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

by Susan Oyama

Book 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822324725
• ISBN13: 9780822324720
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Essential reading for those interested in anti-essentialism

This is a collection of essays that advances the interesting arguments of Oyama's earlier work: `The ontogeny of information'. Oyama helps us to rethink in subtle and complex ways the concepts of `biology', `inheritance', `nature', `evolution', and so on and she also reconfigures the relationships between them. Together the reworkings of these ideas provide a sophisticated framework which eschews various forms of reductionism and determinism whilst emphasising contingency, history, and complexity. Her discussions of developmental systems are essential reading for anyone seeking a more complex way of engaging with the complexity of life and our understanding of it.