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Chocolate is an example, incorporating the sweet and fatty properties so innately appealing to humans. Restraint in the face of such choices was not a part of our inherited equipment. The variety of edibles is modest in most ancestral environments, but an enormous variety of foods is available in the contemporary environment: foods from all over the world, in any season, are now available in local supermarkets. , 1986). The linkage between energy expenditure and consumption of food, present in the ancestral environment, has been broken in the contemporary world.

The most explicit application of domain specificity in the broad realm of social behavior is Alan Fiske's (1991, 1992) four models of social structure, which map in specific ways onto particular domains of life, such that, in most cultures, for example, communal sharing is characteristic of family relations and meal contexts. Domain specificity (modularity, adaptive specializations), while accepted to some degree in the study of cognition and language, has not penetrated very deeply into psychology.

The answer to this question is interesting, because the dynamic processes that cause cultural adaptation can lead to systematically different outcomes from those of natural selection acting on genetic variation (Richerson & Boyd, 2005). Some of these differences are adaptive. Culture evolves faster than genes and can track more rapidly varying environments. Symbolic marking divides human populations up into semiisolated pseudospecies, as it were, that adapt finely to their local environment, resisting the cultural analog of gene flow from other environments.