Papers & Chapters by Dominic Johnson
Recent evolutionary accounts seek to explain religious belief and behavior in terms of native cog... more Recent evolutionary accounts seek to explain religious belief and behavior in terms of native cognitive dispositions and culturally transmitted innovations that have persisted because they have adaptive value. Despite the often vitriolic evolution- religion debate, new evolutionary theories typically avoid challenging the truth of religious beliefs. In this paper we do three things. (1) We describe five new devel- opments in evolutionary theory that have potential relevance to whether religious beliefs are truth-tracking or not: adaptive misbeliefs, error management theory, self- deception, signaling, and imitation. (2) We assess both their posited application to religious cognition and their possible entailments for the truth or warrant of religious beliefs. (3) We explore whether and under what conditions scientific explanations of religious belief should (a) remain neutral to the truth status of those beliefs or (b) render judgment about a belief’s falsity – or truth – as important aspects of the phe- nomenon to be explained.
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Papers by Dominic Johnson
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Evolution and Human Behavior
... 1987, p. 12). Further still, groups, rather than individuals, often make decisions in war but... more ... 1987, p. 12). Further still, groups, rather than individuals, often make decisions in war but these also result in military incompetence (Hinde, 1993), 2 and may even exacerbate their effects (Wrangham, 1999a). Thirdly, various ...
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Pilot studies of KRUUK (1989) in the UK revealed that amongst Mustelidae badgers are unusual as t... more Pilot studies of KRUUK (1989) in the UK revealed that amongst Mustelidae badgers are unusual as they form large groups sharing a communal site. Although there is a profusion of studies on badgers from the UK, there is genuine lack of supporting evidence that they are particularly social elsewhere in Europe, and densities are extremely variable. Such great geographic variation in behaviour provides an excellent opportunity to progress in testing models of social behaviour and cooperation in mammals. This area of research is also important because in Britain badgers have been linked to the spread of bovine tuberculosis. Whether this is likely to be a problem elsewhere in Europe largely depends on understanding the ecology and behaviour of badgers and their interacti- ons with other mammalian species. The aim of this paper is to highlight the recent developments in the study of the social biology of this species, with a view to encouraging more research in Europe.
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In an ideal world, people would tackle major crises such as global climate change as rational act... more In an ideal world, people would tackle major crises such as global climate change as rational actors, weighing the costs, benefits and probabilities of success of alternative policies accurately and impartially. Unfortunately, human brains are far from accurate and impartial. Mounting research in experimental psychology reveals that we are all subject to systematic biases in judgement and decision-making. While such biases may have been adaptive heuristics that promoted survival and reproduction in the Pleistocene environment of our evolutionary past, in today's world of technological sophistication, industrial power and mass societies, psychological biases can lead to disasters on an unprecedented scale. Beyond the exploding ecological and socio-economic research on climate change and how to deal with the 'tragedy of the commons', it is a better understanding of human psychology - 'the tragedy of cognition' - that may ultimately tip the balance against the seeds...
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War is typically studied by treating states as independent data points, focusing on particular ch... more War is typically studied by treating states as independent data points, focusing on particular characteristics and risk factors of individual states as causes of conflict. This situation is ironic, because it is the interactions among states in the international system that forms the entire unpinning of international relations theory. The world's states and the relationships between them would therefore be better modeled as a network. Network analysis (graph theory), which has been extensively developed and tested in the natural sciences (e.g. ecological networks and food webs), can be used to examine the structure and behavior of the international system as a whole, allowing the quantification and analysis of: (1) how individual state behavior affects and is affected by the state system; (2) the role of indirect interactions (via linked neighbors), which are otherwise hard to study; and (3) the influence of "key player" states in the network (i.e. if and how certain s...
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Abstract An evolutionary perspective on leadershipassumes that leadership consists ofa constellat... more Abstract An evolutionary perspective on leadershipassumes that leadership consists ofa constellation of adaptations for solving different coordination problems in human ancestral environments, most notably pertaining to group movement, social cohesion, and intergroup relations. Our evolved leadership psychologyinfluence sthe way we think about and respond to modern leadership, which creates the potential for a mismatchbetween,leadership requirements in modern versus ancestral environments. This chapter provides some evidence for this mismatch hypothesis and notes some
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evidence on expectations, aggression, gender
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Summary As a means of developing a procedure for evaluating the merit of pork billies for produc-... more Summary As a means of developing a procedure for evaluating the merit of pork billies for produc- ing sliced bacon, measurements and evaluations were obtained for each of a group of 100 carcasses and for one untrimmed belly from each carcass. Each belly was subsequently skinned and then thoroughly ground and mixed for analysis of fat content of the entire
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Philosophical Magazine Part B, 1990
We briefly describe some of the recent developments in the theory of magnetic alloys. From a star... more We briefly describe some of the recent developments in the theory of magnetic alloys. From a starting point of the compositionally disordered ferromagnetic phase, we show how to predict the tendency to order together with the interrelation between magnetic and compositional order. We illustrate our theory with an application to a Ni–Fe alloy. Our calculations of ‘local response’ functions, which
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Folia Zoologica -Praha-
Although the Prisoner's dilemma is a leading metaphor for the evolution of sociality, only a ... more Although the Prisoner's dilemma is a leading metaphor for the evolution of sociality, only a few studies demonstrate that this game indeed operates in nature. We offer an alternative perspective, in which parasites and their hosts are used as a model system, suggesting that Prisoner's dilemma may be rare due to different individuals experiencing variation in the payoffs they receive from alternative strategies. Ectoparasites (such as fleas) move stochastically between hosts, causing differential parasite burdens. The resulting variance in the need for cooperation - in this case cooperative allogrooming - means that payoffs for different strategies (e.g. cooperate and defect) are not fixed. Our simulations revealed that due to parasite dynamics, cooperation among hosts conforms to a mixture of two games: Mutualism and Cruel Bind, both of which are more likely to coerce individuals into mutual cooperation than Prisoner's dilemma. Though interesting, Prisoner's dilemma ...
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BMC evolutionary biology, Jan 10, 2002
The Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) is a widely used paradigm to study cooperation in evolutionary bi... more The Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) is a widely used paradigm to study cooperation in evolutionary biology, as well as in fields as diverse as moral philosophy, sociology, economics and politics. Players are typically assumed to have fixed payoffs for adopting certain strategies, which depend only on the strategy played by the opponent. However, fixed payoffs are not realistic in nature. Utility functions and the associated payoffs from pursuing certain strategies vary among members of a population with numerous factors. In biology such factors include size, age, social status and expected life span; in economics they include socio-economic status, personal preference and past experience; and in politics they include ideology, political interests and public support. Thus, no outcome is identical for any two different players. We show that relaxing the assumption of fixed payoffs leads to frequent violations of the payoff structure required for a Prisoner's Dilemma. With variance twi...
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BMC ecology, 2001
The Resource Dispersion Hypothesis (RDH) proposes a mechanism for the passive formation of social... more The Resource Dispersion Hypothesis (RDH) proposes a mechanism for the passive formation of social groups where resources are dispersed, even in the absence of any benefits of group living per se. Despite supportive modelling, it lacks empirical testing. The RDH predicts that, rather than Territory Size (TS) increasing monotonically with Group Size (GS) to account for increasing metabolic needs, TS is constrained by the dispersion of resource patches, whereas GS is independently limited by their richness. We conducted multiple-year tests of these predictions using data from the long-term study of badgers Meles meles in Wytham Woods, England. The study has long failed to identify direct benefits from group living and, consequently, alternative explanations for their large group sizes have been sought. TS was not consistently related to resource dispersion, nor was GS consistently related to resource richness. Results differed according to data groupings and whether territories were ma...
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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Jan 17, 2009
Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) has earned the nickname "warrior gene" because it has b... more Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) has earned the nickname "warrior gene" because it has been linked to aggression in observational and survey-based studies. However, no controlled experimental studies have tested whether the warrior gene actually drives behavioral manifestations of these tendencies. We report an experiment, synthesizing work in psychology and behavioral economics, which demonstrates that aggression occurs with greater intensity and frequency as provocation is experimentally manipulated upwards, especially among low activity MAOA (MAOA-L) subjects. In this study, subjects paid to punish those they believed had taken money from them by administering varying amounts of unpleasantly hot (spicy) sauce to their opponent. There is some evidence of a main effect for genotype and some evidence for a gene by environment interaction, such that MAOA is less associated with the occurrence of aggression in a low provocation condition, but significantly predicts such behav...
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Personality and Individual Differences, 2007
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Evolution and Human Behavior, 2015
ABSTRACT Lanchester’s “Laws of Combat” are mathematical principles that have long been used to mo... more ABSTRACT Lanchester’s “Laws of Combat” are mathematical principles that have long been used to model military conflict. More recently, they have been applied to conflict among animals, including ants, birds, lions, and chimpanzees. Lanchester’s Linear Law states that, where combat between two groups is a series of one-on-one duels, fighting strength is proportional to group size, as one would expect. However, Lanchester’s Square Law states that, where combat is all-against-all, fighting strength is proportional to the square of group size. If conflict has been important in our evolutionary history, we might expect humans to have evolved assessment mechanisms that take Lanchester’s Laws of Combat into account. Those that did would have reaped great dividends; those that did not would have made a quick exit from the gene pool. We hypothesize that: (1) the dominant and most lethal form of combat in human evolutionary history (as well as among chimpanzees and some social carnivores) has been asymmetric raids in which multiple individuals gang up on a few opponents, approximating Square Law combat; and (2) this would have favored the natural selection of an evolved “Square Law heuristic” that correlated fighting strength not with raw group size but with group size squared. We discuss the implications for primate evolution, human evolution, coalitionary psychology, and contemporary war.
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Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences, 2011
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Foreign Affairs, 2005
... dependent on material strength alone.28 These two mechanisms of positive illusions, performan... more ... dependent on material strength alone.28 These two mechanisms of positive illusions, performance en-hancement and opponent deception, can of ... than to that of bureaucrats: shows of resolve and bluffing between national leaders are quin-tessential elements of international ...
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Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia, 2005
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Papers & Chapters by Dominic Johnson
Papers by Dominic Johnson