SEMINAR: Attachment and the evolution of cooperation

The Seminar: Cooperation is the foundation of human social life and by any definition the essence of culture itself: shared meaning, value, and goals. But how it evolved remains a mystery. Game theory shows that it can evolve but is silent about mechanisms - what motivates us to cooperate? Moreover, evolutionary models of human cooperation attribute the benefits of cooperation largely to adults, raising questions about how they learned to cooperate. I argue instead that the motive to cooperate evolved out of the basic mammalian attachment process - that cooperation and culture began in mother-infant interaction.

The Speaker: Emeritus Professor Jim Chisholm received his BA with Honours in Anthropology from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT and his MPhil and PhD in Anthropology from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. He has conducted fieldwork among the Navajo and Aboriginal people in Arnhem Land and taught anthropology at the University of New Mexico, human development at the University of California, Davis and human evolutionary biology at UWA. After retiring from UWA in 2011 held a Senior Sabbatical Fellowship in the National Evolutionary Synthesis Centre at Duke University and then a Visiting Professorship in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. He uses the principles of evolutionary ecology, life history theory, sexual selection theory, and parental investment theory to investigate the role of early psychosocial stress and attachment history in the evolution and development of theory of mind and the capacity for culture and the development of alternative reproductive strategies and their implications for health capability. He is the author of Navajo Infancy: An Ethological Study of Child Development (Aldine de Gruyter) and Death, Hope and Sex: Steps to an Evolutionary Ecology of Mind and Morality (Cambridge University Press). He is currently writing a book on the role of emotion in the evolution of culture.