Adam Kuper and Jonathan Marks's gloomy portrait of integrative, big-question research in anthropology (Nature 470, 166–168; 2011) does not square with the large body of literature that covers areas such as behavioural ecology, cultural evolution, cognitive anthropology, gender studies, cross-cultural economics, moral psychology and environmental change. Publishing this work in high-impact general science and focused interdisciplinary journals ensures wide attention beyond the discipline.

The Evolutionary Anthropology Society was created to cut across traditional anthropological divides. It has some 350 members drawn from biological, cultural and archaeological specialities. Other interdisciplinary scholarly associations are The Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association, and the Society for Anthropological Sciences. Each has hundreds of members active in the kind of research the authors claim is scarce or lacking. Productive interdisciplinary centres, such as the Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity based at University College London, also catalyse innovative research that integrates biological, cultural and archaeological perspectives.

We feel that a genuinely interdisciplinary field of human diversity is emerging, synthesizing ideas and data from the social and behavioural sciences with theory and modelling techniques from evolutionary biology and game theory. Unlike Kuper and Marks, we see ample evidence that this work features in current debates about cognition, altruism, economic behaviour and environmental degradation (see, for example, M. Borgerhoff Mulder et al. Science 326, 682–688; 2009).