ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on an objection from within evolutionary biology, one that hinges on the way in which the concept of 'human nature' is pressed into service as the opposite of culture, creating a distorted view of both development and evolutionary processes; a view that remains incredibly resilient in the face of all attempts to eradicate it. The notion that humans are, in fact, 'interestingly similar' (as Edouard Machery puts it (2016: 63)) has driven most of the recent evolutionary theorizing on the nature of human nature. The 'Standard Social Science Model' (SSSM) was presented as a naive 'Blank Slate' view. Tooby and Cosmides argued that the social sciences regarded humans as infinitely malleable, and shaped entirely by culture through a small number of general-purpose learning mechanisms. Tooby and Cosmides took great pains to explain why their view was not deterministic, as well as showing why it neither denied nor constrained the production of behavioral variability.
