نقش نوشتن و ثبت در تکامل فرهنگی همکاری انسان ها

Efforts to account for the emergence of large-scale cooperative human societies have focused on a range of cultural advances, from the advent of agriculture to the emergence of new forms of political regulation and social identification. Little attention has been accorded to the role of writing and recordkeeping in cultural evolution. Recent insights garnered here from behavioural economics, palaeography, grammatology, evolutionary psychology, and anthropology suggest that writing and recordkeeping helps to solve the problem of cooperation in large groups by transcending the severe limitations of our evolved psychology through the elaboration of four cooperative tools – (1) reciprocal behaviours, (2) reputation formation and maintenance, (3) social norms and norm enforcement, and (4) group identity and empathy.

Our species’ ability to cooperate in large groups of unrelated individuals is perhaps our most important survival strategy. Humans rely on food, resources, labour, and information from fellow group members and routinely share these things with others. We do this on a scale that ranges from small hunter–gatherer societies of fifty or so individuals to large modern agriculturalist societies and nation states comprising thousands or millions of individuals. Such societies require individuals routinely to bear costs for the benefit of genetically unrelated individuals in a wide variety of ways, ranging from the remittance of tribute or tax to more extreme forms of self-sacrifice as cannon fodder on the battlefield. Explaining the evolution of this level of cooperation presents a theoretical puzzle because co-operators in a population are vulnerable to exploitation by free-riders who reap the benefits of cooperation without paying the costs.