Beneath New Culture Is Old Psychology: Gossip and Social Stratification

Abstract

Abstract How do we apply an evolutionary perspective to human culture? After all, much of post-Pleistocenesociety is evolutionarily unanticipated, that is, many of its most prominent features could not have existed during the Pleistocene. Even contemporary agrarian communities differ drastically from the foraging economies of our ancestors, and modern industrial societies are utterly exotic in Pleistocene perspective, with their vast scale, literacy and libraries, mass communication and media, ease of travel, general-purpose money, control of indoor climate, ubiquity of strangers, reliance on external institutions to accomplish heretofore familial responsibilities, availability of contraception, juxtaposition of great wealth with great poverty, and relatively low infant and child mortality rates. But does all this novelty mean that evolution is irrelevant to an understanding of our current way of life? Key aspects of most contemporary societies could have emerged, after all, only long after human psychology had largely reached its present form and then either ceased to evolve entirely or to evolve at a very slow rate.

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