Idealism, Materialism, and Biology in the Analysis of Cultural Evolution
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Bye-Bye, BABY! A Cultural Evolutionist's Response to Evolutionary Culture Theorists' Complaints Robert Bates Graber Truman State University, Kirksville ABSTRACT The fragmentation of anthropological theory after around 1970 saw the emergence of evolutionary culture theory (ECT), commit- ted to applying, to culture, strictly Darwinian concepts and/or population-genetic models. ECT theorists have complained that traditional cultural evolutionism has been (1) about the wrong thing; (2) naïve about human nature; (3) Spencerian rather than Darwinian; (4) unscientific; and (5) nonquantitative. This paper responds, from a cultural-evolutionist perspective, and finds that these criticisms do not withstand scrutiny. It concludes that evolu- tionary culture theory's requirement of transmissibility between individuals means that it cannot deal effectively with key properties that apply intrinsically to collectives rather than to individuals, and that the approach therefore holds little promise for elucidating the course of human culture. In concluding his masterly Evolutionism in Cultural Anthro- pology, Robert L. Carneiro asserted that the most salient feature in human history is the fact that, beginning as small, simple Paleolithic bands, human so- cieties were eventually transformed into the large, power- ful, and complex states of today. And tracing the course of this transformation – this evolution – and laying bare the factors and forces that brought it about, remains the most challenging and rewarding task any anthropologist can undertake (Carneiro 2003: 288). Social Evolution & History, Vol. 6 No. 2, September 2007 3–28 © 2007 ‘Uchitel’ Publishing House 4 Social Evolution & History / September 2007 Two years later, however, Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd declared that this very transformation is not really evolution at all; it is, in their view, more akin to ecological succession than evolution. In the same way that lichen colonizing a glacial moraine change the environment, making the soil suitable for grasses which in turn further change the soil, making way for shrubs, simpler societies change their environments in ways that make more-complex societies necessary (Rich- erson and Boyd 2005: 59). The structural and functional differentiation that have attended the millennial growth of human societies now pervade our daily lives; nearly everywhere, these days, human culture has, as its fun- damental features, a ‘horizontal’ differentiation consisting in an elaborate division of labor, and a ‘vertical’ one consisting in a marked and enduring stratification with respect to wealth and power. Certainly Marx, Spencer, and Durkheim were centrally concerned with this transformation; indeed, it would be difficult to suggest any single preoccupation more characteristic of significant sociocultural thought since the Enlightenment. By what path, then, is reached the remarkable conclusion that the essence of cultural evolution (as they go on to argue) lies elsewhere? And Richerson and Boyd were not alone. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and M. W. Feldman (1981) had managed, over twenty years be- fore, to devote an entire book to the ‘transmission’ and ‘evolution’ of culture, while making only the barest mention of the long-term trajectory along which culture so evidently has developed. Aver- ring that American anthropologists such as Julian Steward, Leslie White, Marshall Sahlins, and Elman Service had meant, by cultural evolution, ‘typologies of historical changes in social and political structure’, they argued that the term would better be kept suffi- ciently general to include approaches such as their own (Cavalli- Sforza and Feldman 1981: 362). How are we to understand such approaches? In general, they compose a somewhat distinct lineage emerging from the remark- able differentiation – fragmentation, some would say – of anthro- pological theory after around 1970. The feature most characteristic of this particular lineage is the conviction that progress in evolu- tionary biology holds promise for shedding new light, in one way or another, on human culture. Two main varieties, it has been sug- Graber / A Cultural Evolutionist's Response 5 gested, can be identified: one that sees cultural evolution as an in- formation-transmission process, and to that extent as illuminable through analogy to population genetics, and another – rooted less in genetics than in ethology – that seeks to elucidate evolved bi- opsychological processes operating as constraints on culture (Flynn 1997). ‘Evolutionary culture theory’ (ECT) is a useful generic term for this entire lineage (Durham 1990), since, whereas traditional cultural evolutionism's central concern is to illuminate long-term change of a specifically cultural kind, these newer approaches' cen- tral concern is to theorize about culture in an explicitly biological- evolutionary way. From the ECT perspective, then, traditional cultural evolution- ism is, first of all, about what one might call the ‘wrong thing’ – or, at least, about phenomena that would be better termed something other than ‘evolution’ (e.g., ‘succession’, according to Richerson and Boyd). There are, in addition to this rather introductory com- plaint, four others to be discussed here, namely, that traditional cultural evolutionism is (2) biopsychologically naïve; (3) Spencer- ian rather than Darwinian; (4) unscientific; and (5) qualitative rather than quantitative1. IS CULTURAL EVOLUTIONISM NAÏVE ABOUT HUMAN NATURE? Cultural evolutionism, at least since its revival in the mid-20th cen- tury, has had relatively little to say – as little as possible, one might suggest – about human nature. Especially unhappy about this is Jerome Barkow, whose Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Ap- proaches to Mind and Culture (1989) is among ECT's more ambi- tious theoretical efforts. Marvin Harris's (1979: 63) laconic discus- sion of four primate-wide tendencies regarding food, sex, energy- efficiency, and love-and-affection this author finds far from satis- factory. Indeed, Harris's austere sketch of human nature Barkow calls ‘simplistic’ and even, ‘given his prominence in contemporary anthropology’, ‘embarrassing’ (Barkow 1989: 239). As Barkow sees it, Harris has scarcely hinted at the evolved constraints to which human cultural variability is subject: For Harris, there apparently are no constraints except for his four needs or ‘psychobiological drives’. However, for (among others) Lumsden and Wilson (1981), and Boyd 6 Social Evolution & History / September 2007 and Richerson (1985), this crucial problem is by no means settled, and each of these sets of authors reviews a sub- stantial body of empirical evidence for such restraints (for instance, the nature of certain phobias, data on the diffu- sion of innovation in other cultures, risk-taking behav- iour). But there are strong theoretical reasons to believe that they and others have only scratched the surface of these evolved constraints on human flexibility (Barkow 1989: 240). The opening sentence of the above quotation misrepresents Harris's actual position, which, as we shall see below, is not onto- logical (Barkow's phrase ‘are no constraints’ [emphasis added] to the contrary) but instrumental. More to the point, however, is this: it is clear, from the ethnographic and archaeological evidence, that whatever human nature may have done to constrain cultural varia- tion, it has by no means prevented a great deal of variation, in space and time, from in fact occurring; and cultural evolutionism generally prefers trying to explain variation that has occurred rather than variation that has not. ‘When we look at the full sweep of culture history’, wrote Carneiro in a context different but by no means irrelevant, ‘the most striking thing we see is not that equilib- ria were maintained but that they were overthrown’ (Carneiro 1978: 209). Nearly as critical of cultural evolutionism's handling of human nature have been those conspicuous contributors to evolutionary culture theory, physicist Charles J. Lumsden and biologist Edward O. Wilson. Like other ECT enthusiasts, they reject approaching cultural evolution as though it had, distinguishable from its human bearers, a ‘life of its own’ (Lumsden and Wilson 1981: 176–177). Therefore when, near the end of their book, they concede that sev- eral formulations by cultural evolutionists have represented signifi- cant steps forward, the compliment is sharply barbed: ‘Such gener- alities, along with the models issuing from them, exemplify the real progress possible even with very primitive notions about the sources of human motivation’ (Lumsden and Wilson 1981: 352– 353, emphasis added). Marvin Harris's (1979) characterization of human nature is acknowledged, but deemed insufficiently elabo- rated; the apparent ‘real progress’ they have just conceded cultural evolutionism to have made they see as accordingly flawed: In their present form, [...] such conceptions are not only in- complete but also seriously misleading. From analysis of Graber / A Cultural Evolutionist's Response 7 the information available to us about human cognition and development, we have concluded that the human mind is far more structured than has been postulated by Harris and many others active in the theory of anthropology, econom- ics, and sociology (Lumsden and Wilson 1981: 353). This claim that ‘the human mind is far more structured’ than others suppose, and Barkow's assertion that a minimalist model of human nature has only ‘scratched the surface of […] evolved con- straints’, bespeak