Cultural anthropology’s love-hate relationship with evolution: what will the future bring?

Abstract

Cultural anthropology and evolutionary biology arose around the same time, and both adopted the same evolutionist framework. Their paths soon diverged, however, largely because anthropology rejected the notion of evolutionary progress—and thus the notion of the existence of primitive versus advanced races—before evolutionary biology did. Most anthropologists subsequently rejected all evolutionary interpretations of ethnographic patterns and thus all biological influences on human behavior. Most evolutionary biologists until recently ignored the massive role of culture in guiding human behavior. Promising recent work suggests that important new insights emerge when evolutionary and cultural influences on behavior and society are integrated. The success of these new approaches indicates that the presence of a similar mental substrate everywhere produces a non-trivial level of predictability and thus convergence in cultural evolution. Future work along these lines should therefore yield novel insights in how humans respond to changing subsistence or institutional arrangements.