This paper explains why self-adaptation does not explain the global political system at this time and postulate what conditions must be met if it did. Self-adaptation, if it were achieved and maintained in some proximate form, would constitute a phase transition.
Altruistic punishment may be the glue that holds societies together - by distributing and internalizing policing of free-riding, solving the second-order social dilemma that is an obstacle to collective action.
Exploration of games in which punishment is possible and cheating is not automatically detected reveals that norms can emerge and stabilize only if those who fail to punish violators are also punished.
The ability of humans to organize collective action on a scale much larger than would be predicted by theories of egocentric rationality can be perhaps best explained in an evolutionary context by the slow and uncertain process (not necessarily leading to a desired end) of group selection on cultural variation (distinct from group selection based only on genetic kinship), facilitated by humans' special skills at imitation and teaching.
This paper examines the notion that the enclosure of the information commons through the privatization of information that used to be in the public domain is part of a broad pattern of legal and political changes that are transforming several of the fundamental elements of modernity: science, scholarship, and law.
Network closure produces echo, gossip that reinforces dispositions rather than increasing information flow or the kind of trust that increases social capital.
Music may be a key driver of human biological and cultural evolution, enabling individual brains to engage in complex internal cognitive synchronization and externally attuning the brains of different individuals into group cooperative activity.
Patton attributes differences between two Ecuadorian ethnic/political groups in their willingness to cooperate in the Ultimatum Game to the groups' "differences in coalitional stability, perceptions of trust, and needs to maintain reputation," and emphasizes properties of the groups' political environment over individual differences.
Commons based peer production (e.g., free software) has emerged in the pervasively networked digital information economy as a third method of production which for some projects, has productivity gains, in the form of information and allocation gains, over market and firm-based production.
While existing studies on institutions for common-pool resource management have generated a relatively large number of universal design principles common to successful institutions, these principles apply to the institutions themselves; future research should include contextual factors of the resource, user group and external environment and focus on specific causal configurations of a more narrow range of interacting variables.
