Tuesday, 26 May 2009

Williams on the limits of evolutionary psychology.

The generic human need to make and listen to music, for instance, might be explained at the level of evolutionary psychology, but the emergence of the classical symphony certainly cannot. In fact, the insistence on finding explanations of cultural difference in terms of biological evolution exactly misses the point of the great evolutionary innovation represented by Homo sapiens, the massive development of non-genetic learning.

Bernard Williams, Truth and truthfulness, p 28

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