Book Review The Challenge of Human Social Behavior

the nature and effects of cooperation across the entire spectrum of life – cooperation among genes, cells, individuals, and groups of individuals. The authors – about half biologists and half social scientists – represent a small group of investigators engaged in an important and difficult task. They are testing the question whether all of the social activities of humans can be accounted for by the process of organic evolution – by the history of natural, sexual, and social selection. To the extent that we wish to understand what we humans do, we must also understand why we do those things. One dimension of understanding the why has to explain how our social activities contribute to the reproduction of our genetic materials, the only process that has any possibility of explaining why particular forms of life, and their particular traits, or behavioral repertoires, continue to be represented today. The focus on culture is partly because the cultural behavior of humans seems most likely to call into question the hypothesis that, except for (1) accidents involving rapid changes to novel situations and (2) incidental or pleiotropic gene effects, traits of organisms persist and become elaborate only when they serve the genetic reproduction of th