The evolution of cooperation in organisms of varying degrees of complexity. Group selection, kin selection, eusociality, miscellaneous other mechanisms.
Brian McGill’s parable of the hens, based on Muir and Craig (1998), a.k.a. putting the “coop” in “cooperation”.
High productivity egg-laying is associated with aggression — indeed the highest egg layers are basically the ones that beat up the other hens in the coop with them and capture the most resources. […]
Then in the 1980s people got the idea to use group selection. Instead of picking individuals that were most productive, they selected entire hen houses that were most productive to produce the next generation
References
Axelrod, Robert. 1997. The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration. Princeton University Press.
Axelrod, Robert, and William D. Hamilton. 1981. “The Evolution of Cooperation.” Science, New Series, 211 (4489): 1390–96. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1685895.
Axelrod, Robert, and Ross A Hammond. 2003. “The Evolution of Ethnocentric Behavior.” In.
Bernhard, Helen, Urs Fischbacher, and Ernst Fehr. 2006. “Parochial Altruism in Humans.” Nature 442 (7105): 912–15. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04981.
Bowles, Samuel. 2001. “Individual Interactions, Group Conflicts, and the Evolution of Preferences.” Social Dynamics 155: 190. http://books.google.ch/books?hl=de&lr=&id=DBiyi8Ubih4C&oi=fnd&pg=PA155&dq=Individual+interactions,+group+conflicts,+and+the+evolution+of+preferences&ots=NMFYvAwGHU&sig=Fs56TT7N1lMHkenZOqk3g-uSGvs.
———. 2004. Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution. Princeton University Press.
Bowles, Samuel, Jung-Kyoo Choi, and Astrid Hopfensitz. 2003. “The Co-Evolution of Individual Behaviors and Social Institutions.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 223 (2): 135–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5193(03)00060-2.
Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. 2000. “Reciprocity, Self-Interest and the Welfare State.” Nordic Journal of Political Economy 26: 33–53. http://www.nopecjournal.org/NOPEC_2000_a02.pdf.
———. 2004. “The Evolution of Strong Reciprocity: Cooperation in Heterogeneous Populations.” Theoretical Population Biology 65 (1): 17–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tpb.2003.07.001.
Boyd, Robert, and Peter J Richerson. 1987. “The Evolution of Ethnic Markers.” Cultural Anthropology 2: 65.
Boyd, Robert, and Peter J. Richerson. 1990. “Group Selection Among Alternative Evolutionarily Stable Strategies.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 145 (3): 331–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5193(05)80113-4.
———. 1992. “Punishment Allows the Evolution of Cooperation (or Anything Else) in Sizable Groups.” Ethology and Sociobiology 13 (3): 171–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/0162-3095(92)90032-Y.
Boyd, Robert, and Peter J Richerson. 1999. “Complex Societies: The Evolutionary Origins of a Crude Superorganism.” Human Nature 10: 253.
Brockhurst, Michael A, Angus Buckling, and Andy Gardner. 2007. “Cooperation Peaks at Intermediate Disturbance.” Current Biology ??
Challet, Damien, and Yi-Cheng Zhang. 1997. “Emergence of Cooperation and Organization in an Evolutionary Game.” Physica A: Statistical and Theoretical Physics 246 (3-4): 407–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-4371(97)00419-6.
Cheng, Joey T., Jessica L. Tracy, and Joseph Henrich. 2010. “Pride, Personality, and the Evolutionary Foundations of Human Social Status.” Evolution and Human Behavior 31 (5): 334–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.02.004.
Dawkins, Richard. 1990. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.
Fosco, Constanza, and Friederike Mengel. 2010. “Cooperation Through Imitation and Exclusion in Networks.” Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jedc.2010.12.002.
Gelman, Andrew. 2008. “Methodology as Ideology: Some Comments on Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation.” QA Rivista Dell’Associazione Rossi-Doria 2 (September). http://www.stat.columbia.edu/ gelman/research/unpublished/axelrodps.
Gintis, Herbert, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr. 2003. “Explaining Altruistic Behavior in Humans.” Evolution and Human Behavior 24 (3): 153–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(02)00157-5.
Gintis, Herbert, Eric Smith, and Samuel Bowles. 2001. “Costly Signaling and Cooperation.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 213 (1): 103–19. https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.2001.2406.
Hauert, Christoph, Silvia De Monte, Josef Hofbauer, and Karl Sigmund. 2002. “Volunteering as Red Queen Mechanism for Cooperation in Public Goods Games.” Science 296 (5570): 1129–32. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1070582.
Henrich, Joseph, and Robert Boyd. 1998. “The Evolution of Conformist Transmission and the Emergence of Between-Group Differences.” Evolution and Human Behavior 19 (4): 215–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(98)00018-X.
———. 2001. “Why People Punish Defectors: Weak Conformist Transmission Can Stabilize Costly Enforcement of Norms in Cooperative Dilemmas.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 208 (1): 79–89. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519300922021.
Henrich, Joseph, and Francisco J. Gil-White. 2001. “The Evolution of Prestige: Freely Conferred Deference as a Mechanism for Enhancing the Benefits of Cultural Transmission.” Evolution and Human Behavior 22 (3): 165–96. http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/class_text_065.pdf.
Hetzer, Moritz, and Didier Sornette. 2009. “Other-Regarding Preferences and Altruistic Punishment: A Darwinian Perspective.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 1468517. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1468517.
———. 2013a. “The Co-Evolution of Fairness Preferences and Costly Punishment.” PLoS ONE 8 (3): e54308. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0054308.
———. 2013b. “An Evolutionary Model of Cooperation, Fairness and Altruistic Punishment in Public Good Games.” PLoS ONE 8 (11): e77041. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077041.
Kling, Arnold. 2020. “Evolutionary Roots of Cooperation.” askblog. June 25, 2020. http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/evolutionary-roots-of-cooperation/.
Le, Stephen, and Robert Boyd. 2007. “Evolutionary Dynamics of the Continuous Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 245: 258–67.
Mead, Nicole, and Jon Maner. 2012. “When Me Versus You Becomes Us Versus Them: How Intergroup Competition Shapes Ingroup Psychology.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6 (8): 566–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00447.x.
Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life. 2006. The MIT Press.
Muir, W. M., and J. V. Craig. 1998. “Improving Animal Well-Being Through Genetic Selection.” Poultry Science 77 (12): 1781–88. https://doi.org/10.1093/ps/77.12.1781.
Nowak, Martin A. 2006. “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation.” Science 314 (5805): 1560–63. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1133755.
Oliveira, Nuno M., Rene Niehus, and Kevin R. Foster. 2014. “Evolutionary Limits to Cooperation in Microbial Communities.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (50): 17941–46. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1412673111.
Ostrom, Elinor. 2000. “Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 14: 137–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/2646923.
Peters, Ole, and Alexander Adamou. 2015. “An Evolutionary Advantage of Cooperation.” June 10, 2015. http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03414.
Press, William H., and Freeman J. Dyson. 2012. “Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Contains Strategies That Dominate Any Evolutionary Opponent.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (26): 10409–13. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1206569109.
Richerson, Peter J, Robert T Boyd, and Joseph Henrich. 2003. “Cultural Evolution of Human Cooperation.” Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation, 357.
Riolo, Rick L, Michael D Cohen, and Robert Axelrod. 2001. “Evolution of Cooperation Without Reciprocity.” Nature 414 (6862): 441. https://doi.org/10.1038/35106555.
Sigmund, Karl. 2011. “Moral Assessment in Indirect Reciprocity.” Journal of Theoretical Biology In Press, Corrected Proof. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2011.03.024.
Simler, Kevin, and Robin Hanson. 2018. The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. 1 edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tooby, John, Leda Cosmides, and Michael E. Price. 2006. “Cognitive Adaptations Forn-Person Exchange: The Evolutionary Roots of Organizational Behavior.” Managerial and Decision Economics 27 (2-3): 103–29. https://doi.org/10.1002/mde.1287.
Tracy, Jessica L., Azim F. Shariff, and Joey T. Cheng. 2010. “A Naturalist’s View of Pride.” Emotion Review 2 (2): 163–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073909354627.