The Philosophy of Social Evolution
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19968089 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jonathan Birch (0000-0001-7517-4759, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Pages | 224 |
| Publication date | 2017-11-22 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | The Philosophy of Social Evolution (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/oso/9780198733058.001.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W2752879988 |
| Open Library | OL27415900M |
| ISBN | 9780198733058 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 34 |
From microbes to humans, the natural world is full of spectacular examples of social behaviour. In the 1960s, W. D. Hamilton introduced three key innovations—now known as Hamilton’s rule, kin selection, and inclusive fitness—that changed the way we think about how social behaviour evolves, beginning a research program now known as social evolution theory. This is a book about the philosophical foundations and future prospects of that program. Part I, ‘Foundations’, provides a philosophical analysis of Hamilton’s core ideas, with some modifications along the way. We will see that Hamilton’s rule provides a compelling way of organizing our thinking about the ultimate causes of social behaviour; and we will see how, in inclusive fitness, Hamilton found a fitness concept with a special role to play in explaining cumulative adaptation. Part II, ‘Extensions’, shows how these ideas, when extended in certain ways, can help us understand cooperation in micro-organisms, cooperation among the cells of a multicellular organism, and culturally evolved cooperation in the earliest human societies. In all these cases and more, living things cooperate because they are related, where the concept of relatedness picks out relevant statistical patterns of similarity in the transmissible basis (genetic or otherwise) of social traits
Adaptation (eye) · Biology · Epistemology · Inclusive fitness · Kin selection · Natural (archaeology) · Natural selection · Selection (genetic algorithm) · Social evolution · Sociology · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Psychology · Social Psychology
Quasi-Darwinian mechanisms
Think like an ecologist?
Could Religions Augment Cooperation by Recruiting Hamilton’s Rule through the Use of Fictive Kinship Language
Altruistic deception
Inclusive fitness as a criterion for improvement
The Hamiltonian view of social evolution
Communal philosophy? A possible framework for academia-community interaction
Kin Selection
The Units of Life
Games in the Philosophy of Biology
Towards a Pricean foundation for cultural evolutionary theory
Sometimes you ride the Pegasus, sometimes you take the road
On the Stability of Racial Capitalism
Rethinking Norm Psychology
How we got stuck
Cumulative culture and complex cultural traditions
In pursuit of mutual benefits in school-based citizen science
Social evolution as moral truth tracking in natural law
The Pleistocene Social Contract
Cultural Selection
Modelling cultural selection on biological fitness to integrate social transmission and adaptive explanations for human behaviour
The demography of human warfare can drive sex differences in altruism
Cultural group selection and human cooperation
Signaling theories of religion
Communication as Socially Extended Active Inference
Transitions in evolution
Betting blind
The debate over proximate and ultimate causation in biology
Reintroducing Kin Selection to the Human Behavioral Sciences
Exploring an Evolutionary Paradox
Blind Cooperation
Biological Markets, Cooperation, and the Evolution of Morality
Cancer and the Levels of Selection
Cultural Evolution, Niche Construction and Ecological Inheritance
| Unique citing works | 34 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 4,25 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2026 (9) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 27 |