Christopher Boehm
Weatherhead Resident Scholar
1999-2000
The Evolution of Moral Communities
"The brand of anthropology
I practice is unusual," states Christopher Boehm, Weatherhead Fellowship
resident scholar, "insofar as I am a cultural anthropologist interested
in politics, morality, and evolution who later in my career spent sixteen
months in the field studying conflict resolution among wild chimpanzees." His
research and writing centers on morality, combining humanistic concerns
with an interest in natural selection.
"In
a discipline that is experiencing severe rifts between 'humanists,
and 'scientists,' I feel that the best way to heal this schism is
to produce provocative work that bridges the gap," says Boehm.
During his fellowship year, Boehm is working on a book titled The
Evolution of Moral Communities which will combine humanistic
and evolutionary approaches to explain a major problem of interest
to philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, and biologists: the
basis of human altruism.
Boehm's
argument is that the human sociobiologists have missed the main evolutionary
process that differentiates human from most other animals, a form
of group selection. "Bands regularly promote altruism, and I
shall demonstrate that this is explainable in terms of currently
neglected mechanisms
of natural selection. This will require a departure from standard
evolutionary-biology theory of the past three decades, which simply
sets aside selection taking place between groups as being irrelevant," asserts
Boehm.
"I
believe the book will provide new answers about how hunter-gatherers
moralize, about the place of morality in natural history, and about a
human nature that probably is more altruistic than presently acknowledged."
Boehm's
most recent book, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian
Behavior was published in 1999 by Harvard University Press and examines
the human sense of autonomy and freedom in an evolutionary context. With
David Sloan Wilson, Boehm is conducting an ongoing research project,
supported by the Templeton Foundation, that focuses on explaining conflict
resolution and forgiveness behavior in an evolutionary context.
Affiliation at time of award:
Director, the Jane Goodall Research Center, and Professor of Anthropology,
University of Southern California
Christopher Boehm to present SAR
lecture.
Return to Resident Scholars
1999-2000.
