The hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution took place in an environment that we in the first world are incredibly unfamiliar with. We know about the tribes of hunters and gatherers, small groups of people roaming around, and small villages, but the grand majority of us have not traveled to indigenous societies in less developed countries where people still live in an environment similar to this one.
The reason I want to establish that the evolutionary environment is so foreign to modern people is that the evolutionary explanation for human behavior is incredibly concerned with this environment. It is actually very important to try to envision our species in its infancy to understand the line of argumentation that evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists present. This is also the chief reason why, though speaking in evolutionary terms can often sound insensitive, understanding that references to men and women are talking about early humans in an environment where almost all of their concerns were evolutionary should make this discussion sound much less morally charged.
The theory goes that evolution (in the evolutionary environment) created the ‘knobs’ of human behavior that society turns up or down based on what is perceived as evolutionarily fruitful at that specific period of time. An example is the human practice of self-deprecation. There are evolutionary reasons that it developed in people, including the value in knowing one’s place in a hierarchy and not unnecessarily challenging the hierarchy and fighting losing battles.That is the knob, and society turns it, usually through how parents raise their children. Charles Darwin was highly self-critical, and much of his personal writing laments his actions and shortcomings. However, he had 10 children, 7 that lived to adulthood. Perhaps, in Victorian England, there was a value to putting oneself down? We could analyze today’s culture to try and determine how that knob should be set today