beware of your good reputation!

Collective action in large groups whose members are genetically unrelated is a distinguishing feature of the human species. Individual reputations may be a key to a satisfactory evolutionary explanation. This week I suggest a brief and easy to read letter about cooperative behavior in humans:

Fehr, E. 2004. Don't lose your reputation. Nature 449, 449-450

In this letter Fehr comments the findings of Panchanthan and Boyd (published in the same issue of Nature) and reviews the state of the art of collective cooperative behavior theories. I assume that you all are familiar with the basic concepts of reciprocal altruism and the importance of status into animal behavior (including us).

Image: Woo Suk Hwang, fallen angel of the South Corean Scientific arena with his truly clonned dog, Snuppy.