by Edward O. Wilson. Harvard University Press. 2004. First edition 1978.
Chapter 1: Dilemma
The essence of the argument, then, is that the brain exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly. The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques. Steven Weinberg has pointed out that physical reality remains so mysterious even to physicists because of the extreme improbability that it was constructed to be understood by the human mind. We can reverse that insight and note with still greater force that the intellect was not constructed to understand atoms or even itself but to promote the survival of human genes.
Chapter 2: Heredity
In 1945 the American anthropologist George P. Murdock listed the following characteristics that have been recorded in every culture known to history and ethnography:
Age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organization, cooking, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labor, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethnobotany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift giving, government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propriation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting, weaving, and weather control.
Chapter 4: Emergence
If it is true that history is guided to a more than negligible extent by the biological evolution that preceded it, valuable clues to its course can be found by studying the contemporary societies whose culture and economic practices most closely approximate those that prevailed during prehistory. These are the hunter-gatherers: the Australian aboriginals, Kalahari San, African pygmies, Andaman Negritos, Eskimos, and other peoples who depend entirely on the capture of animals and harvesting of free growing plant material. Over one hundred such cultures still survive. Few contain over ten thousand members, and almost all are in danger of assimilation into surrounding cultures or outright extinction.
Hunter-gatherers share many traits that are directly adaptive to their rugged way of life. They form bands of a hundred or less that roam over large home ranges and often divide or rejoin each other in the search for food. A group comprising twenty-five individuals typically occupies between one thousand and three thousand square kilometers, an area comparable to the home range of a wolf pack of the same size but a hundred times greater than what a troop of exclusively vegetarian gorillas would occupy. Parts of the ranges are sometimes defended as territories, especially those containing rich and reliable sources of food. Intertribal aggression, escalating in some cultures to limited warfare, is common enough to be regarded as a general characteristic of hunter-gatherer social behavior.
The band is, in reality, an extended family. Marriage is arranged within and between bands by negotiation and ritual, and the complex kinship networks that result are objects of special classifications and strictly enforced rules. The men of the bands, while leaning toward mildly polygamous arrangements, make substantial investments of time in rearing their offspring. They are also protective of their investments. Murder, which is as common per capita as in most American cities, is most often commited in response to adultery and during other disputes over women.
Chapter 5: Aggression
Among contemporary !Kung San violence in adults is almost unknown; Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has correctly named them the “harmless people.” But as recently as fifty years ago, when these “Bushman” populations were denser and less rigidly controlled by the central government, their homicide rate per capita equalled that of Detroit and Houston.
[Elizabeth Marshall Thomas herself takes issue with this statement in her 1989 epilogue to her 1959 classic: The Harmless People]