SOMETIMES THE BUS DOES WAIT (Editor's Introduction)
The human sciences have been preoccupied, in recent years. Both sociology and sociocultural anthropology have been ever more concerned with issues of equity and power, with learning to hear the voices of minorities and of women, with seeking to understand macro-level phenomena such as globalization and micro-level phenomena such as the negotiation of social identity. Anthropology's core concept of culture and sociology's claims to empiricism and objectivity have become suspect. The scientific programs of Auguste Comte and of Bronislaw Malinowski have been largely discarded, and both natural and social scientists (1) who present themselves as searchers for the essential truths of human life are now likely to be seen as primarily pursuing their own power and influence. "Objective" is embarrassed to be seen without its quotation marks. Perhaps the only assumption beyond challenge is that of the social-cultural construction of a reality no longer held to be "out there" but instead understood to be consensual, with hegemonic collectivities self-interestedly striving to control that consensus. But while social scientists have been learning the vocabulary of "hermeneutics" and "gazes" and "narratives," of "discourses" and "texts," of "trope" and "power," of "othering" and "alterity" and "imagined communities," of "essentialism" and "agency" and "embodiment," other disciplines have been having their own revolution: Darwin's revolution. Almost unnoticed by many social scientists, the mighty labor of shifting humankind from our privileged position in the land of the non-animals to the natural world, the work of applying to ourselves the Darwinian framework that has been so astoundingly successful when applied to every other species, is well under way.
This volume is an invitation to social-cultural anthropologists and sociologists who have been missing the great evolution-revolution of our time to come visit: to visit the metanarrative of Darwinian thought that is now so large a part of the non-sociological study of human nature and society. It asks the reader to put aside the preconceptions and stereotypes social scientists often have of the "biological" (ably deconstructed by Segerstråle and by Kurzban and Haselton in part II of this volume), and to engage a powerful paradigm that is far away from those past generations - and current criminals - who would invoke a vocabulary of "genes" and "Darwin" as justification for genocide. "Biological" connotes "product of cascades of incredibly complex processes in which endogenous and exogenous factors cannot necessarily be distinguished from one another": social scientists often think it means "rigid and invariant" when they should be thinking "complex and contingent and dependent on environment." There are no genes for complex behaviors. "Genes for" is just short-hand, metonymy, attention-getting trope, and no one really believes in single genes causing complex behaviors (cf. Dawkins 1982). The evolutionary perspective provides no particular support for the status quo, no rationalizations for racism or any other form of social inequality. It has often been associated with the political Left, not the Right. "Cultural" cannot possibly be opposed to "biological" because culture and society are the only means we have of expressing our evolved psychology: like the beaver's dam, culture is both our own construction and our environment (Laland, Odling-Smee and Feldman 2000, 2001). Social-cultural constructionism is, within broad limits, not only compatible with an evolutionary approach but demanded by it! If your impression was that most evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists thought otherwise, it is good that you are reading this book. (2)
Missing the Revolution is also intended for the practicing evolutionary psychologists/behavioral ecologists and other evolutionists who are bewildered, dismayed, or just plain angry over the scorn and sneers (3) so often directed at the work they do in good faith and fascination. When intelligent people insist on talking past one another it usually means that there are unshared assumptions about what they think they are talking about. Missing aims in part to help evolutionists to spot the assumptions made by many social scientists and to explain how the perspective and findings of evolutionary psychology are essential if we are to have a systematic, cumulative social science that is not utterly isolated from the other human sciences.
Missing's perspective is not just that we need both the social and biological sciences but that they are so intertwined that the one without the other is at best incomplete, at worst, in error. It comes at a point in history when many social scientists seem to be defining their interests and identities in opposition to the biological (Bauerlein, 2001), and at a time when much of the debate seems to involve the torching of conveniently constructed straw houses in which no one ever really lived (see Kurzban and Haselton, this volume). Missing presents some applications of evolutionary psychology (and related approaches) in a manner intended to illustrate their relevance to current concerns of social scientists. It hopes to be a bridge. Its goal is to persuade social scientists to put aside preconceptions and think about the likely links between what they are doing and what evolutionists are doing. That is, after all, what is happening both for the general reading public and in most non-social science academic disciplines. First, though, what Darwinian field are we talking about?
There is no single term for those applying Darwinian theories of evolution to human behavior, and no clear consensus about how, precisely, this perspective is to be applied. The terms "human behavioral ecology," "sociobiology," "evolutionary psychology," "Darwinian psychology," and even "selfish gene theory" are in current use, though many evolutionists (particularly evolutionary biologists and some psychologists) find no need to apply a distinctive term to themselves or to their work because, for them, evolution is mainstream. The supply of labels is not endless but can seem so: Mysterud (2004) found 57 appellations, that deal with what he considers "humans and modern evolutionary theory" (p. 107). To use my own work as an example of the fluidity of labels, writing in 1973 the term I used was "Darwinian psychological anthropology," in 1974 it was "biosocial anthropology," in 1980 it was "human ethology," in 1989 "sociobiology," in 1992 "evolutionary psychology," in 1994 "evolutionary psychological anthropology." Mysterud (p. 107) quotes Alexander's (1987) hope that labels such as "sociobiology" will "melt away" because they lead to "artificial subdisciplines" associated with particular individuals or points of view and so impede the integration of biological arguments into the human sciences in general. Alexander is no doubt right but for the moment labels seem to be a necessary evil.
For this volume I will again favor "evolutionary psychology" because it clearly indicates that the goal is not to focus on individual or population differences but on human nature as a product of biological evolution. But note that the title of evolutionary psychology's first major edited volume was "Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture" (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992) - there was never any intention to make the field just one more kind of psychology. In the present context I will use "evolutionary psychology" rather inclusively and often in conjunction with "sociobiology." I will also use "human nature" as synonymous with "human evolved psychology." However, many of the contributors to this volume would definitely not call themselves evolutionary psychologists. Most but not all, I believe, would accept that Evolutionary Psychology is the Infrastructure of Culture and Society. (This last term, abbreviated as "EPICS," was the original working title for this volume.)
In a New York Times review of David Buss's (2000) The Dangerous Passion, Courtney Weaver writes: "Is Darwin replacing Freud as the spokesman for a millennium? Judging from the recent publication by evolutionary scientists of decidedly politically incorrect theories, it certainly seems that way" (Weaver, 2000). Yes, and however belatedly, Darwin is replacing not only Freud but perhaps Marx and Weber as well, for the reading public, as the source of insight into human nature and society.
If physics was the pre-eminent field of most of the Twentieth century, biology is queen of the first part of the Twenty-first. Parsing the human genome was only the opening round, with proteomics (the study of the proteins produced by the genes) likely to compete with space weaponry in scope of funding requirements. The media are filled with stories of cloning and of the genetic engineering of food crops, while biomedicine promises imminent cures for a host of illnesses. Explainers of biology such as Helen Fisher (1999, 1992, 2004), Richard Dawkins (1976, 1989, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, 2000, 2003; Dawkins & Dennett, 1999) and Richard Wrangham (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996; Wrangham, McGrew, de Waal, & Heltne, 1994) and (the late) Stephen Jay Gould (e.g., Gould, 1989, 1995, 2002)regularly find their work bestsellers, as do those who, like Michael S. Gazzaniga (1992, 2000), Jean-Pierre Changeux (1997, 2000; Edelman and Changeux 2000), Antonio Damasio (1995, 2000, 2003), Daniel Dennett (1995, 1997, 2003), Oliver Sacks (1990,1990, 1995a, 1995b) and Steven Pinker (1993, 1997, 2002) explain to the reading public how the brain and its mind work. The heroes of our time are not the anthropologists who study our own species, as Margaret Mead did, but those who, like Jane Goodall (1990) and Dian Fossey (1983), have studied nonhuman primates. Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, allocates far more space to biology and biomedicine than it does to any other fields. In psychiatry, Freud has moved to the margins and a powerful pharmacopeia has situated disorders not in the spirit or mind but in the brain and the biochemistry. Literature, music, the arts, film and journalism are being revealed as structures that rest on a base of biology and evolution, thanks to thinkers and researchers such as Joseph Carroll (1994), Hank Davis (Davis & McLeod, 2003;Davis & McLeod, 2003 Davis & Javor, 2004), Ellen Dissanyake (1992, 2000), Nils Wallin, Bjorn Merke and Steven Brown (Wallin, Merker and Brown, 2000), Robert Storey (1996) and Karl Grammar and Eckart Voland (Grammar & Voland, 2003). In the media, not nuclear war but bioterrorism and bioweaponry take pride of place among our fears. For better or worse, we live in the Age of Biology.
Academic disciplines have responded to the "evolution revolution" with varying degrees of engagement and incorporation (as summarized in the sidebar,"the response of disciplines"), just as they did in the past with Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Strangely, though, sociology and social-cultural anthropology have largely ignored the new perspective, for the most part summarily dismissing it, occasionally attacking it in passing, or, more usefully if less frequently, treating controversies over applying Darwin to the human sciences as interesting sociological phenomena to be analyzed (e.g., Segerstråle [2000] and this volume). Van den Berghe (1990) and Ellis (1996) have described the reaction of social scientists to evolutionary approaches to human behavior as "biophobia." But let us separate sociology from social-cultural anthropology, for a moment.
Social-cultural anthropology has probably been even more resistant to evolution than has sociology. This may be because anthropology's disciplinary organization has had an unanticipatedly compartmentalizing effect on evolutionary thought. In the past, particularly in the U.S.A., anthropology followed a "four-square" model consisting of social-cultural anthropology, anthropological archaeology, anthropological linguistics, and physical/biological anthropology. Though most anthropologists would specialize in just one of these areas, basic training in the discipline involved all. However, the subfields have drifted apart, in recent decades, and increasingly their members read different journals, attend different meetings, and have different colleagues. In addition, there have been many new subfields within anthropology, so that the American Anthropological Society is now a federation of sections: "General anthropology" has become a residual category of membership for the temerarious, the courageous souls who scorn to escape the flood of journals and meetings by sheltering within a more narrow specialization. Thus it is that most social-cultural anthropologists automatically relegate to one of the physical/biological or archaeological subfields anything to do with "sociobiology" or evolution, including the evolution of human behavior and even the application of evolutionary perspectives to culture and current social phenomena. (Though not myself a biological anthropologist, for example, I found long ago that the only anthropologists who read my evolution-oriented work were the biological anthropologists, regardless of what audience I thought I was addressing.) The old four-fold model of anthropology essentially functions today not to integrate, as it once did, but to compartmentalize, as social-cultural anthropologists routinely react to anything evolutionary as "biological anthropology, not my field, nothing to do with me or my work" (when they do not react with various nefarious stereotypes, discussed below).
However, there are perhaps three groups of anthropologists who have taken an explicitly evolutionary approach and who at least in times past would probably have been part of the social-cultural subdiscipline. (4) The first of these is the human behavioral ecologists, whose work Lee Cronk discusses in this volume. Many of these anthropologists, however, no longer identify with mainstream social-cultural anthropology which, by and large, ignores them. In part, this is probably because behavioral ecologists see themselves as applying evolutionary biology to the human species and therefore doing "science," while many social-cultural anthropologists appear to see such efforts as mere "scientism." (5)
There has been a split within anthropology between those who think of themselves as doing "scientific" anthropology, with concerns about data, hypotheses and objectivity; and those who see anthropology as largely a political and moral exercise sharing far more with the humanities than with the natural sciences. (6) Perhaps the most visible fall-out of this dispute was the splitting of Stanford University's Department of Anthropology, in 1998-99, into two separate administrative, degree-conferring units, one now called the Department of Anthropological Sciences and the other the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology. Though the two units overlap heavily in subject matter one sees anthropology as a science, the other as part of the humanities. The split does not follow the boundaries of the four subfields. Traditionally, anthropology was both science and humanities - for many of us, having a foot in both camps was part of its appeal - but today there are strong pressures to dissociate. In the context of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology there is irony here, because, as we have seen, the humanities, but not the humanities-influenced social sciences, are to a reasonable extent engaging with Darwinian thought.
The second group of (non-biological/non-archaeological) anthropologists who have been hospitable to the evolutionary perspective consists primarily of those influenced by the cognitive sciences and who also tend to find it useful to view culture as particulate (the particles having various terms, with some adopting Richard Dawkins' (1976) term, "meme"). One thinks of the important analysis of the nature of religion being done by Pascal Boyer (1993, 1994a, 1994b, 2000, 2001)and by Scott Atran (2002), as well as Atran's insights into categorization (1998, 1999); and of Francisco Gil-White's (2001) analysis of ethnicity. Dan Sperber's (1994, 1996) conception of culture as an "epidemiology of representations", too, is informed by evolutionary and psychological perspectives. (Oddly, some social-cultural anthropologists seem to be respectful of some of these evolutionary efforts while being scornfully dismissive of evolutionary psychology per se.)
Finally, there is the important work of Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd on gene-culture co-evolution. These authors view culture and genes as interacting systems of inheritance. Their approach is exemplified by their (2004) Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. (One of their many original ideas, that of the "work-around," will be discussed below in the context of "an evolutionarily-informed praxis.") (7)
Why are so many social-cultural anthropologists so scornful of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology? Whence comes this impulse to stick finger in the Darwinian eye whenever it dares to gaze at human behavior? The sources are (at least) five: First, there is the horrifying history of past and present mis-use of biology in social science and in social policy. Second, there is the deeply embedded dominance of two strands of Cartesian thought in the social sciences, the fixed idea that there is a huge gulf between humans and other animals; and the belief that body and mind are separate rather than one and the same, which makes possible the implicit belief that biological evolution has to do with the body rather than the mind. Third, there is the Durkheimian fallacy, the idea that collectivities can share representations in ways somehow independent of the psychology of individuals, and its more recent adjunct that when such sociological determinism becomes insupportable then the protean concept of "agency" is all the psychology that need be added. Fourth, there is the 19th century utopianism of Marx, with his romantic idea that if we can only get our mode of production and system of social relations right, all social inequality will be abolished and human nature will be perfected (or at least, greatly improved). Fifth, there is the idealistic belief that the social sciences have a mission, a moral mission, to oppose oppression and inequality wherever it is found, and the unexamined assumption that an evolutionary approach is somehow irrelevant or even opposed to that mission.
We all know that the bad biology of the past has led to genuinely evil efforts, from selective sterilization to wholesale genocide: hellish policies have been conducted in the name of eugenics and of "racial" purification. The horror of these atrocities, culminating in the Holocaust, led to a wholesale repudiation of this pseudobiology and determinism and to a reshaping and redefinition of sociology and social-cultural anthropology as anti-biological fields. Of course, current evolutionary thought is light years away from that horrifying pseudobiology but that is no guarantor against its appropriation and mis-use. Demagogues and would-be demagogues from all parts of the political spectrum are opportunistic and use and mis-use whatever they can (e.g., David Duke's [1998] irrelevant and misleading invocation of sociobiology in his My Awakening). But the attempted appropriation of biology for political purposes does not contaminate it for other use: Shakespeare (8) points out that "the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose," but this has not led the Christian world to abandon its Bible. Neither Pol Pot nor Stalin led to worldwide rejection of Marxism.
Ptolemy may be dead but his spirit lives on. Yes, Copernicus was right and the Earth is not the centre of the universe, yes, we have learned to denounce the claims of racism and patriarchy and we struggle against the ethnocentrism that lurks within us: but no, species-centrism, that last and most pervasive of all the centrisms, still seems self-evidently right to many people. Even some who consider themselves prejudice-free may speak (and more importantly, think) of "humans and animals" rather than "humans and other animals." Once, Descartes could preach that it was our souls that separated us from all other living things, making of them mere robots but of ourselves aspirers to the angelic; today's discourse has evolved, for now our separateness and superiority are due not to our esprit but to our culture: applicable as the theories of the evolutionary biologists may be to the sex of the praying mantis, the alarm calls of marmots, the plumage of the peacock and the parenting habits of the mouth-breeding cichlid, surely they are irrelevant to the complexities of human culture and society, divorced as these are from the genes and instincts that control the actions of all others save ourselves. Surely, too, those who trespass by seeking to apply evolutionary psychology to our species and our societies must have dark motives: perhaps they seek to reduce glorious humankind to mere animal status or, even worse, to support the manipulations of eugenicists and the claims of racists. Much of the opposition to applying evolution to human behavior stems from this deeply conservative, even reactionary impulse to maintain the mysteriousness of human behavior and, at all costs, to keep a chasm between ourselves and the rest of "Creation." Social scientists and Creationists are often strange allies in the campaign to continue to exclude human behavior and society from the natural world. What unites them is their Cartesianism.
Cartesian thinking makes evolutionary psychology appear exculpatory. When we argue that there is an evolved underpinning beneath even the most despicable of human acts, even rape and torture, are we really excusing such behavior while pretending to condemn it? Evolutionists often find it difficult to convince critics that their accounts are in no way exculpatory. Perhaps this lack of communication is also Descartes' fault, for most of us (and virtually all social scientists) remain mired in his insistence on a mind-body split. In our society, we tend to construct the mind as an essence, a self or soul or awareness that is the executive responsible for controlling the body. The body in turn is seen as being responsible for supporting and maintaining the mind, the self. But how can the mind be expected to maintain responsible control when the body fails it? Our legal systems, reflecting our Cartesian folk psychology, do not always expect it to. The mind's control is believed to weaken when the body (never the mind!) produces powerful emotions, or when the body suffers from physical or mental illness, or when the body's use of alcohol or other drugs prevents it from providing the mind with proper support. Given this folk psychology, legal responsibility can be mitigated by bodily failings. But what does all this have to do with anger against evolutionists?
In our folk psychology, it is the body and not the mind that is the product of evolution. Thus, if I argue that males use violence and even rape to gain reproductive advantage, and have been selected to do so, I am heard as arguing that this is another instance of seeking to excuse criminal behavior on the grounds that it is a fault of the body, a failing, and that the mind, that impalpable Cartesian essence, cannot be expected to control so imperfect a body. This defense elicits even more anger than claiming alcohol use as mitigation in cases of, say, vehicular homicide, because while drunkards can be sobered up, men cannot stop being male: to invoke evolution and crime in the same paragraph is likely to be read as "you can never blame men for their violence." Add to this misunderstanding the faulty assumption that biological means "fixed or rigid," and I am heard as saying that not only are men violent criminals and rapists, not only can they not be blamed for it because their behavior is a product of evolution, but nothing can be done about it because it is biological. Well, that argument certainly is enraging. It is also stupid. The misunderstanding is a product of our (usually unexamined) Cartesian folk psychology.
The argument that I read most evolutionary psychologists as actually making begins with a non-Cartesian tack - there is no separate physical body and spiritual mind, there is nobody there but you. The brain consists of various mechanisms of varying degrees of generality and specificity. As they operate, we experience. It may be that self-consciousness is part of that experience because our species has been selected for complex, predictive cognitive maps of the social behavior of others and of ourselves (or our selves) (Barkow 1989; see Damasio, [2000] for an essentially similar but neurologically-based approach to the problem of consciousness and self). (9) Be that as it may, we do have a brain that is amazingly able to understand and to influence others but which nevertheless remains an organ of the body, not a separate spirit or essence. One of the evolved attributes of the body of a young human male, as Fessler (this volume) discusses, is the capacity for a flash of rage. It is no more good or bad than, say, the ability to store extra calories as adipose tissue - both capabilities are products of evolution which in some environments have adaptive and in others deadly consequences; both are at times unwelcome but neither is utterly uncontrollable. Fessler is no more excusing male anger by pointing to its evolutionary roots than a physiologist is advocating obesity when discussing the formerly adaptive aspects of lipid metabolism.
But how do we integrate a social science theory with the evolutionary and psychological when the theorist expressly denies having made any psychological or biological assumptions? There is, after all, a long tradition, associated in sociology with Emile Durkheim and in social anthropology with A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, which demands that one explain the social in terms of the social. From this perspective, any recourse to the psychological or biological is an incriminating reductionism that renders one's identity as a genuine social scientist suspect. Historically, this disciplinary firewall helped to protect the nascent disciplines of sociology and social-cultural anthropology from the racist pseudobiology and pseudopsychology that reigned during their early years. It also, not coincidently, made the new fields distinct from their neighbors, permitting them to claim in their own right authority from the public and resources from the academy. This convenient barrier against "reductionism" still serves its turf/resources protection function, which is probably why it continues to be staunchly defended. Unfortunately, however, it also serves to "protect" sociology and sociocultural anthropology from profiting from the massive advances made in recent years in biology and psychology.
It is not logically defensible to claim a Durkheimian disjunction (rather than continuity) between the social and the psychological/biological. How can human motives and emotions, the ways in which we bond with others, our jealousies and competitions - socially-culturally constructed though these be - not have their roots in our biopsychology, our evolved human nature? Strauss and Quinn (1997:12-47) patiently deconstruct the myth that one can talk about the social - about social representations and selves and surfaces and emotions and even shared schemata - without being psychological. They explicate the confusions found in theoreticians from Geertz (both early and late) to Butler and Bourdieu and Foucault, confusions that arise because representations that are "external" or "public" necessarily have an internal (psychological) counterpart: if they are not instantiated in the brain then where are they, the ether? Some schemata are more motivating than others and psychology is necessary to understand this; however socially constructed emotions may be they seem to have a core that is much the same in society after society; public ideas are also private ideas and understandings; and so forth. For social behavior to take place, for meanings to be inferred and identities to be negotiated, the human brain must be at work - there are thoughts, perceptions, strategies, ideas, and emotions in play. While much is public, much is not. But even that which is public must be represented in the human brain because where else can social knowledge exist? Cultural transmission is only a metaphor, what Strauss and Quinn refer to as the "fax" model. No direct transmission from brain-to-brain takes place, only inference (Sperber, 1996) involving complex evolved mechanisms.
Does the sociological concept of agency solve the problem of the Durkheimian fallacy? "Agency" is the term social scientists use to recognize that there is such a thing as human volition and choice and not just deterministic structure. One can argue that it is a useful abridgement that permits social scientists to get on with their work without having to go into psychological detail. One could also argue that social scientists should not be "getting on" with their work without, for example, first studying the well-developed literature in psychology and economics on decision-making (e.g., Gigerenzer, 2000; Kahneman & Tversky, 2000). Certainly, using "agency" can function to maintain an aura of the mysteriousness about human choice. Sociologist Bernd Baldus (this volume) argues that evolutionary psychology is to be criticized for neglecting agency, which he sees as a major source of the variation in human behavior.
It is odd that by far the harshest critics of the application of Darwinian thought to human beings have come from what Segerstråle (this volume, 2000) refers to as the "cultural left": after all, as she explains, evolutionists have been in the past and frequently today are themselves in fact often politically to the left. Segerstråle concludes that the dispute, by and large, is a sort of leftover from the Seventies. Some on the left, both past and present, she explains, have understood that if there is no such thing as a biologically-based human nature then totalitarian dictators can indeed succeed in recreating humanity according to their own designs, as both Stalin and Hitler (among others) sought to do. However, Marx did teach and his more fundamentalist followers still believe that social inequality is the cause of most of the evils of human nature, and that we are a perfectable species: once social inequality has ended, the resultingly improved human nature will not restore it. For those of this faith, arguing for a highly complex evolved psychology is worthy only of anathema.
But if being on the left has the core meaning of espousing a set of values having to do with equity and dignity, as the noted ethicist Peter Singer (2000) argues, then the left needs a solid theory of human nature in order to achieve its goals. As we will see, evolutionary psychology may provide not just theory but a potential praxis for social activists.
Many social scientists see their work as a sort of moral mission - first and foremost, help the oppressed and protect our world. Very often, these individuals do estimable work both as serious scholars and as partisans of the public interest (e.g., the research and writing of anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes on the trade in human organs (Delmonico et al., 2002; Scheper-Hughes, 1998, 1999, 2000). From their perspective, would not a focus on evolutionary psychology - a field whose goal is the accumulation of knowledge of human nature and society and which emphasizes past adaptations - draw attention away from the social inequality and oppression that are the proximate causes of human suffering? Would not a social science concern with our evolved psychology be at the expense of understanding and exposing the far more immediate cause of so much human pain, the unequal distribution of wealth and power?
Consider that the field of medical epidemiology, which some of us may naively imagine to epitomize benignity, has been strongly attacked by moral mission social scientists. The deservedly eminent medical anthropologist Paul Farmer (1998), for example, criticizes epidemiology for focussing on individuals rather than on political economy and transnational factors. He approvingly quotes (p. 103) McMichael's (1995) portrayal of that field as "...oriented to explaining and quantifying the bobbing of corks on the surface waters, while largely disregarding the stronger undercurrents that determine where, on average, the cluster of corks ends up along the shoreline of risk. So, individual cases of disease are corks while political/economic forces are the currents, and epidemiologists focus only on corks while ignoring currents. What would a Farmer or McMichael make of evolutionary psychology, with its focus not even on the cork but on what is happening within the cork and on the cork's conjectural evolutionary history? Surely, for the moral mission sociologist or anthropologist, advising social scientists to engage with evolutionary psychology must appear akin to urging firefighters to take a break from the current conflagration in order to study pyromancy.
But that analogy is utterly false: a more apt comparison would be advising firefighters to study the principles of combustion in order to help prevent and more effectively extinguish fires. Evolutionary psychology is an essential aspect of understanding the problems our species faces and finding solutions to them. This is emphatically not because evolutionary thought is some kind of moral guide (as some scholars hope and as others fear): we cannot derive morality from biology. (10) But we can use evolutionary psychology as a tool in analyzing how capitalist systems function and why social problems, inequality in particular, recur. With the aid of social scientists, evolutionary psychology can lead to an evolutionary praxis (Barkow, 2003). Let us table that important possibility for the second time, for the moment, while we return to the topic of what evolutionary psychology is and is not.
What is a gene? (11) A gene is not a recipe book - it is closer to being one of the ingredients in the stew. Perhaps the gene is the meat - no one denies the importance of the DNA - but it is not some kind of executive, or master plan, or anything like a blueprint. Information in a fertilized egg is generated, produced by cascades of interactions of mindboggling complexity, with other factors, particularly the make-up of the mother-supplied machinery in which the gene finds itself, equally sine qua non. The gene-first approach - whether the conceptual gene used by the mathematics of population genetics or the distributed but physical gene of genomics - does have its virtues. But the misleading image of an executive gene, single-codonly able to cause disease or talent, has captured the popular imagination and helped to generate funding for gene-centered research. This approach has also drawn some thoughtful criticism. Nelkin and Lindee (1995) show how the gene is often presented as a sort of secular soul, the essence that ultimately determines individual behavior. The views of developmental systems theorists such as Griffiths and Gray (1994) and Oyama (1991, 2000) are in sharp contrast, seeing the gene as one ingredient among many. Evelyn Fox Keller (1999) goes so far as to write that "The history of genetic programs bears the conspicuous marks of a history of discourse and power" (p. 289). Despite such criticism, the gene-first assumption currently prevails. One hears people saying not "she has the gift for that" but "she has the gene for that." (12) This essentialistic/deterministic view feeds into biophobia because it presents the gene as the controlling CEO responsible for everything - including our most horrifying behaviors. If genes are so powerful then they must be dangerous, they are destiny: the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in our genes! But though the myth of the executive gene (13) contributes to the anger social scientists often express when presented with evolutionary accounts of human behavior, in fact evolutionary psychologists do not usually study genes or genetics, and genes have but small place in the present volume.
Between genes and behavior lie the mechanisms. Evolutionary psychology says little about genes but much about these mechanisms (14), (15). (Some evolutionary psychologists at times do not seem to understand this, and it would be very good if there could be a moratorium on their talking about genes when it is mechanisms that are the real subject.) Presumably, the constellations of genes underlying our evolved mechanisms are the product of evolution, but the focus of the evolutionary psychologist is not on the DNA but on the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and the mechanisms that may have evolved in response to them (e.g., mechanisms that may protect one from being cheated in social exchange or aid in mate selection or helped to distinguish kin from non-kin). Theories of mechanisms need to be compatible with genetics and evolutionary biology in general, of course, but (in line with vertically integrated thinking, discussed below) cannot be reduced to individual genes. The ontological status of the mechanism construct is a controversial one but that debate is about ontology and ontogeny, not genetics.
Perhaps evolutionists themselves bear some responsibility for not emphasizing sufficiently mechanisms and the "distance between genes and culture" (Barkow, 1984). As has already been pointed out, most of the talk about "genes for behavior" has simply been metonymy on the part of theorists concerned with developing general theories of evolution and adaptation rather than theories of specific mechanisms. However, by not making it clear that there must be some kind of mechanisms involved, overly elliptical evolutionary exposition - or the hurriedly-read accounts of some journalists - may give the reader the impression that genes are intended as some kind of executive replacement for complex theories rather than as components in a multilevel explanation of the behavior in question. We have already seen that privileging the gene and DNA has been attacked by developmental systems theorists who criticize even the idea of genetic "transmission" of traits, instead arguing that the genes are simply one of the sets of components involved in the construction of an organism. So long as it is accepted that the behavioral traits of an organism are indeed shaped by natural selection, there is no need for the social scientist qua social scientist to be concerned with arguments over the molecular biology of reproduction, including the precise definition and role of the gene. It is not even clear that the social scientist need be overly concerned with the details of the arguments over mechanisms (e.g., the "cheater-detection" mechanism posited by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (Cosmides & Tooby, 1989, 1992, 2001)). We do not need to understand the biological bases of the mechanisms in order to understand their social consequences.
Our culturally-patterned behavior is both enabled and constrained by a panoply of evolved mechanisms that are just barely beginning to be understood (Barkow, 1989). Evolved mechanisms are useful heuristic devices and we take them for granted when we talk about how our how bodies function. There are evolved physiological mechanisms to regulate our temperature and our caloric intake and our blood sugar level and our sexuality and so forth. These mechanisms are not in contrast to adaptation by natural selection, they are its products. The challenge to biological evolution has been to select a single set of genes that can keep the organism adapted within a broad range of circumstances; and genes (16) that reliably produce mechanisms to do this are the solution. They permit the organism to adjust to the vicissitudes of environment within its own lifetime. Our immune systems respond even to novel disease organisms, our digestive systems can absorb nourishment from a vast array of foods (even unfamiliar ones), our pattern of physical strength and coordination improves with the particular demands we put on our bodies, and so forth. In similar fashion, the broad array of central nervous system and endocrinological mechanisms responsible for regulating our social behavior permit us to function across a very wide variety of ecological and cultural settings. These mechanisms are our evolved psychology, our human nature, and they permit the huge amount of variation in behavior typical of our species both within and across societies. So effective are these mechanisms that their operation is invisible to many social scientists, who imagine that the environment and "culture," unaided, have somehow alone shaped and patterned both the rich diversities and the enduring commonalities of human history. If all our social worlds are but a stage, evolutionary psychologists study the machinery backstage, the evolved mechanisms. They unpack the black box of human nature. There is no reason to imagine that the mechanisms of the central nervous system are any less complex than those of other bodily systems. Just as a shared set of digestive mechanisms both enable and constrain the diverse diets of human populations, so do a comparable set of behavioral mechanisms enable and constrain our social-cultural behavior. (Such, at least, is the guiding assumption of evolutionary psychology.)
It is evolutionary psychology's focus on the mechanisms that makes it infrastructural to understanding social action and the social sciences. The emphasis is not on the genes.
Textbook after textbook informs the student that we human beings adapt to different ecological settings through culture, while animal species do so through genetic change. This commonplace observation tells us little because it leaves out evolved mechanisms. The behavior of one species differs from that of another because their evolved mechanisms are different. Ours have been designed by evolution to adapt us to a cultural environment. ("Culture" is defined below.)
Some evolved psychological mechanisms involve what can loosely be termed "learning." One can learn from one's own experience (individual learning) and from the experience of others (social learning). When a species becomes capable of a sufficient degree of social learning, a new possibility arises: local populations may develop pools of shared information that is communicated both within and across generations. The total pool of such information associated with a particular population can be termed a culture. In this sense of culture it is quite common among social animals, including whales and dolphins (Rendell & Whitehead, 2001). Our own species is hypercultural (Barkow, 2001), so heavily dependent on total immersion in a vast information pool that our central nervous system requires it to develop properly Geertz, 1962, 1973).
The informational items comprising human cultures go by many names, including: ideas, beliefs, traits, instructions, representations, schemata, and (for those who like near-rhymes) "memes." The same or similar particles of information may occur in many different pools that, in any case, usually overlap with one another; the population(s) with which a pool is associated may be distributed rather than tied to limited geographic regions. A single individual may participate in more than one pool, given that pools are properties of populations and the same individual may be counted in multiple populations (there are many ways in which to define a population). The structure of information pools depends upon the brains of individuals at one level and upon the social organization of its population(s) on the other (i.e., some castes or professions may specialize in certain kinds of information) and is not a property of the pool itself. Note that this informational approach to the culture concept avoids the various criticisms levelled at it during the eighties and nineties by critics such as Clifford and Marcus (1986) and Abu-Lughod (1991). An evolutionary view of culture is not essentialistic, does not promote the exoticizing of the other, and does not confuse people with geography. At the same time, there is nothing of A.L. Kroeber's (1917) "superorganic" in it, either, and it is not a reified causal entity. It is, however, applicable to a globalizing world in which both people and information travel constantly. (For a broad introduction to the idea of culture as particulate, see the interesting collection edited by Robert Aunger (2000). Aunger (1999) has also published a thoughtful defense of the culture concept itself. Cronk [this volume] discusses some approaches evolutionists have taken to culture, as do Janicki and Krebs (1998). Though evolutionists often have different conceptions of culture, there does appear to be a consensus that it is informational and at least somewhat particulate in nature.
From the culture-is-a-pool-of-particulates perspective, culture above all is something that people use. In doing so we both shape and are shaped by the information pools in which we swim. The cultural pool is also (to change metaphors) an "arena for conflict" (Barkow 1983, 1989, 1994)in which we seek to add informational items in our own interest and change or delete items which are not. In recent years, many ethnographers have emphasized a particular kind of cultural information, that associated with discourse and text. However, many informational items, though they may profoundly influence our worldviews, our posture and gait and choice of comfort foods and what we expect from a friend, are not textual in nature (Spiro, 1996).
This great dependence on culture is a very risky business, from an evolutionary perspective. Our brains are full of evolved mechanisms that manage that risk. Here is a thought experiment: Imagine that our evolved psychology really is Malinowskian (in the sense of Malinowski's [1944] A Scientific Theory of Culture), basically a few drives tied to an empty sponge that absorbs culture like water until it is time for it to be squeezed out again for the next generation. Culture is thus static. Now, imagine an isolated population with a pool of this static information that, however, at the outset perfectly fits the local environment. But time passes and environments alter: fisheries get depleted, climates change, ecologies go through successions; at the same time, individuals introduce inaccurate information into the pool in pursuit of their own interests, while errors in transmission of information inevitably occur (Barkow, 1989). Eventually, a great deal of useless and even harmful information accumulates in the local cultural pool. Perhaps even worse, for lack of new information and revision of old, opportunities involving potential foodstuffs and innovative technologies and economic organization are missed, so that the environment is now being exploited ineffectively. For such a population of cultural sponges, one of two things will happen: either a crisis will drive it to extinction/absorption by a rival group; or natural selection will occur against such heavy reliance on culture. Such selection could conceivably favor individual learning at the expense of cultural capacity. Most likely, however, there would be selection for the ability to test socially transmitted informational items, to challenge them, revise them, add to them and delete them. Individuals with these abilities would out-reproduce others. The population would develop various evolved mechanisms permitting people to edit and revise information. Individuals would be editors of the cultures in which they participated, and so the information pools would be kept reasonably up-to-date.
It is doubtful that our ancestors were ever sponges but there is no doubt that we have evolved considerable ability to revise and edit culture (Barkow, 1989). We do it constantly, as we "rebel" emotionally as adolescents, rebel politically as adults; or when we scan the practices of disparate groups for interesting innovations. Above all, in searching for prestige we may either maintain or revise our culture. We seem to pay preferential attention to the high-in-status, learning more from them than from others (Barkow, 1976; Chance and Larsen, 1976; Boyd and Richerson, 1985). In small-scale societies, this mechanism would probably have spread the skills of the more successful cultivators, foragers, hunters and tool-makers; today it is a wild card leading to a proliferation of rock-star wannabees.
Social scientists almost universally accept some form of social constructionism, the belief that rather than our living in a readily knowable "out there" reality, we dwell in a world that is socially constructed, constructed by our experience with others and validated consensually and communally (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). (17) This belief makes sociologists and social-cultural anthropologists leery of large claims to truth ("metanarratives") and allegations of objectivity (Bauerlein, 2001). Social-cultural anthropologists in particular are more likely to be comfortable with local, contingent, non-absolute and situated partial knowledges (as in the elucidation of "lived experience" and in interpretive approaches to ethnography) than with broad explanatory frameworks (such as Darwinism). To speak of "objective" knowledge strikes the social constructionist as embarrassingly naïve. Indeed, social constructionist sociologists of science have spent much effort in debunking the claims to objectivity of "science" and arguing that scientific "truth" is in fact a socially constructed "truth claim," the product of social and political processes, a partial truth (e.g., many of the readings in Biagioli [1999] and in Jasanoff, Markle, Petersen, & Pinch [2001], as well as Latour & Salk [1986]). Social constructionism has become a badge of in-group membership, for many social scientists, in spite of both mild (e.g., Hacking, 1999) and scathing (Bauerlein, 2001) philosophical criticism of their use of the approach. If you are a sociologist or social-cultural anthropologist today you must be a social constructionist.
The non-radical social constructionism typical of the social sciences is not only compatible with evolutionary psychology, it is required by it. Our species has a hypertrophied cultural capacity, an immense dependence on socially "transmitted" information. That we socially construct our realities is an inevitable concomitant of that reliance. A culture-bearing species, one that like ourselves depends primarily on socially-transmitted information pools for adaptation to local conditions, must also evolve mechanisms permitting and even requiring social construction - how else could individuals adjust to local reality, that is, to the different constructions of different cultural informational pools? Social construction is thus not an alternative to a biological account of human behavior, properly understood it is a biological account, a major aspect of our evolved psychology (cf. Campbell, this volume). Like other biological traits, social construction is both enabled and constrained by our bodies, in this case the organ known as the brain and its various evolved mechanisms.
Let us take as an example of how multilevel, vertically integrated social science explanation can work, Catherine Lutz's (1988) insightful analysis of the social construction of emotions on the Micronesian atoll of Ifaluk. Her argument for the uniqueness of local conceptions of emotions is incompatible with the assumption that our English-language labels represent a universal core of evolved emotions. But her work is entirely compatible with the argument that our English-language emotions are just as socially constructed as are those of Micronesia. Her work is also compatible with the strong evidence that there are indeed basic emotions and that they play a major role in the regulation of behavior and share a very similar neurophysiological basis among primates (and many other mammals) (Barkow, 1997; Damasio, 1999, 2000; Ekman & Davidson, 1995; Lane, Nadel, & Ahern, 2000) in general. (18) In effect, evolutionary psychology provides the equivalent of themes and ethnography the local socially constructed variations of human emotions. (19) An evolutionary perspective adds to Lutz's work: It frames it in a broad context and acknowledges the physical basis and evolutionary history of the emotions, but it takes nothing away from Lutz' insights and interpretations of Ifaluk society and the role played there by socially constructed emotions.
Understanding the evolutionary bases of social constructionism prevents the "anything goes" approach that Campbell (this volume) criticizes (particularly with regard to gender). Unconstrained social construction would obviously be maladaptive. Those with brains that constructed realities in which there was no need for the individual to gather or to hunt or to assess abilities realistically against those of competitors were presumably less likely to become our ancestors than were those who had some respect for physical reality. Natural selection should, logically, have provided some constraints on social construction: where are they? Elsewhere (1989), I have argued that two of these constraints may have been our alleged tendencies, as adolescents, to rebel against established authority and ideas, and to attend to and learn preferentially from the high-in-status. Adolescents everywhere strive to find a place for themselves, and often may question established ideas and practices. They also re-evaluate local status hierarchies and seem to imitate those whom they perceive to be high in relative standing. It is possible (though obviously very difficult to establish empirically) that these tendencies would have tended to keep culture constructions from moving too far from physical reality. Note that these mechanisms, if mechanisms they are, seem to be weak and imperfect. Cultural editing has been studied in rather desultory ways by social scientists under rubrics such as "popular memory," "authenticity," "the invention of tradition" (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1992), "revitalization movements" (Wallace, 1970) and religious and ideological change in general. The topic calls for the perspectives of evolved psychology and the notion of culture as an arena for (informational) conflict, and in the future is likely to be a significant focus within anthropology.
If our evolved mechanisms evolved in the first place to solve adaptation problems, does this mean that human behavior, especially the behavior patterned by our social institutions, is normally adaptive? Do we tend to act so as to enhance our genetic fitness? Not necessarily. Evolutionary wisdom is past wisdom, adaptation to previous environments, and the ways in which our current environments are both different from and similar to those of our ancestors is a question whose theoretical importance is matched only by the extent to which it has been under-researched! We are not our ancestors, and in today's range of human environments, with their often vast scale compared to the small bands of our predecessors, evolved mechanisms may play novel roles with little direct connection to adaptation and biological fitness. After all, in an age of contraception we may still maximize copulatory opportunity but not the reproductive success at the heart of biological evolution. Advertisers use our evolved mechanisms in myriad ways remote from genetic fitness as they seek to associate their products with sex and status, and the preferential-attention-to-the-high-in-status mechanism today has quite odd effects, producing a plethora of rock-star-wannabees and children of peasant farmers who wish to grow up to be Jet Li. For evolution-minded social scientists, the interesting questions are not about gene frequencies but about (for example) the mechanisms that presumably underlie political behavior and generate social class - or gossip (Barkow, 1992) and sensational news (Davis & McLeod, 2003; Shoemaker, 1996).(Note that in Cronk's chapter in this volume, he describes his field of behavioral ecology as one in which the question of whether people are following adaptive strategies is paramount and the evolved mechanisms are of secondary interest. The approach he describes contrasts with the evolutionary-psychology-is-infrastructure approach being promoted here. Both perspectives, of course, are valid and, as he indicates, ultimately compatible and even convergent.) (20)
Can culturally-patterned behavior be maladaptive, either in the technical sense of reducing genetic fitness or the every-day sense of reducing health and well-being? The answer is "yes," for both senses. Maladaptation is possible for a variety of reasons that can only be telegraphed, here. First, organisms are never perfect biological machines, so that any adaptation may have some maladaptive consequences (e.g., monkeys fall from trees at times but living in trees is still on the whole adaptive; our cultural-dependency is like the monkey's arboreal adaptation - most of the time it is adaptive but not always). Second, as "mismatch theory" argues, we are adapted to past but not necessarily to current environments. Third, culture is an arena for informational/belief conflict and we can often be persuaded to follow a strategy that is in someone's fitness interests but not necessarily our own. (Believe me, buy my snake oil, religion, political party, etc. It will solve all your problems). Fourth, we make mistakes and teach them to others ("high-impact aerobics, the great health discovery"). Fifth, some particles of cultural information ("memes") arguably are like viruses, spreading at the expense of their hosts, ourselves (e.g, certain religious ideas, according to Richard Dawkins [2003]) (21).
Evolutionary psychologists argue that our shared evolved mechanisms make for the psychic unity of our species, our human nature. Is this belief a form of essentialism? Contrary to some (e.g., DeLamater & Hyde, 1998), evolutionary psychologists and other evolutionists are not essentialists.
Evolutionists do not ordinarily speak of canine nature or cervid nature or human nature (as I do). Instead, they speak descriptively of "species-typical characteristics," thereby recognizing that a species generally has no one defining trait but, rather, a cluster of traits with no single one necessarily being crucial. The concept of species-typicality is rather similar to that of disease syndrome, where the overall pattern rather than a single feature is the defining quality. Human nature is not (let us hope) a disease syndrome but it, too, refers to a cluster of traits rather than a universal essence. Of course, the precise mixture of components of any individual's psychology will be unique; given that the underlying mechanisms evolved to permit great flexibility in behavior, we expect considerable individual and group differences. (And as behavior geneticists point out, we do differ genetically from one another, as well. See Segal & Bouchard, 1999, for a study of the complexities of heredity and environment in connection with twins.)
Many social scientists follow Marx in believing that "human nature" is merely a reflex of society and of history (e.g., Geertz, 1973; Gramsci, 1957; Sahlins, 1976). A strict acceptance of this position requires a rejection of evolutionary psychology and an embracing of the Cartesian divide between humans and other animals, with economic systems replacing the Cartesian soul. However, in academia extreme positions tend to be constructed by opponents taking advantage of how easy it is to ignite straw. In practice, social science and evolutionary disputes about human nature today are often simple figure-and-ground problems. If one comes to the study of our species from a background in animal behavior and neuroendocrinology then the notion that human nature is anything but biological is bizarre: there are demonstrable differences at the levels of DNA, gross morphology and neural organization between ourselves and other species; surely, to the biologically-oriented, our nature is human because of those differences. After all, human beings share so much in terms of both individual and collective behavior, compared even to our closest relatives, the apes (cf. Rodseth and Novak, this volume). But if one's background is limited to sociology or ethnography then it is the differences among human groups that are salient and explanations of these surely must have to do with history and environment and economics, not biology. But both the evolutionist's distal and the ethnographer's proximal perspectives are entirely valid (and in the spirit of vertical integration, discussed below, should always yield very different but mutually compatible theories and data; wherever apparent incompatibilities are detected these should be generating research). Unfortunately, the ugly history of biology in the social sciences and "biological determinist" stereotyping can make it difficult for the social scientist to appreciate the evolutionist's perception of our species. At the same time, the social-cultural anthropologists whose work is readily accepted by evolutionary psychologists are primarily those who concentrate on universals, whether underlying or overt. The name at the top of this short list is probably that of Donald Brown (1991), who has ably described the universals of human societies. (Social-cultural anthropology's old
documentation-of-difference project has obscured the essential similarities among human societies -- careers in ethnography are not made by the highlighting of similarities. But to be fair, many similarities with their own home culture are likely to be invisible to ethnographers, so that they per force write only about what they see, the differences.)
Evolutionary psychology partakes of the notion of vertical or compatible integration (Barkow 1989; Cosmides, Tooby and Barkow, 1992; Walsh, this volume). The "integration" is of the modest kind found in the natural sciences. For example, chemistry is compatible with the laws of physics but in no practical way can chemistry be reduced to physics. Biology is compatible with chemistry as well as with physics, but no one in their right mind would attempt to reduce the functioning of the pancreas or the succession of forest ecologies to nothing but chemistry. However, a biologist who described processes incompatible with chemistry or a chemist who claimed to have discovered reactions that violated the laws of physics would be considered a crank! The natural sciences follow the compatibility rule, meaning that apparent incompatibilities with current consensus in related disciplines are considered to be indicators of error in one field or the other and a justification for further research. Much of the steady, cumulative progress of the natural sciences is a product of the compatibility rule. Much of the chaos in the human sciences, the changes in fashion that some social scientists optimistically consider progress, (22) and the strong current tendency to join the humanities and abandon the goals of a social science entirely, reflect the confusions brought about by the lack of a compatibility rule.
Unlike natural scientists, social and behavioral theorists typically ignore explanations at other levels of organization, or, worse, treat them as competitors! Thus, even in the 21st century most social scientists still usually write about a phenomenon - violent assault, monogamy, whatever - as if it were primarily either a matter of biology or of environment/culture (see Kurzban and Haselton, this volume, for further discussion). But vertical integration emphasizes the systematic search for compatibilities and incompatibilities among the multiple levels of explanation required to account for the complexities of human social life, and a forsaking of dated dichotomies such as nature vs. nurture and mind vs. body and culture vs. biology. What evolutionists are asking is only that sociology and social-cultural anthropological accounts be compatible with what we think we know of human evolution and psychology: that is all! Incompatibilities indicate errors at one level or the other and must drive research. The aim is never to replace sociology or anthropology with psychology and biology, and certainly not to create a social science comparable to axiomatic physics, with its elegant, intricate aspirations to mathematical lawfulness and predictability.
Our accounts of human psychology must be compatible with our understanding of human evolution, but psychology cannot be reduced to evolutionary biology. The social sciences and psychology must be mutually compatible but the social sciences cannot become psychology. Reduction is foolish because different levels of organization have emergent properties, properties that cannot be readily predicted from lower levels. Thus, our complex evolved psychology has characteristics - such as consciousness, self-deception, and so forth - in no way predictable from Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, prescient though Darwin was. Similarly, the social organization of states or the impact of the automobile on cityscapes cannot be reduced to or predicted from psychology or biology. But when social scientists do explain such phenomena they inevitably make psychological assumptions (pace Emile Durkheim), assumptions that need to be assessed for compatibility with the current consensus in psychology and human evolution. If a social science theory implies a psychological trait that appears to be impossible in the light of biological evolution then this is an indicator of a problem point, a place on which to focus attention, because either the social science theory is in error or the fault lies in psychology and evolutionary theory (or perhaps both are in error). Even when we find that some social practices do indeed enhance genetic fitness (as the behavioral ecologists discussed in Cronk's contribution to this volume often do), that does not somehow cancel the necessity and validity of the disciplines of psychology, history and sociology.
Abandoning the intellectually sloppy habit of making implicit and unexamined psychological assumptions will come at a price. We will have to be even more careful than at present not to bury our psychology in personifications, as when "society" or "culture" causes behavior, or in protean concepts such as "embodiment," "patriarchy," "agency," or "power." A move towards making our assumptions explicit, while leading to much greater clarity and substance in theorizing, may be at the expense of some of the magnificent display prose that has come to be so admired by many social scientists, whose hermeneutics permit them to appreciate the aesthetic interplay of the hybridized potentialities of pastiches of multivocalic subjectivities. Striving for a sentence to instantiate a single meaning may seem retrogressive, for some, but vertical integration requires it. If your words may have many meanings they can certainly be played with but the profusion of potential significances makes it impossible to apply the compatibility rule. The goal of impressing the reader with one's complex brilliance may have replaced that of building cumulative understanding. (Those who have built their careers upon their mastery of richly dense, multiplexly abstract social theory will face a problem of translation into prose that permits the identification of implicit assumptions. No doubt there will be competing translations.)
Of course, there are evolutionary psychologists, too, who forget or ignore the compatibility rule. Far from being an excuse for social scientists to do the same, such lapses are best viewed as an opportunity for sociologists and social-cultural anthropologists to criticize evolutionary psychology in a constructive rather than dismissive manner. (Social scientists are also needed to protect psychologists, including evolutionary psychologists, from their tendency to generalize to the human species on the basis of research done on undergraduates in one or two countries.)
What vertical integration and evolutionary psychology do for the social sciences is threefold: 1) they permit culling of impossible theories while identifying areas where further research and thought are needed; 2) they permit a practical if strictly limited approach to the often-sought unification of the life sciences with the social sciences; and 3) they can reveal serious deficiencies in academic programs and training.
1) Culling and hidden assumptions
The first decade of this century is a fertile time for the social sciences, with 1000 flowers blooming ... along with a dismaying number of weeds. Social scientists often think of career success in terms of founding a personal school of thought, complete with partisans and critics and neologisms. Training consists not of studying a sequence of topics (e.g., molecular biology, genomics, medical implications of genomics, etc.) but of great individualistic, relatively unintegrated thinkers (e.g., Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, Habermas, Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler, Mead, Giddons, Latour, etc.). How do we weed this overgrown garden by getting rid of at least the weakest theoretical approaches? The compatibility requirement of vertical integration suggests one way. Are the psychological/biological assumptions made by the theory compatible with what we believe about our evolution and psychology? After all, a theory involving chemistry that violated physics' requirement for conservation of matter and energy would be readily discarded. A theory in social-cultural anthropology or in sociology that incorporated assumptions that are impossible in terms of modern biology and psychology should at the least be considered suspect. For example, suppose our implicit or explicit assumption is that human females and males are psychologically identical except for matters directly touching on reproductive physiology. As we see from Campbell's contribution to this volume, this assumption is incompatible with an immense amount of psychological(and also neuroendocrinological) research. It is also incompatible with evolutionary biology, where we learn that sex differences in the amount of investment needed to reproduce, as well as differences in the variability of reproductive success, always (in every species studied) lead to differences in reproductive strategies and therefore behavior.
2) Vertical integration cannot fully unify the social and life sciences
Evolutionary psychology with its commitment to vertical integration seeks to retie Latour's (1993:1-8) "gordian knot" but fails. Latour argues that modern thinkers have developed "three distinct approaches to talking about our world: naturalization, socialization and deconstruction" (p. 5). He chooses the work of E.O. Wilson as emblematic of the first perspective, the "naturalizers;" Pierre Bourdieu is taken as emblematic of the second, the "socializers" or "sociopolitical" (the latter is my own term); and Jacques Derrida as emblematic of the third, the discourse analyzers. The naturalizers view the world in terms of the biological -- the sociopolitical and the text/discourse disappear in the sense that they are disregarded. The socializers speak of society and power but, for them, both the biological and the textual/discursive vanish. For the analysts of discourse, both the sociopolitical and any claims for a "real" world disappear. Indeed, for those concerned with the analysis of discourse, "to believe in the existence of brain neurons or power plays would betray enormous naïveté" (p. 6). The problem with these three modes of analysis, Latour explains, is not their lack of power but their inability to be combined, their mutual exclusivity.
An evolutionary approach is clearly a naturalizing one - the goal of evolutionary approaches to the human sciences is, after, to put our own species back into the natural world. But Latour does not appreciate the inclusive nature of the naturalistic perspective. True, if the human sciences are to be naturalized then contemporary sociology and social-cultural anthropology must pass through the culling process of compatibility with adjacent fields, but most of the familiar landscape would remain. We have already seen that social constructionism survives handily, and Foucauldian ideas of power can certainly be linked to the evolutionist's conception of power as the ability to influence the behavior of others in one's own (genetic) self-interest. Much in Marxism and even classical economics can and should be rethought in terms of a more sophisticated evolutionary psychology in which people have multiple, shifting goals that do not reduce to greed. Much of deconstructionism and discourse analysis is readily compatible with the evolutionist's insistence that communication evolved as a way to influence the behavior of others in one's own interest, rather than to convey some kind of truth for its own sake. The culled social sciences would still be recognizable as the social sciences but with new clarity and compatibility and a tendency for ordered understandings to accumulate rather than for fashions to shift.
Vertical/compatible integration is an intellectually much less ambitious goal than the total ending of dichotomies for which Latour (1993) calls in We Have Never Been Modern - for followers of Latour and other philosopher/anthropologists its very simplicity will make it unacceptable (23). The approach is also far more modest than the "jumping together" of explanations espoused by E.O. Wilson (1998) in his Consilience. I am sympathetic to the goals of these authors and aware that for true unifiers vertical integration can be no more than a first step. But it is a step we have not yet taken.
Will an evolutionarily-informed, vertically integrated social science resemble the natural sciences? (24) Perhaps it should not. The eminent biologist (and critic of sociobiology) Richard Lewontin (1995:28) warns: "Each domain of phenomena has its characteristic grain of knowability. Biology is not physics, because organisms are such complex physical objects, and sociology is not biology because human societies are made by self-conscious organisms. By pretending to a kind of knowledge that it cannot achieve, social science can only engender the scorn of natural scientists and the cynicism of humanists." In similar fashion, sociologist of science Bent Flyvbjerg (2001:166) urges us "to drop the fruitless efforts to emulate natural science's success in producing cumulative and predictive theory; this approach simply does not work in the social sciences." True enough, axiomatic physics makes a poor model for the social sciences, but the pronouncements of Lewontin (25) and especially Flyvbjerg seem remarkably premature given that few social scientists have ever attempted vertical integration. Human science theory needs to be evaluated in terms of compatibility with adjacent levels of analysis. I suspect that the eventual result will probably be a lot closer to the multi-level, multidisciplinary field of natural history and to plant and animal ecology than to chemistry or physics: but in the end, all sciences are unique, and other fields have only limited applicability as models. (Adopting the formalisms of the natural sciences without their vertical integration produced the kind of foolishness in which academic psychology, for much of the 20th century, ruled consciousness out of its subject matter in order to be more "scientific," straight-jacketing itself by tailoring its theories to fit its conception of "scientific" methodology.)
A third practical implication of vertical integration has to do with the training of students. The notion of a biologist who understands no chemistry or a chemist who knows no physics is a nonsensical idea; yet training in social science requires scant acquaintance with psychology and none at all with biology, especially evolutionary biology! As Donald T. Campbell (1969) once pointed out, it is unproductive for academics to seek to clone themselves. In the social sciences, however, we strive to duplicate in our successors ancient academic boundaries while too often inculcating in them disciplinary ethnocentrism and intolerance, carefully excluding the neighbors as sources of insight. (26) Ending the parochialism and insularity of the social sciences does not mean that our students must begin by becoming biologists and psychologists, however, any more than biologists must begin by becoming chemists. They are expected to know the basics of related fields but this requirement stops far short of full multidisciplinarity. Basic evolutionary biology and psychology are actually quite simple. Students weaned on postmodernism and its privileging of display prose often find evolutionary psychology startlingly straightforward.
How can evolutionary psychology/sociobiology aid in one of the great tasks of today's social science, the analysis and critique of a globalizing, postcolonial world under assault by neoliberal ideology? Let us begin with a simple example, the evolutionary analysis of "globesity," the obesity pandemic.
We know that we evolved in environments in which the scarce nutrients were often salt, fat, and (because it is an indicator of the ripeness and thus nutritional value of fruit) sweetness. Our ancestors in part became our ancestors because they were the ones who could detect and then prefer these valuable nutrients. Offspring resemble their parents, taught Darwin, and we resemble our ancestors in prizing fat and salt and sweet. In the modern era, the manufacturers of industrial foods have taken full advantage of our evolved chemical-detection/preference mechanisms by producing foodstuffs super-rich in fat, salt, and sugar. We love them, we rush to buy products rich in them, we eat far more of them than our bodies require or even can safely process: and so food-processing plants and corporate capitalism flourish. Unfortunately, their success is based on a large proportion of the population ingesting too many of these nutrients and too little of others, resulting in ill health (particularly obesity and its frequent sequelae, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.) (See Sidebar for further discussion of and references to the mismatch between our industrial diet and the diet to which our bodies are adapted.)
There are parallels between commercially successful industrial foods and commercially successful mass media. Our attentional mechanisms draw our focus, willy-nilly, to what for our ancestors would have been adaptation-relevant information. The weather, physical danger from any source, scarce resources - these topics readily capture our attention. But we are a social species and apparently evolved in an environment featuring strong social competition (Mithen, 1996). As a result, much of the apparently adaptation-relevant information that pricks up our ears is social information such as sexual activity, change in the reputation of others for honesty, alteration in health, strength, or relative standing, creation and demise of friendships/alliances, birth and death, and so forth. We constantly exchange such information, often distorting it so that it is in our self-interest or the interest of relatives and friends (cf. Buss & Dedden, 1990; McAndrew & Milenkovic, 2002). We call this phenomenon "gossip" (Barkow, 1992). A careful study of 200 years of newspapers shows that these are also the kinds of topics that we want to read about (Davis & McLeod, 2003).
In research now under way (placeholder for eventual reference), it appears that these are also the topics that commercially successful Hollywood and Bollywood movies focus on. We seem to automatically yet avidly attend to gossip-like information about, for example, the reputations and sexual activities of fictional high-status individuals or of actual celebrities who, however, are for no practical purpose members of our communities. Just as industrial food manufacturers exploit our evolved sense of taste, other corporations exploit our evolved attentional mechanisms to sell us newspapers, movies, and other media. Whether this flood of often fictitious information is actually harmful has not yet been clearly established but it certainly is profitable for the interests producing it.
This is not the place in which to develop a full theory of the media exploitation of the brain's attentional triggers: the topic is illustrative of the point that the evolutionary perspective helps us understand the infrastructure of modern society and readily generates substantial research programs with great relevance for social-cultural anthropologists and sociologists. Anyone interested in "globalization" will find that Darwin is a good place to begin in understanding how multinational corporations can be so successful in creating demand for their products worldwide. Evolution is always a good place to begin but - remembering the lessons of vertical integration - seldom a good place to end.
The infrastructural role of our evolved psychology is hardly limited to film and food. For example, in the 1970's, in the city of Maradi in Niger, I undertook a study based on the premise that human beings, as we grow older, learn to substitute symbolic prestige criteria for the relatively agonistic dominance hierarchies of young children and of other primates. I found, in Maradi, that those shut out of other paths to high relative standing by the ruling government fonctionnaires were turning to Islam. They were also delegitimating status-claims of the French-language-educated élites, creating a powerful resurgence of religion(Barkow, 1975). A project that began with theories of primate social hierarchies moved, in vertically integrated fashion, to a study of religion. One conclusion of the study was that was that some prestige strategies have the emergent result of generating socioeconomic development, while other strategies have primarily political and ideological or religious impacts. Peoples who seek prestige primarily in terms of display or of religious learning are less likely to prosper economically than those who seek prestige through the long-term accumulation of resources, including skills and education. As usual, this evolutionary perspective complements, rather than invalidates, existing theories of development. Once again, an evolutionary perspective proved infrastructural and integrative with respect to social science theory.
Are there political orders that work well because of their match with our evolved psychology, and others that fail for lack of such a match? Fukuyama (2002:106) argues that "...Contemporary capitalist liberal democratic institutions have been successful because they are grounded in assumptions about human nature that are far more realistic than those of their competitors." This assertion begs for detailed and vertically integrated analyses of the specific social institutions he has in mind and the way in which our evolved psychology underlies each, both for societies he categorizes as successful and those he considers unsuccessful. Of course, clear definitions and a historical perspective are crucial for any such generalizations about whole societies, but here is a research project worthy of our efforts.
There are various other pockets of evolutionary perspective in human science research, as is discussed in the sidebar and earlier in the context of sociologists and social-cultural anthropologists who are not in the mainstream because they are Darwinian. These quick references and brief discussions are meant only to be suggestive: a full, vertically integrated explication of the relationships between our evolved psychology and modern societies and socioeconomic systems will require . . . the participation of engaged, social scientists!
The great weakness of the Marxist and Marxian critique of capitalism and struggle against oppression is their failure to predict the recurrence of inequality. History shows that after the revolution comes...another revolution. Social problems recur, with each set of solutions leading to new problems, while slow reforms often only palliate. There is a cliché that youthful Marxist idealism gets replaced with middle-aged conservatism, a veer to the political Right. Perhaps this is because the middle-aged have experienced the return of the reformed, that is, the restoration of old problems in new guise, the endless recurrence of social inequality, of people wanting more resources and respect for themselves and their children and their friends than they want for others. The old aristocrats and capitalists are overthrown only to be replaced by a "new class" - in the case of Soviet Communism, by the nomenklatura or bureaucratic élite (Djilas, 1957). Such phenomena are generally discussed in moral terms, that is, in terms of betrayal. Unfortunately, moral condemnation no matter how well-deserved does not make for adequate social theory. It is the evolutionary perspective that can provide not only a framework for analysis but at least a hope of effective praxis.
Social stratification is a reflex of the evolutionary fact that do people want more for their own children than they want for the children of others (Barkow, 1992; Tiger & Shepher, 1975): ideologically-based efforts to create social systems that ignore this evolutionary reality, as in the early Israeli kibbuttzim, fail. In evolutionary terms, this is a no-brainer: Offspring resemble their parents and we are the children of those who did more for their own children and other kin than they did for others because by doing so they had more surviving children and other relatives than did those others. Once human societies became relatively sedentary and it became possible for us to leave rank and wealth to our children, we did so (Barkow, 1992). But biology is not destiny unless we ignore it (Barkow, 2003). An anti-nepotistic, meritocratic ideology makes for far better-qualified administrators than does a favor-your-children-and-other-relatives ethic. It also directly counters our evolved psychology (27). Fortunately, by using our practical awareness of human nature when we design bureaucracies, we can work around our tendency towards nepotism. We can try to make sure that the system rewards those who are not nepotistic and punishes those who are. Constant vigilance will still be needed because we are indeed working around human nature and also because one aspect of that nature is our tendency to believe that rules and even moral principles apply only to others rather than to ourselves; but relatively non-nepotistic bureaucracies can and do exist. Wise social planners and designers of bureaucracies are constantly taking our evolved psychology into account, sometimes working with it and other times working around it.
The term "work around" comes from the work of evolutionists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd (1999, 2001). How do we explain the Wehrmacht, the Germany military forces of 1935-45, when we obviously did not evolve to risk our lives on behalf of non-kin strangers running a murderously aggressive modern state? Richerson and Boyd analyzed how the German officer corps worked around our evolved psychology, manipulating it to create an evolutionarily unanticipated social institution whose effects had nothing to do with genetic fitness (and which, in fact, was no doubt maladaptive for a large proportion of its participants, particularly those who were killed!). Our species evolved psychology is well-adapted to mutual defense on a local level, and given external threat we bond tightly on the basis of kinship and community and their markers, such as accent, rallying around a leader who takes the role of a senior relative (28). The German military's work-around involved: 1) organizing the army in terms of units of men from the same region who shared a local dialect; 2) training officers to look after the men and to take responsibility for their welfare; and 3) promoting strong bonding among the men and between enlisted men and officers.
Military organization is hardly unique in having an evolutionary psychology infrastructure: We could move from social institution to social institution and for each one identify the underlying evolutionary psychology. This claim seems particularly plausible in connection with the advertising and marketing industries, but there are no institutions without motivated individuals, and the study of those motivations ultimately leads to a study of our evolved psychology. Capitalism itself (as was previously suggested)involves a complex work-around of mechanisms having to do with social standing, reputation and resource control. The work-around concept helps move us from evolutionary biology's concerns with genetic fitness and the evolutionary psychologist's focus on individual-level evolved mechanisms to the social scientist's emphasis on society and culture. Work-arounds simply are the way in which Boyd and Richerson chose to talk about how history has channelled the expression of our evolved psychology. Note that work-arounds do not ordinarily arise from a sophisticated understanding of Darwin but out of experience and insight with what works, in the real world, and probably also from a group-level selection process. That is, organizations and even nations arise and dissolve in a (non-biological) Darwinian process. We mostly get to know and study only the successful societies, so it would be surprising if we did not find that they utilized numerous effective work-arounds. For example, societies with non-nepotistic civil services are probably more likely to endure, historically (all things being equal), than those with in which bureaucratic advancement is more a matter of kinship than merit.
An evolutionarily-informed praxis would look much like deliberately designed work-arounds (Barkow, 2003). Could we develop a work-around to correct the industrial food problem previously discussed? We could and we should. Perhaps the attend-preferentially-to-the-high-in-status mechanism previously discussed could be enlisted - high-status individuals would be presented disdaining some industrial food products in favor of more healthy foods. Perhaps the ethnocentrism response could be harnessed if we taught children to associate fat, sweet, and salty foods with out-group membership. Linking healthy foods to having a competitive edge would be a likely tactic, as would associating them with sexual attractiveness.
Do we really need evolutionary psychology to develop ideas that, frankly, would not win novelty awards from the advertising industry? Not necessarily. Elsewhere (Barkow, 1994), I have described evolutionary psychology as "Granny's psychology" because so much of its content is intuitively valid. Evolutionary psychologists argue that human intelligence is primarily social, having evolved largely to solve the problems of social living. This means that we are the products of selection for expertise in dealing with other people. If so, then by now most of the possible insights into the operation of our minds and societies must already have been figured out (probably by the ancient Greeks!). We should therefore expect that evolutionary psychology strategies will frequently elicit an "I already knew that" response. Of course, the reward structure of academia strongly privileges the unexpected and implausible assertion (e.g., we can learn about human intelligence by studying rats while ignoring the contents of consciousness), and there is a culture in the human sciences of devaluing the familiar. It is as if the response to Newton's theories of gravity had been, "nothing new here, I already was aware that apples fall down and not up." But if evolutionary psychology has any validity then most if its findings should be consistent with our lived experience - if it is not then we have not an evolutionary praxis but an evolutionary paradox.
The only person I know who has deliberately attempted to follow an evolutionary praxis is activist and columnist Amy Alkon. In a poster presented at Rutgers University during the June, 2002 meetings of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, she described how she used evolutionary psychology in a campaign against Sports Utility Vehicles. (29) The shaming techniques she exploited would not startle any experienced environmental activist. They make considerable intuitive sense and are also excellent evolutionary psychology (since shaming involves lowering the other's status, and status, for evolutionists, has much to do with access to both social and physical resources ultimately linked to genetic fitness).
Evolutionary psychology does not produce magic bullets for the guns of social activism, but it remains useful. It teaches us what is likely to work and why. It reminds us that we as social activists and moral mission social scientists are also human, subject to the same temptations of self-deception and desire for status and advantage for our children as the rest of the world, and therefore we are at risk of being the successors of the current oppressors. It especially teaches us that the claim to moral superiority is just another kind of claim to status. An evolutionary perspective provides an intellectual framework considerably more sophisticated than the good guys vs. bad guys into which even the brightest activists risk falling. And it reminds us that both we and granny probably believe in a lot of silly things, so that putting our beliefs in the form of hypotheses and throwing them into the bearpit of research and controversy in evolutionary psychology is wiser than assuming that our intuitions are always correct (e.g., does shaming really lower status, and did Amy Alkon's tactics effective lower status, and in whose eyes? - these are researchable questions). Finally, it could turn out that some evolutionary insights are indeed genuinely novel. (30)
Still, an evolutionary praxis will often simply frame the familiar in terms of the Darwinian metanarrative. Just that is satisfying for some of us and should not be objectionable to the rest. The point is that evolution and activism are definitely mutually compatible and the association is likely to strengthen the latter. The "moral mission" social scientists previously referred to will find the evolutionary approach largely comfortable (except, perhaps, for the reflexivity aspect of it - examining one's own motives and actions is always disquieting and can be embarrassing).
Human beings apprehend the world through stories, and stories about stories, and the Darwinian metanarrative is one of the greatest stories about stories ever told. For the human sciences, it serves two purposes. One of these is to provide a framework which "makes sense" to researchers, which permits us to put human and non-human behaviors and societies in a framework meaningful to ourselves and our students and readers. Is the framework objectively true? That kind of question no longer has meaning. Does it have competition, in its power and comprehensiveness? Marxism and neo-Marxism leave out the natural world and are thus not competitors - only the world's great religions are comparable in scope. Do we need powerful, integrating metanarratives? Postmodernists would say "no," for the postmodernist stance is skepticism towards all grand theory (Lyotard, 1984), all "totalizing" metanarratives. One could argue that postmodernism is itself a metanarrative, an argument whose only point is that all or at least most of us seem to need some kind of broad framework to understand the universe, even if that framework involves the organized denial of that need. For many of us, Darwin seems to work, constantly giving us the feeling of "now that makes sense." For those for whom it does not work that fact provides license for thoughtful criticism and a reason to seek to develop alternative frameworks leading to alternative predictions and definitions of data, but is certainly not grounds for contemptuous dismissal.
Regardless of whether the evolutionary framework provides some kind of cognitive satisfaction, of "fitting together" for any particular individual, it serves its second human science purpose for everyone: it is an incredibly powerful generator of theories and hypotheses. These must be tested and debated, alternatives considered, and so forth, in the usual business of science. The so-called "adaptationist program" is about generating hypotheses and theory, it is first and foremost a heuristic stance. Only secondarily, because it is also a satisfying metanarrative for many, need its theories and data and plain stories be linked to other Darwinian stories in a grand narrative. And always, the compatibility requirement is a rigorous test of what can be retained and what must be rethought, a requirement largely lacking in non-science metanarratives.
One can be deeply skeptical of the Darwinian metanarrative while still seeking to understand and use it. Non-Marxists can and do read Marx and use his insights. Non-Christians may learn from that religion. Non-evolutionists may find much of value in Darwin and in the Darwinian perspective shared by evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. Of course, if they know nothing of these fields but the parodies produced by critics then they will indeed wonder what the fuss is about. But because so much of the intellectual life of our period of history is heavily influenced by Darwin, they miss much. For social scientists, who have largely been among the missing, they risk seeing their fields marginalized (as Ellis, [1996] has warned).
Of course, for many evolutionists, Darwinism is not a "metanarrative," it is simply the truth, and those who reject it are the heathen, the infidels, the outgroup. Enthusiastic evolutionists do at times forget about vertical integration, they do at times over-generalize from data from a single society, they do at times create stories about past adaptive advantage that serve only to account for current results rather than to generate new hypotheses: In short, they do, at times, need and can benefit from criticism. There is no good reason for such criticism to be vicious or belittling or disrespectful, however, even when it is badly needed.
The naturalizing project of the Darwinians has suffered badly from a lack of criticism, a lack of informed criticism from social scientists. Social scientists have no monopoly on expertise in human society and culture, true, but their knowledge of this subject is massive. Psychologists and biologists may present much theory and data on likely evolved mechanisms and human commonalties but, without informed criticism from sociologists and social-cultural anthropologists they may overlook even the need for theorizing differences and contingencies, for appreciating the role of social structure and economics - and history -- in human action. If the work of sociologists and social anthropologists suffers from the Durkheimian fallacy, that of psychologists in particular can suffer from a slighting of levels of organization above that of the individual. But when evolutionary perspectives do encompass both the individual and the socioeconomic context, wonderful things happen. We get, for example, the previously cited accounts of the nature of religion from Boyer and Atran. We get Barbara Smuts'(1995) account of the origins of patriarchy. We get the beginnings of a coherent framework for understanding both human psychology and sociology. We get social science disciplines in which knowledge is cumulative and accessible across the island empires of competing frameworks. Possibly, just possibly, we get a reversal of the steadily growing marginalization of the social sciences.
The ethnographers of old were so self-absorbed with their own discipline and its conventions and fashions that they at times ignored the political revolutions around them, patiently reconstructing "timeless" ways of life that never existed. Today, most of their successors blithely ignore or dismiss the evolution-revolution going on all around them, endlessly identifying social injustices but not taking advantage of the new knowledge that sheds insight into their recurrence and just might provide a helpful praxis. The social sciences borrow fashions like second-hand clothes from the humanities, gaining useful garments - there can be real insights embedded within display prose, to be sure - but also often donning a set of vicious prejudices against empirical and quantitative work, against the idea of hypothesis-testing and the primacy of data, against Darwin and biology, and in favor of a literary style that often produces not precious metal but rough ore with every reader per force a refinery. The social sciences are not bankrupt, intellectually, but they have certainly lost massively in public esteem because, to change metaphors, they are constructing a plethora of interesting roofs and sometimes even walls but are ignoring the foundation of their work, which, if it is not to collapse, must take account of the evolved nature of our species and the findings of adjacent disciplines.
Because (as was discussed previously, and at greater length in Barkow,1989), we apparently evolved in terms of small groups that often competed against one another, we readily fall into such groupings today and seize on badges of group identity. Dress, hairstyle, language and accent readily serve as such markers or badges (Irwin, 1987): as do ideologies and beliefs. Academia is full of the politics of small bands and coalitions battling against one another. Whenever we see a construction/belief held as beyond question, treated as so obvious that only idiots and enemies would challenge it, we should suspect that we are seeing a group-identity marker, a way of distinguishing between in-group and out-group members. So it is with the anti-evolutionary, anti-science, unexamined social constructionist stance so often held by sociologists and social-cultural anthropologists. It is an identity marker rather than a serious intellectual position because the intellectual engagement with the evolution revolution is not there, its place taken by misconceptions and stereotypes. Note that the problem is not the critical stance of social scientists towards evolutionary psychology - both fields can only benefit from mutual criticism - it is the dismissal, the lack of engagement, that is so lamentable. (31)
Why should social scientist constructionists who reject the natural sciences' claims to objectivity and argue that science is only one way of knowing rush to embrace the evolutionists' assertions that in Darwin and evolutionary psychology and neuroscience lie the scientific (biological) bases for human society and culture? They will not, cannot, should not. Neither should they rush to dismiss. The Darwinian perspective is indeed only one way of knowing... but one so powerful and pervasive that in their scornful dismissal it is the social sciences themselves that are becoming marginalized! To repeat, one does not have to be a Marxist to be familiar with Marxism and to use some of its lessons - Marx is taught as a matter of course to students of social anthropology and sociology. So it should and perhaps eventually will be with Darwin and evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. The perspective may never come to dominate the social sciences but it will be recognized as one requiring engagement rather than dismissal.
We need and will always need the engaged social scientist working within a moral mission. Their struggle will never end because the conditions they challenge are ultimately rooted in our evolved human nature. This is not a counsel of despair. True, individuals will always tend to seek their own self-interest, form coalitions and join groups, work to transmit their own advantages to their children at the expense of the children of others, see themselves as noble and good and their rivals as ignorant or evil, be prone to ethnocentrism and to feelings of moral superiority and self-righteous anger, and compete in the arena of culture to edit information in self-serving ways. Both individuals and collectivities that see themselves as lower in status and control of resources than others will periodically challenge their relative standing. Those in advantageous positions will continue to follow strategies to maintain their privilege, from military means to ideologies and religions that preach that the status quo is good for all and perhaps divinely sanctioned. There can be no enduring, unchanging utopia: always, there will be individuals and groups who can see changes that would benefit themselves and who will effortlessly convince themselves that the benefits of reform or revolution will accrue to all (and sometimes they will be right). Always, all sides will see themselves as "the good guys." If nothing else, each young generation will seek pride and place, challenging the existing order and those already well-established in it, taking a critical stance towards received culture and editing it. All these strivings, even in the absence of other causes of change (e.g., environmental degradation, resource depletion, technological developments, population growth or decline, climate change) will mean that revisions and reversals and new constructions will always be there. Fukuyama (1992) not withstanding, history will not end. The need to struggle against oppression is permanent because the notion of a perfected human nature is oxymoronic.(And as with "granny's wisdom" [above], we knew that already, didn't we?)
None of this implies fatalism or despair. Evolutionary psychology tells us that the game is endless, not that it is bootless. Capitalism can be a Marxist nightmare or a cornucopia, depending on the kinds of governments and laws we devise, and an evolutionist perspective on human nature and society merely remind us that we have to work very hard and keep on working hard if we are to have sound laws and good governments. But this constant effort is the stuff of life, and as evolutionists would expect, in playing the game of life and politics we often experience great happiness, cooperate mightily, create magnificent works of art and frequently act with much generosity and even nobility. It is our evolved human nature that permits all this. Evolutionary psychology is a recognition of our humanness, not, as some may fear, its denial. An understanding of evolutionary psychology is a license to struggle against the self-seeking tendencies we find in others and in ourselves, and if we so choose, to fight against social inequality and injustice, all the while taking a skeptical attitude towards the accounts and excuses of others for their actions - and for our own, when we turn the Darwinian gaze inward.
This volume asks the social scientist to become, not an uncritical convert and devotee, but at least an informed critic. Previous generations of sociocultural anthropologists and sociologists came to grips with Freud and with Marx: It is past time for the current generation to come to grips with Darwin.
The brief "bridging" passages that precede each of the four sections if this book are in effect continuations of this introduction. The chapters are illustrative of current evolutionary approaches but are too few to represent more than a sampling of ongoing work - a truly comprehensive overview of Darwinian perspectives in the human sciences would require a trilogy!
The Response of Disciplines
Academic disciplines have engaged in various ways with the developments in evolutionary theory. This sidebar is intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive, its point being that the evolutionary revolution is omnipresent except for mainstream sociology and social-cultural anthropology.
Political Science has, since 1980, boasted the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences, a group whose meetings and journal include a strong evolutionary stream. Major books in the field include Schubert and Masters'(1991) edited collection Primate Politics, Masters (1989) The Nature of Politics, and Rubin's (2002) Darwinian Politics. Courses in what is sometimes referred to as "biopolitics" include discussions of evolutionary psychology, sociobiology and primate behavior along with other relevant biological topics such as the new reproductive strategies.
Many economists are interested in evolutionary approaches to their discipline, resulting in, for example, the Journal of Bioeconomics. Peter Koslowski's (1999) Sociobiology and Economics presents a good overview of the evolution revolution in Economics. There is widespread interest in game theory, with emphasis on mathematical models of the "Prisoner's Dilemma" family common in evolutionary biology and economics. This interest is reflected in, for example, Larry Samuelson's (1997) Evolutionary Games and Equilibrium Selection, Jurgen W. Weibull's (1995) Evolutionary Game Theory, and Herbert Gintis's (2000) Game Theory Evolving. Economists are also interested in the evolutionary nature of human self-interest, particularly with regard to contract behavior (e.g., Brian Skyrms' (1996) Evolution of the Social Contract, and Peyton H. Young's (2001) Individual Strategy and Social Structure: An Evolutionary Theory of Institutions. The contrast between the traditional rational choice assumption of classical economics and the heuristics and decision-rules approach favored by evolutionary psychologists has provoked much intellectual interest.
The field of law enjoys a growing number of analyses of the implications of evolutionary psychology for its domain. For example, there is Roger D. Masters and Margaret Gruter's (1992) The Sense of Justice: Biological Foundations of Law, John H. Beckstrom's (1993) Darwinism Applied: Evolutionary Paths to Social Goals, Kingsley R. Browne's (1998) Divided Labours: An Evolutionary View of Women at Work, and his (2002) Biology at Work: Rethinking Sexual Equality. These analyses have considerable importance not just for law but for sociology and for women's studies. Each year, the conferences of "The Society for Evolutionary Analysis and the Law" bring evolutionary and legal thought together.
Aside from psychology, the field that perhaps has most engaged with evolutionary psychology and sociobiology is psychiatry. Evolutionary psychiatry is a burgeoning field. A few representative titles might include Stevens and Price's (1996) Evolutionary Psychiatry, McGuire and Troisi's (1998) Darwinian Psychiatry, Bruce Charleton's (2000) Psychiatry and the Human Condition, Gilbert, McGuire and Bailey's (2000) Evolutionary Psychotherapy, and Glantz and Pearce's (1989) Exiles From Eden: Psychotherapy From an Evolutionary Perspective. Any social scientist with a focus on "deviant" behavior or mental health needs to keep abreast of this exciting work.
(Non-psychiatric) medicine and nutrition are also being influenced by evolutionary thought, particularly (though not exclusively) by "mismatch" or "discrepancy" theory - the premiss that many of our ills (social, psychological and physical) are due to the distance between our current environment and the environments in which we evolved and to which we presumably remain adapted. Good entries to this field would be Trevathan, Smith and McKenna's (1999) collection, Evolutionary Medicine, or Nesse and Williams'(1994) Why We Get Sick. Eaton et al. (1994) will be of special interest to those concerned with the health of women, with special reference to cancer of the breast, ovary, and endometrium. A recurring theme of this field is that physicians have often misunderstood the body's adaptive response to disease (e.g., by taking the body's raised temperature and decreased iron levels in response to infection as illness to be treated rather than as adaptive defense); or have pathologized evolved prophylactic mechanisms such as (according to Profet [1992, 1993] menstruation and pregnancy ("morning") sickness. In nutrition, Eaton, Shostak and Konner's (1988 The Paleolithic Prescription remains a good popular introduction to using the likely diet of our ancestors as a guide to healthy eating. More recently, Loren Cordain (2001) has provided a similar argument and guide. (These authors are primarily scientific researchers rather than popularizers). The underlying assumption of these works is that our bodies are still adapted to the diet of our forager/hunting-gathering ancestors, rather than to the very high carbohydrate diet prevalent since the beginning of agriculture. Evolutionists (and others) argue that we are very poorly adapted to our current industrial diet of highly-processed foods.
The humanities - literature and the arts - have not disregarded the evolution revolution. See, for example, Joseph Carroll's (1994) Evolution and Literary Theory, Robert Storey's (1996) Mimesis and the Human animal, Cooke and Turner's (1999) Biopoetics, Wallin, Merker and Brown's edited (2000) volume The Origins of Music, and Ellen Dissanayake's (2000) Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began. Grammar and Voland's Evolutionary Aesthetics (Grammar & Voland, 2003) replaces the mysteriousness of judgements of beauty with Darwinian analysis.
Philosophers have long been deeply involved with evolutionary theory, often criticizing, often supporting, often utilizing. The relevant literature is vast but three illustrative works would be the huge tome edited by Hull and Ruse (1998), Philosophy of Biology; Daniel Dennett's (1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and Larry Arnhart's (1998) Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature.
In 1999, the journal Managerial & Decision Economics published a special, evolutionarily-oriented issue on "Management and Human Nature," while Nigel Nicholson's (2000) Executive Instinct: Managing the Human Animal in the Information Age, explains the basics of evolutionary psychology to the business community.
To summarize this sidebar, a multitude of fields are engaging with evolutionary psychology and the evolutionary perspective in general, leaving the social sciences lagging behind.
1. By "social scientists" I mean to include sociologists, social-cultural anthropologists, and any other individuals or groups comfortable with this umbrella appellation.
2. And if you happen to be a sociobiologist or evolutionary psychologist who thinks otherwise - or who writes as if you think otherwise - then it is especially good that you are reading this book.
3. See, for example, the angry scorn of Lancaster's (2004)commentary in Anthropology News, the newsletter of the American Anthropological Association. Lancaster presents evolutionary psychology as a proponent of the "bioreductionism" that he quite correctly criticizes. One could make a good case, however, for evolutionary psychology being as much victim as perpetrator of "bioreductionism": By reducing the subtlety and sophistication of evolutionary psychology's arguments to silly statements about "genes" and "programming" Lancaster himself is a species of "bioreductionist."
4. I am omitting the major contributions made by archaeological anthropologists to understanding the evolution human behavior because my focus is on social-cultural anthropology. I do not for a moment mean to slight such important work as, for example, Steven Mithen's (1996) The Prehistory of Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science.
5. "Scientism" usually refers to the belief that the "scientific method" is the only road to true knowledge. For most social scientists, there are various roads to knowledges (the plural is deliberate), and that of science perhaps so weak as to be inapplicable to their subject matter. Note that my generalizations about social scientists are based on my own experience and reading - I know of no applicable survey research data.
6. See Kuznar (1996) for a defense of "scientific anthropology" against creationists and racists as well as Marxists and some feminists and postmodernists.
7. I am not sure how to categorize the Cambridge sociologist and evolutionist, W. Gary Runciman (1998, 2001; Runciman, Maynard Smith, & Dunbar, 1996)- - some people are simply individuals rather than schools of thought
8. In The Merchant of Venice.
9. My argument was that we were selected for complex internal representations of others in order to predict their behavior. Such a system necessarily requires an internal representation of the organism itself in order to model the outcome of social interactions. Any organism with an internal representation of self experiences consciousness, with self-awareness the product of a sufficiently complex internal representation of self. This argument, while totally lacking in neurophysiological sophistication, has the virtue of being testable. See Barkow (1989) for the full discussion.
10. There is a huge literature on the relationship between biology and ethics. While Darwin is anything but a guide for proper behavior - there (arguably) never was a "social Darwinism," only a "social Spencerism"- evolution does have much to say about our "moral emotions" and sense of injustice and about the ways in which cooperation can often be the outcome of competition. For those who wish to explore this broad area, the reader edited by Katz (2000) is a good place to begin. Ridley's (1997) well-written work is likely to be of particular interest to social scientists concerned with altruism, cooperation, and the environment. Other relevant works include Alexander (1993), Arnhart (1998), Boehm (2000), De Waal (1996), McGuire (1992), Wilson (2002), and Wright (1994).
11. For excellent and highly readable answers to the questions of what gene and genome are, see Ridley (2000). There are a variety of conceptions of the "gene," a term that itself seems to be evolving.
12. I have even heard, "he just doesn't have the genes for that." In that context, "genes" was apparently meant to be a euphemism for cojones.
13. Evolutionists must constantly battle against the idea of a super-deterministic gene. For recent skirmishes, see Dennett (2003) and Pinker (2002).
14. Segarstråle (this volume) suspects that this avoidance of genetics represents an effort on the part of evolutionary psychologists to avoid controversy, and this suspicion is shared by at least one behavior geneticist of my acquaintance. My own research interests do not involve genes, but perhaps Segarstråle is correct and this focus does reflects a desire for a quiet life; I doubt that, in my own case, but of course I cannot speak for others.
15. Otherwise well-informed critics such as Ehrlich and Feldman (2003), who see evolutionary psychologists as some kind of genetic reductionists, are very far off the mark because the field has little to do with genetics or genes. The debate in which such critics need to engage involves the nature, generality, limits, and of course ontological status of posited mechanisms and the claim that they constrain and enable the enormous diversity of human societies.
16. More properly, polygenes, a group of genes that work together to help produce a particular trait or mechanism.
17. Social constructivists differ from constructionists in focussing on the individual, psychological level (Gergen, 1994:67), while radical constructivists (von Glasersfeld, 1991, 1995) are careful not to posit any kind of "objective" reality out there at all.
18. I am grateful to Dan Fessler for his insight into the relationship between Lutz's work and evolutionary psychology. Any misunderstandings are entirely my own, however.
19. For a more philosophical approach to reconciling social constructionist and evolutionary psychology, with particular reference to the nature of emotion and the work of Catherine Lutz (1988), see Mallon and Stitch (2000) and Stitch (1996). These authors see the dispute over local rather than core universal definitions of emotions as a misunderstanding about metaphysics.
20. See also Borgerhoff Mulder, Richerson, Thornhill and Voland (1997) for a thorough discussion of the relationship between evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology.
21. For discussion of how maladaptive cultural traits can become established, see Aunger (2000), Barkow (1984, 1989:293-322), Edgerton (1992), Logan and Qirko (1996), Richerson & Boyd (2004), and Takahasi (1998, 1999).
22. Jack Goody (1982:8)describes "the emergence of new sociological theory" as involving "the statement of opposition to the present establishment." He adds "that this process is often 'cyclical' and 'repetitive,' more rebellion than revolution" (drawing on Max Gluckman's distinction between rebellions as opposed to revolutions). Changes are more substitutions in approach than major changes in theory: "Rather than crystallizing existing knowledge and offering a model for future experimental and intellectual work, such changes indicate any shift of emphasis between possibilities that lie permanently embedded in the analysis of sociological material..." Goody disputes that sociology and social anthropology are cumulative fields, as opposed to cyclical fields in which not so much theory as "approach" changes over time. An approach provides a "plan of attack," a general research strategy about what "to look for" (p. 7). Poststructuralists would no doubt disagree with Goody.
23. Complex ambiguity is the academic version of conspicuous consumption. Geoffrey Miller (2000) explains conspicuous consumption as a type of display behavior - items are frequently purchased by the wealthy not in spite of their cost but because of their cost. Similarly, in academia, obscure, convoluted, richly ambiguous theoreticians are often read not in spite of their difficulty but because of their difficulty. The ostensible payoff in conspicuous consumption is utility and in conspicuous display prose intellectual insight but in fact in both cases the payoff is primarily a claim to status by the purchaser/reader. The philosopher Bertrand Russell (1946) long ago demonstrated that the most abstruse of philosophical ideas could in fact be presented with great lucidity - but Russell was writing at a time when it was indeed clarity rather than its lack that earned prestige and publication.
24. O'Meara (1997) and the accompanying commentaries on his position make for a good entry to the debate within anthropology on this topic. As of this writing, there is no sign of a consensus emerging
25. Lewontin has been a powerful critic of efforts to understand the behavior of our species in the light of evolutionary biology (see Segåstrale [2000] this volume). While he appreciates that adopting an empty scientific formalism ("scientism") is not the solution to the problems of the social sciences, he would apparently not agree that the solution is making the assumptions of social scientists compatible with evolutionary biology and psychology. Few, however, have made the attempt.
For a discussion of the sociological processes in the social sciences that generate ignorance of and antipathy towards adjacent fields, see Barkow (1989:11-14). The structurally-generated insularity of the social sciences is a significant factor in the movement of many social scientists to the humanities, in recent years. Without the power of the vertically integrated approach to winnow out impossible theory, and without the stimulation that comes from cross-species comparisons, the student of social science is faced with a bewildering variety of approaches and no easy way to differentiate among them except, to be sure, the political (that is, in terms of alliances and career interests, factors important in all fields).27. In 1968, while living in a small Hausa village in northern Nigeria, I once attempted to explain to an ordinary farmer the idea that nepotism was something bad and civil service examinations good. I knew the precise instant when, in spite of my imperfect Hausa and the bizarreness of the idea, he had grasped what I was saying because he suddenly looked at me in shock. His instant and amazed reproach was: "You would favor strangers over your own brothers?" It was clear that, for him, I was advocating a really unusual kind of immorality.
28. These evolved mechanisms underlie the ethnocentrism phenomenon, the tendency for human beings to readily form into in-groups that are likely to compete with out-groups for status and resources and to face external threat with increased in-group solidarity. For discussion of ethnocentrism and also of how we may have been selected for this cluster of traits, see (for example) Alexander (1979), Barkow (1989, 2000), Irwin (1987), LeVine & Campbell (1972), Reynolds, Falger, & Vine (1987), and Shaw & Wong (1988).
29. Amy Alkon, a journalist and syndicated columnist, placed cards on the windshields of SUVs parked on Los Angeles streets. The cards read (to quote from the account under her own byline that appeared in the Los Angeles New Times of April 11, 2002 (http://www.newtimesla.com/issues/2002-04-11/sidecar.html/1/index.html) and from the account in the London Guardian of April 16, 2002 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4395102,00.html): "Road-hogging, gas-guzzling, air-fouling vulgarian! Clearly you have an extremely small penis or you wouldn't drive such a monstrosity. For the adequately endowed, there are hybrids or electrics. 310 798 1817." Dialing that telephone number would result in a voice saying, "Piggy, piggy, piggy. If you can afford one of those huge new SUVs you can afford something that doesn't suck all the air out of the planet and spit it back black ... It's really creepy that you drive that thing and I just wanted to let you know." Alkon (in a personal communication) explains that she pressed the evolutionary psychology buttons that she believes would create shame over driving an SUV because doing so meant that these drivers were using up more than their fair share of resources. Though her campaign is only a modest and simple beginning, and not necessarily the best possible strategy to achieve her end of protecting the environment, it does support the notion that an evolutionary praxis is possible. Presumably, more subtle techniques are possible.,
30. For example, the study of sperm competition and its implications was quite unanticipated (e.g., Bellis & Baker, 1995; Birkhead, 2000; Low, 1999).
31. In part, though only in part, the larger context for the anti-evolution stance of the human sciences is that of the "science wars" of the turn-of-the-century. For an analysis of anti-biology and anti-evolutionism in the humanities, see McBride (1998).
32. My thanks to James Bryan for his helpful suggestions contained in a personal communication dated August 31, 2001.
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