There Is Only One Human Culture
People—social scientists and laypersons alike—often speak of culture in the plural (“cultures”) because they believe that there are many different cultures in the world. At one level, this is of course true; the American culture is different from the Chinese culture, both of which are different from the Egyptian culture, and so on. However, all the cultural differences are on the surface; deep down, at the most fundamental level, all human cultures are essentially the same.
To use a famous metaphor, coined by the cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris,12 it is true that, at the surface level, people in some societies consume beef as food and worship pigs as sacred religious objects, while those in others consume pork as food and worship cows as sacred religious objects. So there is cultural variety at this concrete level. However, both beef and pork are animal proteins (as are dogs, whales, and monkeys), and both pigs and cows are animate objects (as are Buddha, Allah, and Jesus). And people in every human society consume animal proteins and worship animate objects. At this abstract level, there are no exceptions, and all human cultures are the same. There is no infinite variability in human culture, in the sense that there are no cultures in which people do not consume animal protein or worship animate objects.
To use another example, it is true that languages spoken in different cultures appear completely different, as anyone who ever tried to learn a foreign language knows. English is completely different from Chinese, neither of which is anything like Arabic. Despite these “surface” differences, however, all natural human languages share what the linguist Noam Chomsky calls the “deep structure” of grammar.13 In this sense, English and Chinese are essentially the same, in the sense that beef and pork are essentially the same.
You need proof? Any developmentally normal child can grow up to speak any natural human language. Regardless of what language their genetic parents spoke, all developmentally normal children are capable of growing up to be native speakers of English, Chinese, Arabic, or any natural human language. In fact, when a group of children grow up together with no adults to teach them a language, they will invent their own natural human language with complete grammar. This does not mean, however, that the human capacity for language is infinitely malleable. Human children cannot grow up to speak non-natural languages like FORTRAN or symbolic logic, despite the fact that these are far more logical and easier to learn than any natural language (no irregular verbs, no exceptions to rules). Yes, a developmentally normal human child can grow up to speak any language, as long as the language is a product of human evolution, not a recent invention of computer scientists or logicians.14
Pierre van den Berghe, whom we encountered in the last chapter, again puts it best when he says, “Culture is the uniquely human way of adapting, but culture, too, evolved biologically.”15 Despite all the surface differences, there is only one human culture, because culture, like our body, is an adaptive product of human evolution. The human culture is a product of our genes, just like our hands and pancreas are.
Biologically, human beings are very weak and fragile; we do not have fangs to fight predators and catch prey or fur to protect us from extreme cold. Culture is the defense mechanism with which evolution equipped us to protect ourselves, so that we can inherit and then pass on our knowledge of manufacturing weapons (to fight predators and catch prey) or clothing and shelter (to protect us from extreme cold). We don’t need fangs or fur, because we have culture. And just like—despite some minor individual differences—all tigers have more or less the same fangs and all polar bears have more or less the same fur, all human societies have more or less the same culture. Fangs are a universal trait of all tigers; fur is a universal trait of all polar bears; so culture is a universal trait of all human societies. Yes, culture is a cultural universal.
Three Examples of Exotic Culture That Never Was
The recent (and somewhat shameful) history of the social sciences is very instructive in this respect. It shows that every time there was news of a discovery of a new, exotic culture in a remote region of the world, completely different from the Western European culture, it turns out that the discovery was a hoax. Every time, it turns out that there are no human cultures that are radically and completely different from other cultures. We’ll share three such examples.
Margaret Mead and the Samoa16
In 1923, Margaret Mead (1901–1978), one of the most celebrated anthropologists of all time, was an anthropology graduate student of Franz Boas at Columbia University. Boas was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, and was therefore politically and personally motivated to prove wrong the Nazi policy of eugenics. While this is an admirable goal in and of itself, Boas unfortunately chose the wrong tactics to achieve it. He wanted to show that biology had nothing to do with how humans behave, and that environment—culture—determines human behavior entirely. He was a strong proponent of cultural determinism.
In order to demonstrate that culture and socialization determine human behavior in its entirety, Boas gave his graduate students (including Mead) the impossible task of finding a human culture radically different from the Western culture, where people behave completely differently from Americans and Europeans. Margaret Mead was sent to Samoa with this mandate from Boas.
On August 31, 1925, Mead arrived in American Samoa to conduct her research. She was to spend six months doing her field work. Unbeknownst to Boas, however, Mead was involved in another, secret research project, and spent almost all of her time in Samoa doing this other work. She was to leave Samoa in a month, and she had not done any of the fieldwork for Boas on the topic of cultural and behavioral variability to find evidence that Samoan behavior was completely different from American behavior. She decided to finish this work quickly by interviewing two young local women about the sexual behavior of adolescents in Samoa on March 13, 1926.
Mead knew that in the United States and the rest of the Western world, boys were sexually aggressive and actively pursued girls, while girls were sexually coy and waited to be asked out on dates by boys. “How different are things in Samoa? How are Samoan boys and girls when it comes to sex?” Mead asked her two young female informants, Fa’apua’a Fa’amu and Fofoa Poumele.
Fa’apua’a and Fofoa, just like young women everywhere, were quite embarrassed to talk about sex to a total stranger. So they decided to make a big joke about it out of sheer embarrassment. They told Mead the opposite of how things were in Samoa. They told her that boys were quite shy, and girls actively pursued boys sexually. It was a hoax, but in the minds of Fa’apua’a and Fofoa, the story that they were telling Mead was so outrageous and so obviously untrue that they couldn’t believe anyone in her right mind would believe them.
Except that Mead did, for this was exactly the type of “evidence” that Boas had sent her to Samoa to gather. Here now was evidence that sexual behavior of adolescents could be completely different from (nay, the opposite of) how it is in the United States. So culture does completely determine human behavior after all! Mead was ecstatic. She left Samoa in April 1926 and published her “findings” in Samoa in a book called Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928. The book immediately became an international bestseller and later a classic in cultural anthropology, and, among other things, formed the foundation of modern feminism. Feminists pointed to the “evidence” in the book to support their claim that, given different “gender socialization,” Western boys and girls could be completely different. Boys could be more like girls, and girls could be more like boys. So, in a sense, modern feminism was founded on the basis of a hoax.
More than sixty years later, on May 2, 1988, Fa’apua’a, who was then 86 years old, told a Samoan government official (who happened to be the son of Fofoa, who passed away in 1936) that everything she and her friend Fofoa told Margaret Mead about the sexual behavior of Samoan boys and girls on that fateful night of March 13, 1926, was untrue. It was a hoax. As it turns out, overwhelming ethnographic evidence by now shows that Samoan ad
olescents are no different from adolescents anywhere else in the world. Boys are sexually aggressive and active, and girls are sexually coy and shy.
The Gentle Tasaday
In 1968, biosocial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published the first edition of the anthropology classic Yanomamö: The Fierce People.17 In the book, Chagnon describes the life of a tribe of South American Indians called the Yanomamö, living in the jungles of Brazil and Venezuela. The Yanomamö are so fierce and warlike that a third of adult males (and 7 percent of adult females) die in their constant battle. They are thought to be the fiercest people on earth.
Now that the Yanomamö were known to the world through Chagnon’s work, the cultural determinists—the intellectual descendants of Franz Boas—had a task at hand. If human culture and behavior were infinitely variable, then there must exist the opposite of the Yanomamö somewhere on earth. If there were “the fiercest people on earth,” then there must also be “the gentlest people on earth.” Merely three years later, the cultural determinists got their wish.
In 1971, Manuel Elizalde, an official of the Marcos government in the Philippines, discovered an isolated tribe of twenty-six men, women, and children on the island of Mindanao. Called the Tasaday, they were said to lead a Stone Age life, without any knowledge of agriculture or even the existence of any other humans besides themselves. They had been completely cut off from the rest of the world for centuries. They were wearing leaves and living in a cave. Among other things, they were so peaceful (so opposite of the Yanomamö) that their language did not even contain any word for violence, conflict, or aggression. Two years later, a book describing their peaceful life was published with the predictable title The Gentle Tasaday.18
With the help of the Marcos government, Elizalde tightly controlled media and scientific access to the Tasaday for fifteen years. As a result, not much more was known about them, and what was known about them by the rest of the world was officially sanctioned by Elizalde. In 1986, the Marcos government collapsed and Elizalde fled the country to Costa Rica. When two journalists went to the site of original discovery of the Tasaday, they found the cave empty. They found the Tasaday in a nearby village, wearing T-shirts and blue jeans. Upon further questioning, two of the original twenty-six Tasaday admitted to pretending to be Stone Age people upon Elizalde’s insistence. It turns out that Marcos had instructed Elizalde to manufacture this band of peaceful Stone Age people in order to attract the world’s attention to the Philippines but away from the brutal policies of his oppressive government. When a group of German journalists went to the cave a few days after the two original journalists uncovered the hoax, they discovered the Tasaday once again playing the parts of Stone Age people, pretending to live in a cave and wearing leaves on top of their T-shirts and blue jeans.
When one of us (Kanazawa) took his first sociology course in 1982, his instructor used the second edition, published in 1981, of the bestselling introductory sociology textbook Sociology by Ian Robertson. On Chapter 2, there is a picture of the Tasaday, all peacefully and quietly sitting in their cave. The caption to the photograph reads, “The Tasaday, a recently discovered ‘stone age’ tribe in the Philippines, apparently do not have words in their language to express enmity or hatred. Competition, acquisitiveness, aggression, and greed are all unknown among these gentle people. The existence of societies like the Tasaday challenges Western assumptions about ‘human nature.’” Five years later, Kanazawa taught his own introductory sociology course at the University of Washington for the first time and used the third edition of Robertson’s still bestselling textbook, published in 1987—a year after the hoax had been uncovered. All references to the Tasaday had been deleted in the third edition.
Incredibly, anthropologists still debate the authenticity of the Tasaday even today,19 but the majority of opinions appears to be that they were not a genuine Stone Age people. One thing is certain: A small tribe of twenty-six people could not have been completely isolated from the outside world for centuries because that would lead to massive inbreeding. And they also could not possibly have been so peaceful that their language lacked any word for conflict and competition. For better or worse, aggression and violence are part of male human nature. It could be heightened, as among the Yanomamö, but it could not be completely erased from human nature.
The Native American Environmentalism20
Unlike the first two, our third and final example of an exotic culture that never was is something that is not yet widely known as false. It is commonly believed even today that, unlike the later European settlers to the American continents, Native Americans are protective of the environment. It is often said that Native Americans make every decision with the next seven generations in mind.
In 1854, the governor of the Washington Territory, on behalf of President Franklin Pierce, met with Chief Seattle, leader of the Duwamish Indians, and offered to buy Chief Seattle’s land. This was Chief Seattle’s response to the offer:
How can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us…. Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people…Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
It’s a beautiful speech. The only problem is that Chief Seattle never made it. The whole speech was written by a white screen-writer and professor of film, Ted Perry, for the 1971 ABC TV drama Home. It was fiction. This is the origin of the myth of Native American respect for the environment.
There is no contemporaneous record of what Chief Seattle actually said at the meeting with the governor in 1854, but according to one eyewitness account, made thirty years later, Chief Seattle thanked the governor for the President’s generosity. He was very eager to do business with the President and sell his land to the US government.
The myth that Native Americans are protective of the environment was further fortified by the “Keep America Beautiful” series of public ser vice announcements in 1971, the same year Home aired, with the unforgettable image of the “crying Indian.” The Indian witnesses white people littering and polluting the environment, and quietly weeps for Mother Earth and the abuse that she must go through at the hands of white people. The message of the public service announcement was that we must all be as protective of the environment as the Native Americans were.
(After his death in 1999, it was revealed that Iron Eyes Cody, the man who played the “crying Indian” in the public ser vice announcements in 1971 and subsequently made a career in Hollywood, portraying numerous Native American characters in movies and TV shows, was not Native American at all. He was born Espera Oscar DeCorti, a son of two Italian immigrants.)
Archaeological evidence shows that Native Americans were no more or no less protective of the environment than were any other groups on earth. A large majority of plant and animal species that ever existed on the American continents had been driven extinct by Native Americans long before Columbus set foot in the West Indies. Environmental protection is a luxury that became possible to Western societies only in the last several decades. Before industrialization and the current age of material abundance, all human groups had to exploit the environment to the maximum just to survive. No one could afford to be environmentally conscious, and Native Americans were no exception.
The point of these examples of exotic culture that never was is to highlight the fact that all human cultures, however exotic and seemingly different on the surface, are essentially the same. There are no human cultures that are radically and completely different from any other, just like there are no human bodies that are radically and completely different from any other. Every time there appears to be a new discovery of an exotic culture that is different from all others, it turns out to be a hoax.
Now that we have discussed the fundamentals of evolutionary psychology in the last two chapters, you should feel free to delve into the questions that we pose, and answers we suggest for them, in the substantive chapters (chapters 3–8). There is, of course, much more to evolutionary psychology than we discussed in chapters 1 and 2, and if you are interested, we suggest that you explore the books and articles that we recommend in footnote [10] in chapter 1. But our discussion in the last two chapters should be sufficient to inform the questions and answers anywhere in the next six chapters. So feel free to jump in, jump around, and explore the questions that most interest you. Enjoy!
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Barbie—Manufactured by Mattel, Designed by Evolution
THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX AND MATING
Because it focuses so much on reproductive success, most of the fascinating studies that come out each year in evolutionary psychology are about sex and mating. One of the earliest studies in the field, conducted in the mid-1980s, surveyed over ten thousand people from thirty-seven cultures throughout the world and asked them what they sought in their ideal mate.1 To the surprise of everyone (except for evolutionary psychologists), the study found that, regardless of culture, language, religion, race, or geography, men everywhere want the same things in women, and women everywhere want the same things in men (but different from what men want in women).
Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire–Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do Page 5
