Farewell to Adaptationism: Unnatural Selection and the Politics of Biology

MERRILLSINGER Hispanic Health Council Farewell to Adaptationism: Unnatural Selection and the Politics of Biology This article argues that human adaptation has lost its utility as a concep- tual toolfor either biological or medical anthropology,despite the recent eforts of practitioners in these subdisciplines to rescue it by considering the influences of power, history, and global social processes. It draws on cases from diversefields, including evolutionary studies, ethology, genet- ics, and epidemiology, to suggest new ways of conceptualizing the rela- tionship between humans and their physical and biotic environments; environments that they, and to a lesser degree other species, are not so much “adaptingto” as transforming,while being transformed themselves in the process. Central to this reconceptualization is an understanding of human behavior and environmental relationships in political-economic context. [human adaptation, human biology, political economy, critical medical anthropology] mong the lesser celebrated of the seminal and influential works of Charles Darwin, father of both modem biology and adaptationist thinking, is a book Awith the quaint but intriguing title The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits (188 1). In this text, whose abundant title no less than its content suggests the profound influence of society, Darwin sought to explain what some might consider a minor problem for such a prodigious mind, namely the marked increase in ground clover in rural England during the 19th century. In Darwin’s engaging analysis, which is said to have provided him with more sheer delight than his troubled efforts to understand human evolution (Eiseley 1977). the great naturalist traced the expansion of clover to a significant improvement in the quality of soil due to a parallel increase in the earthworm population, as well as to enhanced opportunities for pollination occa- sioned by a synchronous growth in the number of bumblebees. Darwin tied these faunal changes to a drop in the number of predatory rodents, such as the dormouse, that was triggered by a rise in the number of rodent-eating domestic cats. Cats, he explained, had undergone a population boom of their own because of their senti- Medical Anthropology Quarterly 10(4):49&515. Copyright @ 1996 American Anthropological Asso- ciation. 496 FAREWELLTO ADAFTATIONISM 497 mental selection by rural British women as favored pets to ease the aggrieved loneliness of spinsterhood, a condition that was also rising at the time. Lest this account begin to sound too much like the old woman who progres- sively swallowed a host of wiggling and squiggling creatures, I turn quickly to the ultimate causes of population changes brought to light in Darwin’s analysis. In the 19th century, rural spinsterhood in Britain, he observed, was a social product of the Industrial Revolution. Central to this radical social transformation was a broad demographic restructuring. As Frederick Engels reported in his angry account of the living and working conditions of the 19th-century British working class, “The rapid extension of manufacture demanded hands, wages rose, and troops of work- men migrated from the agricultural districts to the towns” (1969[1845]:50). Thus Manchester, the site of the young Engels’s urban ethnography,had in 1773 “a mere 24,000 inhabitants; by 1851when the majority of the inhabitants of the British Isles were living in towns-its population had increased more than tenfold, to more than 250,000” (Wolf 1982:276). An immediate product of this rapid labor migration under conditions of capitalist hegemony were the urban slums documented in gory detail by Engels. But no less than urban Manchester, which Engels described as “a planless, knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness, whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external surroundings”(1969[ 1845]:85), was the so-called natural ecology of the British countryside shaped by the Industrial Revolution, in all of its political, economic, and cultural dimensions. Both these so-called human and natural environments bore the deep imprint not only of human cultural activity and human labor, but also of changing human social relationships. In this simple country tale lies a basic point I wish to stress in this article. It is a point alluded to by Raymond Williams in his sagacious observation that “the idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history” (19806). Indeed, I shall argue, it is not merely the idea of nature-the way it is conceived and related to by humans-but also the veryphysical shape of narure, including of course human biology, that has been deeply influenced by an evolutionary history of hierarchical social structures-that is to say, by the changing political economy of human society. While Darwin’s theory of natural selection has since the 1930s been the dominant scientific understanding of the driving force of biological evolution, a narrow cultural conception of “nature” packed into this theory has restricted attention to the effects of what might be called unnatural selection, that is, the process of differential survival and reproduction under precarious conditions created to serve the interests of dominant social groups. There is, to borrow Duden’s (1991) apt phrase, an entire “history beneath the skin,” and an important part of that history is the story of human social inequality and oppression. As a result, it is my belief that biological anthropology, no less than medical ecology (Singer 1989), must move beyond the reigning acceptance of nature as a given and separate phenomenon to which human biology is adapted. Critical to this transition, in fact, is a thoroughgoing reexamination of the whole adaptationist perspective and its dominant place in biological anthropology, a dominance that is being questioned increasingly in biology (Gould 1982; Gould and Lewontin 1984; Lewontin 1984; Lewontin et al. 1984; Rose and Rose 1976). 498 MEDICALANTHROFTILOGY QUARTERLY For much of its recent history, biological anthropology has attempted to bracket the question of political economy on the grounds that this topic raises issues beyond its subdisciplinary purview. As Wiley comments, in analyzing environmental change, biological anthropologists tend not to explore research questions about why the environment was disrupted, by whom, and for what ends, but instead focus on the process of responding to or coping with such disruptions.. This focus steers researchers away from con- temporary social ills such as inequality and maldistribution of resources and power differentials, which are couched in such terms as “culture contact” and “modem- ization.” Instead of factors originating in social forces, “culture contact” or “diseases of modernization” are put forth as stresses, while the roots of these forces remain unexamined. [ 1992223-2241 Why might such fundamentally important issues remain unexamined? What are the forces that set the conservative agenda of biological anthropology or biology itself for that matter? One answer is that “the problematic of science-what questions are thought to be worth asking and what priority will be awarded them-is . strongly influenced by social and economic factors” (Levins and Lewontin 1985:4). At any historic moment, “what pass as acceptable scientific explanations have both social determinants and social functions” (Lewontin et al. 198433). The politics of society, in other words, helps to shape the politics of biology, including its dominant institutions (e.g., university departments, journals, professional associa- tions), career paths, funding patterns, and research directions. Consequently, To do science is to be a social actor engaged, whether one likes it or not, in political activity. The denial of the interpenetration of the scientific and the social is itself a political act, giving support to social structures that hide behind scientific objectivity to perpetuate dependency, exploitation, racism, elitism, colonialism. [Levins and Lewontin 198541 Of late, an effort has been made to challenge the timorous character of biological anthropology. An objective of recent work by a creative vanguard of biological anthropologists interested in political economy, especially the political economy of health (e.g., Armelagos et al. 1992; Goodman 1992; Leatherman 1992; Thomas 1992; Wiley 1992). is to rescue the concept of human adaptation from the shackles of conventional understanding. There is, in other words, a mounting concern to pour new wine into the old wineskin of adaptationism by sensitizing the concept to the influences of power, history, and global processes. For example, Armelagos et al. (1992) introduce the “adaptive process model” as part of their attempt to construct a new, politically aware, biocultural synthesis. They argue: The adaptive process can be generally characterized as the production and reproduction of behaviors and strategies directed at meeting particular ends with limited resources and options within changing, multiply-constrained environments. It is a notion of relative benefit and compromise. Critical to this approach is an idea of adaptive cost and conflict. Thus, we are concerned with how adaptive compromise is negotiated among agents, the congruence and conflict inherent in responses to competing problems and constraints, and how the conse- quencesof responses serve to alter host behavior. .Options for response

Load more