Excerpt

In the following pages, I sketch my own experiences working in and between the social and biological sciences, and then present: a personal view of the present state of theory in the social sciences; the challenge to social science theory from the new paradigm in behavioral biology (“sociobiology”); some reasons why most social scientists have strongly resisted any rapprochement with evolutionary biology; and a few closing thoughts on the prospects for a unified theory of behavior.

A Personal Odyssey

Since the views I present here will be necessarily brief and highly idiosyncractic, I first offer a summary of my experience in the behavioral sciences. My graduate work in social anthropology was at the University of Chicago, where the faculty passed on to me a largely intact version of the structural–functional paradigm as they had received it from Durkheim via Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. Although I had previously had no interest in physical anthropology, I was persuaded by the remarkable Sherwood L. Washburn to undertake a field study of the social behavior of savanna baboons in Kenya. His reasoning was that highly social primates such as baboons had very complex social behavior, and that the traditional training of primatologists in physical anthropology, comparative psychology, or mammalogy was insufficient or inappropriate for understanding that complexity. My thesis, on “The Social Organization of Baboon Troops,” was a model of the structural–functional approach, and embodied all of the implicit “group selection” presuppositions of that field. By 1964, I had begun a twelve-year study of the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert. Some thirty students and colleagues investigated a wide spectrum of topics, ranging from archaeology, demography, and nutrition to infant development, social organization, and belief systems (e.g., Lee and DeVore 1976; Shostak 1981). At Harvard, I had an appointment in the Department of Social Relations, taught its introductory course, and served as chairman of its Social Anthropology “Wing.” During the next twenty years, my time and that of my students has been equally divided between primate studies and hunter-gatherer studies.

In 1980, we began a similarly intensive, long-term series of coordinated studies on the Efé pygmies and Lese horticultural populations of the eastern Ituri Forest of Zaire. Our methods and research goals, however, are now very different from those we employed in the original study of the Kalahari !Kung. Today, I am chairman of the Anthropology Department, with a joint appointment in Biology, and consider myself a “behavioral biologist.”

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