Cedric Perret

cedric.perret.research[at]gmail.com

I’m a postdoctoral researcher working across the departments of evolutionary biology and economics at the University of Lausanne. My research asks how a society’s environment shapes the way it is organised, and how the way it is organised, in turn, shapes what evolves within the society, both its culture and its people.

Some of the questions that I work on:

Why do some human groups stay small and equal while others grow large, unequal, and ruled by a few?
What environment leads people to specialise into different kinds of work ?
And how does the way a society is organised then shape what evolves within it — its rules and institutions, and even the genetic make-up of its people?

I completed my PhD on the rise of social hierarchy with Simon Powers, followed by postdocs on the evolution of moral rules (with The-Anh Han) and competing theories of inequality (with Thomas Currie). I’m now a postdoc with Laurent Lehmann at the University of Lausanne, where my research focuses on the division of labour and the evolution of institutions. I’m always glad to exchange across disciplines and to connect theory with real-world data, so if you’d like to collaborate, get in touch.

You can find my work on Google Scholar and ResearchGate below. I also maintain a Julia package for modelling evolution, feel free to take a look.

Selected publications

2023

Modelling the role of environmental circumscription in the evolution of inequality

Cedric Perret, and Thomas E. Currie

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Jun 2023

Abs PDF

Circumscription theory proposes that complex hierarchical societies emerged in areas surrounded by barriers to dispersal, e.g. mountains or seas. This theory has been widely influential but the lack of formal modelling has resulted in theoretical and empirical challenges. This theory shares parallels with reproductive skew models from evolutionary ecology where inequality depends on the capacity of subordinates to escape from despotic leaders. Building on these similarities, we extend reproductive skew models to simulate the concurrent evolution of inequality in many connected groups. Our results show that cost of migration does not directly limit inequality in the long term, but it does control the rate of increase in inequality. Second, we show that levels of inequality can be reduced if there are random errors made by dominants, as these lead to variations that propagate between polities. Third, our model clarifies the concept of circumscription by relating it to geographical features: the size of a region and the connectivity between polities. Overall, our model helps clarify some issues about how migration may affect inequality. We discuss our results in the light of anthropological and archaeological evidence and present the future extensions required to build towards a complete model of circumscription theory. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’.