Cooking is the most important use of fire. Besides making some food taste better, it can make food easier to chew and digest, it kills bacteria in food, and is an important aid to food preservation. Cooking greatly expanded the range of substances humans could eat. Evidence of cooking is ancient and widespread.
It is presumably because of their great antiquity and utility that fire-making and cooking have spread to all human societies (or spread with humanity—Homo sapiens sapiens—to all its locations). In other words, the explanation for the universality of fire and cooking is at least in part a matter of invention (or discovery) and diffusion, which are cultural processes par excellence.
Although the fascination humans have for fire might conceivably reflect something extracultural, there is little reason to think of the use of fire or cooking as anything like instincts. Both lack direct counterparts outside the hominid line. The traits show no sign of spontaneous emergence in the individual at any particular time in life. We have almost no reason to think that humans would do either if not taught to. For these and other reasons, cooking and the use of fire are prototypically cultural (Blum 1963:45).
But the assertion that fire and cooking have utility, which provides a motive for their spread and subsequent retention in the cultural repertoire of all peoples, rests upon physical features of the human organism. Fire and cooking have other uses than the ones mentioned above, but each that was mentioned has reference to human physiology: our requirements in terms of body temperature, our vulnerability to certain kinds of predators, the nature of the human digestive system, the nature of our interactions with microscopic organisms, and more. It should also be noted that not all these uses of fire, and even more so of cooking, are “obvious.” It is possible that even the well-informed among us do not yet fully understand the benefits our distant ancestors realized by cooking their food (nor, for that matter, do we understand the ways in which humans may have physiologically adapted—perhaps in terms of dentition or digestive enzymes—to the use of cooking).
Archoses
These form a bizarre and only hypothetical subtype of (4), in which the diffusion is with humanity (rather than from one group to another) and the utility is zero or less. Weston La Barre (1984:10) coined the term and defined archoses as beliefs that consist of “nonsense and mis-information so ancient and pervasive as to be seemingly inextricable from our thinking.” Archoses may be illustrated by an alleged near-universal, the “muelos” belief as described by La Barre (1984).
La Barre’s argument concerns a series of beliefs and practices that are rooted in a few interrelated misconceptions about human anatomy and physiology. These misconceptions stem from the reasonable observations that the brain is not merely the seat of consciousness but of life too, and that semen is a substance that transmits life. These two observations are linked by the notion that bone marrow and brain, which physically resemble each other and semen, are a common substance, muelos, that is the source of semen. The spinal column is a conduit from the main supply of muelos to the genital organ (this conception appears in some of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical sketches; see frontispiece in La Barre 1984). From these erroneous conceptions flow a whole series of further beliefs—among them, for example, the belief that life can be reconstructed from one’s bones—and also some practices that have worked extraordinary mischief among humans.
Headhunting is the unfortunate practice to which La Barre gives most attention. The practice was widespread in both the Old and New Worlds. Drawing particularly on Indo-European and Southeast Asian materials, La Barre shows that headhunting is widely associated with fertility. Taking heads ensures fertility of crops, animals, and people. The practice is believed to produce fertility because it is a traffic in life-substance. Scalping was a variant: because hair sprouts from the life-carrying organs—head and genitals—it is thought to carry life-giving force too.
A less malign but still unfortunate spinoff of these mistaken conceptions, according to La Barre, is the set of beliefs and practices involved in husbanding semen. Thus masturbation is thought to weaken or madden because it drains the bones and brain of their substance.
La Barre traces a variety of other widespread beliefs or practices to the muelos belief. Its connections with the religions of the world—whether great or small—are numerous.
La Barre places the origin of these beliefs in a Palaeolithic Urkultur. The beliefs spread so far and survived because there was no way to correct them. Perhaps it is possible that a cultural trait or complex could achieve universality in the absence of clear utility, possibly even with numerous harmful effects, so long as it had no superior competitors (and assuming that no belief at all is for some reason not a viable alternative). Until the advent of scientific anatomy and physiology, the muelos belief lacked such positive competition.
But there are various interrelated objections to La Barre’s argument. One hinges on a problem of evidence: if all, or nearly all, elements of the muelos complex were widespread, the complexity of its pattern would strongly suggest a single origin. But this is not the case. Among some peoples—e.g., the ancient Indo-Europeans—we find the full complex. Among many others we find no more than disparate elements and can only assert that they are remnant parts of an earlier full complex. They could be false cognates, associations independently hit upon. Accordingly, we cannot rule out the possibility that what La Barre sees as manifestations of a single belief complex is actually a set of unrelated complexes that happen to overlap at some points.
Even if we were to concede the widespread nature of the core of the complex—the posited connection between brain, spinal column, marrow, and semen—why shouldn’t we think that their resemblance repeatedly suggested connections between them that we now know to be false? Why shouldn’t we think that the belief is an elementary idea or statistical universal rather than an archosis?
Materialists would offer further objections, especially by pointing out that beliefs underlying headhunting, for example, may be rationalizations rather than explanations. And the practices, however they may be justified or explained, may therefore benefit some people even if harmful to numerous others.
In spite of these objections, I have dwelled on this case at length because, if correct, it is one of the most culturologically pure of all explanations for universals. Granted it does have reference to biological facts, but the reference cannot easily be thought of as a reflection, recognition, or logical extension from those facts; it is more of a distortion. However, if we delve into the assumptions that La Barre seems to make, we still find some possible underlying psychobiological elements of explanation. One is that people are prone to learn and transmit traditional lore with minimal change over long periods of time. Another is that people are prone to explain the unknown. When problems present themselves to human consciousness, humans are not content with no explanation at all, which rules that out as a viable alternative to false and harmful explanations. (The propensity to explain the unknown is discussed again below.) Yet another is that people are prone to an interest in certain things more than others, and so to have theories about the things that interest them. La Barre demonstrates people’s unusual interest in life force and reproduction. So even archoses yield in part to noncultural explanation.
Conservation of Energy
This explanation is called upon specifically to explain linguistic “marking,” which was described in chapter 3. At all levels in which marking occurs there is an intuitively grasped similarity. Generally the unmarked is the more common (its text frequency is greater), it is linguistically less complex, and it can show more irregularity.
George K. Zipf’s (1949) pioneering studies of word frequencies resulted in his “principle of least effort,” which offers a general explanation for many marking patterns (Greenberg 1966): the more frequently used word will tend to be unmarked because this simplifies language or reduces the energy that speech consumes. The tendency to conserve speech energy in this manner is so u
niform over time that it produces numerous universals or near-universals. Conservation of speech energy everywhere produces certain regularities in language, and these regularities qualify the notion that speech sounds and patterns are essentially arbitrary. There is of course much arbitrariness in language, but where the economy of energy can exert pressure without loss of communicative effectiveness, sound and sense come together (see also Friedrich 1975).
Because of the considerable scope for arbitrariness in language it is often thought of as cultural. Yet the process that shapes marking universals operates through human physiology: conservation of energy refers to the energy utilized by the human body. Marking, thus, can only be understood as an interaction between human biology and the cultural aspects of language. Moreover, economy of effort or energy is an evolutionary factor that almost certainly impinges upon more than language: “Economy and efficiency are universal characteristics of biological mechanisms” (Williams 1966:41).
The Nature of the Human Organism, with Emphasis on the Brain
In chapter 1 we saw that Ekman and his associates posited a neuromuscular “facial affect program” to explain universal expressions of emotions. And in this chapter we have already seen that handedness is at least partly explained in terms of the division of labor and internal structure of the human brain. These are examples of universals explained in terms of the human organism.
It is well known in anthropology that in his famous book on The Elementary Structures of Kinship Lévi-Strauss (1969 [1949]) explains various features of kinship in terms of three universal “mental structures”: (1) the innate recognition of rules, (2) reciprocity, and (3) the bond created between givers and receivers of gifts. Since Lévi-Strauss does not link his discussion in any detailed way to the anatomy of the brain, no specialized knowledge is required to follow his argument. It rests largely on the assumption that these structures must somehow be a part of the mind if we are to make sense of uniformities in human behavior. More recent appeals to the human mind in explaining universals are often based on much more specialized knowledge of its structure and function—and hence involve knowledge that many sociocultural anthropologists lack.
For example, d’Aquili and Laughlin (1979) offer an explanation for the myths that normally or universally accompany ritual in terms of “three critical higher cortical functions: conceptualization, abstract causal thinking, and antinomous thinking” (1979:162). (The latter refers to the dualistic thought mentioned above with respect to handedness.) These functions are lodged in particular regions of the brain (the supramarginal and angular gyri and adjacent regions)—so one or more may be eliminated by trauma to those regions—and the functions appear to the authors to be adaptations (as defined below).
D’Aquili and Laughlin argue that these cortical functions not only give us the capacity to mythologize but that by virtue of what they call the “cognitive imperative” humans are driven to “organize unexplained external stimuli into some coherent cognitive matrix” (1979:161). Thus, except where such matters as scientific caution are engaged to temper the results of this mechanism, humans are everywhere driven to try to explain what they perceive; where these explanations are not objectively apparent, first causes in the form of supernatural entities are generated.
Given that a number of anthropologists have noted the tendency for humans everywhere to impose meaning on the world, and that curiosity is lifelong for humans (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989:580–583), it is clear that d’Aquili and Laughlin offer an explanation for a real problem. But few anthropologists are in a position to evaluate their evidence in terms of neurobiology. Further examples of this sort will be given below in the section on partial explanations.
Evolutionary Theory
If we assume that society and culture are products of human action, or that society and culture (including language) are evolved characteristics of humans, and that humans themselves are products of organic evolution, then evolutionary theory offers the only explanatory framework for universals that is potentially all-inclusive. In order to assess this claim it is first necessary to outline basic elements of evolutionary biology. This task is necessary in part because there are some terms that anthropologists and evolutionary biologists use with differing meanings.
The concept of natural selection is a central element in evolutionary theory. Natural selection is the process whereby organisms that are better adapted outbreed (and hence are more “fit” than) those that are less well adapted; by virtue of this process species undergo changes in their features over time. “Better adapted” refers to appropriateness of design toward particular ends. Let me illustrate this hypothetically. A certain conformation of beak might allow a particular species of bird to break seeds better and thus confer greater fitness on the individual birds with the superior beak conformation. Insofar as the superior conformation has a heritable basis (i.e., insofar as specific genes—a genotype—differentiate the superior from the inferior conformation of beak—the phenotype), it is then transmitted in larger proportion to the next generation of the bird species in question. In the face of a continuous environmental challenge (i.e., cracking a seed of particularly nutritive value in a specific environment) over many generations, a feature of beak conformation may evolve that can be said to be an adaptation to seed cracking.
For many biologists (e.g., Williams 1966; Burian 1983), this is the only correct usage of the term “adaptation.” It requires a rigorous explication of the relationship between (phenotypic) design and function in the context of a stable relationship between a species and its environment. Sometimes, however, adaptiveness is gauged or measured not in terms of the relative fitness of design with respect to function but in terms of reproductive differentials: fitness is measured not by its immediate cause (such as the superior beak conformation) but by its real or alleged immediate effect in terms of “reproductive success.”4
Natural selection generally being a slow process occurring over many generations, it is widely assumed among biologically knowledgeable anthropologists that human nature evolved during the long Palaeolithic period in which humans were foragers: too little time has elapsed since then for substantial evolution of human nature to have taken place. Moreover, the environments of postforaging human groups have in many respects been far from uniform or stable, which further militates against any patterned evolution of human nature away from the characteristics forged in the Palaeolithic. Homo sapiens now lives in environments that must differ in numerous ways from the “natural” environments in which its universal features evolved. The discrepancy between the environment in which we evolved and the many novel environments in which humans now live is both a research curse and a blessing. Having to reconstruct the features of the former—in order to determine which features of human nature may be adaptations in the sense described above—is clearly a complication, and yet the many novel environments in which humans now live constitute a wealth of unplanned experiments that sometimes make features of human nature stand out in bold relief (see, e.g., chapter 5 or Symons’s [1979] comparison of homosexual communities to illuminate male and female differences).5
Since sociocultural anthropologists use the word “adaptation” in much wider contexts, and often in a much looser way, it is clear that this is a point at which they are particularly likely to misunderstand biologists and be misunderstood by them. In contexts where confusion might exist, it is helpful to refer to adaptations in the evolutionary biological sense as “phylogenetic adaptations.”
Differing usages of the term “behavior” also divide the biological from the social sciences. The behaviors that ethologists classically studied and sought to explain are conceived of as “fixed action patterns,” coordinated movements that are presumably underpinned by complex neuromuscular programs that are elicited by specific entities or actions that are called “releasers” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1979). More recent students of animal behavior are much less concerned with the fixity of the behaviors they study, but the behaviors
are still physical patterns of action. In either case, it is relatively straightforward to specify the phenotypes that have undergone selection: features of anatomy and physiology in particular. Social scientists, by contrast, almost always use the term “behavior” in a wider sense that includes activities that have in common only their ends, not neuromuscular response patterns. Political “behavior,” and many much less complex forms of human behavior, have nothing approaching the neuroanatomical fixity of animal behaviors. There are exceptions, of course, such as the infant’s sucking reflex, certain facial expressions of emotion, and the coyness display—but they are few. Consequently, the phenotypes upon which selection could act to fix such behaviors as adaptations would generally have to be features of psyche: ends, goals, motives, or drives. These ends or drives might be fixed but not the actions they give rise to.
Another fruitful source of misunderstanding concerns the distinction between the function of an adaptation and its various effects. The bird whose beak has been modified in our hypothetical example may, as an incidental side effect of its new beak form, engage in somewhat different aggressive acts—because its beak is wider, harder, longer, shorter, or whatever. But to confuse incidental effect with the function that was central to the selective process is a cardinal error. Because it is hardly ever possible to reconstruct in detail the evolutionary history of a species, the attempt to distinguish functions from effects requires a rigorous analysis of design—in a comparative perspective when possible—along with whatever knowledge can be achieved of the environment(s) in which the trait was fixed by natural selection.
Human Universals Page 15
