It is not only the religious world-view that seems so precarious in the light of it. All kinds of moral aspirations, set against what we can know or surmise about our hunter-gatherer ancestors, seem to be so much wishful thinking. How can we entertain the liberal hope for equality between the sexes, for universal human rights, for a global community without wars, when we reflect on the harsh conditions in which our species is said to have evolved, and for the need, in those conditions, for belligerence, relations of domination, and an innate division of labor between woman and man?
