EPists insist that the whole range of human behavior, on both the micro and the macro level, can and must be explained with reference to our genetic inheritance. For example, anthropologist Donald E. Brown (1999) suggests that EP has the potential to at least partially answer all of the following questions:
What motivated British colonialism? What motivated renaissance Florentines to finance their state? Why did Brazilian men find mixed-race women so attractive? What promotes falsity in reports of human affairs? Why did historical-mindedness develop in ancient Greece and China but not India? When homosexual communities developed, why did gay men pursue sexual strategies so different from those of lesbians? Why does a Heian-period Japanese description of fear of snakes sound so familiar to a Westerner? Why have rebels tended to be youngest rather than eldest siblings? (p. 138)
But in addition to tackling such grandiose questions, EPists also offer insights into more mundane aspects of human behavior. For example, in his controversial and successful How the Mind Works (1997), MIT psycholinguist Steven Pinker explains ophidiphobia and arachnaphobia in terms of our EEA: a revulsion at snakes and spiders is part of our genetic inheritance because it was adaptive in the conditions of the African savanna. So basic is this to our natures that we continue to avoid these creatures, even if we live in geographical regions in which they are non-poisonous (p. 386). Similarly, Pinker suggests that popular artistic taste inclines to depictions of landscapes and water because those scenes are reminiscent of our hunter-gatherer past (p. 526).
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