The evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy the­o­ries of human behav­iour are fas­ci­nat­ing, as any­one who has read Matt Ridley’s acclaimed The Red Queen can attest. For those that haven’t, how­ever, The Econ­o­mist has cre­ated what may be the best primer on evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy I’ve read.

No one is sug­gest­ing Dar­win­ism has all the answers to social ques­tions. Indeed, with some, such as the role of hier­ar­chies, it sug­gests there is no defin­i­tive answer at all—itself an impor­tant con­clu­sion. What is extra­or­di­nary, though, is how rarely an evo­lu­tion­ary analy­sis is part of the process of pol­i­cy­mak­ing. To draw an anal­ogy, it is like try­ing to fix a car with­out prop­erly under­stand­ing how it works: not impos­si­ble, but as likely as not to result in a break­down or a crash. Per­haps, after a cen­tury and a half, it is time not just to recog­nise but also to under­stand that human beings are evolved crea­tures. To know thy­self is, after all, the begin­ning of wisdom.

via Seed