Niles Eldredge, curator of
invertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, has
maintained eclectic interests over the course of his career. He is an expert in trilobites (extinct early
arthropods), co-creator with Stephen Jay Gould of the punctuated equilibrium
hypothesis (which challenged conventional thinking on the tempo of evolutionary
change), a vocal opponent of creationism, an impassioned writer on contemporary
environmental issues, especially on the issue of biodiversity loss, and is
known for his collection of trumpets and cornets.
.jpg)
Eldredge’s initial interests at
Columbia University were in anthropology though during an ethnographic
fieldtrip to Brazil in 1963 he found himself more interested in collecting
fossils in a nearby reef than in life in the fishing village that the research team
was visiting.[1] He went on to receive his PhD in geology at
Columbia, but nevertheless retained an interest in culture, especially on the question
of connections between biological evolution – oftentimes restricted to
explications of changes in the anatomical hard-parts of organisms – and the
evolution of culture. Humans are
pronouncedly cultural organisms, an aspect of their constitution that confers
upon them behavioral flexibility and capacity for rapid change that exceeds the
speed of typical biological change. From
this perspective, can it be claimed this it is our capacity for culture that
primarily determines our species evolving relationship with our environment?
That culture in large part
determines our environmental prospects is a contention that Eldredge examines
in his book Dominion. To see the force of the argument one must take
the long view. The emergence of culture
must be seen as an outcome of those same evolutionary processes that produced,
let’s say, the compound eyes on a trilobite.
Eldredge says:
"We have reached our present precarious position as an outcome of an ecological evolutionary course on which our ancestors embarked at least 2.5 million years ago. And our deep evolutionary history - hence our deep evolutionary future - is a story of shifting positions vis-à vis our approach to the natural world and its component ecosystems."[2]
If contemporary environmental
problems are an outcome of changes, conceptual (new ideas about “nature”),
technological (new tools and more energy to do the business of world
transformation), and institutional (new social arrangements), that influence
our ecological dealings with the world we live in, then we will benefit from
knowing how these changes came about. Or
at least, this is the claim made by Eldredge. Other scientists taking a similar tack are
ethologists, sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, and advocates of
Darwinian medicine all of whom advocate an evolutionary approach to
understanding our present circumstances.
We are constrained by the past, but are liberated by insights into those
constraints since those paths that are not closed off are ones we might
plausibly take.
The view that a capacity for culture is an evolutionary
outcome should, of course, be as unsurprising as contemplating the evolution of
any other character related to the behavior of an organism. The mating systems and related behaviors of
animals – head-butting competition by Barbary Sheep, or harem-formation in
gorillas – seem to call for an evolutionary explanation, and yet the capacity
for culture seems to be taken as that characteristic of humans that takes us out of nature. We have nature on the one hand and culture on
the other. It’s as plain as black and
white!
The fact of culture confers upon
the bearer a certain freedoms and elasticity has struck several commentators as
important. Ecologist Paul Sears, for
example, saw this as precisely the capacity that distinguishes us from other organisms
He wrote:
“With the cultural devices of fire, clothing, shelter, and tools [Man] was able to do what no other organism could do without changing its original character. Cultural change was, for the first time, substituted for biological evolution as a means of adapting an organism to new habitats in a widening range that eventually came to include the whole earth.”[3]
In his entertaining account of
the new paradigm of telescoping evolution,
captured in Richard Linklater 2001 film Waking
Life, Eamonn Healy, a professor of chemistry at St. Edward's University in
Austin, Texas, described how rapid changes dues to cultural evolution will lead
to the emergence of the “neo-human”. One
supposes this is a good thing.
Certainly, such eventualities and wild temporalities are characteristic
of a new order and are not in the province of the old and cold (biological)
evolutionary processes.
Assuming for the moment that the
emergence of culture represented a threshold, after which humans are less bound
to a set of preordained genetic edicts, nonetheless, it is important to
distinguish the products of culture
from the capacity for culture. This is a distinction that I anticipated
above. When we examine the
particularities of culture – who did what when – we don’t necessarily expect there
to be a genetic component to these. There may be interesting gene-culture
interactions, but not all cultural attributes are genetic. A capacity for culture, on the other hand, is
something that requires particular mental attributes, a type of mental
architecture. To speculate about mental
architecture is to pose, at first glance at least, a more traditional
evolutionary question.
Understanding the evolutionary
basis for cultural capabilities allows one to speculate about difference
between humans and our closest relatives in general terms. Chimps may have some competence but does it
confer on them the same elasticity of responses to environmental
circumstances? Stephen Mithen considers
such matters in his account of human’s cognitive fluidity. Christophe Boesch and Michael Tomasello,
describe some important similarities between chimp and human culture which they
say indicates shared evolutionary roots.
The two pronounced difference that they discuss include the way in which
language in humans can allow for vaster cultural dissemination in space and
time than in the case for chimps and the way in which human cultures rely more
extensively on cultural accumulation – a sort of “ratchet effect” whereby
cultural modification amplify over time.[4]
The significance of Eldredge’s
suggestion concerning the importance of examining the evolutionary roots of
current environmental is illustrated in some accounts of our contemporary
environmental predicaments. For
instance, in his 1997 book Eco Homo
Noel Boaz claimed:
“What evolved as a superior energy-extracting systems for human groups in the marginal habitats of the Pleistocene was a machine the over-produced in times of plenty. Culture in the hands of the first agriculturalists 10,000 years ago increased population densities, created diseases unknown to earlier hominids, built the first villages and temples, and gave humans the pervasive misconception that they were above the laws of nature even as they rushed headlong into a despoilment of their habitat unknown in any other species.”
Culture, like our faculty for
packing on adipose during lean times, is presumably a product of natural
selection. Even if one can give a full
account of its significance for the fitness of Pleistocene humans, this capacity
may either constrain our response to our current problems, or may, of course,
result in the emergence of the neo-human who is either impervious to the rigors
of a fouled planet or else has the wit and fluidity to do something about it.
[1]
Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2008.
[2]
Eldredge, N. 1995. Dominion. Henry Holt and Co; paperback edition, University
of California Press, 1997
[3]
Sears PB. 1957c. The Ecology of Man. [Oregon State System of Higher Education,
Condon Lectures.] Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Press.
[4]
Christophe Boesch and Michael Tomasello (1998) Chimpanzee and Human Cultures .
Current Anthropology 39.5 591-614.
No comments:
Post a Comment