Abstract
The paper presents a bioeconomics theory of homogeneous middleman groups (HMGs) as adaptive units as well as empirical evidence in the form of a number of historical case studies of HMGs functioning as adaptive units in less-developed economies lacking infrastructure. The evidence presented is not new: most of the case studies have been published [Landa (in Jenkins (Ed.) The informal sector: Including the excluded, 1988)]. What is new, however, is analyzing the phenomena of HMGs in a new way—as adaptive units viewed from a group selection perspective. In doing so, the case studies in this paper present empirical evidence of the existence and importance of group selection in human society.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the ‘Bioeconomics’ panel, Public Choice Society meetings, March 22–24, 2002, San Diego, California; ‘Evolutionary Approaches to Religion’ organized by Richard Sosis, at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Conference on ‘Religion, Economics, and Culture’ held October 22–24, 2004, Kansas City, Missouri; the ‘Evolutionary Concepts in Economics and Biology’ Workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for Research into Economic Systems in Jena, Germany, Dec. 2–4, 2004 and at the Department of Economics, University of Turin, May 19, 2005. I thank the late Jack Hirshleifer for helpful comments on an early version of the paper, and to Michael Ghiselin and Alexander Field for helpful comments on a recent version of the paper. Finally, I thank David Sloan Wilson for encouraging me to write this paper as a target paper and providing helpful comments on the final version of this paper.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Landa, J.T. The bioeconomics of homogeneous middleman groups as adaptive units: Theory and empirical evidence viewed from a group selection framework. J Bioecon 10, 259–278 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-008-9043-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-008-9043-8
Keywords
- Adaptation
- Complex regulatory mechanisms
- Major life transitions
- Social norms
- Institutions
- Trust
- Kinship
- Ethnicity
- Clubs
- Multilevel selection
- Cultural group selection
- In-group cooperation
- Between-group competition
- Cultural bearing and transmission units
- Dual-inheritance theory
- Ethnocentrism