The human capacity for culture and all that it entails (intelligence, language, morality, altruism, justice, etc.) posed a real and serious problem to the early evolutionists (Cronin, 1991). Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-founder of classical Darwinian evolutionary theory, for example, became more and more convinced that natural selection could not possibly account for our advanced mental attributes and the distinctly human brain. And, what is worse, some of these refined capacities would even have been a downright nuisance and a danger "in the severe struggle he [the savage] has to carry on against nature and his fellow-man" (Wallace, 1891).
Charles Darwin strongly disagreed with this view, as did, initially, Thomas Huxley. Eventually, however, ’Darwin’s bulldog’ came to believe that human morality must have been the result of cultural evolution only: the struggle for existence in nature, he held, is so profoundly red-in-tooth-and-claw that it would smother a developing morality at birth because morality must necessarily work against nature: "[S]ince law and morals are restraints upon the struggle for existence, the ethical process is in opposition to the principle of the cosmic process [the Hobbesian war of each against all], and tends to the suppression of the qualities best fitted for success in that struggle" (Huxley, 1894).
Herbert Spencer, the founding father of Social Darwinism (which we shall encounter later on) argued that the inheritance of acquired characteristics was the only possible evolutionary force responsible for the evolution of human morality. His vision was that the inheritance of acquired characteristics (a theory of evolution associated with the French naturalist Lamarck) would bridge the gap between biological and cultural evolution, forging them into one grand seamless process (Cronin, 1991). In the next section I shall return to some of these issues.
My point of view is that many phenomena surrounding war and warfare, war practices, rituals, motives, etc. cannot be properly understood without the sociocultural context (i.e., the shared set of meanings, ideas, concepts, beliefs, values, assumptions) in the construction of the various social cosmologies. We simply cannot do without cultural categories, as will be exemplified in the discussion of the materialist school and the sociocultural construction of what constitutes a resource (Ch. 5). I regard human beings as shrewd social strategists, clever manipulators, and conscious, intelligent decision-makers in the service of their inclusive fitness, operating within the constraints of their cultural semantics: the signification and interpretative frameworks (the semiotics and ethics) provided by the culture they happen to have been born in. The cultural aspects of human behavior should not, however, be portrayed as disembodied systems of symbolic information, as is commonly done by cultural anthropologists. This is a rather curious stance in light of our knowledge of cultural universals (D. Brown, 1991). It is far more plausible to assume that these cultural universals - including language acquisition and structure, toolmaking, kinship rules and incest avoidance, religion, morality, age- and sex-differentiated roles and statuses, some degree of ethnocentrism and territoriality, etc. - are grounded in universal features of human nature, traits that, in turn, are intimately linked to properties of the human central nervous system. As such, both the capacity for and the expression of cultural behavior may be viewed as products of evolution by means of natural selection (Crippen, 1992).
Yet another tentative answer might be: Basically, both natural and cultural evolution are processes of information transmission. One transmits the information contained in the DNA, the other the information contained in the mind. For example, sex (male/female) is a biological category. Gender (masculine/feminine), on the other hand, is a cultural category, implying norms, standards, values, meanings, and templates or prescriptions of appropriate conduct and role behavior; but ultimately the cultural category of gender does not make any sense without the biological category of sex.
It is often asserted that culture is a Lamarckian process. It means that social knowledge and organization are transmitted not by genes but by learning, from simple imitation to linguistic information. The function of culture is to transmit the information acquired during individual life from generation to generation. In this sense culture really is a Lamarckian process that departs radically from biological evolution in both structure and dynamics.
However, culture may conform to the Darwinian ’logic’ in at least three different senses. Firstly, the biological capacity for culture itself is transmitted genetically. Secondly, sociocultural traits still cannot escape ultimate evolution by natural selection. Finally, cultural evolution could follow the same laws and principles that work in biological evolution.
The core of the sociobiological approach is that behavioral capacities and tendencies have developed in response to the environment in human evolutionary history through natural selection. Human customs, social institutions and cultural forms have not developed in a biological vacuum, but under the conditions of interactions with natural selection. The biological nature of early Homo must have faced the ecological challenges in the ancient environment, have influenced the elementary shapes of social structures, and have constrained possible trajectories of human history.
~~The Origin Of War: Evolution of a Male-Coalitional Reproductive Strategy -by- Johan M.G. van der Dennen
No comments:
Post a Comment