The Taming of Evolution The Persistence of Nonevolutionary Views in the Study of Humans

• Tác giả chính: Greenwood, Davydd (auth)
• Định dạng: Điện tử Chương của sách
• Ngôn ngữ: Tiếng Anh
• Được phát hành: Ithaca Cornell University Press 1984
• Những chủ đề: Evolution; Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography; Social and cultural anthropology; History of science
• Truy cập trực tuyến: OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: description of the publication

Tóm tắt

The theory of evolution has clearly altered our views of the biological world, but in the study of human beings, evolutionary and preevolutionary views continue to coexist in a state of perpetual tension. The Taming of Evolution addresses the questions of how and why this is so. Davydd Greenwood offers a sustained critique of the nature/nurture debate, revealing the complexity of the relationship between science and ideology. He maintains that popular contemporary theories, most notably E. O. Wilson's human sociobiology and Marvin Harris's cultural materialism, represent pre-Darwinian notions overlaid by elaborate evolutionary terminology. Greenwood first details the humoral-environmental and Great Chain of Being theories that dominated Western thinking before Darwin. He systematically compares these ideas with those later influenced by Darwin's theories, illuminating the surprising continuities between them. Greenwood suggests that it would be neither difficult nor socially dangerous to develop a genuinely evolutionary understanding of human beings, so long as we realized that we could not derive political and moral standards from the study of biological processes.

Mô tả vật lý

1 electronic resource (228 p.)

số ISBN

vr7v-1c65
9781501719936
9780801417436
9781501719943
9781501719882

Truy cập

Open Access