Just over 20 years ago the publication of two books indicated the
reemergence of Darwinian ideas on the public stage. E. O. Wilson's
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and Richard Dawkins' The Selfish
Gene, spelt out and developed the implications of ideas that had
been quietly revolutionizing biology for some time. Most
controversial of all, needless to say, was the suggestion that such
ideas had implications for human behavior in general and social
behavior in particular. Nowhere was the outcry greater than in the
field of anthropology, for anthropologists saw themselves as the
witnesses and defenders of human di versity and plasticity in the
face of what they regarded as a biological determin ism supporting
a right-wing racist and sexist political agenda. Indeed, how could
a discipline inheriting the social and cultural determinisms of
Boas, Whorf, and Durkheim do anything else? Life for those who
ventured to chal lenge this orthodoxy was not always easy. In the
mid-l990s such views are still widely held and these two strands of
anthropology have tended to go their own way, happily not talking
to one another. Nevertheless, in the intervening years Darwinian
ideas have gradually begun to encroach on the cultural landscape in
variety of ways, and topics that had not been linked together since
the mid-19th century have once again come to be seen as connected.
Modern genetics turns out to be of great sig nificance in
understanding the history of humanity."
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