Introduction

What is the best way to classify the many deviant conditions that are possible in human societies? Is it possible to distinguish between basic or universal types of deviance that can be found in any society or historical period? And how can we organize and explain the wide variety of responses that can be observed across different types of deviance, individuals, situations, and societies? Is it possible that these different responses can be explained in terms of a limited number of psychological mechanisms? Answering both kinds of questions – about categorizing deviant conditions and the responses to them – would greatly assist us in organizing and integrating the enormous amount of facts about social responses to deviance that are available.

We believe that current evolutionary theorizing could be of great help in simultaneously answering these two kinds of questions. In particular, it should be possible to describe the basic features of early human societies, argue that these societies needed to cope with a limited number of basic types of deviance in order to function effectively, and speculate about the psychological mechanisms that should have been selected for (or “designed”) by evolution to make these adaptive responses possible, and that were retained or genetically inherited by later generations.