Paper short abstract:

Naturalistic approaches to cultural behavior are not necessarily bound to a commitment on a universal - fixed - human nature. In my contribution I will try to point out how is possible to conciliate a strong naturalistic commitment with the acknowledgement of the human behavioral variability.

Paper long abstract:

In general, naturalistic research programs are not, up to now, particularly widespread in anthropology. One reason that can explain this state of affairs is that, in most cases, the approaches to human sciences that presented themselves as naturalistic (e.g. sociobiology, evolutionary psychology) tended to underline the universality and the commonness of the human behavior and to deny, or give less importance, to the diversity.

However, from a comparative point of view, the variety of human behavioral patterns can not be compared to the variability present in other species and it is worthwhile to argue that this variability has to be explained in terms of the importance that social learning dynamics (culture) have among human beings.

In my theoretical contribution, I will try to point out how is possible to conciliate a strong naturalistic commitment (and I will try to explain what is required to fulfil such a commitment) with the acknowledgement of the human behavioral variability. In particular, I will refer to three different, but conciliable, research paradigms: (1) the empirical study of social learning in comparative psychology, (2) the gene-culture coevolutionary modeling, and (3) the so-called embodied cognitive science.