Biological Institutions: the Political Science of Animal Cooperation
Abstract: The main theme in the evolution of social behavior is how cooperation between organisms can emerge in the face of conflicts of interests. Political science studies cooperation and conflict, and the socio-political structures these produce in the most socially complex animal, humans. In particular, political scientists have long studied how political, economic and social institutions affect human behavior, and how these institutions change over time. We argue that this institutional approach can be applied fruitfully to the evolution of animal behavior. The institutional approach goes beyond the conventional focus on studying the evolution of individual strategies in a given social setting to studying how the social interaction itself is set up. We identify several areas of institutional theory that have immediate applications to biological problems and suggest future avenues for theoretical and empirical research at the interface of social science and biology.
