ABSTRACT
Myth 1 is the ‘standard social science' model of thinking and emotion. 1 It is just as wrong as saying that everything we think, do and feel is determined by our genes. The mind is the last battle ground for these two polarised positions. Although general medicine ditched this false dichotomy years ago - realising that human anatomy and physiology, health and disease, were all a product of an interaction between both genes and environment, psychology has been struggling to find this middle ground when it comes to defining both mental health and mental illness. We seem reluctant to examine what parts of our minds are determined by evolution and what parts seem to be unique to the individual or his experiences. You could assert that this is because there are no fossils of human behaviour. However, for centuries now we have been documenting human behaviour in all contexts around the globe. Furthermore, there are traditional hunter-gatherer communities to examine in the present day, whose cultures might, to a certain extent, represent ‘living fossils' of our ancestors, despite the influence of observers and the insidious seep of modern urban life. We can look for certain ‘universals' of thinking and emotion which are common to all cultures. We can also examine the behaviour of other mammals from which we presume to have evolved.
