Human universals, as the products of natural selection, can only be understood in the context of the conditions in which they evolved, their "environment of evolutionary adaptation" .
Consequently, human beings have the mental apparatus appropriate to the survival and gene-propagation needs of hunter-gather societies on the African savanna during the Pleistocene. the claim is that, in evolutionary terms, nothing of significance has happened over the course of post-Pleistocene human history, though obviously the range of social, economic, cultural, and political change over that period has been enormous.
Central to the case is the assertion that many dysfunctional human behaviors and social pathologies stem from the mismatch between our Stone Age minds and the complex socioeconomic and political structures we have created since the Neolithic revolution in agriculture and the creation of settled societies. In this regard, EP has close affinities with Freud's analysis in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930): the more complex the society, the more it is necessarily repressive of unconscious human motivations.
Consequently, human beings have the mental apparatus appropriate to the survival and gene-propagation needs of hunter-gather societies on the African savanna during the Pleistocene. the claim is that, in evolutionary terms, nothing of significance has happened over the course of post-Pleistocene human history, though obviously the range of social, economic, cultural, and political change over that period has been enormous.
Central to the case is the assertion that many dysfunctional human behaviors and social pathologies stem from the mismatch between our Stone Age minds and the complex socioeconomic and political structures we have created since the Neolithic revolution in agriculture and the creation of settled societies. In this regard, EP has close affinities with Freud's analysis in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930): the more complex the society, the more it is necessarily repressive of unconscious human motivations.
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