re: #80 wrenchwench

Cultural traits have little or nothing to do with actual evolution, though.

I knew someone would say that. I think the same processes apply if those traits become a threat to survival. Civilization, and tribal life before it, depends on a certain level of cooperation and consensus. The conspira-liars are a serious threat to that, and they are symptomatic of a larger threat.
Compared to the long history of evolution, “culture” is a very new phenomenon. There is no reason to suppose that it, too, is not an aspect of evolution or affected by evolutionary principles. I would prefer to think of these traits as behaviors that are passed on by a process analogous to genetic inheritance, but not literally an example of it. It is a common observation, for example, that violent and aggressive parents have aggressive children. There are apparently some biological aspects to this but they are far less important than the behavioral ones.
In this society, sub-cultural affiliations often take the place of parents in fostering various behavioral traits. It may be speculative to say that these are subject to same evolutionary pressures as the purely biological, but I think the possibility is very strong that they are. In the broadest sense, evolution is about change in response to change.