A Social Science Curriculum
For The 21st Century
A social science curriculum for the 21st
century is one that is biologically informed and up to date and that is no
longer constrained by ideologies like the blank slate, the noble savage, the
ghost in the machine, post-modernism, deconstructionism, cultural relativism,
creationism and other ideas on both the left and the right. It is a curriculum that is based on a truly
scientific understanding of human nature.
The social sciences today lag behind the natural sciences as a result of
being held hostage to ideologies which are opposed to a more empirical and
biological view of human nature and resulting human society, culture and
history. Over the coming decades the
social sciences, and to a lesser extent the humanities, will come increasingly
into consilience with the natural sciences.
This means that social and cultural behavior will be increasingly
explained in a way that is more harmonious with the natural sciences,
especially biology. This approach will
lead to greater understanding of humans and the human predicament. Its rate of diffusion will depend upon more
communication between the natural sciences and the social sciences and
humanities. It will also depend on more
integration of the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities in our
school curriculum from elementary school to college. In this paper I will trace the rise and fall of ideology as a
driving force behind the social sciences and show that it is being replaced by
a more empirically sound view of human nature.
I will also demonstrate how there is considerable common ground between
the natural sciences and the social sciences and humanities, and how the fears
of postmodernists, deconstructionists, cultural relativists and others on both
the left and right are largely unfounded.
Lastly I will lay out a plan for more integration of the natural
sciences with the social sciences and humanities in our school curriculum from
elementary to college level.
***
“Man
will become better when you show him what he is like.”
“Culture
is not causeless and disembodied. It is
generated in rich and intricate ways by information processing mechanisms
situated in human minds. These
mechanisms are, in turn, the elaborately sculpted product of the evolutionary
process. Therefore, to understand the
relationship between biology and culture one must first understand the
architecture of our evolved psychology.”
Leda
Cosmides, John Tooby & Jerome Barkow, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary
Psychology and the Generation of Culture
“History
and culture, then, can be grounded in psychology, which can be grounded in
computation, neuroscience, genetics, and evolution.”
Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
“The
swiftness of cultural evolution in historical times may by itself seem to imply
that humanity has slipped its genetic instructions, or somehow suppressed
them. But that is an illusion. The ancient genes and epigenetic rules of
behavior they ordain remain comfortably in place.”
Edward
O. Wilson, Concilience
The purpose of all sexually reproducing
organisms is to survive and reproduce and this purpose – eating and mating --
ultimately drives their growth patterns and behavior. Economic and reproduction-oriented activities (food and family)
underlie human societies. With humans,
eating and mating, and the complex of social relationships supporting them
underpins much of our human cultural development. Human culture can be viewed
as a tool for adaptation, as the apex of human technological creation. Culture is not just a material technology of
tools and objects, it is also a memetic technology of concepts and ideas that
affect behavior. A brief look at human
history reveals that there are certain cultural concepts and ideas that prove
resilient. Ideas can evolve to become
better adapted to spreading themselves to human minds. But not all aspects of culture have direct
adaptive functions. Many types of human
cultural creations such as music, art, literature and religion are by-products
of brain abilities that were designed for other directly adaptive purposes. The variability of culture can be explained
in terms of a universal human nature interacting with unique historical and
environmental forces. These forces act upon populations of humans and help to
create the epidemiological dynamics of culture within those populations.
Karl Marx correctly pinpointed our
economic way of life as one of the primary causal agents of culture. Sigmund Freud pointed to the effects of our
procreation impulses on our personal psychology. William James was correct when he said that humans have even more
innate instincts than other animals and that this is what explains the
complexity of our behavior. William
James also realized that religion was a product of our psychology.
What kind of social science curriculum do
we want in our elementary, secondary and post secondary schools in the 21st
century? The answer is easy: one that
is integrated and connected conceptually, and one that is empirical and not
ideological. In short, a social science
curriculum for the 21st century will be one that is evolutionarily
and biologically correct.
I spent the decade of the 1980s studying
and practicing cross-cultural psychology, which looks for the ways in which our
unique cultures shape our thoughts, emotions and behaviors, with the focus
placed on differences between human societies.
Cross-cultural psychology tends to view the mind as a blank slate upon
which culture writes the rules for thoughts, emotions and behaviors. I spent the decade of the 1990’s studying
evolutionary psychology, which looks at the ways that all humans are
fundamentally the same regardless of what are most often superficial cultural
differences. Evolutionary psychology
views the brain as an organ which is a product of evolution; it views the mind
as the product of the brain’s neurological architecture and resultant
neurochemical processing patterns which drive cognition and emotion which in
turn drive behavior.
Capitalism, Communism, Marxism, Leninism,
Nazism, Racism, Macarthyism, Christian Fundamentalism, Moslem Fundamentalism,
Zionism, Humanism, Behaviorism, Postmodernism, Deconstructionism, Cultural
Relativism and Creationism are some of the –isms of my life over the past 50
years. And each one of them has ways of interpreting human behavior,
culture and history.
The lives of humans, for better or worse,
are driven by ideologies and have been so for all of recorded human history and
most likely for some of our prehistory as well. Certain beliefs have been resilient -- beliefs in the intrinsic
efficacy of clan heads, chiefs, priests, kings, pharaohs, emperors, presidents
and prime ministers; beliefs in the supernatural and attendant religious
mythologies; beliefs in the roles of particular family members; beliefs in a
certain type of education with a certain curriculum. We can perhaps even say that the human penchant for ideologies is
largely biologically-based in that ideologies are a creation of a biological
brain that evolved from the material and social needs of a hunter-gatherer
past. Ideologies can serve adaptive
functions and they can also make individuals and societies dysfunctional.
Most ideologies, like various religious
and political ideologies we are familiar with, are by their very nature
conservative and resistant to change -- they have built-in memes that instruct
the believer to disregard contradictory ideas, somewhat like a defense
mechanism. Many religious doctrines
either explicitly or implicitly direct people to disregard the beliefs of other
religions and often characterize members of such other religions as infidels
and heathens. Another ideology, the
anti-ideology, the empirical scientific method, promotes continual revision and
adjustment as part of its nature. The
scientific method is based upon the gathering, counting and ordering of
phenomena that are measurable through the senses or through prosthetic
extensions of the senses. Observable and measurable input from the senses –
empiricism – is what sets science apart from other “soft” epistemologies.
Ideologies certainly play an important
role in our lives. They are blueprints
for thoughts, emotions and behaviors.
They serve as heuristics and cognitive frameworks. Perhaps one of the
great initial ideologies we humans created for ourselves was the idea that we
are superior to the rest of nature and have a right to dominate nature and to
cut and control it as we please. We put
ourselves above nature in various ways by creating mythologies and pantheons of
human-like gods and goddesses. The Book
of Genesis of the Old Testament Judeo-Christian Bible has a patriarchal God
telling humans that he created everything for their exclusive use, thus forming
a foundation for the materialistic and environmentally exploitative nature of
western culture. And the ancient idea
(shared by many Jews and Christians alike) that the descendants of the
Israelites are special people in the eyes of this God may be one of the roots
of our problems in the Middle East today.
Ideologies color our perceptions and our
cognitions. During the 20th
century cultural anthropologists were so busy seeing the variability and
uniqueness of the so-called “exotic” cultures they were studying that they
failed to see the ways in which humans are fundamentally the same. This was because they subscribed to a social
science ideology that held that cultures are independent superorganisms that
shape all meaningful human thoughts, emotions and behavior. They failed to see the universal human
nature that lies below the surface of seemingly unique cultures. A look at the same ethnographic record today
shows that there are actually more similarities than differences between
cultures. There are more human cultural
universals than there are unique differences.
These cultural anthropologists also failed to realize that the very fact
they could understand other cultures proves that we have an evolved universal
neural substrate and psychological architecture that allows humans to understand
each other’s minds.
As a social scientist I was raised on
cultural determinist views and accepted them until I began to see the
overwhelming contrary evidence that was accumulating by the late 80’s from
evolutionary biology, human physiology and genetics, cognitive science,
neuroscience and hybrid disciplines such as psychoneuroimmunology
Recent ideologies affecting the social
and behavioral sciences are postmodernism, deconstuctionism and cultural
relativism, that tend toward thinking that there is no one true objective
empirical reality and that realities are unique to individuals and their
groups, and that histories are subjective narratives and not so much a
recording of objective, empirically experienced facts.
Postmodernism and cultural relativism are
alive and well in the Pacific. At a
recent Pacific educational symposium, where I was giving a workshop for
teachers, I was emphasizing the importance of teaching our children scientific
explanations of cause and effect in the natural world as a remedy to
supernatural and pre-scientific thinking.
Several Chamorro women from the Micronesian island of Saipan became
hostile and attacked science as “western” and “just one view of reality.” Everything is relative, subjective meaning
of the narrative is all-important, and there is no objective reality. I had mentioned to them the anxiety-causing
effects of beliefs in ghosts and said that of course there are really no such
things as ghosts, of disembodied entities floating about in another dimension,
and that what we call the spirits of our ancestors are simply the memories we
keep of them, and that people who believe they have seen ghosts simply have an
overactive imagination. They insisted
upon their beliefs in disembodied spirits and ghosts of ancestors saying that
it was part of their culture and if they believe in ghosts then ghosts are
real. This is an example of a
phenomenon that can be found worldwide in many different cultures: the belief in
a “ghost in the machine” that is some kind of essence of the being that somehow
animates and directs it. One of these
Chamorro women cited another example of this kind of cultural relativism by
saying that “you believers in western science tell children the scientific
reason for why it rains (i.e. evaporation & condensation) while we tell our
Chamorro children that it rains because of the actions of spirits and
gods.” My question to everyone here
today is: what do you think it is better to teach our children: scientific
cause and effect with regard to the natural world or archaic mythologies that
were developed in past ages.
Postmodernism, deconstructionism and
cultural relativism have given us many rich and useful insights but they are
not explanatory systems in and of themselves; they are only microanalyses that
very often extract phenomenon too much from context and disconnect it from
other empirical causal elements. They
are, in essence, only perspectives, and nothing more. A casual glance at some of the work spawned by postmodernism
reveals a lot of pretentious, overly jargonized, incoherent nonsense. A splendid book entitled Intellectual
Impostures (entitled Fashionable Nonsense for the U.S. edition) by
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont is an expose’ on the intellectual bankruptcy of the
postmodernist proclivity for producing the most confused pseudo-scientific
expositions ever written. Sokal, a
physicist, is famous (or infamous) for his 1996 hoax in which he submitted a
paper to the postmodernist journal Social Text which subsequently published
it as a legitimate postmodern critique of science. The paper, entitled “Transgressing the boundaries: towards a
transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity” was from start to finish utter
nonsense that was written as a parody in the postmodern style. Sokal was originally inspired to do this by
a book entitled Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with
Science by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt.
In a review of Higher Superstition Richard Dawkins cites several
of the book’s examples of the excesses to which postmodernism can go. First a typical incoherent, jargon-centric
and virtually meaningless passage from Jacques Derrida:
“If
one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject
neotextual materialism or conclude that society has objective value. If dialectic desituationism holds, we have
to choose between Habermasian discourse and the subtextual paradigm of
context. It could be said that the
subject is contextualized into a textual nationalism that includes truth as a
reality. In a sense, the premise of the
subtextual paradigm of context states that reality comes from the collective
unconscious.”
( Derrida cited in Dawkins, 1998, pp. 141-143)
Another one by the French psychoanalyst
Felix Guttari is, in the words of Sokal and Bricmont, “the most brilliant
mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have
ever encountered”:
“We
can see clearly that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear
signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this
multireferential multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality,
the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions
remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our
dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticized previously.” (Ibid)
But none is greater in absurdity than the
ideas of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray who argues that Einstein’s theory of
relativity based on E=mc2 is a subjective equation. According to Irigaray this is because it “privileges” the speed
of light over other speeds. In
addition, Irigaray also believes some areas of physics are “sexed.” She feels that fluids and their flows have
been unfairly neglected in favor of a “masculine physics” which privileges
rigid, solid things like the erect male sex organ. Her American expositor Katherine Hayes sums up Irigaray’s ideas
in magnificent form:
“The
privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science
to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of
fluidity with femininity. Whereas men
have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak
menstrual blood and vaginal fluids.
From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to
arrive at a successful model for turbulence.
The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions
of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave
unarticulated remainders.” (Ibid)
For an amusing parody of the postmodern
perspective on empirical science visit the website www.butterfliesandwheels.com/dictionary.php
for a Fashionable Dictionary: Your guide to the language of pseudoscience
and fashionable nonsense. And it is
indeed time to stop this nonsense!
Biologically
Informed And Up To Date
The 1990’s were deemed the decade of the
brain by the U.S. Congress and the brain sciences indeed flourished. A research foundation that had been built up
over a forty-year period bore much fruit during the 90’s and the human brain
and the human mind were considerably mapped out. The connection between the brain-mind and culture also become
increasingly apparent. There is still
much to learn and there are new discoveries every week it seems, but we now
have a concrete understanding of the geography and topography of the brain and
how the brain creates the mind and how the mind creates behavior. Another field that has blossomed over the
past few decades is the science of genetics that has revealed to us the code
that creates the proteins that create cells, tissues, organs and
organisms. A third field of science
that has tied the two above sciences is the science of evolutionary biology
that forms the conceptual foundation for all life sciences. Evolutionary biology explains how and why
organisms and species emerge and how and why they developed the information-processing
and behavioral programs that they possess.
The conceptually organizing field of evolutionary psychology gives us a
scientific understanding of human nature and resultant human behavior, social
organization and culture. Evolutionary
psychology is a hybrid of psychology, evolutionary biology, physical and
cultural anthropology and cognitive neuroscience.
The brain comes pre-wired and predisposed
toward a wide range of important human thoughts, emotions and behaviors related
to human survival and reproduction including fear and defense, sex and mating,
kinship altruism, social cooperation and social competition. The human brain is modular with many
different types of information processing circuits that rely on specific types
of input stimulus from the external physical and social environment. But the human brain also has
an enormous capacity for plasticity – learning by interaction with the physical
and social environment. The brain has a
huge memory capacity and memories are stored in distributed networks of protein
molecules on the surfaces of neurons.
There are 100 billion neurons (brain cells) in the human brain that
comprise the circuitry that runs the organism.
And lastly, the human mind is combinatorial in nature, that is, there
are endless possibilities to create new ideas and concepts by combining
existing ideas and concepts. Human
language is also combinatorial in nature allowing us to create an infinite
number of meaningful utterances by combining the elements of a language.
What is Evolutionary Psychology
In their
landmark book entitled The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, pioneer
evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and Jerome Barkow put
forth a theoretical foundation for an integrated causal model of human behavior
and edited a volume of original empirical works that show the evolutionary and
biological foundations of the human mind, culture and resultant behavior. With the publishing of that book the field took
off and produced and continues to produce numerous empirical works that look at
evolutionary biology, behavior, culture and history. Albert Einstein pointed out that a theory allows us to observe
and make sense of phenomenon that before were indiscernible and this is exactly
what evolutionary biology did for psychology and what evolutionary psychology
is doing to the social and behavioral sciences today. We can now see patterns where before we could not due to the lack
of a unifying theory. But the evolutionary psychology of the late 1980’s and
the1990’s was built upon a foundation laid in the 1960’s and 1970’s by
evolutionary biologists such as George Williams, William Hamilton, Richard
Dawkins, Robert Trivers, Edward Wilson and others who first founded the field
and called it sociobiology. But because sociobiology was attacked by the
ideologues in academia during those times it had to go underground only to be
resurrected under the name of evolutionary psychology. Today evolutionary psychology rests on a
massive foundation of empirical evidence that is rapidly transforming the
social and behavioral sciences.
According to The Adapted Mind:
“Evolutionary psychology is simply psychology
that is informed by the additional knowledge that evolutionary biology has to
offer, in expectation that understanding the process that designed the human
mind will advance the discovery of its architecture. It unites modern evolutionary biology with the cognitive
revolution in a way that has the potential to draw together all of the
disparate branches of psychology into a single organized system of knowledge.”(Tooby,
Cosmides, Barkow, 1992, p. 1)
The authors begin by pointing to the fact
that other scientific disciplines such as astronomy, chemistry, physics,
geology, and biology have developed “a robust combination of logical coherence,
causal description, explanatory power, and testability, and have become
examples of how reliable and deeply satisfying human knowledge can become.”
(Ibid p. 19)
While the rest of the sciences have been
communicating conceptually with each other and weaving themselves together
through discoveries that reveal their mutual relevance to each other, a
doctrine of intellectual isolationism has characterized the social sciences. The social sciences have tried to ignore the
evolutionary and biological causality of human behavior in favor of cultural
causality made possible by a content-free human brain. The problem is, a content-free brain is an
impossible brain.
For example, the anthropologist Clifford
Geertz advocates abandoning any attempts at empirically explaining the causes
of social phenomenon in favor of treating social phenomenon as “texts” to be
interpreted like one interprets literature.
According to Geertz we should “turn from trying to explain social
phenomenon by weaving them into grand textures of cause and effect to trying to
explain them by placing them in local frames of awareness.” ( Geetz 1973, p.6
cited in Pinker, 2002 p. )
As an example of the incoherent extremes
to which a social scientist who is not rooted in biological reality can go,
here is Geertz saying that “our ideas, our values, our acts, even our emotions,
are, like our nervous system, cultural products…” (Geertz, 1973, p. 55 cited in
Pinker, 2002 p. 25) So according to
Geertz, even our nervous system is a product of culture!
Another anthropologist, Edmund Leach,
blatantly rejects that scientific explanation should be the focus of
anthropology. According to Leach
“social anthropology is not, and should not aim to be ‘science’ in the natural
science sense. If anything it is a form
of art. Social anthropologists should
not see themselves as seekers of objective truth.” (Leach, 1982, p. 52 cited in
Pinker, 2002, p.).
According
to the authors of The Adapted Mind
“This
disconnection from the rest of science has left a hole in the fabric of our
organized knowledge of the world where the human sciences should be. After more than a century, the social
sciences are still adrift, with an enormous mass of half-digested observations,
a not inconsiderable body of empirical generalizations, and a contradictory
stew of ungrounded, middle-level theories expressed in a babel of
incommensurate technical lexicons. This
is accompanied by a growing malaise, so that the largest single trend is toward
rejecting the scientific enterprise as it applies to humans.” (Tooby, Cosmides, Barkow,
1992, p. 22)
“We suggest that this lack of progress, this “failure to
thrive,” has been caused by the failure of the social sciences to explore or
accept their logical connections to the rest of the body of science – that is,
to causally locate their objects of study inside the larger network of
scientific knowledge.” (Ibid, p. 23)
The reigning view of the social
sciences during the 20th century is embodied in what is referred to
as the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) which holds that culture is a
disembodied entity unto itself, a sort of super-organism that is absorbed by
the blank slate minds of humans to shape their every thought, emotion and
behavior. The SSSM denies the existence
of an evolved human brain with an evolved architecture that predisposes humans
toward certain types of thoughts, emotions and behaviors. The Standard Social Science Model also holds
that biological evolution has been superceded by cultural evolution.
The alternative view, one that is called the Integrated Causal Model
(ICM) holds that the human psychological architecture consists of numerous
evolved mechanisms designed for solving evolutionary long-enduring problems
such as finding food and mates, recognizing emotional expressions and surviving
in complex social groups. In this view
the human brain contains many content-specific information-processing circuits
designed to address these adaptive problems.
And these circuits, when combined, also produce many of the
content-general abilities of the human brain.
This bundle of many brain circuits represents the universal human brain
architecture and the resultant universal human nature. The combinatorial power of these circuits
combined leads to flexibility and the ability to create variable culture in
response to the physical and social environments.
Once
again, according to Tooby, Cosmides and Barkow:
“The
Standard Social Science Model requires an impossible psychology. Results out of cognitive psychology,
evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, developmental psychology,
linguistics, and philosophy converge on the same conclusion: A psychological
architecture that consisted of nothing but equipotential, general-purpose,
content-independent, or content-free mechanisms could not successfully perform
the tasks the human mind is known to perform or solve the adaptive problems
humans evolved to solve – from seeing, to learning a language, to recognizing
an emotional expression to selecting a mate, to the many disparate activities
aggregated under the term ‘learning culture.” (Ibid p. 34)
The result of the Standard Social Science
Model has been to divorce the social sciences from the natural sciences in a
way that makes it difficult and sometimes impossible for them to communicate
with each other about much any substance.
In his book entitled Concilience: The Unity of Knowledge,
E. O. Wilson, the eminent Harvard biologist and one of the founders of
sociobiology, calls for the unification of the natural and social
sciences. The term concilience
used by Wilson refers to this unification whereby we recognize the biological
and evolutionary connections between the human organism and the culture that it
creates. Concilience is what is
currently underway and will continue throughout the 21st
century. It will be a unification of
the natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities under an umbrella
of mutually consistent concepts and explanations of causality. Social and cultural phenomenon will be able
to be explained in evolutionary, biological, genetic and memetic terms. In the chapter of Concilience
entitled “From Genes to Culture” Wilson puts it succinctly:
“Culture
is created by the communal mind, and each mind in turn is the product of the
genetically structured human brain.
Genes and culture are therefore inseverably linked…Genes prescribe
epigenetic rules, which are the neural pathways and regularities in cognitive
development by which the mind assembles itself. The mind grows from birth to death by absorbing parts of the
existing culture available to it, with selections guided through epigenetic
rules inherited by the individual brain.” (Wilson, 1998, p. 127)
No Longer Constrained By Ideologies
The 20th century witnessed the
blossoming of the social and behavioral sciences after their founding by such
illustrious 19th century figures as Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max
Weber, William James and others. During
the early to mid 20th century under the guidance of figures like
Franz Boas, Sigmund Freud, John Watson, B.F Skinner, Ruth Benedict and Margaret
Mead, the social and behavioral sciences developed into distinct branches,
developing their own theories and fruitful bodies of research that were
unfortunately sometimes incomplete and disconnected because of the lack of a
unifying theory. One idea that did
unify the social and behavioral sciences during this time was the idea of the
blank slate, the idea that almost all of human thought, emotion and behavior
are given to humans by the internalization of culture. In this view, human thought, emotion and
behavior patterns were not directed by genetic and physiological dispositions
but by the external super-organism known as culture. According to Emile Durkheim, one of sociology’s founding fathers
and early architect of the Standard Social Science Model:
“
But one would be strangely mistaken about our thought if, from the foregoing,
he drew the conclusion that sociology, according to us, must, or even can, make
an abstraction of man and his faculties.
It is clear, on the contrary, that the general characteristics of human
nature participate in the work of elaboration from which social life
results. But they are not the cause of
it, nor do they give it its special form; they only make it possible. Collective representations, emotions, and
tendencies are caused not by certain states of consciousness of individuals but
by the conditions in which the social group, in its totality, is placed. Such actions can, of course materialize only
if the individual natures are not resistant to them; but these individual natures
are merely the indeterminate material that the social factor molds and
transforms. Their contribution consists
exclusively in very general attitudes, in vague and consequently plastic
predispositions which, by themselves, if other agents did not intervene,
could not take on the definite and complex forms which characterize social
phenomenon.” (Durkheim, 1895/1962 cited in Tooby,
Cosmides & Barkow, 1992, pp. 24-25)
The blank slate is an idea attributed to
John Locke, a British philosopher looking to refute theories of innate ideas
(i.e. humans are born with ideas already) Locke, an empiricist himself,
developed a theory of mind and a theory of knowledge which said that everything
in our minds comes from experience
Locke’s idea was an excellent one that
reminded us of the impact of our physical and social environments on our
thoughts, emotions and behaviors. It
reminded us about the malleability and flexibility of human behavior and
explained the abundance of difference cultures. This empiricist idea made a great contribution to the social and
behavioral sciences that would develop in the 19th and 20th
centuries. It formed the theoretical
foundation of the enlightenment, the philosophies behind the American and
French revolutions, and the ideas of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and other
founders of modern social science. The
idea of the malleability of human behavior also goes back in the history of
Chinese ideas about education, from Confucius to Mao Tse Tung.
Confucius
actually had it right and accepted the ideas of both of a human nature and
malleability when he said:
“Men’s
natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them apart.” (Confucius, The Analects)
Mao
Tse Tung’s elegant statement of human malleability captures the spirit of the
worldview of Marx and other social scientists.
“A
blank sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful
words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be
painted on it.” (Mao Tse Tung, cited in Glover, 1999, p. 254)
However, one flaw in the thinking of many
great Western philosophers like Locke or Marx and their contemporaries is that
they often tended to use their theories to explain too much; they sometimes
forced the facts into their theories and neglected the facts that didn’t fit or
contradicted their theories. In short,
they sometimes tended to be too all-encompassing when it was not
warranted. They also sometimes failed
to see some of the connections that existed between phenomena, connections
which evolutionary theory now provides.
The theory of the blank slate especially
blossomed in the ideas of 20th century anthropologists such as Franz
Boas, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. In their hands it led to the belief that
all human thought, emotion and behavior is determined by culture, and that the
effects of biology and genetics on the human mind and resultant culture are
minimal to nonexistent. Biology was seen as endowing humans with the five
senses, the hunger, sex and fear drives and a general capacity to learn –
especially to learn culture. This view of the Standard Social Science Model
holds that biological evolution has been superceded by cultural evolution. Culture came to be seen as an entity unto
itself, a sort of super-organism that directed human psychology.
“Instincts
do not create customs; customs create instincts, for the putative instincts of
human being are always learned and never native.”
(Ellsworth
Faris, 1927, cited in Degler, 1991, p. 84)
“We
are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable,
responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.” (Margaret Mead, 1935/1963,
p. 289)
“Much
of what is commonly called ‘human nature’ is merely culture thrown
against a screen of nerves, glands, sense organs, muscles, etc.”
(Leslie
White, 1949, cited in Degler, 1991, p. 209)
The idea of the blank slate made a lot of
sense because it seemed to be true.
Experiences do indeed shape our psychology but only because there are innate
information processing circuits which allow us to make sense of certain aspects
of the environment in certain ways, thus predisposing us to certain courses of
action. The idea of the blank slate
also came to be politically correct because it formed a theoretical foundation
for some good social policies, especially in the areas of education and
relations between racial and ethnic groups.
If everyone was born equal with a blank slate for a mind, then the differences
they do develop are a result of their experiences: there are no innate
differences between people of different sexes and races, and with equal access
to quality educational experiences anyone can flourish intellectually. The blank slate appeals to many because it
provides a rationale for social engineering and political correctness.
The next idea that has had a good
following in the West up until the present is the idea of the Noble
Savage. First popularized by the
French Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and influenced primarily
by the discovery of the so-called “New World,” it promotes the idea that humans
in their natural state live a selfless, peaceful utopian existence; that
anxiety, greed and violence are products of civilization. An earlier British philosopher named Thomas
Hobbes believed just the opposite however; he held that humans in the state of
nature lived lives that were “nasty, brutish and short,” and that the strong
domineering social and political structures of civilization are necessary to
bring order to chaos. But the romantic
idea of the noble savage took root and is alive and well to this day as Pinker
aptly points out:
“No
one can fail to recognize the influence of the doctrine of the Noble Savage in
contemporary consciousness. We see it
in the current respect for all things natural (natural foods, natural
medicines, natural childbirth) and the distrust of the man-made, the
unfashionability of authoritarian styles of childrearing and education, and the
understanding of social problems as repairable defects in our institutions
rather than as tragedies to the human condition.” (Pinker,
2002, p. 8)
We know today that the lives of our
hunter-gatherer ancestors were neither an idyllic paradise nor a brutal
chaos. Our ancestors lived in small
bands of around 50 people, relied on cooperation and creative thinking to
survive and reproduce, had a varied diet, were subject to fatal injuries and
diseases and did not suffer from obesity.
To some, by modern terms, our hunter-gatherer past might seem idyllic
but life expectancies were much shorter and people suffered the anxiety of
getting enough food, finding and keeping a mate and trying to cooperate and
compete with members of their own group and other groups as well. It was to solve these basic economic and
social problems of survival and reproduction that our ancestors developed the
contents of their culture – ideas, beliefs and rules for thoughts, emotions and
behaviors. One can easily see how
seemingly tried-and-true ideas might become rigid ideologies that prescribe
behaviors for successful survival and reproduction – don’t question what seemed
to work in the past.
During the decade of the 1990’s
biological psychology came into its own and began to bring about a conceptual
integration of the social and behavioral sciences by grounding them in
evolutionary and biological reality.
The modern synthesis of psychology and biology came into full form. Steven Pinker, director of the Center for
Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among the
many modern synthesizers of biology and psychology, has worked to build bridges
between biology and culture. In his
book The Blank Slate, Pinker outlines four bridges that
have been built between biology and culture; these are:
Bridge
#1 -- Cognitive Science
Cognitive science is the study of the
information processing patterns of our brain-mind. Mental computation can be explained in terms of information,
computation and feedback that take place within the tissue of the brain. Our thoughts, ideas, beliefs and memories
exist as networks of connections between neurons, 100 billion of them, with
each neuron being able to communicate with thousands of others across one
hundred trillion synapses. Just think
of the connectivity and the combinatorial nature of this processing. These patterns of activity within the brain
can then be manipulated to become thinking and planning. The states of wanting and trying are
feedback loops that receive information about the discrepancy between a goal
and the current state of the world around us.
The mind is connected to the physical and social worlds by the sense
organs that change physical energy into the data structures of the brain that
transmit signals to the motor programs by which the brain controls the muscles.
The brain is a modular
information-processing organ that creates our psychological architecture. The mind is a result of the information
processing activity of the brain. The
mind is not a blank slate because blank slates don’t do anything, and our brain
is certainly pre-equipped to do lots of things. The brain contains many evolved innate information processing
circuits or instincts, if you will.
William James was correct when he said one hundred years ago that humans
have more and not less instincts than other animals. The mind’s programs are combinatorial and can generate a wide
range of behavior. The universal human
brain and psychological architecture underlies the relatively superficial
variations in behavior across cultures.
A look at the human genome shows us the blueprint, and a look at Gray’s
Anatomy shows us the finished product – a universal human design with universal
human abilities. All living things
process the information that they require from their environment for survival
and reproductive purposes. Humans have
been said to live in a “cognitive niche” because they are able to process so
many different kinds of information and depend so much upon it.
Bridge
#2 – Neuroscience
The second bridge between biology and
culture is neuroscience, which is the study of how our thoughts, emotions and
behaviors are implemented in the neural circuitry of the brain. The mind is a result of the electrochemical
activity of the brain. Every aspect of
our mental lives is a result of the physiological events taking place in the
tissues of our brains. Neuroscientists
today have an extensive knowledge of the workings of the human brain from
molecules to tissue to brain circuits and systems. Thoughts and emotions give off physical signals and through
various brain-imaging techniques scientists can monitor and map out the parts
of the brain that are in use during different mental activities and
states. Scientists can literally “read”
a person’s mind. Neuroscience allows us
to see the physical events behind the neural architecture of the brain, which
underlies our psychology and cultural universals.
Bridge
#3 – Behavioral Genetics
Another bridge between biology and
culture is behavioral genetics that is the study of how genes affect our
patterns of thought, emotion and behavior. The recent cracking of the human
genome was a milestone toward our understanding of the relationship between
genotype and phenotype, that is, between the genetic code in our DNA and the
resultant organism – a human. We have
already discovered genes for many types of human abilities and disabilities and
the catalogue will continue to grow as will our understanding of the massive
complexity of how genes interact with each other within the organism and how
this genetic interaction affects the organism’s internal development and
interaction with the physical environment.
Behavioral genetics allows us to see the genetic code behind the
physiological and neurological structure of the human organism.
Bridge
# 4 – Evolutionary Psychology
The final bridge between biology and
culture is evolutionary psychology that seeks to put it all together into an
integrated causal model to explain human behavior and culture.
As
stated in The Adapted Mind
“Culture
is not causeless and disembodied. It is
generated in rich and intricate ways by information-processing mechanisms
situated in human minds. These
mechanisms are, in turn, the elaborately sculpted product of the evolutionary
process. Therefore, to understand the
relationship between biology and culture one must first understand the
architecture of our evolved psychology.” (Tooby, Cosmides, Barkow, 1994, page 3)
And,
of great importance to the social sciences,
“With evolutionary psychology in place, cross-connecting
biology to the social sciences, it is now possible to provide conceptually
integrating analyses of specific questions: analyses that move step by step,
integrating evolutionary biology with psychology, and psychology with social
and cultural phenomena.” (Ibid)
Conceptual integration means that the
various disciplines within the social and behavioral sciences should be
mutually consistent between themselves, and also mutually consistent with the
natural sciences. The natural sciences
already possess conceptual integration, i.e. the laws of chemistry are
consistent with the laws of physics.
But this type of conceptual consistency does not exist within the social
and behavioral sciences where we find psychology, psychiatry, anthropology,
sociology, history and economics living largely in isolation from one another
with no unifying theory and accompanying principles. That theory is Darwin’s theory of natural selection along with
modern genetics and evolutionary biology.
The
Adapted Mind explains how the Integrated Causal Model connects
the social sciences to the rest of science by the following:
“a.
the human mind consists of a set of evolved information-processing mechanisms
instantiated in the human nervous system;
b.
these mechanisms, and the developmental programs that produce them, are
adaptations, produced by natural selection over evolutionary time in ancestral
environments;
c.
many of these mechanisms are functionally specialized to produce behavior that
solves particular adaptive problems, such as mate selection, language
acquisition, family relations, and cooperation;
d.
to be functionally specialized many of these mechanisms must be richly
structured in content-specific ways;
e.
content-specific information-processing mechanisms generate some of the
particular content of human culture, including certain behaviors, artifacts,
and linguistically transmitted representations;
f.
the cultural content generated by these and other mechanisms is then present to
be adopted or modified by psychological mechanisms situated in other members of
the population;
g.
this sets up epidemiological and historical population-level processes; and
h.
these processes are located in particular ecological, economic, demographic and
intergroup social contexts or environments.” (Ibid p. 24)
The
Social Sciences Today Lag Behind The Natural Sciences
The social sciences lag behind the
natural sciences because they have failed to consider the evolution and
physiological construction of the human organism. The social sciences have suffered from the lack of a unifying
theory behind human behavior and the resultant lack of integrating causal
explanations. There has been a
proliferation of disconnected observations of human behavior with weak or
non-existent theory to unify and explain. For example the “theory” of
behaviorism that says all human behavior can be explained by stimulus, response
and association; the “theory” of humanism which says that all human behavior
can be explained in terms of self-esteem and self-image; the “theory” of
psychoanalysis which says that all human behavior can be explained by
understanding unconscious conflicts.
Each of these three “theories” is based on accurate observations of
factors affecting human behavior, but they are not full explanatory theories in
and of themselves. They are in fact
what are referred to as middle level theories that provide a middle level explanation
of cause and effect. The only true
“theory” in psychology today is the theory of evolutionary psychology, which
says that all human behavior can be explained by understanding our biological
evolution and the structure and function of our evolved physiology and
resultant neurological and psychological architecture.
The
Social Sciences Have Been Held Hostage To Ideologies Opposed To A More
Empirical and Biological View Of Human Nature And Resulting Human Society,
Culture And History
In
his 1997 U.S. National Bestseller entitled How The Mind Works,
cognitive scientist Steven Pinker points out that:
“The
confusion of scientific psychology with moral and political goals, and the resulting
pressure to believe in a structureless mind, have rippled perniciously through
the academy and modern intellectual discourse.
Many of us have been puzzled by the takeover of humanities departments
by the doctrines of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism,
according to which objectivity is impossible, meaning is self-contradictory,
and reality is socially constructed.” (Pinker, 1997, p. 57)
Sociobiology, the use of biology to
understand human social behavior, emerged in the 1970’s by prominent scientists
such as George Williams, E.O. Wilson, Robert Trivers, William Hamilton, Richard
Dawkins and others. Begun by Charles
Darwin in the late 1800’s it took another century before scientists had the
empirical data to create the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology, genetics
and psychology. But this progress of
the 1970’s was constrained by left-wing ideological attacks on these scientists
that were putting forth a more biological view of the human mind, culture and
resultant thoughts, emotions and behaviors.
Wilson’s book Sociobiology
caused quite a stir. Ideologically
driven and theoretically incoherent essays and books were published to attack
it. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wrote a book entitled The Use And
Abuse of Biology in which he only revealed his true worry that culture
would be dethroned as an independent super-organism directing all human
thought, emotion and behavior and that this would undermine the prestige of the
field of cultural anthropology.
The leftist paleontologist Steven Jay Gould and leftist geneticist
Richard Lewontin wrote an essay entitled “Against Sociobiology” in which they
basically accused Wilson of promoting eugenics, Social Darwinism and the
hypothesis of racial differences in intelligence. Wilson was absurdly accused of defending racism, sexism, social
inequality, slavery and genocide because of his scientifically sound view of
the genetics and biology of human behavior.
At Harvard where he taught, Wilson was harassed and jeered and protested
by the politically correct students and faculty of the time. In one incident in 1978 when he was
addressing a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
a group of placard carrying and slogan chanting protestors interrupted his
speech and came up onto the stage and poured a pitcher of water over his head.
Richard Trivers, another pivotal figure
in the development of the sociobiology of the 1970’s, wrote landmark papers on
the evolutionary basis of altruism, parent-offspring conflict, differential
male and female rates of parental investment, sibling rivalry and human
self-deception. He too was reviled as a
tool of the right-wing establishment even though he was in fact rather left of
center himself.
Another major target of the politically
correct in the 1970’s was Richard Dawkins for his 1976 book entitled The
Selfish Gene in which he laid out a scientifically correct view of
genetic evolution in all living things.
He was immediately accused of “genetic determinism” and “crude
reductionism,” two inaccurate and essentially meaningless but widely used
abusive terms applied to sociobiology.
The “selfish gene” in the hands of unscientific ideologues quickly
became one of the most misinterpreted scientific concepts. Dawkins was accused of saying that people
are naturally selfish and want only to selfishly spread their genes. But what Dawkins put forth was a correct
“gene-centered” theory of evolution.
Animals, including humans, don’t consciously strive to spread their
genes, but they consciously strive to experience the enjoyment of sex and
offspring. Genes spread themselves by
designing organisms for their own use.
Genes make us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children and by
living our social lives we are able to survive and reproduce and thus pass on
the “selfish genes” whose nature is to replicate.
In 1976 the American Anthropological
Association tried but failed to pass a motion condemning Wilson’s Sociobiology. The anthropologist Derek Freeman published a
book in 1983 entitled Margaret Mead and Samoa, which
largely debunked Margaret Mead’s theories about culture and behavior in Samoa
and revealed that she was in fact an incompetent anthropologist. That same year the American Anthropological
Association passed a motion that condemned Freeman’s expose’ on Mead. She was, after all, an icon of the cultural
anthropology establishment, and Derek’s empirically grounded debunking could
not be tolerated.
In the 1960’s the psychologist Paul Ekman
discovered through his cross-cultural research that certain human facial
expressions were universal among humans.
These expressions relate to the emotions of surprise, fear, anger, joy,
sadness and disgust. Ekman’s findings,
which should have been hailed as a milestone in human studies, were condemned
by Margaret Mead and other anthropologists, who feared that he threatened to
replace the culturally unique with the culturally universal. Much of cultural anthropology’s efficacy
rests on the prevalence of the culturally unique and exotic over the culturally
universal. Today Ekman is a
world-renowned specialist in the science of facial expressions as they relate
to universal human emotions.
Evolutionary psychology has also been
attacked from the right as well.
Conservative Christian fundamentalists condemn it because it does away
with the Genesis creation myth and the idea of an eternal human soul or the
“ghost in the machine.”
It’s true that Darwin’s theory of evolutionary biology has been misused
in the past, as was the case with Social Darwinism in the late 1800’s and early
1900’s in Europe and America. Biology
was indeed misused in the name of Euroamerican imperialism, racism and fascism. But as is the case with all knowledge, scientific
knowledge it must be used responsibly.
We cannot condemn science just because some people have misused it.
The fall of the overly ideological social
sciences that began in the 1970’s reached a critical mass during the 1990’s
with a large and irrefutable body of empirical scientific knowledge. There is just too much contrary evidence
against a view that ignores our evolution and our biology. The mapping of the human genome and the
human brain and the mountains of empirical evidence from dozens of areas of
research have revealed to us our genetic, evolutionary and biological
heritage. They have revealed to us our
true human nature. In 1991 the
anthropologist D. E. Brown published a book entitled Human Universals
in which he pointed to the fact that there are more similarities than
differences between human cultures.
Brown has put together an extensive list of traits that are shared by
all human cultures. (see appendix A) This should come as no surprise since all
humans share the same evolutionary history and current human genome.
There
Is Considerable Common Ground Between The Natural Sciences And The Social
Sciences And Humanities.
There is nothing to fear from biological or evolutionary explanations
for human culture. These explanations
demystify and explain but do not detract from the value of our cultural
creations. We can now explain human
culture in terms of universals that are adaptive such as our core social
behaviors related to subsistence and mating.
We can also explain many elements of human culture in terms of
universals that are by-products of our brain-mind abilities such as art, music,
literature and religion. The
variability of culture can be explained in terms of a universal human nature
interacting with unique historical and environmental forces acting upon
populations of humans and with the epidemiological dynamics of culture within
populations.
One example among scores of possible examples is the one used by Wilson
in Concilience in which he traces the traditional Amazonian art to the
culturally acceptable drug ayahuasca and its effect on the brain. Mystical religious experiences can now be
explained in terms of brain chemistry and it appears that some of the world’s
great religions were started by individuals who had what we would refer to
today as real psychological or psychiatric “issues” to put it mildly. Hearing voices and seeing apparitions are
signs of schizophrenia today and not signs of communicating with
anthropomorphic gods and goddesses. The
great charismatic founders of religious cults that became full-blown religions
combined their intense personalities with their audio and visual hallucinations
to enthrall their followers.
Brain chemistry is directly linked to cultural creation. For example, the neurotransmitter dopamine
plays a key role in the brain’s reward pathway that prompts good feelings in
response to certain behaviors such as relieving hunger, quenching thirst or
having sex. Dopamine also facilitates
pattern making by the brain, in other words, it helps us to see patterns in the
world around us that can help us to pursue opportunities and avoid
dangers. An excess of dopamine has also
been implicated in schizophrenia and belief in the supernatural and
paranormal. Schizophrenics see patterns
where none exist, as do people who believe in the supernatural and paranormal.
(New Scientist, 2002; Horvitz, 2003)
In a 1994 article in the British Journal of Psychiatry entitled
“Creativity and Psychopathology: A Study of 291 World-Famous Men” the author
Felix Post points to the connection between low to moderate psychopathology and
artistic creativity. Post studied the
psychological histories of 291 famous men in science, thought, politics and
art. The categories were: scientists
and inventors, statesmen and national leaders, painters and sculptors,
composers and novelists and playwrights.
According to Post, all these men:
“…excelled not only by virtue of their abilities and
originality, but also of their drive, perseverance, industry, and
meticulousness. With a few exceptions,
these men were emotionally warm, with a gift for friendship and
sociability. Most had unusual
personality characteristics and, in addition, minor ‘neurotic’ abnormalities
were probably more common than in the general population. Severe personality deviations were unduly
frequent only in the case of visual artists and writers.” (Post, 1994, p. 22)
Post goes on to say that:
“Scientists had the lowest prevalence of psychic
abnormalities, but even in their case these were absent or trivial in only
one-third. The amounts of
psychopathology increase steadily from composers, politicians, artists, and
thinkers through to writers.” (Ibid p. 24)
Ancient Shamans, who were the original ancestors of all priests,
experienced altered states of consciousness from various means, including drugs
and sensory deprivation, and used this as their inspiration as well as their
device to enthrall and convince their clients of their authenticity and
spiritual efficacy. This does not mean
that psychopathology is a prerequisite of creativity and cultural creation,
however it does demonstrate both direct and indirect links between brain
processes and certain types of cultural creation. After all, the Oracles at Delphi breathed noxious fumes and had
visions, while the witchcraft crazes of 16th and 17th
century Europe were fueled not only by religious and social anxiety but also by
the psychoactive effects of mold on rye bread. And in fact, much of male
cultural creation (and a look at history reveals males creating a large amount
of culture) is not a function of pathology, but is a function of sexual
selection, whereby males strive to impress women to get women as their
mates. Men have been trying to impress
women in every way for ages: by proving their physical and manual prowess, by
proving their intellectual and linguistic prowess, by proving their social and
economic prowess, and also by proving their artistic, musical and literary
prowess. Women are selecting men based
upon certain criteria. (see below David Buss and The
Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating)
The newly developing science of memetics is also giving us understanding
of the evolution of culture. Memes,
like their biological counterpart genes, are the units of culture such as ideas
that develop and spread because of their impacts on human minds, human lives
and human societies. There are musical
ideas, artistic ideas, religions ideas, literary ideas, philosophical ideas,
ideas related to human survival and reproduction such as ideas regarding
economic, social and political organization, ideas regarding mating and
childrearing and many others that show a remarkable resilience down through the
ages. As mentioned earlier, some ideas
are directly adaptive and others have no apparent adaptive functions at all or
very indirect adaptive functions at best.
A recent landmark book by Pascal Boyer entitled Religion Explained: The
Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought provides a
convincing case that religion, like many other cultural creations is a
by-products of the mind’s inference systems which have been designed for other
purposes but can be used for many other things by humans. Boyer’s explanation, one that would be
supported by modern cognitive neuroscience, is that humans are stimulus junkies
because the human brain has so many specialized stimulus (information)
processing systems which have been designed for specific adaptive tasks but
which can be used for other things by humans.
Accordingly, music is a result of the human desire for pure and
intensified auditory stimulation by a brain designed for adaptive auditory
processing. Art is a result of the
human desire for pure and intensified visual stimulus by a brain designed for
adaptive visual processing. Music and
art have no adaptive value; they are pure pleasure technologies. Another factor behind human cultural
creation is our ability to think abstractly and in a sense decouple our
cognition from the physical world around us.
We can develop and manipulate concepts and ideas in our minds. Like music and the arts, certain religious
ideas have been successful because they activate existing inference systems
that are of vital importance to humans such as those that govern our most
intense emotions, shape our interactions with other people, give us moral
feelings, and organize social groups.
(Boyer, 2001, p. 135)
Biologically and environmentally correct
history is providing a unifying theory for that field. The Pulitzer Price winning book Guns,
Germs, And Steel by Jared Diamond shows how the broad sweeps of human
history have been strongly influenced by the physical environment in which
populations found themselves. For
example, according to Diamond, the civilizations of Eurasia, from China to
Egypt and everything in between, were the earliest to make major social,
political, economic and technological breakthroughs because of the geography of
the Eurasian continent. Specifically,
the availability of many types of domesticable plants and animals and their
similarity across the same band of latitude led to food supplies that could
support large populations. In addition,
because of the east-west axis provided by the continent, ideas were able to
travel in an efficient manner over the terrain by way of foot travel and
horses. By contrast, there were few
domesticable plants and animals in north and south America and the south-north
axis cut across difference bands of latitude which did not allow the spread of
plant and animal species adapted to a specific biome. North and South America did not get horses until European
explorers and settlers brought them after 1492.
In the area of gender relations and human
mating behavior, the book by David Buss entitled The Evolution of Desire:
Strategies of Human Mating is a multiculturally researched book that is
a landmark standard in the field of evolutionary psychology. This book provides a solid empirical basis
for understanding the complex mating behavior of humans and the underlying male
and female psychologies involved. Among
Buss’s many important findings are his globally universal profiles of what
women and men look for in a mate.
Universally, women look for economic capacity, social status, age
(slightly older), ambition and industriousness, dependability and stability,
intelligence, compatibility, size and strength, good health and love and
commitment. These traits add up to a
mate that will be able to successfully provide for her offspring. Universally, men look for youth, beauty as
characterized by things such as skin tone and facial and body symmetry,
chastity and fidelity. These traits add
up to a mate with good genes to blend with his own and one that will be
sexually faithful so he doesn’t end up expending his resources on another man’s
child. (Buss, 1994, pp. 19-72)
Another book, The Axemaker’s Gift: Technology’s Capture And Control Of
Our Minds And Culture by James Burke and Robert Ornstein provides a
grand historical synthesis and explanation of the dynamics of human cultural
development, particularly with regard to the way that humans “cut and control”
their environments -- the physical environment, social environment and the
information environment. From the first
axemakers who began making stone tools two million years ago with which to more
efficiently “cut and control” their physical environments, up through the ages
with the development of not only more hand tools and eventually machinery, but
also tools to cut and control the information environment such as writing,
printing and computers.
All of these books and scores of others
are examples of how to go about integrating by connecting our evolutionary past
to our present with our biology in mind.
A quick search on the internet will reveal the large body of knowledge
out there related to the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology with the
social and behavioral sciences.
In the light of overwhelming empirical data
regarding the connection between biology and culture it only makes sense to
accept the clear evidence. And if that
evidence is clear, we should be considering integrating it into our teaching of
the social sciences at the elementary, secondary and post-secondary
levels. At the elementary, secondary
and post-secondary levels in the social sciences we should be teaching the
scientific view of cosmology and the origins of the universe and our solar
system and earth. We should be teaching about the evolution and connectedness
of all life on earth, and specifically the evolution of the human brain and
behavior. We should help our students
to understand the cause and effect relationships behind human thoughts, emotions
and behaviors. And we should let them
understand the development of human culture and all of its multifaceted
functions. In short, we help our
students to understand the physical world around them and also what it means to
be human in that world.
Parts of the plan have already been laid out for us
with regard to utilizing brain research to inform our educational theory and
practices. There has already been a
considerable integration of the brain sciences with education theory and
practice and a proliferation of research and publications. From Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences
to Jensen’s Teaching With The Brain In Mind, we have witnessed a
literal explosion of books that integrate the brain sciences with educational
practices. The brain sciences are
being applied to every area and situation of human life. From mental health and our knowledge of a
host of psychological and psychiatric disorders, especially schizophrenia and
anxiety disorders, to gender relations and our knowledge of the innate differences
and similarities between the brains and resultant thoughts, emotions and
behaviors of males and females of our species.
An excellent contemporary guide to exploring the human brain and
resultant psychology is The Owner’s Manual for the Brain: Everyday
Applications from Mind-Brain Research by Pierce J. Howard.
Over
The Coming Decades The Social Sciences, And To A Lesser Degree The Humanities,
Will Come Increasingly Into Concilience With The Natural Sciences.
I believe that the ideological opposition
to a biologically informed view of human mind, behavior, society, culture and
history is on the decline in the face of overwhelming counter evidence. I also believe that we will be seeing more
of the concilience between the natural and social sciences that E.O. Wilson
talks about. This means that social and
cultural behavior will be increasingly explained in a way that is more
harmonious with the natural sciences, especially evolutionary biology. This approach will lead to greater
understanding of humans and the human predicament. The rate of diffusion of this concilience will depend upon more
communication between the natural sciences and the social sciences and
humanities in general, but especially in universities and colleges. It will also depend on more integration of
the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities in our school curriculum
from the elementary to the postsecondary levels. The diffusion of biological interpretations to the social
sciences will be easiest because of the existing scientific attitude that
exists in these fields. The diffusion
may be slower in the humanities, which might put up more resistance, but
perhaps not.
The social sciences must embrace rather
than abandon the empirical scientific method.
The more that the social sciences can tell us about cause and effect
with regard to human individuals and society, the more relevant and useful the
social sciences will be. There is no
nature-nurture debate -- it’s 100% genes and 100% environment. Genes and the vehicles they build (us) live
within and act upon a physical environment in a relationship of co-evolution.
There is no dichotomy between biology and culture. Humans are able to create culture by virtue of their
evolutionarily shaped physiological, neurological and psychological
endowment. Humans create culture for
directly adaptive purposes, for indirectly adaptive purposes and for no
adaptive purposes at all. Some of the
greatest human cultural creations such as art, music and religion are
by-products of the functions of real adaptations. Art, music and religion certainly have some psychological
functions in that they provide pleasure, but they serve no adaptive
functions. We could survive and reproduce
without them, but they make survival and reproduction more enjoyable because
they exaggerate audio and visual stimulus that is adaptable and therefore
pleasurable. (Pinker, 1997, chap 8)
Much has been said to the effect that a
scientific version of human nature, psychology and culture takes away the
intrinsic meaning of life, but that could not be further from the truth. Life does not lose meaning through the
demystification that evolutionary psychology brings. In fact, life gains even more richly textured and complex
meaning when we know our evolutionary and biological heritage, when we know how
we got to be the species that we are, when we learn to understand our true
nature. Life does not lose meaning if
there is no ghost in the machine -- no essential spirit or soul that lives on
in an afterlife. In fact, life gains
more intrinsic existential meaning in that our individual lives are what really
matter and we should make the best of them.
Because the beneficial effects of meditation and prayer have been proven
to be a result of brain chemistry and it’s affect upon the immunological system
and not an experience of the Supreme Being, does not detract from their value
either.
As Anton Checkov said: -- Man will become better when you
show him what he is like. And
to the concerned politically correct ideologue, by the word “man” Checkov meant
“humankind” including women. Evolutionary psychology and an evolutionarily and
biologically informed social science hold out the promise for us to truly
understand ourselves in every way, the good, the bad and the ugly. Humans have an evolutionary and biological
predisposition toward violence, particularly coalitional violence, but they
also have an evolutionary and biological predisposition to cooperate and
mediate conflicts so as to avoid violence.
But it would be incorrect to say that because violence is natural for
humans that it is morally good. That
would be the naturalistic fallacy, the fallacy that if it’s in nature, if it’s
“natural,” that it’s “good.” While humans do have moral propensities, they also
have less then moral ones as well.
Biology is amoral in that it only seeks to explain cause and effect in
living things.
“The
dread of a permanently wicked human nature takes two forms. One is a practical fear: that social reform
is a waste of time because human nature is unchangeable. The other is deeper concern, which grows out
of the Romantic belief that what is natural is good.” (Pinker, 2002, p. 159)
Another fear is that a biological view of
human nature does away with free will, but again, nothing could be further from
the truth. An understanding of the
brain and the organism’s thoughts, emotions and behaviors reveal that the very
nature of the brain is to make choices – the brain is designed for choice. The brain is computational in nature with
circuits dedicated to if-then statements based upon input from the senses. These are called inferences that are
essentially choices of how to think and feel which in turn drive behavior. All human action is based upon choices made
by these innate inferential abilities.
A more biological view of humans promotes
equality – all humans come from the same genome that was finally hammered out
during a genetic bottleneck that took place around 200,000 years ago in
southern Africa. Humans, unless born
impaired from genetic damage, all share the same underlying physiology and
neurology, the same neurological and psychological architecture that
predisposes them toward certain species-specific patterns of thoughts, emotions
and behaviors.
With regard to the issue of gender
equality, many feminists don’t want to accept the fact that there are some
innate differences in abilities between men and women. They want men and women to be the same so
that men and women can be equal in society.
But besides the obvious physical and physiological differences between
males and females of our species, there are also important, neurological,
psychological, hormonal and immunological differences as well. Research also shows that there are
differences in certain abilities between men and women. On average, females are superior to males in
verbal performance (both verbal memory and verbal fluency). Women are also better in landmark memory. Men are superior to women in visual-spatial
and targeting ability and in math skills. (Kimura, 2002; Howard 2000; Moir
& Jessel 1991) There is an
evolutionary and biological basis for these differences in abilities. But feminists miss an important point -- men
and women don’t need to be biologically the same in order for there to be equality
between the sexes and for that equality to be valued by a society. In addition, throughout our evolutionary
history and continuing to the present the males and females of our species,
because of their evolutionary heritage, are predisposed toward certain
distinguishable patterns of gender behavior, i.e. masculine and feminine
behavior. And if some women feel
inclined act masculine and some men feel inclined to act feminine as a way of
attaining happiness, then that is their right and their privilege. A biological view of human nature does not
preclude people from having cultural beliefs that run against the grain, which
we’ve been doing for ages, and which is an example of the great amount of free
will we do possess. Biology is not
entirely destiny.
In the foreword for Richard Dawkin’s 1976
book entitled The Selfish Gene, the pioneer sociobiologist Robert
Trivers wrote:
“Darwinian
theory gives us a glimpse of an underlying symmetry and logic in social relationships
which, when fully comprehended by ourselves, should revitalize our political
understanding and provide the intellectual support for a science and medicine
of psychology. In the process it should
also give us a deeper understanding of the many roots of our suffering.” (Trivers, 1976)
And once we understand the many roots of
our suffering as springing from aspects of our evolved human nature we can
perhaps deal with them on a more objective basis.
In Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel
he makes as strong case for the fact that the Eurasian civilizations
became so advanced because of the geography of resources and communication and
not because of some inherent racial superiority of Asians and Europeans. He also posits that cultures become more
advanced when they are in contact with other cultures that they can borrow from
and share with. If you are a Pacific
islander, a member of a society on a remote island in a region that was
isolated from important external cultural development, you might be better able
to understand your own level of development vis a vis Asia and Europe. You might also be more open minded to the
value of more formal regional and international contacts backed up by better
social science education
And lastly, many critics, especially
Christian Fundamentalists object to the fact that an empiricist scientific view
of morality does away with the need for an anthropomorphic god that give us our
moral rules and punishes us when we break these rules. But human moral behavior does not require
supernatural underpinnings. I will
conclude with a quote from E. O. Wilson’s Concilience chapter eleven
“Religion and Ethics,” which provides and empirical view of the moral nature of
humans:
“Ethics
in the empiricist view, is conduct favored consistently enough throughout a
society to be expressed as a code of principles. It is driven by hereditary predispositions in mental development
– the ‘moral sentiments’ of the Enlightenment philosophers – causing broad
convergence across culture, while reaching precise form in each culture
according to historical circumstances.
The codes, whether judged by outsiders as good or evil, play an
important role in determining which cultures flourish, and which decline.” (Wilson, 1998, p. 240)
While evolution by natural selection is
an amoral process, the requirements of human social life have given humans
evolutionary adaptations that, taken together, predispose them toward moral
behavior for the sake of survival and reproduction. It can be said with empirical confidence that humans are indeed
moral animals.
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Donald E. Brown’s List of Human Universals
Source: The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
|
Abstraction in speech and thought Action under self-control distinguished from those not under control Aesthetics Affection expressed and felt Age grades Age statuses Age terms Ambivalence Anthropomorphization Anticipation Antonyms Baby talk Belief in supernatural/religion Beliefs, false Beliefs about death Beliefs about disease |
Beliefs about disease Beliefs about fortune and misfortune Binary cognitive distinctions Biological mother and social mother normally the same person Black (color term) Body adornment Childbirth customs Childcare Childhood fears Childhood fear of loud noises Childhood fear of strangers Choice making (choosing alternative) Classification Classification of age Classification of behavioral propensities |
Classification of body parts Classification of colors Classification of fauna Classification of flora Classification of inner states Classification of kin Classification of sex Classification of space Classification of tools Classification of weather conditions Coalitions Collective identities Conflict Conflict, consultation to deal with Conflict, means of dealing with Conflict, mediation of |
|
Conjectural reasoning Containers Continua (ordering as cognitive pattern) Contrasting marked and nonmarked sememes (meaningful elements of language) Cooking Cooperation Cooperative labor Copulation normally conducted in privacy Corporate (perpetual) statuses Coyness display Critical learning periods Crying Cultural variability Culture Culture/nature distinction |
Customary greetings Daily routines Dance Death rituals Decision making Decision making, collective Differential valuations Directions, giving of Discrepancies between speech, thought, and action Dispersed groups Distinguishing right and wrong Diurnality Divination Division of labor Division of labor by age Division of labor by sex |
Dreams Dream interpretation Dominance/submission Economic inequalities, consciousness of Emotions Empathy Entification (treating patterns and relations as things) Environment, adjustments to Envy Envy, symbolic means of coping with Ethnocentrism Etiquette Explanation Face (word for) Facial communication |
|
Facial expression of anger Facial expression of contempt Facial expression of disgust Facial expression of fear Facial expression of happiness Facial expression of sadness Facial expression of surprise Facial expressions, masking/modifying of Fairness (equity) concept of Family (or household) Father and mother, separate kin terms for Fears Fears, ability to overcome |
Fear of death Feasting Females do more direct childcare Figurative speech Fire Folklore Food preferences Food sharing Future, attempts to predict Generosity admired Gestures Gift giving Good and bad distinguished Gossip Government Grammar Group living |
Groups that are not based on family Habituation Hairstyles Hand (word for) Healing the sick (or attempting to) Hope Hospitality Husband older than wife on average Hygienic care Identity, collective Imagery Incest between mother and son unthinkable or tabooed Incest, prevention or avoidance In-group distinguished from out-group(s) |
|
Inheritance rules Institutions (organized co-activities) Insulting Intention Interest in bioforms (living things or things that resemble them) Interpolation Interpreting behavior Intertwining (e.g. weaving) Jokes Judging others Kin, close distinguished from distant Kin groups Kin terms translatable by basic relations of procreation Kinship statuses Language |
Language employed to manipulate others Language employed to misinform or mislead Language is translatable Language not a simple reflection of reality Language, prestige from proficient use of Law (rights and obligations) Law (rules of membership) Leaders Lever Likes and dislikes Linguistic redundancy Logical notions Logical notion of “and” Logical notion of “opposite” Logical notion of “part/whole” |
Logical notion of “same” Magic Magic to increase life Magic to sustain life Magic to win love Making comparisons Male and female and adult and child seen as having different natures Males dominate public/political realm Males engage in more coalitional violence Males more aggressive Males more prone to lethal violence Males more prone to theft Males, on average, travel greater distances over lifetime Manipulation of social relations |
|
Marking at phonemic, syntactic, and lexical levels Marriage Materialism Meal times Meaning, most units of are not universal Measuring Medicine Melody Memory Mental maps Mentalese Metaphor Metonym Mood or consciousness altering techniques and/or substances |
Moral sentiments Moral sentiments, limited effective range of Morphemes Mother normally has consort during child rearing years Mourning Murder proscribed Music Music, children’s Music related in part to religious activity Music seen as art Normal distinguished from abnormal states Nouns Numerals (counting) |
Music, vocal Music, vocal , includes speech forms Musical redundancy Musical repetition Musical variation Myths Narrative Nomenclature, (perhaps the same as classification) Nonbodily decorative art Oligarchy, de facto One (numeral) Onomatopoeia Overestimating objectivity of thought Pain |
|
Past/present/future Person, concept of Personal names Phonemes Phonemes defined by sets of minimally contrasting features Phonemes, merging of Phonemes range from 10 to 70 in number Phonemic change, inevitability of Phonemic change, rules of Phonemic system Planning Planning for future Play |
Play to perfect skills Poetry/rhetoric Poetic line, uniform length of Poetic lines characterized by repetition and variation Poetic lines demarcated by pauses Polysemy (one word has several related meanings) Possessive, intimate Possessive, loose Practice to improve skills Precedence, concept of Preference for own children and close kin, nepotism |
Prestige inequalities Pretend play Pride Private inner life Promise Pronouns Pronouns, minimum two numbers Pronouns, minimum three persons Proper names Property Proverbs, sayings Proverbs, sayings in mutually contradictory forms Psychological defense mechanisms |
|
Rape Rape proscribed Reciprocal exchanges (of labor, goods, or services) Reciprocity, negative (revenge, retaliation) Reciprocity, positive Recognition of individuals by face Redress of wrongs Resistance to abuse of power, to dominance Rhythm Right-handedness as population norm Rites of passage Rituals Risk taking Role and personality seen in dynamic interrelationship (i.e. departures from role can be explained in terms of individual personality. |
Sanctions Sanctions for crimes against the collectivity Sanctions include removal from the social unit Self-control Self distinguished from other Self as neither wholly passive or wholly authoritarian Self as subject and object Self-image, awareness of (concern for what others think) Self-image, manipulation of Self-image, wanted to be positive Self is responsible Semantics Semantic category of affecting things and people |
Semantic category of dimension Semantic category of giving Semantic category of location Semantic category of motion Semantic category of speed Semantic category of other physical properties Semantic components Semantic components, generation Semantic components, sex Sememes, commonly used ones are short, infrequently use ones are longer Senses unified Sex differences in spatial cognition and behavior |
|
Sex (gender) terminology is fundamentally binary Sex statuses Sexual attraction Sexual attractiveness Sexual jealousy Sexual modesty Sexual regulation Sexual regulation includes incest prevention Sexuality as focus of interest Shame Shelter Sickness and death seen as related Snakes, wariness around Social structure Socialization |
Socialization expected from senior kin Socialization includes toilet training Spear Special speech for special occasions Statuses and roles Statuses, ascribed and achieved Statuses distinguished from individual Statuses on other than sex, age, or kinship bases Stinginess, disapproval of Stop/nonstop constraints (in speech sounds) Succession Sweets preferred Symbolism Symbolic speech |
Synesthetic metaphors Synonyms Taboos Tabooed food Tabooed utterances Taxonomy Territoriality Thumb sucking Tickling Time Time, cyclicity of Tools Tool dependency Tool making Tools for cutting Tools for making tools Tools patterned culturally Tools, permanent Tools for pounding |
|
Toys, playthings Trade Triangular awareness (assessing relationships among the self and two other people) True and false distinguished Turn-taking Two (numeral) Tying material (i.e. something like string) Units of time Verbs Violence, some forms of proscribed Visiting Vocalic/nonvocalic contrasts in phonemes Vowel contrasts Weaning Weapons |
Weather control (attempts to) White (color term) |
|
Note: The above list should be considered a partial list. There are certainly many more. But it’s a start.