Gene Culture Coevolution

In "Against Literary Darwinism," Jonathan Kramnick attacks a straw man version of literary Darwinism. His conceptual framework implies that biology is restricted to a few modular cognitive processes, like those for the autonomic nervous system, and that everything else in human experience derives from "culture" and "history." That false dichotomy displays a shallow understanding of biocultural theory, and indeed Kramnick's essay is generally under-informed and out of date.

Special Evolutionary Issue of the online journal Politics and Culture. Edited by Joseph Carroll.

http://politicsandculture.org/2010/04/28/contents-2/

27 essays organized under five headings: (1) The Evolutionary Turn in Psychology and the Humanities; (2) Politics and Ethics; (3) Religion; (4) Literature; and (5) music.

Also, a symposium on the question "How is art biological," with commentaries by seven scholars and with responses from various contributors to each of the commentaries.

Social Legal Theory (SLT) has been heralded as the “third pillar” of jurisprudence, offering a social scientific alternative to the rational relativity of legal positivism and the moral determinism of natural law. Yet recently SLT’s most ardent champion, Professor Brian Tamanaha, appears to have broken ranks. Assuming a “holistic” perspective, Tamanaha now contends that law “emerges” from both social and naturalistic influences. This move not only undermines SLT, it seemingly transforms that view into the existing theory of jurisilience, which uses the holistic epistemology of consilience to provide a bio-socio-cultural account of law’s essence.

Despite outward appearances, however, these approaches are far from identical. Unlike the revamped version of SLT, which is ontologically constrained and conflicted, jurisilience explains law’s emergence through systems science and cutting-edge sociology. It shows that law is not a simple assemblage of social and/or natural forces. Instead, it is a complex information network of interdependent “jurisystems.” Grounded in our natural need for homeostasis, human legality originates in our genetic and neurobiological systems, scales up to our normative social systems, and becomes externalized as a supreme system of formal law. Once entrenched, law does not remain stagnant, but continuously coordinates human conflicts, relieves social stress, and reinforces social bonds. Over time, law’s dynamism changes social behavior and cultural memory, initiating a cycle of epigenetics and gene-culture coevolution that renews our biological disposition for legality. Given law’s systemic nature, any socio-centric jurisprudence now seems obsolete. The fact is, jurisilience and jurisystems do not just systematize SLT; they systematize SLT right out of existence.

В антологию включены работы основателей эволюционной эпистемологии — К. Лоренца, К. Поппера, Д. Кэмпбелла, статьи Р. Ридля, Г. Фолльмера, Э. Эзера, Ф. Вукетича как основных представителей эволюционной эпистемологии и последователей К. Лоренца. Книга содержит разделы, представляющие важные для эволюционной эпистемологии смежные направления - теорию геннокультурной коэволюции (Ч. Ламсден, А. Гушурст и др.) и нейробиологию (Дж. Эдельман, Г. Рот). В разделе «Эволюционная эпистемология в России» публикуются работы И. П. Меркулова, A.B. Кезина, E.H. Князевой, И.А. Бесковой, И.А. Герасимовой.

Книга адресована специалистам в области эпистемологии и философии науки.

The Ape That Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behaviour, our child-rearing patterns, our moral codes, our religions, our languages, and science? The book tackles these questions by drawing on ideas from two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory. The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass on our genes. At some point, however, we also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which we’re but a tiny, fleeting fragment.

A Memética é, então, a ciência que estuda como memes se propagam. O que a genética faz com os genes, a Memética faz com os memes. Ou, mais precisamente, o que a genética de populações e a epidemiologia fazem com as informações genéticas, a Memética faz com as informações culturais. O ponto a ser discutido então é apenas se os modelos matemáticos aplicados na primeira podem também ser usados na segunda. Isso, é claro, levanta enormes problemas. Será que a cultura realmente pode ser dividida em unidades de informação? De que são feitos os memes? Como eles são passados? Como saber se eles foram realmente passados ou não? O que determina que um meme vai infectar a mente de uma pessoa e de outra não? Quem manda no meu comportamento sou eu ou meus memes? Eu posso escolher quais memes vão me infectar? Utilizar modelos biológicos para tratar a cultura não seria reducionista e mecanicista? [...] É com este espírito que o livro foi escrito. Mas, antes de tudo, é um livro de divulgação científica. Pretende dar ao leitor a fundamentação filosófica e científica para discutir os conceitos aqui tratados. Pode, então, ser lido por um não-filósofo que só sabe de biologia aquilo que aprendeu na escola

An overview of evolutionary literary study (ELT), outlining the history, defining central topics and core principles, positioning the field in relation to contiguous fields such as cognitive rhetoric, contrasting it with poststructuralism, and describing salient works in the field. Thirty-five scholars respond to the target article. The rejoinder categorizes the responses by common themes such as comments on the possibility of unified knowledge, evolutionary cultural theory, reduction, and the adaptive function of literature and other arts.

O conceito de memes surgiu em 1976 com Richard Dawkins como um análogo cultural dos genes. Deveria ser possível estudar a cultura através do processo de evolução por seleção natural de memes, ou seja, de comportamentos, idéias e conceitos. O filósofo Daniel Dennett utilizou tal conceito como central em sua teoria da consciência e pela primeira vez divulgou para o grande público a possibilidade de uma ciência dos memes chamada "memética". A pesquisadora Susan Blackmore, 1999, foi quem mais se aproximou de uma defesa completa de tal teoria. No entanto, a memética sofreu pesadas críticas e ainda não se constituiu como uma ciência, com métodos e uma base empírica bem definida. A presente tese visa entrar nesta discussão, analisando todas as principais críticas que foram feitas com o objetivo de analisar se a memética poderia de fato ser uma ciência e também que tipo de ciência ela seria.

Among the several main reasons for the present gradual demise of the hitherto dominant hypotheses of 'modern' human origins, the replacement or 'out of Africa' models, are the issues of genetic drift and introgression. The operation and consequences of genetic drift are considered, especially in terms of their effects on the evolution of the human species during the Late Pleistocene period. The complexity of the subject is reviewed in the light of several relevant frames of reference, such as those provided by niche construction, gene-culture co-evolutionary theories, and by the domestication hypothesis. The current cultural, genetic and paleoanthropological evidence is reviewed, as well as other germane factors, such as the role of neurodegenerative pathologies, the neotenization of humans in their most recent evolutionary history, and the question of cultural selection-based self-domestication. This comprehensive review leads to a paradigmatic shift in the way recent human evolution needs to be viewed. This article explains fully how humans became what they are today.

Human populations may differ genetically not only in their anatomy but also in their mental characteristics. Our species is not too young for such differentiation. In fact, human genetic evolution has proceeded faster over the past 10,000 years than over the previous million. With the rise of farming, and social complexity, humans were no longer adapting solely to a limited range of natural environments. They were adapting to an everwidening range of cultural environments, each of which imposed its demands on mind and body.

Thus, mental characteristics do not have the same adaptive value in all environments, and differences in adaptive value will lead, over time, to genetic differences. Are the latter large enough to explain IQ differences between human populations? That question has led to studies of people who are ancestrally diverse but raised in the same environment, such as transracial adoptees. Unfortunately, the environment can never be fully equalized. We should measure genetic differences directly, and a promising step in that direction has come with research to identify alleles associated with educational attainment. There is no need to identify all of them, just a large enough sample. These "witnesses" can then be questioned to determine the strength and direction of natural selection, and its consequences.

Also promising is the study of IQ and ancestry in ethnically mixed groups. This research instrument is not without problems. Large continental populations often have high-achieving minorities who may contribute disproportionately to the founding of new groups or to admixture with old ones. In addition, natural selection can alter the distribution of alleles within a new group, even after a few generations.

Evolutionary approaches to human behaviour date back to Charles Darwin, though they were somewhat eclipsed in the first half of the twentieth century. They began to become more prominent, as evolutionary studies of animal behaviour matured as a scientific discipline in the middle of the twentieth century. The sociobiological approach prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s has been succeeded by a variety of approaches, including human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology, and gene-culture co-evolution or dual inheritance theory. This entry details the inception, prominent proponents, key features, representative case studies, and major criticisms of each of these three current approaches. It also notes the current trends in the field, toward greater use of computer models and experimental methods in studying human behavioural evolution.

"La evolución humana es un área de estudio muy discutida. Decenas de libros y centenares de artículos han analizado sus aspectos durante poco más de un siglo. La literatura es abundante, diversa y muy complicada. Sin embargo, recientemente una nueva propuesta se ha sumado al debate dentro de las llamadas teorías neodarwinistas. Mediante el análisis de una insospechada variable, esta nueva mirada apunta a reescribir la ciencia de la evolución humana. Para los antropólogos, biólogos y psicólogos que desarrollan este enfoque, la cultura no sería un componente anecdótico sino esencial del proceso evolutivo humano. ¿Qué evidencias respaldan sus afirmaciones?"

"Human evolution is a hotly debated area of study. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles have analyzed its aspects for little more than a century. The literature is abundant, diverse and very complicated. Recently, however, a new proposal has joined the debate within the so-called neo-Darwinian theories. By analyzing an unsuspected variable, this new approach aims to rewrite the science of human evolution. For the anthropologists, biologists and psychologists who develop this approach, culture would not be an anecdotal but an essential component of the human evolutionary process. What evidence supports their claims?"

A Memética é, então, a ciência que estuda como memes se propagam. O que a genética faz com os genes, a Memética faz com os memes. Ou, mais precisamente, o que a genética de populações e a epidemiologia fazem com as informações genéticas, a Memética faz com as informações culturais. O ponto a ser discutido então é apenas se os modelos matemáticos aplicados na primeira podem também ser usados na segunda. Isso, é claro, levanta enormes problemas. Será que a cultura realmente pode ser dividida em unidades de informação? De que são feitos os memes? Como eles são passados? Como saber se eles foram realmente passados ou não? O que determina que um meme vai infectar a mente de uma pessoa e de outra não? Quem manda no meu comportamento sou eu ou meus memes? Eu posso escolher quais memes vão me infectar? Utilizar modelos biológicos para tratar a cultura não seria reducionista e mecanicista? [...] É com este espírito que o livro foi escrito. Mas, antes de tudo, é um livro de divulgação científica. Pretende dar ao leitor a fundamentação filosófica e científica para discutir os conceitos aqui tratados. Pode, então, ser lido por um não-filósofo que só sabe de biologia aquilo que aprendeu na escola

In the 1990s and early 2000s, much of the work done in evolutionary literary study was polemical and programmatic. Scholars attacked the cultural constructivist ideas prevailing in the academic literary establishment, rehearsed the basic logic of the adaptationist program, and made exploratory efforts to formulate principles of interpretation that could be linked to specifically evolutionary ideas. Over the past decade, polemics and programmatic rehearsals have diminished while literary theory and interpretive literary criticism have matured. Many evolutionists in the humanities argue that basic human motives are channeled into specific cultural norms, that specific cultural norms are articulated in imaginative form through myths, legends, rituals, images, songs, and stories, and that humans universally regulate their behavior in accordance with beliefs and values that are made vividly present to them in the arts. Evolutionary literary scholars aim at analyzing the thematic, tonal, and formal features of literary works; locating the works in a cultural context; explaining the cultural context as a particular organization of the elements of human nature within a specific set of environmental conditions; registering the responses of readers; describing the sociocultural, political, and psychological functions the works fulfill; locating those functions in relation to the evolved needs of human nature; and linking works comparatively with other artistic works, using a taxonomy of themes, formal elements, affective elements, and functions derived from a comprehensive model of human nature.

Linguistic signalling is compared with using artificial and organic codes. Based on Barbieri’s (2003) work, I begin by showing parallels between organic processes and how language prompts conscious attitudes and micro-semantics. Hypothetically, organic coding may shape the neural and interactional dynamics that subtend language. Turning to development, I then compare the organic process of DNA transcription with Trevarthen and Aitken’s (2001) intrinsic motive formation (IMF). This shows that the organic process model can throw light on the emergence of self. As in protein manufacture, embodied adaptors use the closure of a world to promote functional change. Rather as cells synthesise proteins, IMF prompts neural reorganization. By constraining how action and perception impact on neural activation, proto-artefacts (expressions, emotions and attitudes) gradually insinuate themselves into how we act, feel and speak. Human customs connect intrinsic motivation and displays of affect that, over time, prompt infants to belief in words. Parallels between organic coding and language dynamics are thus consistent with a distributed view of language. As artefacts and organic codes co-evolved, our bodies became dependent on an ability to take the language stance.

Humans are often altruistic in a variety of contexts, even towards strangers they may never meet again. What explains this behavior? Many argue that kin selection cannot explain it, but group selection can. Contra this common line of reasoning, I provide two ways that kin selection might help explain the evolution of broad-scope human altruism: in gene-culture co-evolution and in a 'cultural' version of kin selection.

A partire dall’utilizzo sempre più ricorrente dell’«Effetto Baldwin» nell’attuale dibattito evoluzionistico, l’intento di questo articolo è quello di andare ad analizzare teoreticamente l’originale veste di tale principio, inizialmente chiamato «selezione organica», all’interno del pensiero di uno dei suoi principali fautori: James Mark Baldwin. Le osservazioni evoluzionistiche di questo autore, in parte dimenticate nella riformulazione dell’«Effetto Baldwin» da parte della Sintesi Moderna, risultano particolarmente originali proprio alla luce del contemporaneo tentativo di «estensione» del paradigma darwiniano.

Stress has been a subject of intense research over the past few decades. Any holistic understanding of stress requires an interdisciplinary approach. In particular, psychosocial stress studies must include both sociocultural and biochemical variables in their design. In this experiment, the author used a competitive binding immunoassay to quantify cortisol samples before and after an exam in undergraduate university students (n = 29). Multiple variables potentially relating to cortisol production and psychosocial stress reactions were assessed using a pre-exam questionnaire. This questionnaire also included a question regarding perceived preparedness before and after the exam. It was hypothesized that a rise in cortisol (signifying a stress response) would correlate with negative change between predicted preparedness for an exam and retrospect preparedness. Out of 29 students, 10 exhibited a rise in cortisol. Of those 10, 9 noted a decrease in confidence after the exam. A contingency table was used to organize data for a Chi2 analysis. It was found that a rise in cortisol was significantly correlated with a negative change in confidence (p < 0.05). Future studies should investigate the roles of corticosteroid binding globulin and other possible variables in salivary cortisol measurement as well as any effects of group study on pre-exam salivary cortisol levels.

This volume gives evidence for the unity of knowledge in evolutionary biology, the evolutionary social sciences, and the humanities. It contains 14 separately authored essays, a foreword by Alice Dreger, a theoretical introduction by Joseph Carroll, and afterwords by David Sloan Wilson and Jonathan Gottschall. Edward O. Wilson, Christopher Boehm, Herbert Gintis, Michael Rose, and Henry Harpending discuss human social evolution. Barbara Oakley integrates psychology and engineering. Dan P. McAdams delineates a model of human identity, and Carroll and his collaborators use a similar model for a quantitative study of Victorian novels. Ellen Dissanayake and John Hawks probe the mystery behind the markings ancestral humans made on stones. Brian Boyd uses cognitive psychology to analyze poetry and comics. Catherine Salmon and Mathias Clasen use evolutionary psychology to explain salient genres of popular culture: horror fiction, professional wrestling, romance novels, and male adventure novels.

A teoria darwinista tem contribuído para a discussão de problemas nos mais diversos campos filosóficos, entre os quais se inclui a ética e a teoria moral. Tendo em vista que as ciências sociais têm rejeitado tentativas biológicas de explicar o comportamento normativo humano, a primeira seção será destinada a mostrar os motivos dessa rejeição e como a teoria da dupla herança os supera. Seus pressupostos são explicitados na segunda seção. Ao assumir que a cultura é uma causa última da evolução humana, a teoria da dupla herança supera dificuldades encontradas por outras abordagens evolutivas que pretenderam explicar a evolução do comportamento normativo humano, ao salientar a evolução da psicologia social humana e dos instintos responsáveis pelo raciocínio moral e jurídico. Nesta perspectiva, reconhece-se que há princípios morais inatos e universais incorporados à mente humana, que impossibilitam a estabilização cultural de normas morais/jurídicas incompatíveis com eles. Essa tese é debatida na última seção do artigo, na qual se discute a problemática relação entre direito natural e positivo, um problema clássico da teoria moral e jurídica.

Culture or the non-genetic passing on of information between successive generations has been shown to be quite common among different species of animals, especially, but not exclusively, among primates. During the last decades several attempts to reveal the essential characteristics that make us "uniquely human" (tool use, grammar) have been falsified by new discoveries. Nevertheless, the extreme degree to which some characteristics have developed in our species suggest that some force during our evolutionary history has tipped the scales finally in favor of behavioral flexibility and the continual adaptation to new surroundings and new techniques and life styles. An attempt is made to integrate several hypotheses into a plausible account concerning the ecological circumstances in which the peculiarities of our genus and species evolved.

Intensive summer course, July, 2016, Aarhus University. 

Course Description:

Over the past forty years, the evolutionary perspective has gradually developed into an explanatory framework that encompasses all things human: anatomy, physiology, behavior, and the products of the human mind. The evolutionary human sciences are now entering a mature phase. They have developed a sophisticated understanding of basic human motives and the logic of the human life cycle. The one most important weakness in much evolutionary psychology, until recently, has been an inadequate understanding of “culture,” and especially of “imaginative culture”: religion, ideology, myth, the arts, and intellectual life. That weakness is now being corrected by evolutionary thinking emerging from the humanities. Evolutionary studies of literary works have been entering a phase of mature command. This course is designed to acquaint students with the total set of ideas that enter into a biocultural understanding of prose fiction, graphic narratives, and film.

The premise of this course is that works of fiction center on the main substantive areas of human motives: survival, mating, parenting and family life, growing up, establishing an individual identity, engaging in the social life of a community, experiencing conflicts between communities, and pursuing the life of the mind. In each session of the course, we shall read background psychological studies on each of these themes and also read fictional works that center on the theme for that session.

Lactase persistence, the ability to digest the milk sugar lactose in adulthood, is highly associated with a T allele situated 13,910 bp upstream from the actual lactase gene in Europeans. The frequency of this allele rose rapidly in Europe after transition from hunter–gatherer to agriculturalist lifestyles and the introduction of milkable domestic species from Anatolia some 8000 years ago. Here we first introduce the archaeological and historic background of early farming life in Europe, then summarize what is known of the physiological and genetic mechanisms of lactase persistence. Finally, we compile the evidence for a co-evolutionary process between dairying culture and lactase persistence. We describe the different hypotheses on how this allele spread over Europe and the main evolutionary forces shaping this process. We also summarize three different computer simulation approaches, which offer a means of developing a coherent and integrated understanding of the process of spread of lactase persistence and dairying.

Universal social institutions, such as marriage, commons management and property, have emerged independently in radically different cultures. This requires explanation. As Boyer and Petersen (2012) point out ‘in a purely localist framework [these institutional commonalities] would have to constitute massively improbable coincidences’ (3-4). According to Boyer and Petersen, those institutions emerged naturally out of genetically wired behavioural dispositions, such as marriage out of mating strategies and borders out of territorial behaviour. While I agree with Boyer and Petersen that ‘unnatural’ institutions cannot thrive, this one-sided explanation of universal social institutions in terms of genetic human nature is unsatisfactory. Drawing on the literature on multi-level selection and gene-culture coevolution, I argue that universal social institutions are first and foremost the products of cultural selection. They occupy fitness peaks in the landscape of cultural possibilities, much in the same way that biological adaptations occupy fitness peaks in the landscape of biological possibilities. To show this, I use game-theory. By modelling the domains of social interaction in which marriage, commons management, and property emerged as Prisoner’s dilemma situations, it becomes clear how an institutional framework allows the group to move to an interactive equilibrium with a larger payoff. Institutions do so by incentivising (through punishment and/or reward) all parties to adopt a cooperative strategy. They are culturally selected ways of optimising genetically constrained domains of human social interaction.

Over the last 10,000 years, the human genome has changed at an accelerating rate. The change seems to reflect adaptations to new social environments, including the rise of the State and its monopoly on violence. State societies punish young men who act
violently on their own initiative. In contrast, non-State societies usually reward such behavior with success, including reproductive success. Thus, given the moderate to high heritability of male aggressiveness, the State tends to remove violent predispositions from the gene pool while favoring tendencies toward peacefulness and submission. This perspective is applied here to the Roman state, specifically its long-term effort to pacify the general population. By imperial times, this effort had succeeded so well that the Romans saw themselves as being inherently less violent than the “barbarians” beyond their borders. By creating a pacified and submissive population, the empire also became conducive to the spread of Christianity—a religion of peace and submission. In sum, the Roman state imposed a behavioral change that would over time alter the mix of genotypes, thus facilitating a subsequent ideological change.

Tay-Sachs, an inherited neurological disorder, is unusually common among French Canadians from east-ern Quebec. Two alleles are responsible, one being specific to the north shore of the St. Lawrence and the other to the south shore. This pattern of convergent evolution suggests the presence of a selection pressure limited to eastern Quebec. Both alleles probably arose after the British conquest of Quebec in 1759 or at least were uncommon previously. To explain the high incidence of Tay-Sachs among Ashkenazi Jews, some authors have invoked heterozygote advantage, i.e., heterozygous individuals enjoy a higher rate of neuronal growth, and thus greater learning capacity, without the neurological deterioration of homozy-gous individuals. Such an advantage would have helped Ashkenazim perform the mental effort required for work in trade and crafts. A similar situation may have developed in eastern Quebec, where the relative scarcity of British and American merchants made it easier for French Canadians to enter occupations that required literacy, numeracy, and future time orientation.

At the turn of the previous century, Thorstein Veblen used Darwinian evolutionary principles to explain the macro-historical evolution of human societies, as well as the institutional structure of the modern pecuniary culture. Even if Veblen had a strong intuitive grasp of the evolutionary forces operating in society, he was not always clear and explicit in developing his ideas towards a full-fledged, consistent evolutionary social theory. This paper argues that a relatively recent theoretical approach, gene-culture coevolution theory, has the conceptual apparatus to remedy this problem and thus make Veblen’s ideas an important part of contemporary evolutionary thinking in social theory.

Recent evolutionary theories of religions emphasize their function as mechanisms for increasing prosociality. In particular, they claim that fear of supernatural punishment can be adaptive when it can compensate for humans' inability to monitor behavior and mete out punishment in large groups, as well when it can inhibit individuals' impulses for defection. Nonetheless, while fear of punishment may inhibit some antisocial behaviors like cheating, it is unlikely to motivate other prosocial behaviors, like helping. This is because human physiology has evolved separate neurological systems with differential behavioral correlates either for (1) processing fear and responding to threats or (2) facilitating social interactions in environments which are deemed safe. Almost all vertebrates possess autonomic pathways for processing threats and fear, which result in "fight," "flight," or "freeze" responses and so likely mediate interactions in dominance hierarchies. Mammals, however, possess an additional, phylogenetically newer, pathway dedicated to suppressing such defensive responses in the service of promoting social affiliation or engagement. Here, we argue that this mammalian physiology supports an alternative hierarchical system unique to humans: prestige. In contrast to dominance, which involves aversion, fear and shame, prestige hierarchies are characterized by physical proximity and eye-contact, as well as emotions like admiration and respect for leaders. Prestige also directs the flow of cultural information between individuals and has been argued to have evolved in order to help individuals acquire high quality information. Here, we argue that not only does the mammalian autonomic pathway support prestige hierarchies, but that coupled with prestige biased social learning, it opens up a means for prestigious figures, including deities, to support the spread of prosocial behaviors. Thus, in addition to theories that emphasizes religious fear as a motivating factor in the evolution of prosocial religions, we suggest that reverence-which includes awe and respect for, deference to, admiration of, and a desire to please a deity or supernatural agent-is likely just as important. In support of this, we identify cases of religions that appear to be defined predominantly by prestige dynamics, and not fear of supernatural punishment.

The emergence of modern societies is an evolutionary puzzle.
Homo sapiens is the only animal species capable of cooperating in
large-scale societies consisting of genetically unrelated individuals.
From a biological point of view, this feature leads to enormous ques-,
tions. Social scientists typically assume that human life is lived in largescale
societies as a result of cultural, social and institutional history. In
this perspective, social institutions such as law, economy and religion,
enhance cooperation to higher levels. Gene-culture coevolutionary
theories have studied this issue in an integrated framework that accounts
for social and biological theories of cooperation. These theoretical
approaches have provided an account of the emergence of human
institutions with reference to a coevolutionary background in which
specific innate psychological features of the human mind enable the
evolution of social institutions that impose social pressures requiring
the evolution of a complex moral psychology that enables life in a social
environment with institutions. However, although gene-culture coevolution
theories can explain cooperation in pre-modern societies,
they still cannot explain social life in complex societies such as contemporary
democracies, in which cooperation occurs even when individuals
do not agree about the main values of their society. Acknowledging
this fact raises the question as to how it has been possible-from a biological
perspective-that people cooperate in large-scale societies with
individuals with whom they are not genetically related and with whom
they may not even share values and symbolic structures of mutual self-understanding. Following Edward 0. Wilson, in hoping to achieve
consilience between the natural sciences and humanities, this paper argues
that the cooperation level required to drive the evolution of complex
societies is possible as a result of the emergence of one particular
institutional sociocultural framework: constitutionalism. In this sense,
this paper is an attempt to integrate sociology, biology and legal theory
in its understanding of constitutionalism as an evolutionary adaptation
to specific historical and sociological circumstances that demanded the
emergence of institutions to accommodate diversity, pluralism and
complexity.