When I wrote my quick little blurb about what allowed early humans to survive, that something I referred to that allowed early humans to survive was the propensity for people to hang out with one another. Where were the studies that looked at the impact of group dynamics on human evolution? Complex social organizations are the foundations of all human achievement. It seems to me that our evolution was shaped more by our social environment than our physical environment.

This is not an original thought. My ideas grew from reading Naturally Selected. Surely somebody else had come to a similar conclusion. I knew there had to be research being pursued along these lines, but I only found the linked to paper today. While this idea has an aesthetic appeal to me, it's evidently not in the main stream of contemporary thought and research. My impression is that most of the current attention is being given to the molecular aspects of genetics. We have a long way to go before we can start making definitive links between gene sequences and behavior. Our genes function on a level of complexity and feedback that far exceed our limited ability to understand complex and nonlinear systems.