PART I – THE COOPERATIVE ANIMAL
Question 1
How did an ape become a civilisation-building cooperative species?
Before asking why humans divide into tribes, perhaps we should start with the more surprising question:
How did we become so good at cooperating in the first place?
Humans are unusual animals. We cooperate not only with relatives and close friends, but with strangers, sometimes with millions of people we will never meet. We teach one another, share knowledge across generations, follow common rules, coordinate around shared goals and build institutions far beyond the capacity of any single individual.
None of this was inevitable.
So what changed during human evolution? How did an African ape acquire the capacity for language, shared intentions, cumulative culture, moral norms and cooperation on such extraordinary scales?
And there is a deeper puzzle at the heart of Beyond Tribes:
If cooperation is one of humanity’s greatest evolutionary strengths, why does it so often stop at the boundary of the group?
The questions we want to explore
- What makes human cooperation different from that of other animals?
- How did language, teaching and cumulative culture change the way our ancestors lived?
- Why do humans cooperate with people who are not relatives?
- What roles do reciprocity, reputation, punishment and social norms play?
- Did competition between groups help strengthen cooperation within them?
- How much of “human nature” is universal, and how much is created by culture?
This is where our journey begins: with the animal that learned to cooperate, and, eventually, learned to build civilisation.