19 Biological Theories of Culture and Sociobiology

Dr. Vijeta Dr. Vijeta

epgp books

 

Contents

 

Introduction

 

1.  Theories of Evolution: Biological and Cultural

 

2. Cultural Ecology and Neo-Evolutionism

 

3.  Sociobiology

 

Summary

 

Learning objectives

 

Through this module, one will be able to know about

  • the biological theories of culture and concept of sociobiology
  • the theories of evolution
  • Cultural ecology
  • Neo-evolutionism

 

Theories and methods in social and cultural Anthropology Biological Theories of Culture and Sociobiology

 

Introduction

 

In the early years of anthropology, the prevailing view of anthropologists and other scholars was that culture generally develops (or evolves) in a uniform and progressive manner. The Evolutionists, building from Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection, sought to track the development of culture through time. Just as species were thought to evolve into increasing complexity, so too were cultures thought to progress from a simple to complex states. It was thought that most societies pass through the same series of stages to arrive, ultimately, at a common end. Change was thought to originate from within the culture, so development was thought to be internally determined. The notion of dividing the ethnological record into evolutionary stages ranging from primitive to civilize was fundamental to the new ideas of the nineteenth century social evolutionists. Drawing upon Enlightenment thought, Darwin’s work, and new cross-cultural, historical, and archaeological evidence, a whole generation of social evolutionary theorists emerged such as Tylor and Morgan. These theorists developed rival schemes of overall social and cultural progress, as well as the origins of different institutions such as religion, marriage, and the family (Long & Chakov).

 

 

1.    Theories of Evolution: Biological and Cultural

 

The main protagonists of the theory evolution are Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. In general, the term evolution represents the process of gradual development. This is the process through which simple things, over the time, become complex. The English naturalist Charles Darwin, in his extraordinary classic titled ‘On the Origin of Species’ depicted the evolution of the biological organisms existing in the world. This work was published in 1859. This landmark work immensely influenced the then scientific community of that time. Another scholar Herbert Spencer (also known as an evolutionist and his works had huge influence in the American and the British Sociology) applied this theory to his explanation of the development of the society. According to Munch (1994): “He combined the philosophical utilitarianism of his British compatriots Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill with the organicism and evolutionism blossoming in his own days because of striking success of Darwin’s evolutionary theory in biology”. Though Spencer’s theory had a huge influence during his lifetime, just after his death, these theories faced huge criticisms from the scholars of the new age. But the idea of evolutionism dominated for many years (Diah et al, 2014).

 

Other than Darwin and Spencer, scholars like Tylor, Morgan, Bastain, Rrazer and some others are also considered as evolutionists. E. B. Tylor’s famous contribution titled ‘Primitive Culture’ was published in 1871. He got influenced by the revolutionary philosophical development of the nineteenth century. He was influenced by the works of Charles Darwin also. If we concentrate on the world history of that point of time, we shall find out that in that particular era, English people were mainly concentrating on expanding their political territory through massive colonialism. As a result, many people like the travellers, explorers, businessmen, missionaries and several officials of the Government were visiting the different parts of the world. Tylor took the help of these people in preparing his thoughts and writings. Tylor (1903) gave an innovative all-embracing definition of culture:

 

“Culture, or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of the society”. Tylor proposed the idea of unilineal evolution. According to him, a society’s evolution is unidirectional and it passes through three different stages one after another: the savagery, the barbarism and the civilization. Tylor assumed that hunter gatherers and other non-Western societies were living at a lower level of existence than the ‘civilized’ societies in Europe”. Tylor also proposed an evolutionary theory of the origin of religion (Scupin & DeCorse, 2012). According to Langness (1974) commented that Tylor defined religion as the belief in spiritual beings. He has shown the different stages of evolution of religion. From a state of non-religious condition, it moves towards the belief in souls and phantoms. Then people started to believe in ghosts-souls. After that they set their beliefs on the spirits. Then they started to believe in individual’s guardian spirits and species deities. After that the idea of polytheism came. The last stage in the evolution of religion, according to Tylor, is the belief in the supreme deity. The other important proponent of evolutionism is Lewis Henry Morgan. His most prominent work titled ‘Ancient Society’ was published in the year of 1877. Langness (1974) mentioned that: “Morgan was interested in the evolution of a number of specific things. He listed them as follows: Subsistence, Government, Language, the Family, Religion, House Life and Architecture, and Property”. For example, in terms of the evolution of the family, by examining the Hawaiian society, Morgan anticipated that human beings of the past used to live in the ‘primitive hoards’ where they used to practice unregulated sexual behaviour and as a result, people could not identify their own fathers. After that there came brother-sister marriage and group marriage in a chronological order. Then there came the matriarchal society and the last form of family is the patriarchal one where men took the charge of economy and politics (Scupin and DeCorse, 2012). Morgan also talked about the development of arts of subsistence. According to him, this development went through five successive stages. In a chronological order, they are- Natural subsistence (fruit), Fish subsistence, farinaceous subsistence (cultivation), Meat and milk subsistence and the last one is unlimited subsistence (through field agriculture). On the evolution of the social institutions, Morgan speculated that at first there was kinship based societies and then there came the territorial or politically based societies (Langness, 1974).

 

For Morgan, the cultural features distinguishing these various stages arose from a “few primary germs of thought”- germs that had emerged while humans were still savages and that later developed into the “principle institutions of mankind.” Morgan postulated that the stages of technological development were associated with a sequence of different cultural patterns. For example, he speculated that the family evolved through six stages. Human society began as a “horde living in promiscuity,” with no sexual prohibitions and no real family structure. In the next stage a group of brothers was married to a group of sisters and brother-sister mating was permitted. In the third stage, group marriage was practiced, but brothers and sisters were not allowed to mate. The fourth stage, which supposedly evolved during barbarism, was characterized by a loosely paired male and female who lived with other people. In the next stage husband-dominant families arose in which the husband could have more than one wife simultaneously. Finally, the stage of civilization was distinguished by the monogamous family, with just one wife and one husband who were relatively equal in status. Morgan believed that family units became progressively smaller and more self-contained as human society developed. His postulated sequence for the evolution of the family, however, is not supported by the enormous amount of ethnographic data that has been collected since his time. For example, no recent society that Morgan would call savage indulges in group marriage or allows brother-sister mating (Long & Chakov).

 

The theoretical school of Functionalism considers a culture as an interrelated whole, not a collection of isolated traits. Like a human being has various organs that are interconnected and necessary for the body to function correctly, so society is a system of interconnected parts that make the whole function efficiently. The Functionalists examined how a particular cultural phase is interrelated with other aspects of the culture and how it affects the whole system of the society; in other words, cause and effect. The method of functionalism was based on fieldwork and direct observations of societies. The anthropologists were to describe various cultural institutions that make up a society, explain their social function, and show their contribution to the overall stability of a society. Bronislaw Malinowski is credited with bio-cultural Functionalism, which explains a culture as an interrelated whole, not a collection of isolated traits. Based on his fieldwork in various areas of the world, particularly the Trobriand Islands in New Guinea, Malinowski established the theory of Functionalism. A culture is composed of many different elements, such as food acquisition, family relationships, and housing. Malinowski believed that all of these elements are connected and work together for one purpose, which is to meet the needs of individuals in the culture. In other words, culture exists to satisfy the basic biological, psychological, and social needs of individuals (http://faculty.cascadia.edu).

 

In the development of anthropological theories, another prominent school after evolutionism is the school of historical particularism. The pioneer of this thought is the German born American anthropologist Franz Boas who is also regarded as the father of American anthropology. Over his lifetime, he could create a good number of students and followers who contributed immensely in the field of anthropology in the later periods. Boas’ contribution was noteworthy as he logically criticized the ethnocentrism of evolutionism. He was also a serious critique of armchair anthropologists before his time. He highlighted the importance of fieldwork and over his lifetime he made several fieldtrips. He conducted research on the Eskimos living in the Northern Canada and the Kwakiutl Indians in the North-west Coast. According to Boas, the societies cannot be categorized as ‘savage’ or ‘civilized’. This approach follows a kind of belittling. Rather than following a ‘nomothetic’ (considering several cases at a time) approach, he encouraged the anthropologists to follow an ‘idiographic’ (dealing with particular/ specific cases) approach (Langness, 1974). This is the basis for his thought of ‘historical particularism’. According to him, each culture of each society has its own uniqueness and the society has its own distinctive historical development. That is why he introduced the concept of ‘cultural relativism’ and invited the anthropologists to disregard the prevailing ethnocentric views (Scupin & DeCorse, 2012). Boas was a dynamic anthropologist who worked almost in all four subfields of anthropology. He emphasized heavily on the fieldwork method. Though Boas made several fieldtrips in his lifetime, later, he was criticized for not staying in those fields for a prolonged period (Diah et al, 2014).

 

2.    Cultural Ecology and Neo-Evolutionism

 

After the Second World War, the highly criticized issue of evolutionism again got a momentum by some new anthropologists. This school of thought is termed as neo-evolutionism. The main theorist in neo-evolutionism was Leslie White. He tried to highlight the factors like energy use and technology as the main causes of cultural evolution and change. According to him, the cultural change depends on the per capita use of energy in a year. If this per capita energy use increases, change happens. For example, in the hunter and gatherers society, people only used human energy and could not use any other energy. In the agricultural society, people could use their own energy plus the energy of animals and plants. As a result, cultural change happened. In the modern industrialized societies, people are using diverse sources of energy. As a result, there was a huge transformation in culture. The more complex the use of technology, the more complex becomes the cultural development. It is to be mentioned here that Leslie White did not mention about any particular case or culture when describing this evolution. That is why this view is not ethnocentric and can be associated with the society in general. That is why; some often call this theory in the name of ‘general evolution’. Another important theoretical development was termed as the ‘cultural ecology’. It is also called as ecological anthropology. Its main proponent was Julian Steward.

 

Steward classified evolutionism suggested by different scholars at different times into three categories. The first one is the unilineal evolution that is suggested by Tylor and Morgan. The second one is the neo-evolutionism suggested by Leslie White. Steward termed it as universal evolution as Leslie White, in his theory, did not focus on any particular/individual culture and used the term culture in a broad sense. According to Ember et al (2011), Steward ‘classified himself as a multilineal evolutionist: one who deals with the evolution of particular cultures and only with demonstrated sequences of parallel culture change in different areas’. Steward mentioned that ‘a social system is determined by its environmental resources’. According to Mahmud (2008), the main idea of cultural ecology is ‘to determine whether cultural adaptation toward the natural environment initiate social transformations of evolutionary change’. Steward emphasized the ‘interrelation among the natural conditions in the environment i.e. rainfall, temperature, soils and technology, social organization, and attitudes within a particular socio-cultural system’ (Scupin & DeCorse, 2012).

 

 

3.   Sociobiology

 

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection (Darwin 1859) describes the world of organisms as a world of competition for survival and replication. Due to the high fertility rate of most populations, within a few generations the world would be overcrowded by most species, but in fact we observe in most cases an almost steady state of population. From that observation Darwin infers that there must be a strong competition for the resources organisms need, i.e. not all individual organisms that are born are in fact able to survive and to reproduce (‘struggle for existence’). The next step is the fact that individuals of the same kind slightly differ in their qualities and that often certain ‘varieties’ are inherited (Darwin refers to knowledge from the field of breeding). In the struggle for existence those qualities that lead to better survival chances (natural selection in a narrower sense) and higher chances of reproduction (sexual selection) will thereby necessarily be more often present in the next generation than maladaptive features or disadvantageous traces. This process is labelled by Darwin in analogy to man’s selection in breeding “natural selection”. Natural selection ‘chooses’ from the occurring differences (‘mutations’) those features that tend to increase fitness, and Darwin infers that this process leads over a long time of accumulation of small differences to the origin of new species and to the astonishingly complex and highly functional ‘adaptations’ (‘designs’) that we find everywhere in nature (Spahn, 2012).

 

The term ‘sociobiology’ was introduced in E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) as the “systematic study of the biological basis of all social behaviour”. Wilson seems to intend “the biological basis of behaviour” to refer to the social and ecological causes driving the evolutio n of behaviour in animal populations, rather than the neurological or psychological causes of behaviour in individuals; however, Wilson clearly thought sociobiology and neuroscience would have important theoretical interactions. Wilson’s references to evolution are also usually references to evolution by natural selection, although he does accept that the action of selection on animal societies can result in maladaptive outcomes at the level of populations (Wilson, 1975). The first meaning of “sociobiology” is as Wilson’s own term for a range of work that is currently referred to (and was largely referred to at the time) as behavioural ecology. Behavioural ecology is a science that uses evolutionary theory and especially adaptationist methods to try to understand animal behaviour (Sociobiology, 2005). The sociobiologists, on the other hand, focus strongly on selective pressures predicted by theory, on the implications of the maximization-of-inclusive-fitness axiom for the pure theory of behavioural evolution. They are not, after all, experts in human behaviour and have a strong tendency to assume that they and we already understand the nature of hominid behavioural adaptation to environment. Sociobiology resembles early Freudian thought. One branch of sociobiology, Trivers’ “parental investment theory,” provides a good illustration of this last difficulty. Trivers (1972) sets out to explain sexual dimorphism, both behavioural and morphological, in terms of intrasexual selection. The female, having more energy invested in an ovum than does a male in a sperm cell and having more of her reproductive capacity potentially at risk in any given fertilization, will be much more “coy” about permitting copulation than the male. Maximization of inclusive fitness demands that the female be more selective than the male in her choice of partners. All things being equal, males will therefore maximize their inclusive fitness by competing for partners. Since some of this competition is likely to be agonistic in nature, larger males will tend to prevail. Thus, there is intrasexual selection for large size among males but not among females. Particular ecological considerations can rule out agonistic competition among males but, in general, wherever sexual dimorphism does exist it will be the male which is larger.

 

In sociobiology, Inclusive fitness has two components: (1) adaptation to environment and (2) competition among individuals striving to maximize their respective inclusive fitnesses. External environment is the limiting factor for the latter process, e.g., there is no use being the largest male, as a result of intrasexual selection, if there are periodic famines during which the largest individuals starve to death. Selection always involves compromise among numerous factors, and the sociobiologists will go wrong if he is unaware of some of them-particularly of factors having to do with the ecology. But ignoring considerations of inclusive fitness and concentrating solely on the ecology is also an error. Sociobiology must also be applied to contemporary cultures. A prime empirical question for socio-biology’s application to human behaviour is the extent to which both our individual learning preferences and our cultural-level practices tend to maximize inclusive fitness. The psychologists and ethologists can concentrate on the individual; only the anthropologist is in a position to relate traditions and institutions to inclusive fitness.

 

 

Summary

 

In the early years of anthropology, the prevailing view of anthropologists and other scholars was that culture generally develops (or evolves) in a uniform and progressive manner. The Evolutionists, building from Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection, sought to track the development of culture through time. Just as species were thought to evolve into increasing complexity, so too were cultures thought to progress from a simple to complex states. It was thought that most societies pass through the same series of stages to arrive, ultimately, at a common end. Change was thought to originate from within the culture, so development was thought to be internally determined. The notion of dividing the ethnological record into evolutionary stages ranging from primitive to civilize was fundamental to the new ideas of the nineteenth century social evolutionists. Drawing upon Enlightenment thought, Darwin’s work, and new cross-cultural, historical, and archaeological evidence, a whole generation of social evolutionary theorists emerged such as Tylor and Morgan. These theorists developed rival schemes of overall social and cultural progress, as well as the origins of different institutions such as religion, marriage, and the family (Long & Chakov). The main protagonists of the theory evolution are Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. In general, the term evolution represents the process of gradual development. This is the process through which simple things, over the time, become complex. After the Second World War, the highly criticized issue of evolutionism again got a momentum by some new anthropologists. This school of thought is termed as neo-evolutionism. The main theorist in neo-evolutionism was Leslie White. He tried to highlight the factors like energy use and technology as the main causes of cultural evolution and change. The term ‘sociobiology’ was introduced in E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) as the “systematic study of the biological basis of all social behaviour”. Wilson seems to intend “the biological basis of behaviour” to refer to the social and ecological causes driving the evolution of behaviour in animal populations, rather than the neurological or psychological causes of behaviour in individuals; however, Wilson clearly thought sociobiology and neuroscience would have important theoretical interactions. A prime empirical question for socio-biology’s application to human behaviour is the extent to which both our individual learning preferences and our cultural-level practices tend to maximize inclusive fitness. The psychologists and ethologists can concentrate on the individual; only the anthropologist is in a position to relate traditions and institutions to inclusive fitness.

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References/Suggested Readings

  • Barkow, J. 2009. Culture and Sociobiology. American Anthropologists. Vol. 80 (1).
  • Ember, C. R., Ember, M. R. and Peregrine, P. N., 2011. Anthropology (13th edition). USA: Pearson.
  • Langness, L. L., 1974. The Study of Culture (Revised Edition). California: Chandler & Sharp Publishers, Inc.
  • Long, H. and Chakov, K.: Social Evolutionism. http://anthropology.ua.edu/cultures/cultures.php?culture=Social%20Evolutionism
  • Mahmud, S. M. A., 2008. Socio-cultural Anthropology: A Review of the Major Schools of Thought. Social Science Review [The Dhaka University Studies, Part-D], 25(2), 75-92.
  • Mohamad Diah, N., Hossain, D.M., Mustari, S. and Ramli, N.S., 2014. An overview of the anthropological theories. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 4(10 (1)), pp.155-164.
  • Munch, R., 1994. Sociological Theory From the 1850s to the 1920s, Volume 1, Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers.
  • Overview of Nineteenth-century Evolutionism. http://faculty.cascadia.edu
  • Scupin,  R.  and DeCorse,  C.  R.,  2012.  Anthropology:  A  Global Perspective  (7th edition). Boston: Pearson.
  • Sociobiology,2008. http://stanford.library.usyd.edu.au/archives/fall2008/entries/sociobiology.
  • Spahn, C. 2012.Sociobiology: Nature and Nurture. http://www.academia.edu
  • Trivers, R. L. 1971 The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology 46:35-57.
  • Trivers, R. L. 1972. Parental Investment and Sexual Selection. In Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man. Bernard G. Campbell, ed. Pp. 136-179. Chicago: Aldine.
  • Tylor,  E.B.,  1903.  Primitive  Culture:  Researchers  into  the  Development  of  Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. London: John Murray (originally published in 1871).
  • Tyson, L., 2006. Critical Theory Today A User-Friendly Guide (2nd edition). New York: Routledge.
  • Wilson, E. O., 1975, Sociobiology, Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press.
  • Wilson, E. O., 1976, The Response: Academic Vigilantism and the Political Significance of Sociobiology. BioScience, 26(3): 183; 187–190.
  • Wilson, E. O., 1978, On Human Nature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.