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HANNAH CHAPELLE WOJCIEHOWSKI, VITTORIO GALLESE, Introduction

thropologists John Tooby and Irven DeVore in a seminal 1987 article. 1
In that essay, they argued that over millions of years, hominids grad-
ually learned how to manipulate their environments and to improve
their survival through long-term planning, tool manufacture and
skills acquisition, cognitive modeling of how the world works, com-
munication of those models through language, and many more de-
velopments. These acquired abilities contributed to the enhancement
of human cooperation and social organization. For Tooby and De-
Vore, human culture must be understood, then, as a function of evo-
lution; our ancestors gradually came to occupy what they called the
cognitive niche.
Though they did not use the word “biocultural” in their essay,
Tooby and DeVore nevertheless proposed a model for understanding
the nature/culture binary in such a way that the two concepts, once
thought to be fully opposed, were fused together in a new way. A
more radical theory of the biocultural has emerged alongside of their
theory — namely, that cultural evolution affects biological evolution,
and that cultural practices can exert pressure on the human genome. 2
Epigenetics shows that DNA does not code the synthesis of proteins
in a rigid and deterministic way, but is influenced by our relationship
with the world. The physical, but also material, historical, social and
cultural environments in which we live, and even the type of human
relations characterizing our life, all influence the expression of our
genes. In these instances, DNA does not change through mutations,
but its expression does, and, even more interestingly, those changes
are passed on to descendants. 3

1 John Tooby and Irven DeVore, “The Reconstruction of Hominid Behavioral
Evolution Through Strategic Modeling,” in The Evolution of Human Behavior:
Primate Models, ed. Warren G. Kinzey (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), 183-237.
2 On the shaping influence of culture on biological evolution, see, e.g., Peter
J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed
Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
3 Vi orio Gallese, “Neoteny and social cognition: A Neuroscientific Perspec-
tive on Embodiment,” in Embodiment, Enaction and Culture, ed. Christoph
Durt and Thomas Fuchs (Boston: MIT Press, 2017), 309-331.

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