at the same time it is way too easy to grossly oversimplify evolution and biology as they translate into current cultural or other behaviors.
We are extremely complex animals, and on top of the 4 billion years of biological natural selection which determined the outlines of our physiological and genetic realities we have overlaid things like acquired, passed down knowledge and belief systems (both correct and incorrect, helpful and hindering), then language, then culture, and the rest.
Obviously we're primates, but we're also vastly different in some rather striking ways from any other primate (indeed, any other life-form) on this planet. We're really in uncharted territory-- in so many regards.
I reject most sorts of absolutist assertions on this topic, no matter where they originate- I think it's silly-as-fuck to suggest that girls are "hard wired to like pink and to shop", just as it is also silly-as-fuck to suggest that the penetrative sex act is an artificial, "unnatural" act invented by some spooky oppression planetary penis conspiracy.
I think it's silly to assert that under no circumstances are there any physiological or evolutionary drivers for some of the things we do, including the things we collectively have created in our cultures, yet likewise it seems pretty clear that a great deal of our behavioral expectations are culturally programmed or reprogrammed.
This is why I think the goal of real positive enlightenment or change; wherever this stuff actually comes from- always ought to be helping people find the tools and means to program or reprogram their own brains, break out of the cultural or semantic webs through which they see reality, and basically as much as feasible make their own damn decisions about shit.
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