If you think all people but a select few are stupid that is fine. Just tell me why you are part of the select few and what qualifies others to be exceptions. Can you answer this question? Will you answer?
[WS:] I'll try, if you find the word "stupid" in what I posted on the subject.
FYI, following the flock, stock knowledge and established patterns of thought and behavior has nothing to do with intelligence or lack thereof - and you seem to be jumping to conclusions prematurely here. AFIK, people who are educated, intelligent and creative in some fields, can be pretty closed-minded and following the established paths in others, and vice versa.
Nor is following the flock and established path necessarily a bad thing. It often offers significant advantages in terms of saving transaction costs. FYI, Alexander Gershenkron, whom I highly respect, explicitly makes that argument about belated economic development - countries that come late to the process can benefit by following the already tested paths instead of reinventing the wheel. But as it is the case of human actions and capabilities, what is an advantage under one set circumstances can be a disadvantage under other. Jared Diamond argued that quite convincingly in _Collapse_.
As to your request for a "proof" of my evolutionary claims, - which btw are quite tangential to my main argument that people are by nature social and thus engage in behavior that is social (i.e. follow the group) - you know darn well that the whole field is in a large part a conjecture. We can only observe cases of evolutionary changes in modern times, and apply patterns established from these observations to the past. That does not make it unscientific - many sciences make conjectures about things that they cannot directly observe based on patterns they can observe - it is just that you cannot provide an empirical proof in the way you typically do in science - by stating the antecedent and determining if the hypothesized consequent obtains.
But let me reverse your question and ask - how do you think we as a species became a "social animal" if not by evolutionary process - by the fiat of a god?
Wojtek