History of Science and Technology Colloquium

This talk will compare the boundary work of evolutionary psychologists and cultural anthropologists as they create their scientific disciplines. I will argue that each group attempted to put forth a different argument about what counted as a proper explanation of culture and the kinds of definitional moves each group made differed substantially. Here at the dawn of the twenty-first century, some psychologists are creating a new discipline called "evolutionary psychology." The evolutionary psychologists maintain that all of our explanations for social and cultural behavior are truncated because these explanations are not grounded in Darwinian evolution. Evolutionary psychologists point to Boasian cultural anthropology as the worst offender for non-Darwinian explanations of culture. At the dawn of the twentieth century, cultural anthropologists, particularly Alfred Kroeber (1879-1960) did indeed argue that cultural explanations should not invoke biology. However, a close examination of Kroeber’s claims reveals that Darwinian thought was a necessary part of Kroeber’s separation of culture from biology.