Humans were selected for behavioral malleability, not fixedness

Evidence

The rapid pace of social change causes even thornier problems for the biologically deterministic view. People have changed little genetically over the past millennium, but they have changed markedly in their beliefs, mores, social and occupational roles, cohabitating arrangements, family practices, and styles of behavior even within the past decades through rapid cultural and technological evolution. Dobzhansky (1972) has argued eloquently over the years that humans are a generalist species that was selected for learnability and malleability of behavior, not for behavioral fixedness. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 178

Categorization

• XREF: Seeds the reader’s anti-essentialist angle: if behavior is highly malleable within a stable gene pool, psychologically it is social conditions — authoritarian appeals, Islamophobic policy — not ‘human nature’ that produce harmful conduct. — connects to: Human status is socially learned like language, not animal instinct — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 62; Humans can be trained to match chimpanzee working-memory accuracy. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 91; Observable behavior and environment are more reliably knowable than inner personality structure. (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 178