STS 367 - Mind, Culture, and Biology

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as SOCI 367) Increasingly in recent years Darwinian approaches to the analysis of human behavior have emerged at the center of modern science-based opposition to social constructionism and postmodernist thinking. Nowhere is this challenge more pointed than in the use of evolutionary perspectives to explain patterns of human culture. This course examines the deployment of Darwinian social science to account for morality and religion; art and literature; consumerism and consumer culture; sex/gender and standards of beauty. The goal is neither to celebrate nor to dismiss evolutionary psychology and its allies but rather to play Darwinian insights and potentially questionable claims off against those of feminist, Marxist and sociological critics. Mr. McAulay.