. Socially enforced rules create powerful environmental pressures, and the lowest-cost strategy to avoid social penalties becomes preemptive self-control. Impulse control (whatever your genetic predispositions) has long been adaptive for humans. Even for powerful humans, because “counter-dominant coalitions” punish “resented alpha-male behavior” (like hogging an unfair share of meat). Ultimately this becomes inverted eugenics: eliminate the strong, if they abuse their power. 5. This premium on self-control shaped our moral sense, our capacity to internalize our culture’s behavioral rules and feel strongly that certain behaviours are definitively right or wrong. Shame and guilt — i.e. our moral emotions that likely serve as evolutionarily useful “fast thinking” — enable “self-policed” social contracts. 6. Our prior “apelike…fear-based social order” changed to include “internalizing rules and worrying about personal reputations.” Conscious, reputation-based social selection for collaborative activities subsequently became dominant. Those known to be poor cooperators would not be selected for joint ventures, including the massively expensive business of raising new humans. Boehm calls this tendency for team players to breed with each other “auto-domestication” (we bred ourselves for cooperation). 7. However plausible Boehm’s “moral origins” story seems, key aspects are hard to deny. Humans objectively have culturally configurable social-rule processors (i.e. a “moral sense”). Put another way: It is in our nature to need rules. By enabling improved social productivity, rules beat no rules. Our social-rule processors work like our language-rule processors in that both evolved for social coordination. We automatically absorb the (often tacit) rules of our native cultures grammar and behavioral norms. As Alison Gopnik notes: an “impulse to follow rules …seems…innate” and it emerges untutored. Toddlers act in “genuinely moral” ways, understanding that certain rules should not be broken. Moralities, like languages, likely have an underlying universal structure that cultures configure differently (e.g. Jonathan Haidt’s six component mix: fairness, care, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity.) 8. Once our social-rule processors arose, their cultural configurations also became subject to “productivity selection.” We’re descended from those with the fitter traits, and tools, and rules (i.e the higher productivity moralities). Perhaps common patterns in extant hunter-gatherer habits harbor lessons? 9. Economics today faces the same basic issues Boehm describes, further complicated by the evolutionarily recent rise of agriculture, cities, and industrialization, and the opportunities for un-egalitarian accumulation they created. But none of that negates key features of team survival logic (especially the viable limits of self-maximising). - http://evolution-institute.org/article/how-to-create-a-cooperative-darwinian-economy-in-23-steps/?source=tvol