Kim Sterelny – Norms: Cooperation, Scale and Complexity 

Just about everyone who works on the evolution of social or moral norms connects the evolution of norms to the distinctive character of human cooperation. More specifically, important recent work has connected the evolution of norms to the scale of human cooperative life: this idea is developed in somewhat different ways in Michael Tomasello’s Natural History of Human Morality; Robert Boyd’s A Difference Kind of Animal; and Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success. I accept the broadest outlines of this picture: I agree that the emergence of norms is linked to both cooperation and complexity. But I shall argue that they key driver is economic complexity; the changing nature of the returns on cooperation, rather than social scale. Scale is indeed challenging; but in my view, that challenge came later, around the Pleistocene/Holocene transition.