ABSTRACT

In a paper contributed to the centennial celebration, in Chicago, of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, 1 I pointed out that vital evolutionary questions of a sociopsychological order need reconsideration in the light of twentieth-century knowledge. While questions of this kind were among those originally broached in the nineteenth century, along with others essentially biological in nature, evolutionary thinking among psychologists and cultural anthropologists fell into abeyance, as time went on, with the rejection of the recapitulation theory in its classical form and of unilinear theories of cultural evolution. The study of human evolution became more and more restricted to biological problems dealt with by physical anthropologists. But, with the discovery of new types of early hominids (small brained but bipedal in locomotion), the accumulation of observations on the social behavior of nonhominid primates in their natural state, the development of psychoanalytic theories, culture and personality studies, and the conceptualization of the nature of culture provided by twentieth-century cultural anthropologists, we now have a more fruitful point of departure for enlarging the boundaries of evolutionary thinking beyond a morphological frame of reference. What appears to be indicated is a conjunctive approach to problems of hominid evolution in which relevant data from various specialized disciplines can be integrated and major categories of variables defined in the general framework of behavioral evolution (Roe and Simpson, 1951).