The Prince recognizes that ideas about genes, traits, natural and sexual selection are often explained through species interactions. Yet, these concepts also apply to humans. Here, the key interactions happen between the sexes.
This is especially true with gene-culture coevolution. Here, genes and culture interact in a feedback loop. Changes in genes can shape culture. In turn, culture can influence genetic selection, and vice versa.
The promise the Colorful Prince imagines is that once there is a People, the interplay between the altruistic gene, traits, and sexual selection will create a context, a culture, where its members learn and explore the depths of prosociality.
The Prince takes this position regarding coevolution to highlight that this is not a new idea but a new cycle of it. Perhaps it is the case that four million years ago, social learning became evolutionarily advantageous. But we don’t have to go that far back for an example of this.
Roughly 14,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, the right conditions were in place for a ratcheting effect to drive cumulative cultural evolution. A process of the accumulation of increasingly complex adaptations, of cultural information, including behaviors and technologies that are modified, improved, and passed down through generations, occurred. Knowledge that exceeds the innovative ability of any single individual created a People capable of initiating human civilization.
