During the waning decades of the twentieth century, two radically opposed cultural accounts of kinship emerged in the narratives of evolutionary psychology, on the one hand, and in those of the new reproductive and biogenetic technologies, on the other. Both are peculiarly inflected by a Euro-American cultural obsession with choice, but they move in opposite directions. Whereas Marilyn Strathern (1992) has argued that the new reproductive technologies "enterprise up" nature - read as biology - dissolving it into a plethora of choices, I contend that evolutionary psychologists "enterprise down" culture - read as individual choice - dissolving it into natural/sexual selection and innate psychological "mechanisms". While others have traced the cultural transformations engendered by the reproductive and biogenetic technologies, in this paper I attempt to untangle the web of analogies, assumptions, erasures, and imaginative leaps that make possible the "enterprising down" of culture in evolutionary psychology's reductive account of kinship and gender and to map some of the consequences of that account.
evolutionary psychology; gender; kinship; nature