Verbs, Bones, and Brains

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Nature

Agustín Fuentes, Aku Visala, Agustín Fuentes, Aku Visala

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268101176
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The last few decades have seen an unprecedented surge of empirical and philosophical research into the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, the origins of the mind/brain, and human culture. This research and its popular interpretations have sparked heated debates about the nature of human beings and how knowledge about humans from the sciences and humanities should be properly understood. The goal of Verbs, Bones, and Brains: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Nature is to engage these themes and present current debates, discussions, and discourse for a range of readers. The contributors bring the discussion to life with key experts outlining major concepts paired with cross-disciplinary commentaries in order to create a novel approach to thinking about, and with, human natures. The intent of the contributors to this volume is not to enter into or adjudicate complex philosophical issues of an epistemological or metaphysical nature. Instead, their common concern is to set aside the rigid distinctions between biology and culture that have made such discussions problematic. First, informing their approach is an acknowledgment of the widespread disagreement about such basic metaphysical and epistemological questions as the existence of God, the nature of scientific knowledge, and the existence of essences, among other topics. Second, they try to identify and explicate the assumptions that enter into their conceptualizations of human nature. Throughout, they emphasize the importance of seeking a convergence in our views on human nature, despite metaphysical disagreements. They caution that if convergence eludes us and a common ground cannot be found, this is itself a relevant result: it would reveal to us how deeply our questions about ourselves are connected to our basic metaphysical assumptions. Instead, their focus is on how the interdisciplinary and possibly transdisciplinary conversation can be enhanced in order to identify and develop a common ground on what constitutes human nature.

CHAPTER ONE

OFF HUMAN NATURE

JONATHAN MARKS

What I would like to do is articulate an anthropological position on human nature that is not official—there’s no statement on human nature by the American Anthropological Association—but that I think is the most consistent with modern understandings derived from contemporary anthropology. I begin with a proposition about our place in nature—nature, of course, being a word that does a lot of work here—in the post-Darwinian world, namely, that we are biocultural ex-apes.

Ex-apes? Second part first. What do I mean by ex-apes? Evolution is descent with modification, and we are descended from apes, yet modified from them. Now, of course, it is not that difficult to find popular or even scholarly literature that will tell you that we are apes, on the grounds that our ancestors were apes. But that is not descent with modification; that is descent without modification. That is just descent.

To understand evolution means understanding that descent and modification are in constant tension with one another, and to reduce evolution to one or the other is a mistake. That’s why when the evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson said at midcentury, “It is not a fact that man is an ape, extra tricks or no,”¹ what he means is that there is an important distinction to be made between our ancestry and our identity. What we are is not the same thing that our ancestors were. Our remote ancestors were fish, and although there are interesting things to be learned about the human condition through an appreciation of our fish ancestry, it really does not make any more sense to say that we are modified fish than it makes to call a book a modified tree. That emphasizes the descent at the expense of the modification, and serves a purpose that is rhetorical, not empirical. Moreover if science says that you are an ape because your ancestors were apes, then what does science say about you with the knowledge that your ancestors were slaves? Presumably, rather, science would say in both cases that the identity of ancestors may at best constrain but certainly does not determine the identity of descendants.

So that is what we are: ex-apes. Our ape ancestry can be seen if you look hard for it. We share many of our anatomical features with apes. A rotating shoulder, strongly flexed digits, and a short, stiff spinal column. Monkeys, by contrast, like many other groups of mammals, have long, flexible spines, ending in a tail; extension of the wrist and fingers, because they tend to walk on their hands rather than hang from trees; and more limited movement at the shoulder.

And what do I mean by biocultural? About two and a half million years ago, our ancestors started creating sharp surfaces, by deliberately banging rocks together, and making not so much the first tools but the first tools that are recognizable as tools in the archaeological record. So we have been coevolving with, and adapting to, technology for millions of years. And this shows up not only in the evolution of the tools themselves but in the evolution of our bodies as well. Chimpanzees do not make nice things, because, compared to us, they have small, weak brains and small, weak thumbs. Probably the only test of physical strength at which you could beat a chimpanzee is a children’s thumb-wrestling contest. In other words, (physical) dexterity coevolved with (cognitive) mentality and (inorganic) technology. That’s a lot of coevolution.

And that is why we recognize that human evolution over the past couple of million years reflects a change from the domain of biological evolution to biocultural evolution, as our ancestors increasingly came to rely on innovations in communication, technology, and society in order to adapt and survive. And by about one hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors were surviving not so much by what was in their heads as what was between their heads, that is to say, relationships and historical traditions that transcend the individual organism and are in a classic sense, then, superorganic. And of course today we do the great bulk of our adapting culturally. Alleles for good eyesight and disease resistance tweak the gene pool, but glasses and antibiotics have had a much greater effect in solving those problems.

So as scientists interested in the human condition, so to speak, we focus on culture, because it embraces the historical process by which we principally adapt, and which gives us our orientation in a complex cognitive and social world. This is not to say that biology is not there in the modern world, but if you want to understand sugar consumption, it is insufficient to talk about our primate heritage. Our sugar consumption is the result of history, of political economy; like our meat consumption and beer consumption. They are all good in a biological sense, but a liter of Dr. Pepper is doing a lot more than satisfying a biological urge. And to understand it, you need to understand the relevant history, labor, pricing structure, availability, and so on. The biology, the nature, does not really tell you what you want to know in the modern world, even though it is there.

So if we are interested in explaining the major features of human behavior—why some people think it is OK to eat a dog and other people think it is OK to eat a horse, and still others think it is OK to eat a whale; why some people wear jeans while others wear saris—well, those are group-level differences, in which nature is a constant and culture is a variable. I mean, those populations are genetically slightly different but not in any sense that is explanatory given the question at hand. Consequently it is easy to juxtapose nature to culture and just work with the differences that are the products of history, not of microevolution.

Now I have just summarized the last century of anthropology for you in a couple of pages. The major patterns of variation in human behavior are found at the boundaries of human group identities, and they are the products of historical, rather than microevolutionary, forces. This is not to say that behavioral genetics is without value; it simply accounts for a trivial portion of the variation in human behavior. One person may be sadder and another happier for genetic reasons, but if those genes are patterned like the other genes we know of, then both forms are present in most populations. But if you want to know why one person is sad in Chinese and another in French, genetics is not the place to look. Certainly the French depressive and Chinese depressive have far less in common in their lives than the French depressive and nondepressive or the Chinese depressive and nondepressive do.

Broadly speaking, we call that historical trajectory that structures lives and gene pools cultural, and acknowledge that it is a product of history, not biology. But might there be elementary structures of the human mind, upon which culture is simply inscribed? Perhaps it is human nature to think in terms of binary oppositions, as Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested: man-woman, day-night, hot-cold, dry-wet, human-animal, raw-cooked, nature-culture. Maybe that is a hard-wired aspect of human nature. On the other hand, archaeologists tend to think in trinary terms: Upper, Middle, Lower Paleolithic; Pre-Classic, Classic, Post-Classic; Stone, Bronze, Iron Age; Early, Middle, Late Pleistocene. But that would go against human nature—which would have to imply that either archaeologists are not human or they are unnatural. Surely there are a lot of people who think culturally in dichotomous fashions and there are many who do not. If that means that it is human nature to think dichotomously except when we do not, then it is not a very useful statement about humans, or biology. It might be a good description about certain systems of human thought, but of course we have no evidence at all that there is any innateness to it; this becomes a discussion of human nature without nature.

Culture in Us

So rather than bracket nature and set it off from culture, we tend instead to see how culture helps to construct nature. Culture is part of us in three ways, of which I’ve already mentioned the first, as an ultimate cause of the human condition, something that constitutes the environmental niche to which we have been adapting: the social, technological, physical, and cognitive features that our gene pools have been adapting to over a few millions of years. Second, it is a proximate cause of the human condition, that is to say, as the aspects of the environment that we experience as individual organisms—not simply the communicative and cognitive environments we are born into but also ecological stressors, which might reflect life at high altitude, or a high-fat diet, or the repetitive motions associated with a lifetime of manual labor, or simply growing up under a regime of social prejudice, which is known as embodiment in modern racial theory.

And third, culture permeates the entire prospect of seeking and claiming to find human nature in the first place. In 1972, Pioneer 10 was launched, carrying a picture of a man and a woman out beyond the solar system (fig. 1). The first question you may be asking after seeing it is, why did NASA use your tax money to send a picture of naked people into outer space? Obviously, their aim was to present a depiction of the senders in the event that the probe was intercepted by aliens. Equally obviously, the people depicted are not accurate representations of the people who actually sent the spacecraft but are instead representations of what those people wished they looked like. Further, it is the group that the senders intended to convey their own membership in—not the nation, not the ecosystem, not the neighborhood, but the species. That is why they chose a youngish, well-built male and female. What sense that might make to alien minds is a good question, as is the question of whether the male is issuing a generalized greeting of some sort (“Hi! Welcome to the galaxy!”) or a warning (“Halt! This is a private nudist colony!”).

Figure 1. “Pioneer plaque” by Vectors by Oona Räisänen (Mysid); designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake; artwork by Linda Salzman Sagan. Vectorized in CorelDRAW from NASA image GPN-2000-001623. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pioneer_plaque.svg#/media/File:Pioneer_plaque.svg.

The larger point, though, is why they are naked and depilated. After all, when the aliens trace the probe back to Earth (a map is conveniently featured on another part of the plaque), would they not be surprised to find the humans clothed? Would they recognize us, if all they can match to the illustration is our face and hands? Or would they be angry at us for lying about what we look like and proceed to annihilate us on that basis? Why choose to send space aliens an image of what we look like and then show us differently from what we actually usually look like? The answer is that the astronomers intended to convey a “natural” image of our species, one stripping humans of their culture and depicting what they called in the French Enlightenment Man in a state of pure nature. And yet not only is that a lie, for that is not what the aliens will see when they land among us; but it is also a lie about a lie, for in imagining itself to be free of cultural information, the plaque nevertheless conveys cultural information. Certainly the haircuts and lack of body hair are cultural; as are the gendered postures and gazes, with only the man looking you straight in the eye (to a baboon, that would be a threat gesture; let us hope the aliens don’t see it that way).

The point, then, is that culture is not to be scraped away, like the icing on a cake, but is rather an intrinsic part of the human condition, like the eggs in the cake. Not only is culture a part of us, but it is a part of how we see ourselves when we try to imagine ourselves without culture. It also means that opposing nature to culture is a falsehood, and thus to regard modern anthropologists as “idiot Lockean environmentalists” in order to make the case for human nature serves a rhetorical purpose but is without scientific merit or an empirical basis. The reason, then, that you find a lack of enthusiasm for a concept of human nature in anthropology is that “human nature” implies a separation from and opposition to culture, which was cutting edge in the nineteenth century but which was empirically seen to have outlived its usefulness over the course of the twentieth.

No Nature without Culture

Regardless, though, of the lack of formalization of a concept of culture prior to the nineteenth century, the idea that there is a discernible human nature—perhaps rooted in genetics, rational thought, or social politics—that corresponds to the dog’s nature to bark, the cat’s nature to purr, or the pigeon’s nature to nest and coo can be found among the ancient Greeks. Of course, we realize that humans are different from other species, for example, by walking and talking. The question is how valuable a pre-Aristotelian concept may be in a post-Darwinian world.

So when Mel Konner from Emory University asks rhetorically what it could possibly mean to deny human nature,² in a journal called Nature, I think there is a straightforward answer. If the assumption is that there is an important or interesting part of the human condition that is bracketable and studyable independently of the effects of the cultural environment and social interactions with conspecifics, that assumption does not seem to hold for much of anything. One of the most striking aspects about human evolution is the change in life history that becomes obvious when you compare humans to apes.

There has been a lot written lately on the evolution of menopause. Where an ape breeds essentially until she dies, a human does not, and actually still has a few good decades left after the onset of infertility. The value of this situation might be to assist her own daughter in parturition and child-rearing, since those are a lot more difficult in humans than in apes: the human infant’s head is bigger than the ape infant’s head, and consequently where an ape mother can generally give birth by squatting silently alone, a human generally has someone else around. Birthing is far more social in humans than in our close relatives. Moreover, growth and development are retarded in humans, so that where a chimpanzee is getting its wisdom teeth at age eleven, a human will wait another decade. So not only are humans older for longer than apes are, but humans are also younger for longer than apes are. Why? Because we survive by learning, and learning takes time.

But one of the problems with the concept of human nature, imagining the isolation of those features that are innate from those that are learned, is that those are not antonyms in human biology. The most uncontroversial aspects of our nature, walking and talking, are both innate and learned. Not only are they learned in a generic sense, so that we can communicate and locomote, but they are also learned in very specific cultural senses. We not only learn how to move, but we learn how to move properly or appropriately. Ugandans and Japanese do walk differently. We learn both language and a language, that is to say, the human form of communication and the locally meaningful and specific human form of communication. So it is not really that we are biologically programmed to walk and talk but that we are biologically programmed to learn to walk and talk correctly. By “correctly,” what I mean is that there are a lot of ways of doing it but only one way of doing it right—so that the people around you can make sense of you, and you do not look or sound too weird.

The point is that we cannot juxtapose what we are biologically adapted to do against what we learn to do, because we are biologically adapted to survive by learning things, including most fundamentally how to locomote and communicate. But this fact raises an interesting question: If it is human nature to walk and talk, then you have defined two-year-olds out of the category “human.” And based upon what standards of linguistic competence you adopt, you may be defining sixteen-year-olds out of our species as well. One possibility is to be a biological reductionist and define anything with human cells as human. Another, as some anthropologists have suggested, is to think about a human becoming, rather than idealizing a thirty-year-old hermit who is fully physically mature and yet devoid of any social experiences, as the proper referent of a human being and everyone else as an approximation of it. The essence of being human is to b...