Bot Biological and Cultural Anthropology experiences a Major Change in Theory essays

Bot Biological and Cultural Anthropology experiences a Major Change in Theory essays In the middle of this century, bot biological and cultural anthropology experiences a major change in theory. In biological anthropology, biological anthropologists adopted an approach which on the gene. They saw the human evolution as the process of genetic adaptation to the environment. In the mean time, there were also analogies to evolution. Cultural evolution also followed a process of In the field of anthropology, a very important theory is that of sociobiologists. Sociobiologists focus on adaptation and reproductive success rather than progress toward perfection. Edward O. Wilson was of the most important of them. He adopted an approach that focused on level of the gene. He saw social behavior as controlled, in principle, particular genes, and he saw evolution as occurring at this level reproductive success amounted to increasing the frequency of certain in future generations. However, the insistence of sociobiologists on grounding at least some behavior in universal human genetic runs contrary to cultural anthropologists' emphasis on the primacy of culture itself as the determinant of human social life. Several distinct approaches can be identified in contemporary sociobiology. The first one is evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is concerned primarily with the analysis of the mind as a device formed by natural selection. The second focus is human ecology. It emphasized populations rather than cultures, human biology, as well as evolutionary ecology. The difference from psychology is that it focuses on testing the hypotheses that culturally patterned traits actually enhance fitness rather than mind. The third approach involves the search for human universals. People advocating kind of approach concentrate on discovering the characteristics found all human societies. (McGee and Warms, 1996) However, this universal evolution point of view is rej...