Van de Vliert is courageously taking up the challenge to understand differences among nations in terms of culture, wealth, and climate. It is also timely as the consequences of climate change are receiving much interest from conservationists, agronomists, economists, military planners, and others. Not in a position to critically evaluate the data and analyses in the current paper, I accept them as useful summaries given current knowledge. However, there are ways of enriching the analyses and testing the hypotheses by going beyond the exclusive human-focused anthropocentric lens by considering other species and the rich comparative data being gathered on them. Here I can only touch on a few possible approaches that might be explored in the future. These include inter- and intraspecific variation in nonhuman animals (especially primates) in social organization, resource availability, and play.

Van de Vliert begins by positing the evolutionary link between the behavior (habits) of all species and their ecologies (habitats), but then proceeds to use often heavily massaged data to classify human populations as residing in areas with extreme versus benign environments and being either wealthy or poor. Nonhuman populations also live in areas and confront great variation in climatic challenges and resource availability. Any explicitly evolutionary approach should not begin with humans as being unique and thus countenance disregarding other animals. Perhaps they are, but assuming this uncritically has blindsided scientific progress in the past, whether the topic is tool use, language, cognitive theory, aggression, altruism, empathy, or creativity. Indeed, the very last sentence in the “coda” (sect. 6.4) repeats this speciesism. Money is, ostensibly, the main element in the present analysis that could distinguish us from other species. But this is disingenuous. First, Van de Vliert does allow that nonmonetary resources can be involved in human societies, and is obvious from the role of trading in ancient and even some current small-scale societies. Second, animals have been trained in token economies and other settings where objects can become generalized secondary reinforcers, which is how Skinner and other learning psychologists characterized money.

Regardless, the critical claim that Van de Vliert makes concerns those living in extreme (challenging) environments. In such climatic settings, those with poor resources have social and political systems with more social rigidity and conformism and less opportunity for individuals to have “freedom,” as measured in terms of survival needs, political freedoms, and reaching one's potential through self-expression and individual opportunity. But other species also vary in their social organization. The role of ecology (habitat structure, food, water, temperature, predators, disease) in social organization, for example, is quite robust, and work on this topic goes back decades (e.g., Crook Reference Crook1970).

Nonhuman primates are obvious taxa to study as they have great variation in social systems, including, for present purposes, rigid hierarchical dominance systems to others based on “fission-fusion,” family groups, and so forth. Primates, even in the same or related species, can occupy habitats varying from “benign” to those that are cold, dry, or food-limited. For example, although all macaque monkeys share a basic social dominance system, it varies greatly among the species in this genus (Thierry et al. Reference Thierry, Iwaniuk and Pellis2000). Do populations of macaques in more stressful environments (e.g., climate, food, predator risk) have more stereotyped and individually constrained behavior than those in environments where food and other stresses are rare? We do, know, for example that in macaques, the Japanese (“snow monkey”) macaque, perhaps the least “tropical” large monkey (it even has lost most of its tail), has a far more rigid hierarchical social system than the Tonkean macaques, who live in a rather benign habitat. This suggests that ecological, as well as phylogenetic, factors have historically played important roles in social behavior.

What about freedom and tolerance for individual expression? In animals, play is clearly one way in which they express themselves in seemingly nonsurvival behavior where the social rules are bent and where individuality and creativity (as in locomotor and object play) are tolerated. Thus, play can be a surrogate measure of freedom and plugged into Van de Vliert's analysis. Pellis and Iwaniuk (Reference Pellis and Iwaniuk2000) concluded from a phylogenetic analysis of all groups of primates that adult play is limited or absent in species with rigid social hierarchies. In human societies, the lack of tolerance for artistic freedom (creative play) in Fascist, Communist, theocratic, and other authoritarian regimes is well known (Burghardt Reference Burghardt2005). Here societal wealth is not so much the issue, perhaps, as how it is distributed and controlled, as well as the context in which such regimes emerged. Interestingly, a recent comparison in juvenile play in the two macaques mentioned above documents that Tonkean macaque juveniles play in longer and more variable bouts, and with less competition and more cooperation, than do Japanese macaques (Reinhart et al. Reference Reinhart, Pellis, Thierry, Gauthier, VanderLaan, Vasey and Pellis2010).

Not only is play inversely related to rigid social organization, it is also related to the availability of resources. For example, squirrel monkeys in food resource challenged environments play far less than the same species in habitats with ample food (Baldwin & Baldwin Reference Baldwin and Baldwin1974). This finding has been replicated in many species and also supported through experimental manipulations (see Burghardt Reference Burghardt2005, pp. 157–61). Findings such as these led to the development of the surplus resource theory of play (Burghardt Reference Burghardt and Blass1988; Reference Burghardt2005) in which play in animals is more likely to evolve in species with the physiological and behavioral attributes to expend surplus resources of energy and time in behavior that can enhance learning, flexibility, adaptability, novelty, and innovation.

Van de Vliert ends by making some predictions about changes in freedom as a result of climate change. One can see parallel shifts in animal populations. For example, California sea lion play was reduced following El Niño events that reduced food availability (Ono et al. Reference Ono, Boness and Oftedal1987); such findings open many avenues of future research. In short, grounding the hypotheses developed by Van de Vliert in more rich comparative perspective may allow testing them with more rigorous and biological approaches than seems currently congenial to some segments of evolutionary psychology (Burghardt Reference Burghardt2013).