There’s a biology professor at my alma matter, Paul Bingham, who teaches a course on a theory of his that is meant to explain “human uniqueness.” It doesn’t have anything direct to do with economics, other than an intersection on studying human behavior, but it has captivated many young minds at the university, including my own, and I’m curious what this group of people think about how it explains behavior. I’ve since given into to my gnawing suspicion that it’s a BS theory, but I am still intrigued by it.

It’s called the coalitional enforcement hypothesis, and it is explained here. Looking at it briefly, I suspect it will be received as, at best, an entertaining read.

If you want a TL;DR, basically uniquely human levels of cooperation arose from the evolution of the ability to throw with such skill as to kill conspecifics from a distance with a diminished cost. This created the ability for a group of humans to cooperate more efficiently vis-a-vis the capacity to enforce that cooperation by killing freeloaders and antagonists (by throwing shit at them until they died). So with the ability to cooperate and its beneficial effects on human survival, humans began evolving the traits we see today (e.g., intelligence, language, human morality, etc.), as they are favorable for cooperation. The theory goes on to explain that human history can be broken down into steps of escalating scale of human distance killing and likewise escalating scale of human cooperation.

That might not be the best TL;DR; I was registered for the course, but dropped out due to a hospitalization, and only sat in on the class after I graduated. Still, I can try to discuss what I remember if you’re too lazy to read the link.