Just found online archives of Scott Atran and Dan Sperber. Both are cognitive scientists who have been really changing how I view "human nature" and "culture." Basically, Atran & Sperber would probably characterize much of anthropology as pure description and typology, with little predictive power. They tend to use a reductionistic ground-up methodology, that is, a "mind's-eye" angle that explains culture as an emergent property of the interplay play between mental modules. Roughly speaking, they oppose simple memetic & functionalist arguments, and they seem quite often similar in tone to "blank slaters" who argue for an almost random and profusion of cultural "spandrels," but Atran & Sperber work within the field of evolutionary psychology, and so are critically aware of the constraints placed upon cultural evolution by our mental hardware.

I especially recommend Dan Sperber's An objection to the memetic approach to culture. It is ironic in light of Dawkins' role in the "sociobiology controversy" that from where Sperber stands Dawkinsian memetics neglects essential innate features in the human mind and overplays the card of conscious cognition.

Related note: Recently, I have come to thinking about societies in a way influenced by the modular mind thesis. It seems that the conventional "blank slate" paradigm implies the possibility of a level of free-form social diversity congenial to those who place a primacy on a particular set of norms, usually espoused by "progressives" of any given age. Roughly speaking, they would not put much stock in the idea of a finite number of social equilibria, rather, all social configurations are at the same "energetic state," so only considerations of norms and values come into play. In contrast, another view of human nature is, roughly speaking, "deterministic," and only considers one social configuration as the ideal equilibrium, that is, at a "low energetic state." In relation to that social configuration all other configurations are uphill, and therefore unstable. Because there is only one stable equilibrium, which is maintained by a fixed set of social norms, those must be the norms that any society must uphold to stave off collapse. This deterministic view is often aligned with a "conservative" position, which holds that the "traditional" customs & beliefs of the recent past reflect the only equilibrium. But, there is also a third way, one which denies the rejection of any constraints of the "blank slaters," or the restrictive conception of only one-true-equilibrium of traditionalists. When anthropologists survey and classify cultures, I do not believe that they see a flat distrubtion of populations along most of the significant axes of classification. That is, populations are not equitably distributed along a spectrum, for example, an equal number of highly polygynous cultures, moderately polygynous cultures, monogamous cultures, moderately polyandrous cultures and highly polygamous cultures. Rather, there is a strong skew toward polygyny as the idealized norm in many cultures, though the majority are functionally monogamous. A small group of cultures are polyandrous, but they are often characterized by the marriage of brothers to one woman in environmental contexts where scarcity of resources dictates that the burden of raising a family must be shared. In other words, there does exist a small coterie of peoples who exist at a different stable equilibrium than is the norm. This equilibrium is stable and at a low energetic state only under particular constraints. Neverthless, it illustrates the point that adherence to the infinite possibility of cultures is non-empirical (human cultures tend to cluster around certain social configurations), while the conception of only one way-of-life is probably shaped by the reality of the environmental and social context that a particular culture exists within. After all, a world where slavery was abolished would have been unimaginable 300 years ago! And yet 99% of the world's cultures now get along fine without an institution that was once omnipresent in various forms.

Basically, this is just a recasting of the idea of an adaptive landscape.