Why would natural selection favor the prevalence of cooperation within the groups of selfish
individuals? A fruitful framework to address this question is evolutionary game theory, the …

Social norms are patterns of behavior that are self-enforcing within a group: Everyone
conforms, everyone is expected to conform, and everyone wants to conform when they …

Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the
wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters …

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-
relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including …

Diverse lines of theoretical and empirical research are converging on the notion that human
evolution has been substantially influenced by the interaction of our cultural and genetic …

Contemporary humans exhibit spectacular biological success derived from cumulative
culture and cooperation. The origins of these traits may be related to our ancestral group …

Large-scale societies in which strangers regularly engage in mutually beneficial
transactions are puzzling. The evolutionary mechanisms associated with kinship and …

Cooperation is needed for evolution to construct new levels of organization. Genomes, cells,
multicellular organisms, social insects, and human society are all based on cooperation …

We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is
the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and …

Oxford presents, in one convenient and coherently organized volume, 20 influential but until
now relatively inaccessible articles that form the backbone of Boyd and Richerson's path …