Evolution's Eye
A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
In recent decades, Susan Oyama and her colleagues in the burgeoning field of developmental systems theory have rejected the determinism inherent in the nature/nurture debate, arguing that behavior cannot be reduced to distinct biological or environmental causes. In Evolution’s Eye Oyama elaborates on her pioneering work on developmental systems by spelling out that work’s implications for the fields of evolutionary theory, developmental and social psychology, feminism, and epistemology. Her approach profoundly alters our understanding of the biological processes of development and evolution and the interrelationships between them.
While acknowledging that, in an uncertain world, it is easy to “blame it on the genes,” Oyama claims that the renewed trend toward genetic determinism colors the way we think about everything from human evolution to sexual orientation and personal responsibility. She presents instead a view that focuses on how a wide variety of developmental factors interact in the multileveled developmental systems that give rise to organisms. Shifting attention away from genes and the environment as causes for behavior, she convincingly shows the benefits that come from thinking about life processes in terms of developmental systems that produce, sustain, and change living beings over both developmental and evolutionary time.
Providing a genuine alternative to genetic and environmental determinism, as well as to unsuccessful compromises with which others have tried to replace them, Evolution’s Eye will fascinate students and scholars who work in the fields of evolution, psychology, human biology, and philosophy of science. Feminists and others who seek a more complex view of human nature will find her work especially congenial.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Evolution's everywhere these days, and some of its most strenuous public explainers like to make claims about genes and human nature: often they say they can show how the first shape the second. Oyama (The Ontogeny of Information) wants to complicate that picture. Her subtle and sometimes abstruse study of recent concepts in biology and social science--concepts like "evolution," "development," "phenotype," "construction" and "competition"--aims to displace models of selfish genes with models of competing and interacting processes: these processes, working at every level, can improve our explanations of how populations and (especially) people grow, differ and change. Oyama's developmental systems theory draws on the newish field of "science studies" (in which philosophers and sociologists look at the assumptions and logic of scientific disciplines), on biologists' critiques of their field (among them Richard Lewontin and Evelyn Fox Keller) and on bits of literary theory. A professor of psychology at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at the CUNY Graduate Center, Oyama writes for a highbrow audience, though one spread across many disciplines. Her prose can sound too academic or drably general: she hopes, for example, "to adopt a thoroughgoing interactive constructivism with respect to both developmental and evolutionary processes." What she means is that she wants to think--and to get us to think--about how culture, environment and genetic programming are constantly "talking to" one another, and how it's their interaction that creates us. It's a worthy goal, and one her book should advance. Illus.
