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Resolving The Anti-Antievolutionism Dilemma: A Brief For Relational Evolutionary Thinking In Anthropology, Emily Schultz

Anthropology Faculty Publications

Anthropologists often disagree about whether, or in what ways, anthropology is “evolutionary.” Anthropologists defending accounts of primate or human biological development and evolution that conflict with mainstream “neo-Darwinian” thinking have sometimes been called “creationists” or have been accused of being “antiscience.” As a result, many cultural anthropologists struggle with an “anti-antievolutionism” dilemma: they are more comfortable opposing the critics of evolutionary biology, broadly conceived, than they are defending mainstream evolutionary views with which they disagree. Evolutionary theory, however, comes in many forms. Relational evolutionary approaches such as Developmental Systems Theory, niche construction, and autopoiesis–natural drift augment mainstream evolutionary thinking in …