In the ancestral environment, population densities were very low. My understanding is that almost everyone in your band would be at least somewhat related, or have an ambiguous degree of relatedness, and would be someone you’d rely on again and again. How often do we think interactions with true non-relatives actually happened?
I’m not sure there’s anything that needs to be explained here except “evolution didn’t stumble upon a low-cost low-risk reliable way for humans to defect against non-relatives for personal advantage as much as a hypothetical intelligently designed organism could have.” Is there?
Well of course there are no true non-relatives, even the sabertooth and antelopes are distant cousins. The question is how much you’re willing to give up for how distant cousins. Here I think the mechanism I describe changes the calculus.
I don’t think we know enough about the lifestyles of cultures/tribes in the ancestral environment, except we can be pretty sure they were extremely diverse. And all cultures we’ve ever found have some kind of incest taboo that promotes mating between members of different groups.
In the ancestral environment, population densities were very low. My understanding is that almost everyone in your band would be at least somewhat related, or have an ambiguous degree of relatedness, and would be someone you’d rely on again and again. How often do we think interactions with true non-relatives actually happened?
I’m not sure there’s anything that needs to be explained here except “evolution didn’t stumble upon a low-cost low-risk reliable way for humans to defect against non-relatives for personal advantage as much as a hypothetical intelligently designed organism could have.” Is there?
Well of course there are no true non-relatives, even the sabertooth and antelopes are distant cousins. The question is how much you’re willing to give up for how distant cousins. Here I think the mechanism I describe changes the calculus.
I don’t think we know enough about the lifestyles of cultures/tribes in the ancestral environment, except we can be pretty sure they were extremely diverse. And all cultures we’ve ever found have some kind of incest taboo that promotes mating between members of different groups.