ABSTRACT
If we from now on maintain the position that the human slate is not blank, what then has natural selection written on it? This question refers to an enormously vast and challenging area of research, which would be impossible to give due justice to in this chapter. Instead, the objective of this chapter is to give a few hints at what it could mean that humans have universal interests founded on genetically evolved preparedness. As the reader shall see, these hints point not only to the fact that humans are not blank slates, but also to the fact that genetic preparedness rarely means that genes would be independent on social conditions for human traits and interests to ‘materialise’ in human behaviour and activities. For human traits and interests to be expressed in activities, such as social interaction, stimuli from the social environment are needed. Below follow a few examples. They are divided into gene-environmental interplay at the level of our entire species, and at the level of individual variation.
