ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the origins of the human behavioral ecology approach, its early reception, and its subsequent development. Since the heady times of the late 1970s several things have happened in human behavioral ecology. The first and most important is that, despite its public relations problems, human behavioral ecology has become an established paradigm with a large empirical literature to its credit. The year 1979 was a productive year for the new paradigm in other ways as well. As a freshman at Northwestern University, Lee Cronk let it be known that he had read E. O. Wilson’s and Richard Dawkins’s books while still a high school student and was interested in the new paradigm, he was instructed by an anthropology faculty member to read Sahlins's book as a purgative. In 1998, a prominent and influential cultural anthropologist presented a colloquium in William Irons's department on the future of anthropology.
