Building on studies of historical non-Westphalian world orders, this article challenges desires to identify a ‘first’ international. The question ‘when was the first international?’ is fundamental to defining disciplinary boundaries and the ontologies that shape them. Such quests are substantialist rather than relational, limiting our understanding of the relations and diversity of agents involved in world ordering. Existing approaches to the ‘first’ international are caught in a ‘Mesopotamian trap’: a combination of social evolution conceptual models grounded in colonial epistemologies, analytical presentism, and the surviving propaganda of ancient urban rulers. This article proposes ‘dynamic multiplicity’ as a new framework to account for the diversity, complexity, dynamism, and relationality of world orders in past and present. Dynamic multiplicity emphasizes: a quantitative and qualitative multiplicity of actors; never-ending and always unfolding relations; the instability and permeability of social actors; the diachronic nature of social action; hierarchical and heterarchical power relations; the multi-scalar spatiality of the social; and sustained and critical interdisciplinarity. It applies dynamic multiplicity to the case of Sumer and ancient West Asia, a so-called ‘first’ international, to reveal a diversity of durable relational actors and contradict assumptions that international relations necessarily lead to world orders of homogenous unit-types.

A critical response to Bart Wilson's (2022) theory of property, focusing on his assertion of a final cause in the evolution of property. It argues that while Darwin's great achievement was to remove final causes from earthly evolution and thus move the question of how biological life is organized from theology to science, Wilson's apparent restoration of a final cause to the evolution of property would move the question of how social life is organized from science back to theology, a clear step backward.

Human decision-making is affected by a diversity of factors including material cost–benefit considerations, normative and cultural influences, learning and conformity with peers and external authorities (e.g. cultural, religious, political, organisational). Also important are dynamically changing personal perceptions of the situation and beliefs about actions and expectations of others as well as psychological phenomena such as cognitive dissonance and social projection. To better understand these processes, I develop a unifying modelling framework describing the joint dynamics of actions and attitudes of individuals and their beliefs about the actions and attitudes of their groupmates. I consider which norms get internalised and which factors control beliefs about others. I predict that the long-term average characteristics of groups are largely determined by a balance between material payoffs and the values promoted by the external authority. Variation around these averages largely reflects variation in individual costs and benefits mediated by individual psychological characteristics. The efforts of an external authority to change the group behaviour in a certain direction can, counter-intuitively, have an opposite effect on individual behaviour. I consider how various factors can affect differences between groups and societies in the tightness/looseness of their social norms. I show that the most important factors are social heterogeneity, societal threat, effects of authority, cultural variation in the degree of collectivism/individualism, the population size and the subsistence style. My results can be useful for achieving a better understanding of human social behaviour and historical and current social processes, and in developing more efficient policies aiming to modify social behaviour.

Morality can be adaptive or maladaptive. From this fact come polarizing disputes on the meta-ethical status of moral adaptation. The realist tracking account of morality claims that it is possible to track objective moral truths and that these truths correspond to moral rules that are adaptive. In contrast, evolutionary anti-realism rejects the existence of moral objectivity and thus asserts that adaptive moral rules cannot represent objective moral truths, since those truths do not exist. This article develops a novel evolutionary view of natural law to defend the realist tracking account. It argues that we can identify objective moral truths through cultural group selection and that adaptive moral rules are likely to reflect such truths.

Issues of sexual reproduction lie at the core of evolutionary thinking, which often places an emphasis on how individuals attempt to maximise the number of successful offspring that they can produce. At first sight, it may therefore appear that individuals who opt for gender-affirming medical interventions are acting in ways that are evolutionarily disadvantageous. However, there are persuasive hypotheses that might make sense of such choices in evolutionary terms and we explore these here. It is premature to claim knowledge of the extent to which evolutionary arguments can usefully be applied to issues of gender identity, although worth reflecting on the extent to which nature tends towards diversity in matters of sex and gender. The importance of acknowledging and respecting different views in this domain, as well as recognising both the uncertainty and likely multiplicity of causal pathways, has implications for clinicians. We make some suggestions about how clinicians might best respond when faced with requests from patients in this area.

The evolutionary trend toward increasing complexity and social function is ultimately the result of natural selection's paradoxical tendency to foster cooperation through competition. Cooperating populations ranging from complex societies to somatic tissue are constantly under attack, however, by non-cooperating mutants or transformants, called ‘cheaters’. Structure in these populations promotes the formation of cooperating clusters whose competitive superiority can alone be sufficient to thwart outgrowths of cheaters and thereby maintain cooperation. But we find that when cheaters appear too frequently – exceeding a threshold mutation or transformation rate – their scattered outgrowths infiltrate and break up cooperating clusters, resulting in a cascading loss of social cohesiveness, a switch to net positive selection for cheaters and ultimately in the loss of cooperation. Our findings imply that a critically low mutation rate had to be achieved (perhaps through the advent of proofreading and repair mechanisms) before complex cooperative functions, such as those required for multicellularity and social behaviour, could have evolved and persisted. When mutation rate in our model is also allowed to evolve, the threshold is crossed spontaneously after thousands of generations, at which point cheaters rapidly invade. Probing extrapolations of these findings suggest: (1) in somatic tissue, it is neither social retro-evolution alone nor mutation rate evolution alone but the interplay between these two that ultimately leads to oncogenic transitions; the rate of this coevolution might thereby provide an indicator of lifespan of species, terrestrial or not; (2) the likelihood that extraterrestrial life can be expected to be multicellular and social should be affected by ultraviolet and other mutagenic factors.

Why do we still speak of foragers and farmers? The division of societies into categories including ‘savage’ hunter-gatherers and ‘civilised’ farmers has its roots in seventeenth-century northwestern Europe, but has implications for archaeologists and anthropologists today. Such concepts still provide the frameworks for much intellectual labour including university courses, academic conferences and publications, as well as providing the basis for moral and political evaluations of contemporary societies and practices for a wide range of people, from governments to development agencies, ‘alternative’ archaeologies and parts of the Green movement. This paper examines some of the currents which contributed towards their establishment, and argues that writing ‘across’ such deep-seated categories may be the only way to challenge their hegemony and develop new questions. As an example recent trends in data and interpretation of the ‘mesolithic-neolithic transition’ in western Europe are discussed.