While developing his theory of natural selection, Charles Darwin was horrified by a group of wasps that lay their eggs within the bodies of caterpillars, with the larvae eating their hosts alive from the inside-out.
Darwin didn’t judge the wasps. Instead, he was troubled by what they revealed about evolution. They showed natural selection to be an amoral process. Any behavior that enhances fitness, nice or nasty, would spread.
Selection isn’t limited to DNA. All systems of inheritance, variation and competition inexorably lead to selection. This includes culture, and I’m one of a team of researchers at Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins who use a cultural evolutionary approach to understand human bodies, behavior and society.
