Our knowledge of the evolution of human thought is limited not only by the nature of the evidence, but also by the values we bring to the authoritative scientific study of our ancestors. The tendency to see human thought as linear progress in rational capacities has been popular since the Enlightenment, and in the wake of Darwinism has been extended to other species as well. Human communication can be used to transmit useful information, but is rooted in symbolic processes that (...) are nonrational—that is, they involve choosing among functionally equivalent alternatives, any of which is as good an option as any other. The evolution of human thought cannot be realistically isolated from the evolution of human society or human communication, neither of which is rooted in obvious rationality. (shrink)

ArgumentEvolutionary psychologists argue that because humans are biological creatures, cultural explanationsmustinclude biology. They thus offer to unify the natural and social sciences. Evolutionary psychologists rely on a specific history of cultural anthropology, particularly the work of Alfred Kroeber to make this point. A close examination of the history of cultural anthropology reveals that Kroeber acknowledged that humans were biological and culture had a biological foundation; however, he argued that we should treat culture as autonomous because that would bring benefits to (...) the biological sciences as well as the human sciences. Hence, the historical caricature of his work by evolutionary psychology fails. The paper concludes that cultural anthropologists were successful in creating their discipline, at least in part, because they argued by pragmatic definition. Evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, offers an essentialist definition of “culture” and thus offers a much less promising vision of interdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to (...) grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as “replicators” which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be “vehicles” of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units.The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to “organs” of group-level “organisms.” Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals. (shrink)

According to David Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness consists of explaining how and why qualitative experience arises from physical states. Moreover, Chalmers argues that materialist and reductive explanations of mentality are incapable of addressing the hard problem. In this chapter, I suggest that Chalmers’ hard problem can be usefully distinguished into a ‘how question’ and ‘why question,’ and I argue that evolutionary biology has the resources to address the question of why qualitative experience arises from brain states. From this (...) perspective, I discuss the different kinds of evolutionary explanations (e.g., adaptationist, exaptationist, spandrel) that can explain the origins of the qualitative aspects of various conscious states. This argument is intended to clarify which parts of Chalmers’ hard problem are amenable to scientific analysis. (shrink)

This paper addresses whether the often-bemoaned loss of unity of knowledge about humans, which results from the disciplinary fragmentation of science, is something to be overcome. The fragmentation of being human rests on a couple of distinctions, such as the nature-culture divide. Since antiquity the distinction between nature (roughly, what we inherit biologically) and culture (roughly, what is acquired by social interaction) has been a commonplace in science and society. Recently, the nature/culture divide has come under attack in various ways, (...) in philosophy as well as in cultural anthropology. Regarding the latter, for instance, the divide was quintessential in its beginnings as an academic dis-cipline, when Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the first professional anthropologists in the US, rallied for (what I call) the right to ignore—in his case, human nature—by adopting a separationist epistemic stance. A separationist stance will be understood as an epistemic research heuristic that defends the right to ignore a specif-ic phenomenon (e.g., human nature) or a specific causal factor in an explanation typical for a disciplinary field. I will use Kroeber’s case as an example for making a general point against a bias towards integration (synthesis bias, as I call it) that is exemplified, for instance, by defenders of evolutionary psychology. I will claim that, in principle, a separationist stance is as good as an integrationist stance since both can be equally fruitful. With this argument from fruitful sepa-ration in place, not just the separationist stance but also the nature/culture di-vide can be defended against its critics. (shrink)

I admire Wilson & Sober's (W & S's) aim, to alert social scientists that group selection has risen from the ashqs, and to explicate its relevance to the behavioral sciences. Group selection has beenwidely misunderstood; furthermore, both authors have been instrumental in illuminating conceptual problems surrounding higher-level selection. Still, I find that this target article muddies the waters, primarily through its shifting and confused definition of a "vehicle" of selection. The fundamental problem is an ambiguity in the definition of "adaptation." (...) On the one hand, any evolutionary change that results from a selection process could be called an adaptation, by definition; I call this the "weak" view of adaptation. A "strong" view of adaptation, on the other hand, includes some notion of design - the evolution of a specific complex trait understood, in an engineering sense, to provide a mechanism favoring its owner's success in contributing to the evolutionary lineage. (shrink)

Strong adaptationists explore complex organic design as taskspecific adaptations to ancestral environments. This strategy seems best when there is evidence of homology. Weak adaptationists don't assume that complex organic (including cognitive and linguistic) functioning necessarily or primarily represents taskspecific adaptation. This approach to cognition resembles physicists' attempts to deductively explain the most facts with fewest hypotheses. For certain domainspecific competencies (folkbiology) strong adaptationism is useful but not necessary to research. With grouplevel belief systems (religion) strong adaptationism degenerates into spurious notions (...) of social function and cultural selection. In other cases (language, especially universal grammar) weak adaptationism's 'minimalist' approach seems productive. (shrink)

This paper describes a cross-cultural research project on the relation between how people conceptualize nature and how they act in it. Mental models of nature differ dramatically among and within populations living in the same area and engaged in more or less the same activities. This has novel implications for environmental decision making and management, including dealing with commons problems. Our research also offers a distinct perspective on models of culture, and a unified approach to the study of culture and (...) cognition. We argue that cultural transmission and formation does not consist primarily in shared rules or norms, but in complex distributions of causally-connected representations across minds in interaction with the environment. The cultural stability and diversity of these representations often derives from rich, biologically-prepared mental mechanisms that limit variation to readily transmissible psychological forms. This framework addresses a series of methodological issues, such as the limitations of conceiving culture to be a well-defined system or bounded entity, an independent variable, or an internalized component of minds. (shrink)

Here, I consider the recent application of phylogenetic methods in historical linguistics. After a preliminary survey of one such method, i.e. cladistic parsimony, I respond to two common criticisms of cultural phylogenies: that cultural artifacts cannot be modeled as tree-like because of borrowing across lineages, and that the mechanism of cultural change differs radically from that of biological evolution. I argue that while perhaps remains true for certain cultural artifacts, the nature of language may be such as to side-step this (...) objection. Moreover, I explore the possibility that cladistic parsimony can be justified even if is true by appealing to the inference pattern known among philosophers as ‘Inference to the Best Explanation’. (shrink)

What are the driving forces of cultural macroevolution, the evolution of cultural traits that characterize societies or populations? This question has engaged anthropologists for more than a century, with little consensus regarding the answer. We develop and fit autologistic models, built upon both spatial and linguistic neighbor graphs, for 44 cultural traits of 172 societies in the Western North American Indian (WNAI) database. For each trait, we compare models including or excluding one or both neighbor graphs, and for the majority (...) of traits we find strong evidence in favor of a model which uses both spatial and linguistic neighbors to predict a trait’s distribution. Our results run counter to the assertion that cultural trait distributions can be explained largely by the transmission of traits from parent to daughter populations and are thus best analyzed with phylogenies. In contrast, we show that vertical and horizontal transmission pathways can be incorporated in a single model, that both transmission modes may indeed operate on the same trait, and that for most traits in the WNAI database, accounting for only one mode of transmission would result in a loss of information. (shrink)

Retracing the primary common aspects between anthropological and psychoanalytic thought, in this article, we will further discuss the main common points between the notions of the unconscious according to Carl Gustav Jung and Claude Lévi-Strauss, taking into account the thought of Erich Neumann. On the basis of very simple elementary logic considerations centered around the basic notion of the separation of opposites, our observations might be useful for speculations on the possible origins of rational thought and hence on the origins (...) of consciousness. (shrink)

In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to (...) grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as "replicators" which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be "vehicles" of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units. The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to "organs" of group-level "organisms." Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals. (shrink)

This paper explores the presence of both relativistic and universalistic elements in Adam Smith’s moral philosophy. It argues that Smith is more sympathetic to the concerns of anthropologists than most philosophers have been, but still tries to uphold the possibility of moral judgments that transcend cultural contexts. It also argues that the tensions between these aspects of his thought are not easy to resolve, but that Smith’s sensitivity to the issues that give rise to them makes him a useful figure (...) with whom to think through the relationship between anthropology and moral philosophy to this day. (shrink)

Using Tõnu Viik's statement of the relationship between philosophy and culture as a framework, after discussing both nature and world, I investigate how culture affects the ways human beings live in nature and the world, then the implications of living in culture for philosophy and human knowledge, and finally the philosophy of culture, what it is or might be and its place as a focal point for a philosophical understanding of human life and activity.

Kroeber’s "The Superorganic" (1917) stands as the first extreme statement of cultural holism. Some have compared it to Durkheim, the majority to Boas; some have denied any evolutionary message, others read in it a theory of "emergent evolution" arising from his transcendental holism. What was it, exactly? When understood as part of a trilogy comprising two other articles (one from 1915, the other from 1919), it emerged that his extreme brand of cultural holism was a necessary tool to carry out (...) a relatively hidden evolutionary agenda. This led me to rethink his evolutionism, to deny that he was a cultural determinist, to understand this part of his anthropology in terms of "epistemological obstacles" (Bachelard 1938), and show that it reemerges in Appadurai’s understanding of globalization (1996). (shrink)

Ethnocentrism, it is said, involves believing certain things to be true: that one's culture is superior to others, more deserving of respect, or at the ‘centre’ of things. On the alternative view defended in this article, ethnocentrism is a type of bias, not a set of beliefs. If this is correct, it challenges conventional wisdom about the scope, danger, and avoidance of ethnocentrism.

Biology and the social sciences share an interest in phylogeny. Biologists know that living species are descended from past species, and use the pattern of similarities among living species to reconstruct the history of phylogenetic branching. Social scientists know that the beliefs, values, practices, and artifacts that characterize contemporary societies are descended from past societies, and some social science disciplines, linguistics and cross cultural anthropology for example, have made use of observed similarities to reconstruct cultural histories. Darwin appreciated that his (...) theory of descent with modification had many similarities of pattern and process to the already well developed field of historical linguistics. In many other areas of social science, however, phylogenetic reconstruction has not played a central role. (shrink)

What Is Race? Evidence from Scientists (1952) is a picture book for schoolchildren published by UNESCO as part of its high-profile campaign on race. The 87-page, oblong, soft-cover booklet contains bold, semi-abstract, pared-down images accompanied by text, devised (so it declared) to make scientific concepts ‘more easily intelligible to the layman’. Produced by UNESCO’s Department of Mass Communication, the picture book represents the organization’s early-postwar confidence in the power of scientific knowledge as a social remedy and diplomatic tool. In keeping (...) with a significant component of the race campaign, What Is Race? presented genetics as the route to an enlightened, scientific, non-prejudiced understanding of race. This article seeks to explain the book’s management, aesthetics and framing in the context of postwar disciplinary and international politics. Viewing UNESCO’s race campaign as a high point for an internationalist ideology of mass education, this article also analyses the visual and literary arguments of What Is Race? and proposes that the enduring image of genetics as technical and neutral knowledge was in part shaped by UNESCO’s efforts to communicate scientific authority to an apparently ‘popular’ audience. (shrink)

Version 4.4 October, 1994 Introduction When explaining human behavior, anthropologists frequently distinguish the things that people do of their own free will from the things they do because they have to. In much of anthropology, and most American archaeology, this is the difference between style and function. Functional behaviors are the things people are constrained to do; stylistic behaviors are the things people do when unconstrained. Where necessity stops and free choice begins is, of course, a classic problem of social (...) science theory, but wherever the boundary is placed, it is generally implied that the domains thus divided are not of equal importance (Bettinger 1991:49-50). Few straddle this fence: Materialists emphasize function and downplay style; structuralists and postmodernists do the opposite. Recent attempts to apply neo- Darwinian concepts to the archaeological record predictably side with materialist tradition, repeating the premise that it is most important to explain functional behavior; stylistic behavior is interesting only for localizing social units in time and space. (shrink)

Rates of violence in the American South have long been much greater than in the North. Accounts of duels, feuds, bushwhackings, and lynchings occur prominently in visitors’ accounts, newspaper articles, and autobiography from the 18th Century onward. According to crime statistics these differences persist today. In their book, Culture of Honor, Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen argue that the South is more violent than the North because Southerners have different, culturally acquired beliefs about personal honor than Northerners. The South was (...) disproportionately settled by Protestant Scotch-Irish, people with an animal herding background, whereas Northern settlers were English, German and Dutch peasant farmers. Most herders live in thinly settled, lawless regions. Since livestock are easy to steal, herders seek reputations for willingness to engage in violent behavior as a deterrent to rustling and other predatory behavior. Of course, bad men come to subscribe to the same code, the better to intimidate their victims. As this arms race proceeds, arguments over trivial acts can rapidly escalate if a man—less often a woman—thinks his honor is at stake, and the resulting “culture of honor” leads to high rates of violence. Nisbett and Cohen support their hypothesis with an impressive range of data including, laboratory data, attitude surveys, field experiments, data on violence, and differences in legal codes. (shrink)