Evolution's Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide

by Susan Oyama

Overview

In recent decades, Susan Oyama and her colleagues in the burgeoning field of developmental systems theory have rejected the determinism inherent in the nature/nurture debate, arguing that behavior cannot be reduced to distinct biological or environmental causes. In Evolution’s Eye Oyama elaborates on her pioneering work on developmental systems by spelling out that work’s implications for the fields of evolutionary theory, developmental and social psychology, feminism, and epistemology. Her approach profoundly alters our understanding of the biological processes of development and evolution and the interrelationships between them.
While acknowledging that, in an uncertain world, it is easy to “blame it on the genes,” Oyama claims that the renewed trend toward genetic determinism colors the way we think about everything from human evolution to sexual orientation and personal responsibility. She presents instead a view that focuses on how a wide variety of developmental factors interact in the multileveled developmental systems that give rise to organisms. Shifting attention away from genes and the environment as causes for behavior, she convincingly shows the benefits that come from thinking about life processes in terms of developmental systems that produce, sustain, and change living beings over both developmental and evolutionary time.
Providing a genuine alternative to genetic and environmental determinism, as well as to unsuccessful compromises with which others have tried to replace them, Evolution’s Eye will fascinate students and scholars who work in the fields of evolution, psychology, human biology, and philosophy of science. Feminists and others who seek a more complex view of human nature will find her work especially congenial.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822324720
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	05/03/2000
Series:	Science and Cultural Theory
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.13(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Susan Oyama is Professor of Psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York. Her book The Ontogeny of Information is also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1: Looking at Development and Evolution
Transmission and Construction: Levels and the Problem of Heredity

What Does the Phenocopy Copy? Originals and Fakes in Biology


Ontogeny and the Central Dogma: Do We Need the Concept of Genetic
Programming in Order to Have an Evolutionary Perspective?


Stasis, Development, and Heredity: Models of Stability and Change


The Accidental Chordate: Contingency in Developmental Systems

Part 2: Looking at Ourselves

Essentialism, Women, and War: Protesting Too Much, Protesting Too
Little

The Conceptualization of Nature: Nature as Design

Bodies and Minds: Dualism in Evolutionary Theory

How Shall I Name Thee? The Construction of Natural Selves

Evolutionary and Developmental Formation: Politics of the Boundary

Notes

References

Index

Editorial Reviews

Evolution's everywhere these days, and some of its most strenuous public explainers like to make claims about genes and human nature: often they say they can show how the first shape the second. Oyama (The Ontogeny of Information) wants to complicate that picture. Her subtle and sometimes abstruse study of recent concepts in biology and social science--concepts like "evolution," "development," "phenotype," "construction" and "competition"--aims to displace models of selfish genes with models of competing and interacting processes: these processes, working at every level, can improve our explanations of how populations and (especially) people grow, differ and change. Oyama's developmental systems theory draws on the newish field of "science studies" (in which philosophers and sociologists look at the assumptions and logic of scientific disciplines), on biologists' critiques of their field (among them Richard Lewontin and Evelyn Fox Keller) and on bits of literary theory. A professor of psychology at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at the CUNY Graduate Center, Oyama writes for a highbrow audience, though one spread across many disciplines. Her prose can sound too academic or drably general: she hopes, for example, "to adopt a thoroughgoing interactive constructivism with respect to both developmental and evolutionary processes." What she means is that she wants to think--and to get us to think--about how culture, environment and genetic programming are constantly "talking to" one another, and how it's their interaction that creates us. It's a worthy goal, and one her book should advance. Illus. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Oyama writes elegantly and from a deep intellectual base. This alternative view to the dominant genetic determinism will be of interest to all who seek a more complex view of human nature. It is an excellent book, beautifully composed.”—Katherine Nelson, City University of New York


“Susan Oyama's Ontogeny of Information provided a navigational chart for researchers seeking to avoid the shoals of the nature-nurture dichotomy. Here, in Evolution's Eye, she good-humoredly unmasks the rhetorical stratagems of reflexive genecentrism, while continuing to strengthen the case for the integrative, multifocal approach of developmental systems theory.”—Helen E. Longino, University of Minnesota


“To think of nature and nurture as two distinct categories is not only wrong, Susan Oyama convincingly argues, but doing so hobbles our attempts to understand the nature of development and evolution at every level. Hers is a voice that needs to be heard.”—Evelyn Fox Keller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

From the Publisher