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    Cultural Anthropologist Erickson going after Pinker's "The Blank Slate," and biological explanations of culture in toto
    By Ken Myron | November 11th 2010 09:45 AM | 8 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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    About Ken

    Anthropology by birth, cognitive ethology by grandiose pretense. I am a researcher specializing in prosimian behaviour, ethology, and the genetic...

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    From Neuroanthropology blog









    Review article Tunnel vision







    Pinker, Steven. 2002. The blank slate: the modern denial of human nature.



    London: Penguin. 509 pp.













    The gap between sociocultural anthropology and biological/physical anthropology is deep, but fairly recent. In the 1870s, Tylor enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the Darwinists; he was inspired by, and in turn inspired, Darwin himself. Later generations also engaged in respectful dialogue until, roughly, the end of the Second World War.















    After the war, biological approaches to human nature and culture were discredited in public life, only to reemerge with a string of popular books by the likes of Desmond Morris and Lionel Tiger, culminating in the last chapter of E. O.Wilson’s scholarly work Sociobiology (Wilson 1975), where the great entomologist pleads for a reintegration of the social sciences into the mother science, that is to say biology.





    The relationship between sociocultural anthropologists and some evolutionary biologists (who we maycall neo-Darwinists) has been tense and occasionally hostile since then.





    In the following essay, ‘The growth of culture and the evolution of the mind’ (Geertz 1973b), Geertz develops a perspective on the evolution of mind. He begins with the familiar contrast of freedom versus determinism, where he approvingly quotes Ryle,who says that it is rubbish to posit the two as opposites, since a golfer can perfectly well obey the laws of ballistics, the rules of golf and play with elegance (57). It occurs to me that Steven Pinker could have said that. (In fact, E.O. Wilson once did.)



    Geertz then elaborates on the view of human evolution also presented in the previous essay: culture began, embryonically, already with proto-humans millions of years ago, whose brains were a third the size of ours. Through mutual reinforcement – culture contributed to the growth of the cortex (presumably through changing the circumstances of natural selection) and vice versa – and rendered us flexible and generally endowed. ‘Though it is apparently true enough that the invention of the airplane led to no visible bodily changes, no alterations of (innate) mental capacity, this was not necessarily the case for the pebble tool or the crude chopper, in whose wake seems to have come not onlymore erect stature, reduced dentition, and a more thumb-dominated hand, but the expansion of the human brain to its present size’ (67). Finally: ‘In fact, this type of reciprocally creative relationship between somatic and extrasomatic phenomena seems to have been of crucial significance during the whole of the primate advance’ (68) and ‘The human brain is thoroughly dependent upon cultural resources for its very operation; and those resources are, consequently, not adjuncts to, but constituents of, mental activity’ (76).





    Put differently, there is no way of being human apart from the culturally specific ones. The question is, where does this view depart from that of Pinker? "









    Download the whole review:



    Wednesday Round Up #128



    By neuroanth



    Posted: November 10, 2010



    http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2010/11/10/wednesday-round-up-128/











    C! 2007 European Association of Social Anthropologists.






    Comments

    Gerhard Adam
    ‘Though it is apparently true enough that the invention of the airplane led to no visible bodily changes, no alterations of (innate) mental capacity, this was not necessarily the case for the pebble tool or the crude chopper, in whose wake seems to have come not only more erect stature, reduced dentition, and a more thumb-dominated hand, but the expansion of the human brain to its present size’
    This is a quantum leap in explaining causation that isn't supported by the evidence.  Humans are clearly not the only tool-using animals, so it begs the question of which came first.  Isn't it equally plausible that a genetic mutation resulted in a larger brain which gave rise to more significant tool development?  This is the fundamental problem with such stories, because they might be true, but there is nothing in the evidence that requires they be true, since alternative mechanisms could've given rise to the same results.
    Gerhard Adam | 11/12/10 | 15:22 PM
    KenCog
    I do disagree with Erickson, however I think there is a large distinction to be drawn between Macaques washing roots/P. Paniscus digging with sticks for grubs and human-toolmaking, as we have not made any observations of primates innovating to improve their tools. I believe the buzzword is "cumulative culture."
    Ken Myron | 11/12/10 | 19:05 PM
    Gerhard Adam
    Yes, there's a distinction now, but there's no reason to believe that early human tool-makers/users were any different.  So to conclude that it was the tools that gave rise to human brain development would also require explaining why a similar transition hasn't occurred in other tool users.
    Gerhard Adam | 11/12/10 | 19:13 PM
    KenCog
    Agreed; i think it is altogether problematic, this magic moment pursuit. Darwin himself said it would be nearly impossible to fix on a time when there appeared a creature you could call "man." Evolution is such an algorithmically complex mechanism (and tautology, at that), and cultural evoluition, inasfar as modeling it, compounds that complexity. Whatever happened that seems to have made of homo sapiens a singulalry unique species, it was a coalescence of suited factors, not a single selective influence sublimating humans to a conceptual existence.
    Ken Myron | 11/12/10 | 22:34 PM
    Gerhard Adam
    I also think that in our pursuit of natural selection we overlook the small, but finite possibility that a beneficial mutation could occur that triggers a series of events that leads to radical divergence of a species.  In other words, we tend to view selection operating on specific problems (i.e. running faster, etc.), but rarely consider that evolution can also occur in the absence of a selection pressure (especially in a relatively small population).  It is precisely such a shift that could've given rise to human intelligence and may have nothing to do with natural selection in a purely competitive sense.
    Gerhard Adam | 11/12/10 | 23:44 PM
    KenCog
    Perhaps; I'm not a dogmatist, but I don't think human intelligence is much of a mystery. I do think random mutations could have happened early in speciation, perhaps at a subspecific level of a segregated population. But it makes sense to me that such a prominent trait could be assumed to have been adaptive. A mind which could bypass direct learning strategies (i.e., trying things out) through non-imitative means would have a fitness advantage in the drastic climate variation at the end of the pleistocene/ beginning of the holocene, in coincidence with the emergence of culture in artifact associated with sapiens' appearance. A non-functional trait, like the crossing over of the spinal cord near the brain stem, something like that, seems more likely to be a wild card winner, as it is both inexplicable and ineffectual.
    Ken Myron | 11/13/10 | 00:15 AM
    Gerhard Adam
    My problem with the adaptive perspective is that it doesn't seem to have happened more than just once.  Clearly if there were selection pressures that could give rise to something like human intelligence we would see more than one species displaying it.

    It is this that leads me to believe that intelligence is an anomaly.  There is no question that it conveys an advantage, but it also carries with it some significant liabilities, so the jury's still out on whether it will prove to be successful in long-term evolutionary terms.  Humans haven't been around nearly long enough to make such a claim.
    Gerhard Adam | 11/14/10 | 19:45 PM
    KenCog
    Something need not be adaptive in perpetuity to have been adaptive, nor does an adaptation need to be free of instances of maladaptive byproducts. It's also far from clear that humans are the only species to have evolved our level of intelligence, merely our expression of it. There are many other intelligent species that also have singularly unique manifestations of high intelligence: dolphins, bonobos, etc. Our unique adaptation of symbolic intelligence is what defines our speciation, so it seems pretty reasonable that we would be alone in having it. I think this is another tautological observation.
    Ken Myron | 11/15/10 | 09:30 AM