The Origins of Cooperation: Male and Female Points of View
Posted by Richard Conniff on March 3, 2009
Did the intensely cooperative behavior of human beings emerge as a byproduct of group rivalries? H. Kern Reed and Bert Hölldobler put forward one variant of that idea, called “nested tug of war” theory, in 2007. (I wrote about it in a column for The New York Times.) Or is cooperation a necessary result of the way we raise our babies, as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy argues in her new book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding? Natalie Angier takes a look at Hrdy’s theory in today’s New York Times:
Our capacity to cooperate in groups, to empathize with others and to wonder what others are thinking and feeling — all these traits, Dr. Hrdy argues, probably arose in response to the selective pressures of being in a cooperatively breeding social group, and the need to trust and rely on others and be deemed trustworthy and reliable in turn. Babies became adorable and keen to make connections with every passing adult gaze. Mothers became willing to play pass the baby. Dr. Hrdy points out that mother chimpanzees and gorillas jealously hold on to their infants for the first six months or more of life. Other females may express real interest in the newborn, but the mother does not let go: you never know when one of those females will turn infanticidal, or be unwilling or unable to defend the young ape against an infanticidal male.
By contrast, human mothers in virtually every culture studied allow others to hold their babies from birth onward, to a greater or lesser extent depending on tradition …
Dr. Hrdy wrote her book in part to counter what she sees as the reigning dogma among evolutionary scholars that humans evolved their extreme sociality and cooperative behavior to better compete with other humans. “I’m not comfortable accepting this idea that the origins of hypersociality can be found in warfare, or that in-group amity arose in the interest of out-group enmity,” she said in a telephone interview. Sure, humans have been notably violent and militaristic for the last 12,000 or so years, she said, when hunter-gatherers started settling down and defending territories, and populations started getting seriously dense. But before then? There weren’t enough people around to wage wars.
Check out the rest of Angier’s article here. And you can read the Reed and Hölldobler “nested tug of war” paper here on PNAS.
