International Dialogue
Abstract
No philosophical question is older than What are we, we humans? Michael Tomasello contributes a splendid, empirically based answer to this hoary debate in Becoming Human, with a programmatic subtitle, A Theory of Ontogeny. We humans are an evolved organism with a capacity to create culture only by means of which we can realize aspects of our biological selves—and just as our biology can realize aspects of our cultural selves. That is, our biology evolved in ways that released in us capacities for “culture” that, in turn, released in us biologically relevant capacities, with “enormous and cascading phenotypic effects”—but effects “not encoded directly in the genes” (5).
Recommended Citation
Gregg, Benjamin
(2022)
"Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny Michael Tomasello. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019 pp. 392.,"
International Dialogue: Vol. 12, Article 9.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32873/uno.dc.ID.12.1.1200
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/id-journal/vol12/iss1/9
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