ABSTRACT
Anthropology as a discipline is the study of humans, in the widest sense. However, most contemporary anthropologists align themselves with one or the other of two subdisciplines, social/cultural anthropology or biological/physical anthropology, which use very different theoretical bases and modes of investigation. For several decades, social anthropologists have rarely focused on evolutionary parameters such as fitness, even when addressing the cultural components (i.e., marriage systems) of fundamentally biological processes such as reproduction. Equally, biological anthropologists have a relatively brief history of addressing the social transmission of information, a phenomenon that is so central to the behavior patterns studied by social anthropologists. A comprehensive evolutionary approach to the study of human social behavior is therefore still maturing.
