The papers below lay the initial scientific groundwork on which the major theoretical project of our book, Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe, is based. Notice that this book is written for a global audience, but simultaneously carries an advanced scholarly message.
The theory we develop has extreme simplicity and great predictive power. Conflicts of interest between non-kin determine the social behavior of all animals at all times. We propose that humans are the first animals in Earth's history to gain control over these conflicts of interest, allowing the emergence of a vast, adaptively powerful new scale of social cooperation - the potentially Humane Universe. In turn, we acquired this control over conflicts of interest as a result of unprecedented access to inexpensive coercive threat - initially through the evolution of our novel ability to throw with elite skill, to project Death from a Distance. Inexpensive coercive threat makes "law enforcement" adaptively accessible. Everything uniquely human emerges as a result.
This approach apparently gives us the best theories of the human fossil record, of language evolution and of the emergence of our cognitive virtuosity we have ever had. Our theory also generalizes to the most powerful and complete theory of history we have ever possessed. Each adaptive revolution in the two million year human story results from playing the single, ancient human adaptive trick at ever larger scales - each new scale of social cooperation being enabled by the development of a new weapon allowing the domain of cost-effective law enforcement to be expanded. The behaviorally modern human revolution; the agricultural revolutions; the rise of the archaic and modern states; the modern economic miracle; and the ongoing contemporary emergence of pan-global human cooperation are all predicted, simply and transparently, by this theory.
Our theory apparently gives us the long-sought capacity to unify all the social sciences - from anthropology, linguistics and psychology through sociology, history and economics - and to join them with the natural sciences for the first time. A strong new unitary science of 'humanology' may be within our grasp. In addition to these substantial scientific/intellectual payoffs, a complete theory of human uniqueness also holds the promise of powerful new capacities for pragmatic and ethical action in pursuit of the common global human interest.
Okada, D. and P. M. Bingham (2008). Human uniqueness-self-interest and social cooperation. Journal of Theoretical Biology 253(2): 261-270.
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Bingham, P. M. (2000). Human evolution and human history: A complete theory. Evolutionary Anthropology 9(6): 248-257.
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Bingham, P. M. (1999). Human uniqueness: A general theory. Quarterly Review of Biology 74(2): 133-169.
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