The Decline of ‘Evolutionism’ in Evolutionary Philosophical Anthropology. Explaining the Decline of Its Predicate
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22370/lv.2026.31.1.4691Keywords:
adaptation, human nature, gene-culture, intelligence, natural selectionAbstract
A pending question that those interested in philosophical anthropology and evolutionism have yet to answer is why evolutionary philosophical anthropology (EPA) fell into disuse or why it became detached from evolutionism. This work aims to analyze the ‘evolutionism’ of philosophical anthropology, that is, the evolutionary considerations that EPA acquired from biology but that, in recent decades, it has stopped using. The profound change that the classic concepts of evolutionism have undergone has strongly impacted the questions and object of study of EPA, resulting in the disuse of the last predicate. The EPA’s loss of prominence was not due to the criticisms of evolutionism coming from philosophy or biology but very specifically to paradigm changes where complexity, cultural, and social evolution have the greatest explanatory weight, to the detriment of biological considerations that relied mainly on the mechanism of natural selection or genetic aspects. Philosophical anthropology and current biology have brought culture back and placed it at the center of explaining why we adapt and survive. That is why evolutionism is now dispensable for EPA.
After the introduction (section I), I make a historical recapitulation of the antecedents of evolutionism (section II), which later gave rise to the canonical approach of evolution by natural selection (section III). This last is done without ignoring that evolutionism has gone through multiple facets, eclipses (Bowler, 1985), and problems that arise when the selectionist explanatory mechanism is abused. Notoriously, such issues were transmitted to philosophical anthropology (section IV). Later, I summarize some recent philosophical anthropology proposals that illustrate the decline of the ‘evolutionism’ predicate. These positions are nourished by interdisciplinary evidence from paleoanthropology, archaeology, ethology, and cognitive sciences, among others, and all those together account for the decline of the reiterated predicate. I underline the less selectionist approach that maintains that what makes us human is rather culture -and not only our genes (section V). Finally, I summarize some current debates on the “cultural turn” in philosophical anthropology, and I emphasize that by relocating the fundamental role that culture plays in evolution, what the AFE needed so much from biology (natural selection and the force of genes) is now dispensable (section VI).
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