Love,war and cultures: a reply to my commentators

The purpose of this short reply is to consider the issue of the evolution of the exceptional human intellectual capabilities which has been the focus of the majority of the comments to my article “love, war and culture: an institutional approach to human evolution” all published in the April 2013 of the Journal of Bioeconomics. All the contributions are submitted to the test of two plausibility conditions. The first requires that the explanation of the emergence of human capabilities should rely on circumstances peculiar, or better unique, to human evolution. The second states that the explanation should not rely on factors that require the pre-existence of these capabilities. The claim, advanced in this short article, is that only the “sexual subsidy hypothesis” satisfies these conditions.