ABSTRACT
The epistemic fragmentation of the human has often been judged negatively, first and foremost for existential and metaphysical reasons. Mary Midgley, for instance, in her introduction to a new edition of her Beast and Man (1978), deplores the 'sharp division[s] between mind and body, between culture and nature, between thought and feeling'. A similar synthesis bias might surface in the assumptions of the direct critics of evolutionary psychology. Kroeber was Franz Boas's first PhD in anthropology and the ninth in the whole US. Kroeber defended the identity and importance of cultural anthropology by using the biologist's own concept of heredity: he defined culture as heredity of another sort that is, at the same time, opposed to biological heredity. Kroeber ignored that nature and culture interact as factors in the evolution of humans since for him culture was first and foremost an explanandum.
