Sociobiology 5: What is at issue

So now, I think it's worth asking what we really can achieve by doing sociobiological investigations, and some of the traps in previous attempts.

Humans are animals. They are vertebrates, mammals, primates, and apes. Like other animals, their behaviours are formed, constrained, and in most cases fully dependent upon their biology, but the confounding factor in doing sociobiology is the trap of taking one's own culture, the culture of the researcher, as being "normal" and treating all other cultures as less than normal, or primitive, or in some other manner less than worthy, treating biases acquired in one's upbringing as the "proper" state.

This biasing has resulted in defences of male dominance, patriarchy in general, colonialism, racial rankings, and so on. Like the Great Chain of Being Mark I, this Great Chainism Mark II treats European or western values as being somehow the inevitable outcome of the evolutionary process, just like progressivism in evolutionary biology has treated intelligence and language as inevitable. Once you rank traits according to your own culture, the path is wide open to devalue others, and in the extreme, to treat ethnicities that are different from your own as pests to be exterminated. Not only the Nazis held this view, as it was quite common before evolutionary theory to treat, say, Australian aborigines as somehow a race doomed by evolution to extinction, and our European duty was to ease their slide into oblivion.

One of the basic reasons for this was that, until fairly recently in the history of ideas, there was no clear distinction between "culture" and "race" or biology. And race was itself defined in cultural as well as geographical biological variation. The attack upon this around the period after the second world war is well known. What I want to focus on is a somewhat more subtle error, of mistaking social institutions in the west as being universal for all societies. An example is monogamy - the twentieth century saw many people claiming that a nuclear family was the default for human sexual relations, with the woman necessarily the homemaker and man the mighty hunter.

We are past all that now, although there is always the temptation to revive it in some form or another. But many sociobiological "explanations", such as the Thornhill and Palmer "rape is natural" thesis, strike one as being simplistic at best, and downright malign at worst. Yes, rape is a natural phenomenon, but so is cholera. Explaining rape in terms of inclusive fitness begs all kinds of questions, not least being: how much is rape an outcome of cultural influences, and not biology? I do not think that the ubiquitous tendency of cultures to blame the victims of rape rather than the perpetrators is somehow biological, for example, as witness the current case in Saudi Arabia. If anything is cultural, that is.

Darwin himself had no clear distinction between culture and biology, which I think motivates his claim that:

The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.

Is this cultural evolution, or biological evolution? Darwin equivocates on the term "race" discussing it at length in the Descent of Man as a biological concept, using interfertility of human races as a basis for thinking that they are all geographical variants of a single species. But here he seems to mean that the culture of "civilised nations" is what is evolving and supplanting each other.

So we have to be very careful to ensure that we actually are investigating biology, and not culture, and this is very hard to do. As I said, the use of phylogeny is helpful here. If we find a general or typical behaviour in apes that is also found in humans, we can have some confidence that the behaviour is biological (although we also have to watch out for anthropomorphising animals, and particularly to not import cultural attitudes into observations of these non-human animals).

Once we have identified the homologies, then we have to turn to explaining the human forms. This is also hard. Take my favourite example of social dominance. As apes, it is to be expected that we will exhibit social dominance behaviours in our social structures, with alphas and betas and so on. Apes do that; in fact most primates do that. But how much of any social dominance hierarchy is due to our biology, and how much is due to the particular cultures in which we are observing it? That is tougher to discern.

Universality of a mode of social dominance is no guarantee that it is biological - all extant human societies arose within the last 50,000 years from a common ancestral population, and in the meantime there has been substantial cultural diffusion. So we have to look at the most isolated populations, in Papua New Guinea and Australia, and the evidence remaining from the past centuries of invasion and inculcation of global attitudes makes that "signal" hard to detect. Very few "naive" populations have been scientifically observed, especially if we grant that the proper distinction between culture and biology only took root in anthropology and sociology in the past hundred years. And prejudices remain - the objections to symbolic reasoning in African great apes are often founded on them.

But it is worth attempting to identify what is biological about human behaviour, if only because, a priori, there must be such traits. They exist in other species, and we are after all animals.

I think that what would make sociobiology work is twofold: one, that we iteratively refine our hypotheses based on cross-species comparisons. If humans seek social standing via dominance competition, and our close cousins also do, that is good reason to think it is biological. In one way, culture itself is biological, given that chimps and bonobos also evidence cultural transmission, along with various monkeys, cetaceans and even birds. Phylogeny gives us a crossbearing here. Work done by child and cognitive psychologists also helps - if we can see evidence of behaviours before acculturation has occurred too much, that is evidence that behaviours are biologically based. But we must proceed cautiously.

As I said before, selectionist explanations must follow rather than drive this work, but that is not entirely the full story. We have reasons to expect that social dominance behaviours are biological in part because there is, after all, a selectionist reason for seeking pack or troop reputation: it increases one's fitness via access to mates and resources, as well as gaining mutual or reciprocal support from the pack or troop members. Xenophobia in chimps is undoubtedly homologous with xenophobia in humans, for the selective reason that protecting kin and access to resources increases the average fitness of members of the group. But it matters not whether these are group-selectionist or individual-selectionist explanations, except to philosophers of biology.

I'm almost done on this topic for now, but I would like to say one more thing. The thing about sociobiological explanations I most like, the reason I am a reborn sociobiologist, is that it tends to deprecate our specialness, and most of all the specialness of our ruling culture. There's nothing more advanced about western culture than about tribal or other cultures because they all, including our own, are the outworking of the same biology. In fact, knowing that we are what we are: mildly altruistic, mildly xenophobic, but trading dominance seeking apes, indicates the sorts of things that a decent social constitution has to guard against and encourage, if we want a better social order. We must expect nepotism, and distaste for those who are foreign. Our laws and institutions should prevent this. We should not expect that our behaviour in cities will be any different, once allowances for density of social connections is taken into account, than it would be if we were nomadic foragers. As I said before, we are in our wild-state. And we always will be. It is that backdrop in which social evolution, the evolution of culture, is framed and plays out.

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Very good as usual. I think your suggestions to avoid the excesses of sociobiology (and of the debate it engendered) make sense. Doesn't that pretty much insure it will be ignored though?

Nice piece.

I think there are a number of concerns with sociobiology, judging by recent experience.

First, there is a tendency in any field to overstate the power of one's proprietary explanatory mechanisms. What you describe in this piece is a field of study that is modest and careful. While I agree with the general principles you lay out here, there seems to be a pretty persistent tendency among folks who have worked this patch and written about it to be grasping and/or publicity hungry. I think this pretty much goes with the field--there is a quasi-religious quality to people's desire to find some sort of key to human behavior, by which they might pass easy judgment. So far, scientists have shown that they like that kind of power a little too much, imo.

Secondly, I think sociobiology has persistently underestimated the power of social and cultural systems. I just don't think they can be simply reduced to mere functions of biological systems, which seems to be the prevailing attitude of folks in the sociobiology camp.

Human behavior, I think, is clearly the result of a complex interaction of several different mutually penetrating systems. So far what we've seen from sociobiologists seems to me to be pretty willfully ignorant of non-biological (or at least not traditionally biological) considerations.

I am not sure that scientists generally are willing to change their ways on this point. Are you?

Am I what? I haven't yet done any such work (I'm a philosopher - we leave the heavy lifting to others). But I fully concur that culture and sociological institutions are causes, and that they are complex as all hell. That's why the phylogenetic approach - it has a chance of disentangling biological from cultural causes. But culture is well-studied. Sociobiology only makes sense if it can offer some underlying explanation of this complexity. I do not think that it offers a complete explanation, but it can at least give some of the substrate to culture.

This biasing has resulted in defences of male dominance, patriarchy in general, colonialism, racial rankings, and so on.

Hmmm...I'm not looking for or presenting a "defense of male dominance, patriarchy in general" (I think "defense" is a statement of "should", not "is", which seems to me to be a doubtful starting place for science), but you have an actual example of a natural, persistent, human matriarchy where females occupy the dominant fraction of the economic, social, legal and political leadership roles occupied by men in all human societies that I am aware of?

There is a certain perverseness in pointing to a observed ('patriarchy') as being a possible cultural artifact when there aren't any documented unambiguous counter-examples of matriarchy in any known society at any place or time, no matter how isolated the society (or at least I am not aware of any).

It is like speculating that there may be a species of ten legged mammal. There could, but no one knows of an actual one.

By Benjamin Franz (not verified) on 22 Nov 2007 #permalink

Matriarchal societies.
Ants.
Elephants.

I expect that human patriarchal societies 'ethnically cleansed' matriarchal societies as an affront to their natural right to rule.

By grasshopper (not verified) on 22 Nov 2007 #permalink

Am I what?

. . . confident that scientists will start explaining complex cultural and social phenomena rather than pointing to a similar biological phenomenon and essentially saying the things are the same.

I am not sure that your ambition that cultural and biological causes might be disentangled is in the cards. It could very well be that the best we can hope for is to describe them and distinguish them notionally. In fact I figure that's quite likely the case.

On matriarchy: chimps and bonobos have a dual gender hierarchy, and in the case of chimps, I think, the female hierarchy trumps the male hierarchy if they decide the alpha male is behaving badly. One of the problems with terms like "patriarchy" is that it presumes that the female hierarchy is ineffectual, and that if males have the named leadership roles, women have no dominance at all. This may be true in special circumstances (like Islamic tribal societies), but most human societies have this duality, and I doubt that even the most determined patriarchists ever stamp it out (an ironic aspect of Old Testament studies is that it is clear that the post-Josiah priesthood tried to do exactly that by eliminating worship of Asheroth, which was a female rite). Here we can set up expectations based on phylogenetic considerations.

On the likelihood of scientists doing what I suggest, this is already happening. Primatology has led a number of people to rethink the distinction between cultural and biologically mediated traits. It's not that we will ever eliminate culture - because all biological traits and behaviours are employed in an existing cultural context, just as genes are employed in a given environment, and the disentanglement will be equally as difficult, but as it doesn't retard genetics, neither should it retard sociobiology. Moreover, neurobiology and some kinds of psychology are already trying to identify species typical behaviours for humans. So it will happen gradually over time. There's a lot of baggage to overcome.

Can a clear distinction between biology and culture be made? When most people hear the word "culture" they have a concept of the Guiding Light of Human Reason leading to civilization and progress. If you deny human specialness, then presumably you deny this view, but isn't the culture that's left a little thin on the ground?

Let's say we take the members of an ape troop and ratchet up their capacity for tool use so they can successfully occupy a greater variety of environments than they normally do. Might the latent capacities of their innate social behaviors lead to a greater variety of social organization than we see today? Might something like this explain human cultural differences? Is that culture? Is that something I need to separate out in order to get at the biology?

Take two of the great examples of human culture: art and music. What strikes me about both (and not to undermine human accomplishment in this area) is how trivial they are. In both cases we're probably seeing: (1) the exploitation of some trivial aspects of our sensory system through super-stimuli (something that probably doesn't require specific behavioral capacities as such); (2) playfulness (found throughout mammals); (3) tool-use (admittedly highly developed in humans); and (4) possible sexual motivations. If you take these basic biological features and blindly apply them over and over again you could get something resembling cultural production.

Throw in a similar account for our literary and philosophical musings and you get centuries of stories, theories, documents, and great treatise explaining, rationalizing, and broadening these phenomena (even adding and subtracting from their enjoyment and steering their development). And yet still, even with this entangled morass, it could be that biological explanation is doing the weight of the work here.

So, I supposed what I'm suggesting is, if you throw out the view of human history being a march of reason to ever greater civilization, isn't it then possible to at least entertain the notion that much of our culture is actually quite a dumb phenomenon?

Dumb? I don't know. Biological? Surely. Culture is whatever is transmitted to individuals from their society that is not obligately biological, such as knowledge of how to do things, rituals, and so forth. All of these have a biological substrate, but the exact form of the expression of that substrate is not determined by the biology. But that doesn't imply that it isn't rational. I think we have had a false view of rationality for a long time - it is usually a matter of betting on the best way, individually, to behave so as to improve fitness, and often that is a matter of going along with whatever arbitrary behaviours are required for inclusion in the group. Hence, for example, and as I have argued, creationism is a form of rationality.

I'd like to chime in with a pet peeve of mine. First off, I should say that I am trained as a developmental neurobiologist particularly interested in the evolution of multiple developmental strategies within a single organism (and thus a single genome). Specifically, how does the local environment shape gene expression to produce different cell types? I bring this up to emphasize my issue with the equating of the term "biological" with "genetically determined". It's a little off-topic perhaps, but I still feel that there is a basic assumption made that then leads me to question a lot of the sociobiology (and ev-psych) conclusions because I can't get past this point. I am aware that I may be misunderstanding this point, but let me give an example from popular culture that highlights my point.

Often, we hear in the media about custody battles over an adopted child. It is usually espoused in the media as a battle for rights between the biological and adopted parents. My point is that both parents can make a biological claim to parenthood. From my admittedly superficial understanding, I would say that the adoptive parents, if they have been involved in caregiving, have experienced a form of neural plasticity that causes them to identify as parents, feeling the same emotions as a "genetic" parent (my preferred term).

I bring this up because you mention "Universality of a mode of social dominance is no guarantee that it is biological - all extant human societies arose within the last 50,000 years from a common ancestral population, and in the meantime there has been substantial cultural diffusion." I would argue that the cultural diffusion, while not genetically determined, is still subject to biological explanations. And that while cultural determinism isn't genetic, this cultural plasticity may be something that is, as you touched on earlier.

And this ties into where my thinking on the topic lies. Perhaps I missed it in your posts, but to me the strongest group selectionist arguments that I can see come from not only a consideration of selection among groups, but selection due to changing environmental conditions, both due to biological and nonbiological factors. The best example that I can think of is the "Red Queen" hypothesis. Specifically, with regards to parasitism, evolution favors systems that are highly plastic to enable them to overcome novel challenges. Similarly, the evolution of our nervous system can be seen as analogously allowing us the "cultural plasticity" to overcome novel behavioral challenges due to our changing environment. Thus, focusing on genetic explanations for specific cultural traditions may be misguided, much like focusing on inheritance of specific genes involved in resistance to smallpox may not be important in understanding our resistance. I'm not sure how this fits into the models of sociobiology and group selection describes by W&W, but I'd be interested in your take on this.

I very carefully avoided saying that sociobiology rested on genes. The term "biological" here is of course more general, and includes realisation of heritable traits under different conditions.

I agree with you that cultural selection is an outpouring of the biological traits of central nervous systems, which themselves evolved to deal with changing environments, and continued to evolve from the first appearance of them, presumably in the Edicaran, to now. But I don't get why you think this must be the outcome of group selection. Red Queen, yes, but not group selection, I think. I suspect you may mean something different to what I mean by it (and what W&W mean by it).

There is selection between cultural groups. But it is not something that relies on biological group selection.

I guess I am thinking about group selection in terms of the benefits of sexual reproduction and genetic recombination within a population that maintains a significant genetic diversity to deal with rapid environmental change (at least, rapid in evolutionary terms). And the evolution of nervous systems that are plastic is yet another way to deal with rapid environmental change. But I'm not sure if the evolution of a highly plastic nervous system requires a group selectionist view in the same way that the evolution of parasite resistance can be viewed in this way.