Excerpts from the introductory chapter of Evolution and the big questions – sex, race, religion, and other matters by David N. Stamos. Italics in original, boldface and hyperlinks added by me. Published electronically by HonestThinking on 11 April 2008.
My primary motivation for making the below excerpts of the introductory chapter available here at the HonestThinking web site is to promote what I consider to be an excellent book. My hope is that this will wet the reader’s appetite and that he or she will buy the book and read it in its entirety.
My secondary motivation is to use these excerpts as part of a currently ongoing (as of March and April 2008) public debate in Norway, where Dr. Torgeir Skorgen of the University of Bergen has claimed support from this book to his view that race is nothing but a social construction. I consider that a misrepresentation of Stamos’s view, and submit the below excerpts as partial evidence.
My layman’s understanding is that my use of Stamos’s material is in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988, in particular its Chapter III. Should my understanding be in error here, I apologize in advance to Stamos and Blackwell Publishing, and ask to receive instructions telling me what kind of modifications would be necessary in order to bring my use of Stamos's material in line with the pertinent rules and regulations.
Compiled by Ole Jørgen Anfindsen, Ph.D., editor, HonestThinking
There is a debate raging in virtually every college and university in the Western world, and also widely among the public. It is whether evolutionary explanations – Darwinian explanations – can be legitimately extended to the big questions that vitally concern us all, questions that fall outside of biology as normally circumscribed. The big questions concern matters between the sexes, racial issues, religion, and so much more. The debate as a whole is the interdisciplinary question par excellence, involving not only biology but philosophy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, feminism, theology, and virtually every other discipline in one way or another. This unique and timely book is devoted entirely to that debate, as a critical introduction. […]
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In short, evolutionary science is one of the greatest and most solid of human achievements, possibly even the greatest of all time. As such, it should be denied to no one. But what is worse, to deny evolution is to deny the very nature and value of evidence itself. Reasoning that is not based on evidence, that ignores it or even fights against it, is reasoning that invites moral condemnation. We would hold a judge or jury in contempt were they to decide court cases on emotions and ideologies rather than on evidence. The offense becomes only worse for the big questions in life. As W. K. Clifford (1879) argued over a century ago, we have both a personal and a social duty to avoid belief unsupported by or opposed to evidence, just as we have both a personal and a social duty to avoid the spread of disease. Disrespect for evidence translates psychologically and socially into a culture of lies and power politics, not a culture that values truth and justice.
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The main theme that runs throughout the chapters is the debate between evolutionary explanations and what has come to be known as the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM). The SSSM is a way of looking at human nature that is commonly found in sociology, behaviorism in psychology, cultural anthropology, Marxism, women’s studies, and gay studies. […]
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One might say the debate between the two models is between an emphasis on evolutionary history and an emphasis on cultural history, but this is not entirely accurate. The debate is not nature versus nurture, but rather nature-nurture versus nurture. Biologists routinely argue that a full explanation for a given trait (whether physical or behavioral) requires a genetic and ultimately evolutionary explanation (nature) and an environmental explanation (nurture). […]
The SSSM, on the other hand, tries its best to play down the role of biology and play up the role of the environment, namely, culture and conditioning. Ultimately it views human nature as enormously plastic (moldable), or, to vary the metaphor […], as a tabula rasa, a blank slate. For example, Marxists argue that humans are not innately greedy, […]. Instead, for Marxists, it is a capitalist system that makes people greedy. […] Similarly, many feminists and social scientists argue that it is not because of their biology that men are so aggressive and violent toward women. Instead, they claim, it is a patriarchal system that makes men that way. Raised in a truly egalitarian system, men and women, behaviorally, would be basically the same. […] Common to each of these three examples, to Marxism, women’s studies, and gay studies – indeed it is part of the common denominator of SSSM thought – is the further claim that hierarchy is not innate to the human species but the product of cultural history, in other words a social construction (this is the current fashionable phrase). Humans in this view are perfectly capable, in spite of their biology, to live in non-hierarchical social arrangements. It is the environment, past and present, that makes the hierarchies in humans, not genes, so also it is the environment that must be changed to fix the problem.
In the previous century one of the most powerful exponents of SSSM thinking was behaviorism in psychology. For behaviorists, what was true of serial killers and rapists was true of philanthropists and gifted musicians. In each and every case, it was not the person, or their genes, that was responsible, but rather it was the environment that had made them. John Watson, the first great of behaviorism, proclaimed,
Give me a dozen healthy infants,
well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee
to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I
might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man
and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities,
vocations, and race of his ancestors.
(Watson 1924, 104)
Similarly for the last of the great behaviorists, B. F. Skinner, although he recognized the role of genes via instincts more than earlier behaviorists, the due he gave them was superficial. For Skinner as for many others, human nature is still so plastic that he envisioned a utopia in which human society, engineered using behaviorist principles, enjoys previously unknown bliss, a world where “behavior likely to be punished seldom or never occurs,” “people live together without quarreling,” and people “bear no more children than can be raised decently” (Skinner 1972, 66, 214). (Utopia thinking, indeed, tends to be common among SSSM thinkers.)
What went hand in hand with behaviorism, both ideologically and temporally, was cultural relativism in anthropology. Not only were fashion and art found to be tremendously variable and entirely culturally relative, but so too, as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict (1934) argued, were “mannerisms like the ways of showing anger, or joy, or grief … or in major human drives like those of sex … in fields such as that of religion or formal marriage arrangements” (59). What is considered normal in one society, she pointed out, might easily be considered abnormal in another. On such a view no culture is right and no culture is wrong, and morality, far from having any innate norm, “differs in every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits” (73).
Although genuinely evolutionary explanations of human nature have been around since Darwin, they had difficulty being taken seriously in academic disciplines outside of professional biology until the power and pervasiveness of the SSSM received a number of serious blows. One serious blow (some would say the fatal blow) was delivered by the linguist Noam Chomsky. Beginning in the 1950s, Chomsky argued that language acquisition, contrary to behaviorism, is not simply a matter of basic intelligence and stimulus-response conditioning; indeed, that such a model could not possibly work. He argued, instead, that we humans enter the world with what he called a universal grammar hard-wired into our brains, meaning that it is coded for in our DNA. Chomsky accomplished a veritable revolution in the science of linguistics, one that is still ongoing but is now widely accepted in its broad outlines. His greater importance, however, lies in the effect his revolution had on the SSSM with its blank slate view of human nature. Not only did Chomsky’s revolution open the door to the computer model of the mind-brain (cognitive science), but it also opened the door to evolutionary models of human behavior, namely, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. […]
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What is wrong with the SSSM […] is that as a way of thinking it produces resistance, even phobia or denial, to the fact that humans are a biological species. We can resist the fact as much as we want, but it remains the fundamental fact of our existence. Our species, Homo sapiens, did not pop into existence out of nothing, but instead evolved ever so gradually from an earlier species, which in turn evolved ever so gradually from a yet earlier species, and so on back through evolutionary time. Granted, very few, if any, professional academics who subscribe to the SSSM would wish to deny this (the evidence for evolution is just too great). But what they do wish to deny, instead, are the many implications of this fact. And that is where the problems arise. Quite simply, Homo sapiens is not just an evolved species but a social species, one that evolved in small hunting-gathering groups. As such, it would be utterly remarkable if this animal species did not evolve special instincts while all the others have. SSSM thinkers, interestingly, have no problem admitting rabbit nature, or wolf nature, or gorilla nature, but when it comes to humans they just do not want to admit that there is such a thing as human nature.
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Related to this is the fear that talk of genes and human nature invariably involves biological determinism. The fear is that once it is granted that genes influence human behavior then it must also be granted that they determine human behavior, so that the status quo with all its injustice is justified and any hope of progressive change is lost. This fear is understandable, given that there is a history of injustice supported by biological theories, the Nazi doctrines of racial supremacy and inferiority being a striking example among many. Indeed, the fear of what evolutionary biology might mean for human nature has prevented many from taking the time to learn the basic principles of evolutionary biology and genetics. What should become apparent as we go through the coming chapters, however, is that “biological determinism” is a bogey term, one that does not have scientific respectability. To be sure, there are legitimate fears that are involved with the self-knowledge that comes from studying evolutionary biology, but the fear of biological determinism is not one of them.
Finally, there are political reasons for why many find the SSSM appealing and are immediately suspicious of, or will not even listen to, those who provide evolutionary perspectives on human nature. At the core of it all is political correctness, with its goal of a sensitive and fair society, especially with regard to groups that have suffered and continue to suffer discrimination and oppression. While among the general public there is a lot of division over the value of political correctness, with many thinking it has gone too far (just listen to call-in radio talk shows), in colleges and universities, especially in the humanities and social sciences, it has become quite a dominant force, even to the point of censorship (in many colleges and universities in the United States, for example, racial theorizing is not allowed). While the basic reasons for political correctness are just and laudable, much politically correct thinking is arguably unrealistic and a form of denial. Nowhere is this plainer than in the big questions where biology should be clearly relevant. Indeed, politically correct thinkers routinely give the impression that they could not care less about being biologically correct. If there is a conflict between political correctness and biology, then too bad for biology. What we shall see in coming chapters is that political correctness, when it shuts itself off from empirical evidence and argument or flies too easily to the SSSM, easily becomes its own worst enemy. To give a quick example, it can now be argued that the communist experiment failed, in country after country around the world, just as every commune experiment of hippies in the 1960s failed, not necessarily because evil or stupid people were behind the experiments, but because they had the wrong theory of human nature. How many other grand visions of human happiness are destined to fail because they have an erroneous concept of human nature?
The truly interdisciplinary challenge, then, as I see it, and it is the real debate, is to try to figure out as best one can just where the SSSM is right and where it is wrong and to be fearless about it, even if that means throwing political correctness to the wind at times. Biology in general and evolutionary biology in particular need to be taken seriously, both if we want to truly understand the human condition and if we believe knowledge is power and we want to support the most effective ways of bettering the world. Granting that we should take biology seriously, however, is one thing, saying exactly where we should do so and to what degree is another. Indeed it is the hard part, but it is also the most interesting.
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Indeed there is enormous arrogance in academia, with in-group and out-group mentality. Unfortunately, not only is this egotism and arrogance misplaced, such that these professors do their respective fields a great disservice, but they also infect their students with the air of their high-minded insularity and thereby perpetuate a priori a barrier within those students to an increase in knowledge and understanding.
See also excerpts from the chapter on Evolution and Race of the same book.
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