Browsing by Author "Palmer, Craig T."

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    Reconceptualizing the Human Social Niche: How It Came to Exist and How It Is Changing
    (The University of Chicago Press, 2016-04-04) Palmer, Craig T.; Coe, Kathryn; Steadman, Lyle B.; Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health
    In this paper we present a reconceptualization of the social dimension of the human niche and the evolutionary process that brought it into existence. We agree with many other evolutionary approaches that a key aspect of the human niche is a social environment consisting primarily of cooperating and altruistic individuals, not a Hobbesian social environment of “war of all against all.” However, in contrast to the conception of this social environment as consisting of individuals who, in Boyd and Richerson’s words, “cooperate with large groups of unrelated individuals,” we propose that it is more accurately described as consisting of cooperating individuals who currently are often nonkin but who, until relatively recently in human existence, were primarily, and in many cases almost exclusively, kin. In contrast to the conception of this social environment coming into existence by way of a process of selection within and between groups, we propose that it is the result of selection operating on traditions originated by ancestors and transmitted to their descendants. We use our fieldwork in three areas of the world (New Guinea, Ecuador, and Canada) to illustrate this process and how current social environments can be roughly placed on a continuum from traditional to nontraditional.
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    Totemism and Long-Term Evolutionary Success
    (APA, 2015-11) Palmer, Craig T.; Begley, Ryan O.; Coe, Kathryn; Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health
    This paper proposes that the clan Totemism existing in many traditional cultures, and described as religious by many ethnographers, provides evidence about the early evolutionary function of religion in the sense that it provides evidence of the effects of religion that caused it to become widespread in our species. However, this paper also proposes that evolutionary explanations of Totemism have failed to fully appreciate the reason clan Totemism acts as a kind of window into the past. This is the fact that the behaviors constituting clan Totemism could not have taken their form when first studied by anthropologists if they had not been copied from ancestors to descendants for many generations. This new multigenerational approach to clan Totemism combines 4 points about Totemism that have been recognized by others, but whose implications have not heretofore been fully comprehended.
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    The Words of Our Ancestors: Kinship, Tradition, and Moral Codes
    (2008) Coe, Kathryn; Palmer, Craig T.
    In this paper we use the cross-cultural record to identify the behavioral rules of conduct, and the system supporting those rules, that are found in traditional societies, such as tribal societies. We then draw on the historical record to identify the behavioral rules of conduct, and the system supporting those rules that were found in the early state. The proposal tested here is that in traditional societies the behavioral rules of conduct and the systems that support them (e.g., processes for identifying guilt, punishing offenders, enacting legislation, preventing conflict) are aimed at promoting enduring, cooperative relationships among individuals who are identified as kin through common ancestry. The assumption underlying this proposal is that once human females increased their investment in offspring, cultural strategies to protect those offspring became more important. A moral system, which is the term we use to refer to the early system of behavioral codes, protected offspring by turning conspecific threats into the protectors, providers, and educators of children. It did this by creating a strong kinship system, the members of which were bound by common ancestry (actual or metaphorical), thus tying individuals into enduring, cooperative relationships by using culture to encourage them to honor ongoing duties to one another. This kinship-based moral system is significantly different from that found in societies in which the majority of interactions are with non-kin, interactions often center on the exchange of good and services, and traditions have largely been broken down. We refer to this second system as a system of law and argue that this distinction between moral and legal systems has implications for attempts to explain the evolutionary basis of human cooperation.