HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION A Conversation with Joseph Henrich 文化如何推动人类进化：与Joseph Henrich对话 时间:@ 2012-09-04

译者:沈沉(@你在何地-sxy)

校对:慕白(@李凤阳他说)

来源: https://www.edge.org/conversation/joseph_henrich-how-culture-drove-human-evolution Part of my program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution. 导言：我的研究课题之一就是要让人们相信，我们应该停止以常见的方式在文化进化和生物进化之间做出截然区分。我们应该将整件事情当作生物进化过程来看待。

JOSEPH HENRICH is an anthropologist and Professor of Psychology and Economics. He is the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Coevolution at University of British Columbia.

约瑟夫·亨里奇是一名人类学家，同时还担任心理学与经济学教授。他还是英属哥伦比亚大学（UBC）文化、认知和协同进化“加拿大首席研究员”。

[JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution—and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it.

约瑟夫·亨里奇：过去几年，我反复追问自己的一个主要问题，大体上就是文化如何推动人类进化。我会回溯至人类刚刚获得累积性的文化进化能力的时候。我说的这种能力是指，观念在代际间不断积累，从很简单的东西发展出日益复杂的工具的能力。一代人添加一点点东西，下一代人又添加一点点东西，如此接力，直到最后得出的工具无比复杂，以至第一代人无论如何不可能发明出来。

This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

这在人类进化中确实是非常重要的一条线索，我们现在已经开始探究一种叫做文化大脑假说的观点，这种观点认为，人脑增大的真正动力就是，文化信息以这种方式不断累积，由此导致我们的大脑越来越善于获取信息，存储、处理和传递这种非基因信息体。

The two systems begin interacting over time, and the most important selection pressures over the course of human evolution are the things that culture creates—like tools. Compared to chimpanzees, we have high levels of manual dexterity. We're good at throwing objects. We can thread a needle. There are  aspects of our brain that seem to be consistent with that as being an innate ability, but tools and artifacts (the kinds of things that one finds useful to throw or finds useful to manipulate) are themselves products of cultural evolution.



随着时间推移，两个系统开始相互作用。在人类进化的过程中，最重要的选择压力正是文化所生成的事物，比如工具。与黑猩猩相比，我们的手要灵巧得多，比如我们善于抛掷东西，我们能够穿针引线。我们大脑的某些方面与此高度协调，使得这种能力看上去似乎与生俱来，但工具和人工制品——那种我们觉得扔出去有用或操作起来有用的东西——本身则是文化进化的产物。



Another example here is fire and cooking. Richard Wrangham, for example, has argued that fire and cooking have been important selection pressures, but what often gets overlooked in understanding fire and cooking is that they're culturally transmitted—we're terrible at making fires actually. We have no innate fire-making ability. But once you got this idea for cooking and making fires to be culturally transmitted, then it created a whole new selection pressure that made our stomachs smaller, our teeth smaller, our gapes or holdings of our mouth smaller, it altered the length of our intestines. It had a whole bunch of downstream effects.



另外一个例子就是用火和烹饪。Richard Wrangham就提出，用火和烹饪一直都是非常重要的选择压力。但在看待用火和烹饪的问题上，经常容易忽略的一点是，它们实际是通过文化进行传递的——人类原本是不怎么会生火的。我们不具备生火的先天能力。但一旦烹饪和生火的观念通过文化得以传递，就创造出一种全新的选择压力，使我们的胃容量变小、牙齿变小、嘴能张开的幅度变小，一口能吃下的东西也变少，而且我们肠道的长度也发生改变。这就带来了一系列的下游效应。



Another area that we've worked on is social status. Early work on human status just took humans to have a kind of status that stems from non-human status. Chimps, other primates, have dominant status. The assumption for a long time was that status in humans was just a kind of human version of this dominant status, but if you apply this gene-culture co-evolutionary thinking, the idea that culture is one of the major selection pressures in human evolution, you come up with this idea that there might be a second kind of status. We call this status prestige.



我们研究的另一个领域是社会地位。有关人类社会地位的早期研究只是简单地假定，人类的地位有其非人类时期的根源。黑猩猩和其他灵长类社群中都有拥有宰制地位的个体。长期以来，人们假定，人类的地位属性只不过是动物群体中的宰制地位的人类版本。但如果运用这种“基因和文化协同进化”的观念，也就是说把文化作为人类进化中的一种主要选择压力，你就会意识到或许存在另外一种类型的地位。我们称其为“威望地位”。



This is the kind of status you get from being particularly knowledgeable or skilled in an area, and the reason it's a kind of status is because once animals, humans in this case, can learn from each other, they can possess resources.



当你在某个领域的知识特别丰富或技能特别熟练时，你就能得到这种地位。这之所以能成为一种地位，是因为一旦动物（此处就是人）能够彼此学习，它们自身便可拥有资源【
编注：此句较绕口，意思是相互学习的可能性，使得个体所拥有的知识成为一种对他人也有价值的人力资源
】。



You have information resources that can be tapped, and then you want to isolate the members of your group who are most likely to have a lot of this resources, meaning a lot of the knowledge or information that could be useful to you in the future. This causes you to focus on those individuals, differentially attend to them, preferentially listen to them and give them deference in exchange for knowledge that you get back, for copying opportunities in the future.



如果存在可资利用的信息资源，那你就会想把你所属团体之中最有可能拥有大量此类资源的人单独区分出来，这是一大堆你将来有可能用得上的知识或信息。这会促使你关注这些人，特别地留意他们，更乐于倾听他们的意见，敬重他们，以此作为从他们那里获得知识、在未来运用这些知识的回报。

From this we've argued that humans have two separate kinds of status, dominance and prestige, and these have quite different ethologies. Dominance [ethology] is about physical posture, of size (large expanded chest the way you'd see in apes). Subordinates in dominance hierarchies are afraid. They back away. They look away, where as prestige hierarchies are quite the opposite.

基于此，我们认为人类存在两种不同类型的地位，分别是宰制和威望，分别对应着不同的动物行为学。宰制（行为学）核心在于身体块头的展示（你能在猿类身上看到的那种大块胸肌）。在宰制等级中，处于从属地位的个体会感到害怕。他们会退缩。他们不会正视上级，而在威望等级中情况则正好相反。

You're attracted to prestigious individuals. You want to be near them. You want to look at them, watch them, listen to them, and interact with them. We've done a bunch of experimental work here at UBC and shown that that pattern is consistent, and it leads to more imitation. There may be even specific hormonal profiles with the two kinds of status.

你会被有威望的个体所吸引。你渴望亲近他们。你渴望看着他们，观察他们，倾听他们，与他们交往。在UBC（不列颠哥伦比亚大学），我们已经就此做过一连串实验，证明了这种模式总是存在，而且会引发更多的模仿。这两种不同的地位可能还对应着各自不同的激素配置。

I've also been trying to think broadly, and some of the big questions are, exactly when did this body of cumulative cultural evolution get started? Lately I've been pursuing the idea that it may have started early: at the origins of the genus, 1.8 million years ago when Homo habilis or Homo erectus first begins to emerge in Africa.

此外，我也一直在试图思考一些更为宏大的问题，比如，这一累积性的文化进化体到底是从什么时候开始的？最近，我一直致力于澄清一个想法，那就是它可能开始得很早：很可能在人属出现时就开始了，也就是180万年前能人或直立人最早出现于非洲的时候。

Typically, people thinking about human evolution have approached this as a two-part puzzle, as if there was a long period of genetic evolution until either 10,000 years ago or 40,000 years ago, depending on who you're reading, and then only after that did culture matter, and often little or no consideration given to a long period of interaction between genes and culture.

通常，研究人类进化的人在处理这一问题时，会把它看作是一个“两部分谜题”，就好像从一开始直到距今1万或4万年以前（具体时间取决于你正在阅读谁的研究），曾经存在过一个长时段的基因进化，自此以后，文化才开始发挥作用。他们很少或根本不会考虑基因和文化之间曾长期相互作用这种情形。

Of course, the evidence available in the Paleolithic record is pretty sparse, so another possibility is that it emerged about 800,000 years ago. One theoretical reason to think that that might be an important time to emerge is that there's theoretical models that show that culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments. If you look at the paleo-climatic record, you can see that the environment starts to fluctuate a lot starting about 900,000 years ago and going to about six or five hundred thousand years ago.

当然，我们能得到的旧石器时代证据相当少。因此，另一种可能性是，这一文化进化体开始于大约80万年前。这个时间点之所以成为一个重要的起源时间选项，一个理论依据在于，已经有理论模型表明，文化——即我们从他人身上学习的能力——是我们对持续的环境变动的一种适应。翻一翻古气候记录就会发现，环境大概在距今90万年前的时候开始剧烈变动，直到距今60或50万年前才消停。

This would have created a selection pressure for lots of cultural learning for lots of focusing on other members of your group, and taking advantage of that cumulative body of non-genetic knowledge.

这有可能创造出一种选择压力，催生了更多的文化学习，促使人更多关注团体中的其他成员，也促使人们更多地利用那种累积性的非基因的知识体。

Another signature of cultural learning is regional differentiation and material culture, and you see that by about 400,000 years ago. So, you could have a kind of late emergence at 400,000 years ago. A middle guess would be 800,000 years ago based on the climate, and then the early guess would be, say, the origin of genus, 1.8 million years ago.



文化学习的另外一个鲜明特征是地区分化和物质文化，这一点在大约40万年前可以看到。所以还有一种说法，认为这一文化进化体始于40万年前。这一时间比较晚，持中的猜测则是基于气候的80万年前起源说，更早的猜测则是人属出现的时候，即180万年前。



Along these same lines, I've been trying to figure out what the ancestral ape would have looked like. We know that humans share a common ancestry with chimpanzees about five or six million years ago with chimpanzees and bonobos, and the question is, what kind of ape was that?



沿着同样的思考线索，我还一直试图弄清祖猿长成什么样子。我们知道，大概500万或600万年前，人类和黑猩猩、倭黑猩猩拥有共同的祖先，问题是，这是种什么样的猿？



One possibility, and the typical assumption, is that the ape was more like a chimpanzee or a bonobo. But there's another possibility that it was a different kind of ape that we don't have in the modern world: a communal breeding ape that lives in family units rather than the kind of fission fusion you might see in chimpanzees, and that actually chimpanzees and bonobos took a separate turn, and that lineage eventually went to humans spurred off a whole bunch of different kinds of apes. In the Pliocene, we see lots of different kinds of apes in terms of different species of
Australopithecus
.



其中一种可能是，这种祖猿更像黑猩猩或倭黑猩猩，这也是通常的假设。但还有另外一种可能性，它们可能是一种当今世界已经不存在的完全不同的猿：一种以家庭为单位、合作繁殖的猿，而不是黑猩猩那种裂变融合群体【
译注：指群体的规模和成员不断变动
】，而且黑猩猩和倭黑猩猩实际上是往另外一个不同方向上演变了，而最终进化出人类的那一谱系则进化成为一系列不同种类的猿。在上新世，我们可以看到大量不同种类的猿，他们都是南猿的不同种。



I'm just beginning to get into that, and I haven't gotten very far, but I do have this strong sense that we now have evidence to suggest that humans were communal breeders, so that we lived in family groups maybe somewhat similar to the way gorillas live in family groups, and that this is a much better environment for the evolution of capacities for culture than typical in the chimpanzee model, because for cultural learning to really take off, you need more than one model.



我才刚刚开始研究这一问题，成果还不多，但我强烈地感觉到，我们现在已经有证据说人类曾是合作繁殖的，因此我们是生活于家庭群体之中的，某种程度上就像大猩猩现在的那种家庭群体生活一样。相比黑猩猩的那种模式，这一模式为文化能力进化提供的环境要好得多，因为文化学习要真正实现飞跃，必须得有多种模式。



You want a number of individuals in your social environment to be trying out different techniques—say different techniques for getting nuts or for finding food or for tracking animals. Then you need to pay attention to them so you can take advantage of the variation between them. If there's one member of your group who's doing it a little bit better, you preferentially learn from them, and then the next generation gets the best technique from the previous generation.



这需要你所在的社会环境中拥有许多个体去尝试各不相同的技术，比如说取出果仁或找到食物或追踪猎物的不同技术。然后你就需要细心关注他们，以便能充分利用他们彼此之间的差异变化。如果群体之中有一个成员比其他成员做得稍微好一点点，你就更乐于向他们学习，于是下一代就能从上一代学到最好的技术。



Other things I've been thinking about along these lines are just trying to think through all the different adaptations that would have resulted from this gene culture interaction. One thing that's been noted by a number of people is that humans are strangely good at long distance running. We seem to have long distance running adaptations.



沿着这条线索，我还在考虑其他一些问题，那就是基于这种基因与文化的相互作用，到底我们会出现哪些不同的适应性变化。其中许多人已经注意到的一点是，人类特别善于长距离奔跑，这一点相当令人诧异。我们身上似乎出现了长距离奔跑的适应性变化。



Our feet have a particular anatomy. We have sweat glands and we can run really far. Hunter-gatherers can chase down game by just running the antelope down until it collapses. We run marathons. We seem generally attracted to running, and the question is, how did we become such long distance runners?



我们的脚具有一种独特的生理构造。我们拥有汗腺，可以跑得很远。狩猎采集者要追捕羚羊的话，只需要追着它跑，直到猎物筋疲力尽自己倒下。我们能跑马拉松。我们似乎全都对跑步感兴趣。问题是，我们是如何变得这样善于长跑的呢？



We don't see this in other kinds of animals. We think if it was an obvious adaptation, we'd see it recurring through nature, but only humans have it. The secret is that humans who don't know how to track animals, can't run them down, so you need to have a large body of tracking knowledge that allows you to interpret spoors and identify individual animals and track animals over long distances when you can't see the animal, and without that body of knowledge, we're not very good at running game down.



在其他动物身上，我们看不到这一点。我们认为，如果这是一种简单的适应，那我们就应该能在自然界中看到它重复出现，但这一现象只有人类身上有。这里的隐秘在于，如果有的人类不知道如何追踪猎物，那他就不可能尾随追捕，所以你需要拥有一大套的追踪知识，以便你能在看不到猎物的时候分析足迹，能正确辨识猎物个体并能长距离追踪到它。如果没有这一知识体系，我们是不善于把猎物追倒的。



There's an interaction between genes and culture. First you have to get the culturally transmitted knowledge about animal behavior and tracking and spoor knowledge and the ability to identify individuals, which is something you need to practice, and only after that can you begin to take advantage of long distance running techniques and being able to run animals down.



在基因与文化之间存在着相互作用。首先你需要拥有那套关于动物行为和追踪的知识、足迹知识和辨识猎物个体的能力，而这是通过文化传递的，是一种需要练习的东西，只有这样，你才能用上长跑技巧，才能把猎物追倒。



That's a potential source for figuring out the origins of capacities for culture, because to the degree that we have information about the anatomy of feet, we can use that to figure out when it started. The same idea follows from cooking and fire. Since we know that those are culturally transmitted now, when we begin to see evidence that that affected our anatomy, that gives us clues to the origins of our capacities for culture.



要弄清人类文化能力的起源，这是一个可以思考的方向，因为凭借对人类足部构造的了解，我们可以弄清文化进化开始的时间。同样的思路也可以用在烹饪和用火问题上。因为我们现已知道烹饪和用火都是通过文化传递的，因此，如果我们能够找到它们影响身体构造的证据，就有了探究我们的文化能力之起源的线索。

Most recently I've been also thinking about the evolution of societal complexity. This is the emergence of complex societies that happens after the origins of agriculture, when societies begin to get big and complex and you have lots of interactions among strangers, large-scale cooperation, market exchange, militaries, division of labor, substantial division of labor. We have a sense of the sequence of events, but we don't have good process descriptions of how it was. What are the causal processes that bring these things about?

最近，我还在思考社会复杂性的进化问题。这里说的是农业起源之后复杂社会的出现，社会开始变大、变复杂，在其中你能看到陌生人之间的大量互动、大范围的合作、市场交换、军队、劳动分工、深度劳动分工。我们对这些事件的发生次序有所了解，但对于它们到底是如何发生的，我们还没能形成一个很好的过程描叙。引发这些事件的因果过程到底是什么样的？

One of the ideas I've been pursuing is that after the origins of agriculture, there was an intense period that continues today of intergroup competition, which favors groups who have social norms and institutions that can more effectively expand the group while maintaining internal harmony, leading to the benefits of exchange, of the ability to maintain markets, of division of labor and of higher levels of cooperation. Then you get intense competition amongst the early farming groups, and this is going to favor those groups who have the abilities to expand.

我一直在思考的一个想法是，在农业出现之后，曾有过一个群体之间激烈竞争的时期，一直持续到现在。这种竞争使得拥有社会规范和制度、从而能够更有效地在扩张的同时维持内部和谐的一类群体脱颖而出，进而凸显出了交易、维持市场的能力、劳动分工和更高水平的合作所能带来的好处。早期农耕群体之间存在激烈竞争，那些拥有扩张能力的群体在这种竞争中更占优势。

You need to be precise about what you mean by these cultural traits and norms. I've worked in a couple of different areas on this, and one is religion. We just got a big grant to study the cultural evolution of religion with the idea being that the religions of modern societies are quite different than the religions we see in hunter gatherers and small scale societies, because they've been shaped by this process over millennia, and specifically they've been shaped in ways that galvanize cooperation in larger groups and sustained cooperation amongst non relatives.

在谈及文化特征和规范时，需要精确界定它们表达的意思。我在许多不同领域中都研究过这一问题，其中一个领域就是宗教。我们刚刚拿到一大笔资金，来研究宗教的文化进化，主要的观点就是，现代社会的宗教与狩猎采集群体和小规模社会中的宗教大不相同，因为它们已经被这一进程不断塑造了几千年，特别是，它们已经被塑造得能够有助于大规模群体中的合作，以及非亲属之间的持续合作。

The emergence of high-moralizing gods is an important example of this. In small-scale hunter-gatherer religions, the gods are typically whimsical. They're amoral. They're not concerned with your sexual behavior or your social behavior. Often you'll make bargains with them, but as we begin to move to the religions in more complex societies, we find that the gods are increasingly moralizing. They're concerned about exactly the kinds of things that are going to be a problem for running a large-scale society, like how you treat other members of your religious group or your ethnic group.

这方面的一个重要例子就是具有高度道德教化意义的神的出现。在小规模狩猎采集群体的宗教中，神通常都是反复无常的。它们是非道德的。它们并不关心你的性行为或社会行为。通常你会跟它们讨价还价。但在更为复杂的社会中，我们发现神会变得越来越具有道德教化意义。它们所关注的，恰好就是会对大规模社会运行构成麻烦的那一类事情，比如你如何对待同一宗教团体或本种族中的其他成员。

Experiments run at UBC and elsewhere have shown that when you remind atheists, it doesn't matter, but if you remind believers of their god, believers cheat less, and they're more pro social or fair in exchange tasks, and the kinds of exchange tasks that they're more pro social in are the ones with anonymous others, or strangers.

UBC和其他一些地方所做的实验都表明，如果你提醒无神论者注意自己的言行，基本没有什么效果，但如果你提醒有神论者，并抬出他们的神，他们就会更少说谎，在参与交易时也会表现得更亲社会或更公平，而且他们在其中表现得更亲社会的这类交易，其对象都是匿名人士或陌生人。

These are the kinds of things you need to make a market run to have a successful division of labor. We've been pursuing that hypothesis and, in fact, we've just sent a number of psychologists and anthropologists to the field, and we'll be doing more of that in the coming years to do these kinds of experiments in a diverse range of societies, seeing if the moralizing gods of a variety of religions create these same kinds of effects.

这恰好是维持市场运转、成功维系劳动分工所需要的特征。我们近来一直在研究这个假说，事实上，我们不久前刚派出了一批心理学家和人类学家就此去做田野研究，未来几年还会加大力度，在大量不同社会群体中去做这类实验，以检验不同宗教中的教化性神是否都能造成以上同样的效果。

We also think that ritual plays a role in this in that rituals seem to be sets of practices engineered by cultural evolution to be effective at transmitting belief and transmitting faith. By attending a ritual, you elevate the degree of belief in the high-moralizing gods or the priests of the religion by the ritual practice. If you break down rituals common in many religions, they put the words in the mouths of a prestigious member of the group, someone everyone respects. That makes it more likely to transmit and be believed.



我们还认为，仪式在文化进化中发挥了作用。仪式似乎是文化进化所创造出来的一整套行为，有助于信念和信仰的传递。通过参与仪式，你就能通过仪式行为提高对高度教化性的神或传教者的信仰程度。如果你分析一下在许多宗教中都能找到的仪式行为就会发现，它们会借群体中某个威望很高、大家都尊重的人物之口来宣之于众。这会令其更易传播、更可能被相信。



People also engage in what we call credibility-enhancing displays [during rituals]. These are costly things. It might be an animal sacrifice or the giving of a large sum of money or some kind of painful initiation rite like circumcision, which one would only engage in if one actually believed in it. It's a demonstration of true belief, which then makes the observers more likely to acquire the belief.



（在仪式过程中，）人们也会参与我们称为“提升可信度”的行为。这是一种代价颇高的事情。可能是以动物献祭，或者捐出大笔钱财，或者是某种痛苦的加入仪式，比如割礼，这些事都是只有真正的信徒才会参与的，是真信仰的展示，并能增加旁观者接受这些信仰的可能性。



Speaking in unison, large congregations saying the same thing, this all taps our capacity for conformist transmission; the fact that we weight what everybody believes in deciding in what we believe.



齐声说话，大规模集会倾诉同样的内容，这些都是在利用人们实现从众传递的潜力——也就是说我们在选择自己要相信什么的时候会考虑其他人都相信些什么。



These seem to want to tap our cultural transmission abilities to deepen the faith, and one of the interesting kind of ways that this has developed is that high-moralizing gods will often require rituals of this kind, and then by forcing people to routinely do the rituals, they then guarantee that the next generation acquires a deepened faith in the god, and then the whole thing perpetuates itself. It creates a self-perpetuating cycle.



这就像是要利用文化传递能力来加深信仰，它发展出来的有趣方式之一是，高度教化性的神通常都要求执行这类仪式，通过强迫人们经常性地履行仪式，就能保证下一代人对神能够拥有更深一层的信仰，然后整套体系就能实现永续。它创造出了一个自我存续的循环。



We think religions are just one element, one way in which culture has figured out ways to expand the sphere of cooperation and allow markets to form and people to exchange and to maintain the substantial division of labor.



我们认为，文化已经发展出了许多方式来扩大合作领域、允许市场形成、促进人们之间的交易，并维持明确的劳动分工，而宗教只是其中之一。



One of the interesting things about the division of labor is that you're not going to specialize in a particular trade—maybe you make steel plows—unless you know that there are other people who are specializing in other kinds of trades which you need—say food or say materials for making housing, and you have to be confident that you can trade with them or exchange with them and get the other things you need.



关于劳动分工，有一点非常有趣：你要选择专门从事某一特定行业，比如打造铁犁具，这需要一个前提，那就是你得知道有人专门从事你对之有需求的其他一些行业，比如食品或建材，而且你需要确信，自己能与他们进行贸易或交换，能够得到你需要的其他东西。



There's a lot of risk in developing specialization because you have to be confident that there's a market there that you can engage with. Whereas if you're a generalist and you do a little bit of farming, a little bit of manufacturing, then you're much less reliant on the market.



发展专业分工有很大的风险，因为你必须确信存在一个你能够利用的市场。如果你是个多面手，能做一点农活，再从事一些制造，那么你对这个市场的依赖度就大幅降低。



Markets require a great deal of trust and a great deal of cooperation to work. Sometimes you get the impression from economics that markets are for self-interested individuals. They're actually the opposite. Self-interested individuals don't specialize, and they don't take it [to market], because there's all this trust and fairness that are required to make markets run with impersonal others.



市场的运转需要很高的信任和大量的合作。你会从经济学得知，市场是由自利的个体组成的。实际上正好相反。自利的个体没法专业化，不能形成市场，因为要使市场在素昧平生的陌路人之间运作，那需要非常高的信任和公平。

In developing this line of thought, one of the things you need to be clear about is what you mean by culture and culture evolution. Culture is one of those terms that has lots of different meanings, and people have used it lots of different ways. In the intellectual tradition that I'm building on, culture is information stored in people's heads that gets there by some kind of social learning—so imitation, teaching, any kind of observational learning.

沿着这条思路想问题时，你需要清晰界定的事物之一就是文化和文化进化的含义。文化是那种带有很多不同含义的词汇，人们已经在用不同方式使用它。在我所背靠的智识传统中，文化指的是人们通过某种形式的社会化学习——如模仿、教育或任何形式的观察学习——而获得并储存在自己头脑中的信息。

We tend to think of cultural transmission, or at least many people think of cultural transmission as relying on language, but that's in part because in our culture, especially among academics, there tends to be a lot of talking, but in lots of small-scale societies, it's quite clear that there is a ton of cultural transmission that is just strictly by observational learning.

我们，或至少很多人，都倾向于认为文化传递是依赖语言的，但造成这种理解的部分原因在于，在我们的文化里，特别是在学术界，人们倾向于进行大量的语言交流，但是在众多小型社群中，很明显大量的文化传递纯粹是依靠观察学习来实现的。

If you're trying to make a tool, you're mostly watching the physical movements of the hands and the strategies taken. You might get tips that are transmitted verbally as you go along. In building a house, you're looking at how the house is built together, again with verbal comments as supplements to getting a sense for how the house goes together.

如果你想学习制造工具，就得主要观察手部的物理运动，以及其中的技巧。在这个过程中你可能会获得一些口头传达的指点。如果要学建房子，你要观察房子到底是怎么建造起来的，当然也会得到一些口头评论，帮助你理解房子到底如何拼起来。

If you're copying how to shoot an arrow, you're watching body position and bow position and aiming, and you're not listening to a lot of exposition on it, although clearly the verbal part of the transmission helps. We think and there's experimental evidence that show you can transmit lots of stuff without using any words.

如果你是在学习射箭，你观察的是身体的姿势、弓箭的位置及如何瞄准，你不会去听一大堆阐释，虽然很明显这种传达的口头部分也是有帮助的。我们认为，而且也有很多实验证据表明，无需使用任何词语，也能传达很多信息。

This is information stored in people's brains, and when we look at other animals, we find that the evolutionary models of culture make really good predictions about culture in fish. Fish will learn food foraging preferences from each other, and non-human primates can learn from each other, but what we don't see amongst other animals is cumulative cultural evolution. The case in which the cultural transmission is high enough fidelity that you can learn one thing from one generation, and that begins to accumulate in subsequent generations.

这是储存在人脑中的信息，当我们观察其他动物的时候，我们发现文化的进化模型能够很好地预测鱼类的文化。鱼类能够相互学习觅食偏好，人类之外的灵长类也能相互学习，但我们在其他动物身上看不到累积性的文化进化。也就是那种能从一代人身上学会某样事物，然后在接下来的数代人中间开始逐步累积的足够准确的文化传递。

One possible exception to that is bird song. Bird songs accumulate in such that birds from large continents have more complex songs than birds from islands. It turns out humans from smaller islands have less complex material culture than humans from larger islands, at least until recently, until communication was opened up. One of the interesting lines of research that's come out of this recognition is the importance of population size and the interconnectedness for technology.

此处有一个可能的例外，那就是鸟鸣。鸟类的鸣叫方式能够累积，以至于大陆鸟类的鸣叫方式要比海岛鸟类的更复杂。我们还发现，直到不久之前，也就是直到交流开放之前，在物质文化的复杂程度方面，来自小型海岛的人群不如来自更大型海岛的人群。源于这一认知的有趣研究领域之一，就是人口规模和互联程度对科技的重要影响。

I began this investigation by looking at a case study in Tasmania. Tasmania's an island off the coast of Southern Victoria in Australia and the archeological record is really interesting in Tasmania. Up until about 10,000 years ago, 12,000 years ago, the archeology of Tasmania looks the same as Australia. It seems to be moving along together. It's getting a bit more complex over time, and then suddenly after 10,000 years ago, it takes a downturn. It becomes less complex.



调查开始之初，我回顾了一个关于塔斯马尼亚岛的案例研究。塔斯马尼亚岛是澳大利亚的维多利亚州南部海洋上的一个岛屿，这里的考古记录非常有趣。直到约1万年前，和1.2万年前，塔斯马尼亚岛的考古记录看起来都跟澳洲大陆是一样的。两者似乎是齐头并进的，随着时间推移而变得日渐复杂。但在距今1万年以后，突然它就衰退了，变得没有澳洲大陆复杂了。



The ability to make fire is probably lost. Bone tools are lost. Fishing is lost. Boats are probably lost. Meanwhile, things move along just fine back on the continent, so there's this kind of divergence, and one thing nice about this experiment is that there's good reason to believe that peoples were genetically the same.



生火的能力可能丢失了。骨制工具丢失了。不会打渔了。船可能也没有了。与此同时，大陆上的事物则照常发展，所以就出现了这种分化。这一案例特别好的一点在于，我们有很好的理由相信两地的人群原本拥有相同的基因。



You start out with two genetically well-intermixed peoples. Tasmania's actually connected to mainland Australia so it's just a peninsula. Then about 10,000 years ago, the environment changes, it gets warmer and the Bass Strait floods, so this cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and it's at that point that they begin to have this technological downturn.



最开始两个群体在基因方面是相互混杂的。塔斯马尼亚最早是跟澳大利亚本土连在一起的，因此只是个半岛。大约在距今1万年前，气候发生了变化，越来越暖，于是巴斯海峡形成了，把塔斯马尼亚岛和澳大利亚其余部分分隔开来。也就是在这时，他们开始出现这种技术上的倒退。



You can show that this is the kind of thing you'd expect if societies are like brains in the sense that they store information as a group and that when someone learns, they're learning from the most successful member, and that information is being passed from different communities, and the larger the population, the more different minds you have working on the problem.



假如把各个社会群体比作不同人的大脑，就可以说发生上述这种事情毫不奇怪。因为社会群体以集体的方式储存信息，如果某人要学习，他就会向最成功的成员学习，而且这种信息会在不同社群之间传播，人口规模越大，你在处理问题时所能依靠的不同头脑就更多。



If your number of minds working on the problem gets small enough, you can actually begin to lose information. There's a steady state level of information that depends on the size of your population and the interconnectedness. It also depends on the innovativeness of your individuals, but that has a relatively small effect compared to the effect of being well interconnected and having a large population.



如果处理问题时能够依靠的头脑数目少到一定程度，你实际上会开始丢失信息。信息的稳态水平依赖于人口规模和互联程度。它也依赖于个体的创造性，但后一方面的影响相对而言比较小，良好的互联水平和大量的人口更加重要。



There have been a number of tests of this recently, the best of which is this study by Rob Boyd and Michelle Kline in which they took the fishing technologies of different Oceanic islands from the time when Europeans first arrived, and they looked at how the population size of the island relates to the tool complexity, and larger islands had much bigger and more complex fishing technologies, and you can even show an effective contact. Some of the islands were in more or less contact with each other, and when you include that, you get the size effect, but you also get a contact effect, and the prediction is that if you're more in contact, you have fancier tools, and that seems to hold up.



在这方面，最近已经有了很多测试，其中最好的当属Rob Boyd和Michelle Kline所做的研究。他们研究了自欧洲人初次抵达以后大洋洲不同岛屿上的捕鱼技术，考察了岛上人口规模如何影响渔具的复杂度，结果发现更大的岛屿拥有更大型、更复杂的捕鱼技术。有效接触也会发挥作用。其中某些岛屿跟其他岛屿之间存在或多或少的接触，如果把这个考虑在内，就既能发现规模效应，又能发现接触效应，理论上的预测是，更多的接触就意味着更好的渔具，这似乎也得到了验证。



If you follow this idea a little bit further, then it does give you a sense that rates of innovation should continue to increase, especially with the emergence of communication technologies, because these allow ideas to flow very rapidly from place to place.



如果你顺着这一想法再进一小步，它就会促使你产生一种想法，那就是创新的速度应该还会继续提高，特别是在通信技术出现以后，因为这使得观念从一地到另一地的流动速度变得非常快。



An important thing to remember is that there's always an incentive to hide your information. As an individual inventor or company, you're best off if everybody else shares their ideas but you don't share your ideas because then you get to keep your good ideas, and nobody else gets exposed to them, and you get to use their good ideas, so you get to do more recombination.



这里要记住的重要一点是，对于你自己知道的信息，你总是有动力进行隐瞒。对于个体发明家或单个公司而言，如果其他所有人都分享他们的想法，而你不分享你的想法，那你就是最受益的。因为这种情况下你能保守自己的好想法，别人没法知道，而你却能使用他们的好想法，这样你就能尝试更多的组合。



Embedded in this whole information-sharing thing is a constant cooperative dilemma in which individuals have to be willing to share for the good of the group. They don't have to explicitly know it's for the good of the group, but the idea that a norm of information sharing is a really good norm to have because it helps everybody do better because we share more ideas, get more recombination of ideas.



信息分享本身就存在合作困境，这种情形是一致存在的。为了集体的利益，个体要有分享的意愿。他们不需要明确地知道这是为了集体的利益，但他们需要建立一个观念，即认为有一个信息分享的规范是件好事，因为这能帮助所有人过得更好，因为我们分享的观念越多，我们得到的观念组合就越多。

I've done a lot of work on marriage systems with the evolution of monogamy. We have a sort of human nature that pushes us towards polygyny whenever there are sufficient resources. Eighty-five percent of human societies have allowed men to have more than one wife, and very few societies have adopted polyandry which would be the flip side of this, and then there's actually a number of societies that allowed both, but they tended to be polygynous because, assuming you have enough resources, the men are going to be more interested in having more wives than the wives are interested in having more husbands, and the husbands aren't inclined to be second husbands as much as the women are willing to be second wives.

我在婚姻体制方面下了很多功夫，研究过一夫一妻制的进化。我们有某种天性，促使我们在资源充分的前提下追求一夫多妻。85%的人类社会曾允许男人拥有一个以上妻子，极少有社会采用过这一制度的对立面，即一妻多夫制。有些社会实际上两者都允许，但最终更可能出现一夫多妻，因为假定有充足的资源，男人会对拥有更多妻子更感兴趣，女人对于拥有更多丈夫就没那么感兴趣，而且丈夫们并不太愿意成为别人的二号丈夫，而女人在做别人的二号妻子方面意愿相对更强。

But in the modern world, of course, monogamy is normative, and people who have too many wives are thought poorly of by the larger society. The question is, how did this ever get in place? And of course, it traces back through Europe.

但是在现代社会，当然一夫一妻制是规范性的，而且那些拥有很多妻子的人会被更大社群当中的人瞧不起。问题是，到底怎么会变成这样的？当然，这要从欧洲往上追溯。

One of the things that distinguished Europe from the rest of the world was something called the European Marriage Pattern, and part of that was normative monogamy, the idea that taking a second wife was wrong as long as you still had the first wife, and this actually traces back to Rome and eventually to Athens. Athens legislates the first rules about monogamous marriage just before the Classical period.

欧洲区别于世界其他地方的一个要点就是欧洲婚姻模式，规范性一夫一妻制就是其中之一。认为只要你的第一个妻子还在，娶第二个妻子就是错误的，这种观念实际上可以追溯到古罗马，甚至古雅典。在古典时代开始之前，雅典人就正式奠定了一夫一妻制的最初规则。

This was an example of a case where people are ready to moralize it, and I like to view it as the evolution of this marriage system of monogamy. It's peculiar. It doesn't fit with what we know about human nature, but it does seem to have societal level benefits. It reduces male-male competition.

人们会把一些东西道德化，婚姻制度就是例证之一，而且我倾向于从一夫一妻制婚姻体制的进化这个角度来考虑。这是很特别的。它跟我们对人性的认知相左，但确实具有社会层面的好处。它能减少男性之间的竞争。

We think there's evidence to say it reduces crime, reduces substance abuse, and it also engages males in ways that cause them to discount the future less and engage in productive activities rather than taking a lot of risks which include crime and other things. Depending on what your value systems are, if you think freedom is really important, then you might be for polygyny, but if you want to trade freedom off against other social ills like high crime, then you might favor the laws that prohibit polygamy.

我们认为，有证据表明这一制度可以减少犯罪，减少毒品滥用，而且它还能吸引男性更多地重视未来，更多地参与生产性活动，而不是到处冒险，制造犯罪及其他事端。这取决于你的价值观体系，如果你认为自由非常重要，那么你可能会支持一夫多妻，但如果你愿意为了减少社会麻烦（如高犯罪率）而牺牲一些自由，那么你可能就会支持立法禁止多偶制。

When I talk about success and un-success, I don't mean anything moralizing. I'm talking about the cultural evolutionary processes that favor the spread of one idea over another. If I talk about normative monogamy as being successful, I mean that it spread, and in this case the idea is that it spread despite the fact that it's contrary to some aspects of human nature. It does harness our pair bonding in some aspects, so it's a complex story there, but it creates societal level benefits.

我所说的成功或不成功，并不具有任何道德意味。我要表达的只是，在文化进化的过程中，某个理念的传播压倒了另外一个理念。当我说规范性一夫一妻制成功了的时候，我的意思只是它传播开了，而且在这个例子中，尽管它与人性某些方面相抵触，但仍然得以传播开来。它确实在某些方面约束了我们的结成配偶的行为，所以这个故事很复杂，但它带来了社会层面的好处。

Societies that have this are better able to maintain a harmonious population, increase trade and exchange, and have economic growth more than societies that allow polygamy, especially if you have a society with widely varying amounts of wealth, especially among males. Then you're going to have a situation that would normally promote high levels of polygyny.

实行一夫一妻制的社会更能维持人与人之间的和谐，增加贸易和交易，实现更快的经济增长，而允许多偶制的社会在这些方面就要差一些，特别是如果这一社会里财富差异非常大时（尤其是在男性之间）。如果存在上述情形，通常都会加剧一夫多妻的程度。

The absolute levels of wealth difference of, say, between Bill Gates and Donald Trump and the billionaires of the world, and the men at the bottom end of the spectrum is much larger than it's ever been in human history, and that includes kings and emperors and things like that in terms of total control of absolute wealth.

比如说，一边是比尔·盖茨、唐纳德·特朗普以及世上的亿万富翁，另一边则是处于财富分配末端的众多人口，财富差异绝对水平远远超过人类历史上的任何时候，而且这还把历史上那些国王、帝王等人物都考虑了在内，他们可是绝对财富的全权控制者。

Males will be males in the sense that they'll try to obtain extra matings, but the billionaires are completely curbed in terms of what they would do if they could do what emperors have done throughout the ages. They have harems and stuff like that. Norms of modern society prevent that.

男性作为男性，就会力图拥有更多的配偶，但现在的亿万富翁在这一点上却受到了完全的约束；本来如果他们可以这么做，他们会这么做的，历史上的所有帝王都不例外。他们会形成后宫体制，或类似的体制，但现代社会的道德规范阻止了他们。

Otherwise, there would be massive male-male competition, and even to get into the mating and marriage market you would have to have a high level of wealth if we were to let nature take it's course as it did in the earliest empires. It depends on what your views are about freedom versus societal level benefits.

否则的话，如果我们像早期帝国那样，让天性不加阻碍地发展，那将会出现大规模的男性竞争，甚至是仅仅想进入配偶和婚姻市场，你就得拥有很多的财富。这取决于你如何看待自由和社会层面利益之间的取舍。

Part of my program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution.



我的研究课题之一就是要说服人们相信，人们应该停止在文化进化和生物进化之间做出截然区分。我们希望将所有这些事情整个当作生物进化看待。



We want to distinguish genetic evolution and cultural evolution, and then at some point we may have epigenetic evolution, and there are other kinds of inheritance systems.



我们要区分基因进化和文化进化，在某些情况下我们可能还发生了表观进化，此外还有其他种类的继承机制。



It's going to be a little bit more of a complex story. Culture is part of our biology. We now have the neuroscience to say that culture's in our brain, so if you compare people from different societies, they have different brains. Culture is deep in our biology.



接下来的故事更加复杂一点。文化是我们生物属性的一部分。现在，神经科学告诉我们，文化存在于我们的大脑中，所以如果你把来自不同社会的人进行比较，会发现他们拥有不同的大脑。文化深嵌于我们的生物属性之中。



We have people with different cultural backgrounds that have different hormonal reactions as well as having different brains on the MRI scan. So culture is just part of our biology, and we shouldn't take this dualistic view that there's this realm of ideas that somehow are separate from this realm of biology, and you're either talking about the realm of ideas or the realm of biology.



我们看到，来自不同文化背景的人会有不同的激素反应，而且在核磁共振扫描上显示的大脑也不一样。所以文化只是我们生物属性的一部分，我们不应该采取一种二元区分的观点，认为存在一个观念领域，和一个生物领域，两者截然分开，只能分别谈论。



Cognition and our ability to think are all interwoven, and we're a cultural species, which means one of our genetic programs is to be able to acquire ideas, beliefs and values and weave them into our brain such that they then affect our biology. A good example of this is the placebos.



认知和思考能力是相互交织的，我们就是一个文化物种，这就是说我们的基因程序之一就是使我们获得观念、信念和价值观并将它们编入我们的大脑，我们的生物属性也因而受到影响。



Placebos are something that depend on your cultural beliefs. If you believe that something will work, then when you take it, like you take an aspirin or you take a placebo for an aspirin, it initiates the same pathways as the chemically active substance.



这方面的一个恰当例子就是安慰剂。安慰剂的作用取决于你的文化信念。如果你相信某物会起作用，那在你服用它之后，比如把安慰剂当作阿司匹林来服用，那么安慰剂就会像阿司匹林那样开启同样的路径。



Placebos are chemically inert but biologically active, and it's completely dependent on your cultural beliefs. If you don't believe that cures come in pills, then taking a placebo aspirin does not have any effect on you. That's a case where it shows the ability of a cultural belief to activate biological processes, and then it's something we know a little bit about.



从化学角度来说，安慰剂是不会起效的，但从生物学上来说，它能起到跟阿司匹林一样的作用，这完全取决于你的文化信念。如果你不相信药能治病，那么服用阿司匹林安慰剂就不会对你产生任何效果。这是表明文化信念能够激发生物过程的一个案例，我们对此稍微有所了解。

One of the large research projects that I run in an effort to understand human sociality is called The Root of Human Sociality Project. In the mid '90s I was working in the Peruvian Amazon and I was working with a group called the Machiguenga. Traditionally, the Machiguenga lived in single-family units scattered throughout the forest. I had been exposed through my advisor, Rob Boyd, at the time to something called the Ultimatum Game, and the Ultimatum Game seemed to provide evidence that humans were innately inclined to punish unfairness.

为了理解人类社会，我正在做的大型研究项目中包括一个“人类社会性探源项目”。上世纪90年代中期我在秘鲁的亚马逊地区工作，跟一个叫做Machiguenga的群体一起。传统上，该群体的人们以独户家庭为单位分散居住在森林里。通过我的导师Rob Boyd，我那时知道了一个叫做“最后通牒博弈”的东西，而这个博弈似乎能够证明人类天性倾向于对不公加以惩罚。

In the Ultimatum Game, two players are allotted a sum of money, say $100, and the first player can offer a portion of this $100 to the second player who can either accept or reject. If the second player accepts, they get the amount of the money, and the first player gets the remainder. If they reject, both players get zero.

在“最后通牒博弈”中，两个参与者会拿到一笔钱，比如100块。参与者A可以开价，将100块中的一部分给予参与者B，后者既可以接受，也可以拒绝。如果参与者B接受，他就能拿走提议数目的钱，剩下的归参与者A。如果他拒绝，那两个参与者都拿不到钱。

Just to give you an example, suppose the money is $100, and the first player offers $10 out of the $100 to the second player. If the second player accepts, he gets the $10 and the first player gets $90. If he rejects, both players go home with zero. If you place yourself in the shoes of the second player, then you should be inclined to accept any amount of money if you just care about making money.

举个例子，假设总数为100块，参与者A开价将100块中的10块给参与者B。如果B接受，他就得10块，而A得90块。如果他拒绝，两人都只能空手而归。如果你站在参与者B的角度想问题，如果你只关心赚钱与否，那你就应该接受任何开价。

Now, if he offers you zero, you have the choice between zero and zero, so it's ambiguous what you should do. But assuming it's a positive amount, so $10, you should accept the $10, go home with $10 and let the other guy go home with $90.

如果A提出不给你钱，那无论如何选择，你都只能空手而归，在这种情况下你应该如何选择就是不确定的。但是，假定A提议分给你一个正数，比如10块，那你就应该接受这10块钱，拿着10块钱回家，让另外那个家伙拿90块回家。

But in experiments with undergraduates, Western undergraduates, going back to 1982, behavioral economists find that students give about half, sometimes a little bit less than half, and people are inclined to reject offers below about 30 percent.

但在实验中，在1982年针对大学生——西方大学生——的实验中，行为经济学家发现，学生们会开价给一半，有时候是略少于一半，一旦开价低于30%，人们就倾向于拒绝接受了。

Subsequent work with non-student adults in the West show that it's an even a stronger result. The older you get, even if you have more wealth and more income, you're especially inclined to only offer half, and you'll reject offers below 40 percent.

针对非学生的西方成人的后续研究显示出了比这更强的结果。随着年龄增长，不管你多么有钱收入多高，你都会特别倾向于只拿出一半钱来分享，而且你会拒绝任何低于40%的开价。

In 1995, it had been done in a number of different countries, and it seemed to be robust. I was thinking that the Machiguenga would be a good test of this, because if they also showed this willingness to reject and to make equal offers, it would really demonstrate the innateness of this finding, because they don't have any higher level institutions, and it would be hard to make a kind of cultural argument that they were bringing something into the experiment that was causing this behavior.

到1995年，研究者已在许多不同国家做过同一实验，这一关系都很明显。我当时想，拿Machiguenga人做个测试会相当好，因为如果他们也显示出拒绝的意愿和平等分享的意愿，那就真的能证明这一发现确属天性，因为这个群体中并没有任何高层次的制度，因此我们很难提出一种文化论证，说他们在参加实验时带入了某些（文化方面的）东西，影响了他们的行为。

I went and I did it in 1995 and 1996 there, and what I found amongst the Machiguenga was that they were completely unwilling to reject, and they thought it was silly. Why would anyone ever reject? They would almost explain the subgame perfect equilibrium, the solution that the economists use, back to me by saying, "Well, why would anybody ever reject? You lose money then." And they made low offers, the modal offer was 15 percent instead of 50, and the mean comes out to be about 25 percent.

我1995年和1996年去那里做了实验，而我从Machiguenga人那里得到的结论是，他们绝不愿意拒绝，而且他们觉得拒绝是愚蠢的做法。为什么有人会拒绝？而且他们几乎都能跟我解释经济学家使用的那个解，即子博弈完美均衡：“为什么会有人拒绝呢？拒绝了你就会损失钱啊。”而且他们还会给出很低额度的开价，开价的众数是15%而非50%，而平均值则是大约25%。

Rob Boyd then was my advisor, and we went to the MacArthur Foundation for some funding, and they funded us, and we were able to put together a team of anthropologists. We brought them to UCLA. We had some economists there, including Ernst Fehr, Sam Bowles, and Herb Gintis, and we taught them some game theory.

Rob Boyd那时候是我导师，我们跑去麦克阿瑟基金会要资助，他们资助了我们。我们由此得以组建了一个人类学家团队，把他们带到加州大学洛杉矶分校。我们在那还有一批经济学家，包括Ernst Fehr, Sam Bowles和Herb Gintis，我们就教了他们一些博弈论。

There was large discussion about methods, about whether we could actually pull this off, and then over the next two summers these field anthropologists went to the field and conducted the ultimatum game as well as a few other games—not systemically across the societies— but it gave us insight that we would then later use, and what we found is that societies vary dramatically, from societies that would never reject, to societies that would even reject offers above 50 percent, and we found that mean offers ranged across societies from about 25 percent to even over 50 percent. We had some of what we called hyper fair societies. The highest was 57 percent in Lamalera, Indonesia.

当时就方法论有很多争论，还争论到了我们到底能否做成这事。但接下来的两个夏季，我们的田野人类学家就到了实地，实施了“最后通牒博弈”和其他一些博弈（并没有在不同社群中系统性实施），这给我们提供了一些见解，后来都能够用上。我们发现的是，社群与社群之间差别极大，有些社群绝不会选择拒绝任何开价，而有些社群甚至连高于50%的开价都会拒绝。而且我们发现，不同社群的平均开价从25%到高于50%不等。有些社群我们称为“极度公平”社会。其中最高的是印度尼西亚的Lamalera人，（开价）高达57%。

We found we were able to explain a lot of the variation in these offers with two variables. One was the degree of market integration. More market-integrated societies offered more, and less market integrated societies offered less. But also, there seemed to be other institutions, institutions of cooperative hunting seemed to influence offers. Societies with more cooperative institutions offered more, and these were independent effects.

我们发现，我们可以用两个变量解释开价方面的很大一部分差异。其中一个变量是市场整合的程度。市场整合度越高的社群开价越高，整合度越低的社群开价越低。不过似乎也还有其他的机制，比如合作狩猎的机制似乎也会影响开价。合作机制越多的社群开价越高，而且两者是独立发挥作用的。

This then led to a subsequent project where we measured market integration much more carefully along with a large number of other variables, including wealth, income, education, community size, and also religion. We did the Ultimatum Game along with two other experiments. The two other experiments were the Dictator Game (the Dictator Game is like the Ultimatum Game except the second player doesn't have the option to reject) and the Third Party Punishment Game.

这又引出了我们后来的项目，我们更加细致地测量了市场整合度，以及很多其他变量，包括财富、收入、教育、社区规模，还有宗教。除“最后通牒博弈”之外，我们还一同做了另外两个实验。一个是“独裁者博弈”（跟“最后通牒博弈”类似，只是参与者B没有拒绝的选项），另一个是“第三方惩罚博弈”。

In the Third Party Punishment Game, there are three players and the first two players play a Dictator Game. They're allotted a sum of money, say $100, and the first player can offer any portion of the $100 to the second player, player B. Now, player B in this game can't do anything, and they just get whatever they're offered. But there is a third player, player C, and player C is given half the amount that A and B are dividing up, and he can use some of his money (20 percent of it actually) to pay to take money away from A at three times the rate. If he's given $50, he can use $10 of it to take $30 away from player A. Suppose player A gives only $10 to player B and keeps $90 for himself, then player B will go home with $10. Now, player C can pay $10, so he goes home with $40 instead of $50 in order to take $30 away from player A. Player A would go home with $60 instead of $90, because he got punished. Player B goes home with $10, and player C goes home with $40 instead of $50 because he chose to punish.

在“第三方惩罚博弈”中有三个参与者，头两个进行“独裁者博弈”。他们会得到一笔钱，比方说100块。然后参与者A可以提议将100块中的任意数目分给第二个参与者，参与者B。在这个游戏中，参与者B不能做任何事，A给他多少，他就只能得到多少。但是还有第三个参与者，参与者C。参与者C手里有相当于A和B所分数额一半的钱，他可以拿出其中的一部分（20%）去抵消掉参与者A手中的一部分钱，而且能1抵3。比如，C手里有50块，他就能花掉其中的10块去抵消掉参与者A手中的30块。假设参与者A只分了10块给B参与者，自己留下了90块，那么参与者B就得10块。但因为参与者C拿出了10块钱，那他拿回家的就是40块而非50块，又因为参与者A手中钱被抵消掉了30块。A拿回家的就是60块而非90块，因为他遭到了惩罚。参与者B拿回家10块，参与者C拿回家40块而非50块，因为他选择进行惩罚。

This gives us two different measures of willingness to punish strangers, ephemeral interactions—people that you don't know and won't see again. In the experiment, one is rejection in the Ultimatum Game, and then this Third Party Punishment measure, and it gives us three measures of fairness in this kind of transaction.

对于我们惩罚陌生人和一次性交往（那些你不认识并且以后也不会再见到的人）的意愿，这就提供了两种测量办法。在试验中，一种测量是看“最终通牒博弈”中的拒绝选项，另一个则是看“第三方惩罚”。并且，它还给我们提供了此类交易中关于公平的三种测量方式。

It gives us offers in all three games and what we found there is that market integration again predicts higher offers in all three games, and size of the community predicts willingness to punish and this fits with a lot of theoretical work, suggesting that if you have small communities, you don't need punishment. You don't need costly punishment. You need some kind of sanctioning system to keep people in line, but you're probably not going to do it with single individuals punishing. You have some other mechanism. It could be some kind of reputational mechanism like if they don't cooperate in this situation, then you won't interact with them in some other situation. It's a withdrawal of interaction rather than direct punishment. There's a number of different ways to create norm systems that operate like that.

在三种博弈中都有出价，而且我们再次发现，在三种博弈中，市场整合度能够预测出价的高低，社区的规模能够预测惩罚的意愿，而且这跟许多理论研究成果相吻合；这意味着，如果社区规模足够小，根本不需要惩罚。根本不需要代价高昂的惩罚。你需要建立某种处罚机制，以便人人都能守规矩，但你可能无需对个体施加单独的惩罚。你还有其他一些机制。可能是某种声誉机制，比方说如果他们在这种情况下不能够合作，那碰到其他情况你就不会与他们互动。这是取消交往，而不是直接惩罚。有许多办法可以创造出按照这个模式运行的规范制度。

In a big society punishment can be most effective because reputational mechanisms can be weak. If you're in a big society and you encounter somebody, you probably don't have friends in common through which you could pass reputational information for which punishment could be generated. You might want to punish them right on the spot or someone who observes the interaction might want to punish them right on the spot or call the authorities or whatever, which is also costly.

在大型社群中，惩罚可能是最有效的，因为声誉机制的效力可能很微弱。如果你在一个大型社群中与某人打交道，你和他之间可能并没有共同的朋友，那你就没法传递声誉信息，也就无从构成惩罚。你可能希望当场惩罚他，或者你们打交道时的某个旁观者可能想要当场惩罚他，或者诉诸权威，这样的代价都是很高的。

This creates a puzzle because typically people think of small-scale kinds of societies, where you study hunter-gatherers and horticultural scattered across the globe (ranging from New Guinea to Siberia to Africa) as being very pro social and cooperative. This is true, but the thing is those are based on local norms for cooperation with kin and local interactions in certain kinds of circumstances.



这就给我们制造了一个谜题。因为通常人们认为，小规模的社区——比如当你研究的是散布全球各地的狩猎采集者群体（从新几内亚到西伯利亚到非洲）——都是非常亲社会的、非常具有合作精神的。事实的确如此，但问题是这只是基于地方性的与亲族合作的的规范，以及在特定情形下的地方性交往规范。



Hunter-gatherers are famous for being great at food sharing, but these norms don't extend beyond food sharing. They certainly don't extend to ephemeral or strangers, and to make a large-scale society run you have to shift from investing in your local kin groups and your enduring relationships to being willing to pay to be fair to a stranger.



狩猎采集者在食物分享上的慷慨是出了名的，但这些规范并不会延伸到食物分享以外。它们绝对不会延伸到一次性交往或陌生人身上。要维持一个大型社会运转，你必须要转型，从投资于你的本地亲族群体和长久关系，转变为愿意为了公平对待陌生人而付出代价。



This is something that is subtle, and what people have trouble grasping is that if you're going to be fair to a stranger, then you're taking money away from your family. In the case of these dictator games, in order to give 50 percent to this other unknown person, it meant you were going home with less money, and that meant your family was going to have less money, and your kids would have less money. To observe modern institutions, to not hire your brother-in-law when you get a fancy job or you get elected to an office is to hurt your family. Your brother-in-law doesn't have a job now. He has to have whatever other job he has, a less good job.



这种情形非常微妙。人们不容易理解的是，如果你想要公平对待陌生人，那就会让你家里的钱变少。在上述独裁者博弈中，如果你要拿出50%的钱给另外一个陌生人，那就意味着你拿回家里的钱会变少，也就是你家的钱会变少，你孩子的钱会变少。要遵守现代的制度，比如在你得到一个好工作或被选为官员以后不要雇佣自己的小舅子，这就会对自己家庭造成伤害。你的小舅子现在没有工作。他必须自己去找其他工作，一个没那么好的工作。



A commitment to something like anti-nepotism norms is something that runs against our evolutionary inclinations and our inclinations to help kin and to invest in long-term close relationships, but it's crucial for making a large-scale society run. Corruption, things like hiring your brother-in-law and feathering the nest of your close friends and relatives is what really tears down and makes complex societies not work very well. In this sense, the norms of modern societies that make modern societies run now are at odds with at least some of our evolved instincts.



服膺于像反裙带关系这种规范，这是与我们的进化偏好相悖的，与我们帮助亲族、投资于长期亲密关系的偏好相悖，但它对大型社群的运转则至关重要。腐败，比如雇佣自己的小舅子、为自己的好友和亲属谋私利这种事，才真正会撕裂复杂社会，并令其不能良好运转。在这个意义上，令现代社会得以运转的现代社会规范是与我们进化形成的至少一部分本能相违背的。



Lately we've been focused on the effects of religion. One of the things I didn't mention from the experimental games project is that in addition to market integration in the second project, we found independently that adherence to a world religion matters. People from world religions were willing to give more to the other person in the experiment, the anonymous stranger.



近来我们研究的焦点是宗教的作用。关于我们的博弈实验项目，有一件事我还没有提到，那就是在第二个项目中，除了市场整合度之外，我们还独立地发现，人们对世界宗教的信仰也有关系。在实验中，信仰世界宗教的人会愿意分更多钱给另外一个人，另外一个匿名的陌生人。



We've been using these experiments in the context of behavioral games. There's since been a number of additional papers coming out of economics showing the relationship between market integrations using measures like distance from market and people's willingness to build impartial institutions. Part of this is your willingness to acquire a norm of impartial roles; that we have a set of rules that governs this system.



我们还将这些实验应用到了行为博弈的情境中去。自那以后至今，经济学领域已经又发表了很多论文，证明市场整合度（用与市场的距离之类方式测量）与人们建构公平制度之意愿之间的关系。内容之一包括，你习得一套关于公平角色的规范的意愿，也就是我们有一套规则来管理这个体系。



Sometimes historians or political scientists call it the rule of law. We have an impartial set of rules that we're going to follow, and those rules apply independently of the identities and our emotional reactions towards the participants.



有时候，历史学家或政治科学家会把它叫做法治。我们有一套需要遵守的公平规则，而且不管我们的身份如何，不管我们对其他参与者的感情态度如何，这套规则都适用。



One of the things we find with the relationship between norms and these risk-managing institutions is that when you have risk managing institutions these impartial norms can spread. Otherwise, people are strongly biased towards maintaining these local relationships. If you want the rule of law to spread or to be maintained, you need conditions in which you're managing risk.



关于规范和这类风险管理机制之间的关系，我们有一个发现是，如果你拥有风险管理机制，那么这种公平规范就能得以传播。否则，人们会强烈偏向于固守他们的地方性关系。如果你希望法治得到传播或维持，那就需要一个有风险管控的环境。



（编辑：辉格@whigzhou）
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