ABSTRACT
Social scientists emphasize the learned components of culture. The famed sociologist Emile Durkheim set people's view of culture early in this century when he said that only social facts can explain social facts. Accordingly, social questions can not be reduced to biological explanations. After all, the language people acquire, the artifacts people produce, the culture people embrace, are unique expressions of their social complexity. Suspicions remained that at the bottom of people's cultural forms are the universal adaptations of millennia past. The strongest evidence for evolutionary influences on culture is people's obsession for the preservation of individual genes through social interactions or through those with whom they share genes. Kinship is the glue holding individuals together within social systems. Close kin are favored over distant kin, kin are favored over non-kin. Social scientists are resisting the evolutionary interpretation of culture, mainly through name-calling, but their battle runs uphill.
