ABSTRACT
Intelligence is part of culture. It developed culture's material underpinnings and rationalizes cultural norms. Although it was once thought to be a unitary capacity that served equally well in all contexts, more recent research in child psychology (e.g., R. Gelman, 1990) and animal ethology has shown that much of intelligence is powerful only in certain domains of the environment for which it was evolved. Species and even contexts have their own intelligences. If this is true, the student of culture should begin to wonder in which section of reality our ancestral primate intelligence was originally designed because it might still bear traces of that origin.
