Beyond Extended Phenotype Evolution of extended identity in order to reconcile study of humanity with biological evolution

Taddese Mezgebo

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The question: “How much of biological evolution based theories, as they are understood presently, apply to human behaviour?” is highly controversial and perhaps highly politicized as well. The inference that human beings are evolutionarily programmed to have urges toward aggression, rape, murder, adultery, genocide and so on is a politically rejected idea within the social sciences. To be politically correct those who use evolutionary framework do claim that people can learn or have capacity for self restraint. However it is not clearly understood, how such restraint can possibly evolve within the evolutionary framework. This paper argues that the missing link that explains such behavior is the concept of extended identity. How extended identity can evolve, following the framework of selfish gene, is explained by integrating theories related to selfish gene, institutional analysis, information economics and social capital literature. Archaeological evidence from evolutionary cognition is also used to show that such evolution could happen 4 million years ago (MYA).

Keywords: extended identity; extended phenotype; selfish gene; asymmetric information; evolution; trust; social capital; imperfect information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B52 J1 P00 Z10 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-03-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-hme
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/54392/1/MPRA_paper_54392.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:54392

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).