Targeted conspiratorial killing, human self-domestication and the evolution of groupishness

Abstract

Groupishness is a set of tendencies to respond to group members with prosociality and cooperation in ways that transcend apparent self-interest. Its evolution is puzzling because it gives the impression of breaking the ordinary rules of natural selection. Boehm’s solution is that moral elements of groupishness originated and evolved as a result of group members becoming efficient executioners of antisocial individuals, and he noted that self-domestication would have proceeded from the same dynamic. Self-domestication is indicated first at ~300,000 years ago and has probably gathered pace ever since, suggesting selection for self-domestication and groupishness for at least 12,000 generations. Here I propose that a specifically human style of violence, targeted conspiratorial killing, contributed importantly to both self-domestication and to promoting groupishness. Targeted conspiratorial killing is unknown in chimpanzees or any other vertebrate, and is significant because it permits coalitions to kill antisocial individuals cheaply. The hypothesis that major elements of groupishness are due to targeted conspiratorial killing helps explain why they are much more elaborated in humans than in other species.