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Cooperation in a Complex World: The Role of Proximate Factors in Ultimate Explanations

  • Thematic Issue Article: The Meaning of “Theory” in Biology
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Abstract

Mayr’s distinction between proximate and ultimate explanation is justly famous, marking out a division of explanatory labor in biology. But while it is a useful heuristic in many cases, there are others in which proximate factors play an important role in shaping evolutionary trajectories, and in such cases, each project is sensitive to, and relevant to, the other. This general methodological claim is developed in the context of a discussion of human cooperation, and in particular, in a discussion on the puzzling stability of the social contract over the Pleistocene–Holocene transition. For I argue that while we have a plausible account of the stability of Pleistocene cooperation, the stabilizing factors of the Pleistocene disappear in the Holocene, but cooperation does not. Holocene humans solved many collective action problems; cooperation did not collapse despite the apparent growth of free-riding elites. So the article combines a methodological claim about the interaction of proximate and evolutionary biology with a substantive one about the ecology of human cooperation.

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Notes

  1. “The Orma, for example, immediately recognized that the PGG was similar to the harambee, a locally initiated contribution that Orma house-holds make when their community decides to pursue a public good, such as constructing a road or school. They dubbed the experiment ‘the harambee game’ and contributed generously (mean 58 % with 25 % full contributors)” (p. 811).

  2. They are also somewhat skeptical of the empirical foundations of work on strong reciprocity and cultural group selection.

  3. Restructuring juvenile learning environments as a by-product of a change in adult life ways might well be sufficient to stabilize a new skill. But young hominins certainly had some capacity to supplement trial-and-error learning with social learning as well: great ape capacity to learn by accurate imitation is at best limited, but they certainly can and do learn something by observing others; they can learn that stone is a resource that can be used to break into (say) a large bone, even if they cannot learn by observation just how the trick is done. Sterelny (2012) shows how this model of social learning is supported by the human archaeological record.

  4. These peoples have often serious obesity-related health problems.

  5. Most obviously, because resources are tapped into lower in the food web, but also because farmers suppress grain-bearing plants’ competitors, so a larger fraction of the total productivity of that trophic level is made available to human consumption.

  6. And perhaps transitions in the opposite direction too: there is a preliminary analysis of Pacific and South East Asian cultures that suggests that the increase in social complexity is incremental, but complexity can be lost too, and when it is, the decline need not be incremental (Currie et al. 2010).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Philosophy and Tempo and Mode, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Kim Sterelny

  2. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Kim Sterelny

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  1. Kim Sterelny
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Correspondence to Kim Sterelny.

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Sterelny, K. Cooperation in a Complex World: The Role of Proximate Factors in Ultimate Explanations. Biol Theory 7, 358–367 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-012-0069-8

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