ABSTRACT
Social solidarity is essential to the survival of society, which in turn is essential to the survival of each of its members. "A conceptually integrated theory," economists learn in a seminal collection of articles devoted to evolutionary psychology, a human-focused incarnation of sociobiology, is one framed so that it is compatible with data and theory from other relevant fields. Scholars in each field can and often do spend their entire professional lives studying human behavior without any reference to or knowledge of any other discipline. Gary S. Becker's approach entails the rejection of the traditional theoretical framework of sociology and its replacement by an economic model. Anthropology, because of its broad, species-wide perspective, is well positioned to appreciate the existence of cross-cultural universals in human behavior, indicating the existence of a shared human identity, founded on the biological commonality of all Homo sapiens. Indeed, "evolutionary anthropologists" have become an increasingly powerful voice within their discipline.
