I recognize the fact that cultures are subject to a form of natural selection, in which unlivable practices are abandoned or changed by the members of a tribal society over time. However, what I do not understand is how one can look at a tribal society today and make assumptions about their past. Members of a tribe may say, "We have done this since the beginning of time," but the oral tradition changes along with everything else, and it isn't really reliable. In several answered questions, you have replied to a person's inquiry about an unpleasant cultural practice with a response along the lines of, that culture has been proceeding for thousands of years, anything unsustainable to its people would have been eliminated by now. But how can we know whether they will be eliminated in the future? If a practice is eliminated in a tribe, does that render our previous criticism of it "correct" from an evolutionary perspective? Destructive practices must exist for a short time before they are abandoned, so how can we tell if the last few hundred years out of thousands in a tribe's history aren't the most internally destructive, or a radical change from what enabled them to survive before? • Ishmael.org, the work & philosophy of Daniel Quinn