Darwin's Descendants

How evolution and culture have historically shaped our understanding of human behavior.

Evolutionary explanations of human behavior have been perennial sources of contention ever since they originated over 150 years ago. In Darwin's Descendants, Allan V. Horwitz traces the debates that began with Darwin's earliest critics and shows how similar tensions animate conversations in classrooms, laboratories, and public culture today.

Rather than treating biological and sociocultural explanations as rival camps, Horwitz examines how each perspective highlights different aspects of the traits, instincts, and norms that shape human life. Through vivid cases that reveal the interplay of inherited predispositions and cultural forces, he shows how instincts such as incest avoidance and emotional expression are behaviors with deep evolutionary roots. Other patterns, including the cultural celebration of courage or the dramatic decline in fertility across modern societies, reveal moments when social values outpace biological tendencies. Still others, such as widespread obesity or contemporary expectations around physical attractiveness, emerge from intricate mismatches between ancient adaptations and twenty-first-century environments. Across these examples, Horwitz shows how conflicts over human evolution have continually reflected concerns about morality, politics, gender, and identity.

Darwin's Descendants explains why evolutionary frameworks attract both enthusiastic supporters and sharp detractors, and why questions about nature and culture remain so charged more than a century and a half after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Horwitz presents a compelling account of how biological and cultural explanations converge and diverge as we seek to understand ourselves.