My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”

Between the age-old outposts maintained by the humanities and the biological sciences lies a vast wilderness where culture and biology form a dense and inter-tangled forest. If you’ve had the feeling that you need to leave your safe and comfortable outpost and venture into this forest in order to truly understand the unique role that culture has played in the evolution of the human species, Gregory F. Tague’s Evolution & Human Culture is your map of that wilderness. A native of the humanities but also a frequent envoy to the biological sciences, Professor Tague has mapped out the paths taken by anthropologists, primatologists, evolutionary psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers who have traveled where human culture and human biology intersect. Different disciplines have discovered different areas of this biocultural landscape and have returned with different ideas; Evolution & Human Culture provides an impressively-complete account of these diverse explorations. An intrepid explorer himself, Professor Tague provides his own take on the importance of culture to human evolution — that culture emerged as a means of creating and maintaining the norms that enable us to be so highly cooperative — but only after laying out the full spectrum of perspectives so clearly that he enables his reader to entertain interpretations differing from his own.