ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the magnum opus of natural selection guided by the relatively new discipline of social neuroscience. Social neuroscience “capitalizes on biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social behavior, and it uses social and behavioral constructs and data to refine theories of neural organization and function”. The human brain is a particularly expensive piece of machinery to be carrying around because of its voracious appetite for energy. Because the human brain is much larger than should be expected for animals of our size, the brain must have been vitally important to gene-culture co-evolution given its extravagant use of the body’s precious energy. While the brain cannot function without genetic input, the physical and socio-cultural environments it is immersed in plays a major role in specifying the billions of relationships that will eventually exist among the brain cells of the adult human being.
