The poverty of selectionism

I am a strong believer in the principle that in scholarly debate, one should respect the arguments of ones opponents, however much one may disagree with them. There are times, however, when this principle of tolerance is stretched to the limit, and nowhere has this been more so in my experience than in encounters with the more fervent advocates of neo-Darwinism in the human sciences. These people sail under a number of flags: there are sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, gene-culture coevolutionists and memeticists1 the latter, perhaps the most bizarre variant of all, holding that the human mind-brain is parasitized by particles of culture (so-called memes) that cause their human hosts to behave in ways conducive to their getting copied into other peoples heads, much as the cold virus, in causing the sufferer to sneeze, succeeds in infecting everyone else in the vicinity. What these approaches have in common is a belief that everything from the architecture of the mind to the manifold and ever-changing patterns of human behaviour can be attributed to designs or programmes that have been assembled from elements of intergenerationally transmissible information, through a process of variation under selection analogous, if not identical, to that which is supposed to bring about the evolution of organic forms. Following a widely accepted shorthand, I shall call them selectionist approaches. With one or two notable exceptions,2 the impact of neoDarwinian selectionism in social and cultural anthropology has been negligible. There are good reasons for this. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, it was quite popular to talk about the replication and diffusion of what were then called culture traits, and by the 1950s it had become conventional to distinguish culture, as an underlying pattern of rules and representations, from its outward, behavioural manifestations. Analogies and comparisons between cultural and biological evolution were commonplace.3 But since then, and especially over the last quarter of a century, sociocultural anthropologists have advanced way beyond these rather elementary formulations. Where once they thought of culture as a kind of content whether conceived as clusters of traits, bundles of instructions, or compendia of rules and representations which filled the capacities of the human mind, they are nowadays much more conscious of culture as process. This process is an unfolding of relations among people and between people and non-human components of the environment, out of which knowledge and understanding is continually being generated or produced. Even within those situations we might label as learning, it is recognized that knowledge is not so much transmitted ready-made as produced anew that is, it is being reproduced rather than replicated. And we now understand much better, too, how persons come into being as centres of intentionality and awareness within fields of social relationships, which are in turn carried forward and transformed through their own actions.4 Selectionists are unaware of these significant developments in social and cultural theory. They have not read the relevant literature, nor do they feel the need to do so, especially because they think theyre ahead of everyone else. But for me, reading their work is like stepping into a time machine, and going back to the days, long before I was born, when issues of culture traits and their diffusion were all the rage. There is, really, a very fundamental difference of approach between most contemporary social and cultural anthropologists and advocates of selectionist models the majority (though not quite all) of whom come from biological anthropology or other disciplines like cognitive science or evolutionary biology. It is that sociocultural anthropologists have spent a lot of time deeply immersed, usually through fieldwork, in another way of life. Their immediate concern is to try to understand this life, and to

Vol. 16 No. 3 June 2000 Every two months

Contents
The poverty of selectionism (TIM INGOLD) page 1
BOB SIMPSON

Imagined genetic communities 3 Nuer ethnicity militarized 6 Home and away 13

SHARON E. HUTCHINSON

TOM HALL and HEATHER MONTGOMERY JOHAN LINDQUIST

Modern spaces and international hinterlands 15

NARRATIVE 18 JONATHAN BENTHALL on Malinowskis tent COMMENT 19 DECLAN QUIGLEY on Rapportage, DAVID SHANKLAND and BEN BURT on the ASA 2000 conference CONFERENCES 23 JULIA PANTHER on the ASA 2000 conference, ANDR ITEANU on Processes of naming OBITUARY 25 HARALD E.L. PRINS on A.H.J. PRINS LETTERS 26 TOM BRASS on Bill Epstein NEWS 26 CALENDAR 28 RAI NEWS 29 CLASSIFIED 31 CAPTION TO FRONT COVER page 30

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1. References to the literature on sociobiology are legion. On evolutionary psychology, see Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby (1992); on gene-culture coevolution see Boyd and Richerson (1985) and Durham (1991); on memetics, see Blackmore (1999). 2. The most prominent exception is Sperber (1996). 3. As long ago as 1956, the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, participating in an interdisciplinary group that had teamed up to explore the analogies between genetic, linguistic and cultural evolution, had coined the expression cultural genotype to refer to the pattern of rules and representations underlying manifest behaviour (Gerard, Kluckhohn and Rapoport 1956). Almost fifty years on, selectionists are still marketing the idea as though it were brand new. 4. See Ingold (1990).

Barkow, J. H., L. Cosmides and J. Tooby 1992. The adapted mind: evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford UP. Blackmore, S. 1999. The meme machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boyd, R. and P. J. Richerson 1985. Culture and the evolutionary process. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Durham, W. H. 1991. Coevolution: genes, culture and human diversity. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Gerard, R. W., C. Kluckhohn and A. Rapoport 1956. Biological and cultural evolution: some analogies and explorations. Behavioral Science 1: 6-34. Ingold, T. 1990. An anthropologist looks at biology. Man (N.S.) 25: 208-29. Sperber, D. 1996. Explaining culture: a naturalistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell.

convey that understanding to others. The overriding concern of selectionists, on the other hand, seems to be to demonstrate the universal applicability of their explanatory models (with blithe disregard, incidentally, for the historical specificity of their provenance). In this enterprise, any empirical data, however simplified, caricatured and divorced from its context, is grist for their theoretical mill. Few selectionists have ever conducted any proper fieldwork, and they know nothing of the challenge that such work can pose to ones most basic assumptions. The people with whom the anthropologist works, and whose lives end up being catalogued in the records of ethnography, may base their understandings on assumptions utterly incommensurate with those built into selectionist models. But this is of no concern to the advocates of such models. While the selectionist proudly attributes scientific status to his or her accounts of other peoples lives, the accounts of the people themselves are packaged as just another traditional worldview, supposedly downloaded over the generations from one passively acquiescent head to another, and whose adaptive significance the selectionist might then set out to explain. Behind all this is the old dichotomy between reason and tradition, which has done so much to sustain the Wests sense of its own superiority over the rest, and to disqualify and disempower local forms of knowledge and understanding. I have yet to read any interpretation of social or cultural phenomena by a selectionist that has added anything to what we know already by other means. To be sure, selectionists pride themselves on being able to come up with what they like to call testable hypotheses according to which, for example, a certain pattern of behaviour is likely to become established in a population if environmental conditions are conducive to the replication and diffusion of the programmatic instructions of which this behaviour is the observable output. Such hypotheses, however, are fundamentally misconceived. For one thing, the idea of culture as consisting in transmissible and diffusable bundles of instructions is based on the false assumptions, firstly, that the meaning of each instruction can be specified independently of the particular environmental contexts of its application, and secondly, stemming from this, that information is tantamount to knowledge. For another thing, no known form of learning in human society can reasonably be described as a simple process of replication. Moreover, what people do is embedded in lifelong histories of engagement, as whole beings, with their surroundings, and is not the mechanical output of interaction between pre-replicated instructions (whether genetic or cultural) and prespecified environmental conditions, as selectionists would have us

believe. But quite aside from all these objections, the very idea that one is actually testing hypotheses is merely a cover for using natural selection as a logical device to turn description into explanation. In effect, what selectionists habitually do is to redescribe the phenomena under investigation in their terms, and then use the metaphor of selection as a trick which appears to convert a description of what is going on into an explanation for it. The fact that most advocates of selectionist models have allowed themselves to be mystified by their own procedures does not make them any more defensible. Selectionism strikes me as such bad science, and so full of shoddy thinking, that I find it very hard to respect. Applied to the realms of social and cultural phenomena it has been utterly disastrous. Perhaps we should not get too hot under the collar about this. As I have already noted, few sociocultural anthropologists take it seriously. But other people do. Indeed over recent years, selectionists have run an extraordinarily successful and well-funded public relations exercise, backed up by all the scholarly paraphernalia of academic conferences, edited volumes, specialist journals and lengthy lists of references in which they all cite one another. Dissenting voices, however, have been comprehensively suppressed. Far from remaining indifferent to all of this, it leaves me feeling viscerally angry. Indeed I have often been taken aback by the strength of my own reaction, and I have wondered about the reasons for it. Part of the problem, perhaps, lies in the sheer hubris with which selectionists advance their claims. Not for them the ramblings of woolly-minded humanists when Darwin and hard science point the way! Why bother to read or engage with the work of generations of social and cultural theorists when it is perfectly obvious that human beings are hard-wired meme-replicating machines? All this stuff about agency and structure, about how persons come into being within fields of social relationships, about culture as process rather than transferable content, is so much froth. Humanists can only deal in proximate realities; neo-Darwinian human science reveals the ultimate causes of things. For those of us who have struggled mightily to find a language adequate to the task of comprehending the range and variety of human experience, it is indeed galling to have to listen as selectionists, flaunting their ignorance of social and cultural anthropology as though it were a mark of radicalism and intellectual virility, rehearse their antediluvian notions of culture and their strip-cartoon sociology in the name of a brave new science. The naivety, ethnocentricity and sheer prejudice of their understanding, at times, beggar belief, but far worse is their refusal to countenance the legitimacy of approaches other than their own. Surely the one thing we should not tolerate, in scholarly debate, is intolerance. And I have found neoDarwinian selectionists peculiarly intolerant of any intellectual challenge to their point of view. They simply assume it to be unassailable and refuse to discuss it further. Their favourite ploy, of course, is to brand anyone who doesnt fall into line as a crypto-Creationist. And that really is sinking pretty low! Social and cultural anthropologists, I believe, cannot afford to maintain a stance of studied indifference to selectionism. Its reductionist formulations and cardboard stereotypes fly in the face of the generous understanding of the richness and depth of human knowledge and experience for which we have always fought. What is required is a policy not of appeasement but of vigorous, principled and public opposition. ! Tim Ingold University of Aberdeen

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 16 No 3, June 2000