Dan Jones strikes again with a lengthy review of the two recent papers on higher primate altruism. Extrapolating from forms of kin selection or reciprocal altruism which seem extremely productive in explaining the behavior of other social species might be of limited utility in characterizing our own species’ highly textured communal structures. Though insights from insect societies are probably good starting points, it seems plausible to me that we will find that human prosocial adaptations will have modulate the details of behavorial ecological models (eg., “theory of mind“).
