Christopher Boehm

University of Southern California | USC · Department of Biological Sciences

Donald Trump's posturing often seems like a classic alpha display, says Christopher Boehm

We provide the most up-to-date evidence available in various behavioral fields in support of the hypothesis that the emergence of bipedalism and cooperative breeding in the hominin line—together with environmental developments that made a diet of meat from large animals adaptive as well as cultural innovation in the form of fire and cooking—created...

For half a century explaining human altruism has been a major research focus for scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, yet answers are still sought. Here, paradigms like reciprocal altruism, mutualism, and group selection are set aside, to examine the effects of social selection as an under-explored model. To complement Alexander's reputationa...

Have humans always waged war? Is warring an ancient evolutionary adaptation or a relatively recent behavior—and what does that tell us about human nature? This book brings together experts in evolutionary biology, archaeology, anthropology, and primatology to answer fundamental questions about peace, conflict, and human nature in an evolutionary co...

Why is it so hard to punish bankers for their scandalous behaviour? Have our evolved moral instincts failed us, wonders Christopher Boehm

Christopher Boehm relishes a wide-ranging assessment of primate morality.

Ancestral Pan, the shared predecessor of humans, bonobos, and chimpanzees, lived in social dominance hierarchies that created conflict through individual and coalitional competition. This ancestor had male and female mediators, but individuals often reconciled independently. An evolutionary trajectory is traced from this ancestor to extant hunter-g...

Hunter-gatherer punishment involves costs and benefits to individuals and groups, but the costs do not necessarily fit with the assumptions made in models that consider punishment to be altruistic--which brings in the free-rider problem and the problem of second-order free-riders. In this commentary, I present foragers' capital punishment patterns...

Homicide often spurs lethal retaliation through self-help and this response is widespread among human foragers because brothers are often co-resident in mobile bands. The roots of this behaviour can be traced back to the shared ancestor of humans, chimpanzees and bonobos, which had strong tendencies to form social dominance hierarchies and to fight...

Triangulating to human nature generally is accomplished by finding analogies with nonhuman primates, by searching for overt behaviors that are universal, by identification of emotions that can be correlated with physiological responses or brain rewards, or by use of appropriate selection scenarios. An additional method is proposed, which focuses on...

Special epistemological problems arise when exotic systems of ideas and affects are studied by a foreigner. Difficulties in knowing “the native view” are discussed, and a partial solution for this epistemological problem is proposed. Exemplification through substantive semantic analysis of a key morality term used by Montenegrin tribesmen results i...

Programmed to Learn: An Essay on the Evolution of Culture. H. Ronald Pulliam and Christopher Dunford. Population Pressure and Cultural Adjustment. Virginia Abernethy.

Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy. Michele M. Moody-Adams. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 260 pp.

Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. 394 pp.

This chapter explores the deep evolutionary roots of altruism and healing. It discusses medical practices among apes, as well as their medical helping behaviours. It then moves to a focus on the role of the shaman as an altruistic healer and the salutary aspects of reduced stress in the agent of altruism. It shows that the roots of genetic altruism...

With an interest in origins, it is proposed that conflict within the group can be taken as a natural focus for exploring the evolutionary development of human moral communities. Morality today involves social control but also the management of conflicts within the group. It is hypothesized that early manifestations of morality involved the identifi...

Proponents of the standard evolutionary biology paradigm explain human “altruism” in terms of either nepotism or strict reciprocity. On that basis our underlying nature is reduced to a function of inclusive fitness: human nature has to be totally selfish or nepotistic. Proposed here are three possible paths to giving costly aid to nonrelatives, pat...

Are humans by nature hierarchical or egalitarian? Hierarchy in the Forest addresses this question by examining the evolutionary origins of social and political behavior. Christopher Boehm, an anthropologist whose fieldwork has focused on the political arrangements of human and nonhuman primate groups, postulates that egalitarianism is in effect a h...

With nothing more than kin selection and reciprocal altruism theories to work with, the selection basis of human degrees of altruism and cooperation is often difficult to explain. However, during our prehistoric foraging phase, a highly stable egalitarian syndrome arose that had profound effects on Darwinian selection mechanics. The band's insisten...

Emergency behaviors of nonliterate groups are taken as a useful starting point for demonstrating that decisions can be integrated more directly into cultural analysis and that the explanatory payoffs can be far-reaching. The methodological feasibility of studying group decisions directly is explored through three exceptional tribal ethnographies wi...

Egalitarian society is ''explained'' chiefly in terms of ecological or social factors that are self-organizing. However, egalitarian behavior is found in a wide variety of social and ecological settings, and the indications are that such societies are deliberately shaped by their members. This paper looks to egalitarian behavior as an instance of d...

In this cross-cultural study of manhood as an achieved status, the author finds that a culturally sanctioned stress on manliness - on toughness and aggressiveness, stoicism and sexuality - is almost universal, and deeply ingrained in the consciousness of men who otherwise have little in common.

This chapter develops an expanded adaptation of Hockett’s design features of language, to compare the purely-vocal communication of humans and free-ranging chimpanzees. The hypothesis is that a chimpanzee type of vocal communication system provides an important preadaptation that could have facilitated the origin of human language. This preadaptati...

A very special form of selection mechanics is explored, through which individuals belonging to species exhibiting some considerable cognitive sophistication key their behavior to outcomes that are directly germane to evolutionary micro-process (blind genetic variation-and-selective-retention), and make realistic decisions that enhance their own rep...

Clan execution among feuding tribal societies is proposed as a significant precursor to modern law. This form of ostracism is examined with respect to its social control functions and the indigenous assumptions about behavior, genes and demography that guide the behavior. It is suggested that there are very close parallels between modern legal syst...

Morality may be defined as the problem solving activities of a moral community, a primary group which uses a wide range of sanctions directly to reduce conflict, which also sanctions perceived causes of conflict, and defines and controls other deviances judged to be antisocial. So defined, morality is a precondition for law. In comparing human with...

Sociobiological arguments for altruism as a universal moral behavior selected for at the genetic level are examined, and strengths and fallacies in sociobiological reasoning are exposed. Then, a broader context is created for asking questions as to the causes of moral universals. The moral system is proposed as a universally present subsystem of th...

Comments on D. T. Campbell's (see record 1976-12046-001) application of evolutionary theory to human social behavior and concludes that Campbell has impressively synthesized the thinking available in many fields concerning cultural evolution. However, in his analysis he has not carried certain psychological dimensions (i.e., variability, selection,...

Simultaneously a symbol for benevolent hospitality and hostile insularity, the American small town and its surrounding rural areas have assumed many faces and forms in both filmic and literary representations over the last hundred years. Whereas the metropolis carries with it a specific history and culture that is known, at least in part, by an aud...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1972.