Abstract

Evolutionary Psychology human-nature.com/ep – 2004. 2: 3-6 ————————————— Book Review The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit by Melvin Konner, 2nd edition. Henry Holt, New York, 2002. Richard Wrangham, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Peabody Museum 50B, 11 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: wrangham@fas.harvard.edu. In the 1970’s, people at Harvard interested in human behavior behaved like members of rival high-school cliques. Under the banner of sociobiology were biologists Bob Trivers, a brash young genius, Ed Wilson, synthesizer and visionary, and master anthropologist Irven DeVore whose many students, such as Sarah Hrdy, Steve Gaulin, John Tooby and Barbara Smuts, were beginning to carry the revolution forward. They were challenged by the vaunted leaders of neighboring fields such as geneticist Richard Lewontin and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionists who for both scholarly and political reasons were scornful of the new pronouncements about human behavior. Supported by social scientists mistrustful of biology in any form, these skeptics wore their left- wing politics on their sleeves and raked the sociobiologists with accusations of bias and incompetence. Anthropologist Melvin Konner found himself in this cauldron after returning from two years of living with !Kung San foragers in Botswana. The intellectual