Publications |
Institutionalised commitment and its origins
Human Nature (2026)
It has been argued that reputationally-enforced commitments were part of the explanation for human cooperation for much of our history. In this paper, I show how the advent of hierarchical societies and formal institutions following the Neolithic revolution introduced a new means of enforcement for commitments – institutionalised third-party punishment. I argue this was pivotal for the evolution of modern human prosociality.
You can find the paper here.
You can find the paper here.
A commitment account of norm externalisation
Biology & Philosophy (2025)
One of the distinctive features of moral norms is thought to be their externalised character. To say that a norm is externalised is to say that it is experienced as imposed on us from the outside and exacting a demand on all, regardless of their group. I offer a commitment account of the emergence of externalised norms that situates their evolution as part of a coevolution of commitment and cooperation over human history.
You can find the paper here.
You can find the paper here.
The limits of our explanation: a case study in Myxococcus xanthus cooperation
Biological Theory (2025)
In this paper, I demonstrate two ways in which our major theories of the evolution of cooperation may fail to capture particular social phenomena. I use the case of group predation in the strain of myxobacteria known as Myxococcus xanthus as an illustrative example. I show the genomic, ecological and modelling difficulties in constructing an adequate simplified model of this social behaviour, with lessons for the modelling of cooperative behaviour among other organisms.
You can find the paper here.
You can find the paper here.
Commitment: From Hunting to Promising
Biology & Philosophy (2024)
I illustrate the transition between two forms of commitment in our evolutionary history: from pre-linguistic commitment, in the form of participation in group hunting among early hominins, to linguistic commitment, in the form of explicit promises. I show how group hunting changed our cooperative landscape and provided the selective environment for the evolution of a more effective commitment.
You can find the paper here.
A more public-facing version of my thoughts on commitment and cooperation is featured in Aeon, here.
You can find the paper here.
A more public-facing version of my thoughts on commitment and cooperation is featured in Aeon, here.
Metatickles and Death in Damascus
Electronic Proceedings for Theoretical Computer Science (2023)
Simon Huttegger has developed a version of deliberative decision theory that reconciles the prescriptions of the evidentialist and causalist decision theory. I extend this framework to problems characterised by decision instability, and show that it cannot deliver a resolute answer under a plausible specification of the independence dynamics. I prove that there exists a robust method of determining whether the specification of the independence dynamics matters for all two-state, two-act problems whose payoff tables exhibit some basic mathematical relationships.
You can find the paper here.
You can find the paper here.
Rational Preference in Transformative Experiences
Synthese (2021)
L. A. Paul argues that some decisions are epistemically transformative in such a way that we cannot assign subjective value to the outcomes. She claims we cannot use traditional decision theory to make these decisions rationally. I argue that Paul fails to engage critically with traditional accounts of decision theory and, on closer inspection, it is not clear that her version of decision theory entails a tension between rational and authentic choice. Furthermore, if her contribution is instead to bring to light the importance of authenticity alongside rational decision-making, the definition she provides of authenticity in fact undermines her argument.
You can find the paper here.
A more public-facing version of my thoughts on Transformative Experience is featured in The Crow's Nest, here.
You can find the paper here.
A more public-facing version of my thoughts on Transformative Experience is featured in The Crow's Nest, here.
Book reviews
Review of The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences, by Katja Guenther
Quarterly Review of Biology (2023)
In The Mirror and the Mind, Katja Guenther traces the rich history of mirror experiments over the past 150 years. Clearly written and beautifully detailed, this book will be of interest to psychologists, neuroscientists and anthropologists at all levels of expertise interested in issues of self-recognition or misidentification between the self and other.
You can find the review here.
You can find the review here.
Papers under review
Gossip as a commitment
Robin Dunbar has argued that gossip is that it is a means of social information-sharing in large groups. In this paper, I extend Dunbar’s work, providing an explanation of the proliferation of gossip which appeals to its immediate benefit to the sender of the gossip signal. At the same time as being a reputation-sharing mechanism, gossip constitutes a commitment to act in similar/dissimilar manner to the person about whom we gossip.
Can Deliberation Reconcile Evidential and Causal Decision Theory?
Many attempts to reconcile the prescriptions of two prominent forms of decision theory – evidential and causal – have involved the introduction of deliberational models. In this paper, I address what role deliberation can play in the debate between evidential and causal decision theory when it is aimed at the reasoning process rather than at evaluatively normative claims.
Papers in preparation
(Drafts available)
Social versus technical cognition in cumulative cultural evolution
I argue that attempts to determine the cognitive "difference-maker" between human and animal cumulative culture which rely on developmental and experimental psychology are flawed. They pose methodological difficulties in making inferences from modern humans to our ancestors and encourage "magic-bullet" style thinking. I discuss the merits of narrative explanations as an alternative.
Evolving Human Cumulative Culture
I offer a narrative evolutionary account of the origins of uniquely human cumulative culture, involving a coevolution of socio-cognitive skills with technical reasoning, normative cognition, and cumulative culture itself. I detail how such capacities coevolved in response to the selection pressures of small-scale and large-scale cooperation at different points in our evolutionary history.
The Evolution of Commitment (with Rory Smead)
We model how commitments might become evolutionarily stable as combination of pre-play signalling and indirect reciprocity in a sequential trust game. That is, pre-play signals and subsequent cooperation or defection can affect an agent's reputation which determines whether or not they are a desirable partner for future interaction. We examine under what conditions commitment results in evolutionarily stable cooperation.
Hunting, Alloparenting, and the Origins of Human Social Cognition
(with Richard Moore)
We explore the kinds of social cognition that emerged in response to the selective pressures of group hunting and alloparenting in the early humans. In particular, we question the line taken by many theorists that certain complex cognitive capacities, such as theory of mind, are necessary for eliciting and maintaining alloparental care.
Dissertation Research
The Coevolution of Commitment and Cooperation over Human History
Many explanations for the evolution of cooperation have been offered by biologists and anthropologists ranging from kin selection, group selection, reciprocal altruism and cultural evolution, among others. In my dissertation, I present a new hypothesis which draws our attention to a coevolutionary relationship in our history that has previously been overlooked -- the coevolution of commitment and cooperation. I show how different methods of undertaking commitments in our evolutionary history have enabled more sophisticated forms of cooperation over time which, in turn, create the selective environment for the evolution of increasingly effective commitments. I detail the emergence and consequences of four types of commitment: commitment in shared activity, linguistic commitment, moralised commitment, and institutionalised commitment.
You can find the dissertation here.
You can find the dissertation here.
Future Research
In future work in the philosophy of biology, I am interested in extending my research by (i) investigating the importance of ecological context in understanding how our theories of cooperation apply real-world organisms and their behaviours, (ii) identifying the explanatory limits of game-theoretic and mathematical modelling of the evolution of cooperation and; (iii) exploring the cognitive preconditions for cooperation, particularly in relation to cumulative culture. In decision theory, I am interested in adaptive preferences and their interaction with gender roles in society.
