. . . I am skeptical about the usefulness of the very concept of human nature. . . .  Evolutionary flexibility is . . . inextricably connected to developmental flexibility. . . .  Human diffferences, the diversity, however much there may be,  in actual human developmental outcomes is our best clue as to the diversity of outcomes that might be achieved with a will and a better understanding of human development. (pp. 258-59)

It is increasingly acknowledged that niches are not pre-existing givens, but rather co-evolve with the organisms that inhabit them.  And surely the organism that has taken this phenomenon to the highest level is Homo sapiens. . . .  One way to see the power of cultural evolution . . . is to stress its role in the reconstruction of the human niche. (pp. 280-83)

It is . . . clear that recognition of the variety of factors involved in deveopment makes possible a diversity of individual outcomes within even quite narrowly defined populations. (p. 285)

Ultimately my central contention is that human nature is open. . . .  The openness of human possiblity, of possible changes to the human developmental niche, can cut both ways. (p. 292)

 . . . modern culture contains within it a trace of each of our previous stages of cognitive evolution.  It still rests on the same old primate brain capacity for episodic or event knowledge.  But it has three additional, uniquely human layers: a mimetic layer, an oral-linguistic layer, and an external-symbolic layer.  The minds of individuals reflect these three ways of representing reality.  (p. 262)

Mimetic representations are evident in human children before they acquire language competence. . . .  They continue to be important in adults, taking the form of highly variable social customs, athletic skills, and group expressive patterns (such as mass demonstrations of aggression or rejection).

Tamburrini (1982) pointed out that “there is considerable evidence that formal operational thought is contextually bound” (p. 319).  This is no small concession; the very point of formal operations is that they go beyond context and content.  The failure of adolescents and adults to reason in the ways predicted by Piaget is a serious problem for both the theory and practice of education, for it is precisely the formal reasoning skills that are necessary for mastering academic subjects such as math and science beyond the elementary level.  p. 130

Biologically primary abilities are acquired universally and children typically have high motivation to perform the tasks involving them.  In contrast, biologically secondary abilities are culturally determined, and often tedious repetition and external motivation are necessary for their mastery.  From this perspective it is understandable that many children have difficulty with reading and higher mathematics (p. 63).  p. 131

Differences in cognition across cultures, social groups, and domains of practice are thus commonly explained without seriously analyzing the historical development that has led to those differences.  The underlying relativistic notion is that we should not make value judgements concerning whose cognition is better or more advanced--that all kinds of thinking and practice are equally valuable.  Although this liberal stance may be a comfortable basis for academic discourse, it ignores the reality that in all domains of societal practice value judgements and decisions have to be made everyday.

from Eugen W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to schizoanalysis (Routledge, 1999)

The account which Deleuze and Guattari provide of three modes of social-production--savagery, despotism, capitalism--is best understood not as a history of modes of social-production but as a geneology . . .   Geneology, in the sense of the term Foucault derives from Nietzsche, is based on the premise that historical institutions and other features of social organization evolve not smoothly and continuusly, gradually developing their potential through time, but discontinuously, and must be understood in terms of difference rather than continuity, as one social formation appropriates and abruptly reconfigures an older institution or revives various features of extant social organization by selectively recombining to suit its own purposes.  As Deleuze and Guattari put it, "the events that restore a thing to life [in a given form of social organization] are not the same as those that gave rise to it in the first place."

Turning to ‘egalitarian’ hunter-gatherers, Flannery and Marcus stress various factors: the role of humour, teasing and ridicule as levelling mechanisms; how influence is won not by  bullying but through generosity, modesty and diplomacy; how language and intelligence serve – and most probably evolved – to promote social networking; the absolute imperative to share. They remark how strikingly the urge to maintain egalitarianism contrasts with the jostling for power in chimpanzee societies. The explanation, they suggest, is that while apes put sex first, followed by food and then defence, the order for humans is food, defence and then sex, with marriage acting as a food-getting partnership rather than a hormone-driven sexual liaison. This is why marriage was always a flexible institution: one man one woman;two men one woman; two women one man; foursomes and so on. That said, hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is rather a sham. Flannery and Marcus argue that even the most egalitarian of them had a dominance hierarchy as clear-cut as that in any ape society. The difference is that for humans, the alpha elite were invisible supernatural beings, far too powerful to be overthrown, while the betas were ancestors who did the bidding of the alphas.  No ‘egalitarian’ hunter-gatherer was ever more than a gamma in the social hierarchy

Part 1 of The Creation of Inequality takes the reader though Rousseau's "state of Nature" and sets the baseline in the Paleolithic for the development of inequality. Physical differences had always separated members of species—strength, agility, intelligence—and they form the basis of social organization in our nearest primate kin. Thus, in chimpanzee troupes, the strongest (the alphas) dominate the rest through violence, betas dominate all but the alphas, and so on. The authors compare this "natural" order to the stratification of beings in early cosmologies: gods are all-powerful alphas, ancestors are betas, and humans can only be gammas. What separated humans from chimpanzees and prevented our earliest societies from being ruled by force was our capacity for language. In these first chapters, Flannery and Marcus demonstrate how most early groups used shame, humor, and the clamor of the group to maintain fairness among its members.