Love, War and Cultures: an Institutional Approach to Human Evolution

Ugo Pagano

Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena

Abstract: Love, War and Culture have all played an important role in the evolution of human institutions and they have been characterized by complex relationships. War can select unselfish groups ready to sacrifice themselves for the love of their communities that they recognize to be culturally different from the others. At the same time, horizontal cultural differentiation cannot be taken for granted. Culture is the outcome of long evolutionary processes. It requires some human specific characteristics, including a large brain, that are likely to have been influenced by sexual selection and by the peculiar structure of human love affairs. Thus, if war may have generated love, also the reverse may be true: by favoring the development of human culture, love may have produced the conditions for war among culturally differentiated groups. In turn, war may have co-evolved with group solidarity only under the prevailing social arrangements of hunting and gathering economies. In general, human relations have been influenced by the prevailing features of the goods (private, public and positional) that have characterized production in different stages of history. They have been embedded in institutions involving very different levels of inequality, ranging from mostly egalitarian hunting and gathering societies to typically hierarchical agrarian societies and to wealthdifferentiated industrial societies. The perspectives of the present-day knowledge-intensive economy can also be seen through the same institutional approach to human evolution. The different nature of contemporary production processes involves a new set of alternative possible arrangements that have different implications for social (in)equality and different capabilities to satisfy basic human needs.

Keywords: Evolution; Complementarities; Human Capabilities; Knowledge (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B20 J13 J16 N40 P51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-his and nep-hme
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.deps.unisi.it/quaderni/632.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Love, war and cultures: an institutional approach to human evolution (2013)
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:usi:wpaper:632

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Fabrizio Becatti ().