EMERGENCY DECISIONS, CULTURAL-SELECTION MECHANICS, AND GROUP SELECTION

Emergency behaviors of nonliterate groups are taken as a useful starti ng point for demonstrating that decisions can be integrated more direc tly 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 wi th a focus on emergency adaptive problem solving and its implications for both cultural- and gene-selection theory. Urgently discussed decis ion alternatives become apprehensible to fieldworkers through open gro up debate, while the reproductive effects of decisions are readily ass essed whenever groups act in unison. Implications for the development of a more effective theory of cultural microselection and a truly proc essual definition of culture in its guided phase are suggested. With r espect to long-term genetic evolution, the implications of emergency d ecision making are extended to foragers, exploring special possibiliti es that enable genetic group selection to become robust when groups ar e egalitarian and engage in consensual problem solving. Prehistoricall y, the verdict is that group-selection effects were amplified at the s ame time that individual effects were suppressed. On this basis it is hypothesized that the genetic evolution of human cooperative and altru istic tendencies can be explained in part by selection at the level of groups rather than inclusive fitness.