There's a mismatch between the modern versus ancestral world. Our minds are equipped with programs that were evolved to navigate a small world of relatives, friends, and neighbors, not for cities and nation states of thousands or millions of anonymous people. Certain laws and institutions satisfy the moral intuitions these programs generate. But because these programs are now operating outside the envelope of environments for which they were designed, laws that satisfy the moral intuitions they generate may regularly fail to produce the outcomes we desire and anticipate that have the consequences we wish. ...

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
Cognitive instincts for Cooperation, Institutions & Society
By Leda Cosmides

LEDA COSMIDES, an evoultionary psychologist, is co-director of UCSB's Center for Evolutionary Psychology.

Leda Cosmides's Edge Bio Page