You can accept or reject these particular evolutionary explanations as you like. But the underlying message is worth taking home: Much of what now passes for "natural selection" isn't exactly natural. It's social. As such, it deserves no presumptive respect as a validator or promulgator of objective fitness. Nor does the discovery of a genetic basis for this or that trait prove it's more than a social construct. In the era of cultural selection, many genes are a social construct. Which makes them no less real.
Everybody is equal in all ways! Even if they're not!
In evolutionary terms "objective fitness" simply means the ability to survive and have children who survive. If a gene does that via cultural means, it's still objectively fit. If he means that culture-based evolution doesn't convey the moral rightness or wrongness of the cultures that survive, he's right -- but no form of evolution makes any judgments about morality to begin with. (There's a name for the act of breaking this rule, the naturalistic fallacy.)
Two, no gene is a social construct. It's an identifiable physical phenomenon. Social factors may increase or decrease the prevalence of a gene, but they don't construct it.
Finally, every trait with a genetic base is indeed "more than a social construct." A given gene may not absolutely guarantee a social phenomenon, but if it contributes, that means the phenomenon isn't just social.
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