History and the Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences: Toward a Model of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

The past two decades have seen a rising trend in the application of evolutionary theory to questions of human behavior and society, thereby integrating the biological sciences with disciplines that traditionally study these topics, including the humanities, social sciences, and psychology. Such work has received much criticism owing to a long-standing resistance that views biological, or “genetic,” explanations as overly reductionist, and as ignoring other, potentially more salient factors, like culture. Recent theoretical and empirical advances in the biological sciences, however, have led to what some have termed an “extended synthesis” of evolutionary models and concepts that are capable of addressing more nuanced aspects of human behavior—including behavioral plasticity, developmental processes, collective socialization, and gene-cultural co-evolution. The extensive documentation of the peoples and periods, events and transitions of human history provides a rich bed of knowledge for applying and further examining these models and their relative importance. Such an effort would depend on productive partnerships between evolutionists and historians, and this talk concludes by summarizing three different ways that such partnerships might take shape. 1) Large-scale databases that document one or more aspects of a particular culture or people across time (e.g., Icelandic birth records) and 2) composite databases that document variation across cultures and world regions could both be used to examine general questions and hypotheses. Complementarily, 3) case studies that explore a single culture, period, or event can help to articulate the processes and dynamics by which these more generalized patterns might emerge.