Almost all living humans live in social world that are profoundly unequal in wealth and influence. By the standard of deep human history, that is a recent change. For most of our history humans lived in egalitarian, acephalous communities. This paper focusses on two questions. First: how and why did the social world of egalitarian foragers transition to the unequal worlds of early farming societies and other unequal farming communities. What caused the failure of the mechanisms that guarded equality in egalitarian worlds? Second: why did cooperation, collective action and, in general, the social contract persist through that transition? One of the robust results of both theoretical models and behavioural economics is that cooperation falls apart when free-riding is not controlled. Elites are free-riders, and yet the non-elite continue to contribute, not everywhere but often, to collective action. Theory and experiment seem to be in conflict with much of the last ten thousand years of human history. I’ll suggest answers to these questions based on individual optimising decisions, rather than ones that depend on various versions of cultural group selection.

About the speaker

Kim Sterelny is a Professor and ARC Laureate Fellow with the Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences, ANU School of Philosophy. After studying philosophy at Sydney University, Kim Sterelny taught philosophy in Australia at Sydney, La Trobe University, and ANU (where he was Research Fellow, and then Senior Research Fellow, in Philosophy at RSSS from 1983 until 1987), before taking up a position at Victoria University in Wellington. Between 1999 and 2008 he spent half a year at Victoria and the other half here at the ANU. After 2009 he transitioned to full time at the ANU. His research interests have always been in the border areas between philosophy and the sciences; most of his research and graduate supervision has been in philosophy of biology and the philosophy of the cognitive sciences. In the last decade and a half, he has been particularly interested in human evolution, and in understanding the evolution of the distinctive features of human social life, and of the cognitive capacities that make that life possible.

Sterelny has been a Visiting Professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and at Cal Tech and the University of Maryland, College Park, in the USA. He is the author of The Representational Theory of Mind; the co-author of Language and Reality (with Michael Devitt); Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (with Paul Griffiths); Thought in a Hostile World (which won the 2003 Lakatos Prize); What is Biodiversity (with James MacLaurin); Dawkins vs Gould; and The Evolved Apprentice (the book of the 2009 Nicod Prize Lectures). He is Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and the Royal Society of New Zealand. In addition to philosophy, Kim spends his time eating curries, drinking red wine, bushwalking, snorkelling and bird watching.