Customer Reviews

Evolution and Human Kinship

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This book attempts to create a grand theory of human social behavior by linking kin selection theory to the structure of human kinship. The author proposes several formal mathematical tools to test such a link, focusing in particular on principal components analysis, but highlighting also social network analysis and deterministic models. He tests the validity of kin selection theory in describing several aspects of human kinship from several unrelated data sets, including sharing among kin, the structure of family groups, the emergence of stratified kin groups and kinship terminology.

The book is extremely well written and relatively easy to follow if you skim the mathy bits. It covers a number of issues that are of fundamental importance to kinship theorists, including marriage and descent. It seems very much ahead of its time in its use of mathematical and statistical tools and argues persuasively for the need to examine kinship systematically.

The book's major failing is in its one-sidedness. The touting of kin selection theory is at the expense of consideration of equally valid theories, even within sociobiology (e.g., other evolutionary bases for cooperation, conflict and reproductive skew among related individuals) and can seem a bit naive as a result. Furthermore, much of the existing literature within evolutionary anthropology was ignored or glossed over, leaving the reader with a somewhat biased perception of the status quo in 1988. The author also by and large rejects the American cultural anthropological tradition of kinship studies, which is understandable given his perspective, but does nothing to bridge the study of kinship and biology as he desires. Because the author is a zoologist rather than an anthropologist, much of this is not surprising.

Regardless of the shortcomings of this book, I still recommend it as a supplementary text for any class that considers evolutionary perspectives on human kinship. Chapters 1, 5 and 8 would be particularly interesting for undergraduate students. Hughes' case is stated perhaps too strongly, but is nonetheless a case worth considering, as it adds structure and perspective to explorations of human kinship systems.