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Civilizing Cooperation: Paul Seabright and the Company of Strangers

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Abstract

Paul Seabright is the first to clearly identify a major puzzle about human social evolution: the expansion of cooperation in the more complex societies of the Holocene. Identifying that problem is a major achievement, but in this paper I give a somewhat different account of the nature of the problem and a somewhat different account of the social world of Pleistocene foragers. So, we agree that there is a problem, but not on its nature or solution.

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Notes

  1. Haim Ofek has argued that fire-keeping was the first specialist trade, and that it was a Pleistocene specialization (Ofek 2001).

  2. In pre-market societies, foods sourced from plants are less likely to be shared than food sourced from animals. Gathered resources are consumed by the family that gathers them, and in the normative universe of such pre-state societies, farming seems to have been seen as an extension of gathering rather than hunting (Gurven 2004).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Philosophy and Tempo and Mode, Australian National University, Canberra, 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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Colloquium on Paul Seabright's The Company of Strangers.

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Sterelny, K. Civilizing Cooperation: Paul Seabright and the Company of Strangers. Biol Theory 6, 120–126 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-012-0018-6

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