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One final point we’d like to raise concerns the phenotypic and behavioral gambits (Fawcett et al., 2012). There is no arguing with the fact that humans dominate the planet, and our unprecedented flexibility could be taken to suggest that general constraints on human behavior, whether genetic, physiological, or psychological in origin, are less stringent than those that affect other animal species. One could argue, therefore, that adopting the phenotypic and behavioral gambits is really quite sensible when it comes to human behavior. Having said this, it is apparent that human behavior does not always conform to theory and may even be maladaptive, suggesting there are, in fact, constraints operating. Our way of reconciling these 2 somewhat contradictory statements is to suggest that constraints may be local, contingent, and peculiar to the population in question and not only a reflection of general constraints common to all humans. More specifically, a population’s (and often species’) history may generate constraints in an unpredictable fashion that either are not readily identified using a BE approach or go unrecognized. If we take an animal example (at the risk of seeming to flirt potentially with our self-identified disco problem), it has been shown that, among southern chacma baboons, the concession of reproductive opportunities to subordinates by alpha males can only be understood as the result of a cascading sequence of events that stem from high rates of infanticide in the population, as compared with northern yellow and olive baboon populations (Henzi et al. 2010). This, in turn, likely reflects historic climatic effects that limited male cohort size, in ways that prevented selection for male–male coalition formation, and so increased the likelihood of infanticide as a successful male strategy. In other words, variation in male mating strategies across baboon populations cannot be understood simply as a plastic response to local ecology, as formerly supposed, but needs to be placed in its historical context, with a recognition that this has led to qualitatively different evolutionary solutions. In this way, unique historical events, in this case climatic, may result in flexible behavioral responses that nonetheless retain the signature of these events through time. Ironically, because of the extreme flexibility of humans, our own actions may sometimes be a source of historical “accidents” of this kind. Thus, although we are sufficiently flexible to arrive at an adaptive solution to unpredictable and contingent events, these may continue to exert a strong influence on future behavioral trajectories because of the manner in which local cultural practices “stick” once they are entrenched and valued by a given society (e.g., Aunger 1994). Consequently, human populations may not currently display the predicted pattern for a given environment because the range of strategies available after such events becomes “culturally canalized” (potentially leading to less than optimal behavior). By the same token, of course, they may also give rise to solutions that are somewhat “messy” and convoluted but nevertheless fitness enhancing. In essence, what we are (tentatively) suggesting is that, although we can play the phenotypic and behavioral gambits with a certain degree of insouciance, we ignore history at our peril.

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