Culture–gene coevolution, norm - psychology and the emergence of human prosociality

By Maciej Chudek1 and Joseph Henrich1,2,3

Paper Review

The motive of the paper is to understand the relation among the evolution of culture gene ,norm psychology and human prosociality

Introduction

With the findings of various research and with the help of data produced by experiment and observaion they said that our own evolution had some effect of how our culture and genetic system interacted with each other , i.e. If in a gene pool some had the phenotype not similar to that of others in that case the variant phenotype faces the consicuences which in long run leads to extinction of that variant gene. In this way culture affect the evolution of human race ,then this futher leads to formations of social norms and since we are social in nature we gathered motivations, cognitive mechanism for dealing with thses norms giving rise to psycological norms. Now living in society gave the rise of prestige and the issue of supperiority and others which futher gave rise to prosocial nature.

Culture gene coevolved norm-psychology

Culture and gene had impact on the evolution of norm psychology ,research has proven that the path of evolution which we have travelled in is not in the reach of species with are less cultural(1), as a result we should consider culture evolution together with gene evolution while focusing human evolution, so understanding the psychology of human cooperation requires clear understanding of those norms which are traversing generation, and along with it the inferring and adhereing mechanism that generated these norms. The large scale cooperation found in human is a result of some social norms which has evolved culturally over time.

The evolution of culture and culture-gene coevolution

Human race has gone through many selection pressures before giving us our bretheren. There were mainly two types of pressure associated with them first learning non social information from others and second aquiring social behaviors which help them live with there own species. So the species which had ability to overcome these pressures like better at aquiring ,storing and organising had a selective advantage of the other. These selections in social groups created further grouping on the biases like prestige and conformity which made the possibility of regularly interacting people more like each other and hence greater coordination could be achieved, even adopting phenotypes which complement each other made coordination easier some times and added to culture fitness of the group .eg. A family person need not both bring food and cook it for the family, as in case if male earns and bring home and female preserve and gathers it proves to be a well balanced and fit society. Then selection barrior again come to play among species who coordinate better i.e. They need to match the bahavior as well as complement them in order to sustain the selection pressure

Many roads to norms for large scale cooperation

Large scale cooperation in human is really puzzling because this sort of coorperation faces many challenges namely scale, domain variation , intensification and many more. There should be some way to ensure that cooperator are helped wrt non cooperators, these accounts for costly behaviours like punishments, strategy. Through these we can see how culture evolution affect human evolution , genes which made there carriers to understand and stick to the social norms will not have to lift the wait of the costly behaviours and will settle best in the society.

Conclusion

Norm-psychology is has gained its framework because of cummulative cultural learning, coordination and cooperation. Human tends to learn from people with greater skills ,confidence, more experience, prestige and more common variants. In order to break a norm we need to think but thinking is not required when we have to stick to them.

Individuals can learn social behaviour in social groups spontaneously. We also saw during this paper that selective feature to sustain in a society are norms not just a possible chance for cooperation.

References:

1. [Laland, K.N. et al. (2010) How culture shaped the human genome: bringing genetics and the human sciences together. Nat. Rev. Genet. 11, 137–148 ]