 28:1–4.Google Scholar
Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the 21st Century. Belknap/Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (2011) The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Viking.Google Scholar
Polanyi, K. (1944) The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Range, F. & Virányi, Z. (2014) Wolves are better imitators of conspecifics than dogs. PLoS One 9(1):e86559. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0086559.Google Scholar
Richerson, P., Baldini, R., Bell, A. V., Demps, K., Frost, K., Hillis, V., Mathew, S., Newton, E. K., Naar, N., Newson, L., Ross, C., Smaldino, P. E., Waring, T. M. & Zefferman, M. (2016) Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39:e30. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X1400106X.Google Scholar
Richerson, P. & Boyd, R. (2005) Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ryan, C. & Jethá, C. (2010) Sex at dawn. HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Schull, J. (1990) Are plants intelligent? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13:63–108.Google Scholar
Shepard, P. (1973) The tender carnivore and the sacred game. University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Shepard, P. (1982) Nature and madness. Sierra Club Books.Google Scholar
Shepard, P. (1998) Coming home to the Pleistocene. Island Press.Google Scholar
Shik, J. Z., Hou, C., Kay, A., Kasari, M. & Gillooly, J. F. (2012) Towards a general life-history model of the superorganism: Predicting the survival, growth and reproduction of ant societies. Biology Letters 8(6):1059–62. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0463.Google Scholar
Smaldino, P. (2014) The cultural evolution of emergent group-level traits. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37(3):243–95.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stern, D. (2004) The rise and fall of the environmental Kuznets curve. World Development 32:1419–39.Google Scholar
Trewavas, A. (2008) Aspects of plant intelligence. In: The deep structure of biology, ed. Morris, S. Conway, pp. 68–110. Templeton Foundation Press.Google Scholar
Turchin, P. (2006a) War and peace and war: The life cycles of imperial nations. Pi Press. (Original first edition).Google Scholar
Turchin, P. (2013) The puzzle of human ultrasociality: How did large-scale complex societies evolve? In: Cultural evolution, ed. Richerson, P. & Christiansen, M., pp. 61–73. MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. (2013) World population prospects: The 2012 Revision. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Available at: http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/trends/WPP2012_Wallchart.pdf Google Scholar
Warwick, K. (2001) The quest for intelligence. Judy Piatkus.Google Scholar
Wilson, D. S. (1997) Human groups as units of selection. Science 276:1816–17.Google Scholar
Wilson, D. S. (2010) Truth and Reconciliation for group selection. Available at: http://evolution.binghamton.edu/dswilson/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Truth-and-Reconciliation.pdf Google Scholar
Wilson, D. S. (2014) Groups as units of functional analysis, individuals as proximate mechanisms. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37(3):279–80. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X13003075.Google Scholar
Wilson, D. S. & Gowdy, J. M. (2015) Human ultrasociality and the invisible hand: Foundational developments in evolutionary science alter a foundational concept in economics. Journal of Bioeconomics 17(1):37–52. Available at: http://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-014-9192-x CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, D. S., Hayes, S. C., Biglan, A. & Embry, D. D. (2014) Evolving the future: Toward a science of intentional change. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37(4):395–460. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X13001593.Google Scholar
Wilson, D. S. & Sober, E. (1994) Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17(4):585–654.Google Scholar
Wilson, E. O. (1998) Consilience: The unity of knowledge. Alfred Knopf.Google Scholar
Woodburn, J. (1982) Egalitarian societies. Man 17:431–51. Reprinted in: Gowdy, J., ed. (1998) Limited wants, unlimited means: A reader on hunter-gatherer economics and the environment. pp. 87–110. Island Press.Google Scholar