TY - BOOK ID - 11691417 TI - The Taming of Evolution : The Persistence of Nonevolutionary Views in the Study of Humans PY - 2018 SN - 0801417430 9781501719936 1501719939 9780801417436 9780801419882 1501719947 PB - Cornell University Press DB - UniCat KW - Biological Evolution. KW - Human evolution KW - Nature and nurture KW - Physical anthropology KW - -Sociobiology KW - Biologism KW - Human biology KW - Psychology, Comparative KW - Social evolution KW - Biological anthropology KW - Somatology KW - Anthropology KW - Environment KW - Genetics and environment KW - Heredity and environment KW - Nature KW - Nature versus nurture KW - Nurture and nature KW - Genetics KW - Heredity KW - Human beings KW - Evolution (Biology) KW - Evolutionary psychology KW - Evolution, Biological KW - Sociobiology KW - Philosophy KW - Social aspects KW - Nurture KW - Effect of environment on KW - Origin KW - Human evolution. KW - Nature and nurture. KW - Sociobiology. KW - Philosophy. KW - Biological Evolution KW - Environment and genetics KW - Environment and heredity KW - Evolution UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:11691417 AB - 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. ER -