Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"The reason to think about ancient human behaviour is to get past current cultural impositions and find out what comes naturally."

As Khoth points out, ancient societies had cultures too. What makes you think ancient societies reflect anything other than cultural pressure to conform to forager norms? Given that foragers lived closer to starvation, can't I argue that cultural pressures were stronger on foragers? After all, for foragers to deviate from norms will mean death, whereas farmers have more collective wiggle room. Hence the fact that we see a wide variety of cultural norms among different farming societies. I'm not saying I necessarily believe this, but the fact is that much of evo-psych is guesswork - unless you can provide hard evidence, one plausible-sounding narrative is as good as another.

And not only that, but what makes culture an "imposition" and genetics "natural"? It's an absurd divide.

You calling rapscallion a wuss for his (excellent) post is of course typical, in that so many proponents of evo-psych come to it with an obvious axe to grind. The real reason to think about ancient human behaviour is better to understand ancient human behaviour. It may or may not tell us anything useful about modern humans.

Expand full comment
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

It's worth having another (somewhat hazy) datapoint, but don't forget to take the ancient cultural impositions into account too.

Expand full comment
8 more comments...

No posts