Nature vs Nurture, Biology vs Culture: Refighting Old Battles

 The manner in which we humans comport ourselves can be influenced both by biological factors (nature) and by cultural factors (nurture).  At various times it has been argued that one or the other is decidedly dominant.  More usually, it is recognized that we are influenced by both factors, but the argument over which is dominant, and by how much, seems to go on.  A recent book by Charles King provides an interesting history of the various contentions as they existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century.  The subtitle promises a lot—and King does not disappoint. 

The central characters in this tale are Franz Boas, one of the prime movers in the development of anthropology as a scientific discipline, and four women he mentored as students and researchers: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria.  It was unusual at that time to encounter one woman performing cutting edge research, let alone accumulating four.  And Hurston was an African-American woman, while Deloria was of Native-American descent.

Mead was probably the best known, partially because of her publications and partly because she outlived the others.  She was also the most intriguing because of her complex sex life.  She would make a name for herself living among Samoans, ultimately resulting in “Coming of Age in Samoa.”  Boas had sent her out there with this goal:

“…the first serious attempt to enter into the mental attitude of a group in a primitive society.” 

Mead would make her voyage on a ship called the “Sonoma.”  To make sure the reader realized that she was not a typical female of the time, he included this aside.

“On board Sonoma was a twenty-three-year-old Pennsylvanian, slight but square built, unable to swim, given to conjunctivitis, with a broken ankle and a chronic ailment that sometimes rendered her right arm useless.  She had left behind a husband in New York and a boyfriend in Chicago, and had spent the transcontinental train ride in the arms of a woman.” 

Ruth Benedict would be the Boas student who would go on to be his right-hand woman in co-mentoring students, organizing research initiatives, and performing research of her own.  She was a sometimes lover of Margaret Mead and always a dear friend.  She would be best known for her very popular books “Patterns of Culture” and “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.”

Zora Hurston never became a full-time student, but she did participate in research suggested by Boas and also pursued her own initiatives.  Given her heritage, she was mostly involved in work among the blacks of the American South, and Caribbean peoples.  Her most interesting accomplishment was to be the first person to photograph a real, live, undead zombie.  Her efforts would produce the book “Mules and Men,” but she would ultimately become best known as a writer with her most famous work being the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

Deloria was fluent in English and in several major Native-American dialects.  One of the major anthropological thrusts was to capture what could be learned of Indian cultures.  The difficulty was that those cultures had long been corrupted by interactions with the whites.  Deloria played the important role of trying to verify cultural descriptions that had already been published and trying to capture evolving Indian cultures as they existed at the current time.

When Boas concluded that he would become an anthropologist, the meaning of that word was still being defined.  The major activity in the field was called anthropometry.  It was believed that by measuring physical characteristics, mainly cranial shape and size, one could determine characteristics that could be associated with race, intelligence, criminality, stages of evolution and so forth.  Boas soon concluded that this was nonsense. 

“The idea of a natural ranking of human types shaped everything: school and university curricula, court decisions and policing strategies, health policy and popular culture, the work of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and U.S. colonial administrators in the Philippines, as well as their equivalents in Britain, France, Germany, and many other empires, countries, and territories.  The poor were poor because of their own inadequacies.  Nature favored the robust colonizer over the benighted native.  Differences in physical appearance, customs, and language were reflections of a deeper innate otherness.  Progressives, too, accepted these ideas, adding only that it was possible, with enough missionaries, teachers, and physicians on hand, to eradicate primitive and unnatural practices and replace them with enlightened ways.  That was why America’s foremost periodical on world politics and international relations, published since 1922 and now the influential Foreign Affairs, was originally called The Journal of Race Development. 

People were coming up with hypotheses and then looking for data that would prove the hypotheses correct.  This was a dangerous perversion of the scientific method that allows biases to render research valueless.  Boas would insist, and drill into his students, that the data be accumulated first—and then you attempt to form a hypothesis.  Their research would provide a basis for greater equality among races, ethnic groups, sexes, and economic classes.  If only nations would have accepted what their science had told them.

“Real, evidence-driven analysis, they believed, would overturn one of modernity’s most deeply held principles: that science will tell us which individuals and groups are naturally smarter, abler, more upstanding, and fitter to rule.  Their response was that science pointed in precisely the opposite direction, toward a theory of humanity that embraces all the many ways we humans have devised for living.  The social categories into which we typically divide ourselves, including labels such as race and gender, are at base artificial—the products of human artifice, residing in the mental frameworks and unconscious habits of a given society.  We are cultural animals, they claimed, bound by rules of our own making, even if those rules are often invisible or taken for granted by the societies that craft them.”

“The belief that our ways are the only commonsensical, moral ones has a powerful allure, especially when expressed in the language of science, rationality, religion, or tradition.  All societies are predisposed to see their own traits as achievements and others’ as shortcomings.  But the core message of the Boas circle was that, in order to live intelligently in the world, we should view the lives of others through an empathetic lens.  We ought to suspend our judgement about other ways of seeing social reality until we really understand them, and in turn we should look at our own society with the same dispassion and skepticism with which we study far-flung peoples.”

Boas and his group called the type of research they performed cultural anthropology and their basic theory cultural relativity or cultural relativism.

“For nearly a century their critics have accused them of everything from justifying immorality to chipping away at the foundations of civilization itself.  Today, cultural relativism is usually listed among the enemies of tradition and good behavior, along with such terms as postmodernism and multiculturalism.  The work of the Boas circle makes appearances as bugbears and objects of derision in conservative media and on alt-right websites, among campaigners against diversity programs and political correctness, and on such lists as ‘Ten Books that Screwed Up the World.’  How can we make any judgements about right and wrong, critics ask, if everything is relative to the time, place, and context in which our judgements occur?” 

The Boas group helped to eliminate some of the worst abuses of science, but it is difficult to assess the extent of their influence on the course of events.  World War II was quite an event.  The scientific dispute continues over the roles of biology and culture.  Louis Menand wrote on this issue in a review of King’s book that appeared in The New Yorker: How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity.  The title of the paper version in the magazine was The Looking Glass and began with this lede: “Are we at the end of the nature-nurture debate?” 

“The new biologists are not like the scientists Boas did battle with in the early twentieth century. They agree with Boas that ‘man is one.’ But they think this means that there exists a single ‘human nature,’ and that the success or failure of different forms of social organization depends on how faithful they are to this species essence.”

“This has become almost the default mode of analysis among social and political commentators, who like to cite work by cognitive scientists, endocrinologists, and evolutionary psychologists. In the most reductive version of the new biologism, life is programmed, and culture is simply the interface. Even the social science that is most popular, like behavioral economics, is human-nature-based. Nurture is out.”

“And yet the issues on which Boas and Mead made their interventions, issues around race and gender, are now at the center of public life, and they bring all the nature-nurture confusion back with them. The focus of the conversation today is identity, and identity seems to be a concept that lies beyond both culture and biology. Is identity innate, or is it socially constructed? Is it fated, or can it be chosen or performed? Are our identities defined by the existing state of social relations, or do we carry them with us wherever we go?”

Menand then makes this comment. 

“Other species are programmed to ‘know’ how to cope with the world, but our biological endowment evolved to allow us to choose how to respond to our environment. We can’t rely on our instincts; we need an instruction manual. And culture is the manual.” 

Menand comes down on the side of culture, as do I, but he seems to have a serious misunderstanding of the biology of animals of which humans are only one example.  The reason we have the opportunity to select so many different ways to socialize is because the need to socialize has been so deeply ingrained in our biology—and the biology of many of the animals.  Evolution, long ago, provided the tools that allow us to get along almost no matter what situations we create for ourselves. 

Frans de Waal provided an enlightening examination of the similarities between us and some of our animal kin in his book Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves.  A lower class of animal might survive with the instinct to bite anything it encounters.  Of course, some things will bite back or respond in other lethal ways.  What more advanced animals developed were emotions.  An emotion differs from an instinct because it causes no direct action.  What it does is prepare the body to take action and provides this higher order animal with the time to decide what is the best course of action.  Fear can be responded to with flight, fight, hide, or do nothing at all.  Four options are better than one. 

Emotions were designed to produce physical responses.  It was as though evolution decided that animals would get along better if they could understand the emotions of their neighbors.  Facial expressions tend to make our emotions apparent to an observer.  This knowledge is usually used for prosocial purposes, but antisocial behavior can follow should one specimen try to take advantage of the emotional state of another. 

Perhaps the most socially important emotion is empathy.  Empathy can be defined as the ability to interpret and share the feelings of another.  What de Vaal wishes to make perfectly clear is that the emotion of empathy is not restricted to humans, and that empathy is a physical phenomenon—our bodies are designed to participate in the process, and its activities often take place subconsciously.  One thing that research has established is that emotions are conveyed by facial expressions and animals are excellent at interpreting these signals, particularly within their own species.  Part of the mechanism of empathizing is the unconscious mimicking of observed expressions of another. 

Humans have a large number of facial muscles allowing it to produce an incredible number of very nuanced expressions.  Are humans unique in possessing such complex responses?  Perhaps, but not by much. 

“When a team of behavioral scientists and anthropologists finally tested the idea by carefully dissecting the faces of two dead chimpanzees, they found the exact same number of mimetic muscles as in the human face—and surprising few differences.” 

Scientists tell us that the human line evolved off the chimpanzee line 4-6 million years ago.  It is difficult to believe that both species evolved by developing the exact same facial musculature.  That capability to emote and presumably recognize emotion, must have developed long before the two species diverged. 

Nature really worked hard to provide us the tools for successful socializing.  But nowhere was there a rule describing how the tools should be used.  I agree with Menand’s final comment.

“Only we can tell us how to live. There is nothing that prevents us from deciding that the goal of life should be to be as unnatural as possible. ‘Human nature’ is just another looking glass.”

King anticipated that the nature-nurture arguments would continue by including a quote from the famous physicist Max Planck. 

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.