The Character of Human Institutions: Robin Fox and the Rise of Biosocial Science

He was the editor of The Oxfordian and is the author of many books. . Michael Egan taught at University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Brigham Young University, Hawaii

Biosocial science has breached the shoddy walls of twentieth century social science and is about to take the castle keep.”Anthony Walsh, Boise State University“Robin Fox’s pioneering work on the significance of primate studies for socio-cultural anthropology in the 1970s was deeply inspirational to me. His clarion call in this and numerous other works calling for investigations into pancultural human nature set me a countless others on the quest for biosocial theory in the social sciences. This excellent book gives us a taste of such an organism and why it so valuable to have at least one of them around.”Robert Trivers, Crafoord Prize for Theoretical Biology of the Swedish Royal Academy. As this book, and a cascade of other books and articles can attest, he has lived to see his dream come true. This is a wonderful, sp

"As the pages turn and other essays follow it becomes ever more evident that his friends are a happy lot as well as being immense" according to Marshall. This is a collection off essays written in honor of the renowned anthropologist Professor Robin Fox. The book gets off to a rousing start with Lionel Tiger’s “This Guy, Fox,” the title hinting by punning on the name of the historic Guy Fawkes, that the professor is a constitutional revolutionary. The essay starts with reference to Fox’s classic book Kinship and Marriage. It is revealed that cha

It includes essays by Sir Antony Jay, Lionel Tiger, Howard Bloom, Michael McGuire, Kate Fox, Melvin Konner, Alan Macfarlane, Adam Kuper, Dieter Steklis, Alexandra Maryanski, Bernard Chapais, Jonathan Turner, Linda Stone, Charles Macdonald, Anne Fox, David Jenkins, Frederick Turner, Robert Trivers, and an essay by Robin Fox himself.. From his early studies of kinship, primates, the brain, evolution, the incest taboo, and aggression, to his later work on literature, politics, civilization, law, the Bible, Shakespeare, and the history of ideas, Robin Fox inspired many with an evolutionary vision of humanity that goes beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries and embraces the "universal history of mankind." Fox's work represents an independent "biosocial science" stream of thinking that accepts the Darwinian mandate while avoiding reductionism by recognizing culture as a natural phenomenon.The essays cover Fox's life and his contributions, and address topics as diverse as the meaning and function of laughter; the unforgiving discipline of writing popular anthropology; extreme drinking rituals among young men training for the British army; Darwin and close-cousin marriage; the universal essence of the epic form as a super-attractor; anthropologists' autobiographies; the conflict between science and anti-science; and the decline of British imperial education.This engaging collec