[1] Tooby and Cosmides (1989) argued that the mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught.
Elaborating on the previous example: Cultural Cognitive Causal Chains (CCCCs) are those SCCCs which are shared and reproduced widely among a population.
Boyer (2000)[10] argued that evolutionary psychology, and anthropology in general, should investigate how these cognitive predispositions to cultural material affect their representation in following generations.
A key assumption of human behavioral ecology is that individuals will act in response to environmental factors in ways that enhance their fitness.
Evoked cultural behaviors are those that are the outputs of shared psychological mechanisms in response to local environmental cues[8] Fessler et al., 2015[18]).
As well, the issue of behavioral variation and transmitted culture may be seen as a major point of contention between evolutionary psychology and other disciplines, especially gene-culture coevolution.
Gene-culture coevolution would argue that culture traits may have altered genetic change and selection pressures, ultimately affecting cognition.
While this may difficult, some evolutionary psychologists, such as Gangestad, Haselton, and Buss (2006)[9] have argued that the future of the discipline rests on unifying transmitted and evoked culture.
As they state, “Culture, however, is not a "thing" with singularity; it's an umbrella concept subsuming a collection of extraordinarily varied phenomena, each of which requires scientific analysis” (Gangestad et al., 2006).
Wheeler and Clark (2008) have named this interplay between genes, culture, and embodiment the “triple helix.” The authors suggest that self-created environmental structures and reliance on culturally-transmitted information selected for cognitive modules for continual bootstrapping and increases in computational complexity.
[20][21] As they state, “Triple helix models of mind recognize the role of genetic biases in sculpting key developmental trajectories, and the resulting space both for strong forms of genetically specified cognitive modularity and for weaker forms of emergent modularity resulting from trajectories marked by multiple bouts of culturally scaffolded experience and the self- selection of environments” (Wheeler and Clark, 2008.
[20] Other authors have suggested that borrowing methods of dynamical systems analysis may help unravel this tangled web of genes, cognition, and culture (Kenrick et al., 2003[22]).
Humans show authoritarian reactions and preferences for a strong leader in case of war or perceived collective danger.
The evolutionary function of this so-called regal reaction is that it allows a strong leader to solve the collective action problem in war and suppress free riding.