Beyond biology and culture. The meaning of evolution in a relational world

Abstract

Darwinian accounts of human evolution are riven by a fundamental paradox. While asserting a principle of continuity between human populations and their evolutionary antecedents, they also posit a point of origin from which separate processes of culture and history rise up from a universal baseline of evolved human nature. But the belief in this nature rests on a confusion surrounding the notion of genetic information. Human capacities are not genetically pre-specified but emerge within processes of ontogenetic development that are at once historical and evolutionary. Replacing the ‘population thinking’ of the Darwinian paradigm with a ‘relational thinking’ that focuses on the dynamics of developmental systems leads us to a new vision of anthropology, as a science of engagement in a relational world.