The Hare and the Tortoise: Culture, Biology, and Human Nature - Hardcover

Barash, David P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670810258 ISBN 13: 9780670810253

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1986

Synopsis

An exploration of the fundamentals of biological evolution and of the progressions of cultural evolution sheds light on human sexuality, feminism, family structure and function, aggression, and other social and cultural phenomena

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

We have one foot in the cultural present and the other in our biological past, writes Barash, author of The Whispering Within. He examines the conflict between galloping culture and slow-moving biology as affects sex, feminism and family structure. He addresses the subjects of the nuclear arms race (in a world of Neanderthal mentality), the population explosion, aggression and alienation. Barash looks to the future: the major factor controlling human reproductive success will be the rational intent of prospective parents; about our long practice of artificial selection with domestic animals and plants, he describes this as culture tampering with the fundamentals of biology. His quarrel is not with culture, only with our uses of it. Barash enlivens this study of ourselves with anecdotes from animal life, anthropology and literature; it gives fresh insight into the human condition.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Barash's central observation is that human biological evolution (the tortoise) has not kept pace with human cultural evolution (the hare) and cannot do so. Thus our once-adaptive biologically determined behavior patterns for reproduction and aggressiveness, and our attitudes toward the environment, technology, and members of the opposite sex, are superfluous or even maladaptive. Barash makes some good points, especially in the chapters on population and environment, but elsewhere he rambles and resorts to near platitudes. The discussion of "Neanderthal Mentality" is nothing but a plea to join the antinuclear movement as the only way to cure apprehensiveness in American youth. Overall this is not an especially interesting essay. Walter P. Coombs, Jr., Biology Dept., Western New England Coll., Springfield, Mass.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0670810258
• ISBN 13: 9780670810253
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 351