Times Higher Edu­ca­tion dis­cusses the divide between evo­lu­tion­ary and social anthro­pol­o­gists. 

On one side are the evo­lu­tion­ary anthro­pol­o­gists. “(They believe) our behav­iour is based on things that we did to find mates in our years of evo­lu­tion,” says Alex Bent­ley, a lec­turer in anthro­pol­ogy at Durham Uni­ver­sity. “Then we have the social anthro­pol­o­gists. Some of them really strongly reject this kind of think­ing. They con­sider it reduc­tion­ist. They are focused on the specifics of culture.”

Put crudely, social anthro­pol­o­gists describe and com­pare the devel­op­ment of human cul­tures and soci­eties, while evo­lu­tion­ary anthro­pol­o­gists seek to explain it by ref­er­ence to our bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion. The two sides of the one dis­ci­pline are strug­gling to unite.

The com­ments are worth brows­ing, too.

via Seed