A widespread claim in evolutionary theory is that every group se- lection model can be recast in terms of inclusive fitness. Although there are interesting classes of group selection models for which this is possible, we show that it is not true in general. With a simple set of group selection...

This paper reviews and addresses a variety of issues relating to inclusive fitness. The main question is: are there limits to the generality of inclusive fitness, and if so, what are the perimeters of the domain within which inclusive fitness works? This question is addressed using two well...

We study antisocial preferences in simple money-burning tasks. A decision maker can choose whether or not to reduce another person's payoff at an own cost. We vary across tasks the initial endowment of the decider and the victim. We find that most conventional expectations are refuted: Subjects...

Most of the literature on the evolution of human pro-sociality looks at reasons why evolution made us not play the Nash equilibrium in prisoners' dilemmas or public goods games. We suggest that in order to understand human morality, and human prosocial behavior, we should look at reasons why...

Alger and Weibull (2013) present a model for the evolution of preferences under incomplete information and assortative matching. Their main result is that Homo Moralis – who maximizes a convex combination of her narrow self-interest and “the right thing to do” – is evolutionarily stable,...

Evolutionary explanations of anger as a commitment device hinge on two key assumptions. The first is that it is predictable, ex-ante, whether someone will get angry when feeling that they have been badly treated. The second is that anger is associated with destructive behavior. We test the...

Rand et al. (2013) present a finite population model to explain the evolution of fair behaviour in the ultimatum game. They find that mutation and selection can balance at population states that resemble human behaviour, in that responders on average evolve sizable thresholds for rejection, and...

A widespread claim in evolutionary theory is that every group selection model can be recast in terms of inclusive fitness. Although there are interesting classes of group selection models for which this is possible, we show that it is not true in general. With a simple set of group selection...