INTRODUCTION

The Darwinian Revolution?

From the very beginnings of Western thought, ideas about nature and culture and their interrelationships have been central themes in political and philosophical controversy. Moral and political changes have been wrought or reflected in shifting views of nature and culture.

Evolution, as a global theory about the processes that permeate “nature,” involves a drastic departure from previous theories and ultimately requires a substantial revision in views of nature and culture. Because the counterposed concepts of nature and culture entail moral and political considerations, evolutionary theory could have had immense social consequences. Social Darwinists and strict creationists were quick to point out this possibility in the nineteenth century, and the continuing struggle between evolutionists and creationists over the teaching of evolution in the public schools shows that the issue is not dead.

Nevertheless, and although evolutionism has indeed revolutionized views of nature, it has dealt successfully with nonhuman nature only. In the study of human beings, the trajectory of evolutionary theory has been obstructed not just by antievolutionists but by many scholars who believe they are applying evolutionary theory to the study of human beings. Evolutionary and antievolutionary views of human nature, though quite incompatible scientifically, can and do coexist.

It will immediately be countered that biological anthropology employs evolutionary principles in the study of humans. No one can doubt that it does. Human origins are generally treated evolutionarily; human genetics and population biology are thriving. Ecological principles are widely applied in the study of human groups, and human ethology is rapidly developing as a formal field of anthropological inquiry. Yet despite anthropology’s avowed concern with a holistic biocultural view of humans, biological and cultural inquiry remain surprisingly isolated from each other. The human body, human populations, and human subsistence systems are treated in an evolutionary fashion, while culture is analyzed much as it would have been at any time in Western history before Darwin.¹ This widespread failure to synthesize the study of humans and their cultures cannot be attributed to lack of effort. Numerous attempts have been made, yet as different as their theoretical sources and ideological motivations have been, with very few exceptions they have fallen short in remarkably similar and predictable ways. Thus far, explanations of this general problem have fallen into two broad types: rationality explanations and political-economic explanations. Under the heading of rationality explanations are two subtypes: the “march of science” and unconscious bias.

The “march of science” is seen as an ongoing struggle between the obvious empirical conclusions of science and traditional beliefs. The extent to which evolutionism remains unincorporated in the synthetic study of humans is attributed to a kind of simple survival of prescientific ideas.² This view has many weaknesses. It segregates scientific research from other cultural activities in a way that is neither operationally feasible nor anthropologically defensible. It forces us to take a limited view of science as supracultural and to treat the rest of culture outside science as essentially irrational. It also fails to explain what is at stake for the opponents in the conflicts between different views, reducing the issue solely to a battle between superstition and rationality, to warfare between theology and science.

The second kind of rationality view has been nicely synthesized by Stephen Jay Gould in his fine book The Mismeasure of Man (1981). Gould argues that the recurrence of racist uses of IQ tests and other measurement techniques is aided by “unconscious bias.” This concept liberates us from the suspicion that all racists are cynical plotters against the truth and it implies the existence of a coherent structure of expectations about the phenomena of the world which guides the thoughts of scientists and nonscientists alike. But unconscious bias is too limited an idea for such a broad explanatory task. To the extent that unconscious biases are shared widely and perpetuated despite use of empirical data and sound analytical procedures, they are not biases at all. They are collective conceptions about the structure and operation of the natural world and its significance for us. They are cultural systems.

The “unconscious bias” explanation individualizes the problem culturally and socially. The persistence of nonscientific views is treated as a matter of individual perceptions, and thus deflects us from an analysis of the evident similarities between the unconscious biases of many scholars and their appeal to a broad public. It also fails to take account of the social interests that are served by particular formulations of the relationship between nature and culture.

Political-economic explanations have been elaborately developed in recent years under the general name “social studies of science.” Though still a young field, it offers exciting perspectives on the emergence, acceptance, and rejection of scientific developments.³ A portion of this scholarship reveals the internal social structures of the biological and medical sciences, traces the social-class interests served by certain of their technologies and ideas, and correlates patterns of theoretical development with political and economic situations. On balance these works suggest—they do not yet demonstrate fully—that the most powerful ideas are generally those that favor the interests of the socially powerful.⁴

Though this is promising work, at its core lies a serious unresolved problem that is recognized by most practitioners. A theoretical perspective that deals with the actual relationship between ideological systems and political-economic structures remains to be developed. When the complexity of individual cases is examined, relatively simple deterministic models prove inadequate. Eventually a theoretical formulation of the relationship between ideology and society capable of taking both ideological and political-economic causes into account will be needed. At present the multiplicity of verbs that are used to refer to this relationship reveals the confusion. Ideological systems are variously said to “reflect,” “embody,” “correlate with,” “describe,” “explain,” “legitimate,” or even “embrace” political-economic structures.

Our ability to deal with all of these problems can be substantially improved if we take a more anthropological view of the way cultural systems operate. The coherence, inclusiveness, and staying power of cultural systems, the interpretive functions they perform, and the moral charge they carry must be brought specifically to bear on the analysis of the use to which evolutionary theory has been put in the study of humans.

This is not a new arena for anthropology, and anthropology is by no means the only actor in it. Since its inception the discipline has taken a central role in polemics about biological determinism, having taken strong public positions against racism, eugenics, and environmental determinism. Anthropologists have argued that what is “natural” to humans is by no means easily determined. Some argue that questions about what is natural to humans are wrongheaded, since all humans become human only through culture.⁵ Others claim that with sufficient cross-cultural data and proper analytical care, we may identify human universals that have biological bases.⁶ Whichever view one takes, it is clear that the relationship between biological and cultural systems has long been a central concern of anthropology.

Received wisdom suggests that the major difficulty standing in the way of a biocultural evolutionary synthesis is either the incomplete assimilation of evolutionary perspectives in the study of humans or the sheer political/moral manipulation of evidence and theory. Yet most of the current perspectives, both pro- and antideterminist, can be found clearly stated in texts written both long before and long after Darwin’s time. There seems to be a characteristically Western way of assimilating information about nature into political/moral views about culture, a way as yet little modified by the development of evolutionary theory.

Many pre- and nonevolutionary views treat species as fixed natural categories that embody the ideal form of each species.⁷ This ideal form generally arises in an act of creation that also orders all species into a harmonious system. Creation and subsequent history either are providentially guided or follow some teleological principle.

An evolutionary view, in contrast, treats species as momentary organizations of the immense amount of variation that all organisms produce. These species are formed by natural selection. The dialogue between variation and selection has no inherent direction. The composition of life on earth at any period differs from that in any other period.

It should be clear that pre-evolutionary and evolutionary conceptions of nature are incompatible. Momentary organizations of variation in species cannot be reconciled with ideal and timeless species forms. One must be an evolutionist or not. As obvious as this proposition seems, some scholars think these views to be reconcilable, or at least they throw logic to the winds and reconcile them willy-nilly.

Pre- and nonevolutionary views persist at present in two different ways. In some contexts, pre-evolutionary ideas and language simply continue unmodified. Such thinking is much more prevalent than it may appear. More important, there is a complex form of continuity in which pre-evolutionary terminology has been mostly abandoned but the pre-evolutionary conceptual structure persists essentially intact.

It appears that to most people, pre- and nonevolutionary views are much more attractive than evolutionary views. This attraction requires explanation, especially in light of the great success of evolutionism in the biological and medical sciences. I believe the main reason is that pre- and nonevolutionary views offer a clear relationship between nature and the determination of political/moral conduct. Evolutionism, properly understood, not only explicitly rejects such a relationship but undercuts the vision of nature on which it stands. Evolutionary theory must argue that the difference between “is” and “ought” cannot be bridged by science, a point eloquently made by François Jacob in The Possible and the Actual (1982).

Our society characteristically distrusts political and moral systems that do not rest on assertions about nature and human nature. In order to preserve this practice (and its dubious social benefits) we are willing to entertain an amazing amount of contradiction between the evolutionism we claim to subscribe to and the ideological uses we attempt to make of it.