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ES3217: Loss of Childhood Robert Yerkes’ Laboratory for Primate Biology: foundational studies in human engineering? Amongst the notes for last week was an account of an earlier attempt to produce a biology of the social; today it is usually referred to as Social Darwinism. When you get round to the notes you will find that the eugenic policies which stemmed from the theory had disastrous consequences for certain groups that were deemed to belong to undesirable ‘races’. The problem has not gone away. Stephen Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate, identifies a social science argument which says, in effect, that any social policy based on some form of genetic determinism relating to a particular social group is bound to lead to inequality (the pejorative term used is ‘genetic underclass’). One could, of course, go back much further than these interpretations of Darwin. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau were all ready to produce speculative accounts of human nature which posited a specific genealogy in order to justify the revised forms of society they advocated. (Compare, for instance, Hobbes view that before society human life was ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ with Rousseau’s version of the Noble Savage.) During the Nineteen twenties, before the ‘modern synthesis’ of Darwinism with Mendelian genetics had taken root, Robert Yerkes proposed a different model for humanity: the chimpanzee. The details, including such matters as political funding and university patronage, are covered in Donna Haraway’s book of 1989, Primate Visions, pp. 59-83. As an overview, the following bullet points summarise some of the main aspects of Yerkes’ project. • The main difficulty faced by any social scientist attempting to produce theoretical generalisations about human nature is that its characteristics are always veiled by human culture. Even a new-born infant enters this world via a pre-existing cultural context. • One therefore needs some special means to penetrate to the core of human nature which must surely underpin all human cultures. Equally, one cannot side-step this difficulty by relying on speculative reconstructions of embryonic human mental capacity, or by assuming that ‘primitive’ societies are, by definition, bereft of culture. • Our nearest animal ‘cousins’ are the primates, and amongst these, those showing the highest form of ‘natural’ sociality are the chimpanzees – but their’s is a culture devoid of language or artefact. (Yerkes’ ideas were formulated long before the later, ethnographic studies of primate social life.) • After initial studies to establish the ‘teachability’ of chimpanzees (their status as an ‘ideal’ experimental ‘child’) – and hence their social malleability – it may be possible to use the chimpanzee as an ideal model for experimental social engineering. • Ultimately, if the initial and subsequent studies are promising, it should be possible to identify those designs of social life that ‘go with the grain’ of primate nature, and those that run up against it. Through such studies it should eventually become possible to design an ideal society fit for human nature and growth. As Haraway establishes, it is impossible to disentangle this scientific enterprise from the rest of the human social context from which it sprung. If for no other reason, this is why you need to think about this example and then review your understanding of the equivalent social contexts that make, first sociobiology, and then evo-devo, seem appropriate. In the case of Yerkes, the clearest statements of his life’s work are given in the 1943 publication, Chimpanzees: a laboratory colony, published by Yale University Press. But of course one has to step ‘outside’ of Yerkes’ biography. Haraway offers the following: ‘the fundamental duality of Yerkes as rational, progressive leader and dependent servant of power; the ape laboratory as pilot plant in the service of human engineering; and the structural ambiguity between object and image, servant and master, child and man, model and reality in the scientific relation of ape and human being’ Haraway, 1989: 61). This is a useful once one relates each duality to a specific context within America in the Twenties and Thirties. Haraway also offers a more philosophical perspective – ‘Yerkes meant to refer unambiguously to the chimpanzee as the servant of science; but before the prologue was complete, the servant and the animal, the master and the human being were tangled threads in the social fabric. ‘Man’s curiosity and desire to control his world impel him to study living things’ (Yerkes, 1943:1). With that banal but crucial assertion about the foundation of human rationality in the will to power, Yerkes opened his book. For him the tap root of science is the aim to control. The full consequences of that teleology become apparent only in the sciences of mind and behaviour, where natural object and designed product reflect each other in the infinite regress of face-to-face mirrors, ground by the law of Hegel’s master-servant dialectic’ (Haraway, 1989: 61). Again, having reflected upon this, think about the equivalents for sociobiology and evo-devo today:- We can review some of Yerkes’ context during the lecture, i.e., the idea that the apes could be ‘re-designed’ so as to produce ‘useful’ knowledge, and much of this can be researched on the web and in our own library. Here are some themes to pursue:The domination of mind over body, the contrast between culture (messy) and social engineering (rational, economically effective), human nature as ‘plastic’, docility equals co-operative and ‘teachable’, ontology and phylogeny, progressive reform, social superiority, dominance, leadership. And here are some social headings for America in the Twenties and Thirties:Taylorism (and Fordism), the ‘madness’ of the Great War, psychobiology, the Jazz Age, the Wall St. Crash, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, The Fram Security administration, the rise of the European dictators, the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal, the impotence of the League of Nations.