Download 1 Chapter 1 A Brief History Of The Debate About Human Evolution

Chapter 1
A Brief History Of The
Debate About Human Evolution
When ‘Origin of the Species’ was published in 1859, Charles Darwin
knew his ideas would be greeted with great controversy. He was very
aware that his theory had far-reaching social and moral ramifications. In
addressing humanity’s origins, he was intruding into a domain previously
monopolized by religion. While this meant stepping on the toes of a
powerful Traditional Establishment whose interests and prerogatives were
inseparably intertwined with institutionalized religion, the problem ran
deeper than that. He had a very devout wife, and he agonized about the
effect his ideas might have on beliefs that served to reinforce the moral
foundations of social life. He could not predict what the consequences of
his ideas might be. But as a rational, Victorian Gentleman, he was certain
that in the long run, all knowledge leads to progress. That assumption,
however, did not keep him from handling this knowledge with reticence
and caution. In ‘Origin of the Species’ he focused entirely on the evolution
of the ‘natural world,’ avoiding any direct reference to the relevance his
ideas might have for our own species. He believed his hypothesis would
get a better reception if its implications for our own origins were not
explicitly stated.
In his ‘Descent of Man,’ published twelve years after the ‘Origin,’
Darwin took the next step and put forth the unavoidable conclusion that
humanity, like every other living creature, must have evolved from a
‘lower’ life form. Basing himself on comparative anatomy, he speculated
that our ancestor was most likely an African Great Ape: probably the
chimpanzee. Given the limited state of the biological sciences of that era,
that was an amazingly prescient speculation.
Darwin’s evolutionary perspective represented a huge leap forward
in human understanding. It provided a framework for thinking about our
relationship to the rest of the animal world that previously had been
inconceivable. When Europeans of that era contemplated humanity, they
could only imagine us in relationship to some kind of transcendent order
standing outside of the natural world. To be human meant to be different
from other animals: it was assumed that our motives and life purposes
were rooted in a dynamic that was separate from and ‘above’ nature. Until
Darwin provided certain key conceptual tools, it was almost impossible for
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people to even contemplate that human beings might have arisen from
some other creature.
Something Different About Us
While the idea that humans had evolved took the 19th Century
intellectual world by storm, there was as yet no scientific basis for
understanding the full implications of this. The only fossil human remains
known at the time were a few controversial Neanderthal skeletons. While
Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s tireless advocate, drew attention to the
anatomical similarities between the great apes and us, no one could even
begin to envision a process by which we could have emerged from such
beginnings. Indeed, A. R. Wallace, who shared the discovery of ‘adaptation
through natural selection’ with Darwin, eventually abandoned the theory,
convinced that the mental gap between humans and other animals was
just too great to be accounted for by natural processes.
The scientific and conceptual issues posed by human evolution lay
too far beyond the intellectual framework of the 19th Century. However,
there was an aspect of Darwin’s theory that was readily assimilated by
Victorian culture. The idea of ‘natural selection,’ of a competitive
‘struggle for survival’ that resulted in ‘fitter’ life forms was easily grasped.
This was a generation that was familiar with the works of Adam Smith and
David Ricardo and that was enthralled with the creative powers unleashed
by an emerging market economy. Natural selection made sense to them.
Indeed, they saw evidence for it everywhere: not only in economic life,
but also in historical events and in the structure of their social world. Out
of the struggle for survival, certain superior races and classes had
emerged, the ‘fittest,’ possessed of qualities that enabled them to amass
wealth and power and carry the species further along. This school of
thought was called Social Darwinism. It developed a Darwinian narrative
that represented the stark class and caste differences of that period,
along with the conquest and subjugation of the ‘lesser peoples’ by the
European imperial powers, as expressions of a law of nature.
Franz Boas
Anthropology, as an academic discipline, was born out of a struggle
against Social Darwinism. Franz Boas, a German-Jewish immigrant who
was one of the founders of American Anthropology, played a decisive role
in that process. Boas argued that the assumptions of Social Darwinism
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were based on a completely erroneous understanding of the applicability
of evolutionary theory to human affairs. There is, he posited, a
fundamental difference between human beings and other animals. Animal
behavior is biologically based, and therefore, differences between how
animals behave can be traced to disparities in their biological inheritance.
Humans, on the other hand, are extremely adaptable beings, able to
organize their behavior on the basis of learned traditions. Differences
between human communities are not reflections of differences in
biological make-up. They are expressions of different historical
experiences, of the varied kinds of accumulated social inheritance
available to different communities.
Boas developed a strong and systematic critique of Social
Darwinism. He stood all its assumptions on their heads. The historical
record, he pointed out, rather than confirming Social Darwinism as its
advocates believed, clearly refuted it. Instead of a continuous
advancement by superior races, as one would expect from a Darwinian
narrative, some groups rise to the top only to be displaced by others that
were once considered lowly and barbaric. In 3000 BC the vaunted
‘Nordics’ would have appeared as a lesser race to the highly developed
Egyptians, Sumerians or Chinese. If they were truly a superior race, what
could explain their backwardness at that time? The shifting of the
historical fates of different peoples cannot be explained in biological
terms, but rather, is traceable to another kind of causality: one which
appears “to have been much more potent in leading races to civilization
than their innate faculty” (Boas: 1911.p.16).
Boas’ observations of history, his studies of the adaptability shown
by immigrant communities in America, and his familiarity with the life
ways of indigenous peoples, led him to the conclusion that differences in
biological make-up do not account for the distinctive behaviors and
achievements demonstrated by different communities. While human
biology undoubtedly arose through natural selection as Darwin proposed,
our behaviors take shape and develop as a result of dynamics that are
largely independent of any supposed inclinations of the human organism.
What people do, indeed, what they even think and feel are not
expressions of innate biological givens. These depend on the social
inheritance which nurtures them and which defines their relationship to
nature and one another. We are not like other animals. Most of what we
do “depends upon local tradition and is learned”(Ibid: p.163). Boas called
this social inheritance Culture.
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Culture, Boas concluded, is not an expression of human biology.
People are plastic and can adapt to an incredible diversity of different life
ways. We adapt to nature by means of our cultures rather than our
biology. Over the past ten thousand years, human societies have gone
through dramatic transformations, yet human biology has stayed virtually
the same. What people do, how they survive and relate to nature is not
determined by their biology, but depends upon the accumulation of
cultural inventions they have access to.
Boaz concludes that among humans, history, that is, cultural
development has replaced biological evolution. Human affairs are not
governed by natural selection. The fates of peoples, whether they are the
conquerors or the conquered, are not decided by innate differences, but
are determined by the cultural resources that are available to them. The
Aztecs fell to steel, horses, and gunpowder, not to a biologically superior
Spanish race. Our capacity for culture is undoubtedly the product of
biological evolution. However, once culture appeared, our species was
assimilated into a dynamic that utterly transcends biology and that
operates on a different causal plane.
Social Darwinism Rejected
Early Twentieth Century Anthropology adopted the general
conclusion that human events could not be understood in biological
terms. This represented a great stride forward in human selfunderstanding. By around 1920, Social Darwinism had been pushed out of
the intellectual mainstream into the seamy backwaters of certain virulent
racial and nationalistic movements. It came to a disgraceful and
ignominious end after providing the ideological justification for the Nazi
extermination program.
The founders of Anthropology, to their everlasting credit, were
able to perceive the common humanity and equal potential of all the
different types of people occupying the globe. They spoke out in defense
of the rights and dignity of those less developed cultures that were being
forcibly drawn within the orbits of the Great Powers. Their lasting
contribution, however, was not moral or political. It was scientific: the
perception of a distinction between biology and culture.
Culture, they believed, distinguished humans from other animals
and gave birth to a different kind of being. Once a distinction had been
made between culture and biology, it became possible to differentiate
historical development from biological evolution. People do not adapt to
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different environments with their biology: they adapt with their cultures.
There are, of course, differences in skin pigmentation, body proportions,
and immune responses, but the principal means upon which the survival of
any people depend can always be traced to the cultural inventory
possessed by their community. Historical and cultural dynamics, not
natural selection, hold the key to an explanation of human fortunes.
An Ambivalent Attitude Towards Evolution
As the idea that humans are the products of their cultures took
hold, anthropology was unsure of what to do with the notion of human
evolution. Those forces in the culture that were pushing an ‘evolutionary
perspective’ almost always had some racial or nationalistic agenda.
Indeed, few people realize that William Jennings Bryant, who prosecuted
John Scopes in America’s famous ‘monkey trial,’ was not simply
motivated by religious traditionalism. His opposition to evolution was also
based on strong moral convictions. He believed Darwinism led inexorably
to the view that some people were inferior and of lesser value than
others. In fact, Scopes, who has always been treated as the hero of this
drama, was influenced by Social Darwinist thinking and had presented
material to his classes that treated different races as different stages of
evolutionary progression. Things are never as simple as we might like
them to be.
The mainstream of social and anthropological thought had a very
uneasy relationship with the theory of evolution. On the one hand, it was
appreciated as the basis of a ‘rational,’ scientific world outlook. But its
value to the human sciences was openly questioned. The idea that human
behavior was modifiable and that our actions and attainments were not
biologically fixed had become an article of faith. Evolution, therefor, was
not seen as relevant to an explanation of how people behave. The general
consensus was that once humans had evolved a capacity for culture,
biology had been pushed aside and replaced by a set of cultural dynamics.
Tracing our roots back to the animal world might satisfy our curiosity, but
it could not throw any important light on the human condition. Indeed,
knowing that we evolved seemed to add little, if anything of value to our
understanding of ourselves. It served only to raise disturbing issues.
Problems With The Model
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While the distinction between biology and culture was clearly the
point that needed to be made to move human understanding forward, at
the same time, this division raised a number of difficult questions. There
was something obviously true about it. However, severing the human
organism (biology) from its way of life (culture) created a gap between
human activity and the inner world of impulse and need that did not ring
true. Culture was everything and biology was nothing. People were
portrayed as empty vessels whose substance was drawn entirely from
their cultural milieu. This outlook resulted in a whole genre of works a la
Margret Meade and Ruth Benedict, aimed at demonstrating that people
could be whatever their cultures dictated.
When I was graduate student during the 1960’s, these ideas began
to be seriously questioned. Those were tumultuous times: an era of
unprecedented social upheavals and transformation. As participants in
those events, many of us had directly experienced the pain, sacrifices,
and effort that are intrinsic to such processes. These kinds of changes are
not something that is done to people: they are something people do.
Individuals are indeed shaped by their social environments; but there is
something within the human being that sets a bottom-line to what it will
adapt to and what it will risk everything to change. Those who put their
lives on the line in service of a cause are driven by forces that impel them
from within: and often these are simple biological needs like hunger,
shelter, and the means to make a living. Anthropology’s notion of culture
did not connect with real life. A different generation was asking different
questions and anthropology’s view of humanity was growing increasingly
unconvincing. The separation of culture from biology had resulted in a
passionless silhouette of the human condition.
Renewed Interest In A Biological Perspective
Beginning in the late 1960’s, interest in the role of biology as a
determinant of human behavior began to gather steam both within
anthropology as well as in the larger intellectual community. A shift was
taking place in the intellectual climate: a new age was taking shape. The
optimism of a world that believed science and industry would solve all
problems was beginning to fade. We were entering an era now known as
the ‘Age of Limits.’
Humanity, in the eyes of this new age, was not progressing. It was
simply proliferating. Its growth was diminishing the limited resources of
the planet and threatening the ecological balances that sustain the whole
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biosphere. All our grand ideas and ambitions appeared to be backfiring.
Antibiotics were producing super bugs; fertilizers were destroying the soil;
hydroelectric dams were silting up and ruining fisheries. The bold
attempts to engineer cooperative societies had resulted in totalitarian
nightmares. Humanity’s efforts to reshape nature and society seemed
destined to fail.
Not only were external nature and our social systems proving to be
resistant to our intentions, but even our own inner natures were
demonstrating a similar obstinacy. War, crime, greed, and destructive
egoism were as prevalent as ever. A chorus of voices called out to take
off the rose-colored glasses and honestly face our dark side. We cannot
blame ‘culture,’ they said, for our violent, selfish and flawed behaviors.
New discoveries in the field of genetics provided evidence that such
behaviors as alcoholism and homosexuality had a biochemical dimension.
Perhaps we were not the masters of our own fates after all. It was time to
face up to unpleasant reality of what we really are – the products of an
unsentimental evolutionary process: a process that rewards brutal and
selfish behavior.
As fossil evidence of our species’ early transition from an arboreal
fruit and shoot-eating ape to a terrestrial, tool-using predator emerged,
the advocates of this new perspective were sure they had found the root
of all our failings. We are the descendants of a “race of terrestrial flesheating killer apes:” a fact that explains man’s “bloody history, his eternal
aggression, his irrational, self-destroying inexorable pursuit of death for
death’s sake” (Ardrey, 1961, p.14). This way of thinking was almost
invariably associated with politically conservative conclusions. Crime,
violence, and other anti-social behaviors could not be ameliorated by
economic and social reforms: they were reflections of deep and
permanent patterns embedded in our psyches by evolution.
While this new movement began outside of anthropology, it was
not long before these ideas began to resonate within the field. However,
within anthropology the growing interest in revisiting the debate about
the relationship of biology and cultural behavior had a much stronger
scientific focus. The impetus for a new direction came primarily from
physical anthropology and the newly founded field of primate studies. A
series of important fossil discoveries, as well as advances in dating
methods and the use of interdisciplinary techniques, had dramatically
increased our knowledge of human origins. This new evidence sparked
interest in speculation about the forces that had shaped our evolutionary
development.
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As a number of different evolutionary hypotheses began to emerge,
it became clear that those who were thinking about these issues were on
a collision course with anthropology’s traditional view of human behavior.
In the beginning, these efforts were scoffed at or simply ignored by most
social and cultural anthropologists. There was a sense that anthropology’s
notion of culture had emerged from an earlier battle with an evolutionary
philosophy, and that it was invulnerable to this line of attack. However,
this was not a simple replay of the debate with Social Darwinism. The
questions being asked and the issues at play were quite different. The
answers that had served anthropology so well in that era would not be
adequate in the new circumstances.
The ideas developed by Social Darwinists were not grounded in
biology. That movement was composed of 19th Century social
philosophers, men (which almost all of them were) who had honed their
intellectual skills in an environment that knew nothing about genetics and
that was largely devoid of biological knowledge. They were not asking the
question of how humans had evolved from apes or what the differences
or similarities between humans and other animals might be. They were
only concerned with the differences between human groups: why were
some people able to impose their wills upon others?
The new challenge was based upon a very different intellectual
foundation and it asked very different kinds of questions. Those questions
demanded new answers.
E. O. Wilson and Sociobiology
Throughout the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, cultural anthropology
was largely able to contain the efforts to re-define its central paradigm.
Then, in 1976, there was a turning point. The Harvard biologist E. O.
Wilson weighed in on the debate with a massive tome, Sociobiology.
Marshaling an immense amount of biological information, Wilson argued
that the social lives of all animals – including humans – could be explained
on the basis of the same set of biological principles. In spite of all the
things that appear to make us unique, we are, he claimed, fundamentally
the same as other animals. As biological beings, we have emerged
through the same kind of Darwinian process. Everything about us, the way
our organism looks and functions as well as the various behaviors we
perform have all evolved because of some contribution they made to our
biological survival. That’s how natural selection works. Culture must be
seen through this same lens. It is not something that is separate from our
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biology; it is an expression of our biology. It evolved as part of our
genome.
Wilson’s impressive knowledge of animal biology and his exhaustive
documentation simply overwhelmed a cultural anthropology that had not
taken this biological challenge seriously. He did not convince every
anthropologist – or even a majority. However, he largely drove the
opposition underground. Having dismissed the relevance of biological
evolution, cultural anthropology was not prepared to effectively counter
such a massive and multidimensional assault from a serious scholar with
impeccable biological credentials.
Re-thinking Culture
Anthropologists had seen culture as a uniquely human phenomenon;
distinguished from animal behavior by the fact it did not arise out of
biological reflex or organic necessity. Humans, they argued, construct a
life process that rests on a different behavioral plane. Mother-in-law
taboos, art forms, toggle-point harpoons, and market systems are not
expressions of ‘instincts,’ of built-in organic proclivities, but have
reference to a complex of causal interactions that are not reducible to
biology. The main challenge facing Wilson was to re-define culture: to
make it into something biological. This involved three major elements.
Firstly, Wilson had to establish that culture was not unique to
humans; that it did not distinguish us from other animals but rather was
something we shared with them. If other animals possessed culture, he
argued, then it must be something that could be understood in biological
terms. Wilson handled this challenge very deftly. While many of the
specifics of his evolutionary model has been set aside by evolutionists
who came after him, the way he re-framed culture has had a lasting effect
on the field.
While anthropology is credited with creating the concept of
‘culture,’ in fact, it could not agree on how to define it (Kroeber and
Kluckhohn: 1951). However, there was a sort of default position that was
often used in introductory anthropology classes and that was considered,
if not profound, at least broadly acceptable. This was a definition coined
by Edward Tylor, one of the earliest founders of academic anthropology.
Tylor defined culture as everything that humans acquire as members of a
society – language, tools, mores, norms, beliefs, rituals, art forms, etc.
Wilson devised a definition of culture that, on first sight, appears to
be entirely consistent with Tylor’s. Culture, Wilson stated, is ‘tradition’ -
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“specific forms of behavior that are passed from generation to generation
by learning” (Wilson: 1976, p.168). While this definition seems to be
more or less the same as that used by anthropology, in fact, it embodies
a subtle but significant difference. Tylor’s definition of culture contained a
long laundry list of specific cultural items: various social, technological,
ritual and symbolic constructs that are passed down and learned. Wilson’s
‘tradition’ appropriates the ‘passed down and learned’ aspect of Tylor’s
definition, but substitutes the word ‘behavior’ for the list of cultural
traits. That switch puts learning, rather than what is learned, at the
center of the definition.
By equating culture with ‘tradition,’ and defining the latter as the
transmission of learned behavior, Wilson was able to demonstrate that
‘culture’ is unexceptional in the animal world. Large numbers of creatures,
particularly mammals, transmit learned behavior between generations.
Humans are not unique in this regard. While we might do this more
extensively and effectively than other creatures, the difference is only
relative: “the highest form of tradition, by whatever criterion we choose
to judge it, is of course human culture:” but it “differs from animal
tradition only by degree” (op.cit.). Wilson’s definition of culture as
‘tradition,’ and the idea that human culture does not represent a
discontinuity but, rather, is on a continuum with the behavior of other
animals, is today broadly accepted within the academic community. It is
commonplace to hear reference to the ‘culture’ of different baboon
troops, hyena clans, orca pods, or communities of songbirds.
This definition of culture, however, left two important questions
unanswered. The first had to do with intelligence.
Culture and Intelligence
While Wilson’s re-definition of culture as ‘tradition’ enabled him to
find a common biological point of reference for both human and animal
behavior, he would still have to address the claim that humans transmit
unique kinds of behaviors – behaviors that lie beyond the capacities of
other animals. While Tylor’s definition of culture may have given
prominence to the fact that culture is learned and passed down, neither
he nor those who used his definition believed it could be defined wholly on
that basis. It’s substance also mattered: what was learned and passed
down was believed to be equally critical. Anthropologists of that era
believed that culture consisted of material and behavioral constructs that
were the products of higher mental faculties – faculties they considered
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uniquely human. It never occurred to them that other animals could
create languages, technologies, incest taboos, complex social
organizations, art forms, etc.
Wilson rejected the idea that human behavior is based upon a
unique and ‘higher’ intelligence. He approached this problem the way he
did all others: there are differences, but they are matters of degree, not
kind. There is nothing that humans do, he asserted, that reveals the
operation of a different intellectual or behavioral principle. There is no
absolute dividing line that separates human behavior from that of other
animals. People use tools: so do wasps, birds, sea otters and
chimpanzees. We have complex social organizations: so do ants and other
social insects. Indeed, our close primate relatives have intricate social
hierarchies, pursue sophisticated dominance strategies, and wage wars
against outsiders. Chimps appear to have rudimentary rituals, lions and
wolves cooperate, and elephants demonstrate artistic sensibilities. Many
animals, birds and apes in particular, have elaborate systems of
communication. Bees and vervet monkeys have a proven capacity to
communicate information about external events, something long
considered unique to humans. Many animals also appear to have their own
incest taboos – an instinctive repulsion to mating with close relatives.
According to Wilson, human behavior does not rest upon a radically
new kind of intelligence. Human intelligence is simply at one end of a
mental continuum that extends throughout the animal world. In arguing
that the mentality of humans and other animals is cut from the same
cloth, Wilson was not suggesting that animals are more intelligent and
adaptable than generally believed. Rather, he is asserting that human
intelligence has been grossly over-rated. Our behavior, he argued, can be
encompassed within the same ‘instinctive’ framework that governs the
lives of other creatures. Our mental capacities, and those of all other
animals, are expressions of genetically determined functions ‘wired’ into
our brains by evolution.
Instinct and Cultural Variation?
The third challenge facing Wilson was to reconcile the idea of
genetically determined behavior – ‘instinct’ - with the fact of human
variability. Doesn’t the fact that peoples possess the same basic genetic
make-up and create such a variety of different cultures demonstrate that
culture cannot be an expression of biology? Doesn’t this prove that
cultural behavior is independent genetic controls? A child from an
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Amazonian Indian tribe where no one can count beyond three can be
taught to master advanced calculus enabling him or her to compute the
motion of the planets. Doesn’t this reveal the operation of some
distinctive behavioral principle? Not according to Wilson.
Wilson argued that cultural variation has been greatly exaggerated.
The behavioral differences between different cultures are not
incompatible with ‘instinct.’ To support this contention, he drew on the
thinking of the anthropologist Robin Fox. Fox argued that while the
specific forms of cultures may vary, every culture is fundamentally the
same: they all possess personal adornments, incest taboos, marriage
rules, languages, property laws, mechanisms for settling disputes, beliefs
about the supernatural, social status, initiation ceremonies, courtship
practices, tool and weapons making industries, myths and legends,
dancing, etc., etc. The fact that culture takes many different forms,
Wilson argues, “does not mean that culture has been freed from the
genes”(ibid: p.559). While cultures may differ considerably, what remains
constant is the “overwhelming tendency to develop one culture or
another” (op.cit.). Anthropology, he concluded, became captivated by the
superficial differences between cultures and lost sight of their deep
commonalities – commonalities that are expressions of a shared genetic
inheritance.
The picture of humanity that emerges form sociobiology’s
evolutionary model is not a pretty one. Everything we do, all our behavior
can be traced back to genetic factors that are the products of a merciless
struggle to leave more offspring than our competitors. Selfishness, greed,
egoism, violence and philandering are simply expressions of what ‘works:’
of what enables individuals to stay ahead of the evolutionary game. As
long as ‘nice guys finish last,’ that is, as long as natural selection punishes
those who nobly, but foolishly share their energies and resources with
others, then these are the behavioral traits that evolution will implant in
the human animal.
Wilson’s general framework carried the day. Almost everyone who
believed that biology and evolution were relevant to an understanding of
humanity began to call themselves ‘sociobiologists.’ A new paradigm took
hold and a new generation of evolutionary anthropologists set out to
discover the ‘evolutionary roots’ of our behaviors, i.e., the way in which
everything we do can be traced to some built-in instinct that must have
conferred some evolutionary advantage at some point in our past.
Operating on these premises, the main challenge they face is accounting
for the presence of ‘altruism:’ explaining how generosity and self-sacrifice
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could have evolved within an evolutionary process that only has room for
selfishness.
A Word About Sameness And Difference
Sociobiology does not put forth a concrete hypothesis about
human evolution. It doesn’t think it has to. It is not concerned with
explaining how we got here from there. Indeed, it doesn’t know where
here is. Having reduced culture to animal behavior, it doesn’t find
anything unique or extraordinary about the human way of life, and as a
result, sees no need to propose a special evolutionary model to account
for our peculiarities. Proponents of this school are not interested in
explaining how our distinctive human characteristics may have evolved.
Instead, all their energies are spent demonstrating how human behaviors
we have always thought of as unique, are not really exceptional at all.
Everything about us, they assert, can be fully explained in terms of
biological and evolutionary principles that operate elsewhere in the animal
world.
Sociobiology’s argumentation relies heavily on a simple logical
technique. They find some animal that performs behaviors that share – or
at least appear to share - something in common with our own. They then
argue that this demonstrates that there is no absolute line that separates
our behavior from theirs. The differences are ones of degree, not kind. If
two behaviors differ only by degree, then, in fact, they are the same kinds
of behavior. Hence, there is no fundamental difference between them.
Part of the problem here can be traced to an error of language. The
terms difference in degree and difference in kind are used as if they refer
to two objectively measurable types of difference. In fact, these two
terms are entire relative – and very subjective and imprecise as well. All
things can be seen to differ by either degree or by kind. No two creatures
would seem to be more different in kind then a humming bird and a whale.
One is a mammal: huge, and designed to live in the ocean. The other is a
bird: tiny, and built to fly. Yet when they are compared to mollusks or
insects, their differences can be seen as ones of degree. Both are
vertebrates and share a common anatomical body plan. Indeed, amoebas
and elephants can be seen as the same kinds of creatures if both are
compared with bacteria. They are both eukaryotes: their DNA is
concentrated in a nucleus. Whether anything is to be judged different in
kind or degree depends entirely on the context: on what is being
compared to what.
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The argument that all differences between humans and other
animals consist of ‘differences of degree rather than of kind,’ and thus
that humans behavior can be understood in terms of the dynamics that
operate in other species, amounts, frankly, to sophistry. The difference
between the mass of the earth and a single piece of sand is one of
degree. But it would be poor science, on the basis of that fact, to
attempt to understand the workings of our planet through the
examination of a grain of sand.
Deadlocked
In the brief historical review presented above, I have sought to
highlight the intellectual dialectic that drives the current debate about
human evolution and humanity’s relationship to the animal world. The
argument centers around two contrasting points of view. One side argues
that our primary reality is that we are a biological organism. We evolved
through the same kind of evolutionary process as every other animal, and
it follows that we must be fundamentally the same as them. Everything
about us – our anatomy, physiology, and behavior are ultimately traceable
to an evolutionary logic. The other side argues with equal conviction that
we are cultural beings: our unique capacity to alter our relationship to
nature without changing our biology reveals that we are fundamentally
different from other creatures. Our behavior is not built into our
organisms, that is, is not the product of an evolutionary process. It takes
shape in response to factors that operate on a different plane. As cultural
beings, our life process cannot be understood in biological or evolutionary
terms.
The problem here is that both sides are right. And both sides are
wrong. We clearly are biological beings. At the same time, we are
something other than that. Common sense strongly supports this
conclusion. However, we haven’t possessed the intellectual tools to move
beyond bare intuition and be able to systematically sort all this out. The
categories we are working with are not up to the task. We are forced to
choose between seeing ourselves as either biological beings or a nonbiological ones: as either an animal or not an animal. These options are
not adequate. They are too narrow and limited to encompass the kind of
being that our evolutionary process produced.
The Task Ahead
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To understand human evolution, we will have to develop a model of
how a biological being could have evolved into something more than that.
In the body of this work, I will present an evolutionary narrative that
portrays humanity as a synthesis of biology and culture. A synthesis,
Wikipedia tells us, “is a combination of two or more entities that together
form something new.” That’s what human evolution was about. A great
ape began to rely on cultural behavior and over the course of 2 ½ million
years, it evolved into a bio-cultural being. How easy it is to say that! And,
I must point out; I am not the first to do so. But saying that and
demonstrating it – showing how it happened and what it really means, are
two very different things.
What’s so difficult? In the section we just looked at, I expressed the
opinion that both sides in this debate have a piece of the truth. Why can’t
we just take what is valid in both sides and merge it together into unified
model? Sadly, the problem is much bigger that that. There is something
right in the position of each side. Both start from a premise that has
something valid in it. One side sees us as a biological creature, while the
other identifies us as a cultural being. In that very general and abstract
sense, both have a hold of something true. But both end up very wide of
the mark. Each has developed its ideas in opposition to those of the
other. They have sought to understand their part of the puzzle in
isolation from the other dimension. As a result, instead of possessing half
the truth, they ended up with something that is much less than that. It is
impossible to understand human biology without culture, or culture
without human biology. The part that each side does possess is so
deformed that it cannot be joined with that of the other.
Anthropology’s culture and sociobiology’s biology do not fit
together. The terms, as each side has developed them, are mutually
exclusive. Any attempt to forcibly meld them would only produce an
intellectual monstrosity. To make progress, we will have to re-think the
basic categories of biology and culture. The keys necessary to unlock the
puzzle of human evolution are not to found within those we have
examined so far.
Re-defining Biology
To start with, we will need to revise sociobiology’s flawed model of
biology. Its notion of life excludes the possibility of intelligence. The view
that all behavior is determined at the genetic level leads to the reduction
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of ‘intelligence’ to instinct. The mental activity of living beings is
portrayed as nothing more than automatic, programmed responses that
are genetically ‘wired’ into the brain. In E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, the
massive work that played such a pivotal role in establishing evolutionary
anthropology’s new paradigm, the word intelligence does not appear
anywhere in the Table of Contents or in its extensive 32page index.
Wilson, whose area of expertise was ants, was not interested in
intelligence: he was interested in genes.
It is ironic that in relationship to animal intelligence, sociobiology
and Classical Cultural Anthropology are in full agreement. Cultural
Anthropology also saw animal behavior as entirely instinctual and
contrasted it with the intelligent behavior of humans. Anthropology,
however, did not look at humans from an evolutionary perspective and
was not troubled by the fact that this view created an unbridgeable gap
between the rest of the animal world and us.
Wilson was able to use the widely accepted view that animal
behavior is instinctual, that is unintelligent, to strengthen his case that
human behavior was also under genetic controls. He gave many examples
of animals preforming behaviors that had been previously thought of as
uniquely human. Instead of drawing the conclusion that this indicated that
animals possess intelligence, he argued instead that if animals could
perform these behaviors, this proved they could be achieved through the
operation of instinctual mechanisms.
In this book, we take the opposite approach. Intelligence, the ability
of animals to construct an awareness that enables them to respond
creatively to their circumstances, is assumed to be an integral dimension
of their biological substance. This assumption has a dramatic impact on
one’s sense of evolutionary possibilities. It enables us to imagine the
prospect of an intelligence that could endow behavior with an
unprecedented range of flexibility: indeed, with a capacity to integrate
biological goals with processes operating on the basis of different
principles.
Placing intelligence into the biological equation is vital for getting a
proper focus on human evolution. The growth of bigger brains and
improved cultural skills is the central fact of our evolutionary process.
However, in recognizing the special place of intelligence in human
evolution, we opened up a set of daunting questions. Is human
intelligence truly different from that of other animals? And if it is, how is
it different, and what could explain why such a difference should have
evolved in us alone?
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These are the most difficult questions we face. To be able to
answer them we will need to push contemporary science beyond its
comfort zone: that is, we will have to move into areas where no solid
consensus yet exists. To begin with, we will have to develop a framework
for making sense of this most complicated issue. Presently, there is not
even a generally accepted definition of intelligence. The subject is treated
somewhat like Justice Potter Stewart’s description of pornography: you
can’t quite define it, but you know it when you see it. We will have to do
better than that. In order to answer whether human intelligence is truly
extraordinary, we will need to construct a model that will allow us to
compare human with animal intelligence. That is a huge undertaking, and
it absorbed the greater part of my labors. While I succeeded in bringing
together a lot of exciting new - and old - work on this subject, I cannot
claim to have fully accomplishing this goal. Nevertheless, I believe I was
able to make real progress.
After years of wrestling with the enigma of intelligence, I can
understand why people might want to define evolutionary problems in a
way that would enable them to avoid addressing with it. Any such ploy,
however, is futile. No one can hope to understand what kind of being we
are without coming to terms with the relationship of human intelligence
to that of the rest of the animal world.
Re-defining Culture
Anthropology’s concept of culture also needs serious modification.
This is the other side of the human equation. It involves our way of life:
the behavior that is critical for human survival. Without a proper
understanding of culture, we cannot determine the selective forces that
shaped our development. It holds the key to understanding our unique
evolutionary trajectory.
Anthropology’s concept of culture was formulated in an effort to
distinguish human from animal behavior. It was rooted in the perception
that in humans, there is a separation between biology and behavior that
exists nowhere else in the animal world. This insight represented an
important step forward in our thinking. However, anthropology took this
separation too far. It saw culture not simply as different from biology, but
as the annulment of biology: the negation of it as a force in human life. In
separating culture from biology, it conceived of these as two entirely
different principles. The result was a notion of culture that could not be
fitted into an evolutionary perspective.
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Anthropology argued that culture represented the end human
biological evolution. Because humans adapt to nature by means of culture
rather than through the modification of their biology, natural selection is
no longer the operative force shaping human development. It follows,
then, that once culture came into existence, human biological evolution
came to an end. This is by no means entirely wrong. However, there is
something that also seriously amiss about it.
If the appearance of culture signaled the end of natural selection,
then how could culture itself have evolved? What would have selected for
it? If culture itself is not the product of an evolutionary process guided by
natural selection, then we have no way to account for it. This highlights
the problem with anthropology’s concept of culture. It is one-sided. When
culture is seen simply as something that distinguishes humanity from the
rest of the animal world, it becomes impossible to imagine how it could
have evolved from within that world. If it is understood only as the end
point of human evolution, then how are we to account for the
extraordinary evolutionary process that produced it?
Getting cultural right is central to solving the puzzle of human
evolution. To do that, we will have to completely re-think anthropology’s
notion of culture. We will need to understand it not just as something
that distinguishes humans, but something that, at one point, served as a
bridge between the animal world and us. Culture did not come into being
at the very end of human evolution. It was its driving force from the very
beginning. It was culture that gave our evolutionary process its unique
trajectory.
Conclusion
Humans, I shall seek to demonstrate, are a unique kind of being. We
are the products of an extraordinary evolutionary process in which biology
and culture became fused together to produce something that is both an
animal and not an animal. We are nature grown over into a life form that
transcends the boundaries of biological organization.
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