Stone Age Minds and Group Selection - What Difference Do They Make?
Posted: 13 Nov 2010
Date Written: 2002
Abstract
The paper sets out to identify main tenets of evolutionary psychology (EP) - with its characteristic slogan that ‘our present skulls still house a stone age mind’ - and Sober and Wilson’s multi-level selection theory (MST) - that seeks to rehabilitate group selection in evolutionary theorising - that could be of interest to economic theorising. Four different types of altruism are distinguished. It is further investigated what implications EP and MST have for the study of the psychic mechanisms underlying human behaviour, of the co-evolution of intragroup and intergroup processes, and for methodological individualism.
JEL Classification: A12, B41, B5
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation