. The brain evolved not to think but to act, and ideology is an act of social affiliation which can be compared to kin affiliation, both satisfyingly emotional and expressing a perception about the nature of the real world central to the nature of being human. Males may affiliate to macrosocial ideologies more enthusiastically than females because of their relative lack of certainty of kin relationships. Exogamy was the necessary solution to kin‐related strife in prehistory. Perhaps what the world needs (...) is not only a moral equivalent to war but an ideological equivalent to exogamy to resolve social differences on a much larger scale. (shrink)

While it is obviously interesting, it is not necessary as Boehm does to relate the analysis of morality to lives of primates other than humans. Exposition of human prehistory and history offer ample basis for comparative work. Especially, the transition from hunting/gathering/foraging to agriculture/pastoralism appears to have generated urgent moralistic behaviour. In an interesting historical curiosity, Max Weber himself perceived the basis of morality, or legitimacy, in biosocial processes.