Human Universals is a book by Donald Brown, an American professor of anthropology (emeritus) who worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was published by McGraw Hill in 1991. Brown says human universals, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception."
According to Brown, there are many universals common to all human societies.
Pinker lists all Brown's universals in an appendix. The list includes several hundred universals, and notes Brown's later article on human universals in The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Brown's universals are not all unique to humans, and many are realized differently in different societies.
The list is seen by Brown (and Pinker) to be evidence of mental adaptations to communal life in our species' evolutionary history.p53 The issues raised by Brown's list are essentially darwinian. They occur in Darwin's Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), and in Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863). The list gives little emphasis to the issues of aggression, physical conflict and warfare, which have an extensive literature in ethology. Brown's list does have conflict and its mediation as items.
Notes
References
- George P. Murdock in Linton, The Science of Man in the World Crisis (1945)
- Murdock's concepts were updated by Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (1991)
External links
- Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.
- List of Universals from the book.
- Chapter by Brown
- Introduction to Human Universals and Methods of research by Donald E. Brown
- Humans share same characteristics - Paper, University of British Columbia
