The Problem of Exporting Cultural Norms and Cultural Practices

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I'll be curious to see if any many mediaevalists who study the development of the church in detail, you know, how they receive that ttha theory. It also gets to this problem of spreading democracy. Cause we have this idea, while democracy is great, so we should help other people get become democracies. And all right, let's invade a rack, and we'll bring democracy to these people. Well, they didn't work out so well. As near as i could figure, it's because they're so tribal that the idea of this kind of large, nation wide democratic process we think of as good doesn't work if you have these devoted and often in conflict, tribes

Cooperation is the means by which life arose in the first place. It’s how we progressed through scale and complexity, from free-floating strands of genetic material, to nation states. But given what we know about the mechanisms of evolution, cooperation is also something of a puzzle. How does cooperation begin? A biologist by training, Nichola Raihani looks at where and how collaborative behavior emerges throughout the animal kingdom, and what problems it solves. She reveals that the species that exhibit cooperative behavior — teaching, helping, grooming, and self-sacrifice — most similar to our own tend not to be other apes; they are birds, insects, and fish, occupying far more distant branches of the evolutionary tree. By understanding the problems they face, and how they cooperate to solve them, we can glimpse how human cooperation first evolved. And we can also understand what it is about the way we cooperate that has made humans so distinctive and so successful.