Human Evolutionary Biology Track /
Biological Anthropology Track
The Human Evolutionary Biology MBB Track is available to all students. The Biological Anthropology MBB Track is available only to members of the classes of 2009 and earlier years.
Contact Information
Website:
human evolutionary biology
anthropology (biological anthropology wing)
Advising (for both tracks):
Prof. Cheryl Knott, knott@fas.harvard.edu
Dr. Carole Hooven, hooven@fas.harvard.edu / Maureen Devlin, mdevlin@fas.harvard.edu
The Intellectual Basis
The concentration in Anthropology at Harvard currently has three "wings": archaeology, social anthropology, and biological anthropology. Biological anthropology is primarily concerned with the biology and evolution of humans and non-human primates. It and the new concentration in Human Evolutionary Biology attract some 15 to 30 concentrators per year.
Within biological anthropology and human evolutionary biology we teach and apply an explicitly evolutionary approach to research and teaching on human and primate biology. This perspective has four main pillars:
- Human and primate evolutionary history.
- Human biology, including reproductive biology and endocrinology, musculoskeletal anatomy, neurobiology, nutritional chemistry, and physiology.
- Human and primate genetics and genomics.
- Human and primate behavior, including ethology, evolutionary ecology and culture.
This set of interests works well in providing a general education in biological anthropology/human evolutionary biology. But to satisfy the students who want a concentration that focuses on behavioral evolution, we offer MBB tracks in human evolutionary biology and biological anthropology.
The objective of the MBB program is "to create an interdisciplinary research and teaching community of faculty to understand human nature from the perspective of brain function." In that spirit, we are launching an MBB track in Biological Anthropology that, while small, will be successful in filling this gap for those students who are attracted to the evolutionary- anthropological approach, but who wish to complement it with perspectives from psychology, neurosciences, or other MBB offerings. Such students typically relish the primate and human behavior offerings in the Biological Anthropology wing and Human Evolutionary Biology concentration and ask us for further instruction in related topics such as cognitive evolution, psychological mechanisms, and animal behavior. Until now we have been unable to satisfy them. An MBB track in Biological Anthropology or Human Evoluationary Biology has several explicit advantages: it enables students to free up their options by not having to take the Anthropology-mandated requirements in Archaeology and Social Anthropology; it provides more focus on behavior and less on other aspects of biological anthropology; and it allows students to coordinate their own interests with each other through the Faculty Track Head.