A Positive Conclusion: Biological Determinism vs. Biological Potentiality

In the final chapter of his ground breaking work, The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould wages an all out war on the predominately Western idea known as "biological determinism".

Believing sociobiologists to be examining the myriad of human behaviors too specifically, Gould propagates the notion that behaviors are products of
cultural evolution and not genetics as many sociobiologists suggest. In fact, one of the main arguments Gould promotes is that all theories advancing biological determinism are based entirely on faulty science. Biased data interpretation, biological measurements and scientific fraudulence have long beset any and all attempts to explain human cultural behaviors in a biological context. Instead of searching for specific explanations for each behavior, Gould contends that scientists should attempt to identify the flexible roots of these behaviors, or "generating rule". This generating rule ultimately dictates that genes give humanity the potential for flexible utilizations of any behavior across situations and that natural selection has only acted in pressuring for our extravagantly sized brains. It is in turn our brains that provide us with the large ranges of behaviors we see today. And flexibility is the driving force behind such behaviors.  


To decisively demonstrate this, Gould points to the neoteny of human evolution. 
It doesn't take an anthropologist to recognize that the physical features of the human body resemble closely that of the  juvenile and fetal stages of other primates. Gould goes even further maintaining that our unusual mental flexibility is, in essence, a characteristic of childhood. 




This is the Larsen that came to mind while reading Gould. The reasons, I think, are somewhat obvious.