And the North Koreans?

Rodong Sinmun building, Pyongyang. Source

In my last post, I discussed how South Korea has “gone global.” Its business community has emancipated itself from the nation state and is now outsourcing employment to lower-wage countries and “insourcing” lower-wage labor. The eventual result? A downward leveling of incomes. And a profound ethnic and cultural transformation. South Korea is abolishing itself.

This self-abolition is of concern not just to South Koreans. There is the little matter of their neighbors, the North Koreans. What do they think?

A naïve observer might expect a positive reaction. Doesn’t the North support international socialism? And doesn’t that mean support for multiculturalism? At most, one might expect some sadness that the political Right is piloting this transformation of South Korea.

The North Koreans actually feel differently. In April 2006, the official newspaper of the Workers’ Party, Rodong Sinmun, ran this editorial:

Recently, in South Korea, a strange game pursuing the weakening of the fundamental character of our race and making society 'multiethnic and multiracial' is unfolding.

Those responsible for this commotion are spreading confounding rumors like South Korea is a “multiracial area” mixed with the blood of Americans and several other races, how we must “overcome closed ethnic nationalism,” and we must embrace “the inclusiveness and openness of a multiethnic nation” like the United States.

The words themselves take a knife to the feeling of our people, but even more serious is that this anti-national theory of “multiethnic, multiracial society” has already gone beyond the stage of discussion. Already, they’ve decided that from 2009, content related to “multiracial, multiethnic culture” would be included in elementary, middle and high school textbooks that have until now stressed that Koreans are the “descendents of Dangun,” “of one blood line” and “one race,” and to change the terms “families of international marriage” and “families of foreign laborers” to “multicultural families.”

This is an outrage that makes it impossible to repress the rage of the people/race. To start from the conclusion, the argument for “multiethnic, multiracial society” cried for by pro-American flunkeyists in South Korea is an unpardonable argument to obliterate the race by denying the homogeneity of the Korean race and to make an immigrant society out of South Korea, to make it a hodgepodge, to Americanize it. (Koehler, 2006)

For some, the above editorial is proof that the North Koreans are nuts. They’ve gone Nazi, and there’s no longer any point in dealing with them. This is the message of a recent book that brands the North Koreans as being “ideologically closer to America’s adversaries in World War II than to communist China and Eastern Europe” (Myers, 2010, pp. 15-16).

The truth is a bit more complex. First, they’re not the ones who’ve changed. We have. We’re observing North Korea from a frame of reference that has shifted over time. Today, across our entire political spectrum, we view all forms of ethnic nationalism as outdated, if not evil. Sixty years ago, the same view was confined to the far left. It was even marginal within the leftist ideology that gave birth to North Korea.

What makes North Korea tick? Some background

Socialism, Marxism-Leninism, communism …. These are different words for the ruling ideology of the Soviet Union, particularly during Josef Stalin’s long term of office from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s. During the 1930s, and more so during the war years, Stalin partially rehabilitated nationalism, seeing national identity as normal, legitimate, and even progressive—especially if used to mobilize opposition to fascism and international capitalism. He also promoted autarky and the belief that socialism should be made to work in one country at a time.

Meanwhile, many Koreans were looking to Soviet communism as a way to take back their country. They were really nationalists who resented the way their nation was being made to serve Japanese imperial rule and a tiny landowning class. They also understood that many nations elsewhere faced similar situations. By lending their voices to the chorus of international solidarity, they believed they were encouraging others to become masters in their own house. They were also ensuring their personal survival, since many had to flee to the Soviet Union and China.

In 1945, with the defeat of Japan and the end of the Second World War, these émigrés were brought back to form an administration in northern Korea under the auspices of the Soviet Union. From the outset, their ideology was clearly a mix of communism and nationalism:

Thus Marxism-Leninism cannot affect the deep structures of thought and behavior in any society except over a very long period: it will be grafted onto existing, longstanding roots and, while seeking to transform the roots, will itself be transformed as peoples and cultures render it intelligible to their lives. Part of the roots will be whittled away, but the branches will be pruned as well.

This has proved truer in Korea than in many settings for building socialism, precisely because of the very alienness of the setting to this fundamentally Western set of ideas. Korea had a minuscule proletariat, the beginnings of capitalism, and far too much internationalism (capitalist-style) by 1945. It therefore took from Marxism-Leninism what it wanted and rejected much of the rest: a state with potent organization, capable of providing the political basis for independence at a future point; an economic program of rapid industrialization and a philosophy of subjecting nature to human will; Lenin's notion of national liberation; Stalin's autarky of socialism-in-one country (to become in Korea socialism in one-half-a-country, and now, as Kenneth Jowitt remarked, socialism-in-one-family). Autarky fit Korea's Hermit Kingdom past, and answered the need for closure from the world economy after decades of opening under Japanese auspices. What was unusable was dispatched as soon as possible: above all the socialist internationalism including a transnational division of labor that the Soviets wanted and that Korea successfully resisted, beginning in the late 1950s.
(Cumings, 1982-1983)

In the 1950s, North Korea was more nationalistic than the rest of the communist bloc, but this difference should not be exaggerated. When communist Bulgaria pressured much of its Turkish minority to leave, the reason was that the Turks, as Turks, were incompatible with the Bulgarian nation state. When Mao offered to send Chinese migrants to Siberia, Khrushchev curtly refused: such migration would have endangered the region’s ethnic balance. There was no other reason.

The West was no less committed to the nation state. When the two power blocs went to war over the Korean peninsula, the West never condemned the North Koreans for ethnic nationalism—or the outdated idea that blood relationships are a key organizing principle of society. That idea was not yet outdated. In fact, our side accused the North Koreans of trying to subvert blood relationships—by undermining the authority of the family and by banning ancestor worship.

Since then, the North Koreans have hardly changed. But we’ve changed a lot. Today, in rejecting the nation state, we differ profoundly not just from the North Koreans but also from what we were back in the 1950s. We are strangers to everyone from that time, including ourselves.

Is this surprising? Change moves slowly in communist societies because the State keeps a tight rein on mainstream culture. There is only one authorized ideology, and it’s not easily tampered with—despite all of its revolutionary rhetoric. Any adjustments must be approved by the different organs of the ruling party, which are in the hands of individuals who have slowly risen through the party’s ranks.

The West, despite its superficial conservatism, offers much more leeway for sweeping change. The mainstream culture is an open system. It is much more vulnerable to being altered, and there is no lack of interest groups who understand the value of such alteration. By changing cultural norms, they can change how the average person thinks and behaves.

References

Cumings, B. (1982-1983). Corporatism in North Korea, Journal of Korean Studies, 4, 269-294.

Koehler, R. (2006). I guess this means the DPRK won’t be inviting Hines Ward for a visit (English translation of Rodong Sinmun editorial).
http://www.rjkoehler.com/2006/04/27/i-guess-this-means-the-dprk-wont-be-inviting-hines-ward-for-a-visit/

Korea Central News Agency (2006). Rodong Sinmun Censures Theory of "Multiracial Society" http://kcna.co.jp/item/2006/200604/news04/28.htm#7

Myers, B.R. (2010). The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves—and Why It Matters, Brooklyn: Melville House.

South Korea abolishes itself

“Global Korea” poster. Has South Korea become the new posterboy for globalism?

East Asia has been an outlier in the developed world. Like Western Europe and North America, it is integrated into the global economy and enjoys a high standard of living. This is particularly so for the original five ‘tigers’: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Yet East Asia has bucked the trend toward loss of nationhood. Its governments still see their role as one of perpetuating a specific ethnic identity and cultural tradition. This is in contrast to the view, dominant in the West, that countries should simply be administrative units and should interfere as little as possible in the free flow of capital, goods, and labor.

Recently, this outlier has lost one member. South Korea is falling into line with the globalist paradigm and has opened its borders to increasingly higher rates of immigration:

As of 2007, 1,066,291 registered foreigners were residing in South Korea. More than 400,000 migrant workers are now working in so-called 3-D [Dirty, Dangerous, and Difficult] industries where South Koreans are reluctant to work. 110,362 immigrants entered in 2007 to marry South Korean husbands or wives and the cumulative number of international marriages increased to 364,000 during the 1990-2007 period. In 2005, 13% of all marriages in South Korea were interracial or interethnic marriages and the rate of international marriages was even higher in rural areas where about one-third of all marriages were interracial or interethnic. (Yoon et al., 2008)

When immigration began in the late 1980s, the aim was to ease labor shortages and offset a perilously low birth rate while maintaining the ethnic status quo. Diaspora Koreans would be repatriated from China and the former Soviet Union, and North Korean defectors would be welcomed. This aim was quietly set aside from the mid-1990s onward, as the zone of recruitment broadened to include the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and even countries as far afield as Nigeria (Kim, 2004). Today, South Korea is entering uncharted waters of demographic change:

[…] South Korean society has entered the first phase of multiethnic and multicultural society and the current process seems irreversible. If the current trend continues, the proportion of foreigners residing in South Korea will increase to 2.8% in 2010, 5% in 2020, and 9.2% in 2050 (Yoon et al., 2008)

The increase may actually be greater. On the one hand, the declining birth rate shows no signs of bottoming out. On the other, once immigrant communities become established, they tend to facilitate more immigration from their home countries, whether legal or illegal. It is worth noting that the above figures exclude illegal immigrants, who are estimated to form half the total intake (Moon, 2010).

Will this demographic change meet growing resistance from the public? Not in the near future. If anything, public opinion has been moving in the other direction. Between two surveys, taken in 2003 and 2007, the shift in opinion was remarkable:

For example, to the statement "It is impossible for people who don' t share South Korean traditions and customs fully to become South Korean", 55% of the respondents agreed while 23% disagreed in 2003, but in 2007 30.8% of the respondents agreed while 32.9% disagreed. (Yoon et al., 2008)

There has also been an increase in hostility to public meetings of “ people prejudiced against racial and ethnical groups.” In 2004, 29.6% of respondents felt such meetings “should definitely not be allowed.” By 2007, the figure had risen to 46.5% (Yoon et al., 2008).

Multiculturalism is thus becoming a core value, like filial piety of another age. By adhering to it, South Koreans earn respect not only from their friends and colleagues but also from themselves. This conformity seems to reflect a longstanding desire in Korean culture to comply with social norms.

Will there be resistance from the political elites? Again, not in the near future. Although multiculturalism is often identified with the Left, the new policy of “Global Korea” is actually being pushed by the Right, specifically the Grand National Party (GNP):

For the conservative government, South Korean nationalism and democracy is fundamentally tied to the doctrine of neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism refers to the flow of economic migrant labour and mobile global capital. This global environment also requires government policies to attract foreign migrants and workers into South Korea’s economy and society.

Multiculturalism is a state-led response to these global changes. The policies of multiculturalism define the present and future economic, security and cultural national strength of South Korea. Critics suggest that, in fact, the GNP regards multiculturalism as an instrumental policy of increasing national state power in this global environment. (Watson, 2010)

South Korea has entered what may be called ‘late’ or ‘mature’ capitalism. The business community has emancipated itself from the nation state and is now willing to enrich itself at the expense of its host society, notably by outsourcing employment to lower-wage countries and by “insourcing” lower-wage labor. To this end, its political spokesmen borrow leftwing discourse to create an artificial Left-Right consensus. As Watson (2010) goes on to argue:

The Right has effectively ‘‘stolen’’ the language of the Left (which has traditionally promoted multiculturalism) and colonised the language of multiculturalism with nationalism and security languages and concerns. For the Left, by ideologically separating multiculturalism from economic globalisation and its economic and political inequalities, multiculturalism becomes a quaint cosmopolitan smokescreen covering economic and political hardships.

One might add that the Right has likewise colonized the language of nationalism with multicultural concerns. The push is on to equate Korean nationality with residence on Korean soil. This concept of citizenship is now being taught in South Korean schools:

Mono-ethnicism was not officially removed from K-12 social studies and moral education textbooks until February, 2007. For example, social studies textbooks for sixth graders used to mention that “Korea consists of one ethnic group. We, Koreans, look similar and use the same language” (Mo, 2009). Citizenship education was grounded in this mono-ethnicism, and the national curriculum focused on enhancing democratic citizenship, including obedience to the law, rights as citizens, morality, and loyalty to the nation (Yang, 2007).

[…] The Korean government has acknowledged dramatic social changes in contemporary Korean society and has attempted to implement this view of contemporary Korean society in national curriculum standards. National curriculum standards have replaced mono-ethnicism with the notions of cultural diversity and multiculturalism. (Moon, 2010)

In this, the South Korean government appears to have also acted under pressure from foreign organizations, notably the United Nations:

Mainstream Korean citizens used to believe that Korea consists of “one-blood, one-language, and one-culture.” The Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in the United Nations (UN) has pointed out that the “pure-blooded” ideology and the notions of ethnic homogeneity have resulted in various forms of discrimination in Korea (Wagner, 2009). CERD has recommended recognizing the multi-ethnic character of contemporary Korean society and promoting understanding, tolerance, and friendship among the different ethnic and national groups in Korea. In education, CERD has recommended that the Korean government include human rights awareness programs in the official curriculum. A revised curriculum should describe a Korean society in which people from multiple ethnic and cultural backgrounds live together harmoniously (Hong, 2008; Wagner, 2009). (Moon, 2010)

Why South Korea?

Why is this shift to globalism stronger in South Korea than in other East Asian countries? The likeliest answer is the country’s special relationship with the United States.

This relationship goes far beyond the current stationing of U.S. troops along the demilitarized zone. When South Korea was freed from Japanese rule in 1945, the Americans were greeted as liberators—in contrast to Japan, where they were merely accepted as occupiers. Even today, there is a legacy of pro-American sentiment that has few parallels elsewhere in East Asia.

As liberators, the Americans were able to create a new political class from scratch. The Japanese had forced into exile much of the native leadership, and these émigrés were now brought home to form a government under U.S. auspices. One of them was the first president of South Korea, Syngman Rhee, a man who had spent most of his adult life in the United States. A similar situation existed in North Korea, where the new government was made up largely of émigrés from China and the Soviet Union.

To some degree, this situation still prevails. Political and economic leaders are often graduates of American universities, and they tend to see the U.S. as a model to be followed. Furthermore, this model cannot be easily criticized because such criticism may be seen as sympathy for the communist North.

References

Choi, J. (2010). Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society: The Case of South Korea, The Social Studies, 101, 174–178.

Kim, W-B. (2004). Migration of foreign workers into South Korea: from periphery to semi-periphery in the global labor market, Asian Survey, 44, 316-335.

Moon, S. (2010). Multicultural and Global Citizenship in the Transnational Age: The Case of South Korea, International Journal of Multicultural Education, 12, 1-15.

Watson, I. (2010). Multiculturalism in South Korea: A Critical Assessment,
Journal of Contemporary Asia, 40, 337-346

Yoon, I-J.,Y-H. Song, Y-J. Bae. (2008). South Koreans' Attitudes toward Foreigners, Minorities and Multiculturalism, Paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Boston, MA from August 1-4, 2008.

No, they aren't pure either

Broken Hill skull from Zambia, dated to 110,000 BP. It is often identified as a Homo sapiens, largely because it is so recent. We now have evidence that very archaic hominins inhabited central and southern Africa at least 35,000 years ago.

The past year has brought us a new model of human evolution. It’s a modified version of “Out of Africa.” Present-day humans are now traced to a small founder group that began to expand some 80,000 years ago in East Africa and started to spread out of Africa some 50,000 to 40,000 years ago. Meanwhile, these early modern humans intermixed to varying degrees with the archaic hominins they replaced. There is thus 1 to 4% Neanderthal admixture in present-day Europeans and Asians, and 8% Neanderthal and “Denisovan” admixture in Melanesians (Green et al., 2010; Reich et al., 2010).

What about Africans? Are they the only “pure” humans? This is unlikely on theoretical grounds, as Hammer et al. (2011) point out in a newly released paper:

[…] the greatest opportunity for introgression was in Africa, where AMH [anatomically modern humans] and various archaic forms coexisted for much longer than they did outside of Africa. Indeed, the fossil record indicates that a variety of transitional forms with a mosaic of archaic and modern features lived over an extensive geographic area from Morocco to South Africa between 200 and 35 kya.

Africa’s warm climate tends to break down DNA quite rapidly. So we’ll probably never get to reconstruct an archaic African genome from a tooth or a skeletal fragment. But we can look through modern African genomes for signs of introgression from an archaic source. The most telltale signs are unusual polymorphisms in noncoding regions.

Using this approach, Hammer et al. (2011) assign about 2% of the modern African genome to an archaic population that split from ancestral modern humans some 700,000 years ago. This admixture is dated to about 35,000 years ago and may have occurred in Central Africa, since the level of admixture is highest in pygmy groups from that region.

Who exactly were these archaics?

Beginning ≈700 kya, fossil evidence from many parts of Africa indicate that Homo erectus was giving way to populations with larger brains, a change that was accompanied by several structural adjustments to the skull and postcranial skeleton (14). By ≈200 kya, individuals with more modern skeletal morphology begin to appear in the African record (8, 14). Despite these signs of anatomical and behavioral innovation, hominins with a combination of archaic and modern features persist in the fossil record across sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East until after ≈35 kya […] Interestingly, recent studies attest to the existence of Late Stone Age human remains with archaic features in Nigeria (Iwo Eleru) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Ishango) (Hammer et al., 2011)

Did Homo erectus linger in parts of Africa until as late as 35,000 years ago? The idea is no longer science fiction. We have the example of the “hobbits”—a Homo erectus population that lasted at least as long in Southeast Asia.

Perhaps we should take a second look at the Broken Hill skull, which was found near Kabwe, Zambia and has been dated to 110,000 BP (Bada et al., 1974). Many anthropologists have raised it to sapiens status, largely on the assumption that non-sapiens were no longer around at that time. Yet it doesn’t look at all like a Homo sapiens.

Admixture with late archaics

Broken Hill man probably occupied one end of a range of archaic groups that inhabited Africa on the eve of the ‘big bang’—the demic expansion of early modern humans that began 80,000 years ago somewhere in East Africa. At the other end were late archaic hominins who looked just like early modern humans but still lacked some of the final changes to their neural wiring.

If sub-Saharan Africans have about 2% admixture from Homo erectus, they probably have much more from late archaic hominins, who were more numerous and behaviorally more similar. How great is this late archaic admixture?

According to Watson et al. (1997), about 13% of the sub-Saharan gene pool comes from a demic expansion c. 111,000 years ago that corresponds to the entry of Skhul-Qafzeh hominins into the Middle East. Although these hominins were almost anatomically modern, their technology was Mousterian and differed little from that of Neanderthals.

Some last-minute neural changes seem to have occurred between this expansion 111,000 years ago and the ‘big bang’ 80,000 years ago. Perhaps these changes triggered the second expansion. As Atkinson et al. (2009) write:

[…] the African exodus was predated by a cultural revolution involving new stone blade technologies, skin working tools, ornaments and imported red ochre […] More advanced symbolic systems in language and religious beliefs could have provided a competitive advantage to a group by promoting coordination and cohesion.

What does it all mean?

It’s interesting that we have varying degrees of archaic admixture. But what does it all mean? Did these different admixtures make us different in different ways?

A traditional evolutionist would answer ‘no.’ As Ernst Mayr (1970, p. 80) wrote:

The claim has been made that species owe much of their genetic variability to introgressive hybridization. However, all the evidence contradicts this conclusion so far as animals is concerned. Not only are F1 hybrids between good species very rare, but where they occur the hybrids (even when not sterile) are demonstrably of inferior viability. The few genes that occasionally introgress into the parental species are not coadapted […] and are selected against. Introgressive hybridization seems to be a negligible source of genetic variation in animals.

In opposition to this view, Greg Cochran and John Hawkes have argued that gene introgression enabled early modern humans to adapt more quickly to new environments. Instead of starting from scratch, they just ‘cherry-picked’ genes that had already been developed by the populations they were replacing.

All of this assumes there were cherries worth picking. Did archaic hominins have anything useful to offer? Modern humans and Neanderthals adapted to the same cold environment but they did so in very different ways. The former, for instance, made tailored clothing while the latter were probably as furry as bears.

The stage whisper is that the Neanderthals gave ancestral Europeans special brain genes, notably the latest microcephalin variant (Hawkes et al., 2008). We now know otherwise. The reconstructed Neanderthal genome has revealed no brain genes that our ancestors cherry-picked. As for African archaic hominins, it’s even less clear what they had to offer. These were groups that lived under similar climatic and ecological conditions.

The cherry-picking theory seemed like a great idea. How else could one explain the sudden cultural dynamism of early modern humans? This effervescence began only 30,000 to 20,000 years ago—long after the ‘big bang.’ And it was most evident in southwestern France—a place far from East Africa. Surely the simplest explanation is gene introgression from European Neanderthals.

Well, things are never as simple as they seem. There are in fact other explanations:

1. Southwestern France has provided so many early European artifacts in part because it had so many early Europeans. It benefited from an unusually rich environment that could support a large population of semi-sedentary hunter/fisher/gatherers (Mellars, 1985).

2. France is a country with strong grassroots interest in history and prehistory. This is unfortunately not so elsewhere in the world, where the remote past is often viewed with indifference. Why does so much of our knowledge of the prehistoric Middle East come from Israel? Because Israel is chock-full of archeologists who do their work passionately and, in many cases, for free. We view human prehistory through the lens of present-day interests.

3. Actually, there is evidence of technological complexity almost at the epicenter of the ‘big bang.’ Central African sites have yielded fine tools, dated to c. 90,000 BP, that look just like Aurignacian tools from post-Neanderthal Europe (Brooks et al., 1995; Yellen et al., 1995).

References

Atkinson, Q.D., R.D. Gray, and A.J. Drummond. (2009). Bayesian coalescent inference of major human mitochondrial DNA haplogroup expansions in Africa, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 276, 367–373

Bada, J.L., R.A. Schroeder, R. Protsch, & R. Berger. (1974). Concordance of Collagen-Based Radiocarbon and Aspartic-Acid Racemization Ages, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 71, 914-917.

Brooks, A.S., D.M. Helgren, J.S. Cramer, A. Franklin, W. Hornyak, J.M. Keating, R.G. Klein, W.J. Rink, H. Schwarcz, J.N. Leith Smith, K. Stewart, N.E. Todd, J. Verniers, & J.E. Yellen. (1995). Dating and context of three Middle Stone Age sites with bone points in the Upper Semliki Valley, Zaire, Science, 268, 548-553.

Green, R.E., J. Krause, A.W. Briggs, T. Maricic, U. Stenzel, M. Kircher, et al. (2010). A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome, Science, 328, 710-722.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/328/5979/710.pdf

Hammer, M.F., A.E. Woerner, F.L. Mendez, J.C. Watkins, and J.D. Wall. (2011). Genetic evidence for archaic admixture in Africa, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA), early edition, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1109300108

Hawks, J., G. Cochran, H.C. Harpending, & B.T. Lahn (2008). A genetic legacy from archaic Homo, Trends in Genetics, 24, 19-23.

Mayr, E. (1970). Populations, Species, and Evolution, Belknap Press: Cambridge (Mass.)

Mellars, P.A. (1985). The ecological basis of social complexity in the Upper Paleolithic of Southwestern France. In Prehistoric Hunter‑Gatherers. The Emergence of Cultural Complexity, T.D. Price & J.A. Brown (Eds.). Orlando: Academic Press, pp. 271‑297.

Reich, D., R.E. Green, M. Kircher, J. Krause, N. Patterson, E.Y. Durand, et al. (2010). Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia, Nature, 468, 1053-1060.

Watson, E., P. Forster, M. Richards, and H-J. Bandelt. (1997). Mitochondrial footprints of human expansions in Africa, American Journal of Human Genetics, 61, 691-704.

Yellen, J.E., A.S. Brooks, E. Cornelissen, M.J. Mehlman, & K. Stewart. (1995). A Middle Stone Age worked bone industry from Katanda, Upper Semliki Valley, Zaire, Science, 268, 553-556.

Did the slave trade make Africans polygynous?

Slave exports to the Americas from different parts of Africa (Dalton & Leung, 2011). Did the slave trade create patterns of behavior that today exist throughout sub-Saharan Africa, such as generalized polygyny?

Why is polygyny so frequent in sub-Saharan Africa? As Goody (1973, p. 177) noted, the differences with Eurasia are striking:

In Europe and Asia, polygyny is largely but not exclusively an heir-producing device; often it is a way of replacing a barren wife. In Africa, plural marriage is far more generalised; according to Dorjahn, about 35 per cent of married men have more than one wife. Hence a large percentage of the population is likely to be part of a polygynous unit at some point in the life-cycle. Most men will be polygynously married at some time or other; women are yet more likely to be so. And most siblings will have sets of half siblings, both because of the plural marriage of their fathers and because of the remarriage of their mothers — since polygyny inevitably involves a large differential in the age of marriage, men will be older when they beget children than women are when they bear them. Hence there will be a higher proportion of widows and fatherless children.

Goody (1973) attributes this generalized polygyny partly to female self-reliance in food production. Year-round farming enables women to provide for their own needs and those of their children. A wife thus costs little in terms of upkeep, and this low maintenance cost encourages men to have as many wives as possible.

This rule nonetheless has interesting exceptions. In the savannah regions of Ghana, women plant grain and help with the harvest, but they leave yam cultivation to men and do not engage in hoeing for cereal agriculture. Yet polygyny rates are somewhat higher there than elsewhere in Ghana, where women contribute more to food production. Polygyny is also less frequent in East Africa than in West Africa, yet women contribute more to food production in East Africa than in West Africa.

Goody (1973, p. 185) concludes that “hoe agriculture, female farming and polygyny are clearly associated in a general way” but there must be other explanatory factors. But what?

For Dalton and Leung (2011), one big factor is the slave trade—the mass exportation of African laborers that ended only two centuries ago. West Africa tended to export male slaves while East Africa tended to export female slaves. This pattern reflected differences in market demand: on the one hand, the Americas wanted farm labor; on the other, the Middle East and South Asia wanted domestics or concubines. These differing sex ratios might therefore explain why polygyny is less frequent in East Africa than in West Africa:

The slave trades existed for hundreds of years, and, as a result, Africa experienced abnormal sex ratios for long periods of time. Polygyny could have emerged or been strengthened during the long period of abnormal sex ratios. Figures 1 and 2 suggest the Western Coast should have contained more polygynous marriages, whereas the Eastern Coast should have contained fewer.

These abnormal sex ratios returned to normal once the slave trade had ended in the early 19th century. Why, then, didn’t polygyny rates follow this return to normal? Dalton and Leung (2011, p. 8) blame cultural conservatism: “Once these cultural traits are established, polygyny can become self-sustaining.”

This hypothesis is interesting and might explain some of the variation in polygyny rates within sub-Saharan Africa. But it fails to explain why polygyny rates are in the double-digit range throughout sub-Saharan Africa. East Africa’s rates are lower but still high by world standards. Goody (1973, p. 181) states that East African cattle societies have a rate of 24.7%, i.e., the percentage of married men with more than one wife. Pebley and Mbugua (1989) similarly write: “The frequency is somewhat lower in East and South Africa, although 15 to 30 percent of husbands are reported to be polygynists in Kenya and Tanzania.”

Admittedly, the above figures run counter to the ones offered by Dalton and Leung (2011, p. 1):

[…] the percentage of men in polygynous marriages in Western African countries like Guinea, Togo, and Benin is 35.037, 29.793, and 29.679, whereas in Eastern African countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, and Malawi the percentage is 6.131, 9.206, and 10.101.

These figures come from the latest “Demographic and Health Surveys” and are twenty to forty years more recent than the other figures. As such, they reflect the decline in female farming and the growing urbanization of African societies. In this new context, institutionalized polygyny has given way to looser arrangements with multiple girlfriends and/or prostitutes. And why bring Ethiopia into the comparison? It is not a sub-Saharan country and differs from both West and East Africa in many ways, notably the long-established influence of the Coptic Church and Christian sexual norms.

Dalton and Leung also err in assuming that sub-Saharan Africa had low polygyny rates before the slave trade. Several lines of evidence argue otherwise:

1. The ratio of Y-chromosome to X-chromosome variability is much higher among sub-Saharan Africans, New Guineans, and Aboriginal Australians than among other human populations. This suggests a long-lasting trend of fewer men than women contributing to the gene pool (Dupanloup et al., 2003; see also Torroni et al., 1990; Scozzari et al., 1997).

2. Proto-Bantu, spoken approximately 3,000 years ago, has a specific term for “taking a second wife” (Polome, 1977).

3. A high level of male-male competition for females is suggested by the increased sexual dimorphism of African Americans for weight, chest size, arm girth, and leg girth (Todd & Lindala, 1928; Wolff & Steggerda, 1943). In contrast, a small, gracile, and almost childlike body characterizes Khoisans and Pygmies, the only sub-Saharan populations with low polygyny rates.

After arguing that the slave trade caused generalized polygyny, Dalton and Leung see therein a leading cause of Africa’s lag in economic and social development.

Among similar countries, polygynous countries are poorer than nonpolygynous countries. Polygynous countries have higher fertility and lower savings. The calibrated model in Tertilt (2005) suggests banning polygyny decreases fertility by 40 percent, increases savings by 70 percent, and increases GDP per capita by 170 percent. (Dalton & Leung, 2011, p. 3)

There is undoubtedly some kind of relationship between generalized polygyny and Africa’s stubbornly high fertility and economic poverty, but it’s not a simple one of cause and effect. Banning polygyny will not cause immediate changes to reproductive and economic behavior. Dalton and Leung themselves argue that cultural conservatism alone has maintained high polygyny rates in Africa for the past two centuries. Wouldn’t the same be true for other behaviors?

Remember also that the time depth of generalized polygyny is not the four or five centuries that Dalton and Leung claim. In sub-Saharan Africa, high polygyny rates are associated with ‘female farming’ societies, and such societies began to spread outward from a point of origin near the Niger’s headwaters some 6,000 to 7,000 years ago (Murdock, 1959, pp. 44, 64-68).

Behavioral predispositions have significant heritability, especially in relation to sexual behavior (Comings et al., 2002; Mendle et al., 2006; Belsky et al., 2007). If generalized polygyny has existed in sub-Saharan Africa for six to seven thousand years, wouldn’t it have favored certain predispositions and not others? And wouldn’t those predispositions survive the banning of polygyny?

The question doesn’t seem to have crossed the authors’ minds. They seem to believe, a bit naïvely, that there is only cultural conservatism to worry about. No less naïve are the authors they cite:

Nunn and Wantchekon (2010) examines a particular channel through which the slave trades impact current African economic performances, namely the levels of trust across individuals within Africa. Trust supports economic exchange in well-functioning markets and would have plausibly been affected within groups living in the capture and export economies participating in the slave trades. Nunn and Wantchekon (2010) shows those individuals whose ancestral groups experienced higher slave exports exhibit lower levels of trust even to this day. Our paper contributes to these findings by suggesting an additional channel through which the slave trades have had a long-term impact on current African society. (Dalton & Leung, 2011, p. 2)

Low trust is typical of all simple, clan-based societies. Papua-New-Guinea was not affected by the slave trade, yet it has very low levels of trust. The slave trade may indeed have made people less trusting in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa than in others. But this does not explain why levels of trust are so low in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole.

And questions can be raised about the study by Nunn and Wantchekon (2010). Those authors found that willingness to trust members of other ethnic groups correlated with an ethnic group’s historical importance as a source of slaves. Most slaves, however, were taken during inter-tribal wars, and such wars generally occurred in regions already prone to interethnic conflict.

In short, the correlation is valid, but it doesn’t prove the causal relationship that Nunn and Wantchekon infer. In fact, the line of causality probably runs in the opposite direction.

References

Belsky, J., L.D. Steinberg, R.M. Houts, S.L. Friedman, G. DeHart, E. Cauffman, G.I. Roisman, B.L. Halpern-Felsher. (2007). Family rearing antecedents of pubertal timing, Child Dev., 78, 1302-1321.

Comings, D.E., D. Muhleman, J.P. Johnson, J.P. MacMurray. (2002). Parent-daughter transmission of the androgen receptor gene as an explanation of the effect of father absence on age of menarche. Child Dev., 73, 1046-1051.

Dalton, J.T., & T.C. Leung. (2011). Why is Polygyny More Prevalent in Western Africa?
An African Slave Trade Perspective,

http://www.wfu.edu/~daltonjt/PolygynySlaveTrade.pdf

Demographic and Health Surveys (2011): www.measuredhs.com

Dupanloup, I., L. Pereira, G. Bertorelle, F. Calafell, M.J. Prata, A. Amorim, & G. Barbujani. (2003). A recent shift from polygyny to monogamy in humans is suggested by the analysis of worldwide Y-chromosome diversity. Journal of Molecular Evolution, 57, 85-97.

Goody, J. (1973). The Character of Kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mendle, J. E. Turkheimer, B.M. D’Onofrio, S.K. Lynch, R.E. Emery, W.S. Slutske, & N.G. Martin. (2006). Family structure and age at menarche: a children-of-twins approach, Dev Psychol., 42, 533-542.

Murdock, G.P. (1959). Africa. Its Peoples and Their Culture History. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Nunn, N., & L. Wantchekon. (2010). The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa, American Economic Review, forthcoming.

Pebley, A. R., & W. Mbugua. (1989). Polygyny and Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa. In R. J. Lesthaeghe (ed.), Reproduction and Social Organization in Sub-Saharan Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 338-364.

Polome, E.C. (1977). The reconstruction of Proto-Bantu culture from the lexicon. In L. Bouquiaux (Ed.) L'Expansion bantoue, 2, 779-791. Centre national de la recherche scientifique.

Scozzari, R., F. Cruciani, P. Malaspina, P. Santolamazza, B.M. Ciminelli, A. Torroni, D. Modiano, D.C. Wallace, K.K. Kidd, A. Olckers, P. Moral, L. Terrenato, N. Akar, R. Qamar, A. Mansoor, S.Q. Mehdi, G. Meloni, G. Vona, D.E.C. Cole, W.W. Cai, & A. Novelletto. (1997). Differential structuring of human populations for homologous X and Y microsatellite loci. American Journal of Human Genetics, 61, 719-733.

Todd, T.W. & A. Lindala. (1928). Dimensions of the body: Whites and American Negroes of both sexes. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 12, 35-101.

Torroni, A., O. Semino, R. Scozzari, G. Sirugo, G. Spedini, N. Abbas, M. Fellous, et al. (1990). Y-chromosome DNA polymorphisms in human populations: differences between Caucasoids and Africans detected by 49a and 49f probes. Annals of Human Genetics, 54, 287-296.

Wolff, G. & M. Steggerda. (1943). Female-male index of body build in Negroes and Whites: An interpretation of anatomical sex differences. Human Biology, 15, 127-152.

Whither evolutionary psychology?

Is groupthink genetically determined? Twin studies suggest that people are prewired to identify and comply with social rules.

Where to from here? Will evolutionary psychology ossify and disappear? Or will it redefine itself and move on?

In a sense it doesn’t matter. A name is just a name, and the field of evolution and human behavior has had other names. The main issue is whether the current name is a help or a hindrance. Will it allow change from within?

Bolhuis et al. (2011) think so. In their call for a new evolutionary psychology, they have made several recommendations. One is to accept the reality of gene-culture co-evolution. In short, we should pick up where research petered out some two decades ago.

Amongst the overrepresented categories in genome-wide scans of recent selection are numerous alleles expressed in the human nervous system and brain. This raises the possibility that complex cognition on which culture is reliant (social intelligence, language, and challenges associated with constructing and adapting to new environmental conditions) have driven human brain evolution. Mathematical models exploring how genetic and cultural processes interact provide strong support for the role of gene-culture coevolution in human evolution.

Evolutionary psychologists should reconsider their assumption of a universal human nature. “For example, sex differences in mate preferences constitute a large proportion of EP research and are generally assumed to exhibit universal patterns.” Yet sex roles assume different forms in different human populations.

Another recommendation is to bridge the gap between postulated “psychological mechanisms” and actual neurons. We now have tools, notably MRI, that can locate where a specific mental activity occurs in the brain. Again, such research should take variation within and between human populations into account and not be confined to the usual participant pool of North American university students.

Finally, evolutionary psychologists should stop assuming that the human mind consists mainly of domain-specific programs. Much of our thinking is, in fact, domain-general.

Uh, what is ‘domain-general’? Think of a computer program that has plenty of sections or variables left blank. The blanks can be filled in with information, thus enabling the same kind of program to do a wide range of tasks. We call this in-filling process ‘learning.’

Learning thus takes place via programs that have already been partly hardwired. This is why we can learn some things better than others. There are also constraints on how fast we can learn, how much we can learn, and on how easily we can integrate learned information. Learning is not the opposite of genetic determinism. The two concepts are complementary.

By minimizing the role of learning, evolutionary psychologists not only lose the high ground of credibility but also give a free hand to those who say that humans can learn to think anything. A good example is the debate over social rules:

EP has engaged in a longstanding debate with advocates of cultural evolution over whether human social learning is governed by evolved content biases (e.g., choose the sugar-rich food) or by domain-general context biases (e.g., conform to the local norm). There is sufficient empirical evidence for the deployment of context biases, such as conformity or prestige bias, to render the casual dismissal of transmitted culture counterproductive. (Bolhuis et al., 2011)

Groupthink is a reality, and its persistence in modern societies should make it ideal for EP research. One puzzle of twin studies is the relatively high heritability of religious fundamentalism. Among twins reared apart, 40-46% of the variance seems to be genetic in origin (DiLalla et al., 1996). Perhaps there has been natural selection for humans who can more easily identify and comply with social rules, thus sparing themselves the pain of learning them the hard way.

This point is worth investigating because willingness to comply with rules varies from one individual to another, and from one population to the next. Some people have an unusually high level of rule compliance. Why? Is it learned or innate? Or a bit of both?

Some evolutionary psychologists have actually been moving in this direction. Denise Cummins (1998, p. 37) describes mental evolution as “a strategic arms race in which the weaponry is ever-increasing mental capacity to represent and manipulate internal representations of the minds of others.” In addition to ‘indicative reasoning’ (what is true or false), humans have a capacity for ‘deontic reasoning’ (what is permitted, obligated, or forbidden). For deontic rules, people look for examples of violations. For indicative rules, people look for examples of proof.

In short, indicative rules are subject to change, as people learn more about their environment. Deontic rules are not so easily changed. The latter generally change with a new class of higher-status individuals, who not only are the preferred source of deontic rules but are also seen as being above the rules. Thus, people more easily remember cheaters than non-cheaters, but this memory is weaker when the cheaters are high-status individuals (Mealey, Daood, & Krage, 1996).

All of this raises a problem for the Pleistocene EEA. Hunter-gatherer societies have little if any social stratification. The same is largely true for simple agricultural societies. The ‘big man’ is not a force for social stability and rule making. His dominance is transient, lasting as long as his strength, charisma, and ability to intimidate.

Societies became stratified only during the last 10,000 years. This time also saw the beginnings of lawmaking, codified morality, and organized religion. Of course, there is no reason why these phenomena could not have influenced human nature via gene-culture co-evolution. The last 10,000 years have seen more genetic evolution than the previous 100,000 … or even the previous million.

But to say so is anathema to those who still believe that the human mind stopped evolving over a million years ago.

References

Bolhuis, J.J., G.R. Brown, R.C. Richardson, and K.N. Laland. (2011). Darwin in mind: New opportunities for evolutionary psychology, PLoS Biol 9(7): e1001109. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001109
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001109

Cummins, D.D. (1998). Social norms and other minds: The evolutionary roots of higher cognition. In D.D. Cummins & C. Allen (eds.) The Evolution of Mind (pp. 30-50). New York: Oxford University Press.

DiLalla, D.L., G. Carey, I.I. Gottesman, and T.J. Bouchard Jr. (1996). Heritability of MMPI personality indicators of psychopathology in twins reared apart, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105, 491-499.

Mealey, L., C. Daood, & M. Krage. (1996). Enhanced memory for faces of cheaters, Ethology and Sociobiology, 17, 119-128.

Was evolutionary psychology inevitable?

Cover of Time, August 28, 1995. Evolutionary psychology beat out its rivals in the race to win public acceptance.

During the 1990s, evolutionary psychology overtook and replaced sociobiology. Its success was total, much like that of many paradigms we now accept as normal science. Did it succeed for the same reason? Did it better fit the data?

In some ways evolutionary psychology was better than its rivals and in other ways worse. Its superiority tended to be more organizational, even political. In short, it became the only game in town for study of human behavior from an evolutionary perspective. The alternatives—sociobiology and gene-culture co-evolution—had much less to offer in terms of research funding, career opportunities, or just an untroubled academic life.

Early years of evolutionary psychology

At first, the term ‘evolutionary psychology’ simply referred to psychologists and psychiatrists who shared an interest in evolutionary theory. Such people began to come together in the late 1980s:

In mid-1987, an initial list of people using modern evolutionary theory to address problems in psychology and psychiatry was compiled and distributed. The respondents suggested additional names that expanded the list to over 200 researchers. Many people expressed surprise that there were so many others working in the area. Many more suggested that it was time to organize a forum for the exchange of ideas and research findings in the area. (Evolution, Psychology and Psychiatry 1988)

The first forum was held at the 1988 Evolution and Human Behavior Meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The meeting had two purposes:

- To facilitate the exchange of ideas and findings among researchers in the area of Evolution, Psychology and Psychiatry. The developing new basic science will be emphasized.

- To consider plans for initiating an organization that will promote research and scholarly exchange in the area of Evolution, Psychology and Psychiatry.

The proceedings only hinted at evolutionary psychology’s eventual divorce from sociobiology. Some presenters talked about a mismatch between current behavior and earlier contexts of adaptation, but these contexts were not placed over a million years ago in the Pleistocene.

It was decided to have more meetings and to hold them annually. The 1989 meeting, now called the Human Behavior and Evolution Conference, had a similar mix of ideas. Presenters were now talking more about ‘mismatch’ and ‘mental mechanisms’:

Debate about the relevance of mental mechanisms, rather than current human behavior, to the study of adaptation continued from other conferences in the recent past. […] Turke pointed out that studies examining current reproductive success could reveal the nature of mental mechanisms by comparing contexts in which humans do or do not behave adaptively. […] The abstract models presented by evolutionary psychologists (first by Cosmides and Tooby), which are somewhat like descriptive structural equation models, seem often to be misunderstood to present physiological structures, again making mental mechanisms appear to promote invariant behavior. More sophisticated basic theory is necessary to determine whether current behavior reflects adapted strategies. (HBES, 1990)

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby were already arguing that the genetic determinants of human behavior had assumed their current form long before the emergence of Homo sapiens, but this view was still a minority one. Other presenters were affirming the possibility of much more recent evolution:

Cultural versus natural selection was also the major topic of a roundtable on the final morning, lead by William Hamilton, George Williams, Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfelt, Edward Wilson, Irven DeVore, and Richard Dawkins. Much of the discussion focused on the unit of selection and the selective process. Dawkins stressed defining a specific replicating unit, which must be genes or memes. Williams proposed using epidemiological, disease–transmission models for the spread of cultural traits rather than using genetic models. Wilson stressed the importance of co-evolutionary theory, which models the interaction of genes and culture in epigenetic processes. (HBES, 1990)

Evolutionary psychology was nonetheless en route to becoming a paradigm distinct from sociobiology, with the Pleistocene EEA as the key difference. In 1989, this theme inspired two articles in Ethology and Sociobiology. Don Symons wrote:

[…] a well-formed description of an adaptation must consist solely of words for things, events, relations, and so forth that existed in the EEA, which, in the case of human beings, means the Pleistocene world of nomadic foragers. The specific environmental features to which Tibetan polyandry is adapted, according to Crook and Crook, include agricultural estates, animal husbandry, primogeniture, monasticism, aristocrats, landlords, governments, and taxation. Because none of these things existed in the human EEA, Crook and Crook’s account contains not a single well formed description of a Darwinian adaptation […] (Symons, 1989, pp. 138-139)

John Tooby and Leda Cosmides argued along similar lines:

It is no more plausible to believe that whole new mental organs could evolve since the Pleistocene—i.e., over historical time—than it is to believe that whole new physical organs such as eyes would evolve over brief spans. It is easily imaginable that such things as the population mean retinal sensitivity might modestly shift over historical time, and similarly minor modifications might have been made in various psychological mechanisms. However, major and intricate changes in innately specified information-processing procedures present in human psychological mechanisms do not seem likely to have taken place over brief spans of historical time. (Tooby & Cosmides, 1989, p. 34)

Here, Tooby and Cosmides assert that ‘whole new mental organs’ could not have arisen over the past million years. They then conclude that ‘major changes’ to mental organs are unlikely. This conclusion hardly follows from their initial assertion, which itself is doubtful. New organs have arisen over shorter time spans, specifically through duplication of an existing organ and rapid modification of the ‘spare.’

As a result of these articles and succeeding ones, the Pleistocene EEA came to define evolutionary psychology. The latter ceased to mean ‘sociobiology for psychologists’ and took on a narrower, more paradigmatic meaning.

Gene-culture co-evolution: a competing paradigm

At the turn of the 1990s, it was still far from clear that evolutionary psychology would take over from sociobiology. Gene-culture co-evolution seemed to hold a stronger position.

This other paradigm began in a cultural evolution class that L.L. Cavalli-Sforza taught in 1978-79 at Stanford to Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson (Stone & Lurquin 2005, p. 108). The Italian geneticist argued that the natural environment has not been the main driving force of human evolution. Instead, this role has largely fallen to the cultural environment, such as oral and written language, social organization, technology, means of subsistence, and so forth. There has thus been a feedback loop: we humans have created different cultural environments, which in turn have subjected us to different pressures of natural selection. Our creations have become our creators. This co-evolution fascinated Cavalli-Sforza, and its study now occupied his thoughts.

But others were thinking along the same lines, like the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1979:

[…] as anthropologists, the aspects of the question that will always appeal to us will be much less the genetic determination of culture or cultures than the cultural determination of genetics. […]

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)

The 1980s saw growing interest from other students of human evolution. Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson were among the first, followed by Pierre van den Berghe, Charles Lumsden, E.O. Wilson, and R.D. Alexander. The new paradigm was summed up by Pierre van den Berghe:

[…] the causality between genes and culture is reciprocal […] culture, though clearly possessing some emergent and irreducible properties (notably in its mode of transmission), is itself subject to a wide set of developmental parameters because it comes out of a brain with a definite bio-chemical structure […] the human mind, despite its undoubted plasticity, is not a tabula rasa. It is predisposed to learn certain things with ease, and others with difficulty or not at all. According to this viewpoint, the programmed learning biases of the human brain result in a non-random distribution of cultural products […] Moreover, since culture has consequences for the survival and reproduction of flesh and blood organisms, natural selection must exert some influence on cultural evolution (van den Berghe & Frost, 1986)

Work on gene-culture co-evolution initially involved trawling through the ethnographic literature. In the mid-1980s, however, a major project for field research was launched, specifically among the Inuit of northern Canada.

Its leader? Cavalli-Sforza. The project was organized in 1986 with professors from Queen’s University and Université Laval. The aim was to determine whether natural selection favors different mental toolkits in hunting and gathering societies versus agricultural societies. As one project member, John Berry, a psychologist at Queen’s University, later explained:

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)

According to an unpublished report, Cavalli-Sforza wished to trace the origins of Inuit artistic talent by estimating the relative contributions of genetic endowment and socio-cultural learning:

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?

[…] Is it possible that artistic talent is transmitted culturally (from parents to offspring, from others in society to the artist, and from peers to artist)? How can we assess these types of transmission?

Is it possible that artistic talent is transmitted genetically (from parents to offspring)? How can we assess such transmission? (Berry & Cavalli-Sforza 1986, p. 2)

The approach would be to study specific Inuit artists and then their biological and non-biological relatives. The high rate of adoption among Inuit (between 15 and 30%) would provide a means to distinguish cultural inheritance from genetic inheritance in the transmission of artistic talent. Related mental traits would also be investigated. “Given enough information one can hope to separately estimate two quantities, called respectively cultural and genetic heritability” (Berry & Cavalli-Sforza 1986, p. 5)

The project fell through. At Laval, we assumed something went wrong with the funding. At Queen’s, the story was that Cavalli-Sforza had quit because of illness. Yet his biography makes no mention of illness during this period, the only bouts of ill health being an operation for bladder cancer in 1976 and a heart attack in 1991 (Stone & Lurquin, 2005, pp. 98, 160). In any case, ill health would have been a reason for postponing the project, not canceling it.

This project has left no traces in any of Cavalli-Sforza’s publications—books, journal articles, conference proceedings, or poster sessions. The paper trail amounts to one unpublished report (Berry & Cavalli-Sforza, 1986). Just as mute are his published writings on gene-culture co-evolution. Examples are confined to the usual suspects: lactose tolerance in cattle-raising societies, and malaria resistance among tropical agriculturalists (Cavalli-Sforza & Cavalli-Sforza 2008, p. 264). There is no hint that natural selection might have favored different mental traits in different cultural environments.

Endgame

With Cavalli-Sforza gone, the field of gene-culture co-evolution lost momentum. It had big names, but few of them could put boots on the ground, i.e., do fieldwork. Nor could any of them focus on this area of research. As big names, they typically had their fingers in many pies.

There may have been another reason in the case of Cavalli-Sforza. He was vulnerable to blackmail because of his wartime anthrax research … in Berlin. Nothing terrible came of that laboratory work, but it had the potential to derail his career. At the very least, it was a stain on his curriculum vitae. (1)

Evolutionary psychology thus beat out its rivals by default. The term ‘sociobiology’ was becoming a mark of Cain even among people interested in human behavior and evolution. In 1997, it was literally voted out of existence. Gene-culture co-evolution continued to attract interest but only as a sideline.

With its rivals growing ever weaker, evolutionary psychology gained strength as the millennium drew nearer. It could now offer grad students a hassle-free research environment with a real chance of academic employment later on. This may have been due to avoidance of the stormy issue of population differences (although academia in general was becoming calmer). A bigger reason, however, was the strong focus of its main proponents, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. They talked at conferences, gave interviews to the media, networked, and published, published, published. As they slowly climbed the academic career ladder, they would turn around to help likeminded people on lower rungs.

Bit by bit, they did what the big names could not do. They created a new teaching and research environment. And this environment would be called ‘evolutionary psychology.’

Note

1. Whenever Cavalli-Sforza lists his publications he never goes farther back than 1947. His wartime publications are all the more unknown because they were published under the name of Cavalli. He later changed his name to Cavalli-Sforza, having been ostensibly adopted by the second husband of his maternal grandmother. His autobiography dates the name change to 1950 (a year after his father died) when he was 28, married, and already a father. Such circumstances hardly justified adoption under Italian law or custom. Even more inexplicably, he was still publishing under his old name as late as 1953. Google Scholar lists three publications by L.L. Cavalli in 1950, one in 1951, five in 1952, and two in 1953.

References

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.

Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and F. Cavalli-Sforza (2008). La génétique des populations : histoire d'une découverte, Paris: Odile Jacob. (French translation of Perché la scienza : L’aventura di un ricercatore).

Evolution, Psychology and Psychiatry. (1988). Meeting Announcement, Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 28-30, 1988.

HBES. (1990). Summary of the first Human Behavior and Evolution Conference: Evanston, Illinois, August, 1989, Human Behavior and Evolution Society Newsletter, 1(1), 2-4, July 1990.

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.

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.

Symons, D. (1989). A critique of Darwinian anthropology, Ethology and Sociobiology, 10, 131-144.

Tooby, J. and L. Cosmides. (1989). Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, Part I. Theoretical considerations, Ethology and Sociobiology, 10, 29-49.

van den Berghe, P. L. & P. Frost. (1986). Skin color preference, sexual dimorphism, and sexual selection: A case of gene-culture co-evolution? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 9, 87-113.

Can evolutionary psychology evolve?

The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, over a million years ago in the Pleistocene. A founding myth of evolutionary psychology.

In the future, how will we look at evolution and human behavior? Perhaps we’ll still be looking through the lens of evolutionary psychology, albeit a more “evolved” one than the current variety. Or perhaps there will be a new paradigm.

One thing is sure. Evolutionary psychology, as now defined, is untenable. It suffers from several flawed assumptions:

- Human nature is uniform, except for gender differences. It came into existence over a million years ago during the Pleistocene, in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA). This was long before modern humans began to spread out of Africa some 40,000 years ago and eventually form the populations we know today.

- Given the complexity of human behavior, its genetic basis could not have changed to any appreciable extent since the Pleistocene.

- All present-day humans are therefore essentially the same. All differences in behavior, personality, and temperament must result from a single human nature responding to different environmental inputs.

These assumptions are false. Human genetic evolution has actually accelerated over the past 40,000 years, and even more so over the past 10,000. The latter period, in particular, was not one of people adapting to new physical environments defined by climate, landscape, and vegetation. People were adapting to new cultural environments defined by social structure, normative behavior, and technology.

Yes, human behavior is complex, and any genetic influences must be correspondingly complex. But these influences can be radically changed by a few point mutations. There’s no need to start from scratch, as John Tooby and Leda Cosmides imply. There may simply be changes to developmental timing, such as an infant’s mental plasticity being extended into older life stages. Or there may be changes to the degree of masculinization or feminization. The possibilities are endless. Again, there is no need to posit a huge number of genetic changes.

Yes, we are adapted to past environments—and not to the present one. And there is often a mismatch between something that made sense in the past and our present reality. But why assume a time gap of over one million years? Is it because the Pleistocene makes an ideal setting for just-so stories?

I suspect there is another, more cynical reason. By placing the evolutionary origins of human nature in the distant past, one avoids the messy reality of differences among current human populations—differences in outlook, personality, time orientation, and behavioral predisposition. The Pleistocene EEA may be a just-so story about the past, but it has also had a real impact on the present. It was part of the deal that made evolutionary psychology possible, in the wake of the firestorm that consumed sociobiology.

Will evolutionary psychology evolve?

A paradigm can evolve. Medicine was a pseudo-science that killed more patients than it cured as late as the 1920s. In the space of a few decades, the situation completely reversed. There have been similar turnarounds in other fields. Alchemy became chemistry, and astrology became astronomy.

Indeed, there have been calls for a rethinking of evolutionary psychology, even from Tooby and Cosmides. “Although the hominid line is thought to have originated on edges of the African savannahs, the EEA is not a particular place or time” (Tooby and Cosmides, 2005, p. 22). It is a composite of whichever selection pressures brought each adaptation into existence. There are thus potentially as many EEAs as there are adaptations, and some may be later than others.

This year, several evolutionary psychologists authored what may be called a manifesto for change:

We argue that the key tenets of the established EP paradigm require modification in the light of recent findings from a number of disciplines, including human genetics, evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and paleoecology. For instance, many human genes have been subject to recent selective sweeps; humans play an active, constructive role in co-directing their own development and evolution; and experimental evidence often favours a general process, rather than a modular account, of cognition. (Bolhuis et al., 2011)

The text parallels my recent paper in Futures, sometimes strikingly so. It starts off by observing that in the early years of evolutionary psychology “our knowledge of the human genome was limited and gradualism dominated evolutionary thinking.” Today, we know differently:

Events in the Holocene (the last 10,000 years), particularly the adoption of agriculture, domestication of animals, and the increases in human densities that these practices afforded, were a major source of selection on our species, and possibly accelerated human evolution. Evidence from the human genome strongly suggests that recent human evolution has been affected by responses to features of the environment that were constructed by humans, from culturally facilitated changes in diet, to aspects of modern living that inadvertently promoted the spread of
diseases. (Bolhuis et al., 2011)

This recent evolution has especially shaped the human brain: “Genes expressed in the human brain are well-represented in this recent selection.”

Even when assessed on its own terms, the Pleistocene EEA looks more and more like a myth, and should be treated as such:

[…] the abstract concept of stable selection pressures in the EEA is challenged by recent evidence from paleoecology and paleoanthropology. The Pleistocene was apparently far from stable, not only being variable, but progressively changing in the pattern of variation. The world experienced by members of the genus Homo in the early Pleistocene was very different from that experienced in the late Pleistocene, and even early anatomical modern Homo sapiens that lived around 150,000 years ago led very different lives from Upper Paleolithic people (40,000 years ago) (Bolhuis et al., 2011)

Is a paradigm shift in the offing? Probably. But what form will it take? Perhaps the second question is unimportant. Whether evolutionary psychology changes or disappears, we’ll be looking at evolution and human behavior in a very different light.

To be cont’d

References

Bolhuis, J.J., G.R. Brown, R.C. Richardson, and K.N. Laland. (2011). Darwin in mind: New opportunities for evolutionary psychology, PLoS Biol 9(7): e1001109. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001109
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001109

Frost, P. (2011). Human nature or human natures? Futures, 43, 740–748.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2011.05.017

Tooby, J. and L. Cosmides. (2005). Conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology, in: D. M. Buss (Ed.) The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, pp. 5-67.