ABSTRACT
Much of what goes on in our minds is socially acquired: we learn it from other people. And those people need not be our parents. We can learn from other adults, our peers and
even our own offspring. This complicates, to put it mildly, any attempt to do standard evolutionary ethology on humans. The normal sort of evolutionary model, which presupposes that traits, including behavioural ones, are represented in subsequent generations according to their bearers’ relative successes and failures in passing on genes, does not capture the full range of influences that determine the makeup of human populations.
