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We benefit from being part of a group. Humans have developed an extremely complex society, perhaps because of evolutionary arms races in societal traits (such as cheating and cheat detection).
Our genes have a much greater chance of thriving if we are part of society, than if we are on our own, because a society helps with survival and with child care.
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The survival of a human baby is particularly dependent on the pair bond of its parents
The helplessness of human babies meant that we had to care for them and, because of the harsh environment, their chances of survival were greatly increased if both parents cared for them.
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Traits that encourage us to care for our offspring are promoted by natural selection.
Because we are born prematurely we need to be cared for in our early years to survive.
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Human babies are all born prematurely, unable to fend for themselves
The large size of human baby heads and the narrowed birth canal caused by bipedalism meant that women physically could not give birth later
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Procreation selection promotes traits that help us to have and raise children and to ensure that those children have children of their own. The goal, then, is to have lots of grandchildren.
For our genes to thrive they have to get into the next generation. If not, they die with us.
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Insecurity is one of the main levers that natural selection uses to guide human behavior. It is the characteristic, more than any other, that distinguishes us from other animals.
Insecurity is the driver that tells us that we should be aware of our limitations when trying to find out about the world and be wary of things that we do not understand. Insecurity is the nagging voice at the back of our heads that tells us to be nervous, to be circumspect and on the look-out for danger and for changes in the environment, and that tells us to improve and to prepare ourselves for future challenges.
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We should select good errors over bad errors (which means playing it safe)
Natural selection has biased us towards safer errors because the potential upside of a critical event (living a little bit longer, perhaps mating and having children) is always less valuable to us than the potential downside (gruesome death and end of story). E.g. for threat detection we are biased towards false positives; it is better for us to incorrectly think that a tree is a bear, than incorrectly think that a bear is a tree.
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Humans seem to enjoy sex more than almost any other animal, indeed we are sex-obsessed
The all-important pair bond is helped by great sex
The survival of a human baby is particularly dependent on the pair bond of its parents
The helplessness of human babies meant that we had to care for them and, because of the harsh environment, their chances of survival were greatly increased if both parents cared for them.
Much of our behavior is designed to work well in small groups (the size of typical hunter gatherer tribes), and is not as effective in the large groups that we operate in today.
We are Pleistocene people, and our behavior was shaped by our environment during that time. We were, then, a tribal society.
Why we walk on two legs.
There are many theories for why we evolved to walk on two legs. It has been variously suggested that standing upright helped us to: travel more easily between the increasingly scarce food sources, scan the horizon for predators, wade in shallow water, regulate our temperature, carry tools, pick food from trees, carry our babies, show off our genitalia, and on and on. Improving our hunting skills is a popular theory.