Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-lvwk9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-24T15:12:54.706Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Public goods, sharing genes, and the formation of large groups

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

David Goetze
David Goetze*
Affiliation:
Political Science Department, Logan, UT 84322-0725, USA david.goetze@usu.edu
Get access

Abstract

Humans exhibit intense attachments to very large groups, sometimes numbering in the millions. The author addresses the question of how inclinations to attach to large groups might have evolved and identifies the problem of collective action and free riding as the central obstacles to overcome. He argues that the nonsubtractibility feature of public goods and the inclusive fitness theory of W. D. Hamilton are key elements in the evolution of sharing behavior in large groups: a source of group attachments. The argument implies that the mix of goods available and produced in past and present environments impacts the configuration of different-sized groups found in human society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , September 2007 , pp. 7 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1.Horowitz, D. L., “A family resemblance,” Chap. 2 in Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).Google Scholar
2.Johnson, G. R., “Kin selection, socialization, and patriotism: An integrating theory,” Politics and the Life Sciences, 1986, 4:127–140.Google Scholar
3.Scott, G. M. Jr., “A resynthesis of the primordial and circumstantial approaches to ethnic group solidarity: Towards an explanatory model,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1990, 13:147–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4.Kaufman, S. J., Modern Hatreds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
5.Thayer, B., Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2004).Google Scholar
6.van den Berghe, P. L., The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York: Elsevier North Holland, 1981).Google Scholar
7.Salter, F., “A defense and extension of Pierre van den Berghe's theory of ethnic nepotism,” in Evolutionary Theory and Ethnic Conflict, James, P. and Goetze, D., eds. (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001).Google Scholar
8.Buss, D. M., Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999).Google Scholar
9.Tooby, J. and Cosmides, L., “The psychological foundations of culture,” in The Adapted Mind, Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., and Tooby, J., eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
10.Masters, R. D., “Historical change and evolutionary theory: From hunter-gatherer bands to states and empires,” forthcoming, Politics and the Life Sciences.Google Scholar
11.Hamilton, W. D., “The genetical evolution of social behavior I and II,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1964, 7:1–52.Google Scholar
12.Trivers, R. L., “The evolution of reciprocal altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology, 1971, 46:35–56.Google Scholar
13.Trivers, R. L., Social Evolution (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1985).Google Scholar
14.Axelrod, R., The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books/HarperCollins, 1984).Google Scholar
15.Sober, E. and Wilson, D. S., Unto Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
16.Sober, and Wilson, , pp. 26, 47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17.Carneiro, R. L., “Political expansion as an expression of the principle of competitive exclusion,” in Origins of the State, Cohen, R. and Service, E. R., eds. (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978).Google Scholar
18.Gat, A., War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).Google Scholar
19.Goetze, D., “Comparing prisoner's dilemma, commons dilemma, and public goods provision designs in laboratory experiments,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1994, 38:56–86.Google Scholar
20.Masters, R. D., The Nature of Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
21.Margolis, H., Selfishness, Altruism, and Rationality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984).Google Scholar
22.Rubin, P., Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
23.Samuelson, P. A., “A diagrammatic exposition of a theory of public expenditure,” Review of Economics and Statistics, 1955, 37:350–356.Google Scholar
24.Olson, M., The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).Google Scholar
25.Ostrom, V. and Ostrom, E., “Public goods and public choices,” Alternatives for Delivering Public Services: Toward Improved Performance, in Savas, E. S., ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977).Google Scholar
26.Ostrom, E., Governing the Commons (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
27.Hawkes, K., “Sharing and collective action,” in Evolutionary Ecology and Human Behavior, Smith, E. A. and Winterhalder, B., eds. (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992).Google Scholar
28.Olson, M., The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).Google Scholar
29.Cosmides, L. and Tooby, J.“Better than rational: Evolutionary psychology and the invisible hand,” American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings 1994:327–332.Google Scholar
30.Masters, R. D., “On the evolution of political communities: The paradox of Eastern and Western Europe in the 1990s,” in Human Nature and the New Europe, McGuire, M. T., ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).Google Scholar
31.Whitmeyer, J., “Endogamy as a basis for ethnic behavior,” Sociological Theory, 1997, 15(2): 162–178.Google Scholar
32.Trivers, R. L., “Parent-offspring conflict,” American Zoologist, 1974, 14:249–264.Google Scholar
33.Wilkinson, G. S., “Reciprocal food sharing in the vampire bat,” Nature, 1984, 308:181–184.Google Scholar
34.Slightly modified from Masters, 1989, p. 165.Google Scholar
35.Slightly modified from Masters, 1989, p. 167.Google Scholar