When Culture and Biology Collide

WHEN CULTURE AND BIOLOGY COLLIDE WHEN CULTURE AND BIOLOGY COLLIDE Why We Are Stressed, Depressed, and Self-Obsessed E. O. SMITH Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Euclid O. When culture and biology collide : why we are stressed, depressed, and self-obsessed / E.O. Smith. p. cm. Includes biblographical references and index. ISBN 0-8135-3103-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Human biology—Social aspects. 2. Human evolution. 3. Social changes. I. Title. GN298 .S55 2002 304.2—dc21 2001058682 British Cataloging-in-Publication information is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2002 by E. O. Smith All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Manufactured in the United States of America To Cindy and to the memory of my mother, May Ethel Therrell Smith Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 Intersection of Biology and Culture 1 2 Road Rage, Stress, and Evolution 18 3 Beauty, Blepharoplasty, Barbie, and Miss America 53 4 Fat, Diet, and Evolution 97 5 Depression, Antidepressants, and Evolution 124 6 Welfare, Cooperation, and Evolution 154 Notes 193 References 233 Index 257 Acknowledgments There are a number of people who helped with this book, but the most important was my wife, Cindy Gelb. She made the prose better and the ideas clearer. She also was incredibly understanding through the final stages of the preparation of the manuscript when I was tired and grumpy. A number of my colleagues have helped both directly and indirectly on this project. Peter Brown recognized that this book would not happen without time away from teaching. I have profited from numerous discus- sions with my colleagues, George Armelagos, Peter Brown, Mel Konner, Michelle Lampl, Dan Sellen, Pat Whitten, and Carol Worthman. In addition, I thank Daniel Lende, Melissa Melby, Ryan Brown, and Dan Hrushka for their patience in listening to many of the ideas and helping me refine the arguments. Several undergraduate students have also helped, doing some of the footwork that is a necessary part of this kind of a project— E. A. Quinn, C. Quave, and S. Bew paid attention to the details when it counted. I want to thank the staff of the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory for their invaluable assistance in collecting the obscure and sometimes baffling references and questions that went with them. I am especially grateful to Greta Boers, Reference Librarian for Anthropology, who was always cheer- ful and eager to help with even the most bizarre questions. Finally, Woody, Ivy, and Farrah saved the day. They were always glad to see me, even if all else went to hell. Atlanta, Georgia 24 August 2001 WHEN CULTURE AND BIOLOGY COLLIDE Intersection of Biology 1 and Culture To understand culture one must have some understanding of biological thought. —William S. Beck, Modern Science and the Nature of Life, 1957 What do road rage, tattooing, cosmetic surgery, depression, addiction, obe- sity, and aid to strangers have in common? It is tempting to say nothing, but I hope to convince you by the time you have finished this book that a common thread unites these disparate topics. In addition, I hope you will appreciate that the same underlying principle is likely to have much wider usefulness in our attempt to understand the basic elements of human behavior. What these complicated sets of behaviors have in common is that they are examples of how our evolved biology (our genetic programming) interacts with our cultural environment. There is no denying that our genes guide some of our behavior, but the question is, how much? And then, how can our culture influence what our biology urges us to do? And can our biology and culture influence each other in reciprocal ways? These are all-important questions that help us understand why we do what we do. To appreciate more fully the interrelationship between our culture and our biology, let me offer a real-world example. The heroic acts of emergency personnel as well as countless numbers of civilians following the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., have been recounted on tele- vision and radio, in newspapers and magazines, around watercoolers and coffee machines, and at barbershops and beauty salons throughout the United States. For example, many Americans have heard about thirty-six- year-old Michael Benfante, a New York branch manager for a telecommu- nications firm, who worked on the eighty-first floor of 1 World Trade Center. On the morning of 11 September 2001, he and a colleague got a woman into an emergency wheelchair and carried her sixty-eight stories down the stairs through smoke, fire, and falling debris to a waiting ambulance. 2 WHEN CULTURE AND BIOLOGY COLLIDE As the tragedy unfolded at Ground Zero, Todd Beamer and several other passengers on United Airlines flight 93 overpowered the hijackers that had taken control of their aircraft and, by their heroic actions, likely saved hundreds or more lives. Beamer will be remembered for his “let’s roll” call to arms to several other men on the flight, which then crashed in rural Pennsylvania. These self-sacrificing acts are the stuff of which legends, as well as movies, are made. That we have the ability to overcome our innate selfish tendencies is a defining characteristic of humanity. Not only do we have the capacity to treat other humans in a self-sacrificing manner; we exhibit altruism to nonhumans as well. Immanuel Kant once said, “We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.” If Kant is right, then there are some three hundred or so hugely altruistic owners/handlers of the search- and-rescue dogs that worked tirelessly at Ground Zero. The unique bond between dog and master has been shown in photographs of exhausted German shepherds curled up asleep next to their handlers in emergency shelters near the collapsed towers. Dogs and their handlers worked twelve- hour shifts in an attempt to find victims of the attack buried under the tons of steel and concrete. Not only were there countless numbers of volunteers aiding the emergency personnel at Ground Zero; there were volunteer vet- erinarians who set up emergency treatment facilities for the search-and- rescue dogs. Like the handlers and the dogs, the vets also worked twelve-hour shifts, treating cut paws, dehydration, and respiratory distress. The American Humane Society collected thousands of dollars to help not only the search-and-rescue dogs but also the pets displaced by destruction. The outpouring of selflessness in the wake of the tragedies in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania reminds us of this capacity within each of us. In stark contrast are the acts of the terrorists, who gave their lives in the service of a religious fanatic. Their self-sacrifice, unlike the altruism of those giving aid and assistance, was profoundly selfish. Focused as they were on the destruction of the enemy and their ultimate reward of an eter- nal afterlife in Paradise (al-Jannah), the terrorists demonstrated the limits to which culture can push our basic biology. In a real sense, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon show us how powerful culture can be in reinforcing certain basic human predispositions, such as selfish- ness, as well as how powerful culture can be in overcoming those same predispositions. Understanding human behavior is a difficult but not an impossible task. Unlike other animals, humans rely on the transmission of information INTERSECTION OF BIOLOGY AND CULTURE 3 across generations. This is not to say that other animals and birds do not communicate with one another, for there is a considerable body of scien- tific literature to the contrary. Yet we humans rely far more on the inter- generational transmission of knowledge. The advantage that this gives us is extraordinary. We do not have to reinvent skills, techniques, and beliefs anew each generation. The cumulative effect of this fundamental change in human culture is unparalleled, to the best of our knowledge, in any other animal. While other animals, particularly chimpanzees, transmit specific information from parent to offspring, and offspring learn by ob- serving and practicing parental behavior, no other animal relies on this kind of information transmission as much as humans. It is the centerpiece of our culture. It seems to me that understanding human behavior without understanding something about this information transfer is impossible. First, we must define the body of information that we pass from parents to offspring and among members of the same generation, age cohort, clan, line- age, moiety, and so on. Anthropologists have worried a lot about how to describe culture, but a classic definition written over a century ago still pro- vides an excellent starting point for discussion. Edward Tylor, a British social anthropologist, wrote in his book Primitive Culture (1871): “Culture . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a mem- ber of society.”1 Now the important part of this definition is the last part. What I am talking about are the cultural practices that we acquire as members of society. Our behavior is a product of our culture and our biology.

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