Coming Home: The Evolutionary Roots of Utopia

Abstract

The article discusses insights in evolutionary anthropology which help explain the persistence of utopian thought as well as the qualities that characterize successful utopian experiments. The author looks at previous work on competitive primal nature and the conceptions of evolution from naturalist Charles Darwin. The emergence of sociobiology in the 1970s and 1980s is detailed. Subjects of the article also include dominance hierarchies among nonhuman primates, the behavior of the earliest upright-walking hominids, and the social conditions of hunter-gatherer societies.