Starting from assumptions generated by an evolutionary perspective, Symons (1979) and Daly and Wilson (1983 [1978]) explain and document a complex of universal or near-universal differences between the sexes. Among them are the following: Sex is seen as a service given by females to males (females being the limiting resource); male sexual jealousy is more violent (confidence of paternity being a problem without a female counterpart); men are more quickly aroused, and more by visual stimuli (females being more choosy, and the signs of reproductive potential being more visibly discernible in the female); and the average husband is older than his wife (because a male’s reproductive potential—linked as it is to his ability to invest in child care—typically peaks later than a female’s).10
The greater aggressiveness of males is at least partly a result of sexual selection, aggression being an effective male strategy in the competition for females. Male aggressiveness is, thus, the behavioral and motivational counterpart of the greater physical stature of males. Hormonal factors, among others, underpin both the morphological and temperamental differences between the sexes—some of which are apparent from earliest infancy (Stern 1977).
The universal dominance of men—particularly in the public sphere, as discussed earlier—may well result from the more fundamental human sex differences: above all, the difference in size (Handwerker and Crosbie 1982), in propensity to violence, and in the minimal handicaps entailed for each sex by reproduction (gestation and lactation are considerably greater handicaps to political action than is insemination).
Presumed Evolutionary Theory
Not every explanation of a universal in terms of adaptation is based on sophisticated use of theory. In some cases explanation merely presumes that the human organism has an evolutionary history that determined some feature of human nature that in turn serves to explain some universal. Two explanations for religious phenomena will serve to illustrate.
George Steiner, an authority on the translation of verse, provides an interesting example in his After Babel (1975), which tackles the question of why humans have many languages rather than just one (or even just a few). A major part of his answer turns round his idea of humanity’s constructions of “alternities”: conceptions of the way the world isn’t, whether these be conceptions of past worlds, future worlds, hypothetical worlds, or counterfactual worlds. Steiner argues that, once humans could think sufficiently abstractly about themselves that they could grasp their condition, it was a sine qua non of their further existence that they be able to imagine other conditions. Without articulated visions of conditions other than “the treadmill of organic decay and death,…the individual and the species would have withered” (1975:227, 235). In this view, religion is a product of an adaptation for the generation of alternities (so that languages, whose functions may be as much to create alternities as to grasp realities, therefore proliferate).
Dan Sperber (1985) suggests another explanation for religious phenomena that is equally evolutionist but makes no more than a casual reference to evolutionary theory. In his plea for a more psychologically slanted anthropology, Sperber notes that although we may safely assume that humans have genetically determined cognitive abilities that were shaped by natural selection, this does not indicate that all the effects of these abilities promote fitness. He thus draws a distinction between mental “dispositions” and “susceptibilities.” The former “have been positively selected in the process of biological evolution”; the latter “are side-effects” of the former (1985:80). Most susceptibilities have only “marginal effects” on our well-being and hence do not come under much selective pressure. It is not always easy to distinguish dispositions from susceptibilities, and sometimes one may become the other, as when our disposition to eat sweets gave way to a susceptibility to overconsume sugar. Sperber’s (1985:85) conclusion: “Unlike everyday empirical knowledge, religious beliefs develop not because of a disposition, but because of susceptibility.” In other words, religion is not an adaptation—a biologically advantageous or necessary alternity, as Steiner would have it, but is a side effect of other adaptations.
Evaluating explanations of this sort requires that they be rethought in order to take account of what they omit: a theoretically informed analysis of the possibility and probability that they might be correct and useful explanations. Sperber’s explanation requires less effort of this sort because, for example, some of his terms readily translate into the concepts of evolutionary biology (e.g., dispositions and susceptibilities are adaptations and effects). Furthermore, there is some support for Sperber’s position. D’Aquili and Laughlin (1979), reviewed earlier, argue that divining causes is an adaptation, but they imply that divining first causes that go beyond the evidence is an effect; studies reviewed below in the section on partial explanations also involve effects rather than adaptations.
Interspecific Comparison
This mode of explanation is more or less entailed by evolutionary explanations but sometimes makes sense on its own. For example, Franz De Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics (1982) provides evidence among chimpanzees for what the author calls “triangular awareness,” the ability of an individual A to calculate the interdependence of the three separate relationships composed by his relationships with individuals B and C and the relationship between B and C themselves. This sort of ability among our nearest relatives in the animal world suggests that the same ability in us has phylogenetically deep roots and is therefore innate.
Richard Alexander’s (1979) ultimate explanation of why humans are a group-living species rests on a very broad cross-specific comparison. A great many species, of course, do not live in groups, for it has some real costs (such as considerably enhanced transmission of diseases). Alexander finds only three general factors that, singly or in combination, appear to underlie group living as an adaptation: protection from predators (own species or others), more effective utilization of food resources, and highly localized resources. The evidence suggests to Alexander that it is the first factor that primarily accounts for group living in primates, including humans. Alexander contrasts his mode of explanation with the common assumption that group living needs no explanation, that its advantages are obvious, or that humans are just naturally cooperative and social.
Ontogeny
This mode of explanation is fundamental both to evolutionary and cultural explanations, since in either case the precise steps by which universal traits emerge in individuals must be traced in any thorough explanation of the traits’ universality (even nonuniversals require this kind of explanation).
An anthropological example is Spiro’s explanation for the apparent universality of the Oedipus complex, described in chapter 1. At a specific stage in a little boy’s life a specific configuration in his environment induces the complex in him. Were that configuration to be absent at the critical period, the complex would not develop. It is the universality of the critical environing conditions at the critical period that, according to Spiro, account for the universality of the Oedipus complex.
Further examples are provided by studies of the mother-infant bond, which I mentioned earlier while stressing their importance for understanding kinship, and studies of incest avoidance, which will be the subject of the next chapter.
The ontogeny of facial recognition has received much attention, generally in Western settings. In spite of the Western settings, the subject is directly relevant to anthropology. Kinship requires the ability to recognize kin, which entails the ability to recognize individuals, an ability possessed by many species. Recognition by face is the commonest means employed by humans. Daphne Maurer (1985) prefaces a study that reviews a considerable literature on the ontogeny of facial recognition with the comment that humans have a remarkable ability to recognize the human face in greatly decomposed or blurred images of it, and, moreover, to recognize very large numbers of individual faces. While it might be a mere coincidence, a newborn infant can only focus on objects about eight inches from its eyes, which is the distanc
e between the infant’s eyes and those of its nursing mother; in this position the two typically spend long periods gazing into each other’s faces (Stern 1977; for an apparent or partial exception see Ochs and Schieffelin 1984). Studies of primates raised without ever seeing another conspecific’s face show that at a certain age they recognize it and some of its expressions innately (Sackett 1966). In humans, facial recognition apparently develops in complex interaction between the infant’s developing nervous system and the give and take between the infant and its care givers.
Stern (1985) cites an infant experiment by Meltzoff and Borton (1979) in order to speculate on the ontogeny of our ability to create and understand metaphors. The experiment shows that human neonates at 29 days of age can distinguish by sight the shape of the specific pacifier nipple that has been in their mouth, even though they only feel, not see, its shape. This inbuilt capacity to transfer information from one sensory mode to another not only is crucial to maintaining a unified conception of the world but may be part of the mental mechanism that generates and interprets metaphors.
One of the most important areas of study in which the ontogeny of a universal is central is linguistics. Eric Lenneberg (1967) and Noam Chomsky (1959; 1980; see also Piatelli-Palmarini, ed., 1980)—citing the ease or difficulty with which children acquire particular grammatical forms, which implies an innate “deep structure” of language—argue that we should think of language as analogous to an organ, little different in principle from the other organs of our body, in the sense that they come into being as the result of interaction between genes and environmental cues rather than as the result of simple “learning.” Humans normally “learn” their first language with such extraordinary ease that there is reason to suspect some kind of wiring in the brain for language acquisition: at the right time of life (a “critical period”) it is brought into activity by quite minimal environmental stimuli. At other times—as many of us know from experience—language acquisition is a much more difficult and less successful matter. The regular forms in which deaf children spontaneously construct a communication system (in the absence of models) provides additional evidence of inbuilt wiring for language acquisition (Goldin-Meadow and Feldman 1977). Although the “deep structure” of language remains in many respects elusive and controversial, the age-delimited ontogeny of language is rarely if ever contested nowadays (a fact that was very much involved in the demise of associationist learning theory and the tabula rasa model of the brain that accompanied it; see chapter 2).
Since they are compatible with both cultural or biological explanations for universals, ontogenetic explanations are numerous. Since they can be crucial in determining the precise mix of nature and culture in shaping behavior, they deserve to be even more numerous.
Partial Explanations
Many universals seem to lack a unitary explanation. Religion and aesthetics are examples. Both are perennial puzzles for anthropology because of the absence or uncertainty of their utility or practical value. This makes it difficult to explain them as adaptations in any usual sense of the term (though attempts like Steiner’s are made; for art, see Dissanayake 1988).
In spite of the difficulties presented by an overall explanation, quite a few attempts have been made to explain some aspects of religion/ritual and aesthetics/pleasure in evolutionary or biological terms.11 Some of them, as I indicated earlier, support Sperber’s views about religious phenomena resulting from susceptibilities. Consider the following:
Partial Explanations of Religious Phenomena
There is a long history of explaining a wide range of religious experiences in terms of specific brain dysfunctions—such as epilepsy—or in terms of those features of ritual settings—such as sleep deprivation and prolonged rhythmic activities—that may in various degrees induce or mimic those dysfunctions (see, e.g., Beyerstein 1988). Closely related explanations do not necessarily involve dysfunction but nonetheless involve a channeling of brain function into paths that are, at least, outside the humdrum routine of everyday life.
Rodney Needham (1967), for example, notes the widespread use of percussion to mark transitions in ritual, and he offers an explanation in terms of the nature of the human brain. It is somehow affected by percussive sounds in a way that makes percussion peculiarly appropriate to ritual activities. Later (1978) he linked percussion to a wider discussion of what he called “primary factors” (akin to Bastian’s “elementary ideas”), many of which are recurrent elements in world ethnography because they somehow reflect the way the brain is.
Noting the frequent use in religious activities of swings and other means of achieving vertigo, Alfred Gell (1980) proposes a “vestibular” theory of trance induction. By means of an “assault on the equilibrium sense,” swinging induces an altered state of consciousness, which is interpreted by religious practitioners as a form of religious experience. Techniques such as those employed by whirling dervishes are no doubt similar.
Donald Tuzin (1984) draws attention to the frequent use in religious practices around the world of certain deep-noted instruments, particularly the bull roarer and large drums (large flutes could probably be added). These instruments are believed to produce the sound of the spirits, and Tuzin explains this in terms of the physiological effects on the human brain of the sounds the instruments make. More precisely, it is the infrasonic waves they produce while they are sounding, for these infrasonic waves produce an uncanny feeling which is particularly apt for mystical settings.
The extraordinary number of mind-altering drugs employed to induce trance or other mystical states has received considerable attention from anthropologists (Weil 1972; La Barre 1980). The discovery of endorphins—naturally produced pain-killing substances in the brain—may throw light on a wide variety of hitherto inexplicable ritual practices.
A detailed study of a connection between religion and the character of our psyche is presented by Mundkur (1983), who argues that the widespread presence of the serpent in religious thought and iconography rests upon our innate wariness of snakes, a trait we share with other primates (Hebb 1946). Animal counterparts, the extreme ease with which the fear is acquired and the difficulty with which it is suppressed, the essentially emotional rather than rational basis for the fear, and the sensibleness of the fear in humanity’s natural environments all conspire to render the innateness of this fear intelligible. Death by snakebite has long been a real danger in many of humanity’s environments. Even peoples with traditions of reverence for snakes still show wariness if not fear toward them (Russell 1983).
Note that in most if not all of these cases there is no argument that the specific practices are phylogenetic adaptations, but there is an argument that it is the nature of the human brain to react in specific ways to the practices. Each of these ways of reacting accounts for some part of widespread religious phenomena.
Partial Explanations of Aesthetics/Pleasure
One of the fundamental assumptions of evolutionary psychology is that matters closely related to our survival and reproduction have a likelihood of engaging our emotions. Thus, although there might be little evidence of a general adaptation for an aesthetic sense (but cf. the argument of Dissanayake described below), a disparate collection of emotion-producing activities and entities may structure what we consider aesthetic. Surely the most notable of all examples of pleasure in the service of our reproductive interests is the sexual drive, particularly male orgasm. The imagery of reproduction—ranging from genitals and breasts through nude bodies and the infinite themes of love—is too pervasive to require documentation.
Orians (1980) has examined such matters as the emotional reactions of explorers to different natural settings, the landscaping and planting of parks, and the criteria that make particular pieces of real estate especially valuable, to show that humans seem to have an innate preference for settings that would have been optimal habitats for our Pleistocene foraging ancestors. We like “lakes, rivers, cliffs, and savannahs,” settings in which food,
water, and protection (as in caves) were in optimal combination. Key elements in Orians’s argument are the emotional nature of the human preferences, and comparisons with habitat selection in other species, where its innate component is less questionable. Here the argument is that we have an innate tendency to prefer, seek out, and construct certain kinds of settings because we feel good in them.
Mundkur’s (1983) analysis of the snake in religion is simultaneously an explanation of why it figures so widely in visual representations: we are wired to react to it; it is an inherently potent symbol. Here the argument is not that we find the image good but that it evokes a response that can be put to some use. Gell’s (1980) hypothesis about the relationship between the vestibule and trance is no less an explanation for a number of very familiar pleasures: teeter-totters, merry-go-rounds, horseback riding, children’s whirling games, and so on (Caillois 1961). Turner and Pöppel (1983) provide a remarkable analysis of certain universal features of poetry—particularly its tendency to have lines of about 3 seconds in duration—in terms of various information processing features of the human brain.
If there is anything that comes close to a generic aesthetic sense it might be an appreciation for skill. Given our long dependence on manual skill to make tools, a sense of pleasure in seeing the products of skill—and in producing them—is not an unexpectable trait. Given the utility of verbal skills, the widespread appreciation of them is no less expectable.
Human Universals Page 17
