The “ontological turn” is a recent movement within cultural anthropology. Its proponents want to move beyond a representationalist framework, where cultures are treated as systems of belief (concepts, etc.) that provide different perspectives on a single world. Authors who write in this vein move from talk of many cultures to many “worlds,” thus appearing to affirm a form of relativism. We argue that, unlike earlier forms of relativism, the ontological turn in anthropology is not only immune to the arguments of Donald Davidson’s “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” but it affirms and develops the antirepresentationalist position of Davidson’s subsequent essays.

Although the concept of culture was severely criticized in the second half of the twentieth century, its explanatory use has not been abandoned. Evolutionary psychologists and cognitive scientists have more recently used the concept in models and theories of culture. This use renews the hope that the concept of culture can be explanatorily useful within the social sciences, especially since the new definition of culture connects with both the idea of evolution and with the other natural sciences. In this paper, I analyze the models of cultural evolution developed by Cultural Evolutionary Science (CES), more specifically gene-culture coevolution theoretical models and dual-inheritance theories. I argue that even if CES scholars mostly claim that for them, culture is equal to information, some of these models have aspirations to bring back cultures as discrete units that resemble the social anthropological models of culture that have been already abandoned. I discuss evolutionists’ and social anthropologists’ objections to these models. I claim that despite the popularity of cultural evolutionist theories, social scientists (cultural anthropologists and historians, for example) should remain skeptical about the possibility that this approach can assume an explanatory role for a concept of culture.

A previous experiment showed that there was a strong correlation between conservatism/liberalism and brain activity, linked to an error response ( r = 0.59, p < 0.001) in the USA political environment. We re-ran the experiment on a larger and age-homogeneous group ( n = 100, 50 females and 50 males, aged 20–26 years) in the Czech Republic; a European country with a different sociocultural environment and history. We did not find a relationship between the brain activity connected to conflict monitoring and self-reported conservatism/liberalism orientation (ρ = −0.11, p = 0.297) or conservatism/liberalism validated for the USA agenda (ρ = −0.01, p = 0.910). Instead of replicating the previous study, we decided to test the hypothesis under a different socio-cultural context. Our results support a view of self-reported or validated, conservative or liberal attitudes as a complex behavioral pattern. Such a behavioral pattern cannot be determined with statistical significance, using a simple Go-NoGo detection task, without accounting for confounding factors such as age and socio-cultural conditions. Sufficiently powered studies are warranted to evaluate this neuro-political controversy.

This article evaluates the idea of the modularity of mind and domain specificity. This concept has penetrated the behavioral disciplines, and in the case of some of these—for example, the cognitive study of religion—has even formed their foundation. Although the theoretical debate relating to the idea of modularity is ongoing, this debate has not been reflected in the use of modularity in behavioral research. The idea of domain specificity or modularity of mind is not without its controversies, and there is no consensus regarding its acceptance. Many neuroscientists, as well as several evolutionary psychologists and philosophers, have raised a number of objections that cannot remain overlooked. I will show the areas in which the idea is problematic, what attempts have been made to preserve it, and how social scientific research can move beyond post-Fodorian modularity without losing any valuable insights.