Primate Rituals (Bonobo Love)

Primate Prosociality

“Ritual” Signals & Trust

Selfishness v. Altruism

Explaining Altruism Kin Selection (Inclusive Fitness) Reciprocal Altruism (Tit for Tat)

Language Opens Pandora’s Box (1) Language is the key evolutionary adaptation which makes us “human.” (2)For all its benefits, language creates two critical problems: (a) the ability to lie, and (b) conceptual alternatives: (a) Lying poses a serious and potentially fatal threat to trust; and (b) Conceptual alternatives entail choice and choosing between them creates conflict. (3) These two language problems disrupt, destabilize, and/or destroy social order. (4) After language evolved, humans had to address and overcome these twin threats; social order would otherwise be impossible. (5) Humans preserve social order, and address these twin threats, through ritual:

I will argue that the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers [i.e., “ritual”] logically entails the establishment of convention, the scaling of social contract, the construction of integrated conventional orders, the investment of what it encodes with morality, the construction of time and eternity, the representation of a paradigm of creation, the generation of the concept of the sacred, the sanctification of the social order, the generation of theories of the occult [i.e., the hidden or invisible], the evocation of numinous experience, the awareness of the divine, the grasp of the holy, and the construction of orders of meaning transcending the semantic.