Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author's Abstract

The concepts of vertical integration and evolutionary psychology …suggest that there is little human that is really "evolutionarily unanticipated"; the two "biologically unanticipated" social phenomena this chapter deals with are (a) gossip, soap operas, and "celebrities"; and (b) social stratification; I have deliberately chosen disparate examples of evolutionary novelty in order to illustrate how the evolving field of evolutionary psychology permits powerful, vertically integrated explanations of major sociocultural phenomena.