Ultrasocial
The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19909581 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John M Gowdy (0000-0002-6056-8760, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Publication date | 2021-08-26 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Ultrasocial (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1017/9781108974264 |
| OpenAlex | W4205313704 |
| Open Library | OL35870354M |
| ISBN | 9781108974264 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 299 |
Ultrasocial argues that rather than environmental destruction and extreme inequality being due to human nature, they are the result of the adoption of agriculture by our ancestors. Human economy has become an ultrasocial superorganism (similar to an ant or termite colony), with the requirements of superorganism taking precedence over the individuals within it. Human society is now an autonomous, highly integrated network of technologies, institutions, and belief systems dedicated to the expansion of economic production. Recognizing this allows a radically new interpretation of free market and neoliberal ideology which - far from advocating personal freedom - leads to sacrificing the well-being of individuals for the benefit of the global market. Ultrasocial is a fascinating exploration of what this means for the future direction of the humanity: can we forge a better, more egalitarian, and sustainable future by changing this socio-economic - and ultimately destructive - path? Gowdy explores how this might be achieved
Environmental ethics · Humanity · Ideology · Inequality · Interpretation (philosophy) · Political science · Sociology · Computer Science · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Innovation, Sustainability, Human-Machine Systems · Law · Philosophy · Human Ecology
A Millennium of Peace and Development without Wars in Human History
Observational evidence that economic reciprocity pervades self-organized food co-operatives
Credence, attribution, and creativity in the construction of literary meaning with generative artificial intelligence
Institutionalised Commitment and Its Origins
Fiercely Egalitarian
The human rewilding movement
Cancelling' hunter-gatherers for the cause of twenty-first-century urbanism
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
The Malay archipelago
The Road from Mont Pèlerin
Evolution and the Levels of Selection
Evolution in Four Dimensions
Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics
The Great Leveler
Constructions of Neoliberal Reason
The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C.
Biophilia
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Foundations of Human Sociality
More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas
Stabilizing climate requires near‐zero emissions
Evidence for food storage and predomestication granaries 11,000 years ago in the Jordan Valley
Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines
Lethal Aggression in Mobile Forager Bands and Implications for the Origins of War
Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years ago in northeastern Jordan
Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO 2 emissions
Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology
Prioritizing Climate Change Adaptation Needs for Food Security in 2030
Perspective
Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere
Deeply divergent archaic mitochondrial genome provides lower time boundary for African gene flow into Neanderthals
Climate change, adaptive cycles, and the persistence of foraging economies during the late Pleistocene/Holocene transition in the Levant
Evidence for the Use of Fire at Zhoukoudian, China
When the World’s Population Took Off
Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat
The Human Footprint and the Last of the Wild
Generalizing the core design principles for the efficacy of groups
Documenting domestication
Middle Pleistocene lower back and pelvis from an aged human individual from the Sima de los Huesos site, Spain
Monkeys reject unequal pay
The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols
Global human appropriation of net primary production doubled in the 20th century
Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans
Early Pleistocene Presence of Acheulian Hominins in South India
A possible case of hypervitaminosis A in Homo erectus
Brain Structures Differ between Musicians and Non-Musicians
Hadza meat sharing
Sex equality can explain the unique social structure of hunter-gatherer bands
Tracing the peopling of the world through genomics
The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopotamian Civilization
What Drives Societal Collapse?
The earliest modern humans outside Africa
Energy and Economic Myths
Kinship-based social inequality in Bronze Age Europe
The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I
The weirdest people in the world?
The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism
The Origins of Agriculture
The Incas and Their Ancestors
The Origins of Happiness
The conditions of agricultural growth
The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
The ancient roots of the 1%
An Original Affluent Society?
A Theory of the Origin of the State
Tikopia. The Prehistory and Ecology of a Polynesian Outlier
Cooked starchy food in hearths ca. 120 kya and 65 kya (MIS 5e and MIS 4) from Klasies River Cave, South Africa
Synergistic Selection
Evolution, the Extended Synthesis
Primates and Philosophers
Climate and Conflict
Against the Grain
The Illusion of Free Markets
Evolutionary ecology and resource conservation
The Natufian culture in the Levant, threshold to the origins of agriculture
A theory of human life history evolution
Hunter‐gatherers
Impacts of recent climate change on Wisconsin corn and soybean yield trends
The weight of nations
The agricultural revolution as environmental catastrophe
Environmental regulations and the problem of sustainability
The ultrasocial origin of the Anthropocene
The Reaches of Freedom
The history of Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution
Complexity, Diminishing Marginal Returns, and Serial Mesopotamian Fragmentation
Agricultural biodiversity and peasant rights to subsistence in the central Andes during Inca rule
The Parable of the Bees
Progress and Environmental Sustainability
World on fire
Our hunter-gatherer future
Science for the post-normal age
The Hybrid Origin of “Modern” Humans
From Africa to Eurasia — early dispersals
Empires of the Silk Road
Coming Home to the Pleistocene
A requiem for North American overkill
The World of the First Australians
Increasing breadth of the frontal lobe but decreasing height of the human brain between two Chinese samples from a Neolithic site and from living humans
Diet and attrition in the natufians
Hunters in Transition
First description of the Cro-Magnon 1 endocast and study of brain variation and evolution in anatomically modern Homo sapiens
A Preliminary Index of Social Development
The Significance of Food Storage Among Hunter-Gatherers
Brain Size, Cranial Morphology, Climate, and Time Machines [and Comments and Reply]
Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy [and Comments and Reply]
Foragers, Genuine or Spurious
"Beyond "The Original Affluent Society
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,75 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2026 (5) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 7 |