The Science of Humanics: Multidisciplinary Renaissance of General Anthropology

Abstract

Discussions o f the scope and proper definition o f anthropology make it worthwhile to outline why and how anthropology can be treated as a natural (and exact) science. The paper describes its multidisciplinary components and how the deterministic properties of biological individuality and the probabilistic constraints o f the cultural dimensions can be brought together. Such a synthesis enables us t o treat values within a biological framework and suggests the old term "humanics" for the multidisciplinary nexus. [anthropological biology, humanics, multidisciplinary synthesis, interaction measurement, behavioral biology ] IN THE SEARCH for a solution to the ambiguities in the use of the term anthropology there is a continuing dilemma for those who take refuge in metaphysical constraints, most recently A. N. Whitehead's "onward and upward" evolutionism used by J. W. Bennett (1976) in his paper, "Anticipation, Adaptation, and the Concept of Culture in Anthropology." This is intended to bridge the presumed gulf between natural science and culturalistic phenomena t o be seen in anthropology, the social and historical disciplines, and, for that matter, in literature and the humanistic studies. Even my own adoption of the term anthropological biology, i.e., the general biology of individual human beings and their relations to one another in the exact science sense (not a substitute term for biological or physical anthropology), is not sufficiently explicit.The difficulty is that most biologists, in departments of biology at least, rarely include man as part of the animal kingdom. Medical biologists, on the other hand, are too much concerned with disease and particular entities in developing understandings which can lead to improvements in practice. By contrast, anthropologists pay lip service to biological foundations, but in their writings and practice, the animal is left out.