Our article addresses the question “How is culture biological?” by considering violence. Historians of violence have focused on issues such as foresight, self-control, sympathy and inequality without sufficiently considering the psychological underpinnings of the social and cultural factors they emphasise. At the same time, an approach to the issue of violence that takes into account evolutionary and biological perspectives also draws attention to the connection between real and imagined violence. We argue that scholars from different disciplines in the humanities have much to gain from a greater engagement with biological and evolutionary approaches to human behaviour and thought
