Preprint of article that appeared in Anthropology Today, 3/28/2006 

 

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HUMAN SOCIOBIOLOGY?

 

 

Monique Borgerhoff Mulder (a, b)

 

Carl McCabe (a)

 

 

(a) Department of Anthropology, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA

 

(b) Center for Population Biology, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA

 

 

The 17th annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) was held in Austin, Texas, June 2005 in chandelier-lit ballrooms that thronged with over 500 conference attendees. This was a far cry from the chalky mid-west classroom in the late 1980s where it had all begun. Almost two decades ago a couple dozen enthusiasts had met on a cold Saturday morning to discuss the founding of a society that would later spawn this Texan extravaganza. It was the scale of the event, the journalistic barrage, the number of international presenters (from Brazil to New Zealand, and Netherlands to South Korea), and the range of topics addressed (from Anxiety to Darwinian Literature, and Humour to Child Health, with of course the old favourite Waist-Hip Ratios) that prompted the question – what has happened to human sociobiology?

 

Sociobiology was E. O. Wilson’s term for the evolutionary study of behaviour, introduced in his tome of the same name published in 1975. Human sociobiology drew its name from an infamous final chapter, a highly innovative but rather naïve attempt to apply general evolutionary principles to aspects of human affairs. Despite sharp political, ideological and intellectual exchanges, evolutionary analyses of human behaviour began to bubble and ferment throughout the remaining years of the 1970s, and by the late 1980s HBES was formed. Prominent biologists attended these early meetings, providing a stamp of approval, and much heady enthusiasm surrounded the testing of evolutionary theories for human behavioural diversity. Anthropologists were, from the start, well represented among human sociobiologists. They conducted fieldwork in many parts of the world, exploring the extent to which human cultural behaviour is adaptive, and hence interpretable in a broader Darwinian framework.

 

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So what has changed since the early days? For starters, the name sociobiology is gone.  There is disagreement over whether or not changing a name to avoid political flak is an honourable thing to do. But there was too much epistemological furor and political name-calling in the sociobiology debate [1], too much posing, exaggeration, and stereotyping on both sides for most of us to risk wearing the label. The commonest charge against sociobiology was that it was pure genetic determinism. As such it could be used to justify social inequalities of race or gender.  This was palpably wrong, since sociobiologists were primarily interested in environmental and social contexts of variability, with assumptions about genetic causality playing little if any role in their position. But with large egos on both sides of the debate fanning the flames, outright accusations of racism, sexism, even eugenics, emerged. Sociobiologists struck back, insinuating that cultural anthropologists rejected biological realities simply because this jarred with their desire for an equitable social order.  While this may sometimes have been true, many cultural anthropologists were well aware that there were, and continue to be, multiple views on how cultural and genetic factors interact to produce diversity within and between human populations. By this point the term sociobiology had become so publicly associated with demonic hyperbole that many found it unsalvageable.  Investigators interested in evolutionary reasoning and models changed their tag, variously, to human behavioural and evolutionary ecology, Darwinian anthropology, evolutionary anthropology, socioecology, and so forth.

 

These new labels accentuated somewhat different evolutionary tools. Emphasis shifted from proving that human behavior is adaptive (an agenda easily dubbed as tautological and restrictive), to examining which specific models best explain human behavioural variation within and between populations. This drew attention to model assumptions regarding mechanisms, critical social and environmental triggers, and modes of inheritance. For example, the puzzle of the 19th and 20th century demographic transition poses questions about when and why optimality models are likely to fail, which aspects of the social and ecological environments influence parents-to-be pay, which social models individuals might imitate in choosing fertility strategies, and a host of related questions that are deeply linked to fields not explicitly evolutionary [2].

 

Another change between the early days and Texas is the massive growth of evolutionary psychology, a subfield that now dominates HBES. Evolutionary psychology seems to have entered into the mainstream of psychology. Whether it is welcome there depends on whom you ask. The phenomenal success of this field is due, in many respects, to the dogged insistence of psychologists, such as Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, that adequate attention be paid to the psychological mechanisms underlying apparently adaptive behaviour. How do organisms get it right? What cues do they attend to when updating their decisions in the face of social and ecological change? With what cognitive architecture is our species endowed? Perhaps in part because of the relative ease of collecting data with questionnaires distributed to the PSYCH 101 student body (as compared with heading off to foreign lands, visa and research permit in hand), evolutionary psychologists now far outnumber evolutionary anthropologists. This raises, for anthropologists, inevitable questions regarding the validity and generality of findings based on this unusual population, homo studiensis. Evolutionary psychology has additionally been bedeviled by sensationalism because of its persistent focus on sexuality, mating tactics, rape and other politically sensitive issues – unsurprisingly the popular press avidly market their fare with late-night shows and glossy spreads, posing such misguided questions as whether there is a gene for divorce. Evolutionary psychology has also, in the view of some, abandoned key procedures in implementing the scientific method, or in other words become sloppy [3]. On the other hand new and interesting avenues are opening up with regard to morality, religion, fairness and generosity that are proving to be accessible to experimental manipulations [4]. With a purge of unnecessary sensationalism, evolutionary psychology has exciting places to go.

 

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A remarkable feature of the new sociobiology (if we dare call it that) is the abundant evidence that Darwinism is no dead 19th century paradigm, but a mode of inquiry constantly rethought and reworked. E.O. Wilson and Bob Trivers both gave plenaries at this years HBES. Both, albeit on very different grounds and with very different materials, are challenging some fundamental premises of the old sociobiology (of which both were undoubtedly master architects). Wilson turned away from individual selection to explore the importance of group selection in promoting sociality, while Trivers looked at the implications of new evidence on intra-genomic conflict for the evolution of social behaviour. In similar non-conventional vein, evolutionary biologists are recognizing that there are multiple modes of inheritance (not just genetic), each or any of which might be subject to natural selection. These observations raise new challenges and opportunities for how we think about human (and particularly cultural) evolution. As evolutionary biologists become technically cleverer than their ancestors, they provide an ever more useful set of tools to anthropologists interested in how culturally transmitted information, anthropogenic habitats (both social and environmental) and evolved psychological predispositions interact to produce both novelty and conservatism.

 

This year HBES also hosted a set of special events in honour of Napoleon Chagnon – the so-called “Nap Fest” – under the guidance of Chagnon’s friend and collaborator William Irons and his former student Mark Flinn. There was of course discussion of the vilification of Chagnon’s  (and James Neel’s) work in relation to the Darkness in El Dorado debacle. There was also considerable relief that the American Anthropological Association has recently voted to rescind its own commissioned El Dorado Report (which had cast damning aspersions). The “Nap Fest” focused on celebrating Chagnon’s work, and his influence on the old field of sociobiology. Rich ethnography, creative methodology, and deep attention to the social processes of status competition, prestige-building, and cooperation were evidenced in the papers presented by former students and associates. These carefully analysed studies scrutinizing knowledge, attitudes, behaviour, social networks and their implications for health and other material outcomes constitute invaluable twenty-first century ethnography. They also provide a valuable challenge to some of the universalistic claims emerging from evolutionary psychology by highlighting remarkable, yet predictable, cross-cultural variation in such concepts as status, kinship and altruism.

 

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Perhaps the two most exciting contributions of evolutionary anthropology to our broader discipline will prove to be its methodological and theoretical promiscuity and its pro-science stance. Much lip service is paid to the virtue of interdisciplinary research, but often such work is obscure and poorly focused (or at least very difficult to understand). Because modern evolutionary anthropologists are concerned with optimality, decision-making processes, culturally transmitted information, and dynamic population-level processes its practitioners move, some more seamlessly than others, between psychology, political science, economics, biology, social theory and ethnography. For instance a recent MacArthur-funded, multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural project employs the logic of game theory and the practices of experimental economics to explore the nature and origin of individual preferences [5].  Contextualizing their experimental results within traditional ethnographic description, these researchers grapple with motivations behind cross-cultural variations and regularities in individual decision-making.  This work not only adds a new set of systematic and quantitative tools to traditional ethnographic work, but inspires productive discourse with economists and political scientists. 

 

As regards the solidly scientific stance of evolutionary anthropology, it is clearly a matter of taste whether this is an attractive feature or not. Modern cultural anthropology has made considerable strides unraveling social processes using a largely interpretational standpoint, and eschewing the scientific method. Nevertheless, in our opinion, strengthening the scientific underpinnings of the study of cultural variation within and between human societies will serve not only to open more avenues for interdisciplinary research but also, perhaps, to bolster the flagging reputation of anthropology within the social sciences.

 

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Human sociobiology has disappeared in name, but evolutionary theory is undergoing its own transformation, and continues to inspire anthropologists. A wonderfully comprehensive and even-handed evaluation of these developments can be found in Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown’s overview [6]. Indeed even the American Anthropology Association has learnt to live with the descendants of human sociobiology, this year incorporating an Evolutionary Anthropology Society as one of its sections. HBES annual meetings have already been held in Europe (Berlin and London), and will become increasingly international (with an upcoming meeting in Japan). AT readers, even those deeply antagonistic to the old human sociobiology, should keep their eyes and ears open. There is a lot going on.

 

1.         Segerstråle, U., Defenders of the truth: The battle for science in the sociobiology debate and beyond. 2000, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2.         Borgerhoff Mulder, M., Demographic transition: Are we any closer to an evolutionary explanation? Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 1998. 13(7): p. 266-270.

3.         Smith, E.A., M. Borgerhoff Mulder, and K. Hill, Controversies in the evolutionary social sciences: a guide for the perplexed. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2001. 16(3): p. 128-135.

4.         Henrich, J. and R. McElreath, The evolution of cultural evolution. Evolutionary Anthropology, 2003. 12: p. 123-135.

5.         Henrich, J., R. Boyd, S. Bowles, C. Camerer, E. Fehr, H. Gintis (eds.), Foundations of Human Sociality. 2004, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

6.         Laland, K.N. and G.R. Brown, Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour. 2002, Oxford: Oxford University Press.