ABSTRACT
Social and cultural anthropology set off on a specialized course nearly one hundred years ago while physical anthropology and human biology went a different way— and few of the respective practitioners had much awareness of what the others were doing. The fiction of a holistic anthropology was largely maintained through introductory textbooks and by the fact that all “good” departments had to include both physical and cultural anthropologists. The recent impact of evolutionary biology on anthropological studies has come at a time when biological theory itself has gained new, powerful, and far-reaching insights into the nature of all behavior. The number of critical concepts or new ideas is small— inclusive fitness, nepotism, reciprocal altruism, kin selection, mating strategies, parental investment— but their implications for many kinds of characteristically human behavior are great. And behavior is the key word, particularly as it is relatable to strategies of reproduction and differences in reproductive success.
