Title: What is the true nature of humankind? - Quora
Headings: What is the true nature of humankind?
What is the true nature of humankind?
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Content: What is the nature of human society? In most social science and humanities circles, bringing up the role of evolution in shaping human behavior is unwelcome, and thus unwise� Th e first core objection is empirical: the attempt to reduce the behavior of this most complex social animal to a set of deterministic ‘biological drives’ is said to neglect the pervasive influence of social, economic, cultural, and political forces on human action and co-ordination� Th e second objection is ideological: claims about evolved human tendencies toward aggression or infidelity are seen as white-washing, providing a justification for the mainten
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In most social science and humanities circles, bringing up the role of evolution in shaping human behavior is unwelcome, and thus unwise� Th e first core objection is empirical: the attempt to reduce the behavior of this most complex social animal to a set of deterministic ‘biological drives’ is said to neglect the pervasive influence of social, economic, cultural, and political forces on human action and co-ordination� Th e second objection is ideological: claims about evolved human tendencies toward aggression or infidelity are seen as white-washing, providing a justification for the maintenance of systems of inequality and patriarchy, and thus leaving no space for individual and collective agency to effect radical social-structural change� Eloquent arguments have already been put forth against the supposed empirical naivety of evolutionary psychology� In Th e Blank Slate, Steven Pinker presented the empirical case against the notion that humans are born with no evolved psychology whatsoever, ready to be mounded to produce whatever set of behavioral patterns the surrounding environment and socialization dictates� Rather, as put forward most forcefully by two of the founders of evolutionary psychology – John Tobey and Leda Cossids – our brains arrive on the scene with a set of cognitive tools already prepared to navigate the kinds of social environments in which our ancestors had to survive: small-scale societies of hunter-gatherers and proto-agriculturalists� More recently, research on evolution and behavior has moved beyond the question of nature versus nurture, to ask how the interaction between universal social-cognitive mechanisms and varying ecological contexts yields the cultural diversity in patterns of behavior that we see across societies� Schools of study such as behavioral ecology and evolutionary developmental biology are shedding light on how early life experiences shape key later life decisions and abilities in ways that make adaptive sense� Those working in the field of cultural evolution demonstrate how the uniquely human capacity for social learning generates complex cultural landscapes that our evolved brain learns to navigate, possibly evolving further in the process. Rather than bracketing out the complexity of modern human social systems, sophisticated computational models and simulations can now attempt to build such complexity into theories of evolution and behavior, predicting societal change better than can approaches to