From the issue dated October 18, 2002
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From the issue dated October 18, 2002
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The Relevance of BiohistoryBy ROBERT S. McELVAINELast year, in Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History, I urged scholars to participate in a new branch of scholarly inquiry called biohistory. By applying insights from biology (along with archaeology and anthropology) to history, we can make history more accurate and broaden its chronological scope. Biohistory begins with the simple fact that the beings whose actions constitute the subject matter of history are members of a biological species called Homo sapiens. The relevance of that fact to the study of history would seem to be fairly obvious. Taking humans' biological identity into account would move the study of history back one very large, but entirely logical, step. Evolutionary biology could provide historians with a means of assessing how changes over long periods of prehistory affect the times that we study. If we truly believe that "what's past is prologue," the first step in the study of history should be to take account of what Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist, terms "deep history" -- the evolution of the particular sort of animals we are. A historical approach that ignores biology and human evolution is actually ahistorical, because it omits the events and effects of the longest period of human existence. Yet most written history has ignored the results of human evolution. For most of the 20th century, historians went about their studies in blissful ignorance of the findings of biology. So did most other humanists and, until recently, social scientists. In his 1991 book In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Oxford University Press), the Stanford historian Carl N. Degler wrote of numerous psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and even a few political scientists who had in the past few decades accepted the importance of innate proclivities in humans. But he was unable to point to a single practitioner of our discipline who had recognized that importance in his or her work. The passage of another decade has hardly altered that situation, and it is past time for change. The first essential question to ask is: Why have historians been so hostile to the idea that the biological makeup of human beings, the creatures we study, might have some influence on their behavior? We should determine whether historians have empirical evidence for concluding that human nature as an essentially fixed, biological concept does not really exist, and thus can be of no importance in history -- or whether they have simply dismissed biology as irrelevant, without examining the evidence. The second key question is: Have we in the historical discipline paid any price for our refusal to take biology into account? What could a judicious use of knowledge about human biology do to improve our understanding of history? The idea of judicious use points toward the answer to the first question. The main reason that many historians panic at the thought of including human nature or biology in their work is not because they have carefully examined the potential benefits of illuminating history in that way and concluded they are not worthwhile. Instead, it is that most historians are all too familiar with the injudicious misuse and abuse of biological claims in the past. Connecting biology with history is a practice that does not have a distinguished pedigree. Most previous attempts have considered historical developments as part of a Darwinian struggle for survival in which the most fit (nations, races, individuals, corporations, etc.) succeed and the less fit fall by the wayside, resulting in historical progress. That social Darwinism, which dominated American thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was used to justify extreme nationalism, racism, male dominance, war, gross economic inequality, and a total lack of concern for those in need. In more recent years, both sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have sometimes drifted into extreme biological determinism. We have been reminded of where an apparently biological approach can lead by the racist ideas contained in Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994) and by the argument put forth by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer -- in A Natural History of Rape (MIT Press, 2000) -- that evolution favors rape as a behavior. Then there is the glee with which many men have embraced claims of evolutionary psychology, like the ideas that men are naturally inclined toward promiscuity (the "Darwin made me do it" defense) and that younger women are naturally attracted to older, rich, and prominent men. Small wonder, in view of those unhappy precedents, that trying to ground an examination of history on an understanding of evolutionary biology raises alarms in so many quarters. A historian or anyone else in the humanities who shows an interest in or acquaintance with evolutionary biology is likely to be greeted by his or her colleagues with a shocked, disgusted look and a muttered "You haven't become one of them, have you?" The past abuses justified on biological bases have been very real -- including racial and sexual prejudice, reductions in social-welfare programs, and heightened levels of international conflict. But we historians must not let the shortcomings of the more extreme brands of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology blind us to the role of evolution in human behavior. Recent work in biology and psychology has convincingly shown that our distant ancestors developed a variety of proclivities -- collectively, commonly called human nature and referred to in biology as the human biogram -- to adapt our species to life in small bands of hunter-gatherers. That was how virtually all our hominid and human ancestors lived during at least 98 percent of their evolution. Of course, most people throughout recorded history have led vastly different ways of life, ever since the development of agriculture began to revolutionize human society. Biohistory is radically different from social Darwinism. Social Darwinism focused on the putative differences among groups of humans; biohistory seeks to illuminate aspects of history through a better understanding of human nature -- the fundamental traits and predispositions that all humans share and that make us alike. Those academics who have insisted in recent decades that everything about humans is culturally constructed have allowed their justified fears of biological determinism to lead them into a cultural determinism that undermines the prospects for cooperation and understanding among human groups. Once we have escaped social Darwinism's wrongheaded ideas, we can see that biology is what makes all humans alike, while cultures are what have divided us. Biohistory, moreover, does not see human history as a Darwinian struggle. Instead, it contends that history consists, to a considerable extent, of the interplay between humans' biological inheritance and the social environments in which the creatures with that inheritance have lived over the past 10,000 years or so. The scientific evidence that we are not, in fact, blank slates at birth, wholly shaped by culture, has become overwhelming. The time is past when historians and the general public can afford to ignore scientists' findings because some researchers have used those sorts of data in the past to reach outrageous conclusions. We must stop throwing the Darwinian baby out with the racist and sexist bathwater. Historians have paid a considerable price for sealing ourselves off from the findings of biology about the creatures we study. I have space here to present only a few brief examples of what a biological perspective can do for historians. One instance of an innate human trait that can shed light on historical analysis is pseudospeciation, the ability to convince ourselves that the members of other groups of human beings are not really human. That innate capacity has played a major part in wars, racism, and genocide. Our understanding of such major historical events as slavery, imperialism, segregation, and the Holocaust -- to name just a few -- would be greatly enhanced by taking our tendency toward pseudospeciation into account. Much as the members of our species have an innate capacity to classify others as "them," humans also have a need to feel that we are part of an "us." We have a tendency to identify with the band -- that is, we want to feel united with a group of others whom we know personally. That trait, too, has played a major role in history. In modern societies, it is often difficult for people to fulfill their innate desire to be part of a small group. One way to compensate is to identify with a large, impersonal aggregate of people through such symbols as flags and patriotic songs -- thus, nationalism, with all its dire effects in recent centuries, can be better understood if we think of it as a result of the human trait of identifying with the band. Many other human biological predispositions (among them, both our social nature and our tendency toward anger and aggression) can shed light on various historical issues. But the biological condition that may have had the greatest effect on our history, and the one on which I focus in Eve's Seed, is the fundamental fact that our species reproduces sexually. Because women can do certain things that men cannot -- carry, give birth to, and nourish offspring -- men have always, to varying degrees, experienced feelings of inferiority that might be called, reversing Freud, womb envy and breast envy. As a result, men in cultures around the world have developed definitions of manhood based on the false notion that men are the opposite of women. The particulars vary from culture to culture, but a "real man" is always seen as the negative of a woman: "notawoman." Naturally, men have proclaimed not only their polar opposition to women, but also their superiority in the false sexual dichotomy they have set up. The concept of male over female has, in turn, served as the model for all other forms of inequality and hierarchy. Men -- as individuals or in groups -- who assert their superiority over others typically claim that they are to their alleged inferiors as man is to woman. The men who are most insecure in their "notawomanhood" often try to reassure themselves by seeking power. That biologically based behavior has been an extremely important, yet almost entirely overlooked, force throughout history. Recognizing its role can lead us to a better understanding not only of the subordination of women, but also of the drive for power and conquest in certain men, the development of many aspects of religions, the promiscuity that is so common among political leaders, the language that men use to assert dominance over others, and numerous other aspects of history. The behavior has almost certainly played a role in the actions of historical figures from the Bible's King David to Theodore Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, and Osama bin Laden. (Citing a common motivation for their actions does not imply that those men are morally equal.) The late Sam Cooke was onto something in his song "Wonderful World." One of the major reasons that we "don't know much about history" -- or at least as much as we could -- is that we "don't know much biology." The road that we construct between biology and history must include archaeology and anthropology as bridges to span the chasms of the late Paleolithic and Neolithic, between the bulk of biological evolution and what has traditionally been classified as history. And the road must accommodate two-way traffic. As historians come to realize that arguments based on evolutionary science cannot be ignored, evolutionary scientists need to recognize that something very important has been largely missing from those arguments: history. Evolutionary psychology has greatly underestimated the power of cultural evolution, or, to put it another way, the extraordinary degree of adaptability in Homo sapiens. In jumping from evolution to the modern human experience, many practitioners of the field miss important developments -- like the ability to expand the food supply, a sedentary lifestyle that makes the accumulation of goods feasible, and greatly increased population -- from the period when people first created a social environment for which some of their biological characteristics were not well adapted. That includes the critical last 5,000 years of prehistory, which historians also conventionally shortchange, as well as most of the 5,000 years traditionally called history. Darwinism, in short, is too important to be left to the Darwinists -- that is, biologists and evolutionary psychologists. They need the insights of historians to mediate between humans' evolutionary inheritance and modern behavior as much as historians and social scientists need the insights of biologists to understand better the motivations behind the historical behavior we study. However, we must recognize that biology can help us only with the skeletal framework of historical events. Scientists use Occam's razor -- the principle of keeping explanations as simple as possible -- to cut away the very complexity in which historians revel. Some biologists have begun to take account of history by emphasizing that it is not enough to simply determine what predispositions were favored by the environment in which humans evolved. What is needed, such biologists note, is to examine how those predispositions interacted with the various cultural and historical environments in which humans have lived. Two important books that point toward the conjunction of biology and history from the biological side have been published in the past two years: Bobbi S. Low's Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at Human Behavior (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Paul R. Ehrlich's Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect (Island Press, 2000). I have tried to approach the same conjunction of biology and history from the historical side in Eve's Seed. The bottom line that all of us have emphasized is that biological determinism is not the same thing as biological influence. Although historians must not continue to deny the latter, we have to steadfastly reject the former. Biology should be used to inform our work as historians, but it should never be allowed to dominate historical analysis. Both biology and culture shape human behavior, and we need to recognize the roles of both if we are to gain a proper understanding of our history. So far, we have had evolutionary science without the perspective of history, and history without the perspective of evolution. Now we must combine biology and history to form a new way of understanding the human experience. That is what biohistory hopes to achieve. Robert S. McElvaine is a professor of arts and letters and of history at Millsaps College. His latest book is Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History (McGraw-Hill, 2001). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 8, Page B10 |