Indirect genetic effects among neighbors promote cooperation and accelerate adaptation in a small-scale human society

Abstract

Explaining the rapid evolution of human cooperation and its role in our species’ biodemographic success remains a major evolutionary puzzle. To address this challenge, we tested a social drive hypothesis, which predicts that social plasticity and social selection in human groups cause indirect genetic effects that accelerate the adaptation of fitness, promoting population growth via feedback between the environmental causes and evolutionary consequences of cooperation. Using Bayesian multilevel models to analyze fertility data from a small-scale society, we demonstrate that density- and frequency-dependent indirect genetic effects on fitness promote the evolution of cooperation among neighboring women, increasing the rate of contemporary adaptation by ~5×. Our results show how interactions between the genetic and socioecological processes shaping cooperation in reproduction can drive rapid growth and social evolution in human populations.

Reference

Jordan S. Martin, Bret A. Beheim, Michael Gurven, Hillard Kaplan, Jonathan Stieglitz, Benjamin C. Trumble, Paul L. Hooper, Daniel Cummings, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, and Adrian Jaeggi, “Indirect genetic effects among neighbors promote cooperation and accelerate adaptation in a small-scale human society”, Science Advances, vol. 11, n. 31, July 2025.