From The New Atlantis, a special section on the evolution of human nature, including Randal R. Hendrickson on Steven Pinker and reason’s progress against violence; Micah Mattix on just-so storytelling and the “art instinct”; Whitley Kaufman on the moral paradoxes of sociobiology; and Peter Augustine Lawler on the surprisingly traditional values of evolutionary psychologists. Allen Frances on Charles Darwin, the greatest psychologist. Did sexual selection and culture interact in the evolution of human height? Research suggests our early human ancestors thought grass was delicious. A new discovery of ancient diet in China shatters conventional ideas of how agriculture emerged. Rhitu Chatterjee on why humans took up farming. Why become a farmer? If you think about it, why humans switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture is a big, big puzzle. First farmers were also inbred: Missing teeth suggest sex with close relatives helped bind early farming communities together.
