Foor for thought (and writing):
In the novels, dominant behaviour is "powerfully stigmatised", says
Gottschall. "Bad guys and girls are just dominance machines; they are
obsessed with getting ahead, they rarely have pro-social behaviours."
While
few in today's world live in hunter-gatherer societies, "the political
dynamic at work in these novels, the basic opposition between
communitarianism and dominance behaviour, is a universal theme", says
Carroll. Christopher Boehm,
a cultural anthropologist whose work Carroll acknowledges was an
important influence on the study, agrees. "Modern democracies, with
their formal checks and balances, are carrying forward an egalitarian
ideal."
