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This chapter examines the role that institutions and organizations play in making cooperation possible as we go about our everyday lives. Successful organizations are often the ones that build on the successes of previous organizations, using their abilities to mobilize and motivate people and to frame issues to leapfrog over the collective action dilemma. One of the most important areas of research to grow out of this tradition is the study of how groups of people successfully manage common-pool resources. The chapter first considers the distinction between informal, decentralized norms and conventions on the one hand, and formal organizations on the other, before explaining why organizations succeed or fail. It also explores the process known as “cultural group selection,” an important new frontier in the evolutionary study of cooperation which may help explain our flexible coalitional psychology.

Chapter 2 presents the first part of religion’s evolutionary story. It is argued that our ancestors went through a critical social transformation sometime between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago and that religion emerged as a part of this transformation. To fully understand how this transformation took place, the chapter reviews the basics of evolution by natural selection and then turns more specifically to the evolution of morality and altruism. Evidence is presented supporting the notion that cultural group selection played an important role in the evolution of religion and that religious groups outcompeted “secular” groups by virtue of greater within-group cooperativeness. This cooperativeness was achieved because religion increased social scrutiny. Religious people believed they were under the constant gaze of supernatural agents, therefore compelling them to adhere more scrupulously to group norms of generosity, reciprocity, and self-sacrifice.

The male flash of anger illustrates how evolutionary psychology and cultural anthropology provide complementary components in vertically integrated explanations. Anger is a response to transgression and accounts for the age- and sex-biased distribution of violent risk-taking behavior. Evolutionary psychology also provides an ultimate explanation for the processes occurring at the level of the neurotransmitter: childhood experience influences adult risk-taking propensities, while culturally-constituted socialization practices and interactional patterns shape childhood experience, inscribing culturally-preferred responses to transgression on individual actors; these tacit lessons are further reinforced by overt morally weighted cultural schemas and lexicons. Cultural group selection can occur because those systems that most successfully meet the challenges posed by the socioecological setting are most likely to prosper and spread. Because any given system is the product of unique historical events, even dysfunctional beliefs and practices may persist.

In complex systems theory, two meanings of a complex adaptive system (CAS) need to be distinguished. The first, CAS1, refers to a complex system that is adaptive as a system; the second, CAS2, refers to a complex system of agents which follow adaptive strategies. Examples of CAS1 include the brain, the immune system, and social insect colonies. Examples of CAS2 include multispecies ecosystems and the biosphere. This chapter uses multilevel selection theory to clarify the relationships between CAS1 and CAS2. The general rule is that for a complex system to qualify as CAS1, selection must occur at the level of the complex system (e.g., individual-level selection for brains and the immune system, colony-level selection for social insect colonies). Selection below the level of the system tends to undermine system-level functional organization. This general rule applies to human social systems as well as biological systems and has profound consequences for economics and public policy.

This chapter defends an essentially individualist model of the evolution of cooperation amongst Pleistocene foragers. The chapter argues that these foragers satisfied the conditions of the “folk theorem” of stable reciprocation-based cooperation. Their social groups were small and stable, with very high probabilities of future interaction. They were informationally transparent: reputation was very reliable. The rewards of cooperation were high, and the temptations to defect were rarely large. The costs of sanctioning defection were typically modest, and reputation was reliable enough and valuable enough to make investments in reputation through cooperating in controlling defection worth paying. Foragers cooperated because it was almost always in their individual interest to do so. The chapter argues against the idea that group selection drove the evolution of foraging cooperation; these views underestimate the costs of conflict; overestimate its benefits, and are not supported by the archaeological record. Third, the chapter shows that the selective environment changed at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, as groups became sedentary and larger. These changes eroded the forager equilibrium, moreover group-group conflict is much more significant in the archaeological record from this time. While much remains unclear about the origins of farming and more complex social units, it is clear that the evolutionary basis of cooperation changed radically through this transition.

This chapter argues that language, which rests on the sharing of linguistic norms, honest information, and moral norms, evolved through a co-evolutionary process with a pivotal role for intersubjectivity. Mainstream evolutionary models, based only on individual-level and gene-level selection, are suggested to be incapable to account for such sharing of care, values and information, thus implying the need to evoke multi-level selection, including (cultural) group selection. Four of the most influential current theories of the evolution of human-scale sociality, those of Dunbar, Deacon, Tomasello, and Hrdy, are compared and evaluated on the basis of their answers to five questions: (1) Why we and not others? (2) How: by what mechanisms? (3) When? (4) In what kind of social settings? (5) What are the implications for ontogeny? The conclusions are that the theories are to a large degree complementary, and that they all assume, explicitly or not, a role for group selection.

This chapter furnishes a new theoretical foundation for thinking about the economics of innovation and the innovation problem as a knowledge problem, and a collective action problem, and therefore a governance problem. The theory of the innovation commons is therefore based in new institutional economics. It builds on the analytic frameworks of four key theorists: Deirdre McCloskey on the moral and cultural foundations under which innovation can occur as an evolutionary social process; Friedrich Hayek on “use of knowledge in society,” on cultural evolution, on the ideas of both distributed knowledge and group selection; Oliver Williamson on the coordination problem of idiosyncratic investment under uncertainty and the hazards that contains; and Elinor Ostrom, who resolves the Hayek and Williamson knowledge conditions with a general solution to the collective action problem of knowledge discovery by pooling knowledge through institutional evolution.