Evolved Brains in Evolved Bodies

Jared Diamond seeks to explain the ultimate causes of modern societies’ clear disparities in wealth and power.

He argues that geographical and environmental factors played a pivotal role in shaping the development of human societies.

Recent insights into our own species’ evolved biology fatally undermine this key aspect of Diamond ’s argument.

Left-leaning thinkers often argue that our psychology has remained unchanged since humans began to disperse across the planet 50,000 years ago .

But evolutionary psychologists support this idea of what Stephen Jay Gould calls the “psychic unity of humanity’s humanity” But some divergent evolution of both body and brain between long-separated human populations seems to follow directly from Darwin 's concept of “descent with modification”.

The BBC report suggested that interbreeding with other ancient humans may have introduced genes that may help [modern humans] cope with viruses outside Africa ’ Sophie von Stumm: “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less”.