We build theologies around violence, elect leaders who excel at it, and in the case of so many women… — Robert M. Sapolsky

Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd.

Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That’s not generic prosociality. That’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia.

Ecosystems majorly shape culture — but then that culture can be exported and persist in radically different places for millennia. Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth’s humans have inherited their beliefs about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists.