The peacock’s tale: Lessons from evolution for effective signaling in international politics

February 14, 2012

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Daniel T. Blumstein1, Scott Atran2, Scott Field3, Michael E. Hochberg4, Dominic D. P. Johnson5, Raphael Sagarin6, Richard Sosis7, and Bradley Thayer8 1Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, 621 Young Drive South, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1606, USA. 2CNRS, Institut Jean Nicod-Ecole Normale Supérieure, 29 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris, France. 3National Security Affairs Department,… [Read more…]

Posted in: Political Science

Herbert Gintis: The Evolution of Human Cooperation

January 11, 2012

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Introduction The study of human cooperation today is the current state of a continuous line of intellectual inheritance from Adam Smith and David Hume, through Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, and Emile Durkheim, and more recently the biologists William Hamilton and Robert Trivers. But Adam Smith led in another direction, through David Ricardo, Francis Edgeworth, and… [Read more…]

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Ian Lustick: Institutional Rigidity and Evolutionary Theory: Trapped on a Local Maximum

November 5, 2011

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A prime focus for social scientists, and in particular political scientists, is on institutions. Institutions are stabilized sets of expectations that establish frameworks for social action that affect behavior because they affect calculations and inspire attachments. Institutions do change, but they change slower than life changes. This creates a paradoxical reality. On the one hand,… [Read more…]

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