Weird people

Weird people. Northwest Europeans are more individualistic, less loyal to kin, and more trusting of strangers. (Wikicommons)



Northwest Europeans are WEIRD ... as in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. These traits are in turn associated with certain behavioral and psychological characteristics: "People from these societies tend to be more individualistic, independent, and impersonally prosocial (e.g., trusting of strangers) while revealing less conformity and in-group loyalty" (Schulz et al. 2019).

In a recent study, Schulz et al. (2019) argue that WEIRDness is a heritage of Western Christianity: the branch of the Christian faith that gradually evolved into Roman Catholicism and, later, Protestantism: "we propose that the Western Church's transformation of European kinship, by promoting small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility, fostered greater individualism, less conformity, and more impersonal prosociality."

Social relations are indeed different north and west of a line running approximately from Trieste to St. Petersburg, Everyone is single for at least part of adulthood, and many stay single their entire lives. In addition, households often have non-kin members, and children usually leave the nuclear family to form new households (Hajnal, 1965; ICA, 2013; Laslett, 1977). This is the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP), and there is an extensive literature on it going back to work by John Hajnal.


Was the Western Church a cause or an effect?

Schulz et al. (2019) stress the role of the Western Church in creating the WEMP, particularly by banning consanguineous marriages. The ban came about because "the Church had become obsessed with incest."

That isn't the whole story. Even before Christianity, Roman Civil Law forbade marriages within four degrees of consanguinity. The number was increased from four to seven in 732 by Pope Gregory III, but in this he was following similar bans among the newly converted Germanic peoples. The mid-seventh century Visigothic Code proclaimed that "it shall not be lawful to defile the blood of such as are related even to the sixth degree, either by marriage or otherwise" (McCann 2010, p. 57). In the early ninth century, the Church changed its way of calculating degrees of kinship by adopting the Germanic system. Under the old Roman system, first cousins were considered fourth degree; the Germanic system made them second degree. This change had the effect of doubling the number of ineligible marriage partners (McCann 2010, pp. 57-58).

Schulz et al. (2019, p. 2) assume that the WEMP postdates these prohibitions against cousin marriage: "by 1500 CE (and centuries earlier in some regions), much of Europe was characterized by a virtually unique configuration of weak (nonintensive) kinship marked by monogamous nuclear households, bilateral descent, late marriage, and neolocal residence." 

Actually, no one really knows when this pattern arose. As we go farther back in time, we have less demographic data to work with, but the same pattern still appears in the little we do have. In thirteenth-century Lincolnshire before the Black Death, households were already nuclear and a late age of first marriage was the norm, being 24 for the woman and 32 for the man (Hallam 1985, p. 66). In ninth-century France, two surveys show that households were small and nuclear among married people and that 12 to 16% of the adult population were unmarried (Hallam 1985, p. 56). A third survey shows that both men and women were marrying in their mid to late twenties; (Seccombe 1992, p. 94). Admittedly, the earliest data are limited to France, hence the authors' caveat "centuries earlier in some regions," but France was hardly an outlier in the demographic evolution of northwest Europe.

Earlier demographic data are too fragmentary to produce firm conclusions. Furthermore, the data usually concern elite males who typically took much younger brides. Nonetheless, in the general population we see some evidence of first marriages at late ages. The first-century Roman historian Tacitus wrote about the Germanic tribes: "Late comes love to the young men, and their first manhood is not enfeebled; nor for the girls is there any hot-house forcing; they pass their youth in the same way as the boys" (Tacitus Germania 20). Julius Caesar made the same observation: 

Those who have remained chaste for the longest time, receive the greatest commendation among their people: they think that by this the growth is promoted, by this the physical powers are increased and the sinews are strengthened. And to have had knowledge of a woman before the twentieth year they reckon among the most disgraceful acts; of which matter there is no concealment, because they bathe promiscuously in the rivers and [only] use skins or small cloaks of deers' hides, a large portion of the body being in consequence naked. (Caesar De Bello Gallico 6: 21)

The direction of causality may thus run in the other direction. The WEMP does not exist because the Western Church diverged from the Eastern Church on the issue of consanguineous marriage. Rather, this divergence arose because the Western Church was assimilating the behavioral norms of its newly converted peoples, including the WEMP. By the eighth century, those peoples were dominant within the Western Church and able to push Christian practice in certain directions, particularly postponement of marriage and marriage outside the kin group (Frost 2017). The tail began to wag the dog.


Sources of inspiration?

Schulz et al. (2019) seem to have been inspired by earlier work by Steven Heine and Joseph Henrich (who is one of the co-authors). Curiously, no references are made to the literature on the WEMP, not even to the work by John Hajnal. Less curiously, they pass over the more speculative work by myself, hbd chick, and Kevin MacDonald (Frost 2011; Frost 2017; hbd chick 2011; hbd chick 2012; hbd chick 2014; MacDonald 1990; MacDonald 2011). To the best of my knowledge, Kevin was the first to notice an apparent relationship between northwest Europeans, Western Christianity, and certain psychological and behavioral characteristics. This is evident in his 1990 article and even more so in his 2011 one:

The nuclear family, freed from extended kinship obligations, is the basis of Western social organization. It is unique relative to other culture areas. This pattern is particularly noticeable in the Northwest of Europe rather than the Pontic steppe region. As one goes from the Northwest of Europe to the Southeast, there is an increase in joint family structure, with brothers living together with parents, grandparents and children. Family historian John Hajnal discovered the "Hajnal line" that separates Western Europe from Eastern Europe, the former characterized by nuclear family structure, relatively late marriage and large numbers of unmarried in economically difficult times, the latter by joint family structure and relatively early and universal marriage.

I suspect Schulz et al. (2019) had read material by all three of us. I base my suspicion partly on their use of certain terms and expressions and partly on their references, particularly the curious reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss as an authority on kinship. An American anthropologist would normally cite Lewis Henry Morgan or Robin Fox. I like to cite Lévi-Strauss partly because I was trained at a French-language university and partly because he was, in a sense, my academic grandfather, being the dissertation supervisor of my dissertation supervisor.  He was also the first to come up with the concept of gene-culture coevolution, but that fact is poorly known even among francophone anthropologists.

Anyway, does it matter? The important thing is to put new ideas into circulation.


References

Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe. Advances in Anthropology 7: 154-174.
http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf 

Frost, P. (2011). The Western European Marriage Pattern. Evo and Proud. November 12 http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2011/11/western-european-marriage-pattern.html 

Hajnal, J. (1965). European marriage patterns in perspective: essays in historical demography. In D.V. Glass and D.E. Eversley (eds). Population in History. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, pp. 101-143.

Hallam, H.E. (1985). Age at first marriage and age at death in the Lincolnshire Fenland, 1252-1478. Population Studies 39(1): 55-69.

hbd chick (2014). Big summary post on the Hajnal Line. October 3
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/big-summary-post-on-the-hajnal-line/

hbd chick (2012). Behind the Hajnal Line. January 16
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/behind-the-hajnal-line/  

hbd chick (2011). The Hajnal Line. June 30
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/the-hajnal-line/  

ICA (2013). Research Themes - Marriage Patterns, Institutions for Collective Action http://www.collective-action.info/_THE_MarriagePatterns_EMP

Laslett, P. (1977). Characteristics of the Western family considered over time. Journal of Family History 2(2): 89-115.

MacDonald, K. (2011). Going against the Tide: Ricardo Duchesne's Intellectual Defence of the West. The Occidental Quarterly 11(3): 1-22.
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/duchesne-review.pdf 

MacDonald, K. (1990). Mechanisms of sexual egalitarianism in Western Europe. Ethology and Sociobiology 11: 195-238.
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/E&S1990.pdf

McCann, C.A. (2010). Transgressing the Boundaries of Holiness: Sexual Deviance in the Early Medieval Penitential Handbooks of Ireland, England and France 500-1000. Theses. 76.  Seton Hall University https://scholarship.shu.edu/theses/76 

Schulz, J.F., D. Bahrami-Rad, J.P. Beauchamp, and J. Henrich. (2019). The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation. Science 366(707): 1-12. 
https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/SchulzHenrichetalTheChurchIntensiveKinshipGlobaPsychologicalVariation2019.pdf

Seccombe, W. (1992). A Millennium of Family Change. Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe. London: Verso.

An idea abandoned by its father

Italian wall lizard (Podarcis sicula) (Credit: Charles J. Sharp). Five mating pairs were taken from one island to another, and over the next thirty generations the transplanted population became remarkably different from the parent population.

Unlike other animals, we adapt not only to natural environments but also to cultural environments of our making. We thus direct our own evolution. At the same time we are busy redesigning our cultural environment, the latter is just as busy redesigning us. Like the natural environment, it favors the survival and reproduction of those who best fit in.

This concept of gene-culture coevolution began with anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in a 1971 lecture:

... Among early humans, biological evolution may have selected for pre-cultural traits like upright posture, manual dexterity, sociability, symbolic thinking, and ability to vocalize and communicate. It was culture, however, once it came into being, that consolidated these traits and propagated them. When cultures specialize, they consolidate and favor other traits, like resistance to cold or heat in societies that have willingly or unwillingly had to adapt to extreme climates, like dispositions to aggressiveness or contemplation, like technical ingenuity, and so on. In the form these traits appear to us on the cultural level, none can be clearly linked to a genetic basis, but we cannot exclude that they are sometimes linked partially and distantly via intermediate linkages. In this case, it would be true to say that each culture selects for genetic aptitudes, which then, via a feedback loop, influence the culture that had initially helped to strengthen them.

Credit is usually given, however, to geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. In 1976, he developed the first mathematical models for gene-culture coevolution with another geneticist, Marcus Feldman, and in 1978-1979 he spoke on this subject to a cultural evolution class at Stanford (Feldman & Cavalli-Sforza 1976; Stone & Lurquin 2005, p. 108). Two of his students were Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, who later wrote a seminal book on gene-culture coevolution (Boyd & Richerson 1985). In the mid-1980s, he decided to test this concept in the field by investigating the cultural and genetic bases of artistic talent among the Inuit:

One of the most remarkable phenomena in the contemporary Canadian Arctic is the presence of highly-acclaimed art forms — carving in stone and ivory, and printing on paper. The question we ask is: how can we account for the wide-spread distribution of such talent in a small dispersed population? (Berry & Cavalli-Sforza 1986, p. 2)

To answer this question, he organized a joint project with psychologist John W. Berry at Queen's University and anthropologist Bernard Saladin d'Anglure at Université Laval. The Inuit were chosen for study because their high rate of adoption made it possible "to distinguish cultural from biological inheritance by studying correlations of adopted children with foster relatives on one hand and biological relatives on the other" (Berry & Cavalli-Sforza 1986, p. 5). Also, until recently, Inuit had lived off the land and, as such, had "abilities [that] are considered to be adaptive to a nomadic and hunting life style" (Berry & Cavalli-Sforza 1986, p. 3). Berry argued that the artistic talent of the Inuit came from certain mental skills that helped them during hunting.

Hunters, by this way of thinking, require good visual acuity, keen disembedding skills and a well-developed sense of spatial orientation. To hunt successfully, the hunter must be able to discern the object of the quest (which is often embedded in a complex visual landscape), then disembed the object, and finally return to home base. In contrast, agriculturalists need not develop these particular skills, but rather they need to invest in other areas of development, such as conservation (in both the economic and the Piagetian senses) and close social interactions. (Berry 2008, p. 3)

The project fell through. Cavalli-Sforza said he had to quit because of illness. Neither of his biographies, however, mention any illness during that time period (Frost 2014). Interestingly, his American biography ascribes his interest in culture at that time to a desire to disprove the existence of mental differences between human populations:

Yet another source of his interest in culture was the idea that the concept of human cultural learning was a valid weapon against racist arguments that differences between people (for example, different IQ scores among ethnic groups) were due to biologically determined "racial" differences. (Stone & Lurquin, 2005, p. 86)

The reality was a bit different. He believed in the importance of culture, but not as an entity separate and distinct from biology. This put him in opposition not only to the racists he denounced in the 1960s but also to the antiracists who increasingly viewed him with suspicion from the late 1980s onward.

With Cavalli-Sforza out of the picture, research on gene-culture coevolution languished over the next quarter-century. This field of research needed a high-profile champion in academia, and all of the possible candidates were either unable or unwilling.  Cavalli-Sforza never was suited for the job, being too timid and, frankly, too easy to blackmail. (Do you really think his wartime research on anthrax involved only mice?)

Lately, there seems to have been a renewal of interest, as seen in this review article on "Human biological and psychological diversity":

Humans migrated out of Africa at least 50,000 years ago and occupied many different ecological and climatological niches. Because of this, they evolved slightly different anatomical and physiological traits. For example, Tibetans evolved various traits that help them cope with the rigors of altitude; similarly, the Inuit evolved various traits that help them cope with the challenges of a very cold environment. It is likely that humans also evolved slightly different psychological traits as a response to different selection pressures in different environments and niches. One possible example is the high intelligence of the Ashkenazi Jewish people. Frank discussions of such differences among human groups have provoked strong ethical concerns in the past. We understand those ethical concerns and believe that it is important to address them. However, we also believe that the benefits of discussing possible human population differences outweigh the costs. (Winegard et al. 2017)

This article is a good read, and I was intrigued by its examples of fast evolution, particularly the Italian wall lizards. Five mating pairs were taken from one island to another, and over the next thirty generations the transplanted population became remarkably different from the parent population. The lizards were now larger, had shorter hind limbs, and could bite with much more force. Even more remarkably, they had a new morphological trait: a cecal valve—a muscle between the large and small intestines that slows down food movement and allows digestion of cellulose. This is an adaptation to the abundance of plant food on that island, but it is surprising that an entirely new trait could evolve so fast.

As far back as Darwin, biologists have described evolutionary change as slow. This is true only when organisms live in slowly changing environments. Transplant them into a very different one, and they will evolve very fast. This has been especially true for modern humans, who over the past 50,000 years have spread into a wide range of natural environments from the tropics to the arctic and into an even wider range of cultural environments:

Humans, like many animals, actively alter their environment, which changes the selection pressures they face (Laland et al. 2001; Laland and Sterelny 2006). In fact, humans may be the paradigmatic example of a niche-creating species, using brains rather than brawn to conquer the world (Baumeister 2005; Pinker 2010). Across the globe, humans devised distinctive cultural systems to cope with their environments, creating vastly different selective regimes from one culture to another. (Winegard et al. 2017)

Humans are indeed niche creators who have speeded up their own diversification. Nonetheless, they aren't alone in diversifying so fast. For example, some animal and plant species have spread into a wide range of new habitats since the last ice age, thereby giving rise to many new populations. Whether these recent populations are "sibling species," "subspecies," or "races"—the distinction is often arbitrary—their example can help us understand our own genetic diversity (Frost 2011).

These populations, like our own, seem to have evolved much more anatomically than they have genetically. Their anatomies are often distinct from each other, with no overlap, yet their genomes overlap considerably—there is far more genetic variation within each population than between them. So they are easier to tell apart by their appearance than by their genes. 

Why this discordance between genes and anatomy? Genes don't lie, do they? To make sense of this puzzle, we need to understand three points:

• When a gene has different "alleles" or versions of itself, these alleles vary in their degree of similarity, some performing very differently and others identically or almost so—often because the gene itself is little more than "junk DNA.
• Population boundaries separate not only different populations but also different natural or cultural environments. This is especially true for humans. The cultural environment usually differs, even when the natural environment is the same.
• If the alleles of a gene perform differently, some of them will be more useful to one population than to another because they do better in one environment than in another. The more differently they perform, the more their frequencies will differ across population boundaries, with some alleles being more common in some populations than in others. Conversely, if the alleles perform identically, they will do equally well in all environments and tend to be equally common in all populations. To the extent that different alleles are present within a single population, the reasons will be more stochastic and less related to the usefulness of any one allele. Genetic variation within a population is therefore disproportionately due to alleles that perform similarly.

So genetic variation between populations differs qualitatively from genetic variation within each population. The first kind matters a lot more than the second kind. There are exceptions to this rule, e.g., balanced polymorphisms, founder effects, genetic drift, but that's the general picture. So when you read that genes vary far more within human populations than between them, you should keep in mind that we see the same pattern with many sibling species that are nonetheless anatomically and behaviorally distinct. This pattern tells us only that the populations in question are very young. It doesn't tell us how different they really are from each other, since real evolutionary change can happen very fast—as we saw with the Italian wall lizards. 

References

Berry, J.W. (2008). Models of Ecocultural Adaptation and Cultural Transmission: The Example of Inuit Art, paper presented at the conference Adaptation et socialisation des minoritiés culturelles en région, June 3-4, Quebec City.

Berry, J.W., and L.L. Cavalli-Sforza. (1986). Cultural and genetic influences on Inuit art. Report to Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Ottawa.

Boyd, R. and P.J. Richerson. (1985). Culture and the Evolutionary Process, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Feldman, M.; Cavalli-Sforza, L. (1976). Cultural and biological evolutionary processes, selection for a trait under complex transmission, Theoretical Population Biology, 9: 238-59.

Frost, P. (2014). L.L. Cavalli-Sforza. A bird in a gilded cage, Open Behavioral Genetics, March 28,

http://openpsych.net/OBG/2014/03/l-l-cavalli-sforza-a-bird-in-a-gilded-cage/

Frost, P. (2011). Human nature or human natures? Futures, 43: 740-748.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter_Frost2/publication/251725125_Human_nature_or_human_natures/links/004635223eaf8196f0000000.pdf  
Lévi-Strauss, C. 1971). Race et culture, conférence de Lévi-Strauss à l'UNESCO le 22 mars 1971 (Audio). Polit'productions
http://politproductions.com/content/%C2%ABrace-et-culture%C2%BB-conf%C3%A9rence-de-l%C3%A9vi-strauss-%C3%A0-lunesco-le-22-mars-1971-audio  

Stone, L. and P.F. Lurquin. (2005). A Genetic and Cultural Odyssey. The Life and Work of L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, New York: Columbia University Press.

Winegard, B., B. Winegard, and B. Boutwell. (2017). Human biological and psychological diversity, Evolutionary Psychological Science, 3(2): 159-180.

http://atavisionary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Human-Biological-and-Psychological-diversity.pdf  

The hidden past of Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1973 (Wikicommons)

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss died six years ago, leaving behind a treasure trove of correspondence and unpublished writings. We can now trace where his ideas came from and how they evolved.

I admired Lévi-Strauss during my time as an anthropology student because he asked questions that Marxist anthropologists would never ask. That's why I preferred to call myself a Marxisant, and not a full-blown Marxist. I especially admired him for addressing the issue of nature versus nurture, which had once been a leading issue in anthropology but was now studiously ignored. Only he, it seemed, could defy this omertà and not suffer any ill effects, perhaps because of his age and status.

In his best known tome, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, this issue dominated the first chapter:

Man is both a biological being and a social individual. Among his responses to external or internal stimuli, some are wholly dependent upon his nature, others upon his social environment.

Lévi-Strauss admitted that the two were not always easy to separate:

Culture is not merely juxtaposed to [biological] life nor superimposed upon it, but in one way serves as a substitute for life, and in the other, uses and transforms it, to bring about the synthesis of a new order.

 

He reviewed the different ways of disentangling one from the other:

The simplest method would be to isolate a new-born child and to observe its reactions to various stimuli during the first hours or days after birth. Responses made under such conditions could then be supposed to be of a psycho-biological origin, and to be independent of ulterior cultural syntheses.

[Nonetheless,] the question always remains open whether a certain reaction is absent because its origin is cultural, or because, with the earliness of the observation, the physiological mechanisms governing its appearances are not yet developed. Because a very young child does not walk, it cannot be concluded that training is necessary, since it is known that a child spontaneously begins to walk as soon as it is organically capable of doing so.

(Lévi-Strauss,1969, pp. 3-4)

His interest in the interactions between culture and biology went further. The gene pool of a population will influence its culture, which in turn will alter the gene pool:

The selection pressure of culture—the fact that it favors certain types of individuals rather than others through its forms of organization, its ideas of morality, and its aesthetic values—can do infinitely more to alter a gene pool than the gene pool can do to shape a culture, all the more so because a culture's rate of change can certainly be much faster than the phenomena of genetic drift. (Lévi-Strauss, 1979, p. 24-25)

This is of course gene-culture co-evolution. He may have given the idea to L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, who first began to propound it while teaching a cultural evolution class in 1978-1979. Two of his students, Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, went on to popularize the idea in their book Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985) (Stone and Lurquin 2005, p. 108). Lévi-Strauss had in fact mentioned the same idea long before in a UNESCO lecture:

When cultures specialize, they consolidate and favor other traits, like resistance to cold or heat for societies that have willingly or unwillingly had to adapt to extreme climates, like dispositions to aggressiveness or contemplation, like technical ingenuity, and so on. In the form these traits appear to us on the cultural level, none can be clearly linked to a genetic basis, but we cannot exclude that they are sometimes linked partially and distantly via intermediate linkages. In this case, it would be true to say that each culture selects for genetic aptitudes that, via a feedback loop, influence the culture that had initially helped to strengthen them. (Lévi-Strauss, 1971)

In the same lecture, he made another point:

[Humanity] will have to relearn that all true creation implies some deafness to the call of other values, which may go so far as to reject or even negate them. One cannot at the same time melt away in the enjoyment of the Other, identify oneself with the Other, and keep oneself different. If fully successful, complete communication with the Other will doom its creative originality and my own in more or less short time. The great creative ages were those when communication had increased to the point that distant partners stimulated each other but not so often and rapidly that the indispensable obstacles between individuals, and likewise between groups, dwindled to the point that excessively easy exchanges would equalize and blend away their diversity. (Lévi-Strauss, 1971)

His audience was taken aback, according to fellow anthropologist Wiktor Stoczkowski:

These words shocked the listeners. One can easily imagine how disconcerted UNESCO employees were, who, meeting Lévi-Strauss in the corridor after the lecture, expressed their disappointment at hearing the institutional articles of faith to which they thought they had the merit of adhering called into question. René Maheu, the Director General of UNESCO, who had invited Lévi-Strauss to give this lecture, seemed upset. (Stoczkowski, 2008; Frost, 2014)

Where his ideas came from

Since his death in 2009, we have gained a clearer picture of his intellectual evolution. His published writings had already provided an answer:

When I was about sixteen, I was introduced to Marxism by a young Belgian socialist, whom I had got to know on holiday, and who is now one of his country's ambassadors abroad. I was all the more delighted by Marx in that the reading of the works of the great thinker brought me into contact for the first time with the line of philosophical development running from Kant to Hegel; a whole new world was opened up to me. Since then, my admiration for Marx has remained constant [...] (Lévi-Strauss, 2012 [1973])

Looking through Lévi-Strauss' published and unpublished writings, Wiktor Stoczkowski tried to learn more about this episode but found nothing:

It suffices however to look closely at the milieus that Lévi-Strauss frequented in the 1920s and 1930s, or to reread the articles he published during that period to realize that his references to Marx were at that time astonishingly rare, in flagrant contradiction with his declarations […] In contrast, another name often came up during that time in the writings of the young Lévi-Strauss: that of Henri De Man. And that name, curiously, Lévi-Strauss would never mention after the war. (Stoczkowski, 2013)

As a young leftist disenchanted with Marxism, Lévi-Strauss was especially fascinated by De Man's book Au-delà du marxisme (Beyond Marxism), published in 1927. One of his friends invited De Man to Paris to present his ideas to French socialists. Lévi-Strauss was given the job of organizing the lecture and wrote to De Man about the difficulties encountered:

We have run into many difficulties, which we scarcely suspected and which have sadly shed light on the conservative and sectarian spirit of a good part of French socialism [...]. We thought that the best means to give this [lecture] all of the desirable magnitude would be to make it public [...] [but] to obtain the key support of the Socialist Students, we have agreed to make your lecture non-public, and to reserve admission to members of socialist organizations. Thus, we have learned that Marxism is a sacrosanct doctrine in our party, and that to study theories that stray from it, we have to shut ourselves in very strongly, so that no one on the outside will know (Stoczkowski, 2013)

The lecture was held the next year. Stoczkowski describes the letter that Lévi-Strauss wrote to the invitee afterwards:

"Thanks to you," he wrote, "socialist doctrines have finally emerged from their long sleep; the Party is undergoing, thanks to you, a revival of intellectual activity ...." But there is more. Speaking on his behalf and on behalf of his young comrades, Lévi-Strauss informed De Man that his book Au-delà du marxisme had been for them "a genuine revelation..." Speaking personally, Lévi-Strauss added that he was "profoundly grateful" to De Man's teachings for having "helped me get out of an impasse I believed to have no way out." (Stoczkowski, 2013)

Nothing indicates that Lévi-Strauss had ever been a Marxist in his youth. Both he and his friends saw it as a pseudo-religion that stunted the development of socialism.

But who was Henri De Man?

He was a Belgian Marxist who had lived in Leipzig, Germany, where he became the editor of a radical socialist journal, Leipziger Volkszeitung, that ran contributions by Rosa Luxembourg, Pannekoek, Radek, Trotsky, Karl Liebknecht, and others. In 1907, he helped found the Socialist Youth International. He later returned to Belgium and enrolled when war broke out, seeing the Allied side as a progressive alternative to German authoritarianism.

His views changed during the 1920s, while teaching at the University of Frankfurt. He came to feel that Marxists erred in seeing themselves as an antithesis to the current system; such a perspective made them oppose all traditional values, particularly Christianity and national identity. He now argued that laws, morality, and religion are not bourgeois prejudices, but rather things that are necessary to make any society work. Marxists also erred, he felt, in their narrow focus on economic determinism and their disregard for psychology and the will to act. Although De Man acknowledged the self-destructive tendencies of capitalism, these tendencies do not inevitably lead to revolution. Rather, revolution will happen only when enough people realize that current conditions are neither tolerable nor inevitable. Above all, revolution cannot happen unless it respects existing cultural, religious, and national traditions:

If one sees in socialism something other than and more than an antithesis to modern capitalism, and if one relates it to its moral and intellectual roots, one will find that these roots are the same as those of our entire Western civilization. Christianity, democracy, and socialism are now, even historically, merely three forms of one idea.

Au-delà du marxisme (1927)

De Man returned to Belgium during the 1930s, becoming vice-president and then president of the Belgian Labour Party. In 1935, with the formation of a government of national unity to fight the Great Depression, he was made minister of public works and job creation. In this role, he pushed for State planning and looked to Germany and Italy as examples to be followed. He became increasingly disillusioned with parliamentary democracy and began to call for an “authoritarian democracy” where decisions would be made primarily through the legislature and referendums, rather than through the executive and party politics (Tremblay, 2006).

When Germany overran Belgium in 1940, De Man issued a manifesto to Labour Party members and advised them to collaborate: "For the working classes and for socialism, this collapse of a decrepit world, far from being a disaster, is a deliverance" (Wikipedia, 2015). Over the next year, he served as de facto prime minister before falling into disfavor with the German authorities. He spent the rest of the war in Paris and then fled to Switzerland where he lived his final years. Meanwhile, a Belgian court convicted him in absentia of treason.

Conclusion

Like many people after the war, Claude Lévi-Strauss had to invent a new past. It didn't matter that he had admired Henri de Man at a time when the Belgian socialist was not yet a fascist or a collaborator. As Stoczkowski notes, guilt by association would have been enough to ruin his academic career. Ironically, if he had really been a loyal Marxist during the late 1920s and early 1930s, he would also have denied back then the crimes being committed in the name of Marxism: the Ukrainian famine, Stalin's purges ... Yet, for that, he never faced any criticism.

References

De Man. (1927). Au-delà du marxisme, Brussels, L'Églantine.

http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/de_man_henri/au_dela_du_marxisme/au_dela_du_marxisme.html

Frost, P. (2014). Negotiating the gap. Four academics and the dilemma of human biodiversity, Open Behavioral Genetics, June 20.
http://openpsych.net/OBG/2014/06/negotiating-the-gap/ 

Lévis-Strauss, C. (1969 [1949]). The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Beacon Press.

http://books.google.ca/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=4QhYYQi6CoMC&oi=fnd&pg=PR17&dq=elementary+structures+of+kinship&ots=wMQopD3IgO&sig=pJcCHZQDQBtvCD_w2oWSVNT3cmQ#v=onepage&q=elementary%20structures%20of%20kinship&f=false

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1971). Race et culture, conférence de Lévi-Strauss à L'UNESCO le 22 mars 1971

http://politproductions.com/sites/default/files/art-%C2%ABrace_et_culture%C2%BB_levi-strauss_unesco_22_3_1971.pdf

Lévi-Strauss, C. (2012[1973]). Tristes Tropiques, New York: Penguin

http://books.google.ca/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=lfrk6HmuN7EC&oi=fnd&pg=PT6&dq=%22tristes+tropiques%22&ots=byRLZY8M-I&sig=0BkwimW3xyt5F-hprHoY-UgoS6s#v=onepage&q=marx&f=false

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1985). Claude Lévi-Strauss à l'université Laval, Québec (septembre 1979), prepared by Yvan Simonis, Documents de recherche no. 4, Laboratoire de recherches anthropologiques, Département d'anthropologie, Faculté des Sciences sociales, Université Laval.

Stoczkowski, W. (2008). Claude Lévi-Strauss and UNESCO, The UNESCO Courrier, no. 5, pp. 5-8.

http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=41820&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Stoczkowski, W. (2013). Un étrange socialisme de Claude-Lévi-Strauss / A weird socialism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Europe, 91, n° 1005-1006, 37-53.

https://www.academia.edu/11422480/Un_étrange_socialisme_de_Claude-Lévi-Strauss_A_weird_socialism_of_Claude_Lévi-Strauss

Stone, L. and P.F. Lurquin. (2005). A Genetic and Cultural Odyssey. The Life and Work of L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza. New York: Columbia University Press.

Tremblay, J-M. (2006). Henri de Man, 1885-1953, Les classiques des sciences sociales, UQAC

http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/de_man_henri/de_man_henri_photo/de_man_henri_photo.html

Wikipedia. (2015). Henri de Man

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_de_Man

Negotiating the gap. Four academics and the dilemma of human biodiversity

I’ve published a second article in Open Behavioral Genetics: “Negotiating the gap. Four academics and the dilemma of human biodiversity.” You can read it as a PDF here or as a caliber ebook here. The foreword is reproduced below. Comments are welcome.

 

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Twenty-five years ago I met a professor from the medical faculty who had decided to go into anthropology. He was excited by the concept of gene-culture co-evolution and wanted to get in on the action. But he stressed the need for "prudence." He would first earn his credentials as an anthropologist before tackling this sensitive subject, and he would do so gradually and prudently.

He was already a man of a certain age, and I wondered whether he would have time for all of this, but I said nothing. He knew better than me how to plan his life. And his proposal for research on gene-culture co-evolution had been thoroughly worked out. This was no back-of-the-envelope thing.

Over the next quarter-century he carried out fieldwork and published journal articles, but he never touched the subject that had inspired his move to anthropology. Did he change his mind? I suspect the reason was less thought out. Once you begin your research from a certain angle, it is hard to break away and approach it from a totally different angle—you would have to find new sources of funding and make friends with new people. You would also lose friends. So you take the easy way out, for the time being. And you wait for the right moment, which never comes.

Charles Darwin himself had fallen into that trap. When a non-biologist anonymously wrote and marketed a book about evolution, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the resulting controversy impressed on Darwin the need to become a reputable biologist before writing on the topic. So he bided his time and published, published, published … on other topics in biology. One day, however, fate forced his hand. Another biologist sent him a manuscript that set out the very theory that Darwin had kept under wraps for so long. The rest is history.

You may be thinking: "That was Darwin, and this is me. And my situation is different, very different. And this is a completely different issue. It's really important for me to wait until the time is right!"

I hear you. Maybe your situation is different. And who am I to judge?

 

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This essay presents four academics—Richard Dawkins, Claude Lévi-Strauss, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides—and how they negotiated the gap between personal conviction and mainstream discourse. All four came to the conclusion that human populations differ not only anatomically but also in various mental and behavioral predispositions. These differences are statistical and often apparent only between large groups of people. But even a weak statistical difference can affect how a society will develop and organize itself. Human biodiversity is therefore a reality, and one we ignore at our peril.

Yet most academics do ignore it, their ignorance being either real or feigned. It is easy to forgive the truly ignorant. But what about the ones who know better?  What's their excuse? "I don't have tenure yet." "I'm not well enough known yet." "I don't have enough clout yet." Some will just say: "Please come into my office. Others may hear us talking in the corridor."

And so, among those who do know better, the common response is ... no response. But what else is there to do? How does one go about saying something that is offensive to most people? Is it better to do it gradually? Or all at once? Or is it better to say nothing at all and wait for someone else to speak out?

There are no easy answers, and that may be part of the problem. Too many people are looking for answers that are easy—that cost little in terms of reputation, career prospects, or acceptance at the next cocktail party. Why not instead assume that everything worthwhile has a cost and then look for ways to minimize the cost?

Once you accept that rule of life, everything will fall into place. This intellectual maturity became a source of strength for one of the above academics, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who had to face bitter criticism for what he said. There was an énorme scandale. People were upset and shocked. Yet he carried on as if nothing terrible had happened. Was he so fascinated by his ideas that he simply ignored what others might think? Perhaps. More likely than not, he pondered his dilemma, weighed the pros and cons, and decided that the only sensible thing was to speak out. 

How will you decide? Will you speak out or remain silent?

Reference 

Frost, P. (2014). Negotiating the gap. Four academics and the dilemma of human biodiversity, Open Behavioral Genetics, June 20

http://openpsych.net/OBG/2014/06/negotiating-the-gap/
https://www.dropbox.com/s/uvtmnssmg5rbwpm/Negotiating%20the%20gap%20-%20Peter%20Fro%20-%20Peter.epub  

Claude Lévi-Strauss. The refusal to collaborate

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss is remembered as one of the leading postwar figures of antiracism. He personally encountered racism in 1940 when his Jewish origins cost him his teaching post. As an anthropologist in Brazil, he saw first-hand the dispossession of native peoples in the name of progress. In a UNESCO booklet, Race and History (1952), he pleaded for the preservation of all human cultures, saying that even the most ‘primitive’ ones deserved to survive.

This is the Lévi-Strauss we remember. There was, however, a later stage in his intellectual development that remains largely unknown to most of us, if only because little came of it.

We can see hints of these later views in his 1952 publication, which shows him already deviating from the postwar antiracist consensus:

There are [cultural] contributions that are systemic in character, i.e., corresponding to the specific way each society has chosen to express and satisfy human aspirations as a whole. These ways of life are undeniably original and irreplaceable, but since they represent so many different choices that are exclusive [to each society] it is hard to see how a civilization could benefit from another one’s way of life, unless it renounced being itself.

By the early 1970s, he had become convinced that the emerging world system would eventually liquidate all cultures, and not simply those of the upper Amazon. He also felt that antiracism was moving away from its role of defending the dispossessed and the politically marginalized. In fact, it was becoming the very thing it used to denounce.

These ideas found their way into a lecture he gave to UNESCO in 1971, ironically to launch the International Year for Action to Combat Racism. In this lecture, he attacked the idea that “the spread of knowledge and the development of communication among human beings will some day let them live in harmony, accepting and respecting their diversity ”:

Nothing indicates that race prejudices are decreasing, and everything suggests that after brief local lulls, they resurge elsewhere with increased intensity. Hence the need felt by UNESCO to periodically restart a fight whose outcome seems at the very least uncertain.

But are we so sure that the racial form of intolerance results primarily from false ideas that such or such a population has about the dependence of cultural evolution on biological evolution? Don’t these ideas simply provide an ideological cover for more real conflicts based on the desire to subordinate and on the relative strengths of competing groups (rapports de force)?

In addition, he argued that cultural intermixture is advantageous only if a certain distance is kept between cultures:

[Humanity] will have to relearn that all true creation implies some deafness to the call of other values, which may reach the point of rejecting or even negating them. One cannot at the same time melt away in the enjoyment of the Other, identify oneself with the Other, and keep oneself different. If fully successful, complete communication with the Other will doom its creative originality and my own in more or less short time. The great creative ages were those when communication had increased to the point that distant partners stimulated each other but not so often and rapidly that the indispensable obstacles between individuals, and likewise between groups, dwindled to the point that excessively easy exchanges would equalize and blend away their diversity.

He also maintained that many cultural differences have, over time, produced biological differences:

We cannot insist too much on one fact: although [natural] selection has allowed living species to adapt to the natural environment or to better resist its transformations, with humans the environment has ceased to be primarily natural. Humans derive their distinctive characteristics from technical, economic, social, and mental conditions that, through the operation of culture, create an environment specific to each human group.

… Among early humans, biological evolution may have selected for pre-cultural traits like capability to stand upright, manual dexterity, sociability, symbolic thinking, and ability to vocalize and communicate. It was culture, however, once it came into being, that consolidated these traits and propagated them. When cultures specialize, they consolidate and favor other traits, like resistance to cold or heat for societies that have willingly or unwillingly had to adapt to extreme climates, like dispositions to aggressiveness or contemplation, like technical ingenuity, and so on. In the form these traits appear to us on the cultural level, none can be clearly linked to a genetic basis, but we cannot exclude that they are sometimes linked partially and distantly via intermediate linkages. In this case, it would be true to say that each culture selects for genetic aptitudes that, via a feedback loop, influence the culture that had initially helped to strengthen them.

His lecture ended on a grim note. The population explosion, combined with competition for increasingly scarce resources, will push diverse populations together under conditions less than optimal for peaceful coexistence. Meanwhile, governments will continue to respond with an “ideological struggle against racism”, in the naïve belief that the rising level of tension is being caused by a rising level of ignorance.

… the path that mankind is going down is building up tensions such that racial hatreds provide a pretty poor picture of the regime of heightened intolerance that may become established tomorrow, without even having ethnic differences to serve as a pretext. To circumvent these perils, those of today and those, ever more redoubtable, in the near future, we must persuade ourselves that their causes are much deeper-rooted than those causes that may simply be put down to ignorance and prejudice. We can place our hope only in a change in the course of history, which is much harder to bring about than progress in the course of ideas.

He pursued this line of reasoning during the discussions that followed, as this account makes clear:

Lévi-Strauss felt that UNESCO was going astray by wanting to reconcile two opposed tendencies: civilising progress leads to growth in populations, which encourages cultural exchanges, but the latter lead to the obliteration of cultural diversity, while at the same time demographic saturation causes its inevitable share of intolerance and hostility towards peoples that have become rivals. In this situation, Lévi-Strauss came to maintain the right of every culture to remain deaf to the values of the Other, or even to contest them. This amounted to replacing the conception – defended by UNESCO – of humans spontaneously open to the Other and brought to cooperate with their fellow humans, by a conception of humans naturally inclined to be if not hostile, then at least reserved towards the Other.

Xenophobia – in the very moderate form that Lévi-Strauss gave to it, that of insensitivity to the values of the Other – is here transformed from a fact of modifiable culture into a fact of ineradicable nature. As a result, for Lévi-Strauss the UNESCO project became partially ineffectual, as one cannot hope to change unalterable human nature by action taken on its social element, through education and the fight against prejudice.

These words shocked the listeners. One can easily imagine how disconcerted UNESCO employees were, who, meeting Lévi-Strauss in the corridor after the lecture, expressed their disappointment at hearing the institutional articles of faith to which they thought they had the merit of adhering called into question. René Maheu, the Director General of UNESCO, who had invited Lévi-Strauss to give this lecture, seemed upset. (Stoczkowski, 2008)

Eight years later, Lévi-Strauss recalled this event at another conference. He spoke even more candidly this time, calling antiracism a “trap”:

I believe we have fallen into traps. I remember, if you will let me inject a personal note into this debate, that in 1952 I produced at UNESCO’s request a small booklet called Race and History in which I exalted collaboration between cultures, and in which I showed that it was only to the extent that cultures collaborated with each other willingly or unwillingly that larger, more solid ensembles would arise.

When UNESCO organized in 1971 the year against racism, I was asked to deliver the opening speech. So I said to myself: “No, all the same it’s not possible. We can’t go on year after year repeating nice sentiments and telling ourselves we’re going to further the progress of humanity this way.” And so instead of doing the same thing, like what I had done in 1952, I decided, and I assure you with no ulterior political motive, that I was going to do the opposite. I was going to show that the problems of nature and nurture were, after all, problems that existed, that it was not absolutely forbidden to look into them, and that it was not by affirming in the most sterile way that there were no differences between human groups and individuals that we would further the progress of humanity.

I need not tell you that this set off a huge scandal but I had no feeling of doing anything different from what I had done nearly twenty years before. I wanted to show that we were facing difficult problems and that for me to stick my head in the sand and refuse to look at them was no way to solve them (Lévi-Strauss, 1985, pp. 43-44)

Lévi-Strauss stressed the need for a new paradigm. Through it, we would be better able to examine the reality of human differences and thus be better positioned to face the oncoming “difficult problems.” As his other remarks at the conference make clear, he believed it would be developed by British and American evolutionary biologists, particularly those associated with the nascent field of sociobiology. In line with his 1971 lecture, he spelled out the form of this new paradigm: gene-culture co-evolution.

But it was not to be. I suspect he had been taken in by the sociobiology-bashing of the late 1970s. In reality, very few sociobiologists were interested in the subject, and most studiously avoided it. This avoidance became an article of faith for John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, who would form the vanguard of this field of study. They considered “implausible the notion that different humans have fundamentally different and competing cognitive programs” (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990, p. 30). After all, Richard Lewontin had proven that human racial variation was nonexistent, or almost so:

Human groups do not differ substantially in the types of genes found, but instead only in the relative proportions of those alleles. … What this means is that the average genetic difference between one Peruvian farmer and his neighbor, or one Bornean horticulturist and her best friend, or one Swiss villager and his neighbor, is 12 times greater than the difference between the "average genotype" of the Swiss population and the "average genotype" of the Peruvian population (i.e., the within-group variance is 12 times greater than the between-group variance) (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990, p. 35).

Ironically, Tooby and Cosmides were skeptical about Lewontin’s findings. I remember attending a talk where John Tooby argued that genetic variation within human groups was greatly inflated by disease polymorphisms and other junk variability. But none of this left a paper trail, probably because that was how they wanted it. They dreamed of getting tenure-track positions and didn’t want trouble. In any case, they had no idea that people like Lévi-Strauss were willing to step forward and take the flak with them.

Eventually, in the late 1990s, a small group of anthropologists began to propound something similar to what Lévi-Strauss had predicted. The term ‘race realism’ was bandied about and it seems to have stuck.

But by then Lévi-Strauss could do little to help. He was nearing his 90th birthday and needed assistance just to go to the bathroom.

References

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1985). Claude Lévi-Strauss à l’université Laval, Québec (septembre 1979), prepared by Yvan Simonis, Documents de recherche no. 4, Laboratoire de recherches anthropologiques, Département d’anthropologie, Faculté des Sciences sociales, Université Laval.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1996). Race, histoire et culture, http://www.unesco.org/courier/2001_12/fr/droits2.htm

Lewontin, R.C. (1972). The apportionment of human diversity. Evolutionary Biology, 6, 381-398.

Stoczkowski, W. (2008). Claude Lévi-Strauss and UNESCO, The UNESCO Courrier, no. 5, pp. 5-8.
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=41820&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Tooby, T. & L. Cosmides. (1990). On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: the role of genetics and adaptation, Journal of Personality, 58, 17-67.

Richard Dawkins. The price of collaboration?

One of my readers asks whether the renowned evolutionist Richard Dawkins has ever written on the subject of human races. Do they exist? And, if so, did this process of biological diversification stop a long time ago? Or did it actually accelerate when cultural evolution began to accelerate some ten thousand years ago?

Yes, he did address this subject six years ago in the essay “Race and Creation” (Dawkins, 2004). The essay starts off by acknowledging Richard Lewontin’s finding that human genes vary much more within races than between them. In fact, ‘races’ account for only 6 to 15% of all human genetic variation.

Yet this leads to an apparent paradox. According to Lewontin, the data tell us that any two human groups will overlap genetically to a high degree. Our eyes, however, tell a different story:

Well, suppose we took full-face photographs of 20 randomly chosen natives of each of the following countries: Japan, Uganda, Iceland, Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea and Egypt. If we presented 120 people with all 120 photographs, my guess is that every single one of them would achieve 100 per cent success in sorting them into six different categories.

This paradox has been noticed by others. I remember one who claimed that ‘racism’ prevented us from seeing the genetic overlap between Danes and Congolese. Actually, the same overlap exists between many species that are nonetheless anatomically and behaviorally distinct (see previous post). It isn’t racism that creates the discrepancy between the data and our lying eyes. It’s just that most genes are weakly influenced by natural selection, especially the ‘structural genes’ that Lewontin and other population geneticists love to study. Such genes tell us very little about the strong selection pressures that have sculpted human differences in anatomy and many other traits.

It is fallacious to assume, as Lewontin did, that all genes contribute equally to real functional differences between populations, whether species or races. In fact, most genes have little selective value, being often little more than ‘junk DNA’. Even when a gene clearly is functionally significant, the difference between one allele and another may be like that between Coke and Pepsi. It is also fallacious to assume that genes with low selective value vary between populations in the same way as genes with high selective value. In fact, the more a gene has selective value, the likelier it will vary across a boundary between two different population, since such boundaries usually coincide with geographical/ecological barriers that separate different adaptive landscapes and, hence, different selection pressures.

Dawkins uses ‘Lewontin’s paradox’ to show that races do exist. But how relevant are they to recent human evolution? Hasn’t cultural evolution replaced genetic evolution in our species? On this point, Dawkins argues that the former has actually stimulated the latter. He draws an analogy with sympatric speciation in insects:

Some people think the initial separation has to be geographical, while others, especially entomologists, emphasise so-called sympatric speciation, meaning that the initial separation, whatever it is, is not geographical. Many herbivorous insects eat only one species of plant. They meet their mates and lay their eggs on the preferred plants. Their larvae then apparently “imprint” on the plant that they grow up eating, and they choose, when adult, the same species of plant to lay their own eggs.

… In the case of these insects, you can see that, in a single generation, gene flow with the parental type could be abruptly cut off. A new species is theoretically free to come into being without the need for geographical isolation. Or, another way of putting it, the difference between two kinds of food plant is, for these insects, equivalent to a mountain range or a river for other animals. I am suggesting that human culture—with its tendency to distinguish between in-groups and out-groups—also provides a special way in which gene flow can find itself blocked, which is somewhat analogous to the insect scenario I have just outlined above.

In the insect case, plant preferences are handed down from parent to offspring by the twin circumstances of larvae fixating on their food plant, and adults mating and laying eggs on the same food plants. In effect, lineages establish “traditions” that travel longitudinally down generations. Human traditions are similar, if more elaborate. Examples are languages, religions and social manners or conventions. Children usually adopt the language and the religion of their parents although, just as with the insects and the food plants, there are enough “mistakes” to make life interesting. Again, as with the insects mating in the vicinity of their preferred food plants, people tend to mate with others speaking the same language and praying to the same gods. So different languages and religions can play the role of food plants, or of mountain ranges in traditional geographical speciation. Different languages, religions and social customs can serve as barriers to gene flow. From here, according to the weak form of our theory, random genetic differences simply accumulate on opposite sides of a language or religion barrier, just as they might on opposite sides of a mountain range. Subsequently, according to the strong version of the theory, the genetic differences that build up are reinforced as people use conspicuous differences in appearance as additional labels of discrimination in mate choice, supplementing the cultural barriers that provided the original separation.

At this point, Dawkins winds up his essay, arguing that cultural differences in mate choice may explain many anatomical differences among human populations.

Fine. One point, though. Is mate choice the only human behavior that differs culturally? No, there are also differences in “languages, religions and social manners or conventions.” Wouldn’t these other differences generate selection pressures that likewise differ from one population to the next? And wouldn’t these selection pressures influence not only anatomy but also any trait with a substantial genetic component, including a wide range of behavioral predispositions, mental aptitudes, and personality factors? This would all follow logically from Dawkins’ reasoning. Indeed, he seems to hint at this when he states that “traditions” are no less part of our adaptive landscape than food plants. Having dropped the hint, he goes no further. End of essay.

It’s not as if I’m alone in making the above point. Claude Lévi-Strauss—hardly a rabid sociobiologist—brought it up in a lecture he gave in 1979:

The selection pressure of culture—the fact that it favors certain types of individuals rather than others through its forms of organization, its ideas of morality, and its aesthetic values—can do infinitely more to alter a gene pool than the gene pool can do to shape a culture, all the more so because a culture’s rate of change can certainly be much faster than the phenomena of genetic drift. (Lévi-Strauss, 1979, p. 24-25)

But Lévi-Strauss was never afraid to spell out what he thought. He was a public intellectual in the true sense of the word. In contrast, Richard Dawkins just hints, and hints, and hints … in the hope that someone else will pick up the ball and run with it.

Pathetic.

References

Dawkins, R. (2004). Race and Creation, Prospect Magazine (103), Oct. 23, 2004

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1985). Claude Lévi-Strauss à l’université Laval, Québec (septembre 1979), prepared by Yvan Simonis, Documents de recherche no. 4, Laboratoire de recherches anthropologiques, Département d’anthropologie, Faculté des Sciences sociales, Université Laval.