Abstract

Evolutionary Psychology human-nature.com/ep – 2006. 4: 432-433 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Book Review Culture in Nature: Are We Alone? A Review of Stephen C. Levinson and Pierre Jaisson, (Eds.): Evolution and Culture, MIT Press, 2006. 296 pp. US$75.00 ISBN 0-262-12278-2 (hardback) Pierre L. van den Berghe, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, E-mail: plvdb@u.washington.edu Three decades have passed since the last chapter of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) hit the dozen or so navel-gazing disciplines interested in the cultural behavior and artifacts of Homo sapiens. That chapter clearly set an agenda for integrating the social sciences and humanities into the mainstream of evolutionary theory. It postulated that human culture and the underlying human brain grew out of a process of biological evolution, and continue to be biologically bounded. The central problem for the social sciences was the relationship between genes and culture. There followed, rather quickly, an explosion of attempts to develop models of such a relationship by R. Alexander; J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby; D. Barash; R. Boyd and P. J. Richerson; L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and M. W. Feldman; N. Chagnon and W. Irons; R. Dawkins; W. Durham; J. Lopreato; C. J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson;