Final conference hosted by Collegium Budapest (Institute for Advanced Studies), 15-17 September 2010
Background and Objective
The ESF European Collaborative Research (EUROCORES) Programmes offer researchers from Europe and beyond an opportunity to collaborate on basic research questions that are best addressed on a pan-European scale.
The leading idea behind the EUROCORES programme “The Evolution of Cooperation and Trading (TECT)” is that agents of different nature, ranging from bacteria to multi-national alliances of humans, are likely to be equipped with similar evolved strategies designed to solve the same recurring dilemmas. While distantly related species probably use different mechanisms to implement these strategies, more closely related species are more likely to employ the same mechanisms when solving the same problems. These strategies and mechanisms form the focus of research in the EUROCORES Programme TECT. Collaborative research projects under TECT are united around one main goal, namely to highlight the evolutionary continuity of cooperation, both genetic and cultural, and to make this continuity an object of study in its own right: What explains the evolution of different mechanisms and strategies? Can we trace the evolutionary history of cooperative mechanisms and does this explain the forms of cooperation we observe today? Can 'bounded rationality' and the break-down of cooperation in modern human societies be explained by the activation of mechanisms that evolved in past environments? Does evolutionary history repeat itself in the form of a cultural evolution of human trading behaviour? Another important goal of our programme, essential to achieving the first, is to bring together experts from different disciplines in order to encourage, and enable, ‘cross-fertilisation’ of different traditions, terminologies and methods.
Structure of the conference programme
The TECT Final Conference was scheduled around five thematic sessions, corresponding to the five Collaborative Research Projects funded within the TECT programme.
Session 1
Sustaining eco-economic norms for a sustainable environment (SENSE)
Chair: Eva Hoogland
Session 2
Dynamic complexity of cooperation-based self-organising networks in the First Global Age (DynCoopNet)
Chair: Professor Ana Crespo Solana, CCHS-High Spanish Council of Research, CSIC, Madrid, Spain
Session 3
The social and mental dynamics of cooperation (SOCCOP)
Chair: Professor Arcadi Navarro, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
Session 4
Cooperation in mutualisms: contracts, markets, space, and dispersal (BIOCONTRACT)
Chair: Professor Naomi Pierce, Harvard University, Cambridge, US
Session 5
Cooperation in corvids (COCOR)
Chair: Professor Ronald Noë, Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France
