© Newsquest Media Group
Joining the crowd may be an evolutionarily productive practice. And people will often band together by whatever means available. In a 2001 study, for example, John Tooby and colleagues concluded that no part of the human cognition is designed to encode race as a group identifier (not the case with age or gender). During humans' evolutionary history, the researchers reasoned, people did not often encounter other races. As they showed using team jerseys, categorizing by race is a byproduct of the actual objective set by natural selection: categorizing by coalitional affiliation. (Kurzban et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci, 98:15387–92, 2001.)
Perhaps music serves as a mating display or a means of coordinating social interactions. Maybe religiosity serves as a group-level adaptation, allowing some to persevere over others. Some researchers, known generally as evolutionary psychologists, seek rigorous ways to investigate such complex human traits. In so doing, ...
