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Since World War 11, the Academy Has Been the Site of More Than a Few Heated Intellectual Debates

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Since World War 11, the Academy Has Been the Site of More Than a Few Heated Intellectual Debates Since World War 11, the academy has been the site of more than a few heated intellectual debates. None has been more passionate than the one set off by efforts to apply the bio-evolutionary perspective to human behavior. Even while provoking vicious criticism, the new applications of Darwinian principles-whether called sociobiology, biosociology, or evolutionary psychology -have shed valuable, and appreciated, light on everything from violence to sexist practices. The debate, however, is far from over. The very notion of an underlying human nature flies in the face of contemporary postmodernist theories held dear by many intellectuals and artists. Here we offer a history of the modern human nature debate, as seen by two participants. 14 Lionel Tiger on his struggles in the /wman nature wars 26 Frederick Turner on the new natural classicism in the arts Human Nature 13 by Lionel Tiger or venturing to explore science itself, particularly the role of biology in our within the social sciences. social lives, I have had more The evolving "biosocial" than my share of interesting view that I have helped pio- moments. I11 addition to slan- neer poses a direct challenge der and calumny -depress- to some of the premises of ingly standard fare in the 20th-century social science- academy today-1 have re- and by extension, the cl~er- ceived bomb threats at lec- isl~eclbeliefs of many intellec- tures in Vancouver and Mon- tuals and reformers. Foremost treal and the pronlise of a among these is the assump- "kneecapping" at the New tion that human beings and School for Social Research in their institutions have largely-. New York. I have been the object of a transcended the biological- constraints that demonstration of angry male transvestites govern the animal world, and, according- at the Royal Institution in London, and I ly, that humans are all but free to make the have seen one of the books I co-authored, worlds they choose. The Imperial Animal, con~paredto Mein I had not originally set out for such con- Kampfi All in a day's work, you might say, tentious territory. In fact, I took only the though some 35 years' is closer to the most conventional (that is, biology-free) truth. courses toward my first two degrees at If the toll exacted by my career has McGill University in Montreal, where I occasionally been steep, it has been well had been born and raised in the Jewish worth the price to be able to participate quarter immortalized by Mordecai in the most consequential intellectual Richler's novels. Perhaps the closest I debate of our time, a debate that goes came to biology in my childhood were the back at least to Charles Darwin and the featured herring in ny father's small gro- micl-19th-century publication of his mag- cery. Their immodest aroma joined with nificent and scandal-provoking theory of the waxing and waning of items in the pro- natural selection. duce section to alert me to the facts of sea- The main antagonists then were scien- sonality and the reality of genuine physical tists and clerics. The former thought decay. The one biology course McGill Darwin's theory explained a great deal demanded I take, complete with ritual dis- about nature and possibly even human section of frog limbs and organs, con- nature. The latter considered it a rebuke firmed my lack of interest in nonl~~iman to stories of divine creation as well as a life forms. At the time (the late 1950s), my potential threat to their power to define energies were far more strongly directed reality. But in recent years, the argument toward student journalism and the local over the influence of biology on human literary and political scenes, which includ- society has been far more raucous within ed such figures of later fame as Leonard 14 WQ Winter 1996 Cohen and Pierre Trudeau. ation to generation. After con~pletingmy master's degree at Natural science seemed to be throwing McGill with a thesis 011 the links between up other teasing clues. Emergent long- scientists and administrators in a research term research in East Africa on primates in institute, I enrolled at the London School the wild revealed the complexity of their of Economics and turned to doctoral work social systems. Just as William Foote on decolonization in Africa, a process I Whyte in his extraordinary Street Comer had witnessed earlier on a summer fellow- Society (1943) had shown the previously ship to Ghana and Nigeria. The focus of overlooked intricacy of social life in an my research in 1960-the colonial service American working-class neighborhood, so of Ghana as it became the newly indepen- prin-iatologists such as Jolin Crook and dent nation's civil service-came with a Jean and Stuart Altmann now identified bonus: it allowed me to study the colorful rules ancl patterns behind primate hierar- Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president chies, matrilineal groups, socialization, and a seminal figure in postcolonial and sexuality. And as primatologists African history. became more sophisticated in their What I specifically wanted to determine research techniques, they became increas- was whether Max Weber's theory of the ingly aware of the importance of individ- "ro~itinization of charisma"-the process ual differences among- animals of the same by which the almost magical power of the species. Suddenly, almost as if in a great leader is subtly but decisively trans- thrilling conspiracy, science was offering formed into the mechanisms of b~ireau- us an unexpected insight into nonhuman cratic authority-applied to the political social complexity and the existence of realities of newly independent Ghana. My "personality differences" among individ- research led me to a phrase in Weber's ual animals. work that presumably reflected his desire to see sociology become an authoritative ere was a fundamental challenge to science. It is at the same time a surprising the accepted wisdom of social sci- comment given the rest of his scholarship, entists. The don~inantorthodoxy of the and remains almost wholly ignored by time was that only humans displayed those who mine his work. Weber wrote ongoing and intelligent agency as opposed that charisma was especially difficult to to the reflexive "instinctive" behavior of understand and that "within the narrow animals. Humans could fashion immense- limits of sociology" was comprehensible ly variable and sophisticated social sys- only "in its imperceptible transition to the ten~s,but other species could sustain only biology." relatively automatic patterns of group Why, I wondered, was one of the found- behavior. This remarkably rigid system of ing fathers of sociology conceding so intellectual apartheid went almost com- much ground to biology? I was intrigued pletely ~inexaininecl. No major doctoral for two reasons. First, the differences program in social science required or even between Canadians and Ghanaians struck encouraged its me as far less interesting and important students to be- than their similarities. Second, in West come familiar Africa in 1960-61, I became aware of the with the lives and work of such figures as Raymond Dart and systems of other Louis Leakey then underway in southern species. To the Africa concerning horninid fossils ancl contrary, the for- what they implied about our longevity as a mal distinction species. It appeared we were a much older between natural species than we had thought. Not only and social sci- that, the breaking of the DNA codes in the ence was seen as early 1950s provided a way of ~inderstand- self-evidently cor- ing how very complex information about rect. And the living systems could be passed from gener- implication was Human Nature 15 that somehow social behavior was not nat- some "offensive7' pages dealing with ural and could not be analyzed with the Weber7s "lapse" about charisma and a few same lens used to inspect other animals. others in which I discussed primate politi- But new questions threatened the old cal systems and the potential role of biolo- boundaries. Was there a common human gy in social science. Though it was an nature? Could we return to the concerns of unexpected irritation, the committee's the 19th century about that nature? What censorship was a clue to something rotten did it mean that there appeared to be a nat- in the state of scholarship. ural substrate, rooted in genetics, of com- What I had come up against, I later real- plex animal social behavior? Did this sub- ized, was the hegemony of behaviorism. A strate also extend to humans? Or did our doctrine with deep and varied roots, it goes kind of DNA, combined with the rich back at least as far as John Locke's notion tapestry of our culture, secure us a fully dis- that human beings begin their mental lives tinct and privileged exemption from the as blank slates and are formed, morally and rules governing the rest of nature? socially as well as intellectually, by the sum of all subsequent sense impressions. book that pulled much of this By this logic, environment, and environ- Ainquiry together in a lively but hon- ment alone, makes the human. est way was Robert Ardrey's African The doctrine acquired formal scholarly Genesis (1961), which I devoured when I shape in the early 20th century, notably in laid ands on it in London in 1962. the work of the French sociologist mile rey was a Chicago-born playwright and Durkheim. His Rules of Sociological AuT'7 reenwriter who, after a Broadway failure, Method (published in English in 1938) sought solace in a Life magazine assign- established the unacceptability of using a ment that took him to southern Africa to biological or even a psychological explana- learn about the archaeology and biology tion for social behavior when a sociologi- that was beginning to attract the attention cal one would do.
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