Social class through the evolutionary lens

One of the most striking things about humans is that they behave in different ways in different places. You don't need to travel to an exotic location to see this: just stroll through different districts of your nearest city. You'll see vast differences in behaviour over the space of just a couple of miles. You might think that this flexibility undermines the case for explaining human behaviour in evolutionary terms, but in fact the opposite is true. It's natural selection that gave us land other animals tool the ability to vary our behaviour in response to local context, and natural selection can help explain the ways we deploy that ability. This means that the social sciences and evolutionary biology have a lot more in common than we usually imagine.