Evolutionary Psychology in Hollywood

Jason Read's latest post points to this quote from Neil Blomkamp, the director of Elysium:

You'd literally have to change the human genome to stop wealth discrepancy.... We have biological systems built into us that were very advantageous for us, up until we became a functioning civilisation 10,000 years ago. We are literally genetically coded to preserve life, procreate and get food – and that's not gonna change. The question is whether you can somehow overpower certain parts of that mammalian DNA and try to give some of your money out, try to take your wealth and pour it out for the rest of the planet.

We see here a popular uptake of certain theses of Evolutionary Psychology. Whether or not Blomkamp's version is fair to the best versions of EP (and what responsibility, if any, EP folks have for the ease with which this uptake is possible), we can say that he is projecting contemporary selfish atomism back onto our past. In this popular understanding of the Environment of Evolutionary Adapteness (EEA), selection pressures necessitated selfish behavior. These pressures led our ancestors to develop adaptive genetic coding sequences to produce modules that (given appropriate growth conditions) produce selfish behavior today. Selfish behavior today, however, is adapted but unfortunately maladaptive, since our contemporary social conditions require cooperation, rather than what was adaptive selfishness in the radically different EEA.

But the anthropologists will tell you that the social structure of humans during the EEA was nomadic forager bands, and that contemporary examples of these produce great willingness to share for the vast majority of people and techniques of "social selection" (ridicule, exile, killing) that weed out those who would not share (see Christopher Boehm's work in particular). The other big problem with Blomkamp is that he talks about evolved modules and DNA when he should talk about ontogenetically produced modules and developmental plasticity (see Buller and Hardcastle).

Interestingly enough, Hayek would accept that the EEA produced cooperative behavior, and that contemporary demands for social structures that would support and reward cooperation is "an atavism, based on primordial emotions" that are maladaptive to the rational demands of contemporary market society. On the other hand, Richerson and Boyd would tell us that evolved horizontal small group cooperation is exactly how contemporary hierarchical organizations operate.