Some modern anthropologists hold that biological
evolution has shaped not only human morphology but
also human behavior. The role those anthropologists
ascribe to evolution is not of dictating the details of
human behavior but one of imposing constraints—
ways of feeling, thinking, and acting that "come natu-
rally" in archetypal situations in any culture. Our
"frailties" –emotions and motives such as rage, fear,
greed, gluttony, joy, lust, love—may be a very mixed
assortment, but they share at least one immediate
quality: we are, as we say, "in the grip" of them. And
thus they give us our sense of constraints.
Unhappily, some of those frailties—our need for
ever-increasing security among them—are presently
maladaptive. Yet beneath the overlay of cultural
detail, they, too, are said to be biological in direction,
and therefore as natural to us as are our appendixes.
We would need to comprehend thoroughly their
adaptive origins in order to understand how badly they
guide us now. And we might then begin to resist their
pressure.