GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
Towards a Biological Re-Interpretation of
Culture
For we conceive ourselves to know about a thing when we are acquainted with its ultimate
causes and first principles, and have got down to its elements. Aristotle, Physics 1.184a10-15.
Gabriel Herman
History Department, Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel
[email protected]
opposition to racism, to Social Darwinism, to eugenics,
or from fear, widespread amongst humanists, that the
emotional or intuitive elements in our nature will lose
out to the ‘de-souled’ approach of science) but it
basically goes back to Descartes’ dualist model of
human nature. Inspired by earlier divisions of human
nature into body and soul, Descartes assumed that the
laws that govern the former differ from those that
govern the latter and called for the segregation of the
sciences from the humanistic disciplines: the ‘body’
was assigned to the sciences, the ‘soul’ to the
humanities.3 This conception has had detractors over
the years,4 but most endeavours to displace it have
failed. Attempts to reduce the gap between the sciences
and the humanities came mainly from the side of the
former, where the Cartesian position was gradually
abandoned in the course of the 20th century. Scientists
nowadays work on the assumption of the sameness of
body and soul; with the death of the body, the soul also
ceases to exist. Moreover, new disciplines have come
into being – such as ethology, sociobiology and biosocial theory – that aim to uncover the biological roots
of social behaviour.
Abstract ─ The aim of this paper is to probe the
conception, widespread in the humanities and the social
sciences, that human behaviour is controlled in part by
culture. Approaching the issue from a humanistic point
of view, the possibility of an alternative account of the
relationship between culture and behaviour will be
explored. Following the lead of converging insights in
the life and cognitive sciences, it will be argued that the
totality of human activities, and of their accumulated
products subsumed under the title of ‘culture’, has a
genetic basis. Physical artefacts, intangibles such as
language, norms and values, rituals, literature, music,
science, as well as social and political institutions, may
profitably be analysed as projections and extensions of
the human body and its underlying mechanisms. The
idea of culture as an independent entity that draws on
non–bodily sources to shape human behaviour may be a
red herring. Cultural patterns emerge from preprogrammed genetic information stored in the brain and
activated by external stimuli.
Keywords ─ culture; genetics; biology; humanities; social
sciences; inter-personal diversity; personality; the Big
Five; inter-group diversity; gene-pools; sexuality; the
human brain; environment; pre-programmed behaviour;
intra-species competition
Culture, the focal point of all humanistic disciplines,
has traditionally been treated as an almost perfect
antonym of the ‘somatic’ or the ‘genetic’. 1 Culture
came to be viewed as something spiritual, to the extent
that even the biological reality of the human body was
brought into question: one of its main constituent
elements ─ sexuality ─ being described as a ‘social
construction’.2 Over the years, this view has received
reinforcement from a variety of quarters (e.g.
However, all this has made little impression on
humanists. To this day, many accept the body-soul
separation, taking little or no cognizance of the ongoing genomic revolution. A typical reflection of this
position is contained in the following dictionary
definition of culture: ‘the cultivation or development of
the mind, manners, etc.; improvement by education and
training; refinement of mind, tastes, and manners;
artistic and intellectual development; the artistic and
intellectual side of civilization; a particular form, stage,
or type of intellectual development or civilization in a
society; a society or group characterized by its
Acknowledgment: The author thanks the participants of the seminar
‘The Body, Diseases and States of Mind in (Ancient) Greek
Culture’ that he ran at the Hebrew University in 2011 and 2012 for
help in clarifying the ideas that led to the composition of this paper
1
Throughout this essay I do not provide reference to information
that is easily available on the Web.
2
For a collection of astonishing statements along this line: ‘Human
beings have constructed and used gender – human beings can
deconstruct and stop using gender,’ see Steven Pinker, How the Mind
Works, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997, p. 57.
3
René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode, 1637, Part IV.
4
Snow’s call, issued in the late 1950s, to reduce the gap between the
humanities and the sciences made a great impression at the time, but
had scant practical consequences. (C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and
the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1959). For a recently updated view of the issue, see Jerome Kagan,
The Three Cultures. Natural Science, Social Sciences, and the
Humanities in the 21st Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009.
I. The Theory of Autonomous Culture
DOI: 10.5176/2251-2853_3.2.158
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GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
distinctive customs, achievements, products, outlook,
etc.; the distinctive customs, achievements, products,
outlooks, etc. of a society or group; the way of life of a
society or group’.5
Similar conceptions were nurtured in the social
sciences. Throughout most of the 20th century, social
facts ─ the basic units of sociological and
anthropological thinking ─ were defined in conformity
with the so-called ‘standard social science model.’6
Social facts, following Durkheim, were thought to be
‘things-in-themselves’ that could not be reduced to
anything ‘biological’: social actions stemmed,
allegedly, from social forces, and these were
spontaneously generated.7 ‘Culture is a thing sui
generis which can be explained only in terms of itself
... Omnis cultura ex cultura’, wrote R.H. Lowie.8
‘Culture’, wrote G. P. Murdock, ‘a uniquely human
phenomenon’, is ‘independent of the laws of biology
and psychology.’9 Thirty years after the discovery of
DNA, the anthropologist Hoebel could propose that
‘Culture is not genetically predetermined; it is
noninstinctive. It is wholly the result of social
invention and is transmitted and maintained solely
through communication and learning’. 10 As late as
2000 the biologist Paul Ehrlich defined culture as ‘the
nongenetic
information
(socially
transmitted
behaviours, beliefs, institutions, arts, and so one)
shared or exchanged among us’. 11 Culture, in other
words, came to be slotted into the framework of
learned or acquired behaviour, the kind of behaviour
which is, in Murdoch’s words, ‘socially rather than
biologically determined; … acquired, not innate;
habitual in character rather than instinctive’. 12
Statements such as these created no difficulty, say
twenty years ago, when even scientists subscribed to
the autonomous conception of culture and left its study
to humanists.13 Problems arise today because the truism
of that conception is no longer self-evident.14 In a
5
Lesley Brown (ed.), The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. vol. I,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, p. 568.
6
Cf. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, ‘The psychological
foundations of culture’, in Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John
Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992, pp. 19-136, at 37.
7
Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method. 8th edition,
trans. Sarah A. Solovay and John M. Mueller, (ed.) George E. G.
Catlin (1938, 1964 edition), 1895, p. 13.
8
R. H. Lowie, Culture and Ethnology. New York: Basic Books,
1917 (repr. 1966), p. 70.
9
G.P. Murdock, ‘The science of culture’, American Anthropologist
34/2, 1932, pp. 200-215, at 200.
10
Adamson E. Hoebel, Anthropology: The Study of Man, New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1972, p. 6, his italics.
11
Paul Ehrlich, Human Natures. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000, p.
5.
12
Murdock 1932 (above, n. 9), 201; cf. Hoebel 1972 (above, n. 10),
pp. 22 and 645.
13
Cf. Robin Fox, The Search for Society, New Brunswick and
London: Rutgers University Press, 1989, who styled this theory,
ironically, as ‘the ideological linchpin of the social sciences’, p. 111.
14
Books such as R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon J. Kami. Not
in Our Genes. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, could not be
53
recent textbook on evolution and human behaviour,
Cartwright calls into question Durkheim’s view that
social facts can only be explained by other social facts:
‘On this basis’, he writes, ‘it is difficult to see how
social facts ever arise’. Cartwright suggests that
experience shapes our behaviour by ‘acting upon a
biological substrate (the brain or body) and the way the
brain reacts is primarily a product of biological
hardware rather than sociological software’.15
This attitudinal shift has surely been facilitated by great
strides in fields such as neuroscience, evolutionary
psychology, behavioural and population genetics and, in
particular, the decipherment of the human genome. It is
now becoming increasingly clear that we are dealing not
with just another paradigm shift, but with real ongoing
progress. The discovery of DNA, in particular, has had
some far-reaching consequences which to former
generations of scientists would have seemed to verge on
the miraculous. Here are some typical examples.
By means of genetic engineering it has become
possible to cultivate agricultural species in
environments formerly considered inhospitable
(tomatoes, for instance, in cold climates, through
inserting in their genes the genes of Arctic-sea fish!).
The invention of genetic fingerprinting resulted in the
introduction of undreamed of precision in the rules of
criminal justice, and the acquittal (or conviction) of
thousands of people previously found to be guilty (or
innocent). Prenatal diagnosis has made possible to
prevent the spread of certain nasty genetic diseases
(such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease), the
targeted treatment of others with a genetic component
(such as certain forms of cancer) being just a question
of time. On a more theoretical level, one consequence
of the genetic revolution has been the mapping and
dating of the migrations of modern humans out of
their native Africa some 100,000 years ago. The
culmination of the trend was the Human Genome
Project (H.G.P.), completed in outline in 2003. By
decoding the total complement of genetic material
contained in a human cell (i.e. genome), the project
aimed at achieving ‘the characterization in ultimate
detail of the genetic instructions that shape a human
being’.16
It would thus seem that a hypothesis that was ignored,
condemned and disparaged for more than half a
century, is now crystallizing into a concession that can
no longer be dismissed as politically incorrect. The
unique combination of genetic material that every
written today. The idea that evidence for genetic influence on
behavior is slight or non-existent seems outdated. For a recent
attempt to bridge the gap between the ‘social’ and ‘biological’
approaches, see Tim Ingold and Gisli Palsson (eds.), Biosocial
Becomings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
15
John Cartwright, Evolution and Human Behaviour. London:
Palgrave, Macmillan, 2008, p. 329.
16
Francis S. Collins and Karin G. Jegalian, ‘Genomics and the
future’, Scientific American, December 1999, pp, 50-55, at 50.
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GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
genetic information contained in the cells into cultural
patterns through the intermediary of the brain.
human being inherits from his/her ancestors may be
assumed to be a code for human attributes that may
help unravel the mainsprings of human action. With
the passage of time, the genetic underpinnings of more
and more aspects of human behaviour are revealed.
The possibility that the unique combination of genetic
material that all humans inherit from their ancestors is
involved in determining not only their physical
features but also their political views, socialization
skills, perceptions of the world and of others, as well
as norms and values now seems more real than ever.
We may start our exploration with an overlook at the
main landmarks of humanity’s cultural evolution, as
recognized in palaeoanthropology today.
II. Evolution: Biological and Cultural
Life on earth started approximately 3.5 billion years
ago and evolved, mainly through a Darwinian process
of natural selection, from the simplest DNA molecule
to the highly complex animal species which inhabit
the globe today. Humans diverged from the last
common ancestor shared with apes more than seven
million years ago. The first signs of human material
culture appeared about 2.6 million years ago. Homo
sapiens, the species to which we belong, emerged
about 200,000 years ago in a small region of Africa,
presumably evolving from pre-existing hominids that
became extinct. The first important ‘historical’ fact
concerning homo sapiens is that they migrated out of
Africa about 100,000 years ago and dispersed around
the globe.18 The second important historical fact is that
about 10,000 years ago (more specifically, around
7,500 B.C.) they switched from a hunting-gathering
mode of subsistence to an agricultural one.19 This
involved the cultivation and domestication of wild
plants and animals and the adoption of a more settled
mode of existence (hunter-gatherers were by and large
nomads). The third important historical fact is that
homo sapiens started building cities in the fourth
millennium B.C.. From that point on, cultural
development assumed vertiginous speed, culminating
in the high-level life style and the refinements of
culture and civilization that we enjoy today.
A further, bio-chemical consideration seems to be
pointing in the same direction: the high degree of
overlap between social and biological functions.
More often than not, both seem to be controlled by the
same, genetically synthesized substances. For
example, oxytocin, a hormone secreted by the pituitary
gland, is involved not only in childbirth but also in the
promotion of ethnocentric behaviours (both in the
sense of creating trust and empathy between ingroups, and of fomenting suspicion towards, and
rejection of, out-groups; administering oxytocin to
autistic children increases their social skills). The
brain hormone arginine vasopressin is involved not
only in regulating the body’s retention of water but
also in pair-bonding (at least among voles) and
probably altruism (among humans). Serotonin
regulates intestinal movements and mood, appetite and
sleep, as well as some cognitive functions, such as
memory and learning. The simple organic chemical
dopamine fulfills a whole series of intricate bodily
functions, but is also associated with the brain’s
reward system ─ it is released in the brain as a result
of rewarding experiences such as eating or sex. The
simultaneous effects of these substances on both
bodily and social functions may suggest that the
former is the prime purpose, the latter a side-effect.
With this overview in mind, our initial question may
be re-phrased as follows: is it possible that during the
early stages of human evolution human beings were
entirely the product of nature, whereas at some point
in time, during the later stages of evolution, as they
became increasingly more humane, human beings also
became the product of culture ─ which they
themselves generated? Is it possible, to put it another
way, that culture had disengaged itself from
subservience to the biology of our body and, in the
shape of ideas, communication and learning, turned
Social skills thus seem to be by-products, so to speak,
of biological functions.
Despite developments such as these, an exploration of
the possibility that the entire cultural process might
have a biological basis has not been undertaken. 17
Two recent theories ─ Dual Inheritance Theory and
Memetics ─ that could be expected to embark on such
a line of inquiry by-pass it, coming up instead with a
conception of cultural evolution that is distinct from
genetic transmission. In this paper an alternative view
will be taken. It will be argued that, since genes and
culture operate in tandem, genetics and culture may
not be such disparate objects of inquiry as has
traditionally been assumed. The entire cultural process
may appear as the outcome of the translation of
18
First reaching Asia (about 60,000 year ago), then Europe (about
40-50,000 years ago), Australia (about 40,000 years ago) and finally
the Americas (about 11-16,000 years ago). I discount for the moment
the discovery and use of fire, which has now been pre-dated to c.
800.000 years ago in Eurasia and to c. 1.500.000 year ago in Africa.
19
This, to be sure, did not happen everywhere simultaneously.
Farming was first firmly established in the so-called Fertile Crescent
(c. 7,500 B.C.), then in today's China and Pakistan (c. 5,500 B.C.),
later in Oaxaca and Peru (c. 5,000 B.C.), and then, over the next
7,000 years, in most of the rest of the world.
17
A small group of social scientists have been urging for some
time that this line of research be adopted, often encountering strong
opposition – a best case scenario; (worst case - encountering tacit
dismissal). See, for example, Robin Fox 1989 (above, n. 13).
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GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
into an engine that drives forth the higher, i.e. cultural,
manifestations of human behaviour?20
embryo. In other words, natural objects realize the
replicas implicit in themselves. Fascinated by
Aristotle’s insight ─ he seems to have correctly
guessed the properties of DNA more than two thousand
years ago! ─ the physicist Delbrück has jokingly
suggested awarding him a posthumous Nobel Prize.22
The answer is not a simple one and we must take care.
There is at least one major consideration which could
be seen to favour such a position. This is the disparity
observed between the rates of cultural and biological
evolution, which are indeed striking. As an
evolutionist put it, ‘our genes are roughly the same as
our Palaeolithic ancestor’s, whereas our culture has
changed by an incredible degree’. 21 Thus, our initial
question may be rephrased once again as follows: did
the force that fuelled this evolutionary process draw
on sources other than our genes to propel human
cultural development to such a high level of
acceleration?
However, the effect of genes extends beyond visible
actualities. It is this third level of influence, which the
great British biologist Richard Dawkins dubbed the
‘extended phenotype’, that should be of interest for
students of culture.23 Genes, as Dawkins has put it, do
not merely create phenotypes; they invest the
phenotypes with means for bringing about changes in
the world outside the bodies that contain them with a
view to maximizing their chances of survival and
reproduction. The examples Dawkins gives from
animal life include pigeons carrying twigs to their nest,
cuttlefish blowing sand from the sea bottom to expose
prey, beavers felling trees and manipulating the entire
landscape for miles around their lodge. Animals, in
other words, are genetically programmed to perform
activities that indirectly assist them in their basic
striving for survival and reproduction.
I would like to argue that in all likelihood it did not.
The hypothetical entity that we call ‘culture’ did not
break away from our genes and did not acquire any
sort of autonomy whatsoever. Human genes and
human culture may never have parted company. It is
much more reasonable to assume that everything that
goes under the title of culture is constantly emanating
from our genes – albeit by an extremely tortuous
route.
III. Genotype, Phenotype and Extended Phenotype
To demonstrate this we must introduce some concepts
from genetics into our discourse. We may start with
genotype and phenotype, the former referring to
internal structure, the latter to outward form. Genotype
denotes the coded, inheritable and to the naked eye
invisible information carried in the structure of an
organism’s DNA strands. Phenotype denotes the
outwardly observable characteristics of an organism
that are encoded in the genotype, ‘blue eyes’, ‘big
nose’, ‘dark skin’, ‘5 feet 8 inches’, ‘blood type O’
being good examples. Following the fertilization of an
egg, the genotype coordinates the construction and
maintenance (and even the reproduction) of the new
phenotype while interacting with the environment.
This means that the genotype’s hidden potentials can
be realized in full only if optimal environmental
conditions prevail.
Interestingly enough, Aristotle captured the essence of
this relationship a long time ago. The ‘visible actuality’
of an organism, he wrote, is implied in its ‘hidden
potentiality’: that of an oak tree in the acorn, that of a
chicken in the egg, that of a human being in the
20
This is, precisely, the central idea running through the works of
Paul Ehrlich and Clifford Geertz. According to Ehrlich, ‘culture, not
genes, controls the vast majority of our interesting behavior’ (above,
n. 11). According to Geertz, ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun’, those webs being culture (‘Thick
description: toward an interpretive theory of culture’, in The
Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973, pp. 3-30,
at 5). Neither author confronts the question of when, how and why
this cultural takeover may have taken place.
21
Cartwright 2008 (above, note 15), p. 327.
55
It has now been suggested that this could be
extrapolated to humans, creating the equation: culture =
extended phenotypes = the sum total of peoples’
actions and products thereof (i.e. in excess of actions
concerned immediately with survival and reproduction,
such as eating, shelter and sex, whose genetic
underpinnings are not generally disputed).24
Accepting this equation would mean that we have to
adopt a definition of culture considerably broader than
the standard ones. We have to bring under the purview
of culture all human activities in excess of those
directly designed to ensure survival and reproduction:
religious beliefs and institutions, tools and weapons,
scientific discoveries and entertainment, buildings and
vehicles,
commerce,
economy,
legislation,
constitutions and politics. This broadened definition
will also help to highlight the cumulative nature of
human culture, which sets it apart from the culture of
animals. The use of language and other symbolic
means of representation enabled humans not only to
transmit knowledge synchronically between individuals
and groups, but also to store and pass it on
diachronically across generations. Cultural innovation
consists, more often than not, of accretions to and
elaborations on older, surviving inventions. In terms of
Max Delbrück, ‘How Aristotle discovered DNA’, in Huang Kerson
(ed.), Physics and Our World. New York: American Institute of
Physics, 1976, pp. 123-130. Delbrück cites in full a long list of
Aristotelian passages in which this idea is spelt out, the main one
being Parts of Animals I. 641b 27-3.
23
Genes have ‘extended phenotypic effects, consisting of all its
effects on the world at large, not just its effects on the individual
body in which it happens to be sitting.’ Richard Dawkins, The
Extended Phenotype. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 4.
24
Cf. Cartwright 2008 (above, n. 15), pp. 338-9.
22
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GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
the evolutionary trajectory that it follows, culture is
clearly Lamarckian: phenotypic improvements are not
lost (unless, of course, they are systematically
neglected or destroyed, as is often the case in history);
later generations do not have to start from scratch but
can start off where earlier ones ended. The designers of
rockets and automobiles could start from spears and
carriages as models. Einstein could build on the
achievements of Newton, Shakespeare on those of
Plutarch, Beethoven on those of Mozart. The genome
project could not have gone ahead without the
discovery of the DNA molecule by Crick, Watson and
Wilkins. Another definition of culture would, therefore,
be the totality of the expressions of the long reach of
the human genotype and of its cumulative,
progressively improving products.
Still, difficulties remain. How can we be sure that those
phenotypic manipulations were indeed genetically
controlled ─ i.e. that they emanated from information
encoded within the DNA of each single cell of our
body, rather than from freely flowing ideas,
emancipated from subservience to our genetic heritage?
Or, falling back on the animal parallel, how can we be
sure that when beavers fell trees to build a lodge we
are dealing with something instinctive and genetic,
whereas when modern humans lay bricks to build a
house we are dealing with something social and nongenetic ─ ‘transmitted and maintained solely through
communication and learning’?25
A clue comes from an observation of human diversity.
Interpersonal differences have intrigued men of letters
for ages.28 Few, however, have had the slightest idea
of how they came about or what they were good for.
Charles Darwin, for whom individual diversity was a
peg on which the entire theory of evolution hung,
pleaded ignorance concerning its causes.29 Nowadays
we do seem to have a reasonable working hypothesis:
individual diversity in the more advanced species is
the product of sexual reproduction. Sexual
reproduction involves
genetic
mixing. The
chromosomes that a man inherits from his parents
merge with the chromosomes that a woman inherits
from her parents. These chromosomes get re-shuffled
in the sex cells and in the fertilized egg before and
immediately after copulation ─ they ‘recombine’ and
‘outcross’, in biological jargon ─ producing a zygote
that gives rise to a strikingly unique individual, unlike
any other that has ever lived on earth.
On the genotypic level this means that some 99.9% of
the three billion base pairs that make up the human
genome are identical from person to person; on the
phenotypic level, these account for human universals
(e.g. the subdivision of their body into parts such as
head, neck and trunk, and into systems such as
nervous, musculoskeletal and respiratory). On the
genotypic level, some 0.1% of those three billion base
pairs differ from one individual to the next; on the
phenotypic level these account for those striking
interpersonal differences.30 It has been one of the
surprising findings of genetics that tiny genotypic
differences can bring about disproportionately large
phenotypic ones.
IV. Inter-Personal Diversity
‘Among all the thousands of human beings no two
identical faces exist ─ a thing that no art could supply
by counterfeit in so small of number of specimens!’
wrote Pliny, the Roman polymath.26 He was right, no
doubt. Humans have different faces, sizes, shapes;
different aptitudes, skills and predilections; and
different ambitions, hopes and fears ─ so much so that
we can assert with a high degree of certainty that no
two people who ever lived on earth were, or have been,
identical (i.e. with the exception of identical twins
exposed to identical environmental conditions). This is
particularly manifest in the use of language. Idiolect is
a label used by linguists for an individual’s uses of
vocabulary, selection of idioms, grammatical choices,
and form of pronunciation that differ slightly from
those used by another.27 Idiolects resemble fingerprints
or genetic fingerprints (and probably immune systems)
in that they are unique to each single individual.
25
Of the numerous theories advanced to account for this
state of affairs, priority should perhaps be given to the
one known as ‘parasitical’.31 According to this theory,
chromosomal reshuffling is prompted by the necessity
to ward off the attack of pathogens. Like most
E.g. Plato, Republic 370a-b: ‘people are not particularly similar to
one another, but have a wide variety of natures’. Aristotle noticed that
visible individual differences come down to differences between body
parts, adducing as a case in point the ears (History of Animals
1.492a32-492b4). Leonardo da Vinci dissected human cadavers to
unravel the relationship between internal structure and outward form,
speculating that ‘individuals … differ from one another. The disparity
of form is a result of the variation above and below the norm, with
respect to the bulk and amount and hence to the relationships and
proportions of the various tissues and parts of the body’ (Manuscript
E, Institut de France, Paris 203). Locke noted that ‘Some men by the
unalterable frame of their constitutions, are stout, others timorous,
some confident, others modest, tractable, or obstinate, curious or
careless, quick or slow.’ (John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning
Education, 1693, The Harvard Classics, 1909-14, section 101, his
italics).
29
. Cf. E. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought. Diversity,
Evolution and Inheritance. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1982, pp. 684-85.
30
John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, ‘On the universality of human
nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics
and adaptation’, Journal of Personality 1990, 58.1, pp. 17-67.
28
Cf. above, n. 10.
31 Another serious candidate is the so-called deleterious
Pliny, Natural History vii.1.7-8.
Cf. David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. mutation theory, according to which sex evolved to repair
mutations. Cf. Tooby and Cosmides 1990 (above, n. 30).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 24.
26
27
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GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
animals, humans are engaged in a multiplicity of
‘arms races’, both intra- and inter-species.32 None,
however, matches in fierceness the race they wage
against pathogens. Due to their prodigious numbers
and short life-spans, these microscopic creatures pose
a far greater threat to an organism’s chances of
survival than do ‘conventional’ evolutionary forces
such as predators, natural disasters, climatic changes
or unintended ecological suicides. Diversity,
reinforced occasionally by small, randomly-selected
mutations, provides a measure of protection against
the possibility that pathogens will find a single ‘key’
(i.e. disease) for opening the ‘locks’ (i.e. defence
systems) of large groups and the potential for wiping
out the entire species. The more diverse phenotypes
are, the more difficult it becomes for pathogens to hit
upon such a key. This ties in rather well with the
uniqueness of individual immune systems. One
expression of genetic diversity is phenotypic,
interpersonal diversity; another is immunological
diversity.33
people are forced to stretch their abilities to the utmost
in some fields, thus compensating for disabilities in
others.
Confirmation of the importance of dissent for culture
may come from the robust correlation, highlighted in
Section II, between the rate of cultural progress and
life in cities. There are good reasons to believe that the
intensity of dissent-stimulation is amplified by the
intensity of inter-personal interactions. The hubbub of
city life acts like an elixir, pushing people to ever
higher achievements. ‘After the rise of cities’, wrote
Robert Redfield, ‘men became something different
from what they had been before’. ‘Towns are like
electric transformers’, wrote Fernand Braudel. ‘They
increase tension, accelerate the rhythm of exchange
and constantly recharge human life.’35 Aristotle
believed that the city (polis) enabled members to bring
out their hidden excellence, primarily because it
consisted of ‘human beings differing in kind’, i.e.
unrelated.36
Interpersonal diversity has had far-reaching
consequences for human culture. Using language, and
other means of symbolic of representation that have
been made possible by their enlarged brain, 34 humans
can communicate with each other far more efficiently
than primates can. This means that they can convey
their idiosyncratic worldviews and experiences to each
other with far greater precision. Due to inborn
differences, each person sees reality slightly
differently, in ways that are often incommensurable
with the ways others see it: no two people who witness
the same event will provide the same account of it; ‘as
many men, so as many opinions’, says a Roman
proverb. Dissent, in other words, is inborn. Dissent,
however, lies at the heart of culture. Provided it is
channelled into peaceful competition rather than
violent opposition, it boosts creativity more than
anything else does. To win in intra-group competition,
A telling counter-example would be the so-called
Acheulian stage of tool-culture (about 1.5 million to
800 thousand years ago), during which the kinship
principle pervaded all hunter-gatherer groupings, and
units analogous to cities were non-existent. The
archaeological record tells the story of long-lasting
‘technological’ stagnation: for almost one million
years people were content with reproducing the same
pear-shaped, flaked bifacial hand axes.
32
Further support for this view comes from new insights
in psychology.
The metaphor, borrowed from International Relations,
indicates a situation in which every innovation in offensive
weaponry is countered by an innovation in defensive
weaponry: rockets penetrate deeper, so tank armours get
heavier, so rockets penetrate deeper still. The principle
itself, if not the concept, was known to Darwin: the fierce
struggle between members of the same species as well as
members of different species (some competing for their
lives, some for their food, some to satisfy their urge to
reproduce) was central to his theory of evolution. Cf. R.
Dawkins, and J. R. Krebs, ‘Arms races between and within
species’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London
B.295, 1979, pp. 489-511 and Dawkins 1982 (above, n. 23),
pp. 61-62.
33 So powerful are the evolutionary pressures that push for
diversity that even the sexes in the more advanced species are
thought to have evolved in response to them about 300
million years ago; cf. Tooby and Cosmides 1990 (above, n.
30) and see Matt Ridley, The Red Queen. London: Penguin
1993, esp. ch. 3.
34
On brain size, see below, Section IX.
57
It would seem that this finding tilts the balance
slightly in favour of an underlying genetic conception
of culture. The fact that the same sort of diversity may
be detected in genotypes, phenotypes, immune
systems and personal outlooks may be taken to point
to a closer association between personal outlook and
genetic diversity than between personal outlook and
social invention ─ ‘transmitted and maintained
through communication and learning’.
V. Human Character (or Personality)
Few fields of inquiry have recently undergone a more
abrupt volte face than personality studies. During the
first half of the 20th century doubt was cast over the
conception of ‘character’ that the West inherited from
the Greeks and retained with slight modifications (i.e.
that human character consists of an essentially inborn
35
R. Redfield, The Primitive World and its Transformations.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953, p. 11; Fernand Braudel, The
Structures of Everyday Life. Berkeley 1979: University of California
Press, 1992, p. 479, trans. from the 1979 French edition.
36
Aristotle’s next sentence clearly indicates what he had in mind: ‘a
collection of persons all alike does not constitute a state’, Politics
1261a 23-4: to bring out the excellence of its members, the polis
should consist of a congregation of non-kin.
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GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
measured by these tests’.42 To put it another way,
human phenotypes display a remarkable degree of
stability throughout the lifespan: as a rule, they do not
swerve in the face of deflecting agents from the
directional focus dictated by the genotypic
configurations that make up their character. Reacting
humorously to this attitudinal reversal, a psychologist
wrote: ‘Once upon a time, we had no personalities. Is it
not exciting to see their return?’43
temperament (physis), and a set of acquired
dispositions induced by habit, practice and training
(ethe)).37 The concept of character came to be
downgraded under the impact of what were often rival
schools of thought, amongst which behaviorism
loomed large. Wide character traits, consistency of
behaviour and stability of personality were
pronounced illusory. The concept of personality was
reduced to independent, specific stimulus-response
bonds or habits ─ to ‘the splitting of the whole person
into decontextualized dispositional constructs’. 38
Coupled with the conception of human psyche as a
blank slate, human character came to be viewed as an
entity almost infinitely malleable by nurture ─ which
was in this context often equated with what we call
culture.39
Starting from the 1960s, however, that picture has
undergone progressive revision. An alternative picture
has gradually been drawn, guided by the assumption
that ‘both personality and intelligence are influenced
by genes; that is, large aspects of our personalities and
abilities are inherited (via genes) from our parents and
previous ancestors (grandparents, great-grandparents,
and so on)’.40 Personality, in this view, appears not as
‘a product of the life course, an outcome or dependent
variable, but a robust and resilient set of dispositions
within the individual that themselves help shape the life
course’.41 The objective reality of personality traits has
been confirmed and reconfirmed by numerous tests and
observations (e.g., that basic personality dimensions
are rooted in biology, that they remain largely
unchanged throughout the lifespan, and that they are
cross-cultural). Two researchers have provided a good
concrete example: ‘Many individuals will have
undergone radical changes in their life structure. They
may have married, divorced, remarried. They have
probably moved their residence several times. Job
changes, layoffs, promotions, and retirement are all
likely to have occurred … for many people. Close
friends and confidents will have died or moved away or
become alienated. Children will have been born, grown
up, married, begun a family of their own. The
individual will have aged biologically, with changes in
appearances, health, vigour, memory, and sensory
abilities… And yet, most people will not have changed
appreciably in any of the personality dispositions
37
Cf. Stephen Halliwell, ‘Traditional conceptions of character’, in
Christopher Pelling (ed.), Characterization and Individuality in
Greek Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. 32-59, at 46-7.
38
Dan P. McAdams, ‘The conceptual history of personal
psychology’, in R. Hogan, J. Johnson and S. Briggs (eds.),
Handbook of Personality Psychology. San Diego: Academic Press,
1995, pp. 3-39, at 17.
39
Cf. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate. New York: Viking, 2002; Matt
Ridley, Nature via Nurture. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
40
T. Chamorro-Premuzic, Personality and Individual Differences.
Malden, USA: BPS Blackwell, 2007, p. 7.
41
P.T. Costa, and R. R. McCrae ‘Longitudinal stability of adult
personality’, in Hogan, Johnson and Briggs (eds.) 1995, (above, n.
38), pp. 261-292, at 283.
58
Remarkably, similar ideas have surfaced in historical
studies through the use of altogether different methods.
Carefully assessing the relative importance of the
circumstances that shaped German history before the
Nazi takeover, Yoachim Fest concluded: ‘Among the
peculiarly German circumstances, the one essential
element that cannot be overestimated was Hitler
himself. All the deductions laboriously drawn from
history and the body politic, no matter how
comprehensive and insightful, must in the final analysis
return to Hitler and his personal history, which
decisively put in motion the events that followed. None
of the other countries affected by similar upheavals
during the period between the wars had a leader who
could match Hitler in oratorical power, organizational
ability, tactical genius, and radicalness’.44
This constitutes a striking departure from conceptions
of personality entertained during most of the previous
century. As a contemporary historian has complained,
there was, in those days, a ‘mass murder of historical
characters’: ‘Personality ceased to be important if
statesmen were puppets of economic and social forces;
hence in many works … there are no great men or
leading characters, only automata whose speeches,
ideas and aspirations are mentioned merely to give the
historian an opportunity to sneer and smear’. 45 Once
upon a time, history made personalities. Today, we
seem to be reverting to the position that personalities
make history. An offshoot of this would be that a long
list of super-individual forces (e.g. ‘social currents’,
‘historical trends’, ‘political power’, ‘economic forces’,
‘ideas’, not to mention the divine agencies of theocratic
history) that historians have postulated throughout the
ages to circumvent the idea of personality as the
principal agent of the historical process would be
rendered redundant.
P. T. Costa, Jr. and R. R. McCrae, ‘Personality in adulthood: A
six-year longitudinal study of self-reports and spouse rating on the
NEO Personality Inventory’, Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 54, 1988, pp. 853-863, at 861, my italics.
43
Lewis R. Goldberg, ‘The structure of phenotypic personality
traits’, American Psychologist 48. No. 1, 1993, pp. 26-34, at 32.
44
Joachim Fest, Inside Hitler's Bunker. New York: Pan Books,
2004, pp. 38-39, my italics. Regarding the implications of modern
genetics for traditional conceptions of history, see Daniel L. Smail,
On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008.
45
S. E. Morison, ‘Faith of a historian’, American Historical Review
56 (2), 1951, pp. 261-275, at 270.
42
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GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
There is, however, more to it than that. Psychologists
today can boast of another achievement: the
organization of the myriad individual differences that
characterize human beings into a scientifically
compelling, universally valid scheme. Known as the
Five Factor or the Big Five Model ─ the personality
dimensions
are
Openness,
Conscientiousness,
Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism46 ─ this
is the latest outcome of an attempt, going back to
Hippocrates and Galen, at achieving a scientific
categorization of personality. The Big Five are latent,
intangible personality traits whose existence is inferred
from their observable expressions through the mask of
behaviour. Today the model commands wide
acceptance; some psychologists even claim that it has
reached the status of empirical fact.47
The Big Five model is important for our purposes in
two respects. First, it suggests that all the people who
have lived on earth since the emergence of high culture
can be located, in terms of character, at specific points
along the spectra that make up the five major
personality dimensions. In other words, all human
groups that have existed since the emergence of high
culture have shared the dispositions and preferences of
the Big Five at varying degrees of intensity. For
example, in some groups people may score high in
Agreeableness and Openness, while in other groups
high scoring may be seen in Neuroticism and
Conscientiousness.48 The general personality profile of
the corresponding groups will vary accordingly. To put
it another way, what we call ‘group’ or ‘national
character’ is not so much a matter of communication
and learning and absorbing influences as of the relative
frequency of dominant personality traits in broad
human groups.
Second, the Big Five model belies sweeping
generalizations of the sort ‘man is by nature
aggressive’, or ‘man is by nature peace-loving’, or
‘progress results from the ruthless struggle of all
against all’ that have filled the pages of ethical
discourse through history. Mankind is by nature neither
aggressive nor peace-loving. Only individuals are. And
groups turn out to be aggressive or peace-loving mainly
in accordance with the distribution of, and ratio
between, the degrees of Agreeableness or Neuroticism
of their individual members. As we shall see, however,
learning also plays a part in the process ─ but learning
too springs from our human nature.
A caveat is in order. The Big Five are a necessary, but
not sufficient condition to account for group or national
characteristics. Traits which only show up rarely in
populations
but
could,
nevertheless,
have
disproportionate influence on national character ─
Hitler’s oratorical power for example ─ elude the Big
Five’s grasp. This point takes us to the issue of intergroup diversity.
VI. Inter-Group Diversity
Cultural evolution requires close human interaction.
The circumstances for this interaction derive from the
human tendency to congregate. Keen observers of
human nature agree widely that this tendency is
innate.49 Humans congregate naturally in groups ─ at
least in small ones. For millions of years humans lived
in bands made up of less than 150 members.
Inter-personal diversity logically leads to inter-group
diversity: no two human groups will ever be identical
in terms of their collective psychological profile. This
is because each group incorporates the sum-total of its
members’ individual extended-phenotypic characters ─
and these differ widely. Differences would be further
intensified, or weakened, by variations in the size,
habitat, climate, migration and mating patterns, as well
as the accumulated cultural heritage of various groups.
The end result will be what we might call ‘culturetype’: the sui-generis cultural traits of a group resulting
from a confluence of individual-genetic and
environmental influences. It should, perhaps, be noted
that this conclusion, reached through an exercise in
logic, meshes perfectly with the often repeated
common sense observation that there are as many
cultures as there are groups.
Moreover, human groups share two general tendencies
that have shown up historically with great consistency
and can, therefore, be assumed to be inborn. These
tendencies can be loosely sketched as follows.
First, in-groups tend to create a common view of the
world through the use of symbols. This common view
coincides with what political scientists today call
‘ideology’: ‘a set of ideas or beliefs or attitudes
characteristic of a group.’50 The ideas, beliefs and
attitudes of a group also help distinguish in-groups
from out-groups ─ who are, more often than not, cast
as strangers or enemies. A paradigmatic expression of
this tendency occurs in Leviticus (18.3). God enjoined
Moses not to adopt the folkways of the land of Egypt,
46
For a systematic exposé, see Chamorro-Premuzic 2007 (above, n.
40), pp. 26-27.
47
See Hogan, Johnson and Briggs (eds.) 1995 (above, n. 38), Ch. 28;
Chamorro˗Premuzic 2007 (above, note 40), Chs. 2-3.
48
Cf. P.J. Rentfrow, S.D. Gosling and J. Potter, ‘A theory of the
emergence, persistence, and expression of geographic variation in
psychological characteristics’, Perspectives on Psychological Science
3, 2008, pp. 339-369. An interesting aspect of their finding is that
mid-westerners and southerners scored on average higher on
Agreeableness than people living in other regions of the USA.
59
According to Aristotle, humans have ‘an impulse to form
partnerships’ (Pol. 1253a30). From a primatologist’s perspective, this
appears as follow: ‘We come from a long lineage of hierarchical
animals for which life in groups is not an option but a survival
strategy. Any zoologist would classify our species as obligatorily
gregarious’. (Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers. How
Morality Evolved. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2004, p. 4, his italics).
50
Cf. John Plamenatz, Ideology. London: Macmillan, 1970, p. 16.
49
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GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
wherein the people of Israel had dwelt, nor the ones of
the land of Canaan, whither God brings them. If the
People of Israel wished to become God’s chosen
people, they were to adopt his exceedingly complex list
of taboos, doings and ordinances. As W.G. Sumner put
it a long time ago: ‘There are two codes of morals and
two sets of mores, one for comrades inside and the
other for strangers outside; and they arise from the
same interests. Against outsiders it was meritorious to
kill, plunder, practice blood revenge, and to steal
women and slaves’.51 Throughout history, this human
compulsion has assumed a staggering variety of forms,
from tribalism and ethnocentricity, through nationalism
and racism, to fascism and Nazism.
differentiation and splitting processes reinforce the
impression of genetic underpinning. It might well be
that here we are facing biological forces similar to
those involved, on an evolutionary scale, in the
formation of new species. Assuming that no
contradictory forces come into play, humans’ tendency
to distinguish themselves from out-groups and to split
into sub-groups could lead, over time, to the evolution
of new hominids. Prima facie this may seem farfetched, but we should perhaps bear in mind that that
was precisely the state of affairs before the advent of
homo sapiens: our planet was inhabited by some
twenty species of hominids, differing markedly even in
their biology.
Second, human groups display a strong tendency to
split. Up to the agricultural revolution about 10,000
years ago, people lived, as we have noted, in groups of
up to 150 men, women and children. This coincides
with the so-called ‘Dunbar’s number’ ─ the largest
number of people with whom one is cognitively able to
maintain stable social relationships. 52 Unless strong
incentives are devised to remain together, groups
growing beyond that limit break up. 53 The first and
most powerful of such incentives was probably
language, which may have arisen as a ‘cheap’
substitute for non-human primate grooming to maintain
social cohesion. Language enabled human groups to
peak at 5000, the ideal human cooperative group ─ the
tribe.54 Later on, new devices may have been added, all
designed to keep ever larger groups together (or,
alternatively, to draw together pre-existing cohesive
groups), by counterbalancing their innate tendency to
split through means such as flags, anthems, national
ethics, social contracts, fiction of common descent,
‘imagined’ communities, and, most importantly, mass
communication. The political map of the world today
may be viewed, in part at least, as the outcome of the
interplay of such antagonistic forces.
VII. Gene Pools
It is rather unlikely that these tendencies, which exert a
powerful formative influence on cultures, stem from
social, non-genetic, transmitted and learned forces. (I
am referring momentarily only to the two basic group
tendencies cited above; I will return in Section IX to the
measures and devices devised to counterbalance the
segmentation process). Inter-group diversity clearly
stems from inter-personal diversity, and this clearly has
a genetic basis. Furthermore, the tenacity and vigour of
the attitudes and sentiments involved in the
51
W.G. Sumner, War and Other Essays, (ed.) A.G. Keller. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1919, Section I.
52
Robin M. Dunbar, ‘Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in
primates’. Journal of Human Evolution 20, 1992, pp. 469–493.
53
For examples of sectarianism, illustrating the splitting tendencies
inherent in a wide range of historical societies, see Robin Fox, Tribal
Imagination. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
2011, Ch. 4.
54
Cf. Robin M. Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of
Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
1998.
60
Culture, as recognized long ago, is often pushed to high
peaks of achievement through the activities of
exceptionally able individuals. Thanks to progress in
population genetics, the long-debated question of
whether those abilities result from birth or genes, or
cultural transmission and learning (or some
combination of both), seems at last to have received a
satisfactory answer. The choice of the following
examples is dictated by the consideration that lists of
Olympic and Nobel prize winners provide more or less
objective indices to the differential abilities found in
various human groups.
Take the case of the Ethiopian Oromo, a Bekojicentred ethnic group, whose extraordinary athletic
talents have been described, just before the opening of
the 2008 Beijing Olympics, as follows: ‘Tirunesh
Dibaba, ... smashed the women’s 5,000-meter world
record in June by five seconds, … Kenenisa Bekele ...
has run the fastest times in human history at 5,000 and
10,000 meters… Kenenisa’s 21-year-old brother,
Tariku, is the current 3,000-meter world indoor
champion, while Dibaba’s two sisters, Ejegayehu and
Ginzeber, are also world-class runners. Several other
Bekoji natives are close on their heels, while hundreds
of others … are striving to join them... [T]he two-time
Olympic gold medallist Haile Gebrselassie, ... set a
new marathon world record last year.’55 Since 1960
Ethiopia has won 14 Olympic gold medals in longdistance running events, as opposed to Russia’s 11,
Kenya’s 7, the U.S.A.’s 6, and Morocco’s 5.
Or take the list of Nobel Prize winners, which since the
first award in 1901 includes over 800 individuals. A
striking feature of this list is that out of those 800
winners at least 20% are of Jewish origin, even though
Jews comprise less than 0.2% of the world’s
population.
Numerous explanations ─ social, cultural, occupational
─ have been offered through the ages to account for the
sort of discrepancy revealed by these cases. However,
55
B. Larmer, ‘Fast living’. Time. June 30-July 7, 2208, pp. 75-77.
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GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
all pale into insignificance in face of the puzzle-solving
potential of the gene-pool theory. Developed in
population genetics, and predicated on Mendel’s law of
the independent assortment of the genetic material (i.e.,
genes in sexual reproduction do not blend or get
diluted, thus reducing phenotypic diversity, but shuffle
as discreet units, thus enhancing phenotypic diversity),
the term gene pool refers to the sum total of genetic
information present in a population’s genotype at any
given time. A population may consist of all the living
members of a species, but it may also consist of groups
of various size segregated from the rest of the
population at various degrees in terms of mating
frequency. The latter sort of group is relevant for our
purposes.
Through the employment of breeding, or marriage
strategies directed (presumably) towards status
improvement, the people making up the respective
gene pools have unwittingly amplified the allelic
frequency56 of some hitherto rare genetic combinations
that existed in their respective populations, and these,
reinforced occasionally by small, randomly selected
mutations, produced those extraordinary phenotypic
manifestations. That, coupled with the availability of
appropriate environmental conditions (international
athletic races in the first case and facilities for
intellectual creativity, such as universities or research
centers, in the second), could account for the stunning
performances of the Ethiopian runners or the Jewish
Nobel-prize winners.
The sad case of Huntington’s disease (a fatal, inherited
disease of the nervous system that manifests itself in
convulsions, paralysis and dementia) may provide a
telling analogy. First, however, a difference should be
noted. Whereas traits such as fast running and
inventiveness are caused by the cooperation of tens or
hundreds of genes and gene products in ways that are
as yet unfathomable, Huntington’s disease is pretty
well understood. It is caused by one single mutant
gene, Huntingtin ─ an extended repeat of the DNA
sequence CAG ─ located at 4p16.57 The analogy,
however, is still worth drawing because it is just a
question of time until the secret of the multiple
interactions of the genes is unlocked.
The incidence of Huntington’s disease in Europe,
North American, and Australia is low: 5.70 people per
100,000 (in Asia even lower, 0.40 per 100,000).
However, in two isolated Venezuelan villages
(Barranquitas and Lagunetas), disease ratios soar to
dramatic heights: about half of the population has, or is
at risk of developing Huntington’s disease. The nature
of the underlying mechanism is in this case clear
56
Alleles are particular variants of a single gene that exist at a given
locus on the genome of an individual. There may be many forms of
alleles within a population of one species.
57
I.e. band 6 in region 1 of the short arm of chromosome 4.
61
enough. The initially low frequency of a genotypic
variation was amplified exponentially through
interbreeding within a relatively isolated gene pool
(most Venezuelan villagers are members of a single
extended family). The extraordinary Oromo and Jewish
abilities may have resulted from a similar genetic
coincidence.
I would like to preempt the charge that in providing
this explanation I am re-introducing racist theory into
cultural studies. Gene pools are, as a rule, contained
within ethnic groups or groups traditionally defined as
races and are, therefore, much smaller than them. Not
all Ethiopians are fast runners ─ just some are; not all
Jews excel in inventiveness ─ just some do. Crediting
the entire Ethiopian nation (or, by extension, all black
peoples) with outstanding running abilities, or the
entire European Jewry (or, by extension, all Jews
worldwide) with outstanding inventiveness are typical
examples of the fallacy of preferring arguments that
exalt (or denigrate) the entire group even when they fly
conspicuously in the face of reason.
Nor does the genetic basis of outstanding traits lend
support to any theory of innate superiority of certain
human groups with respect to others. To create
situations of political, social or cultural superiority
inborn traits must combine with, or be backed by,
advantages supplied by geographical, climatic, social,
developmental and/or historical circumstances, and
these are, in history, by and large coincidental (humans
call them ‘luck’).58
I should note, finally, that the science of genetics has
done more than anything to unmask the futility of racist
theory (namely, that the outwardly visible differences
between races, and the alleged concomitant superiority
of one race with respect to others have a genetic basis).
Studies show conclusively that there is far greater
genetic variation within than among human groups
defined traditionally as races.59 People are, to be sure,
different, but significant differences (as opposed to
negligible ones, such as skin colour or eye shape) cut
across racial boundaries; they do not coincide with
them.
VIII. Sex and Culture
Few aspects of human behaviour present a greater
challenge to social invention theory than sex, all the
more so because sex belongs to the category of human
behaviour directly concerned with reproduction. Sex
figures in the world’s cultures more prominently than
Cf. G. Herman, Review of Ian Morris, Why the West Rules ─ For
Now. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Phoenix 66, No.
1/2, 2012.
59
Cf. D. L. Hartl and A. G. Clark, Principles of Population Genetics.
2nd ed., Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates, 1989, p. 302;
Tooby and Cosmides 1990 (above, n. 30), p. 35; Steve Jones, The
Language of the Genes. London: Flamingo, 1993, Ch. 13; Cartwright
2008 (above, n. 15), pp. 369-70.
58
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GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
perhaps any other aspect of human behaviour. Yet, it
seems unlikely that sex is culturally controlled even in
its
most
extreme,
seemingly
non-biological
manifestations. I propose the following demonstration.
Masculinity and femininity are phenotypic characters
encoded in our genotype: XY chromosomes are
conducive to maleness, XX chromosomes to
femaleness. On the phenotypic level these differences
show up as ‘primary sexual characters’ ─ a penis and
testicles or a vulva, and the corresponding sex cells
(gametes) ─ and a whole range of ‘secondary sexual
characters’ that differentiate men from women. To
name just a few, men are on average taller than women,
and their bodies are heavier; their bones are bigger and
their muscles stronger; they possess a deeper voice,
have broader and more prominent chins, and more
facial (“beard”) and bodily hair. Women, by contrast,
have on average wider pelvises, slenderer waists, and
thicker thighs; their spherical breasts and their buttocks
protrude much more; generally, they have a heavier fat
deposit all over their body, which is distributed
differently. From a zoological perspective, inter-gender
differences appear to be a case of ‘moderate sexual
dimorphism’, in contradistinction to the significantly
more pronounced inter-gender differences that exist
among primates.
When we reach the extended-phenotypic level, more
subtle differences come to the fore: women button their
jackets right over left, men left over right; women use
on average almost twice as many words per time unit
as men; men mature sexually later than women, more
frequently die at a young age, and earlier at old age;
women, on the other hand, assume generally far greater
responsibility with regard to everything to do with
reproduction (including whether or not to have sex) and
child rearing than men.
There are patterns of sexual behaviour common to both
genders: flirting, courting, love, infatuation, seduction,
jealousy, choice of mate, long-term bonding
(=marriage),
incest
avoidance,
promiscuity,
philandering, desertion and heartbreak. Culture is
suffused
with
imitations,
sublimations
or
representations of such behaviours: dancing often
simulates copulation; certain balls may appear as thinly
veiled orgies. Clothes, cosmetics and jewellery served
throughout history as mainly female sex displays,
wealth, fame and power as mainly male ones. Beyond
utilitarian functions, all these items serve to enhance
sexual attractiveness.60 Furthermore, the great majority
of the works of literature, music, theatre and visual art
(painting, sculpture, cinema) produced since the
emergence of high culture is fuelled by expressions of
the pleasure (or suffering) derived from the mysteries
60
I am indebted for these insights to Geoffrey F. Miller The Mating
Mind. New York: Doubleday, 2000.
62
of that inter-gender (occasionally
attraction that people call love.61
same-gender)
One way of revealing the weakness of culturaltakeover theory would be by asking where, along the
continuum stretching from the genotypic encodings of
sexuality (i.e. chromosomes XY and XX) down to its
most sublime extended-phenotypic expressions (e.g.
Michelangelo’s David, Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet or the Beatles’ ‘Words of Love’), did culture turn
from a passive product of genetic forces into an active
agent that guides higher cultural activity. The difficulty
is that the result will be arbitrary no matter which point
we choose along that continuum.
Imagine we have opted for the borderline between the
phenotype and the extended phenotype. This would
presuppose cultural control of a whole range of sexual
behaviours ─ e.g. flirting, courting, love, mating,
jealousy. Cultural control of such behaviours would,
however, be rather unlikely, in view of the fact that
those behaviours are indispensable for reproduction.
Without love (or at least attraction) there would be no
flirting, courting and mating, and without mating no
children would be born. But children are born, and
mankind has grown at an exponential rate (we have just
exceeded seven billion human beings!). This fact alone
may suffice to render redundant any idea of a cultural
takeover. Obviously, human reproduction is still
coordinated by the same self-replicating DNA
molecule that gave rise to life on earth more than 3.5
billion years ago.
Imagine we have opted for the borderline between
sexual behaviour oriented strictly to reproduction (e.g.,
flirting, courting, love, mating and jealousy) and the
more ornamental expressions of sexuality in art.62 If we
wish to argue that artistic masterpieces are the product
of social invention, rather than of the long reach of the
human genotype, we run into trouble once again. For
how are we to tell the difference between a woman
putting on fancy clothes to attract men, or a man
making big money to attract women, and a
Michelangelo sculpting David, a Shakespeare writing
Romeo and Juliet, and the Beatles composing ‘Words
of Love’? From a biological point of view (admittedly,
not from a cultural-aesthetic one), all these behaviours
belong to the same category. By producing those
masterpieces Michelangelo, Shakespeare and the
Beatles have acquired fame, and fame helped enhance
their personal sexual attractiveness. The enhancement
of sexual attractiveness is a classic example of
61
Here are some oxymoronic gems on love, gleaned from the
classics: ‘fury inspired’ (Homer); ‘sickness’ (Ovid); ‘a fallen star in a
rubbish heap’ (Heine); ‘… it resembles hate more than it resembles
friendship’ (La Rochefoucauld).
62
This is precisely the stance taken by Ehrlich: ‘Although human
behaviors in these areas (i.e. sex, violence, religion and art) are built
on a foundation constructed by biological evolution, the edifice itself
– though constrained in some ways by the foundation – is a product
largely of cultural evolution (above, n. 11), p. 226.
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GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
extended-phenotypic behaviour, of precisely the same
order as that of a woman putting on fine clothes to
attract a man, or a man making big money to attract a
woman. They are all extensions or projections of basic
biological drives.
A further indication in the same direction would be the
constancy of human sexual behaviour. Culture
advances, indeed, at an astonishing speed. We now
write (e.g. type, on computers, mobile phones), work
(e.g. use sledgehammers), fight (e.g. shoot with
machine guns, launch rockets), and locomote (e.g.
travel by trains, aeroplanes) in ways that were
unfathomable even one hundred years ago. Aristotle
would be stunned by the idea of an automobile ─ not to
mention a rocket. He would, however, have found
nothing surprising in the way we love, flirt, court or
mate. The basic rules of sexual behaviour have not
changed through aeons: we do everything that leads up
to mating and even many things beyond the same way
our ancestors did thousands of years ago. The poet
Heinrich Heine expressed the the process in a strikingly
dense rhythm: ‘Es ist eine alte Geschichte, | Doch
bleibt sie immer neu; | Und wem sie just passieret, |
Dem bricht das Herz entzwei.’63 The abduction of
Helena by Paris makes as good a sense today as it did
in the days of Homer. This could hardly have been the
case if sexual behaviour had been under the control of
some new-fangled extra-bodily force.
IX. The Extraordinary Plasticity of Human Behaviour
We come finally to the most obvious objection that
could possibly be raised against a gene-controlled
theory of culture ─ the extraordinary plasticity of
human behaviour. To fall back on a by now familiar
example, beavers build one type of lodge; humans can
build dozens of types of houses ─ and could be taught
to build dozens more.64 Beavers presumably cannot,
because they have not freed themselves from the
tyranny of genes ─ and consequently, have not
developed culture. Their behaviour remains ─
allegedly ─ biologically determined: innate rather than
acquired, instinctive rather than habitual.
Quite the contrary might be said about humans. Human
behaviour appears outstandingly versatile, adaptable
and inventive. Human culture, in particular, seems to
be associated with forms of behaviour that are acquired
rather than innate: learning, training, coaching,
indoctrinating, practicing, imitating, discussing,
communicating, imagining, inventing, transmitting and
diffusing loom large in the cultural process. Humans
seem to be free from the fixation of heredity and
guided by nothing but their autonomous free will. (This
is, after all, what earned them the title of the lord of
creation). Humans even seem able to rise above nature,
using their reason to duplicate, counter, modify and
even repress innate patterns of behaviour.65 As Plato
has put it, ‘… [T]he other so-called virtues of the
soul… even if not originally innate they can be
implanted later by habit and exercise’. 66
Modern research concurs. Inborn qualities can, indeed,
be duplicated through methods that could appear
acquired or artificial. Dawkins provides the example of
an over-muscled human physique which one can get
‘naturally’, through inheritance ─ or ‘artificially’, by
adopting an extreme regime of exercise. 67 Numerous
analogous instances may be found in the realm of
culture: men ‘naturally’ button their jackets left over
right, women right over left ─ but both can be ‘taught’
to button them the other way round (albeit not without
great difficulty); human groups tend ‘naturally’ to split
─ but these tendencies could be counterbalanced, as we
have seen, using a whole array of ‘acquired’ devices; a
person may score ‘naturally’ high on the scale of
Neuroticism ─ but through proper therapy (medication,
psychoanalysis) his/her location on the scale may be
lowered; humans have ‘naturally’ a strong appetite for
sex ─ but this could be repressed or even ‘unlearned’
(celibacy, monks, nuns, testosterone-reducing drugs);
human beings ‘naturally’ observe the so-called ‘first
law of nature’ ─ self-preservation ─ but by a rational
act of free will they can decide to give their lives for
loved ones, for comrades in arms, or for their country;
people ‘naturally’ dissent, which often leads to
violence ─ but political institutions could be devised
that canalize dissent into peaceful, creative channels;
and, most important of all, man was ‘naturally’ born a
savage, but through education and habit has become a
cultural being. Indeed, the entire ‘civilizing process’
may be rewritten as the gradual repression of inborn,
‘natural’ drives and their replacement with socially
acceptable, acquired patterns of behaviour. Almost all
great religious and ideological movements in history
have set out to fashion ‘new men’ ─ invariably by
ridding the ‘old’ ones of ‘natural’ habits and investing
them with new, acquired ones, whose rules have been
laid down by some god, demi-god, guru, religious or
ideological leader.68 The application of non-corporeal
─ also called ‘cultural’ ─ influences with a view to
modifying pre-programmed inborn (i.e. ‘natural’)
patterns of behaviour seems to lie at the very heart of
culture.
65
Cf. Dawkins 1982 (above, n. 23), p. 13.
Plato, Republic VII 518D, 28-30.
63
67
‘It is an old story, but it remains ever new; and when it happens
Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth. London: Black
to someone, his heart breaks’, Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen.
Swan, 2009, p. 38. Today this could also be achieved through genetic
64
Cf. Hoebel 1972 (above, n. 10), pp. 287-306, for a collection of manipulation – by disabling a gene that makes myostatin, a substance
human house-types constructed in modern and tribal societies. The limiting muscle growth.
houses seem widely to differ in shape, but closer examination reveals 68 This is, of course, often presented as a kind of ‘return to nature’ in
a similar underlying pattern.
their interpretation of it.
66
63
© 2014 GSTF
GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
The point is, however, that to account for such feats we
do not have to posit the activity of any sort of superpersonal ‘cultural’ agency whatsoever that draws on
sources outside the human body. All we have to do is
take a closer look at the extraordinary biological
adaptation known as homo sapiens sapiens’ brain. The
full picture of its modus operandi still eludes our
grasp,69 but great progress has been made in
understanding some of its individual aspects through
what is known as the computational theory of mind.
The human mind, as Steve Pinker has put it, ‘is a
system of organs of computation designed by natural
selection to solve the problems faced by our
evolutionary ancestors in their foraging ways of life’.
Incorporating a dense web of sub-systems that in
today’s technical terms would be designated as optical
analysers, motion guidance systems, simulations of the
world, databases of people and things, goal-schedulers,
conflict-resolvers, the mind is the most complex system
that exists on our planet ─ ‘an exquisitely organized
system that accomplishes remarkable feats no engineer
can duplicate’.70
Indeed, our brains store vast amounts of information
accumulated over evolutionary time and act as the
body’s second command module, as it were (the genes
lodged in each of our bodily cells being the first). And
what a command module! According to one estimate
the human brain contains about 100 billion (1011)
neurons (the core components of the nervous system) ─
electrically excitable cells that process and transmit
information through electrical and chemical signals71 ─
and about 100 trillion (1014) synapses (by means of
which the neurons pass on the signals). The number of
ways that information can be transmitted among
neurons in the human brain is staggering ─ exceeding
the number of stars in the entire universe.72 This fits in
with the fact that although our brain has the same
general structure as that of other mammals, in relation
to body size it is far larger.73 It is clear, nevertheless,
that the difference is of degree only, not kind: we do
not have something that animals do not have; we just
have more of what animals have.
These data alone should suffice to collapse the
argument, cited at the beginning of this paper, that a
69
For the enormous gap that still exists between the cognitive
functions of the brain that have been gleaned on the basis of
introspection and its physiological ones that have been ascertained
on an empirical or experimental basis, see John G. Nicholls, A.
Robert Martin Paul A. Fuchs and David A. Brown, From Neuron to
Brain, 5th edition, Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates,
2011 and cf. with Pinker 1997 (above, n. 2).
70
Pinker 1997 (above, n. 2), pp. x, 18 and 23.
71
By contrast, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has only c.
100,000 neurons but can still perform many complex behaviors.
72
This is without even taking into account the second kind of
specialized cell in our Central Nervous System, the glia, that provide
support to the neurons. In our CNS there are fifty times more glia than
neurons.
73
It weighs, on average, 1352 grams, in comparison with that of the
adult chimpanzee ─ 384 grams ─ and that of the beaver ─ 45 grams.
64
gene-controlled interpretation of human culture is not
viable because of the disparity between the man’s
relatively fast cultural and relatively slow biological
evolution. That disparity need not bother us in the least:
our genes have assembled a mental hardware that could
contain many more years of cultural growth. That
growth would, of course, be facilitated by learning.
X. Learning and Behaviour
To start with, we must dissociate ourselves from the
empiricist notion, associated (perhaps unjustly) with
the name of John Locke, that our brain is a ‘blank slate’
(tabula rasa) that does not contain any innate ideas.
According to such a model, we acquire knowledge by
passively receiving ‘instructions’; thus, the essence of
the cultural process is implanting knowledge into one’s
brain that previously did not exist there. Quite to the
contrary, studies show that our advanced mental
capacity consists of pre-programmed instructions
issued by the genes and hardwired in the brain that
predispose us to act in certain ways in certain
situations.74 The learning process consists not of
inscribing information on a blank slate, but of
stimulating the brain to elicit a response from a rather
wide repertoire of possibilities. So-called ‘acquired
behaviours’ are also pre-programmed genetically. It
took some time until awareness of this possibility sank
in the public mind. The recurring scene on TV screens
during the Paralympics, of victorious blind athletes
replaying the stereotypical gestures of sighted victors
(‘head tilted back, chest puffed out and arms in the air’)
however, made the inference inevitable: those athletes
were enacting innate, not acquired, patterns of
behaviour ─ that must have been programmed into
their behavioural repertoire.75 Even what appeared
prima facie to be acquired behaviour turned out in the
final analysis to be innate (i.e. controlled by genes).
In a way, the process resembles Plato’s doctrine of
anamnesis, according to which ‘learning’ is really
‘being reminded of something’. People can build
dozens of sorts of houses because some kind of model
of shelter is built into their brains. They can learn how
to write or compose music or do mathematics because
some sort of blueprint for the signs or symbols of these
skills is encoded in their brains. To put it another way,
the experience of three and a half billion years of
evolution is encoded in our genes in the shape of
strategies for survival and reproduction (with the
exception, of course, of strategies that were wiped out
by natural selection).76 Fine details may elude us, but
74
Cf. Dawkins 1982 (above, n. 23), pp. 13-16, for an explanation of
why the expression ‘programmed’ carries no more ‘deterministic’
implications than other theories of human behaviour.
75
Clara Moskowitz, ‘Victory gesture may be genetically
programmed’, Life Science, Tuesday, August 12, 2008.
76
A geneticist has expressed the same idea slightly differently: ‘Every
gene must have an ancestor. This means that patterns of inherited
variation can be used to piece together a picture of history more
complete than from any other source. Each gene is a message from
© 2014 GSTF
GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
two general attributes of the repertoire of responses
built genetically into our brain are sufficiently
important to our thesis to merit attention.
First, the repertoire is economic, in keeping with
nature’s well-known parsimony: not only does it
reduce images and ideas into symbols, electronic
signals and neurochemical reactions, but it condenses
the responses to external stimuli into a sort of
grammar: rather than storing one hardwired response to
each single situation that may arise ─ genes do not preprogram every single behaviour that an organism
performs during its lifetime! ─ the repertoire contains a
basic set of rules from which numerous situationspecific responses can be derived. An example from
bird life ─ one which has been cited in support of the
idea of an autonomous culture ─ may provide good
illustration of this principle.
In the days when milk in England was delivered in
bottles to peoples’ doorsteps, tits learned to peck open
the shiny foil tops and drink the cream. They even
managed to transmit that know-how to younger
generations. The argument was made that since the
habit could not have been due to genetic mutation
(there was not enough time for this, seeing that milk
bottles started being delivered to peoples’ doorsteps
only in the 20th century) it must have been ‘cultural’.
Here, in other words, was a clear instance of invention
and social dissemination controlled solely by culture. 77
However, this explanation is not without its own
problems. Tits also peck insects (their staple food) and
in doing so they fulfill what are no-doubt genetically
pre-programmed instructions. When the tits pecked the
milk bottles they were probably fulfilling genetically
pre-programmed instructions too. This is because the
instruction encoded in their brain is of a general, not
specific kind. It runs somewhat as follows: ‘peck at
everything that shines (i.e. insects) to get nutrition’ (i.e.
rather than ‘peck open the foil tops of milk bottles to
get cream’). It is the non-specificity of genetic
instructions, not a cultural force independent of our
genes, that enables the redirection of old forms of
behaviour to new purposes. This applies to humans as
well. For example, the basic instruction, hard-wired in
our Palaeolithic brain, ‘show respect and preferential
treatment to people who “naturally” treat you kindly’
(i.e. relatives), could be redirected to in-groups other
than relatives in the first place, and to countrymen in
general in the second, giving rise to that all-important
political sentiment known as ‘patriotism’. 78
our forebears and together they contain the whole story of human
evolution.’ Steve Jones 1993 (above, n. 59), p. 3.
77
Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2005, p. 170.
78
Cf. G. Herman, Morality and Behaviour in Democratic Athens.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 353-359.
65
On a still wider scale, this also applies to the relatively
quick transition of our species from the lifestyle of
hunters and gatherers (which took up about ninety-nine
percent of our existence), to that of agriculturalists and
industrialists (which has taken up about one percent of
human existence). It is by virtue of the generalized
nature of the instructions encoded in their brains that
humans can switch fields and cope with a whole range
of situations associated with modernity that must have
had some kind of Stone Age analogue ─ for example,
life in mega cities, science parks, political institutions,
philharmonic orchestras or spaceflights.
Second, that pre-programmed repertoire of responses is
indeed wide ─ but not infinitely wide. There is a point
beyond which it cannot be stretched no matter what
you do. Both wild and domesticated animals keep
being run down by cars at night on busy roads, at a loss
to know how to implement the universal biological
imperative of self-preservation in that situation. The
likeliest explanation would be that instructions have
been hard-wired into their brains to avoid predators
higher on the food chain, but none of these bore
sufficient resemblance to a metallic, humming, squareangled entity which rushes forward sending menacing
beams of light that paralyze the senses. Cars fail to
trigger those animals’ defense systems because they
fall out of the range of their genetically prescribed
perceptual limits.
Humans have their limits too. To name just one,
children with moderate musical, verbal or
mathematical talents can be taught to improve their
performances, but only to a certain extent: there is no
way of turning them into a Mozart, a Shakespeare or an
Einstein. As Edward O. Wilson famously said, ‘genes
hold culture on a leash’. Indeed, genes hold culture on
a leash, but on a rather long one. And it would seem
that it is the extreme length of that leash which holds
the key for the translation of genetic information into
cultural patterns.
XI. How Genes Generate Culture
To see how, we must go back once again to the human
brain. It has been repeatedly observed that our brain is
overdesigned: no such costly outgrowth was necessary
for meeting the net requirements of survival and
reproduction.79 Hosts of advanced species happily
survive and reproduce while served by significantly
smaller brains. However, the best pointers to the
apparently excessive potential of our brains are some
feats that by comparison with those of other animals
79
For my purposes it does not matter so much how this came about.
A random genetic mutation that ordained a disproportionately
speedy brain-growth, combined with a genetic drift seems to be an
attractive proposition. For further suggestions, amongst which an
increase in meat-eating among our ancestors looms large, see Chris
Stringer, The Origin of Our Species. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
2011, Ch. 5.
© 2014 GSTF
GSTF International Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) Vol.3 No.2, April 2014
appear as nothing short of extraordinary. Here are some
examples.
Humans have managed to place themselves on top of
the food chain, even though in terms of sheer corporeal
destructive potential they are surpassed by many
animals. Humans have managed to raise their life
expectancy and multiply at an unprecedented rate (7
billion human beings, as we have noted), ‘subduing’, in
passing, ─ as the author of Genesis put it ─ most of the
other species: they have physically eliminated (or
restricted the habitats of) the higher species; they have
subverted the internal chain of command of the lower
ones (i.e. microorganisms, germs and insects, by means
such as disinfectants, medications, inoculations,
insecticides); they have infiltrated the genotypes
(=selective breeding) and have bent to their own
purposes the phenotypes of what are now domesticated
plants and animals. No other species has accomplished
anything even remotely similar. Our closest relatives,
the chimpanzees, who retained more or less the same
brain-body ratio relative to themselves for millions of
years, are today an endangered species.
There is, however, more to it than that. It can
plausibly be argued that humans have succeeded in
breaking out of the charmed circle of evolution by
natural selection.80 Amongst all animal species many
more individuals are born than can possibly survive,
and only those best adapted to the environment will
live to reproduce. Among cultured humans most
individuals that are born survive, and almost all live to
reproduce. Through the use of devices such as
contraception, caesarean sections, food production,
hygiene, sanitation, medicine, artificial habitats, the
anticipation and averting of natural disasters, humans
have managed to tame, by-pass and even contravene
the forces that mould, truncate and divert the
evolutionary trajectory of other species. Human life
does not boil down to a monotonous succession of
attempts at survival and reproduction (though it never
loses sight of those functions); human gene pools can
resist the onslaught of epidemics or climatic changes
without suffering mass extinctions. It is in
consequence of this state of affairs that enormous
amounts of released human energy could be poured
into the generation of what we call culture.
other in- and out-groups than with food or sex. Once,
our lives revolved almost exclusively around survival
and reproduction; now, due to our partial triumph over
the forces of natural selection, our lives revolve mainly
around competition with members of our own species
(which also involves what is called ‘the battle of
sexes’). The creation of high culture, which, as we
have seen, soared to high peaks in cities, may be one
of the most conspicuous by-products of this
reorientation.
Expressed in biological terms, competition with
members of our own species involves the struggle to
optimally express the structural idiosyncrasies that
human genotypes wage against each other through the
mediation of their extended phenotypes. The process
consists of eliciting ideas, flashes of insight, mental
images and old responses to new stimuli that human
phenotypes were born knowing and were stored in
their brains. It is largely facilitated by the fact that due
to their enlarged brains humans can also create
imaginary worlds; bits of those worlds are projected
onto reality to make up significant sections of what we
call culture. There is nothing, however, in culture that
is derived from non-bodily sources; there is nothing
which cannot be viewed as projections and extensions
of the human body and its underlying mechanisms.
Attempts have been made recently to challenge the
classical interpretation of gene function by arguing that
changes may occur in both gene and brain structure
after conception.81 For instance, strands of DNA may
chemically (‘epigenetically’) change their ‘meaning’
while interacting with other proteins, or that under the
impact of culture the activity and morphology of the
brain itself can change. All this is probably true, but
does not affect the basic thesis that the main
independent variables in the story are the genes
themselves; that, to put it another way, both those
epigenetic DNA variations and the culture-induced
changes in the brain may have been pre-programed in
the genes. The primacy of genes as the hidden
potentialities that contain the visible actuality of human
being and the sum-total of their activities is not thereby
undermined. By analogy with a well-known dictum, we
may conclude that there is nothing in culture that was
not earlier in our mind; and there is nothing in our
mind that was not earlier in our genes.
A quick self-examination will reveal the ends towards
which those released energies have been directed. In
our lives we are concerned far more with interactions
with superiors, peers, family, friends, enemies and
Gabriel Herman currently holds the
Professorship in Ancient History at
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Israel. He specializes in ancient
Greek social history, focusing on
issues such as social structure,
interpersonal relationships, moral
norms, rituals, conflict resolution and
decision making. This is his first
publication outside the field of
ancient history.
80
Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, who allow a much more
prominent role to genes than most other authors on human
evolution, assume that the cultural process is also subject to a
Darwinian process of evolution by natural selection (Not By Genes
Alone. How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Evolution by
natural selection is no doubt one of the most powerful ideas of
modern times, but there is not much point in thinking of it as a kind
of iron law that operates under all circumstances.
81
66
E.g., Jablonka and Lamb 2005 (above, n. 77).
© 2014 GSTF