The Psychological Foundations of Culture
TL;DR — The founding manifesto of evolutionary psychology — the opening chapter of The Adapted Mind.
John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, the opening chapter of The Adapted Mind.
The argument against what they call the Standard Social Science Model: that the mind is not a general-purpose learning device shaped by culture, but a set of evolved, content-specific mechanisms — and that culture is generated by those mechanisms rather than written onto a blank slate.
The founding document of evolutionary psychology as a programme. Intensely argued over ever since, both for its specific claims and for the caricature of anthropology it sets up. Read it to know what the field actually asserted, rather than what either side says it did.
Where this came from
72 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.