"Evolutionary explanations of human behavior have been perennial sources of contention ever since they originated over 150 years ago. Despite the paltry material stakes involved, the issue this trial raised about whether human descended from other animals or were divinely created with a special nature have resonated for the past hundred years. Recent contestations over evolutionary views remain equally fierce but have shifted from religious adversaries to opponents in academia. The polemical debate between E. O. Wilson and his critics over his 1975 book, Sociobiology, was perhaps the best-known scholarly conflict in the last half of the twentieth century. While the focus of debates has shifted since Darwin published his monumental works, their intensity has remained high. The basic issues that evolutionary accounts of human behavior raise have led them to become one of the few academic subjects that garner considerable attention in the general culture.

This book applies the major controversies human evolutionary views to a number of specific substantive issues. Each chapter is framed through a general debate in the evolutionary literature that is explored through a particular relevant topic. Its thesis is that, although evolutionary and sociocultural perspectives have typically been posited as in opposition to each other, in fact they are usually complementary and provide different kinds of insights. In addition, it posits that the relative strength of the evolutionary and sociocultural views depends on the particular topic under study. It uses substantive topics that best illustrate a specific kind of interaction between evolutionary and cultural forces. In some cases - e.g. incest avoidance, basic emotions - biological instincts underlie human behaviors.

Yet, in other cases - e.g. the cultural glorification of courage and denigration of cowards or the recent widespread declines of fertility - social values invert biological instincts"-- Provided by publisher.