Brinitzer Cameron
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Department II, Berlin, Germany.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2024 Dec 5;46(4):46. doi: 10.1007/s40656-024-00647-1.
The Cultural Evolution Society was established in 2015 to "catalyze a theoretical synthesis" in the scientific study of human culture. As a field of research, cultural evolution took shape in the 1970s and 1980s around the aim of incorporating culture into biology's modern evolutionary synthesis. Cultural evolution grew around the turn of the twenty-first century at the interface of population genetics and cognitive psychology. This article locates the origins of research on cultural evolution in projects of postwar scientific antiracism and U.S.-based debates about race and intelligence in the 1960s. Charting the development of prominent approaches to studying cultural evolution, I show how population geneticists and cognitive psychologists worked to redefine culture in statistical, populational, and geographic terms to politically neutralize the study of human difference. I situate the forms of genetic and cognitive culturalism that emerged as a result in a longer history of twentieth-century scientific antiracism.
文化进化协会成立于2015年，旨在推动人类文化科学研究中的“理论综合”。作为一个研究领域，文化进化在20世纪70年代和80年代围绕将文化纳入生物学现代进化综合的目标而形成。文化进化在21世纪之交，于群体遗传学和认知心理学的交叉领域发展起来。本文将文化进化研究的起源追溯到战后科学反种族主义项目以及20世纪60年代美国关于种族与智力的辩论。通过梳理研究文化进化的主要方法的发展历程，我展示了群体遗传学家和认知心理学家如何努力从统计学、群体和地理角度重新定义文化，以便在政治上使人类差异研究中立化。我将由此产生的遗传和认知文化主义形式置于20世纪科学反种族主义的更长历史背景中。
