Injustice, inequality and Evolutionary Psychology

Injustice, inequality and Evolutionary Psychology Bruce G Charlton

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Bruce G Charlton  MD Lecturer Department of Psychology Ridley Building University of Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU England Tel:    0191 222 6247 Fax:    0191 222 5622 e-mail   <bruce.g.charlton@newcastle.ac.uk>   ABSTRACT Injustice, inequality and Evolutionary Psychology As biological knowledge of "human nature" continues to grow, political theory and public  policy will increasingly need to take account of Evolutionary Psychology in order effectively  to pursue its goals. This essay stands as an example. Socio-economic differentials are  perceived to be unjust, but the reason for this is not obvious given the ubiquity of  stratification. It is suggested that "the injustice of inequality" has an basis in social  instincts that evolved to promote co-operation in small-scale, egalitarian hunter-gatherer  societies with immediate-return economies. Modern Homo sapiens has been  "designed" by natural selection to live in such societies, and has "counter-dominance"  instincts that are gratified by equal sharing of resources and an equal distribution of  resources.  However, there are also phylogenetically older "dominance" social instincts  (status-seeking, nepotism, mutual reciprocity) deriving from pre-hominid ancestors, and  these tend to create inequality under "modern" conditions of economic surplus. Therefore  human instincts and gratifications are intrinsically in conflict under contemporary  conditions. The radical implications of this analysis are explored. These include support  for a Berlin-esque view of politics as an endemic negotiation of irreducibly plural values;  a clarification of the deficiencies of right- and left-wing political theory; and a rationale for  politics to concentrate primarily on the "micro-level" psychology of subjective gratification  of individuals in their local context, rather than the conventional emphasis upon macro- level policies based on abstract statistical analysis of aggregated population variables.  Injustice, inequality and Evolutionary Psychology Introduction This paper is intended to provide an explanation for some apparently puzzling observations.  Humans evolved in an egalitarian society - a society where resources (principally food) were shared  equally: it seems that humans were "designed" to live in egalitarian societies. Yet all modern day  economic systems demonstrate a markedly unequal distribution of resources. And, despite universal  inequality for hundreds or even thousands of years, political creeds such as socialism still command  substantial support for their egalitarian ideals. One might imagine that human experience would by  now regard inequality as inevitable, yet apparently humans still do not accept inequality, nor have  they fully adjusted to it.  I will argue that these observations are a consequence of universal, evolved "human nature"  interacting with different environmental circumstances. Human nature is approached from a  biological standpoint - specifically from the viewpoint of Evolutionary Psychology (Barkow et al,  1992). Evolutionary Psychology is a recent activity which brings psychology into the mainstream of  biology, focused around the integrated study of "instincts" which are interpreted in cognitive terms as  domain-specific, information-processing modules which have evolved to detect relevant stimuli in the  external and internal environment and respond with adaptive behaviours (Hirschfield & Gelman,  1994; Charlton, 1995). This modern version of human nature employs conceptual advances from  across biology: evolutionary theory, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, primatology  and other disciplines relevant to human behaviour.  It is likely that politics (and the social sciences) will increasingly need to take account of biology  (Barkow et al, 1992). Politics is predicated on conceptions of human nature. That is to say that any  judgments or assertions concerning the absolute or relative desirability of a certain arrangement of  human affairs contain assumptions about what humans are like and what they want. At the most  basic level, politics assumes a great deal of obvious but empirical biological knowledge: that humans  are animals rather than plants; mortal with a lifespan of about 100 years; are born as dependent  babies and develop over several years as children; are able to use language; feel and inflict pain; be  happy and sad and so on. As this knowledge is expanded into the realms of instinct, motivation and  gratification, and its implications are made more precise, then the implications for politics and social  policy will increase.  If human nature is conceptualized cognitively in terms of domain specific instincts, then the instincts  of particular relevance to politics are those concerned with social living. Most animals are solitary,  and the capacity to live in social groups depends upon psychological specializations. The nature of  social specializations has become clearer over the past few decades; and in what follows I draw  particularly upon the ideas of Barkow (1975, 1989, 1992), and of Erdal and Whiten (1994, in press)  and build upon my previous work in the area of  health inequalities (Charlton, 1996, 1997). This  analysis deploys a categorization of social instincts into "dominant" and "counter-dominant"  according to whether they tend to promote a hierarchy of power and resources on the one hand, or  equal sharing of resources and an egalitarian distribution on the other. These fixed, universal instincts  interact with modern economic and social circumstances to produce the various emergent patterns of  "macro-level" statistical inequality measured by economists and sociologists and which form the  subject matter of policy.  The egalitarian ancestral environment It is generally believed that key aspects of the economic and social structure of human "ancestral  society" remained roughly constant for approximately two million years of hominid evolution, and  through most of the existence of Homo sapiens sapiens from the emergence of the species about 150  000 years ago. Much has been inferred of ancestral societies by employing convergent evidence from  archaeology, contemporary anthropological studies, the study of primates, and cognitive  psychology; and a reasonably coherent picture has emerged (Lee & DeVore, 1968; Woodburn, 1982;  Flanagan, 1989; Brown, 1991; Knauft, 1991; Barkow et al, 1992; Bird-David, 1992; Boehm, 1992;  Diamond, 1992; Erdal & Whiten, 1994; Burch & Ellana, 1995; Kelly, 1995; Foley, 1995; Charlton,  1996; Dunbar, 1996: Erdal & Whiten, in the press).  The ancestral society was a nomadic hunter-gatherer "immediate return" economy (Woodburn, 1982)  of fluidly-composed extended family "bands" of some twenty-five to forty members, gathered in  larger, looser alliances of around one or two hundred members, and "tribal" groups of perhaps one or  two thousand people sharing a common language. Such societies operated by collecting food for  immediate consumption using tools made as required. There was no surplus of food or material  goods, and no storage of accumulated resources.  Ancestral societies were to a high degree egalitarian and without significant or sustained differentials  in resources among men of the same age. Equality of outcome in immediate-return economies is  achieved by a continual process of redistribution through sharing of resources on a daily basis  (Woodburn, 1982) and is enforced by a powerful egalitarian ethos in which participants are "vigilant"  in favour of obtaining at least an equal share of food, while making sure that no-one else takes more  than themselves (Erdal & Whiten, 1994).  Despite resource equality, status differentials nevertheless exist in simple hunter-gatherer societies  (as they do in all human societies), and status differentials are associated with differences in  reproductive success. High status men are more attractive to women, have more frequent sex, more  sexual partners, younger and healthier partners, and therefore leave more offspring - at least in  societies without contraceptive technology (Symons, 1979; Ridley, 1993; Buss, 1994; Potts, 1997).  Nonetheless, status differentials tend to be moderate, context-dependent, transitory and down- played in immediate-return societies (Woodburn, 1982) - rather than extreme, rigid, prolonged, public  and cross-generational as status differentials may be in the stratified societies of delayed return  economies (Barkow, 1975; 1989; Diamond, 1992).  Human psychology was therefore shaped by, and adapted for, an egalitarian social environment  where resources were equally shared on a day by day basis (Diamond, 1992; Charlton, 1996).  Dominance instincts and the evolution of equality In his typology of human societies, Gellner (1988) remarks on the uniquely egalitarian structure of  nomadic, foraging hunter-gatherer societies. Gellner interprets equal distribution largely in "negative"  terms, such as the lack of surplus product, the weakness of "coercive" mechanisms for confiscation  and defence of this surplus, and so on. Hence equality is seen as a consequence of the impossibility  of inequality under the conditions of an immediate return economy. However, this negative view of  egalitarian societies being a default state neglects the fact that humans evolved from ape ancestors  whose social structure was almost certainly a dominance hierarchy of economic stratification.  As an explanation for stratification as a universal feature of "modern", delayed-return economies,  Jerome Barkow has suggested a triad of social instincts - status-seeking, nepotism, and mutual  reciprocity. When operating upon surplus resources (Barkow, 1992). "Barkow"s triad" of social  instincts - or something like them - will lead to unequal distribution of resources. Humans will  compete for status, and high status individuals will be able to appropriate and store a greater than  equal share of resources. Those differentially favoured with resources will then use these resources   differentially to favour their relatives", to build mutually beneficial alliances with other status-peers,  and to exchange for the services of allies. Nepotism will mean that such differentials tend to be  perpetuated down the generations.  In our living primate relatives such as chimpanzees and gorillas, status differentials lead to  corresponding resource differentials with a "dominance hierarchy" of high status males securing a  disproportionate share of food, as well as mating opportunities (Barkow, 1975, Barkow, 1989;  Byrne, 1995; Kummer, 1995; de Waal, 1996). It is likely that the same applied to our pre-human  ancestors.  Egalitarian arrangements are therefore relatively recent in the human evolutionarily lineage, having  been operative during the Palaeolithic era during the evolution of the Homo genus (from  approximately 2 million to 150 000 years ago) and until the development of delayed-return hunter- gatherer, agrarian or industrial economies from around 12 000 years ago (Knauft, 1991; Erdal &  Whiten, in the press). Given the existence of "dominance" instincts, such as Barkow"s triad, there  must have been "counter-dominant" instincts that evolved to enable the egalitarian economic structure  of Paleolithic foraging nomads. In other words, humans underwent a transition from dominance  hierarchies to the egalitarian arrangement of nomadic foraging. This implies that, uniquely among  primates, humans have evolved "egalitarian" or "counter-dominance" instincts which were able to  balance-out the evolutionarily more ancient behavioral patterns that would otherwise have led to  dominance and economic hierarchies (Erdal & Whiten, 1994 and in the press).  The most important of these counter-dominant instincts is sharing - especially sharing of scarce and  valued resources such as meat (Cashdan, 1985, de Waal, 1996; Ridley, 1996). Under immediate- return conditions where food is gathered daily for rapid consumption, the outcome of strict sharing is  an equal distribution of resources. Another aspect of the egalitarian instinct is that this equal  outcome is regarded as acceptable and equitable (Erdal & Whiten, 1994 and in the press).  Under delayed-return economic conditions the redistributive effect of egalitarian instincts is  overwhelmed by an amplification of the outcomes of other "dominance" instincts, leading to an  unequal resource distribution.  Counter-dominance and the "egalitarian" instincts The egalitarian instincts for equal sharing and the preference for a uniform resource distribution  remain operative since human nature has not had sufficient time to evolve new adaptations over the  past twelve thousand or so years since the development of delayed-return economies. This  continuing ethos of equal shares presumably underlies the endemic and refractory sense of the  injustice of dominance hierarchies which fuels social dissatisfaction concerning economic  differentials.  This perception of "the inequity of inequality" (Charlton, 1997) is extremely powerful, even in those  affluent societies where access to resources is continually rising across all social groups, or where  resource differentials might seem (to the outside observer) to be trivially slight - the perceived  injustice appears to be triggered by qualitative differentials rather than any specific threshold of  magnitude. The egalitarian instinct leads to sustained peer pressure towards redistribution at the  micro-social level of inter-personal relations; and finds its abstract expression at the macro-level  through a wide range of "leveling" and left-wing political movements such as communism, socialism,  anarchism etc.       There are various theories as to why egalitarian societies evolved, and for the nature of the  reproductive advantage egalitarian instincts offer. The answer is probably linked to the benefits of  cooperation. Cooperation - once established - carries great social advantages stemming from the  ability to specialize and to pool efforts (Ridley, 1996). The tougher question is how cooperation  arose initially, in particular how cooperation benefited those with low status and differentially- lowered reproductive opportunities. A further key question concerns the mechanisms by which  cooperation was maintained against the constant tendency for natural selection acting upon  individuals to creative "parasitic", exploitative behaviours (cheating, stealing etc.) which would  subvert cooperation (Barkow et al, 1992; Ridley, 1996).  One plausible hypothesis is that equal sharing is enforced upon high status individuals by  spontaneously-arising counter-dominant coalitions of lower status individuals (Boehm, 1991; Erdal  & Whiten, 1994). Sharing may be a way of encouraging co-operation and preventing conflict (Franks,  1988); it would compensate low status males for their reduced access to females of high reproductive  potential and can be seen as a way of "buying off" potentially hostile rivals who might otherwise  refuse to cooperate or take hostile action.  The nature of counter-dominant instincts: equal sharing and equal distribution "Counter-dominant" instincts (Erdal and Whiten, 1994 and in the press) operate in two ways: firstly  to enforce equal sharing of resources, and secondly to be satisfied with an equal distribution of  resources. In support of this idea, primatologists such as Byrne (1995), Kummer (1995) and De  Waal (1996) have traced the evolutionary history of food sharing (and of other counter-dominant -  and proto-moral - behaviours) through monkeys and apes to reach the highest (non-human) intensity  and sophistication among the chimpanzees.  Egalitarian human societies are therefore not without their social conflicts: their harmony is of the  nature of a dynamic equilibrium between dominance and counter-dominance, both of which sets of  instincts continue to operate, the equilibrium between which can be altered by a change of  circumstance. In all human societies, even in egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, the persistence of  dominance instincts leads to recurrent attempts by high status individuals to dominate, take more  than an equal share of resources, or hoard  (Knauft, 1991; Erdal & Whiten, in the press). However, in  immediate-return economies attempts by high status individuals to breach the egalitarian distribution  and attain coercive power will readily be detected, and can be met by counter-dominant community  alliances of lower status individuals (Woodburn, 1982; Boehm, 1993).  Counter-dominant alliances may employ a wide range of tactics for mobilizing concerted opposition  from the rest of the community in such forms as public complaint, ridicule, threat, ignoring the  would-be dominant individual"s orders, or actual group violence against dominant individuals.  Homicide is not uncommon (and difficult to prevent) in hunter-gatherer societies. Other alternatives  include expulsion of recalcitrant individuals, or mass emigration to another band to escape  domination.  Such strategies are possible due to the lack of sustained power differentials underwritten by resource  differentials - in immediate-return economies no one person can become so powerful as to be immune  to counter-dominant strategies. But when - as in delayed-return economies - high status individuals  can appropriate a greater than equal share of resources, they are able to sustain this inequality by  building alliances among high status individuals; and by enlisting supporters (eg. a "gang" or  "bodyguard") to create larger and more powerful alliances, trading the stored resources as payment  for cooperation (Barkow, 1992; Gellner, 1988).   Implications for political theory: dominance = right-wing; counter-dominance = left-wing It is striking that the division between "dominance" and "counter-dominance" instincts so closely  parallels the political divisions between right-wing and left-wing, reactionary and radical,  conservative and socialist.  The political right have tended to emphasize a set of values much along the lines of Barkow"s triad:  the essential reality of competition (ie. striving for status), the importance of the family as a natural  source of values and social coherence ("nepotism"),  and the effectiveness of reciprocity as a  principle of distribution (eg. the trading of goods and services to mutual benefit). By contrast the  political left has seen these conservative virtues as vices: and promoted an ethic that is anti- competitive, favors general obligations over family ties, and a distributive scheme based upon need  rather than mutual benefit. And, of course, the core of socialism is the egalitarian instinct; the sense  that fair shares are equal shares and the only just distribution is an equal distribution. Conservatism  has, by comparison, tended to see this demand for "social justice" as springing from resentment: envy  masquerading in the guise of altruism.   By this analysis, each side of the political spectrum has grasped some part of the truth about human  nature in relation to the social instincts. However, both also deny the fundamental nature of those  elements of human nature which conflict with their overall moral scheme. For example, socialism  regards competitiveness as a contingent product of social conditioning that would be eliminated by a  just form of social organization; conservatives denigrate the egalitarian impulse either as a personality  defect which should not be indulged - or else as the by-product of an unsatisfied appetite for goods  which will be gratified by increased social productivity.  Interestingly, the common conservative idea that the right-wing vision of human nature embodies  "deeper" and more "fundamental" instincts than does socialism turns-out to be in line with the time  sequence suggested by evolutionary psychology. Dominance is indeed phylogenetically older than  counter-dominance, and these instincts are more powerful in delayed-return economies. But then the  socialist idea that the left-wing egalitarian ethic of equal shares for all is a more "advanced" moral  imperative than conservatism is also supported by its having been more recently evolved and its  overlying and neutralizing of the dominance instincts under appropriate economic conditions.  It is striking that evolutionary psychology supports a view of modern politics that is closely  analogous to that epitomized by the work of Isaiah Berlin (1969). Berlin"s vision of politics sees it  as the continual attempt to accommodate the irreducible plurality of moral values (eg. justice and  freedom) that are at the same time intractable and intrinsically opposed. Similarly, the conflict  between dominance and counter-dominance instincts - at least under modern, delayed economy  conditions - seems to be both intractable and intrinsic. There is no intrinsically harmonious or  indefinitely stable "solution" to this endemic problem; and any attempt to privilege instincts in a one  sided fashion, and to deny the other instincts any form of gratification, is likely to lead to powerful  reaction.  Consequences for political and social reform  Nonetheless, it is uncertain whether these egalitarian instincts can be fully satisfied in a delayed- return economy. There are no examples of egalitarian, delayed-return economies (Gellner, 1988) and  inequality seems to be indefinitely sustainable - presumably because the injustice of social  stratification operates most powerfully on the least powerful people. An equal distribution of  resources is naturally generated by counter-dominance mechanisms in an immediate-return economy.  But the "dominance instincts" (such as Barkow"s triad) appear to operate more powerfully in  delayed-return economies; and these would need to be overcome in order to enforce equality.  For example, in principle an egalitarian system of distribution in a modern industrial state might be  imagined whereby competition for status was suppressed, nepotism outlawed and reciprocity  prohibited. But whether such an arrangement is either create-able or  sustainable is doubtful. The  thwarting of dominance instincts would substitute a new set of perceived injustices for the inequity  of inequality. Furthermore, the creation of the redistributive "bureaucracy" necessary to implement  counter-dominant redistributive policies, would itself create a dominance hierarchy whereby power  and status were concentrated in the bureaucracy. The perceived injustices of the system (consequent  upon the thwarting of dominance instincts) would then be greatest for the most powerful members of  the population, and it seems implausible that their continued altruism in implementing equal sharing  could be depended upon.  This is one of the major problems with policy goals such as "the state" equalizing income through  confiscatory and redistributive taxation, originally proposed by Fabian socialists such as Bernard  Shaw (1928). The "end" of equality may in itself be gratifying to the counter-dominant instincts, but  this "means" of attaining equality by creating a powerful state to enforce sharing would surely prove  unworkable. The hope was that the ruling bureaucracy could be "re-educated" so that they would  voluntarily forgo the opportunities to distort the equal distribution system in their own favour. But  forms of social organization that depend upon permanently and totally thwarting the fundamental  dominance instincts of the most powerful members of society are not likely to prove practicable or  enduring (Barkow, 1989; Wright, 1994). Another possibility, which can only be hinted at here, is that unhooking the gratification of instincts  from the original circumstances in which they evolved opens human society to the kind of  "unnatural" harmony envisaged and explored by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932) - a  society in which technologies of gratification (eg. drugs, and other direct stimulants, tranquilizers and  euphoriants) have substituted for those realities of social and sexual gratification which are denied by  the nature of the social life. Hence an otherwise unsustainable form of organization is made possible.  It is at least plausible that artificial gratification may be an inadvertent consequence of the  contemporary media culture combined with advances in psycho-pharmacology (Postman, 1985;  Barkow, 1992; Diamond, 1993).  The prospects for equality It is reasonable for policy makers to be concerned by questions of equality, not because such concern  is the core of a political creed, but because a concern for equality (of the kind outlined above) is an  aspect of human nature: universal, inevitable, continuously operative. But - for it to make a positive  difference to human satisfaction - the quality of this concern should take a form very different from  the large scale analyses and plans typical of conventional socialism.   It is often assumed by social democrats that an amelioration of inequalities short of complete  equality of sharing and outcome would suffice to increase social justice, and satisfy the endemic  egalitarian aspirations. So, social democrats accept that inequality is inevitable (or even desirable) in  modern society, but may passionately believe that current levels of inequality are excessive, that  their magnitude ought to be reduced, and that such reduction would effect a qualitative  transformation in equity and increase the sum of human gratification.  However, it seems likely that the instinct for perceived inequality is an a qualitative absolute, all-or- nothing state. The perception of injustice is based on direct experience of inequality, not abstract  ideology and statistics. So far as instinct is concerned, fair shares are equal shares: anything other  than parity is perceived as unjust. ("Equal" shares being defined in this context as qualitatively equal  to human regard; such that any residual difference is considered insignificant.) Certainly, there is no  reason why perceived inequity would be mathematically associated with the measured quantity of  inequality; and all experience speaks against such a relation. Egalitarian instincts have their evolved  role and basis in ancestral tribal societies which were small scale, with a large amount of personal  surveillance and interaction. The process of sharing was public, the result of distribution could not be  concealed, and the consumption of resources was directly observed. This corresponds to the  observation that even slight differentials between social peers tend to provoke social sanctions, while  statistically-measured differentials of vastly greater magnitude at the national or international level  usually fail to provoke counter-dominant strategies (Barkow, 1989).  If resource differentials are indeed a reliable consequence of a delayed-return, surplus economy, then  inequality might be regarded as an endemic injustice which cannot be eradicated but must  nevertheless be negotiated (see Berlin, 1969; with reference to "freedom" and "justice") . Reducing the  magnitude of differentials will not have any necessary or direct effect on perceived inequity; the  inequity of inequality therefore requires containment, compensation and compromise at the  "capillary" social level - the family, the workplace and the community.  The "currency" of such  brokerage is explanation, persuasion and bargaining; and negotiations need to be based upon  satisfying subjective experiences of wealth and health, rather than the kind of objective and  aggregated measurements generated by economics and epidemiology.  Barkow has remarked that human self-esteem is essential for happiness - but that the human  capacity for cognitive distortion, the abstract, symbolic nature of cultural values, and the segmented  nature of social organization with multiple hierarchical systems of economic and associational life  mean (perhaps fortunately) that self-esteem can be more widespread than the existence of society- wide stratification might imply (Barkow, 1975 & 1989). Satisfying the counter-dominant instincts  requires either egalitarian arrangements or, as second best, the phenomenon of encapsulation  (Barkow, 1989). Encapsulation operates when people in different social groups perceive themselves  to be qualitatively different, hence not comparable - as when a peasant considers a king to be almost  a different species, and so does not resent his greater power and wealth. Stable societies in the past  have often combined step-like inequality, stratification of classes or castes, with egalitarianism  within strata.  Given the implausibility of creating across-the-board equality in a mass industrial civilization,  perhaps the most realistic prospect for a more "just and happy" society is an arrangement where  there is an encapsulated hierarchy of resources with egalitarian arrangements among immediate  acquaintances, and differentials confined to a more abstractly reported level. In other words: local  equality; remote inequality.  Conclusion As biological knowledge of "human nature" continues to accumulate and to increase in precision,  political theory will need to take account of it in order to determine which aspects of human  behaviour are universal and must be "worked around", and which aspects are contingent and  potentially malleable. On this basis, the instinct for "the injustice of inequality" should count as a  universal, but essentially a "micro" issue; a matter of individual psychology and close personal  relationships. However, it is "abstract" inequality at the macro-scale - the statistics of inequality  constructed from the objectively measured group data of economics and sociology - that is  commonly reported and debated by politicians, the media and academic researchers. This is a  mistake: it cannot be assumed that these averaged variables are a reflection of subjective human  experience.  Where egalitarian arrangements have actually occurred in a sustained fashion in human affairs  equality has not been imposed from above but enforced from below by micro-social forces generated  in circumstances of small-scale, stable social interactions where power was evenly dispersed. Under  these conditions, effective counter-dominant alliances will form spontaneously to enforce equal  sharing, and these groupings can impose their will on high status community members. By contrast,  abstract inequality in the form of statistical reports may arouse ideological disapproval, and even  political reform or revolution - but does not provoke effective remedial action. If the intention of reform is to enhance human gratification, then macro-action ought to be framed  towards increasing the egalitarian nature of appropriate micro-environments in which the egalitarian  instincts can best be gratified. Macro-scale action (such as political revolution, change of government,  legal or fiscal reform) undertaken to adjust the statistical reifications of abstract inequality in the  interests of "social justice" conceived at the level of nations is missing the point, hence failing to  tackle the problem. Policies to reduce the perceived injustice of health differentials need to provide a  framework for micro-level, personal relationships such that counter-dominant instincts can operate  spontaneously to enforce equality. In other words, attention should be directed at addressing  subjective experiences of inequity, and creating the structures to allow the emergence of counter- dominance alliances to enforce sharing - rather than creating bureaucratic structures for adjusting  objective, statistical measurements of inequality.  The interactions between human nature and justice are complex, and their scientific understanding  remains importantly incomplete. Yet it would be foolish to ignore what is known. Contemporary  humans are attempting to "hijack" instinctive psychological equipment that is designed to maximize  reproduction in an ancestral, hunter-gatherer society; and instead deploy these instincts in  maximizing health and happiness under modern conditions. The scope for success is necessarily  partial, there will always be a mismatch between the basic "design" of humans and the novel  functions and roles we wish to perform; nonetheless, the best results are likely to come from  acknowledging the strengths and limitations of human psychology, and from trying to frame social  and political policy that cuts with the grain of evolved instincts rather than ignoring human nature or  deliberately thwarting it.  Acknowledgment - Thanks are due to George Davey Smith and Doug Carroll for stimulating this  paper by commissioning a contribution on the related topic of socio-economic health variations for a  special issue of Journal of Health Psychology (1997, Volume 2): the present paper draws  substantially upon the reading, thinking and writing I did for that volume.  References Barkow JH. (1975). Prestige and culture: a biosocial interpretation (and replies). Current  Anthropology, 16, 553-576.   Barkow JH. (1989). Darwin, sex and status. 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