Anthropology, law and genetic inheritance

Abstract

Although anthropology has accepted organic evolution as established fact for more than a century, anthropologists have made few serious attempts to anchor human institutions in the specific social behavior of animal aggregations. Throughout the first half of this century, American and British social and cultural anthropologists with few exceptions rejected cultural evolutionary theory in favor of structural—functional study of directly observable societies. Contemporary anthropologists tend to reject or downgrade the significance of panhuman genetic factors in favor of the dogma of culture as sui generis . However, law as a phenomenon of social structure can probably be linked fruitfully to behavioral research with genetic implications—with cautious stretching of the limits of naivety, through examination of the so-called imperatives of societal maintenance and the ‘law jobs’.