TC paper - On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics and adaptation.

On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics and adaptation.

All Tooby and Cosmides publications

T&C make the case that there is likely to be a universal human nature, with "a species-typical collection of complex psychological adaptations," despite the considerable genetic variation in the human population.

Their reasoning is that any complex adaptation requires many genes, and genes get shuffled so thoroughly in a population that there is no way a complex adaptation could reliably appear, unless the different alleles produce only superficial differences between people, and the broad functions built by the genes are universal.