This book seems to address the myth that primitive societies are more harmonious than our present societies.

• Books like The Conquest of Paradise about the European conquest of the native peoples of America claim that compared to the culture of Europe, the “primal communities” of preconquest America were more “harmonious, peaceful, benign and content.”
• Books like The Harmless People paint a picture that the San (formerly known as Bushmen) of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa are at peace with themselves as well as their environment. Unfortunately for her view of San Harmony, it was later shown that these people had an exceptionally high homicide rate and at an earlier time were warlike as well.
• When Tasmanians got separated from the Australian mainland, the 4,000 years of isolation led not to more adaptive cultural forms but to a slow strangulation of the mind. When Europeans came, they exchanged their young women for dogs. By trading young women for dogs, Tasmanian men managed, in a singularly ill-advised choice, both to reduce their food supply and to exacerbate the most glaring problem in their society, interband fighting over women.
• Gusii culture was pervaded by sexual hostility even among members of the same clan. For example, in a custom known as Ogosonia, when adolescent boys were recuperating from the effects of being circumcised, adolescent girls from the same clan came to the hut where the boys were secluded. Maliciously, they disrobed, danced provocatively, challenged them to have intercourse, and made disparaging comments about their genitals. The girls were triumphant if their actions resulted in erections that caused the boys intense pain when their partly healed incisions burst open.
• After studying Apache shamans, Morris Opler concluded that “… the less he does, the better for the patient.
• Montezuma believed that Cortes was the reincarnation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. Disregarding the repeated advice of his council, Montezuma made no effort to stop the Spaniards’ march on his capital. Instead, he showered them with gifts and welcomed them to his palace. His immense and well-armed army waited in vain for orders to destroy the white men who soon proved even to Montezuma that they were anything but godlike.
• Few things done in the quest for beauty were more extreme than the Chinese practice of binding the feet of women. Chinese men have admired small feet in women since before Confucian times, but the practice of footbinding did not begin until around 1100 A.D. In Victorian times, the same Western women, some of whom were the wives of missionaries in China, who deplored footbinding as a “barbaric” custom willingly had themselves cinched into steel- and whalebone-reinforced canvas corsets so tightly that they had difficulty breathing and their internal organs were sometimes damaged. We need hardly be reminded that many American women (and some men) today endure painful and expensive cosmetic surgery to “beautify” their faces or bodies.
• The practice of sending widows or household slaves to the grave with their deceased husbands or masters was known in many parts of the world, including China, Africa, ancient Greece, Scandinavia, and Russia. Many Hindu scriptures, criticized it. For example, In maha nirvana-tantra (verses 79 and 80) it is said that a woman who accepts sati will go to hell.
• In Trinidad and Tobago, The Afro-Trinidadians did just as well economically as their Indian counterparts although they are present-time oriented and reveled in their sociable get-togethers (called “fêtes”), while the Indians put their emphasis on the future well-being of their family.
• Until quite recently, all societies placed the well-being of adults above that of children, especially the very young, and with few exceptions, men have put their interests above those of women. In the Fore of highland Papua New Guinea, men monopolized access to animal flesh and women and children sought to supplement their diets by eating the flesh of deceased relatives. As a consequence, they contracted kuru, a deadly neurological disease caused by a slow virus communicated through cannibalism.

Human nature

• Fallacies of the human nature:
  1. We are prone to accept correlated events as being causally linked.
  2. Humans are predisposed to paranoid ideation, which leads them to suspect the worst of others.
  3. We project our hostility onto others: if we wish harm to others, surely others must wish the same for us.
• Western economists use the concept of bounded rationality to refer to people’s limited ability to receive, store, retrieve, and process information, and economic decision theory takes these limitations into account. Because of these cognitive limitations, along with imperfect knowledge of their environment, people inevitably make imperfect decisions.
• A desire for revenge can also destroy a society. The belief that aggression against a member of one’s kin or residential group must be avenged is extremely widespread. Some anthropologists have argued that blood feuding that limits the response of an aggrieved individual or kin group to an equitable killing—an eye for an eye—is adaptive because, in the absence of strong central policy authority, it controls what might otherwise escalate into wholesale retaliation.
• Farmers tended to avoid conflict, presumably because their ties to the land made it impossible for them to move away should they make an enemy, while pastoralists could and did move their families and herds if they had a serious quarrel.
• Once established, almost any human practice, including divination, feuding, or accusing other people of being witches, can develop some positive social functions for at least some members of a population.
• If children were reared in isolation from their elders they would eventually produce a society with rules about incest and marriage, beliefs about the supernatural, initiation ceremonies for the young, gambling, dancing, myths, legends, and everything else that appears to occur everywhere and hence be the product of human nature.
• A few individuals can eradicate an unwanted or troublesome aspect of their culture, but these individuals were not ordinary people but were chiefs, nobles, and priests, and people like these have often been able to bring about social change.
• Just as many generals were slow to recognize how drastically the machine gun, the tank, or air power would change the nature of warfare, some populations overlook economic or political changes as they steadfastly believe that the future will mirror the past.
• Despite the frequency and seriousness of postpartum depression in the United States, the phenomenon appears to be quite rare in nonWestern societies
• Traditional Darwinian theory has held that because of forces of natural selection, existing genetic variation must have a positive function, but Motoo Kimura’s neutral theory argues that much of the genetic variation in any species, including humans, is adaptively neutral.