I guess I am accepting your offer of the last word here (I can’t really win, can I? I either walk away or I’m a bullying jerk), to try one more time to clarify what I’m saying. What I (and others) mean by culture is not something that overrides nature or biology, but something that provides a great deal of variation in meaning and significance on top of the base that biology allows for. I also don’t mean something hierarchical, where some people are closer to a Hobbesian state of nature and others are more “civilized.” I like some cultural values more than others. I think that they are “better” in terms of providing for more social justice and less suffering and I would prefer to live in a society that possesses them, but this is not a question of such cultural values being either more or less “natural.”

You are certainly right that no society has succeeded in eliminating either murder or violence more generally, and probably also correct that violent impulses are basic to the human condition. What culture has done is shape our understanding of the meaning of violence – under what circumstances it is acceptable, to what classes of people and by which classes of people, with what consequences. Some societies have held that killing one’s own slaves or killing foreigners was acceptable, while others not so much. Cultural understandings don’t eliminate killing, but they change when and how it might occur.

Finally on the article that you cite, I think you are misunderstanding Dr. Hauser’s argument (it is a strangely organized conference talk, so this is very understandable). On the point of biological variation, I read him as arguing not that different species don’t exist, but rather that the tremendous physical variation that occurs can mask the persistence of similar genetic mechanisms. Then on culture, yes he makes the statement that you quote, but it would seem to both endorse the importance of cultural variation and the possibility that that variation is made possible by a set of common mechanisms. Then he writes this:

“Chimps look much more like gorillas than they do like human beings, and yet at the level of genetic similarity chimpanzees cluster with humans and not gorillas. That said, if we leap now from the anatomical level and genetic levels to the psychological level, we are faced with a fundamental problem. If we take some of the towering intellectual achievements in our history (and even some of the less towering intellectual achievements), the gap between us and them is extraordinary; in fact I would say it is larger than the gap we see between gorillas and chimpanzees on the one side, and the humble beetle on the other. So we have to somehow come to grips with the fact that the genetic level of similarity is not accounting for the psychological variation and differences we see.”

Hauser, then, is arguing that the psychological differences, and consequent difference in terms of what each species has been able to produce, between humans and any other animals, are much greater than either genetic or biological differences. Hauser’s argument, along with Noam Chomsky, is that the thing that creates this unique variation for our species is our capacity for expressive language. Other scholars disagree, at least in regard to higher primates, but their disagreements are ones of degree rather than kind: humans possess a capacity for language, and thus for creating, elaborating and transmitting culture, that is fundamentally different from that possessed by any other species.

In the end it’s two separate questions. The same neural mechanisms allow for the possibility of and limits on cultural variation, but our experience of the world changes a great deal depending on which of those cultural variations we live within. In the moral experiment of the fat man and the train, that Hauser refers to, the common structure of moral reasoning, that people feel more than they can explain (or where their explanations seem to follow rather than precede the feeling), provides evidence of common neural mechanisms that underlie our moral thought. So far, so universal. But if one were to introduce other terms to the moral equation that Hauser is pursing, say varying the gender, age, class or social status of the individuals involved, I suspect that we would quickly run into differences in the way that the lives of these hypothetical individuals were valued based on differences in culturally defined concepts of personhood. If we step outside of the thought experiment, we don’t have to wonder, because people in fact do make different kinds of choices in regard to the relative value of human life, just as they do in the music that they enjoy listening to. Cultural variation, like biological variation, is only “illusory” to the extent that we presume it to indicate that cultures or organisms bear no relation to one another. On the other side, one could just as easily speak of the “illusion” of psychological similarity, to the extent that it presumed that common neural responses indicated that there is no difference in the ways that humans experience moral dilemmas or aesthetic expression.

You are of course free to continue to disagree with me and to consider the evolution of our species to be the only issue worth discussing or considering.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,2265446,00.html

I don’t often agree with Gray, who generally seems to think the world is on its way to hell in a handbasket. But he does here what good philosophers can be counted on to do well — expose the hidden assumptions and invalid reasoning of an opponent’s argument. And Dawkins, Hitchens, et al, have quite a lot needing exposure.

What in the hell am I talking about?

I did come here to learn, but I gave up long ago, probably before you were born, accepting things on blind faith. In my experience teachers I have encountered often used the dogmatic method. But I can tell that I have irritated you, so perhaps this post will be more palatable if I punctuate with question marks instead of periods. I will try.

Isn’t the distinction you are trying to make between “biological variation” and “genetic variation” simply a difference of convenience? Isn’t it simply a distinction used by researchers as a form of shorthand? Aren’t “biological variations” produced by evolution by natural selection? For example, a google search on “biological variation between species” produced:

“The Illusion of biological variation: a minimalist approach to the mind” an open talk and discussion by Marc D. Hauser.” The link is:

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~mnkylab/publications/recent/Hauser_IllusionBioVariation_SanSebastian.pdf

In the second paragraph of Mr. Hauser’s opening remarks he says,

“The topic that I want to talk about today falls under the title “The illusion of biological variation.” For those of you who have been staring at the image projected on the screen here, you may think that there is some kind of animation that is creating the motion. But that is a perceptual illusion: the image is completely static, with nothing moving at all, except that your visual system thinks it is. If you don’t believe me, focus on one of these concentric circles and look at the dot, and you will see that nothing is actually moving. Now, no matter how many times I tell you that the image is static, you won’t believe me — well, your visual system won’t believe me it can’t. Illusions are interesting because, no matter how aware we are of them, they simply won’t go away. Similarly, and by way of analogy, I will suggest today that much of the variation that we see in the natural world is in some sense an illusion because at a different level of granularity, there are some core, invariant mechanisms driving the variation.”

He goes on,

“The first point to make is that when we look upon the natural world, we immediately see extraordinary variation in animal forms, what looks like limitless variation, not just in size (from extremely small animals to immensely huge animals), but in shapes, material properties and so forth. Similarly, we see apparently limitless variation in the patterns of animal locomotion, including most noticeably, those observed in the air, on land and in the sea. Somebody raised a question earlier in the meeting about the immune system — again, a system with limitless variation in the kinds of responses that it generates to different kinds of problems in the environment. I want to call all of this observed variation, the “the illusion of biological variation.” It is an illusion, at least in part, because when biologists have looked deeply into the sources of variation in these different domains, as Cherniak’s talk illuminated this morning, we find something different — a common set of core mechanisms that generates the variation.”

At this point, aren’t you, Jpool, thinking, “Yes, but, these variations are not cultural or mental faculties, they belong to physical features of species not to their intellectual features?” Aren’t you already itching to show me the error of my ways? But you have already done that, and I don’t accept it. And neither does Mr. Hauser. He says,

“Thus, for example, it certainly appears to be the case that there is limitless cultural variation. Can we account for it by some simple, primitive mechanisms, and then use pruning as a mechanism for selecting among the possible, biologically given variants?”

Mr. Hauser then discusses language, morality, and music. Do you agree that at least one of these would be included in the concept of culture? I think his presentation is worth reading. Therein you will surely notice that he is saying that these things are part of our evolved natures – in effect they are evola, products of Evolution by Natural Selection. So the question is not if there are variations in culture, the question is are these variations free from Evolution by Natural Selection, are they some other force of nature? I think they are all produced by Evolution by Natural Selection because each and all of us are products of Evolution by Natural Selection. We are not products of culture, but we are products of biology.

If it were otherwise then we would be able, by means of culture, to stop forever the production of individuals who kill. When I raise this point the culturalists cannot explain it. They just wave it away as if it is not important. But it is important, isn’t it? And if these killers are not part of culture then they must be produced by evolution by natural selection, right? So how does the process work? Where along the way does culture control and produces people who do not kill, and where does evolution by natural selection control and produce killers?

Your defense of culture is not really a defense, is it? All you do is list a few things that have variations and claim that this proves how culture is not a part of Evolution by Natural Selection, even though I have already showed you that variation is the fundamental force driving Evolution by Natural Selection. So identifying more and more examples of variation only reinforces my point. You must have something more. “Biological variation,” to quote Mr. Hauser is an “illusion.’ So lists and illusions don’t prove a thing, do they?

But I grow weary. I promise that I will read your next comment, if you should make one, and I will not respond. You can have the last word, and that is exactly what you want, isn’t it?

I agree, the examples you gave are indeed silly, and it was unfair of you to try to put them in my mind or on my lips.

Of course I would be a different person if I had been born in China and raised by my Chinese parents – but that point has nothing to do with what I am saying. We must not forget that Evolution is about species, not about individuals. My actions as a Chinese boy or a Texas boy have no bearing on the survival of our species, but the actions of millions of boys, whether they are Chinese or Texan, might.

So we naturally try to make everything about our own individual position and identity, but that has nothing to do with the survival or our species. Culture is all about individual identity and it has nothing to do with our species’ survivability either.

The elevation of culture as a force outside the effects and power of Evolution by Natural Selection is shown to be false by one simple fact, among many simple facts, and that is that there are tyrants in all cultures. Defenders of culture will answer that those tyrants are just products of human nature (implying that they don’t belong to the culture) and they are right, but culture did not eliminate them. So I assert that very few cultures desire to produce tyrants, but they can do nothing about it. So all of our education, our arts, our science, and our culture cannot prevent the creation of tyrants. The best we can hope to do is control the “effects” of tyrants, but that is an old, old story beginning before the dawn of human history, back when Evolution by Natural Selection was the law of the jungle, and before it was banished by dreamers.

If culture is so important that is adds something to the survivability of our species I would like to have it shown to me. Even science, which I think is our highest human accomplishment, may have made it possible for many billions to live on our planet, but at the end of the day, there is no evidence whatsoever that the lifespan of our species as a whole has been increased. Will we be in 10,000 years?

So because culture cannot control the effects of Evolution by Natural Selection, it is still bound by that process. Unless and until culture can get control of Evolution by Natural Selection and manage it toward the accomplishment of species-wide goals it is still just another way of socializing and nothing more – evolutionarily speaking.

You said,

”We can and do argue about where biology stops and culture begins, but to argue that biology produces culture or that culture is reducible to biology is to ignore the tremendous variation in human thought and behavior that simply does not map onto biology.”

And you are being silly now. Individual variation has always been part of our species. It would be astonishing for it to be any other way, because variation is the driving force behind Evolution by Natural Selection. So you are endorsing evolution, not culture, when you make this claim. It is the interplay of these highly variable individuals, who were produced by Evolution by Natural Selection, that indeed produces culture. In fact, if this high degree of variation is not produced by Evolution by Natural Selection, then just where does it come from? Mr. Darwin claimed variation as the cornerstone of his Theory long ago; you just can’t take it away because you want it for your own theory.

In “Origin of Species…” Chapter I is titled, “Variation under Domestication,” with a subtitle of “Causes of Variability.” Chapter II is titled “Variation Under Nature,” and Chapter V is titled “Laws of Variation.” In addition I counted 400 uses of some form of “variation” or “vary” in the first 67 pages of his masterpiece. I quit because I was tired. So you have to do better than this. I agree with Mr. Darwin, a high degree of variation is to be expected in many species, but not all, the degree is itself variable. (Ain’t it wonderful?) Culture has no claim on variation of human thought; in fact culture is an effect of variation, not a cause. And if culture did not cause variation then what did? You know, and disapprove, my answer.

Really? Presumably, then, you think that northern Italians are biologically different and that explains why they don’t eat so much pasta. If you were raised in China, by Chinese parents (I’m presuming here that you were not), you must beilieve that you would be the exact same person, believing the same thing with the same values and preferences. You can believe that if you want to, but it’s silly. We can and do argue about where biology stops and culture begins, but to argue that biology produces culture or that culture is reducible to biology is to ignore the tremendous variation in human thought and behavior that simply does not map onto biology.

I mean it is complete. I understand what you are saying about sweets and eating a lot of pasta, but I don’t think that distinction is important. The debate seems to me to be about academic turf. I have read “Sense and Nonsense” which discusses Darwin’s views on human behavior, eugenics, progressive evolution, nature vs. nurture, ethology, instinct, sociobiology, kin selection, conflict between parents and offspring, reciprocal altruism, game theory, the rejection of sociobioloy by social scientists, behavioural ecology,flexibility of individual behavior, adaptive tradeoffs, optimal group size, marriage, number and quality of offspring, demographic transition, evolutionary psychology, evolved psychological mechanisms, environment of evolutionary adaptness, domain specificity, detecting cheats, homicide, memetics, meme fidelity, religion, consciousness, science, gene-culture coevolution, cultural inheritance, cultural selection, and conclusions on all the foregoing. The authors named the book well.

It is all a big fuss, but it has nothing to do with evolution by natural selection. It seems to be simply an argument over turf and defining terms. And the largest argument seems to be whether culture lies outside the domain of biology which is the position of social scientists according to the authors. But each of the various forms of human behavior science (?) seem to claim culture to some degree as part of their theories. Perhaps the argument is worthwhile and will someday lead to some great leap forward. But to me it is utter nonsense. So when I say that my education is complete I mean there is nothing that the experts can teach me because they disagree so strongly with each other, so I will decide for myself. And I conclude that culture is determined by biology and therefore is subject to evolution by natural selection. The reason for this is that cultures constantly declare that those who do not do what they like are not part of that culture. For example, Christians often claim that other Christians are not “true” Christians because of some bad behavior. But they are Christians, and the Christian culture has not been able to overcome the biological character of the humans who comprise it. I just can’t escape the idea that all culture is severely limited by biology. There are only a few, a very few, actions that any human can take in any given set of circumstances and they are all biologically determined. Cultures are about expressing our inner lives but they are no more than sunsets or waterfalls — they occupy our minds but they don’t change who and what we are. Evolution is about survivability and our actions will have something to say about that, perhaps. Those actions are biological.

Maybe this will help.

You ask “How in the world can anyone declare that culture is outside the domain of Evolution by Natural Selection?”

Well, statements like “culture is (or is not) outside the domain of Evolution by natural selection” are just too vague, at least by themselves. There are some aspects of culture that have a certain kind of independence from biological evolution, and other aspects that don’t.

For example: If we ask: Why do Italians eat more pasta than the French? This presumably has a purely cultural explanation. But if we ask: Why do people like the taste of sweets? This latter question may have a large evolutionary explanation (e..g, in the relevant ancestral past, sweet food was highly correlated with ripe, nutritious fruit, etc).

There are different kinds of models of cultural evolution and how they might relate to more narrowly biological evolution. For example:

(1) You might argue, as traditional sociobiologists such as E. O. Wilson did, that some psychological or cultural trait is common in our species due to a selection process just as in standard cases (i.e., you have heritable variation in fitness with respect to the traits in question). In this case, you still argue that the traits in question are transmitted genetically.

(2) Instead, you might drop the requirement that the relevant traits are genetically transmitted. For example, if traits are transmitted because children imitate their parents, a selection process can exist without the mediation of genes (sometimes people argue that the incest taboo is an example of this. Suppose that incest avoidance is advantageous because people with the trait have more viable offspring than those without it. If offspring LEARN whether to be incest avoiders from their parents, the frequency of the trait in the population may evolve. This could occur EVEN IF there are no genetic differences between those who avoid incest and those who do not.

In this second kind of selection model, mind and culture replace one of the elements in the standard model (type (1), but not the other. That is, in both models (1) and (2), fitness is defined in terms of reproductive success (having babies). In models of type (2), however, the mode of transmission is replaced by a psychological one.

(3) A third approach is to abandon both of the main ingredients of the traditional model in (1). Suppose that the mode of transmission is NOT genetic, AND fitness is NOT measured by number of babies. According to this approach, individuals acquire their ideas because they are exposed to the ideas of their parents or peers, or other members of their parents’ generation. Some ideas may be more attractive than others, and so increase in frequency. Notice that there is no need for organisms to differ in their survivorship or degree or reproductive success.

Any one of these three models can be used to try to account for some aspect or aspects of culture. Type (1) and (2) are usually called “biological” whereas type (3) don’t propose biological explanations at all.

Of course, one might combine two or more of these processes in describing some feature of culture. Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman do this in their models of the so called “demographic transition”

If I remember correctly, I think that Laland and Brown talk about this case.

I don’t know why you think your education on this topic is now complete – maybe you mean that sarcastically, but I don’t think anyone in the world has the answers to all of these questions.

I don’t know if I understood your concerns or not, but maybe something here will help you.
best,
chris

Thanks for the references, I may read them. But this morning I got “Sense and Nonsense,” by Kevin N. Laland and Gillian R. Brown. It is their analysis of the debate on the validity of evolutionary psychology and its other guises. The argument seems to divide along the line I have already identified: is culture not a part of evolution by natural selection?

The authors say, “For social scientists, culture is most commonly regarded as a cohesive set of ideas, beliefs, and knowledge that exists in a completely different realm to biology. These researchers believe culture is the primary influence on human behavior.”

So I was right all along. I am still confused of course, but about something new. Before I was confused as to how the argument could even exist unless evolutionary psychology’s critics were defining culture as outside the domain of Evolution by Natural Selection. That has been confirmed, they are.

So now my confusion is this: How in the world can anyone declare that culture is outside the domain of Evolution by Natural Selection? It is just the kind of academic argument that is of no interest to me. I am interested in engineering changes to our mass behavioral systems to improve our lives and promote better futures for our children. This kind of argument is a waste of time, and I am glad that you, jpool, and others in this thread have taught me. My education on this topic is now complete.

For some doubts and problems with Evolutionary Psychology, see David Buller’s book, Adapting Minds.

For a discussion of cultural evolution and its relationship to biological evolution, see Elliott Sober’s Philosophy of Biology, chapter 7

best,

chris