ABSTRACT
Anthropologists and sociologists have spent about a century and a half trying to figure out the principles governing the operation of human society. Anthropologists and sociologists have for many decades operated under one or another version of what has come to be called the Standard Social Science Model. This model assumes that behavior is determined almost entirely by various features of the social and cultural environment. Evolutionary psychologists, by contrast, insist that what was adaptive in earlier environments may not be adaptive in novel modern environments. This has an important methodological implication. Nevertheless, important developments in theoretical biology in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in evolutionary biology, provided a basis for reconsidering biology's relevance for human behavior. There are several important qualifications to what has been said thus far. Perhaps most importantly, it is crucial to stress that sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are not forms of biological determinism, a charge often made by critics.
