How did evolution and institutions in tandem allow hunter gatherers to become cosmopolitan participants in market economies?
Paul Seabright: The important part of the story is to emphasize that this is an opportunistic experiment. It’s quite common when you look at animal behavior, for example, to say that their behavior must have proved adaptive for them, that it fits their environment. Implicitly when we do that, we’re saying that the environment today is the same as the environment in which the species evolved. So we use a kind of functionalist explanation that accounts for the evolution of the behavior in terms of its adaptiveness in that environment. The key thing about human beings is that our environment is as much each other as it is a particular natural ecology, and that component of our environment, the social component, has changed spectacularly in the last ten millennia. Therefore, the things we do can’t possibly be explained in a very simple way as having evolved through ordinary natural selection for the environment in which we find ourselves today. So we have to patch together an argument cons
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