ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the individual-person dichotomy and the different interpretations that can be placed on it. It examines the history- evolution dichotomy, beginning with one of the most extreme exponents of historical subjectivism, R. G. Collingwood. Reacting sharply against the view that history can be written across the disciplines of astronomy, geology and biology, as well as of the humanities, Collingwood argues that historians should approach their subjects. Bock, reporting on the debate in the context of a critique of recent sociobiology, continues to represent Ortega as the passionate protagonist of a humanism that ascribes ultimate priority to culture in the shaping of human experience. In the case of Kroeber's 'science', the direction of extension is precisely the reverse, as from Darwinian biology to Boasian ethnology. Thus the 'evolution' of the Darwinian paradigm is formally analogous to the 'history' of the Boasian paradigm, representing the combination and recombination, in individuals and populations, of hereditary and acquired elements respectively.
