Complexities: Beyond Nature and Nurture

by Susan McKinnon (Editor), Sydel Silverman (Editor), Karen-Sue Taussig (Contributor)

Recent years have seen a growing impetus to explain social life almost exclusively in biological and mechanistic terms, and to dismiss cultural meaning and difference. Daily we read assertions that everything from disease to morality—not to mention the presumed characteristics of race, gender, and sexuality—can be explained by reference primarily to genetics and our evolutionary past.

Complexities mobilizes experts from several fields of anthropology—cultural , archaeological, linguistic, and biological—to offer a compelling challenge to the resurgence of reductive theories of human biological and social life. This book presents evidence to contest such theories and to provide a multifaceted account of the complexity and variability of the human condition. Charting a course that moves beyond any simple opposition between nature and nurture, Complexities argues that a nonreductive perspective has important implications for how we understand and develop human potential.

Genres: Anthropology

296 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2005

Reviews

[Nebuchadnezzar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a scatter-shot but nonetheless vital little collection of essays. The fact that it came out of an interdisciplinary anthropological conference may explain its hodgepodge nature. In any case, the volume generally seeks to deconstruct overly simplistic and reductionist applications of biology to the study of humanity. Evolutionary psychology and genic selectionism come in for a good bit of scrutiny here. At times, the book oversteps its bounds in service of contrarian arguments where I don't think current research supports any definite conclusions. However, this is a welcome counterbalance to pseudo-biological reasoning and frankly silly ideas (I'm looking at you, waist-to-hip ratio "research"). The essays give the reader a taste of the true complexity of both biology and culture and how the study of both yield few easy answers. Anyone in the social sciences or humanities looking to apply biological theory should read this as an inoculation against seductive evolutionary just-so stories that are all too often targeted at and uncritically cited by those in said fields.