  Or, are some girls just catty all the time? Getting into social situations with catty girls may just be my freudian old brain issue, because it sure seems like it keeps coming up as a big conflict in my life. Then, I'm left with that everyone but me is crazy corollary: that it's not me, it's them. And it does seem that every woman (save a few priceless encounters) can't resist jockeying for position in conversation, or shooting darts veiled by wit at dinner parties. It makes me feel so tired. This is clearly the negative side to anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's research conclusion that women's social actions are a remnant of primitive life, where a woman's social standing determined her children's survival in the group. We're all trying to hard because our primitive brain's demand it. We must get lovely quick doses of brain drugs in reward for social triumphs, just as men's brains reward them for displays of brawn. But men have progressed as a gender (for the most part) beyond walking around beating each other up. They seem to be able to exist in social environments with no clear alpha. Why can't we women put away the medula oblongata, ourselves? Maybe these men have successful taught their brains that monetary acquisition rather than physical victory determines their children's success?
We don't exactly "teach" our old brain things. A newly expressed behavior (in this case, a trend toward social interaction among otherwise physically overbearing men) must make surviving so advantageous that the genes that set the conditions for that behavior are spread so much more that they infiltrate the population. On one hand, this seems unlikely because wealth is not an indicator of big families these days, rather the inverse. But on the other, I'm considering wealth on modern American terms. Wealth in global terms, over the course of the last four or so centuries certainly has a lower bar. If you can count employable in any labor field as wealth, and overbearing brawn makes one unemployable (not to mention unmarriable), I can actually see those genes losing out.
So maybe men have evolved! In Hrdy's research, she points to the social structure of chimp groups, such as the one inhabited by Jane Goodall's famous "F" family. Flo was able to dominate the other women with social prowess, and achieved an amazing triumph of dynasty by cleverly positioning her daughter, Fifi, as her successor. Therefore, first Flo's children, and then Fifi's were fed most and groomed most by the other chimps, and watched after when the mom was acquiring food.
Food, love, and protection here are the determiners for a baby chimp's thriving. (Two of Flo's sons also endured brief reigns as male alpha, but out of brute might. She probably also spread her genetically social-developed code here, because the extra love and care made her sons big and healthy enough to dominate--socially and sexually. ) Hrdy herself observed Maquaques, and compared her research to the general primate field of knowledge to extrapolate that social ambition must be tied to nurturing instincts in females.
Can I then further extrapolate that I'm sensing so very much cattiness in my life right now because I'm over sensitive to it as an uber-nurturing mama? Or even that my mostly parent-filled social group is a snakeden of positioning efforts? Now that I consider it all, even the women I have seen this in who aren't moms are in the baby-bug phase, which would be one's body building up the hormones and nurturing desires necessary for a baby's survival. They too must be biologically driven to be catty. 
