The Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene

by Walter Goldschmidt

The Bridge to How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene explores the relationship of biology and culture in the evolution of human behavior. Building upon several of the theoretical issues he first addressed in Man's Way , renowned anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt presents a unique look at how human culture functions through biological mechanisms that have evolved from our distant past.
"Affect hunger"--the need for affective expressions from others--underlies nurturance and mutuality. Goldschmidt contends that affect hunger--in combination with other factors unique to the human species--in effect "trumps" the selfish gene and is therefore the essential missing key to understanding human behavior. Employing discussions of primate behavior, ethnographies, cognitive studies, psychological research, and hormonal and neurological studies, he demonstrates how affect hunger not only provides a reward system for learning language and other cultural information, but also remains a motive for social behavior throughout life. Transforming the debate on nature versus culture to one on nature and culture, The Bridge to Humanity provides a fresh perspective on the ways that biology and culture fit together. Indeed, in this book Goldschmidt reinterprets anthropological knowledge, profoundly affecting all students concerned with human behavior and reaching far beyond the
discipline's borders.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Biology

164 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2005

Reviews

[Georgia Bastos · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a gem! I read some years ago and I still carry some ideas from it to this day.

[Alex Kalinske · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wise contribution to the social sciences that remains important 15 years after its publication. Its only flaw is that Freud cannot be appropriated. Drive is drive: unconscious, undifferentiated, scientifically artifact to cogitation plain, simple and ugly; attractive or, if room, repulsive. What is love is love; attraction attraction. All difference we deliberate between the relationship I or you, he or she, feels towards my, his, your, spouse, father, mother or child, is exactly that—after the fact. What is not expressed is somewhere lost where one needn't in the Freudian psychology explain more. What is unconscious may well be left respectfully there.