I much appreciated being invited to write a contribution for this journal, but initially presumed that what was required was a comprehensive review of some major issue in biological anthropology. Indeed I drafted a contribution on the history of the subject during the second part of the...

Why did evolution not give us a utility function that is offspring alone? Why do we care intrinsically about other outcomes, such as food, and what determines the intensity of such preferences? A common view is that such other outcomes enhance fitness and the intensity of our preference for a...

The complexity that we observe in nature can often be explained in terms of cooperative behavior. For example, the major transitions of evolution required the emergence of cooperation among the lower-level units of selection, which led to specialization through division-of-labor ultimately...