Friday, March 4th 11:45 am Gross Hall Room 103 Dr. Silk, of the Arizona State University School of Human Evolution and Social Change, is an expert in the social evolution of primates and humans and has recently been investigating the origins of prosocial behavior in humans through studies of non-human primates. Her work explores the connection between sociality and health/ fitness in non-human primates, and is informed by similar work in humans. Cooperation among unrelated individuals, who do not share direct genetic interests in offspring, is uncommon in nature but ubiquitous in human societies. How did the capacity for large scale cooperation and altruistic social preferences arise within human societies? There are three major hypotheses to account for the evolution of the extraordinary capacity for large scale cooperation and altruistic social preferences within human societies. One hypothesis is that human cooperation is built on the same evolutionary foundations as cooperation in other animal societies, and that fundamental elements of the social preferences that shape our species’ cooperative behavior are also shared with other closely related primates. Another hypothesis is that selective pressures favoring cooperative breeding have shaped the capacity for cooperation and the development of social preferences, and produced a common set of behavioral dispositions and social preferences in cooperatively breeding primates and humans. The third hypothesis is that humans have evolved derived capacities for collaboration, group-level cooperation, and altruistic social preferences that are linked to our capacity for culture. In this talk, I will draw on naturalistic data to assess differences in the form, scope, and scale of cooperation between humans and other primates, experimental data to evaluate the nature of social preferences in humans other primates, and comparative analyses to evaluate the evolutionary origins of cooperative breeding and related forms of behavior.
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