Emergency decisions, cultural-selection mechanics, and group selection

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 with a focus on emergency adaptive problem solving and its implications for both cultural- and gene-selection theory. Urgently discussed decision alternatives become apprehensible to fieldworkers through open group debate, while the reproductive effects of decisions are readily assessed whenever groups act in unison. Implications for the development of a more effective theory of cultural microselection and a truly processual definition of culture in its guided phase are suggested. With respect to long-term genetic evolution, the implications of emergency decision making are extended to foragers, exploring special possibilities that enable genetic group selection to become robust when groups are egalitarian and engage in consensual problem solving. Prehistorically, the verdict is that group-selection effects were amplified at the same time that individual effects were suppressed. On this basis it is hypothesized that the genetic evolution of human cooperative and altruistic tendencies can be explained in part by selection at the level of groups rather than inclusive fitness.