New View of How Humans Moved Away From Apes

The New York Times has an article expanding on an article I already linked to on the evolution of distinctively human social traits. In fact, the points made about the nature of tribal bands and their interconnections, varieties of kinship and nonkinship, F. A. Hayek's observations that different social orders would compete and the best emerge, and Matt Ridley's thesis in The Rational Optimist about trade seem intimiately connected. If so, my project here and at Austrian Economics and Literature are in fact intimately related. Certainly both are about applying the studies of evolutionary processes to understanding literature.

But this idea of interrelated human bands of typically unrelated people is suggestive. Surely we see these dynamics in life and, thus, in literature -- novels and epics being the most obvious places one would see such dynamics represented.