Nature and culture revisited: What do neo-Darwinism and developmental systems theory have to say?

Abstract

In this paper, I deal with the conceptual relationship between nature and culture in Lamarckism, Darwinism, sociobiology, neo-Darwinism, and developmental systems theory. The aim of the paper is to show how sociobiology deviates from what is postulated about this relationship in neo-Darwinism. Namely, thanks to August Weismann’s theory of hard inheritance and Alfred Kroeber’s cultural determinism, neo-Darwinism, unlike the reductionism of sociobiology, starts from a strong conceptual separation of nature and culture in which nature and culture are two separate causal factors equally important for explaining human behavior and human sociability. Finally, I deal with Tim Ingold’s critique of this sharp conceptual separation, which comes from the position of developmental systems theorists in evolutionary biology.