Dear All, Kim will be giving a second talk as part of his ERC-sponsored visit next Tuesday in the Psychology Dept. The ad follows below...
=============================== Dear All, *Prof. Kim Sterelny* is visiting Cambridge and will give *this Tuesday's (11th June) lab talk *at *4.30pm* in the *Craik-Marshall* room. For those who don't know Prof. Sterelny, he is a philosopher of psychology and biology. His website is linked at the foot of this email. Prof. Sterelny will be talking about *Cooperation, Culture and Conflict*. *Abstract:* * * In this paper. I develop a big picture conceptual model of the evolution of human cooperation, and contrast it to an alternative big picture based on group selection. The crucial claim is that hominin history has seen two major transitions in cooperation, and hence poses two deep puzzles about the origins and stability of cooperation. The first is the transition from great ape social lives to the lives of Pleistocene cooperative foragers; the second is the stability of the social contract through the early Holocene transition to complex hierarchical societies. The first of these transitions is driven, at least initially, by individual advantage: cooperation paid off for individual foragers, initially through mutualist interaction; then through reciprocation. This argument leads to a reanalysis of the role of violence and the nature of the freeriding threat to cooperation. But the conditions that select for cooperative individuals in the Pleistocene were eroded in the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. So we need an alternative account of the survival, and indeed the expansion, of cooperation in the Holocene. Group selection driven by intercommunal conflict really does seem central to this second transition.* * As always, drinks at All Bar One will follow the talk. All the best, James Kim Sterelny webpage: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/hppi/about/staff/kim-sterelny _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
