Southern California Primate Research Forum:

The Upcoming Forum

Richard Wrangham

Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

The Evolution of Human Groupishness and Homo sapiens

Saturday, 25 March 2023


CSU Fullerton
McCarthy Hall (room 121)

Campus map: http://www.fullerton.edu/campusmap/

10:00am to 1:00pm

Groupishness is 'being nice without any obviously selfish reason,' or more precisely, a tendency to commit prosocial acts for which the pathway to compensatory fitness benefits is unpredictable. A tendency for groupishness is an evolved trait that is universal in humans and absent in all other primates. It is also a very important component of human social behavior because it promotes cooperation. Its evolution is not well understood however. A difficulty is that the adaptive value of groupishness has classically been argued to come from indirect reciprocity, but an evolved tendency for indirect reciprocity is hard to explain in societies (like most primates) that contain power asymmetries in which a dominant can appropriate resources at will. I contend that a better solution comes from signaling theory. According to this idea, the critical evolutionary change from non-groupish pre-sapiens to groups Homo sapiens was the emergence of coalitions to execute other group members. Groupishness then evolved as a way for individuals to defend themselves against being executed, by signaling their conformity to group norms. I test this hypothesis using information on human self-domestication. I conclude that a major increase in evolved groupishness indeed began as a result of a new ability to execute tyrants, and that this led to the origin of Homo sapiens. The ability to execute group members thus appears to account not only for the evolution of groupishness, but also for the emergence of Homo sapiens as a species.








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