AN ARGUMENT FOR A SOCIOBIOLOGICAL APPROACH

Dr. Tom Arcaro, Professor of Sociology, and Chrissy Kilgariff,  Student

Elon University, Elon, NC 27244

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Humanist Sociology held October 11, 2002 in Madison, Wisconsin

“Openness to the humanistic scope of sociology further implies an ongoing communication with other disciplines that are vitally concerned with exploring the human condition.”

                         -Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology (p. 168)

Reflexive Statements

[Arcaro]  I am currently teaching a course called “Cross-Cultural Encounters” and am using as my text Grindall and Salamone’s Bridges to Humanity (1995).  This book is a collection of essays by anthropologists in which they tell stories about some of their field experiences. Most of the essays are more poetry than prose; they are lyrical statements of self discovery.  Here are the final lines from Jeanne Simonelli’s offering on her fieldwork with the Navajos near Canyon de Chelly:

“The legacy of the experience called fieldwork is change, subtle and blatant.  Its challenge is not just to see and know other people, but to see ourselves in the reflecting pool of their realities; in the company of men and women, to learn what it is to be human. (p. 212; emphasis added).”

I have been on a career-long quest to learn what it is to be human, and this essay represents my latest “progress report” doing fieldwork among that most perplexing species, us.  For the past 20-plus years I have proceeded on the assumption that in order to be a proper humanist I must know what being human means on all levels and from all perspectives. Like Berger, I believe that being a humanist demands communication with other disciplines, and I have found myself reading more and more about the human condition from non-sociologically trained scholars.  May our essay on the topic of sociobiology add to the struggle to create a more just world, at least in some small way.

[Kilgariff]  My journey with answering the question "what does being human mean?" began very naively with a course last winter term.  Perhaps my prurient interests in Jared Diamond’s Why Sex is Fun? and Neese and Williams’ Why We Get Sick fueled my enthusiasm and curiosity for a nonanthropocentric view of human behavior.   In the brief time frame of the course, I found myself making a transition from a traditional social science model of human behavior to a more humanistic understanding of the social world.  The months that have followed have been filled with reading and research, and my attempt to answer the question “what does being human mean?”  In my quest to understand the theory and make sense of the growing body of literature on sociobiology, I have found myself overwhelmed by the need for cross-disciplinary research in human behavior and the lack of support within the field of sociology itself.  The leading writers in sociobiological theory are, ironically, not sociologists, but instead evolutionary psychologists and biologists.  This essay is a necessary contribution from the field of sociology.

Overview

The observation that sociological theory is in crisis is not new. Indeed, should there be a unity of theoretical grounding in our discipline (and within humanist sociology)?  Many would argue that our eclectic approach is healthy, vital and stimulating.  Others might point out that at base, we really can’t offer much to the larger world as a discipline since we can’t even agree among ourselves about basic ontological, epistemological and, hence, methodological questions.  Our essay argues that sociology can learn much from current research in biology and evolutionary psychology, and that these approaches blend well with other more “mainstream” theoretical paradigms in sociological theory.  We agree with Sanderson’s (2001) assessment that a unified sociological theory is both desirable and possible, and this synthesis leads to a “Darwinian conflict perspective” which is consistent with much of what we understand to be humanistic sociology.  Can Al and Betty Lee (AHS co-founders along with Chuck Flynn) see eye to eye with Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin?  Can there be a humanistic sociobiology?  In short, our answer is “yes;” the struggle for a more just planet must begin with a clear answer to the question “what does being human mean?”   

Introduction to the sociobiological perspective

Sociological theory has historically ignored looking at materials from the fields of biology and cognitive psychology when attempting to formulate answers to the question “what does being human mean?”  The aim of this paper is to encourage all sociologists and, most appropriately, humanistic sociologists to begin with the basic fact that humans are just one of countless other species that inhabit this planet.  We need to proceed with a decidedly nonanthropocentric idea—an idea that humans are products of evolutionary forces that need to be examined in order to more fully understand human nature.  Our major premise can be summed up by Sanderson:

“If sociologists continue to deny the importance of biology, within twenty years or so, by which time the evidence for biology will have become much more massive, they are going to look increasingly foolish both within the academy and to the larger educated public.  They will risk becoming seriously marginalized, if not destroyed, as a discipline.”  (p. 137)

Our effectiveness as agents of positive social change, i.e., as humanists, will be depleted if we do become “marginalized.”   It is our increasingly important responsibility as humanists to at least understand the perspective of sociobiology. 

The political climate when E. O. Wilson first published Sociobiology (1975) perhaps made it inevitable that this perspective would be thought of as a justification for racist, classist, and sexist thinking and behavior.  Although we know that much of what we discuss below may seem non-humanistic, we hope is that this paper doesn’t receive the same type of reception that Wilson got at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings in 1978 when a pitcher of ice water was dumped over his head as he was presenting.  Indeed, our main goal here is to invite a more open discussion of a “Darwinian conflict theory” and destigmatize what we feel is a logical and fruitful approach.

A short review of some relevant literature

In Triumph of Sociobiology (2001) John Alcock, an animal behavior researcher, presents an up- to-date review and response to the most common criticisms of sociobiology. His effort is aimed at a general audience and is well presented.  Below is his list of major misconceptions (each corresponding to a chapter or section in the book):

·        “Sociobiology is a novel and idiosyncratic theory of E.O. Wilson

·        Sociobiology is primarily concerned with human behavior

·        Sociobiology deals with the evolution of traits that benefit the species

·        Sociobiology is a reductionist discipline based on the proposition that some behavioral traits are genetically determined

·        Sociobiology makes use of capricious and selective comparisons between human behavior and that of other animals

·        Sociobiology is a purely speculative endeavor, specializing in the production of untested, and untestable, just-so stories

·        Sociobiology cannot account for learned behavior of human cultural traditions, only rigid instincts

·        Sociobiology is a discipline that, by labeling certain actions as “natural” or “evolved”, makes it impossible to justify all manner of unpleasant human behavior” (Alcock 2001:5)

The sociologist Stephen Sanderson (The Evolution of Human Sociality, 2001) provides us with a more sociological basis for these responses, and is written with academic sociologists in mind.  Other more philosophical defenses come from people like Daniel Dennett who, in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), provides excellent justification for sociobiological theory.  Dennett even goes as far as to defend and support the very controversial meme theory (see Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976, for the original statement of the idea and which was expanded on in elaborate detail in Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine, 1999).  Other support for the sociobiological approach comes from the field of medicine.  Neese and Williams argue in Why We Get Sick (1994) that better medicine can be practiced by those who understand and use their knowledge of the evolutionary bases for human physiology and pathology. A wide range of disciplinary approaches can be found in the excellent series of books developed by the Darwin @LSE Programme at the London School of Economics (published by Yale University Press). Topics covered in this series include gender, agriculture, genetics, the “glass ceiling,” and child abuse. For our purposes the most relevant book in this series is Peter Singer’s A Darwinian Left:  Politics, Evolution and Cooperation (1999).  We make mention of his book below.

A review of some of the current texts on contemporary sociological theory yields an interesting mix.  Most theory texts totally ignore sociobiology, but there are a few that include chapter length treatments.  Both Wallace and Wolf (1999) and Turner (2003) make an effort to present the basic perspective, but each falls short in terms of reviewing the current literature generated by non-sociologists or anthropologists, and both are also weak in separating out ideas concerning social and biological evolution.  

Our conception of where humanistic theory should start: rejecting the SSSM

One way to understand the sociobiological perspective is to see it as a critique of the Standard Social Science Model.  We will let the authors who popularized this phrase elaborate:

“According to this orthodoxy [the SSSM], all of the specific content of the human mind originally derives from the "outside" -- from the environment and the social world -- and the evolved architecture of the mind consists solely or predominantly of a small number of general purpose mechanisms that are content-independent, and which sail under names such as ‘learning,’ ‘induction,’ ‘intelligence,’ ‘imitation,’ ‘rationality,’ ‘the capacity for culture,’ or simply ‘culture.”’

They go on to say,

“The social world organizes and injects meaning into individual minds, but our universal human psychological architecture has no distinctive structure that organizes the social world or imbues it with characteristic meanings. According to this familiar view -- what we have elsewhere called the Standard Social Science Model -- the contents of human minds are primarily (or entirely) free social constructions, and the social sciences are autonomous and disconnected from any evolutionary or psychological foundation (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992)."

What we propose is that the evolutionary /sociobiological questions should be raised first and then, when these forces are understood, move “out” from there to the more traditional psychological and cultural explanations.  Indeed, an understanding of sociobiology comes from a balance between biological, evolutionary, social and cultural influences.  Sociobiology is an understanding of the biological hard wiring of the body and mind, and recognizing how those influence our behavior.  Within Western academic thought there has always been at least an acknowledgement of an interplay between biology and social/cultural influences, however an increase in our anthropocentrism in the early 20th century led sociologists away from an understanding of humans as we relate to the rest of the animal kingdom, to humans as “super” beings.  In response to Spencer’s Social Darwinism and later Hitler’s misuse of evolutionary theory, and in a movement of proto-political correctness, the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) emerged and anthropocentric ideas of culture and society became the driving forces to understanding human behavior. 

The SSSM as an oversimplified explanation of human behavior is amply exemplified by Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) where she argued that temperamental differences between the sexes were culturally determined rather than innate.  She presents a case for the absolute malleability of the human temperament which, given much research in the past 20 years, just is not the case.  The SSSM makes anthropocentric assumptions that we are fundamentally different than other species at our core.  The truth is that we are not fundamentally removed from other animals in this world.  We have the same biological or physiological drives to eat, survive, and reproduce. 

One thing that is disturbing to people who adhere to the SSSM about the sociobiological model, is that it infers that human behavioral patterns are unchangeable; it implies that we are stuck with the problems of “human nature.”  If human nature is static then we are stuck with racism, sexism and extreme inequality. Although sociobiologists (including us) would argue that it is impossible to change our specie’s inner core hard wiring, certainly we can change the “soft” wiring of the brain, i.e., the cultural pathways, which modify behavior in potentially more humanistic ways.  Writers like Singer and Dennett—and most other sociobiologists—allow for the fact that certainly if the hardwiring of the brain cannot be changed, the “soft wiring” can be changed; we can change social structures. 

Sociobiology is a starting point, not replacing any other level of explanation, but rather a necessary addition to the understanding to what it means to be human.  We suggest that all equations of explanation—human condition X is influenced by a combination of all kinds of factors—every equation in this form should include as its first variable the sociobiological.  The quest to understand human behavior and hence to change society to a more progressive state needs to be started from the “inside” out.

So if we are not born tabula rasa, what are we?  Is it possible that we are born with a complex array of computational modules in the brain?  Here is what Steven Pinker (1994) has to say about language in his book The Language Instinct:

“Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture. [it] is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works.  Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.  Language is a complex, specialize skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.  For these reasons some cognitive scientists have described language as …a computational model.” (p.18)

Cognitive psychologists disagree on the number and exact nature of the computational modules in the human brain, but they are all quite certain that we do indeed come “hardwired” to a certain extent.  Where do these modules come from?  This is the question we will address next.

Understanding the EEA as an additional beginning point

Most adult Americans have many fillings in their teeth from a lifetime of visits to the dentist.  Interestingly, when you go to the National Museum of Natural History and look at arrays of human skulls –and teeth- of the prehistoric peoples you see no (or certainly very rare) evidence of dental cavities.  How can this be?  There were no dentists then, nor even fluoridated water or modern tooth brushes back when these people lived, so how did they manage to have such good dental health?  The answer is quite simple:  modern humans eat a diet radically unlike that of prehistoric humans, and this diet gives rise to many problems including not just tooth decay but also difficulties with unerupted “wisdom” teeth.  Understanding the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (or EEA) is the only way we can explain, for example, tooth decay. 

Briefly defined, the EEA is the environment in which a species evolved.  The assumption is quite straightforward:  we humans are products of evolutionary design, and that design was geared toward survival in the savannahs of Africa.  Have we evolved in the last 10,000 (or even 100,000) years?  Externally, no.  Has there been evolutionary change in the human brain during that time period?  There is no way to know for sure the answer to this question, but certainly, given the time scale in which evolutionary changes occur, it is safe to say that we have not evolved in the last 5000 years.  (This assumes that there is no Lamarkian “passing on acquired traits” evolution happening.)  We explore this idea further below.

Some further methodological/philosophical implications

We used to define epistemology as a subfield of philosophy (the standard position in most scholar’s minds), but in the last five years we have seen it as being more a subfield of neurology and cognitive psychology. This transition has moved us also from being ontological pluralists to being monists; certainly much research in the past five years has indicated that much (all?) that we once thought in another level of existence is explainable in terms of brain and body functioning (see current research on brain and religion, for example). Books by the likes of Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1999), Antonio Damasio (Descartes Error, 1994 and The Feeling of What Happens, 1999), Ramachandran (Phantoms in the Brain, 1999), Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct, 1994 and How the Mind Works, 1997), Candace Pert (Molecules of Emotion, 1997), and Alison Jolly (Lucy’s Legacy, 1999) have moved me [Arcaro] forward from where I was a few years ago when I presented a paper on epistemology. As I pointed out in that paper, I am doing only what Erich Fromm (The Sane Society, 1955) argued was the responsibility of a humanistic sociologist, namely trying to understand what basic human needs are.

What does all of this mean for the practice of humanistic sociology?

In the final section of this paper we discuss several implications of the sociobiological approach.  

A general model of human consciousness and behavior

Much of what we say about evolutionary psychology is based on a somewhat counterintuitive (especially for academics) model of thought and behavior. Miles Richardson wrote this many years ago (1976), and we think he was on to something.  He said, “Instead of thinking and then proceeding to act, we act and then proceed to explain (see his essay Culture and the Struggle to be Human).”   He was pointing out the same thing that Freud and others had argued for a long time, namely, that the vast majority of what happens in the brain is unavailable to the conscious mind yet directs our behavior.  We are not, for the most part, in control of how our mind functions. This point merits restatement:  Humans, as a species, have the capacity to be intellect-driven, especially for short periods of time.  However, it is not our reasoning and thinking that drives our behavior most of the time.  In fact, most of the time humans act and then think, instead of the thinking through their actions and behaviors.  It is a common assumption that humans think before we speak or act, but from a sociobiological perspective, humans spend most of our time rationalizing and trying to understand our actions. 

A brief understanding of the conscious and subconscious mind reveals that the vast majority of what is going on in our brains is occurring on the subconscious level.  What we consciously think and how we act is only a small portion of what is actually going on in our minds.  Just as animals have instincts that propel them to build nests or fly south for the winter, humans have their own instincts and biological motivations.  Much of the subconscious is preprogrammed through genetic evolution.  The implication of this position is that we are not as rational or “in control” of ourselves as we give ourselves credit for.  It is possible, though, through understanding more clearly the biological and evolutionary bases of our behavior we can learn to think and then act more often than the reverse.

Know thyself?

Given the model of mind we’re suggesting, or rather how the brain functions, the disturbing conclusion that we don’t know what goes on in our mind arises (as pointed out above).  We can’t control what we think consciously sometimes, and certainly unconscious processes are predominate in the mind.  We simply don’t know what’s in there.  Indeed, “Both the process of thought and its content [emphasis in original] are not directly accessible to awareness.” (Crick and Koch, 2000). Yet the Buddhist and the traditional SSSM model of mental health advises us “to look within, to know thyself.”  The standard assumption is that with enough introspection and reflection, you can know yourself. 

Our reading of Damasio, Sacks, Pinker, Crick and Koch (and others) would indicate quite the opposite—an individual cannot know what’s going on in their brain.  Only an outsider can see accurately what that person is doing. (Perhaps –as they have told you- your significant other does know you better than you know yourself!) An individual acts and explains to her/himself what she/he did, but a second person can see those actions and offer an alternative explanations.  The point is that thorough and therapeutic self knowledge involves the help and feedback of others in a compassionate manner. 

On a more macro level the observation that self knowledge is made possible by the observations of others could not be any more relevant.  The United States as [mis]represented by President George Bush does not see itself as the rest of the world sees it.  We are making the assumption that we are our own best judge.  Can we learn about ourselves from the international press and from those living in different nations? Our answer would be clearly yes.   

Can we stay sane?

A wonderful short work discussing the dilemma concerning why we humans sometimes feel disconnected in our modern world is Robert Wright’s (Time 28, 1995, p. 50) essay "The Evolution of Despair: a new field of science” In this piece he examines the mismatch between our genetic makeup –evolved during the Pleistocene in our EEA--and the modern world, and concludes that the Unibomber may have been right.

"Whether burdened by an overwhelming flurry of daily commitments or stifled by a sense of social isolation (or, oddly, both); whether mired for hours in a sense of life’s pointlessness or beset for days by unresolved anxiety; whether deprived by long workweeks from quality time with offspring or drowning in quantity time with them – whatever the source of stress, we at times get the feeling that modern life isn’t what we were designed for (Wright, 1995).

Can the goal of having a mentally healthy population ever be achieved?  Just as we argued above that poor dental health is an outcome of mismatching our modern diet with teeth designed for coarser meals, poor mental health is a logical outcome of asking our brains to take in so much more data than we were ever designed to deal with.  The question is not ”why are people so mentally unstable now,” but rather “how can we change our social structure such that it as much as possible mirrors some of the basics of our earlier life?”  The effort to have more planned community neighborhoods where life is more communal makes much sense from the sociobiological perspective.

What goal should we set for ourselves in terms of mental health?  Fromm asks us to consider the possibility that we can never be chronically happy. Indeed, he points out that

“Just as a sensitive and alive person cannot avoid being sad, he cannot avoid being insecure.  The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself, is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity, without undue panic and fear.”  (Fromm 1955:174, emphasis in the original) 

To put it very bluntly, your genes do not care if you are happy or not, just that they get passed on to another generation.  We are not designed for maximum happiness, but for maximum survival.

Beauty, mate selection, and making babies

The fact that cross-culturally when there is an age difference between mates, for the male to be older (even significantly so) than the female, is easily understood from the sociobiological perspective.  The sociobiologists would note that a man's continued fertility into his later years (especially compared to female's menopausal cessation of fertility) is an obvious biological implication for gender-gap behavior.  Men seek younger women because they still have something to offer to the women. Females may be inseminated and pregnant for nine months and then have limited fertility by breast-feeding during infancy.  Male investment in the offspring is not required post-copulation.  In addition, males are able to father thousands of children in the course of the year, whereas women are able to mother one child every year or two at most. Extended incubation period and the lengthy period of infant dependency on the mother have led to different reproductive strategies in males and females.  Different mate selection strategies have emerged as a result of the "battle of the sexes."  Males look for a female that can adequately care for the offspring through physical (beauty and health) and emotional investment.  Women on the other hand, look for a man with good genes and good resources.  Certainly this is evident in our current standards of mate selection--women seek males with good looks, good health and good jobs and in return, men seek women with reproductive fitness (based on definitions of health and beauty) and the ability to adequately raise children. 

That which is defined as beautiful is, when you look at it more closely, current health, youth, and overall good genes.  Symmetry in the face is found to be appealing as is healthy hair and clear eyes. Beauty is, in women, those qualities which are seen as at base indicators of good health and potential reproductive success.  Females look for in men, by comparison, not only good genes, but skill in acquiring resources, and men tend to get better at this skill as they age.

Why have children?  There’s no logical reason to have children—they are expensive, time consuming, and in general a chronic drain on resources.  From the SSSM, why do people have children?  The answer given is typically tautological, meaning people have children because it’s traditional; they have children because that is what their culture teaches them.  The sociobiological explanation is quite simple:  that’s what we are designed to do. We are ultimately “gene machines;” we are here to pass on our genes from one generation to the next.  It is no wonder we worry about who (and when) our children will marry because their reproductive future is very relevant to our “name” i.e., genes, getting passed on. 

Women in the workplace

If we set a goal, a humanistic goal, to have women serve in 50% of top management roles (as CEO’s or in the House and Senate, for example) the SSSM would say that it is possible if we eliminate sexism.  The sociobiological approach would lead us to the conclusion that this kind of parity is not likely—women want different things from life than men, and most of these differences go back to mate selection.  Men are interested in women who are good nurturers, and who can not only produce offspring but care for them adequately.  Men are going to seek different things in women than what women seek in men.  In fact, it is women who determine—because of their sexual selection—that men will seek power.  Men seek power because this kind of activity will raise their chances for gaining a mate.  As humanists we should work actively to rid the world of sexism, but to set up as the end goal a world where men and women share equally positions of power is unreasonable.  Rather, we would argue that as humanists we need to change is the way that we think about family and career.  We often hear the phrase: “Women are saddled with childcare.”  This statement infers that there is a greater purpose in life than family and love.  One could argue that family, love and childcare are the best purposes in life, certainly from the humanist perspective.  The assumption that women must work and gain power in order to be successful is a false one; it assumes that the real goals in life are those of capitalistic nature: money, career, and material possession.   

Child Development

An understanding of basic biological differences in little girls and little boys should be considered during the developmental stages in children.  Evidence suggests that little boys are slower developmentally than little girls in several dimensions.  Girls acquire language earlier, they learn to read and write more quickly, and they develop spatial skills (walking) at an earlier age.  This evidence runs counter-culture—against the idea that little boys are pushed more to walk, talk and learn faster.  Childcare programs and parents could certainly benefit from this knowledge by understanding the differences in developmental stages in children.             

A good example of child development gone wrong is the “McDonald’s culture” in America.  In addition to brain development during childhood, children also develop food preferences and cravings.   On our tongues, we have taste buds which respond to sweet, salty, bitter, etc.  This is an evolutionary mechanism to desire foods that will be most beneficial for the body.  Chocolate, for example, is sweet, fatty, and high in calories.  Our bodies biologically crave this type of food because it has survival benefits.  When children are exposed to McDonald’s french fries, a food high in fat and calories, their brains and tongues become literally and biologically hooked.  Weekly trips to McDonald’s are predisposing children to a physical craving and attachment to the food, making them literally customers for life.  Food preferences are a good example of “soft wiring” that goes on in the human brain.  We will like to eat that which we grow up with and, as a culture, we need to be more concerned with both the adverse and beneficial results of the foods we serve to our children.  It is important to understand the implications on children in their early development.  (Read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation [2001:122] for a good discussion concerning “why the fries taste good.”) 

Stepfamily abuse

The story of Cinderella is a popular fairy tale in Western culture.  The evil stepmother who marries into the family, brings with her two spoiled offspring, and abuses the beautiful stepdaughter.  The unequal treatment given to Cinderella by her stepmother is an example of her human desire to make conditions best for her own offspring.  The evil stepmother’s neglect of Cinderella is a response to her lack of genetic investment—she does not want to squander her resources on something not her own.  The story of Cinderella is more than simply a story; it is a reality for stepfamily situations that occurs across cultures.  Nearly every culture has some folk story with the theme of stepparent neglect and abuse. 

Stepchildren are 100 times more likely to experience abuse from a stepparent than are biological children (see Daly and Wilson 1998:28).  With this understanding and the overwhelming evidence that suggests that stepparents are more likely to abuse their stepchildren, where do we go from here?  The SSSM model of explanation for these data is weak, but by contrast the sociobiological model accounts for this alarming rate of stepparent abuse easily.  As humanists we can use this approach to understand these tragic phenomena better, and perhaps eventually use this knowledge in designing programs of prevention as a predictable and preventable indicator of abuse. 

Understanding Race and Warfare

Racism is a naturally occurring phenomenon in every world culture.  Using evolutionary theory, one can recognize how racism would be a desirable survival trait for early groups of people.  Those groups who were best able to identify the “others” were better capable of recognizing the enemy and were more successful in times of war and conflict.  Those “racist” cultures would survive more favorably than the others would and those ideas and that way of thinking would be perpetuated in the culture.  Sanderson tells us “Darwin himself saw ethnicity and ethnocentrism as evolutionary adaptations… [he] even made the connection between ethnocentrism and warfare explicit: In-group amity and out-group enmity go together as two sides of the very same coin.”  (p. 223)

As sociologists, we need to start with this understanding of racism as an evolutionary mechanism for survival; it is not an aberration, it is “natural.” Racism, once understood, can be “unlearned” as much of our culture is able to override our biology.  Singer warns, “Racism can be learned or unlearned, but racist demagogues hold their torches over highly flammable material.”  (p. 56)

Are there racial differences?  Within the medical profession, race is a biological reality.  Different races have developed in different regions of the world.  Within these different regions, the physical “racial” difference emerged as survival techniques.  For example, blacks developed sickle-cell anemia to survive malaria and dark melanin to avoid sunburn.  With this understanding, doctors can treat races differently.  In a recent New York Times article, Dr. Sally Satel recognized that “certain diseases and treatment responses cluster around ethnicity.”    Physicians can use race to understand how a certain person may be predisposed to certain diseases or may respond differently to certain medications.  Jerome Kassirer, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine says, “Rather than casting our net broadly, doctors can quickly focus on a problem by recognizing patterns that have clinical significance.” 

And what of war?  Are we destined –or more specifically- are males destined to kill each other in battles small and large until the end of time?  We are “wired” for violence (especially males with our higher levels of testosterone, but we are capable of imagining and creating peaceful social structures.  Robert Wright in Nonzero (2000) makes a wonderfully optimistic argument for how bright our future can be, despite our natures:

“Even today, for that matter, respect for people’s basic humanity- that is, viewing people as people, worthy of decent treatment- may not extend much further than practical considerations dictate. But practical considerations dictate a larger moral sweep now, because interdependence has grown further. You simply cannot do business with people while executing all their male citizens, and increasingly we do business with people everywhere. The growth of non-zero-sumness, a growth driven by technological change but rooted more fundamentally in human nature itself, has in this one basic and profound way improved the conduct of humans. In fully modern societies, people now acknowledge, in principle, at least, that other peoples are people, too.” (p.208)

He goes on to say

“Still, it is hard, after pondering the full sweep of history, to resist the conclusion that- in some important ways, at least- the world now stands at its moral zenith to date.” (p. 208)

When reading Wright’s Nonzero one gains a new appreciation for the concept of symbiogenesis popularized by the biologist Lynn Margulis.  Can we dream that the process of cooperative co-evolution of species (a “kinder, gentler” type of evolution) will become the norm in a world where species –and cultures- interact in increasingly close quarters?  The humanist sociobiologist does not see a future of war and violence as inevitable, but rather the real possibility that we will learn to construct a global social system that facilitates win-win scenarios both between and among species and cultures.

Politics

A good deal of research in sociobiology indicates that humans have been built by evolution to prefer authoritarian forms of government—that is parent-like leadership as opposed to a democratic form of government.  Even though Pericles championed democracy in his time, both Plato and Aristotle were disparaging of the idea.  Subsequent philosophers –and cognitive psychologists- have argued the same thing—namely that humans are predisposed to authoritarianism and have to be indoctrinated against this tendency and towards a democratic society.  In fact, leaders have a constant fight to nurture democracy in order to have a well-educated citizenry that has a commitment to civic engagement and social responsibility.  

This reality has direct implications for current political movement by our own government, where we seem to ethnocentrically assume that democracy is the preferred system of political organization.  We need to examine the premise that democracy is the best system for all and in fact even a natural system.   

Further along these lines if we look at the EEA, we know that humans are very capable of keeping track of reciprocal obligations to roughly 50-150 people.  But once the size gets beyond that, it takes work to have the abstract concept of treating people outside of ones groups; it takes time to nurture that abstract thought.  While it’s natural to be nice to your neighbors—our civility towards each other is easy to do—civility to some abstract other is much more difficult to conceptualize.  We cannot force democracy on everyone because it just doesn’t make sense—many cultures don’t have the ideological infrastructure that can nurture the counter-intuitive act of functioning in a democratic society. 

Conclusion: a humanistic sociobiology

A humanistic sociobiology has as its goal a thorough understanding of what it means to be human, and then actively using this understanding to help create a more just world.  A review of the literature in psychology, biology, medicine, religion, and other areas of inquiry related to human life reveal that these disciplines are more and more focusing on issues and topics that appear to be directly sociological in nature.  The thinkers in these areas are asking and answering (mainly for their colleagues but increasingly for the interested general public) basic sociological questions.  The research of these thinkers is (at least in subtle ways) impacting the direction of our local and national policies and practices and even our global culture.  These disciplines begin with the assumption that understanding human being must start with the premise that we are, ultimately, another species, a product of the process of evolution.  Do we need to reconsider our anthropocentric myopia which has led us to ignore our basic evolutionarily created nature? Perhaps yes, if only to be better able to understand and respond to the work of those in other fields.  But beyond that reason, pure logic dictates that we attempt to understand ourselves from the “inside out,” that is, first from the biological level.

Singer concludes his book

“In some ways, this is a sharply deflated vision of the left, its utopian ideas replaced by a coolly realistic view of what can be achieved.  That is, I think, the best we can do today—and it is still a much more positive view than that which many on the left have assumed to be implied in a Darwinian understanding of human nature.” 

We disagree with his tone; ours is not a “sharply deflated vision” but rather an exciting new beginning, one that has sociology join forces with all sciences toward a common vision of positive social change.  Our goal as humanist sociobiologists is to forge deeper, more productive bonds between those from all disciplines and act as leaders in the movement to use our knowledge for progressive ends.  We are free to design our own future.  Rejecting Singer’s near lament, we will end our essay on a more positive note:

“The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined.  In the gap between those words lies freedom.”--Matt Ridley Genome.