ABSTRACT
Indefensible in light of recent research and discoveries in evolutionary biology, as well as in the evolutionary social and behavioral sciences, the archaic view of the human brain and mind as a content-empty “blank slate” is being replaced in sociology by the notion of an “adapted mind” and an “evolved actor.” By exploring the phylogeny (evolutionary history) of primates in general, and humans in particular, a new cadre of evolutionary sociologists such as Jonathan H. Turner is ushering in a 21st-century view of human nature that is informed and guided by both the cognitive neurosciences and evolutionary biology. Using well-established methodological techniques derived from evolutionary biology such as cladistics, evolutionary sociologists are making significant strides in specifying the evolved properties of the human brain and mind. For the first time, the notion of “human nature” is being explicated on a sound, scientific basis. Evolutionary sociologists are also explaining how these properties constitute the substrates of human sociality itself. Consequently, 21st-century sociological theory will remain hopelessly burdened by folk, pre-Darwinian misconceptions of human nature unless it becomes informed by the rapidly growing body of knowledge accumulating in the evolutionary behavioral and social sciences.
