I loved some of Robert Sawyer's earlier books. He was one of my favorite authors but I haven't read anything he's written in a good while.
But you have a point. I find the idea of "conflation" irksome and this is something I've seen a lot of white male authors engage in, where they extrapolate all of human behavior from a handful of theories about white western men, as if they were the default and standard of all humanity.
My biggest pet peeve is the people's idea that William Golding's Lord of the Flies is some kind of treatise on human nature when actual reality has shown that what he wrote about was something he thought was unique to British Boarding School boys ( and he said as much) and was a commentary on British belief that somehow they were the most civilized.
There was an actual incidence of young boys being stranded on an island for several months and they managed to get along fairly well without adult supervision. Certainly no murder was involved. There is also the situation in Puerto Rico after the hurricanes, where their lives didn't immediately devolve into a horror of Mad Max cannibalism!, as seems to be the idea most prevalent in Hollywood.
As a side commentary, I was not disappointed in human nature after reading the book. As a Black woman, none of the events or characters in that story were a reflection of me or any of my friends and family, who lived in dire circumstances and poverty every day, yet somehow still managed not to give in to our basest natures. Not saying poverty doesn't produce such behavior, its just not what I experienced, or how I am, so this human "nature red in tooth and claw" stuff is not a universal thing.
