Abstract
Humans are extremely prosocial and there are many possible explanations for how we came to be this way. Some have suggested that commitments explain the evolution of human prosociality. Commitments can serve to secure mutually beneficial interaction in the face of short-term incentives to cheat. In this paper, I have two aims. First, I argue that commitment not only applies to familiar practices such as promising but also explains small-scale collaboration among humans as early as two million years ago. In particular, it explains the stability of group hunting. In doing so, I provide a precisification of the concept of commitment. Second, I argue that earlier, non-linguistic forms of commitment can act as an evolutionary scaffold for more complex forms. As such, I will demonstrate how commitment can be understood to have coevolved with human cooperation. The coevolution of commitment and cooperation over our evolutionary history is, I suggest, a crucial part of the explanation of modern human prosociality.
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Notes
Others have pushed back against the early emergence of hunting as important to hominin evolution. See, for example, Barr et al. (2022) and related citations. However, the fact that early hominin hunting is an important form of cooperation in need of explanation and that it had a role to play in the emergence of other forms of cooperation is uncontroversial. The relative merits of other early behaviours (such as cooperative breeding) in the evolution of distinctively human cooperation is not the subject of this paper, though I do believe commitment offers an explanation of other such shared activities.
See Boesch (1994) for a rebuttal.
Despite the evidence presented here, contingency in food sharing is not observed in all forager societies. See, for example, the sharing practices of the Ache with respect to large game (Kaplan et al. 2005).
There is also some evidence of tolerance for slacking and tolerated theft. Among the Siriono, the elderly are known to steal food. Though not directly punished, they are subject to negative gossip (Holmberg 1969). This is not surprising, since we would expect a stable level of defection to coexist with cooperation in equilibrium.
The evidence needed to substantiate the claim that simpler, sex-based differences in behaviour suffice to explain the stability of group hunting would be that male cooperatively hunting species punish males who do not signal they will participate in the hunt. There is as yet no evidence of this in hominins or closely related species. However, we do have evidence that those who signal participation and subsequently defect are punished, in support of the commitment hypothesis.
Of course, this is not to say that innovation increased at a consistent rate following these developments. There are many periods of debated stasis in the early Acheulean.
The precise details of the transition to decontextualised communication is not of importance. See Tomasello (2014) for an exposition.
Note that Tomasello believes “joint commitment” relies on such capacities but he is working with a very different notion of “commitment” than used in this paper.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kyle Stanford and Kim Sterelny for their continued support of my research interests. I also thank Adrian Currie, Ross Pain, Carl Brusse, Paul Griffiths, Kate Lynch and others at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney for reading drafts of this paper. Thanks also to the participants of the Philosophy of Biology conference at Dolphin Beach for their input on these ideas.
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Khan, S. Commitment: From Hunting to Promising. Biol Philos 39, 5 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-024-09940-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-024-09940-6