The Biological Perspective

This chapter analyzes two types of approaches to cultural psychology from a biological standpoint. On the one hand, there is an evolutionary psychological approach that was formulated in the 1990s and claims that both mental and cultural phenomena are fully explained by the theory of evolution, i.e. by the mechanisms of adaptation and natural selection. On the other hand, there are approaches that deal with the interactions between human biology, including its genes and neural structures, and the cultural world, each domain subject to its own laws. In an attempt to integrate neuroscience and cultural psychology, a cultural neuroscience was designed in 2007, which explores the relationships between cultural, psychological, neuronal but also genetic differences. It is shown in this chapter that the current biologically based approaches to cultural psychology do not meet their claims, namely to contribute to the reconstruction and understanding of the meaningfulness of the human subjective and cultural world.