Among the cultural universals listed by Donald Brown are:[2] Based on experiments and studies of accidental and utopian societies, sociologist and evolutionary biologist Nicholas Christakis proposes that humans have evolved to genetically favor societies that have eight universal attributes, including:[5] The observation of the same or similar behavior in different cultures does not prove that they are the results of a common underlying psychological mechanism.
[8] Donald Brown's perspective echoes a common belief held by many anthropologists of his time and earlier (increasingly those who have transitioned into the fields of evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, sociobiology and human behavioral ecology) who were critical of the cultural relativism of the Boas-Sapir school which has dominated much of western cultural anthropology for the last century.
[11] Brown's major source for this is Donald Symons, himself an armchair anthropologist who did not perform any actual fieldwork but rather selectively interpreted certain ethnographies while ignoring those which disputed his assumptions (i.e. cherry picking).
One does not need to look very far into the ethnographic record, for instance, to find very copious refutation of the claims that "sex is seen as a service given by females to males"; some of the most eminent ethnographies of the last century argue the exact opposite, such as Pelto's on the Sami,[12] Altschuler's on the Cayapa,[13] or Dentan's on the Semai.
This perspective is found in the Talmud,[15] the Quran and tafsir,[16] and some Hindu literature, all of which stands as a testimony to the impossibility of Symons' evidence-free assertion.