Human Natures

By P. Ehrlich. 2013

307 citations recorded by the source corpus.

"The Bell Curve", "The Moral Animal", "The Selfish Gene" - these and a host of other books and articles have made a seemingly overwhelming case that our genes determine our behaviour. Now, a leading evolutionary biologist shows why most of those claims of genetic destiny cannot be true, and explains how the aguments often stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution itself. "You can't change human nature", the saying goes. But you can, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich shows us in "Human Natures", and in fact, evolution is the story of those changing natures. He makes a case that "human nature" is not a single, unitary entity, but is as diverse as humanity itself, and that changes in culture and other environmental variations play as much of a role in human evolution as genetic changes. We simply don't have enough genes to specify behaviour at the level that is often asserted. Never has knowledge of our evolutionary past been more important to our future. Developing intelligent strategies for antibiotic use, pest control, biodiversity protection - even for establishing more equitable social arrangements - all depend on understanding evolution and how it works. A hallmark of "Human Natures" is the author's ability to convey that understanding in the course of presenting a history of our species. Using personal anecdote, and example, Ehrlich guides us through the thicket of controversies over what science can and cannot say about the influence of our evolutionary past on everything from race to religion, from sexual orientation to economic development.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/66eed6f20aa6d0f370a4794eecdfb700f0c010cc

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Citations in the corpus

Neurocognitive Adaptations Designed for Social Exchange. (2015, background): “For example, in dismissing the adaptive specialization hypothesis of social exchange without examining the evidence, Ehrlich (2002) considers it sufficient to advance the folk theory that people just “figure it out.””
The Chameleon Effect as Social Glue: Evidence for the Evolutionary Significance of Nonconscious Mimicry (2003, unknown): “Human beings are social animals (Aronson, 1999; Caporael, 2001a; Ehrlich, 2000; V\/right, 1994).”
Human Natures, Nature Conservation, and Environmental Ethics (2002, background): “…on cultural evolution broadly defined (for a sample, see references in Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981, Lumsden and Wilson 1981, Dunbar et al. 1999, Ehrlich 2000) and a substantial one on the evolution of ethics and norms— which is of special interest to those of us concerned with human behavior…”
FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES IN THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF MUSIC: Assessing Innateness and Domain Specificity (2005, background): “The explosion of industry, technology, and widespread literacy of the last dozen human generations attests to the power of our species to alter itself via cultural transmission on a time scale that is virtually insignificant from the perspective of natural selection (also see Tomasello, 1999; Ehrlic”
Modularity in cognition: framing the debate. (2006, background): “There is pessimism about the answers to these questions, sufficient for Ehrlich (2000) to refer to a " gene shortage " (p. 124).”
Winners and Losers in the Context of Global Change (2003, background): “Paul Ehrlich (2000) further argues that the distinction between winners and losers is more often a product of cultural evolution than genetics.”
Power moves: complementarity in dominant and submissive nonverbal behavior. (2003, background): “Second, some researchers have suggested that humans have evolved to be more egalitarian in their relationships (Ehrlich, 2000), perhaps making complementarity both less common and less comfortable.”