Culture is a biological construct.

[TronCat]

Culture is Part of Human Biology: http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/CultureIsBiology.pdf

Between Culture and Biology: http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam033/2002020173.pdf

 

Culture Is Biology: Why We Cannot “Transcend” Our Genes—or Ourselves; by Steve Moxon

Culture (whether human or of other species) is the manifestation of
evolved psychology; and given that this is the product of the biological
structure that is the brain, then culture is biology.

This might seem banal but for the observation that our behaviour
within our cultures feeds back to reinforce the biology—optimising and
making it more efficient. So it is that culture is very much a part of
biology, not merely growing out of it to progress thereafter on an
autonomous track.

Such feedback necessarily takes place, or why would our facility to
create culture have evolved? (Human culture hardly resembles a Gouldian
“spandrel.”) The relationship between any organism and its social system
necessarily is a “hall-of-mirrors” precluding novel trajectory, and not
just in the short-term (as I will duly explain).

Human culture is often, even usually regarded as being “above”
biology because of extra-genetic modes of cross-generational
transmission of cultural product, but an additional mode of transmission
is of little consequence unless what is being transmitted is truly
novel. For the above-mentioned reasons, it is not.

We can see, then, that Edward O Wilson understated the reality when
long ago he pointed out that culture is always “held on a leash” [1]
from biology, never escaping it. Yet Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who
has most concerned himself with evolution, sees an actually weaker tie;
substituting for Wilson’s leash an infinitely elastic cord. He
believes, as in the title of his book-length exposition, that Freedom Evolves. [2] Certainly the facility to cognise and behave flexibly
evolves; and given that this is instrumental to everything on which it
is built, then it serves to make the human organism more efficient in
interacting with its environment; not least with conspecifics.
Consequently, biology and the genome encoding it, far from being usurped
actually are still better expressed. In a non-trivial sense, therefore, we become ever more the slaves
of our biology and our genes, just as we are provided with the illusion
of being progressively freer of them. This fits within the overall
trajectory of evolution: of a progressive increase in reproductive
efficiency (which readily can be seen as the key contrast between humans
and lowly classes such as bacteria).

As a philosopher, Dennett should know all too well that increasing
flexibility of cognition and behaviour is the only meaningful sense of
freedom that an individual organism can experience. Instead, he makes
the leap to join Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker in putting forward
the line that somehow through our culture and our higher cognition we
can (and do) “transcend our genes” (my paraphrase) and thereby our
biology. Indeed, it amounts to a claim that somehow we “transcend” ourselves, which self-evidently is nonsensical.

It’s a bizarre position for arguably our three most eminent
evolutionary thinkers to adopt. This is especially true of Steven
Pinker, who, as the author of the book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature,
[3] should be more keenly aware than anyone of the fallacy of placing
humanity above nature. However, it is the usual view, notably shared by
those who espouse any of the various ideologies of our culture.
According to the philosopher, John Gray, [4] the various humanist
ideologies in lauding mankind all betray how we are unwittingly saddled
with the residue of Christian thinking; no parallel, he argues, being
evident outside of Western culture. The “promised land” of Christian
teleology, Gray sees as having secularised into an unacknowledged
supposed causal agent pulling us towards some sort of utopia; in the
process problematising “free will.” Gray singles out the philosopher of
our illustrious trio: “Dennett … has spent much of his career labouring
to show how scientific materialism can be reconciled with a form of free
will—a project that would scarcely occur to someone from a culture not
moulded by Christianity.”

The Dawkins/Pinker/Dennett axis is backwards, resting on the notion
of “emergence”; that the philosopher Mark Bedau [5] sees as
unnecessarily opening up a great explanatory gulf with lower-level
processes (“emergence” likely being another case of problematising by
philosophers). Their position, as I will outline, falls foul of
systems-biology, the most basic understanding of the concept and theory
of information, and contemporary evolution theory itself.

Steven Pinker memorably quipped that “If my genes don’t like it, they
can go jump in the lake.” He was alluding to his decision not to
spread his genes by reproducing. I challenged him on this from the floor
at a symposium at the LSE in London. Surely an eminent evolutionary
psychologist must well know that in this regard human motivation—that of
the human male, clearly—is a proxy one of desiring sex, not desiring to
reproduce per se; and that the use of modern contraceptive technology
actually facilitates sexual activity? Doesn’t making professor, never
mind such an eminent one, considerably increase appeal to women, both as
a marriage and an extra-pair sex partner?

The Harvard professor has never said anything about eschewing sex,
and the highly competitive behaviour of males with others of their own
sex is (as Professor Roy Baumeister has outlined [7]) the key sex
difference. Males compete for status in order to be selected by females,
and therefore such competition is the principal instrumental behaviour
to what Pinker claims he has in himself usurped—but which in any case he
has not, having merely confused reproduction with sex.

I didn’t get an answer. Just a very long empty stare into the aisle
between the two halves of the audience seating until the chairman moved
on the discussion. Steven Pinker surely realises that far from adopting
what he took to be a culturally derived imperative to replace how he
would otherwise behave, instead he has been subject all along to the
inter-related set of motivations we all share irrespective of the
culture in which we happen to live. Does he imagine he can import into
his brain a novel motivation? From where in the environment would this
come from other than the mirror of evolved social psychology that is our
culture; that is hardly likely, therefore, to throw up something new?
And how does the professor envisage the motivational-set within his
brain reacting other than by subsuming any such hypothetical import to
further its own ends?

The failure of understanding by Pinker here goes deep, resting on a
false schematic of the brain. And inasmuch as this reveals general
truths about system and level that are applicable to the relationship
between the organism and culture, then it is illuminating here to
outline.

The author of How the Mind Works reveals a Cartesian dualist
position in that very title, and evidently believes that he can control
the rest of his “mind”—I will use the more appropriate term,
“brain”—through certain higher-cognitive neural processing in his
cerebral cortex. The truth is that the brain has evolved successive
layers that function instrumentally to the layers below them, with the
whole behaving as one system driven (in terms of initiating alertness)
from the brainstem. There is no control centre.

The cerebral cortex facilitates complex integration of neural
processing, incorporating sensory data from interacting with the
environment, serving to modify behaviour so that it becomes more complex
and indirect, the better to ensure the completion of
motivation-behaviour loops. This does not mean that there is a locus of
control within the cerebral cortex. Indeed, if we insist on any such
identification, we would have to point to the afore-mentioned brainstem
along with some other phylogenetically ancient structures associated
with basic emotions; emotions being a visceral translation of basic
motivation. Motivation does not arise in the cerebral cortex. Here
arises merely neural integration that may contribute to the brain acting
according to one or more key motivations over one or more others.

Our motivations, in functioning as a suite, at any one point in time
feature one or more to the fore. If we are not being self-goaded to
behave directly to bring about sexual intercourse and consequent
reproduction, then we are being self-goaded to behave in some way
instrumental to this eventuality. There is no “debating chamber” within
the brain where some brain within the brain weighs up competing demands,
as we imagine our conscious “mind” to be. What we call consciousness is
an epiphenomenon of the integration of neural processing: the brain as a
whole experiencing, after a delay, facets of its own working.

This simplest schematic of the brain showing the necessary
relationship of parts to the whole as a system, and one that ultimately
is “bottom-up” rather than “top-down”, is a contemporary systems-biology
approach. The causation is not circular as might be
supposed—“developmental systems theory” posits circularity, but the
theory fails through confounding development and evolution. [9] We
falsely intuit downward-causation for obvious reasons, and have less
trouble seeing upward-causation when we move away from the “conscious
mind” and culture to the sub-organismic “major evolutionary
transitions.”

Just as the application of a simple systems-biology perspective gives
us a better overall view of how the brain works, it similarly improves
our understanding of individual organisms vis-a-vis their social systems
and cultural products.

Richard Dawkins takes a similar line to Pinker, famously writing that
“we alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of the
selfish-replicators” [10]. Dawkins would consider himself merely the
“vehicle” for his genes, yet here he imagines he can drive off on some
novel trajectory without genes being at root the navigation. From his
own gene-centric theory, Dawkins would argue that the “vehicle” (or
“interactor”, as some term it) is not primary because it is not the
“replicator.” The counter to this view is, of course, that the
“vehicle”/”interactor” is the entity that is “visible” to selection. And
the chicken-and-egg issue of gene/organism is clouded by the recent
systems-biology understanding of the gene as the gene-protein-cell
complex. [11] But the gene-centric perspective is all-conquering in
“population genetics.”

This is the way we need to look at the gene. Not in a simplistic
abstract model of isolated genetic change at a snapshot in time within
an infinite-sized gene pool, but collectively within the reality of the
finite-sized, usually small reproductive group over time. This
really does bring the social group into biology: through selection
acting across different time-scales enabling the evolution of “policing”
mechanisms against “selfish” traits, in what is termed “lineage
selection.”

Leonard Nunney writes:

Lineage selection does not alter the
fitness relationships of the traits; instead, it exploits variation in
the genetic architecture of lineages to minimize the occurrence of the
trait that is advantageous in the short term but disadvantageous in the
long term. … Lineage selection reduces the likelihood of cheating over
the long term provided lineages that give rise to cheats at a low
frequency are more successful over the long term than are lineages that
give rise to cheats at a high frequency.[12]

The evolving of “policing” of “selfish” traits in this manner
potentially could become so complete that all selection at the level of
the individual ceases, and selection changes from within- to
between-group, [13] so that we get group-selection as it is properly
defined [14], as happened to create the “major evolutionary
transitions.” [15] But as for the particular “particle”-”collective”
relationship of organisms to the social group, this is extremely rare.
It is thought that only eusocial insect species—and only one or two even
of these—could fit the bill. In social systems, almost always selection
operates on the organismic level to produce adaptation that is
considered to be at most a “cross-level by-product” [16]. There is no
“super-organism” in higher-animals.

So it is that in studying even complex multi-tiered nested sociality
in higher animals, Dawn Kitchen & Craig Packer [17] conclude:
“Finally, we could find no compelling evidence that a vertebrate social
system ever exceeds the sum of its parts … The most elaborate social
systems … only require an ability to recognise a large number of
individuals (rather than any form of group-level cognition).” … we see
no reason to invoke anything beyond a simple set of individual decision
rules.”

They see no such thing as “group mind.” Its absence is very apparent
in computer modelling of dominance hierarchy formation, [18] which
occurs by self-organisation given nothing more than the shared neural
capacity of individuals to process what are known as “winner” and/or
“loser” effects—the biasing of likelihood to contest in future based on
the outcome of previous contests.

The upshot is that in higher animals generally, not just for humans,
there is no supra-individual entity, let alone an autonomous one. The
notion that culture is “above” biology looks terminally ill from
whichever angle you look.

The sort of paucity of understanding exhibited by
Dawkins/Pinker/Dennett reaches its apotheosis in “niche-construction”:
[19] the recent theory that culture is a niche we create that becomes
the major locus of selection pressure on the human genome—and,
supposedly, a new form of selection to boot. This is held to explain the
considerable recent evolution of human genes, [20] much of which is
expressed within the brain. But rather than being the result of
selection pressure from any human-created “niche,” this is likely the
result of sexual selection. It is axiomatic in biology that rapid
selection is caused by sexual rather than natural selection, and human
higher cognition surely is under inexorable selection pressure to
further integrate in the service of producing art and good conversation
for courtship purposes. This is the basis of Geoffrey Miller’s “mating
intelligence” theory: [21] that integrated higher-cognition is the
perfect basis of signalling male mate-value given the susceptibility of
the highly complex inter-related genetic coding involved to produce
non-optimal or dysfunctionality (as in schizophrenia [22]).

“Niche-construction” theory is also a profound failure to comprehend
basic information theory, as Tom Dickins has outlined. [23] The brain
receives as input only that which it has been specifically prepared to
look for. Inasmuch as it responds to environmental variability, this is
contingent according to presets that have evolved in anticipation. The
brain imposes models on the environment to suit its purposes; it is not
the case that the environment somehow imposes itself on the brain.

Furthermore, Dickins shows that “niche-construction” theory is
nothing less than a failure to understand the rudiments of contemporary
evolution theory itself, in its positing a new form of selection that is
in fact simply a re-statement of natural selection. And Dawkins points
out [24]—with the full backing of the European Science Foundation
[25]—that the theory is simply a re-statement of his long-held notion of
“the extended phenotype.”[26]

The emptiness of “niche construction” theory is shown by its
inapplicability. Attempts to find support for it in contradicting the
tenet of “adaptive lag” (the oft cited point that the human genome has
not had sufficient time to significantly evolve since the Pleistocene)
end in the sole regularly cited adaptation of the very minor
physiological change that extends lactose tolerance from infancy into
adulthood. No adaptation that in any way significantly changes human
psychology has even been suggested. Evidently the scaling up of social
group size has not required any psychological adaptation that was not
already present. [This is hardly unexpected given that the key ability
to form nested hierarchy is phylogenetically quite ancient, being
exhibited by Cetaceans.]

“Niche-construction” theory is not only a mess of theoretical
wrong-headedness, but it is in dire need of a reason as to why it was
ever formulated.

Any view, such as “niche-construction,” of the supposed primacy of
culture, contradicts the mature “bottom-up” system understanding
provided by systems-biology, in merely assuming downward-causation on no
basis other than the implicit acceptance of Durkheim’s groundless
assertion that there are irreducible “social facts,” when all the
evidence converges on culture being part of biology.

There is perhaps too much of a tendency within science to seek
consensus at the expense of the bold “kite-flying” needed to spur and
make real progress. We can see this in the often stifling peer review
process, and even at symposia to celebrate the extension of the
Darwinian revolution to the social sciences. Given our Western
ideological bent that Gray identifies—which is the root of the dead hand
of the post-modern [sic] imperative not to “privilege,” that
appears to extend to scientific paradigm—it is natural that we should
feel churlish not to attempt to build bridges with social scientists
recoiling from the impending subsummation of their disciplines under
biology. (We’ve seen the war in university anthropology departments as
ascendant biology has riven them into biological and cultural halves.)
But biological/ evolutionary approaches can’t be in bed with the old
“top-down” paradigms of the social sciences, amounting as they do to
little more than repositories of tired ideology. They are expressions of
some of the very distortions of cognition and behaviour that form
evidence for adaptation that biological/ evolutionary models cite.

To a future of a lead from biology / evolution theory in all
disciplines involved in the study of culture that currently work
“top-down,” we might all raise our glasses, toasting “bottoms-up!”

References

[1] Wilson EO (1978) On Human Nature. Penguin

[2] Dennett DC (2003) Freedom Evolves. Penguin

[3] Pinker S (2003) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Penguin

[4] Gray J (2007) Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. Allen Lane

[5] Bedau MA & Humphreys P (2008) Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science. MIT Press

[6.] Pinker S (1997) How the Mind Works. WW Norton & Co

[7] Baumeister RF (2007) Is there anything good about men? American
Psychological Association, invited address.
www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

[8.] Noble D (2008) The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes. Oxford University Press

[9] Pradeu T (2009) Organism in Developmental Systems Theory (DST),
PhilSci Archive http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00004523/

[10] Dawkins R (1976) The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press

[11] Noble D (2008) Genes and causation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 366

[12] Nunney L (1999) Lineage selection: natural selection for long-term benefit. In Keller, ed

(1999) Levels of Selection in Evolution. Princeton University Press

[13] Gardner A & Grafen A (2009) Capturing the superorganism: A formal theory of group adaptation. Journal of Evolutionary Biology

[14] Okasha S (2008) Evolution and the Levels of Selection. Oxford University Press

[15] Maynard Smith J & Szathmary E (1995) The Major Transitions in Evolution. Oxford University Press

[16] Okasha ibid

[17] Kitchen DM & Packer C (1999) Complexity in vertebrate societies. In Keller (see next reference)

[18] Hemelrijk CK (2000) Social phenomena emerging by
self-organisation in a competitive virtual world (‘DomWorld’).
University of Zurich. Published online at http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/ailab/projects/collective/hemelrijkCELE2000.pdf

[19] Laland KN, Kendal JR & Brown GR (2007) The niche
construction perspective: Implications for evolution and human
behaviour. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 5

[20] Laland KN (2009) Personal communication.

[21] Geher G, Miller GF & Murphy J (2007) Introduction: The
origins and nature of mating intelligence. In Geher & Miller (eds) Mating Intelligence: Sex, Relationships, and the Mind’s Reproductive System. Psychology Press

[22] Shaner N, Miller G & Minitz J (2006) Mental Disorders as
Catastrophic Failures of Mating Intelligence. In Geher & Miller
(eds) Mating Intelligence: Sex, Relationships, and the Mind’s Reproductive System. Psychology Press

[23] Dickins TE & Dickins JA (2008) Mother nature’s tolerant
ways: Why non-genetic inheritance has nothing to do with evolution New
Ideas in Psychology 26; Dickins TE (2005) On the Aims of Evolutionary
Theory. A book review of Odling-Smee JJ, Laland KN. & Feldman MW
(2003) Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Evolutionary Psychology 2005 3 human-nature.com/ep

[24] Dawkins R (2004) Extended Phenotype—But Not Too Extended. A Reply to Laland, Turner and Jablonka. Biology & Philosophy v19n3

[25] European Science Foundation (2008) The New Role of the Extended
Phenotype in Evolutionary Biology. An ESF Explanatory Workshop,
Copenhagen, Denmark, 2-5 November.

[26] Dawkins R (1989) The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Oxford Paperbacks

 

 

[Formelyknown]

Yawn. Biological determimist was debunked.

http://www.psychohistory.com/originsofwar/01_killermotherland.html

 

[TronCat]

 

Yawn. Biological determimist was debunked.

http://www.psychohistory.com/originsofwar/01_killermotherland.html

 

 

You're embarrassing. At least cite some actual scientific articles and studies.

 

[Nick Clark]

Then why does therapy (external stimuli in the form of language, the most integral component of culture) alter brain mass and function in individiduals with an OCD diagnosis? This is but one example of epigenetics:

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18718575?ordinalpos=9&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

 

and another:

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110121144007.htm