I’m sort of surprised it’s taken SM this long to have a full-on rant about the shortcomings of sociobiology/ evolutionary psychology/ evolutionary biology — perhaps I’m the only person who is habitually irritated by this field, or perhaps we are all so irritated by it that we’d rather just not go there. At any rate a couple of “different”:http://www.anthroblog.tadmcilwraith.com/2005/05/29/homogenization-of-cultures/ “people”:http://www.discover.com/issues/may-05/departments/discover-dialogue/ have pointed out a “recent interview”:http://www.discover.com/issues/may-05/departments/discover-dialogue/ with “Mark Pagel”:http://www.ams.rdg.ac.uk/zoology/pagel/. I have never read anything he is written, and a quick look at his homepage indicates that he is a fairly prominent scientist. Nonetheless, the interview drove me nuts. Here’s why.
Obviously I have nothing against biology or evolution, and in fact I’ve argued on SM in the past for “the value of a ‘four field’ approach”:/2005/05/16/four-sick-fields/. So I am not one of those dreaded ‘cultural studies postmodernists’ boogiemen that people habitually invoke to make humanists look bad. I don’t have an issue with evolutionary biology in principle, but I do have an issue with it when the analytic models it uses to make sense of human behavior are so blunt.
Let’s do a little ‘anthro 101’ on the assumptions about ‘human nature’ in this interview. For instance, when Pagel claims that “we really aren’t very different from other animals” because, like them, we “engage in warfare” and “forage for food.” We are, obviously animals, and I have no idea how one might want to define ‘warfare’ or what counts as ‘warfare’ in other species but it should only take a second to realize that the rest of this post could be about taking that assertion apart into very small pieces. Equally: ‘forage for food’? Has that been how human communities have supplied themselves with food for the past couple thousand years? Foraging happens, of course. But then again so does prancing around in antlers — and while we’re like deer in that respect, I wouldn’t say that this is defining feature of humans.
Ditto with “We choose mates on the basis of characteristics that we think will be related to our success in reproducing”: If by ‘mate’ you mean ‘marriage’ then in fact you might not be the one doing the choosing if your family has anything to say about it (imagine you are a woman in a culture where women lack agency). And of course the range of marriageable people is defined by culturally specific notions which animals really lack (baboons do not have to marry their cross-cousins). If by ‘mate’ you mean ‘sex’ then ‘choice’ implies a little more rationality than goes into the decision sometimes. If by ‘choose mates on the basis of their sucess in reproducing’ you mean ‘get laid’ then yes, you hit on the person who you think will go home with you (unless, of course, you have a biologically innate ‘fear of strangers’). Like I said, I don’t doubt that we’re animals. But the point is this: the more choices about ‘mates’ matter in terms of ‘resources’ (stable social relationships which channel money, power, calories, etc.) the more likely they are to be regulated by the ways of being human that are the least like the behavior of other animals.
I’m not even going to go into the claim that there is ‘more cultural diversity’ in the tropics because there is ‘more biomass’ and hence more ‘resources.’ As someone who studies a country widely touted as being the most culturally diverse place on the planet (Papua New Guinea), I assure you that it’s not the biomass that makes people speak 700 different languages. And for the record, just because there’s a lot of biomass does not mean it’s all edible.
But what I find most annoying about the interview is the implicit model of ‘cultural groups’ or ‘human groups’ that Pagel uses. Here we have the familiar, but mistaken, idea that ‘cultures’ are internally homogenous and brightly bounded. Basically he appears to use the term ‘culture’ as synonymous with ‘nation state.’ Given the way this approach treats ‘cultures’ as discrete objects, it’s no wonder Pagel can imagine that “Human cultural groups have behaved as if they were different species.” And (of course) each of these externally bounded internally homogenous groups speaks exactly one language. So you can count up cultural diversity by counting the number of languages, right?
Wrong. Ernest Nagel’s analysis of the logic of structure functionalism (in, iirc, The Structure of Science) points out that it is really, really hard to draw clear lines between ‘societies’ and their environment in the same way you can between an organism and its environment. Trying to define the ‘health’ (or ‘goal state’) of a ‘human group’ that it might be trying to improve or at least keep in equilibrium is also difficult. Referring, as Pagel does, to “human groups” such as “Britain, America, and China” is cripplingly problematic. What is ‘China’ again? Does it include Xinjiang? Tibet? People who are ethnically Han? But then what about China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic minorities (‘Han,’ like ‘white’ to most Americans, isn’t a ‘culture’ it’s ‘what normal people are’)? So then is the nation state of China one group or many? If you ‘one’ then you may have a ‘group’ but not a ‘cultural’ one. And at any rate how long has it been since Michael Mann pointed out that “human being are social, not societal”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/052131349X/qid=1117398924/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/102-6229466-0987309?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 and that while networks of power might be empirically distinguishable, they certainly aren’t coterminous with the borders of a polity. Twenty years? And how long has it been since the Boasians demonstrated that culture traits flow across political, social, and economic boundaries so fluidly that I can read newspapers “printed in characters invented by ancient Semites on material invented in China by a process invented in Germany” and “thank a Hebrew deity in an Indo-European language” that I am “100% American”:http://www3.azwestern.edu/psy/dgershaw/lol/American.html? A century or so?
And speaking of 100% ‘American’, did any of the Canadians who read that last paragraph notice that according to Pagel they’re in the same ‘cultural group’ as citizens of the United States?
I don’t take issue with the project of understanding human evolution as a whole, but I do take issue with attempts to explain human behavior that don’t actually take into account what we know about it. I’m sure that if gave an interview in Discover Magazine about the genetic constitution of plants (one of Pagel’s specialities) based on my impressions of the flora in my fieldsite in Papua New Guinea, Pagel would be horrified at my pretensions to scientific expertise. Well you know what? The feeling is mutual. Interviews like Pagel’s (and I’m not making any claims about his work, because I haven’t read it) run roughshod over decades of research by social science and rely instead on their common-sense notions how humans behave. This is simply not good enough to build a rigorous theory of anything on.
If you’re interested in the relevance of the Boasian theories of cultural boundaries today, I highly reccomend Ira Bashkow’s excellent article “A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries”:http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/aa.2004.106.3.443?prevSearch=allfield%3A%28Bashkow%29 and the other papers in that issue of American Anthropologist. If you’d like a global history of human society with a more nuanced, authoritative, and complete account of the growth of human interconnection across the past 40,000 years, I’d suggest “The Human Web”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393925684/qid=1117400274/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-6229466-0987309.
Update: Having browsed quickly through some of Pagel’s work it’s clear to me that his published stuff is much more nuanced than this interview. Nonetheless, I wish he were more lucid when speaking to a popular audience.
Thank you, Rex, for emphasizing the lack of connection between numbers of languages, numbers of cultures, and cultural homogeneity much more elegantly than I did. This is precisely what I saw in the MSNBC article too where the implication was that one language means one culture. It is such an easy idea to grasp, however … even back to Anthropology 101 where so many definitions (bands, tribes, culture, etc.) imply that language is a (the?) marker of group distinction.
And, thanks for taking more time with the article as a whole. I think you are right … there is a trend towards dumbing-down scholarship for mainstream media presentations and the result is the over-simplification of important ideas.
And, somehow I missed the fact that Canadians are culturally American in the last paragraph … but many Canadians would actually be amused to see that such an implication was founded on an acknowledgement that Canadians and Americans are two different groups, if in label only! (We do speak the same language, afterall … don’t we?)
HI Alex Rex (a nice title, really…)
Like you, sociobiologists/evolutionary psychologists get me all hot under the collar. but I also think we in anthro are more worried about them than we should be. They really are cranks, *especially* in that world of “real science” they are always shaking in our faces. giving interviews to Discover, having a research project on “linguistic evolution” — these things indicate a bioscientific career that is definitely NOT going great guns. Real departments of genetics & cell and molecular biology have little use for this kind of crap — not for ideological reasons, but for basic science ones. The more genetics advances, the less room there is for sociobiology’s grand claims to stake territory in that particular knowledge void.
btw, this is one reason I disagree with your “*yawn*” over the Yanomami deal. It probably is pretty tiresome to watch the endless rounds of lowland S. American not-so-celebrity wrestling. BUT one thing that is at stake in the debate is evolutionary psychologist types trying to get their hooks in anthropology. They haven’t got a real disciplinary home of their own — despite all their pretensions to being scientists, science departments certainly don’t want them, and they have to find an academic niche *somewhere* in order to maintain their ragged pretenses to intellectual authority. So they are launching stealth colonizations of our perfectly decent 4 field discipline, none of the subfields of which genuinely needs them, either (including, or especially, physical anthropology). one crypto-stake in the vote over the referendum is their attempt to document that they have an honored place among us. how too shame-making.
Whoah! Whoah there! Okay, this may be deeply heretical, but I’d like to propose that Mark Pagel isn’t actually an evolutionary psychologist.
Look, he doesn’t fit the profile:
.
That’s not an evo psych trait, which is generally to vigourously assert their rational scientific credentials (then when a pertinent empirical point is brought up against their argument, to make out they’re being treated like Hypatia of Alexandria).
Another thing:
This isn’t the sort of thing you find in evo psych. Okay, actually, it is, but then the argument usually does an about turn at this point and all sorts of innate explanations are then proffered. Pagel doesn’t do that. He goes on discussing culture for the rest of the article.
Now, you don’t know me, but if you did, you would know that, in general, I’d really like to agree with you about this:
This time though, it isn’t fair, because Pagel isn’t working alone here. He’s working with an anthropologist, Ruth Mace, who Knows Her Stuff (full disclosure: she was one of my lecturers when I was an undergrad). He isn’t riding roughshod at all, he’s gone about it in the way we would like.
(Given her involvement, there’s an odd irony which emerges for me reading criticism about the “blunt analytic models” being used, because the last time I saw her she was conceding the better part of an argument over birth rates in somewhere-or-other to an epidemiologist with a far more blunt analytic model than she was using).
Whilst I’m being heretical … oh, why not go all the way? I think that thinking about cultures as biological species is actually a rather interesting idea. Before everyone here becomes apoplectic with fury at my biological determinism, I think I should let you know that species concepts in evolutionary biology are an area of particular debate and disagreement. I mean, seriously it reminds me of disagreements over concepts of culture.
This, just to give you a flavour of what could be an interesting discussion (if everyone could keep calm about it).
I don’t think there’s much in that article to cool the incandescant fury of a political scientist or a historian suddenly on the recieving end of a bit of evo-bio/anthropological imperialism, but Pagel and Mace aren’t Tooby and Cosmides.
Kathleen, I’m not sure it is fair to say that they are all “cranks.” In fact, my understanding is that many of them do first rate scientific research … on ants. The problem is when they try to generalize their research to humans.
Hi Kerim,
If by research on “ants” you mean E.O. Wilson — his approaches to insects are no kinder than his approaches to humans; one of his landmark early experiments was to kill everything on an island to study how it was then re-colonized by new species. I actually think there is a steady continuum from the bug studies to the people studies; that key assertions along that continuum are mistaken; and that they won’t stand the test of time and new knowledge. I could, of course, be wrong — but like Fidel Castro I am rather confident that history will absolve me. 😉
Wilson is a great example of what I mean: for a ‘working scientist’, he certainly seems to have a lot of time to produce bombast for a popular audience. When I was an undergrad bio major, and following that as a tech in a neurochem research lab, I basically never heard peep about E.O. Wilson — people were too busy teaching and producing actual disciplinary knowledge. It was only AFTER I got to grad school in anthropology that everyone was so worked up about him. That’s what I mean about the “playing scientist” engaged in by ev pscyh, sociobio, etc that we anthros fall for too easily.
tigerbear — from the evidence available on the web, Mark Pagel walks like an ev pysch and quacks like an ev psych so I’d venture he’s being crafty when he coyly demurs from the title of ‘scientist’ (along the lines of a celebrity saying,” I wouldn’t call myself GORGEOUS and FABULOUSLY TALENTED. I’d just say I’ve been very lucky…”). I looked at Ruth Mace’s website, and I’m not sure she quite makes the case you’d like her to: “Adaptive explanations for the demographic transition to low fertility” — do we need adaptive explanations for this when the socio cultural and political economic ones are so satisfactory?
on a less crabby note: the sharing of all these stimulating links is such exemplary scholarly generosity —
regards
Kathleen
Adaptive explanations can, of course, be cultural.
What does that mean? Let me give an example: let’s say everyone in my community believes in God. No one will marry me if I don’t believe in God; thus, atheism is “not adaptive” and religious belief is ‘adaptive’. is this what you mean by an adaptive explanation that is cultural? There are many persuasive critiques to be made of this kind of use of the term “adaptive” with relation to culture — but let me not get into them without knowing what YOU mean by “adaptive explanations can be cultural”. do you mean something else? can you give an example of what you mean?
Tigerbear — thanks for you comments, which I take in good humor 🙂
1. I agree with you that Pagel isn’t an evolutionary psychologist. I never claimed he was. I claimed he was an evolutionary biologist. That’s what the title of the post was “Mandatory ‘biologists don’t get people’ Rant” rather than “Mandatory ‘pscyhologists don’t get people’ Rant”. So I agree with you. He is not an evolutionary psychologist.
2. I also agree that Pagel has coauthored papers with Mace. As I said,I am not talking about his published work, which I mentioned was more nuanced than the interview. I was just talking about the interview. The remarks made therein are embarrassing. Obviously, just because Pagels works with a licensed anthropologist doesn’t mean that we should stop critically examining what he says in public because he “works with the good guys.” If Mace has been explaining to Pagel these older definitional problems, he sure doesn’t seem to have gotten them in the interview.
(2a. The point isn’t toeing the line and demanding that people not be ‘heretical’ (go ahead and be heretical if you want — this is a BLOG after all, not AE) and follow the party line. The point is that what he said is poorly conceptualized)
3. I’ve never met Mace or Pagel. I am sure they are perfectly decent people and very smart. I have nothing against them personally. Let’s make that clear.
4. I agree it would be interesting to see how debates in biology over problematizing the issue of ‘species’ mirror debates over ‘culture’ as both fields develop methods and theories that challenge previously taken for granted certainties. However, we don’t see any of that in the interview.
5. I don’t know who Tooby and Cosmides are. Nor do I know how political scientists or historians might respond to evolutionary biology/anthropological imperialism. I am sure that there are people out there who are sloppier than Pagel. Who knows — maybe he’s not to blame and the editors butchered the interview? All I know is that Pagel’s interview was annoyingly sloppy.
Thanks for taking the comments in the manner they were intended, Rex. Cheers.
1). This was pretty much in response to your writing a ‘full-on rant about the shortcomings of sociobiology/ evolutionary psychology/ evolutionary biology’ which I felt was a bit of needless conflation (it’d confuse poor Richard Lewontin, for one thing).
2). I think he’s gone about doing what he set out to do in the right way. To go back to your example, had you decided to start researching the genetic consitution of plants, and started collaborating in a research programme with a plant geneticist how would that be any different than what he’s done? I think generally what he’s done has been positive, and interesting, and doesn’t deserve the mandatory rant.
Interestingly, you brought up structural functionalism in your post, which might be quite important. Mace is a behavioural ecologist. Now, certainly I remember reading “Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia” by 1940s struc-funker Audrey Richards as an undergrad and this being seen as an intellectual antecedent to behavioural ecology work then going on in the department. So Mace’s own position may play quite a part in this (and maybe * shrugs * she doesn’t like press). We were quite a bit of a struc-funk department, really.
2a). The “heresy” is to soc anth in general, not the blog (which is still in a liminal state, and thus cannot have heretics, surely?)
3). They may or may not be lovely people. I’ve no reason to think they’re not lovely (mind you, two of my best mates are evo psych-ers, wrong as they are) My point is Ruth Mace Knows Her Stuff.
4). Benefits of a soc/bioanth education:
group discussions on species concepts -> no clear conclusion
group discussions on culture concepts -> no clear conclusion
5). Crikey, I wish I didn’t know who Tooby and Cosmides are (they set down the evo psych paradigm in The Adapted Mind, 1992). I’d think anyone who claimed they could use general models of cultural motors (however well empirically founded) to make definitive claims about the nature of change within modern nation states would piss off political scientists and historians. It’d piss me off if I were a such a person.
I appreciate your continued statements that Mace is very smart.
If I was to get interested in plant genetics it would behoove me to collaborate with a plant geneticist. That is good. It would also behoove me to speak in major magazines as if I has heard of a century’s worth of botany and genetics. That would be bad, and what Pagel did in a forum that will be more widely read, I’m sure, than much of his academic research results.
I can’t really parse #4 — it’s a bit cryptic. Regardless, I’d reiterate two points: first, I agree a four fields approach (if this what you mean by “soc/bioanth education”?) is valuable. Second, anthropologists have many clear conclusions about how culture operates, although we don’t have All The Answers and our discipline conducts itself in a way that may seem strange to people from the ‘hard’ sciences.
Hmmmm . . . I finally got around to reading the interview. I have a suspicion that some of his comments may have been taken out of context so I’m not willing to comment on his capacities as a scientist or “person who thinks about the world”. However, I just wanted to point out that I saw a hint of cultural materialism in his responses, especially where he elaborates on human cultural patterns as resulting directly out of the environment. There is also some Sapir-Whorf in there when he comments on how language affects thought.
Now, I *am* highly influenced by postmodernism (throwing that in there because of Rex’s concern about being identified as one and I’m not a fan of any kind of determinism so I’m always a little wary of any explanation that appears to look for one sole cause of human behaviour, whether it be biology, environment or culture. I *am*, however, open to an examination of how these various factors interconnect, whcih Pagel seems to at least touch on toward the end of the interview when he comments on the slow rate at which members of various cultural groups (the definition of which *are* problematic, I agree) intermate being partially due to economic choice and other cultural factors.
Anyway, I don’t really have a strong opinion on the interview one way or the other . . .just thought I’d share some observations.
Ooops . . .almost forgot: I also wanted to quickly comment on the whole Canadian thing as well. I didn’t see the implication that we were in the same cultural group as USAnians. As for Tad’s comment: “Canadians and Americans are two different groups, if in label only! (We do speak the same language, afterall … don’t we?)”, I just wanted to send a very friendly reminder that not all of us speak English as a first language in Canada 🙂
Okay, clarifications coming.
My point isn’t that Ruth Mace is smart per se (which I’d describe is a personality trait), but that she has expertise in the relevant areas. She could be really smart and know nothing about anthropology, after all.
I’m not convinced that the problems stemming from Pagel’s interview are particularly problematic for anthropologists (whereas political scientists and historians, oh yes, they’d piss me off), also I think there may be subtle problems here between an approach inspired by British social anthropology carried out by an evolutionary biologist and a behavioural ecologist – especially when explicated by the non-specialist, and how that appears when understood in the context of the American cultural anthropological tradition (of which, I’ve assumed you are a member). I think this might be an important part of the issue.
Ignore 4). if you like. The point was that if you’ve been in a group discussion about culture concepts, then you’ve got a pretty good idea of the structure of how a group discussion of species concepts goes.
I’ve got an old-fashioned British anthropology degree, which means I do not understand this four-field structure of which you speak. Quite literally, possibly, as undergrad anth here doesn’t usually include linguistics, but focuses on social anthropology, biological anthropology (mostly primate ethology and palaeoanthropology in my old undergrad dept, more genetics in other places) with a bit of archaeology thrown in.
I dunno if any discipline has All The Answers, especially not the “hard sciences”…
Kathleen, go right ahead with your critiques. My point was about the agnostism of behavioural ecology to the basis of its adaptive explanations (aka “the phenotypic gambit”), which means its explanations can be both adaptive and sociocultural/political economic. Its a false dichotomy to suggest otherwise.
I appreciate your continued statements that Ruth Mace has expertise in the relevant areas (although I notice in fact she has her D.Phil in zoology and not anthropology 😉 ). Pagel — at least in that interview — clearly doesn’t.
Pagel’s interview does pose problems for anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic, and my entry describes two areas in which it does so: assumptions about human nature, as well as the internal homogeneity and external boundedness of cultural units. This is simply not an issue in national style, although I admit it does press buttons on Americans the way it doesn’t for the British.
This is just so transparently obvious to me I don’t really know what to say except deliver a long boring lecture on the history of British social anthropology beginning with Radcliffe-Brown (who was not one to theorize society as the result individuals attempting to maximize their chances of succsessful reproduction)and his opposition to Malinowskian functionalism and ending with Marilyn Strathern’s meditations on the relations between parts and wholes in social analysis (and problematizes the bounded notion of ‘a culture’) with detours in between including stops at Kuper’s criticism of the shortcomings of lineage theory or Freeman’s paper on the concept of the kindred, or J.A. Barnes’s brief note on African Models in the New Guinea Highlands or Political Systems of Highland Burma (or even Pul Eliya) — all of which took to pieces the natural-kinds model of society which R-B endorsed and which might underwrite the ‘cultures as species’ model that Pagel talks about in his interview. Given that this model has been on the way down _even in the British context_ since 1952 this isn’t surprising. Not one of the people on the UCL Social Anthropology staff seem classifiable as a ‘structure-functionalist’ to me. (They do all seem to be doing interesting work, though!)
HI Tigerbear,
That one really wasn’t meant as a critique; believe it or not, I stopped short because I didn’t know if I was getting your point. But I’m still not sure I do; now I’m unclear on the “false dichotomy”. Is the “phenotypic gambit” a contrast to the “genotypic gambit” — that is, the question as to whether adaptive forces operate at the level of the entire organism or the individual gene? [Leaving aside questions of group selection?] Is this what they are “agnostic” about? Or is that off track? If you are so inclined, I think giving a classic example – or even a not-classic, rough illustration — would be really helpful.
I guess this is what I get for protesting too much, heh.
Well, its quite obvious that, you Know Your Stuff too. Yes, obviously struc-func is a 40s/50s thing, which has been on the decline since Evans-Pritchard (who presided over my soc anth education like a multiple-brass-bust-based colossus) wrote that it was in the early 50s. I wish I could name off the top of my head a good article on the nuanced differences of focus between British soc anth and American cultural anthropology in regards to their overall goals and their understanding of culture… I think however there are nuanced differences, and Pagel’s interview spoke to me of the British tradition, and the influence of struc-func thinking on human behavioural ecology*. Which would mean that his stuff ain’t based on “common sense notions”.
Anyway, sorry if the previous comment came across as “you are misunderstanding because you don’t understand British soc anth”. As you clearly do.
Er, UCL Soc Anth and struc-func… I’d have said Phil Burnham and Barrie Sharpe**, but its the behavioural ecology stuff which I think is closest.
*(I reserve the right to be completely wrong and blown out of the water on this, obviously)
** ditto, especially if they turn up here and repudiate me. That’d be embarassing.
I think there are nuanced differences between British and American schools of anthropology. But given the state of Pagel’s interview, I think we can both unite against a common cause 🙂
OK enough of this. I have to actually start doing some anthropology this weekend instead of just talking about it…
I’m a biology (horrors) student and I find it somewhat disturbing that some people have a low opinion of certain fields in biology. I’ll have to admit: sociobiology is controversial among many biologists, in particular where it is applied to human beings; however the field originated as a development on the ‘classical’ study of animal behavior, ethology. It’s quite unfair to say that Wilson, for example, isn’t doing ‘real’ science. If we take the Nobel Prize, say, as an indicator of whether a certain field is ‘real science’, then the study of animal behavior has the endorsement of the Swedes because Tinbergen, Lorenz, and Frisch won the prize in Medicine/Physiology for their pioneering work in the field. Biology is more than just genetics or biotechnology; its scope is all life.
Perhaps this is the result when two different intellectual traditions starting from different premises and working with different philosophies attempt to answer the same questions….
Hi Nancy … I agree completely about my comment about 1 language in Canada … I was really trying to poke fun at possible American views of Canada … but perhaps did it to obtusely to get my point across. I need to find that smilely symbol!
Hi Nancy! It’s really good article, and i think, that i’ll be back soon.