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Frontmatter -- Preface -- Contents -- 1 The Question of Egalitarian Society -- 2 Hierarchy and Equality -- 3 Putting Down Aggressors -- 4 Equality and Its Causes -- 5 A Wider View of Egalitarianism -- 6 The Hominoid Political Spectrum -- 7 Ancestral Politics -- 8 The Evolution of Egalitarian Society -- 9 Paleolithic Politics and Natural Selection -- 10 Ambivalence and Compromise in Human Nature -- References -- Index

Darwin's inner voice -- Living the virtuous life -- Of altruism and free riders -- Knowing our immediate predecessors -- Resurrecting some venerable ancestors -- A natural Garden of Eden -- The positive side of social selection -- Learning morals across the generations -- Work of the moral majority -- Pleistocene ups, downs, and crashes -- Testing the selection-by-reputation hypothesis -- The evolution of morals -- Epilogue: humanity's moral future

Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. 394 pp.

Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy. Michele M. Moody‐Adams. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 260 pp.

Triangulating to human nature generally is accomplished by finding analogies with nonhuman primates, by searching for overt behaviors that are universal, by identification of emotions that can be correlated with physiological responses or brain rewards, or by use of appropriate selection scenarios. An additional method is proposed, which focuses on universally occurring psychological ambivalences as manifestations of competing tendencies in human nature. Ethnographic exemplification concentrates on subsistence crises relevant to reproductive success, and dilemmas associated with feuding assassinations. It is argued that universal psychological ambivalences and the universal decision dilemmas these produce may be a better key to human nature than are universal patterns of observed behavior. It is suggested also that an ambivalence approach can assist us in arriving at a more specific treatment of human behavioral lability, one that can be usefully tied to the decision approaches employed by anthropologists.