A biologist friend of mine sent me this. I thought it might be
of interest to WSN and PSN. My apologies for those of you who will get this
twice.... First are her short comments, and then the article:
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This is a great article in which Jonathan Marks, my favorite
molecular anthropologist, shreds a notorious book of pop sociobiology. For
non-biologist, the word "homologous" means "related by evolutionary descent"
(e.g., a human hand and a bird's wing) as opposed to "analogous" (similar but
not related by descent, as a bird's wing and an insect's wing). I had to
transcribe this because I couldnt manage to download it electronically, so I
apologize for typos I may have introduced).
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Jonathan Marks in Human
Biology Feb.99 issue, pp. 143-146
review of Demonic Males;
Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, by Richard Wrangham and Dale
Peterson
Evolution is in perpetual need of rescue from those who
profess to be its strongest supporters. And those of us who have dedicated
ourselves to teaching evolution to the next generation need all the help
we can get. This book will not make our jobs any easier.
Demonic Males is a titillating and simplistic account of our
origins, with just enough grounding in modern discoveries to be taken seriously,
in the long lineage that subsumes Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris, Ignatius
Donelly, Immanuel Velikovsky, and Erich von Daniken.
The book's thesis is
that our familiar social world is the product of eons of biological evolutionary
forces and not an ephemeral construction of social history. In particular, it is
natural for men to fight to the death as individuals and as groups and for women
to dig it, which perpetuates the fighting. And this is "written in the molecular
chemistry of DNA" (p. 198), Wrangham and Peterson assert, despite the minimal
evidence for such demonic male competition inferable from our bodies and teeth
(p. 178). I, for one, would love to see those Southern blots.
But the
imaginative chemistry is nothing compared to the imaginative ethnology. The
Yanomamo are blithely compared to the Gombe chimpanzees and are represented as
pristine warriors outside of historyæunfortunately
without the benefit of the scholarly insights of such anthropologists as Brian
Ferguson. Margaret Mead gets predictably bashed, as if hers were the only
evidence ever marshaled for the influence of culture on
behavior and Derek Freeman were a reliable and fair
critic,
If there was an award for the most ink
spilled in simplistic interpretation of an ethological factoid, it would have to
go to the bizarre killings of the Kahama chimpanzee community by the
Kasekala males at Gombe in the 1970's. Demonic Males says it is
paradigmatic for chimpanzee behavior and of a piece with organized human
violence. Wrangham and Peterson would have us believe that this episode of chimp
"warfare" throws more light on Gaugamela, Actium, Agincourt, Balaklava,
Vicksburg, Ypres, Nagasaki, and Sharpeville than on Dogs Playing Poker. One,
however, searches vainly for the evidence that it is actually anything more than
an imaginative projection of highly specific cultural ideas and motives onto
nonhumans (as if that would be the first time human cultural values had ever
been projected onto chimps!)
Chimpanzees
not only kill each other like humans do, but also "share other evils: political
murders, beatings, and rape" (p. 131). Apparently, a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission is needed to investigate the Gombe situation, perhaps with Kanzi the
bonobo as interpreter. And naturally, rape is reduced to a reproductive
tactic by "analogy" (p. 140) to orangutans. Of course, the distinction between
analogy and homology is crucial here, and it is exceedingly unclear in
Demonic Males just what the relationship between the behavioral and mental
phenomena imputed to the apes is to those of humans. If the phenomena were
indeed homologous, that would at least reflect the contribution of Darwin to
modern science. Otherwise, we're left with the symbolic analogical associations
of Aesop's Fables, a parody of evolutionary anthropology, as if Darwin
had never been born.
"Wars," Wrangham and Peterson assert as
an example, "tend to be rooted in competition for status." But status for whom?
The grunts? The generals? The sociopolitical entities they represent? Wrangham
and Peterson continue that "we could well substitute for Sparta and Athens the
names of two male chimpanzees" (p. 192). But a chimpanzee is certainly not
homologous to a polis. Neither "Sparta" nor "the Tutsi" nor "the
Axis" was descended from a common ancestor with chimpanzees; they're not
even fundamentally biological entities. Sparta may have been arguably
"like" a chimpanzee, but that would be no more than a literary association.
Sparta was a constructed social entity, the product of a specifically human
symbolic social history. In other words, Demonic Males argues by recourse
to a metaphoric non-Darwinian biology that begins by pretending we're not
human.
It sure takes nerve to
call that science.
The
classic tropes of hyperscientific quackery are all here: This is "evolutionary"
(so to contest it is to be a creationist); it's all rooted in the latest finds
from high-tech genetics (yeah, so was the Final Solution); and it even manages
to recruit that objective, well-traveled "biologist from Mars"(p. 178), if only
there were biologists on Mars and they were as dopey as the worst of them on
Earth.
The reconstruction of prehistory is the
most interesting part of the book. It is doggedly deterministic, which makes it
a particularly amusing origin myth. Astronomical events led to major
climate changes (p. 228), which isolated the ancestors of humans, chimpanzees,
and bonobos. Bonobos snacked on what the gorillas would have eaten if the
gorillas had been there, which permitted them instead to form female coalitions,
which squashed male violence. Chimpanzees, however, being sympatric with
gorillas, had to rely on other foods and couldn't form the female coalitions
that kept the males in check. And somewhere else the fruit trees were succumbing
to dryness "and thereby made humans"(p. 228). Yes, you really are what you
eat.
Lacking much of a sense of history or scientific
responsibility, Demonic Males finally manages to revisit many of the
classic corruptions of human science of the last century.
You
want racism? The book's very cover compares a gorilla to an African
human from an old and embarrassing drawing by Schultz. Were the authors
oblivious to the connotations? Or did they just not care? Unfortunately,
Wrangham's writing is vested with authorityæhe's a Harvard
professoræand with authority comes responsibility.
To compare an African human on the cover of a book about violence, given
the social history of scientific racism (Schultz's original drawing dates from
the 1920's) is a stunning act of thoughtlessness. As far as I'm concerned, it is
entirely irresponsible and inexcusable from anyone with pretensions to modern
scholarly standards.
You want social Darwinism?
"The chimpanzee-human system looks clear. The downtrodden of the earth can rail
against the imperialism of the temporarily dominant , but imperialist
expansionism is nevertheless a broad and persistent tendency of our demonic male
species" (pp. 236-237). In other words, vast inequalities of wealth and
social power are natural, and we are simply obliged to live with itæa rather self-serving inference coming from a professor at an
institution whose endowment is larger than the GNP of most of the nations of
Africa.
You want
eugenics? "with some concerted worldwide action we could probably get measurable
results within a few generations[to] breed a kinder, gentler
man" (p.239). Oh, sure, they tell us it wouldn't work because women actually
prefer "male demonism" so it wouldn't be fair to them. But is that really
the problem? Or is it that we just can't trust demonic professors with the
reproductive rights of the populace, because they tend to have too much
education and too little wisdom æbecause the
last time we did, they helped to enact legislation to sterilize just that part
of society that was least able to protect themselves? Remember Buck v.
Bell?
What we need is
the extension of rights, not moronic males with little understanding of
genetics or evolution glibly suggesting ways to control and curtail the
reproductive rights of other, more vulnerable people. That's the
difficulty with human breeding programs, and some deeper bioethical reflection
by Wrangham and Peterson would have been welcome.
Perhaps the most
striking indicator of the superficiality and poverty of scholarship
reflected in Demonic Males is that Wrangham and Peterson set up their
book by invoking the same discredited argument that Jared Diamond used (The
Third Chimpanzee), namely, that the Sibley -Ahlquist DNA hybridization has
shown humans and chimpanzees to be closest relatives, which makes them the sole,
most credible model for the origin of human social behavior. But it is well
known that Sibley and Ahlquist subjected their data to unreported illegitimate
operations, which determined their highly publicized result and which implies
that the paper was reviewed and published under false pretenses. Without these
alterations, Wrangham and Peterson themselves admitted "it is virtually certain
that Sibley and Ahlquist would have concluded that Homo, Pan,
and Gorilla form a trichotomy. [ J. Molec.
Evol. 30:225 (1990). ] A self-proclaimed "replication " of the results was
easily seen to be entirely inconsistent with the first study and itself
egregiously misrepresentative
[ Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 85:207
(1991)]. Anyone with the merest inclination to examine the literature
critically can see that the only place for that work is alongside Piltdown Man
and the Tasaday and that most of the genetic data simply fail to link
chimpanzee and humanærather an insecure peg on which to hang this book's
central premise, to be sure.
Let us give the final
thought to Thomas Huxley, who was asked to review an audacious work of
pseudoscience a century and a half ago. "Time was," he wrote, "that when a book
had been shown to be a mass of pretentious nonsense, it quietly sunk into its
proper limbo. But these days appear, unhappily, to have gone by.We grudge no man
either the glory or the profit to be obtained form charlataineriebut a book may,
like a weed, acquire an importance by neglect, which it could have
attained in no other
mode."
We can't
afford professionally to neglect Demonic Males, but it would be somewhat
reassuring to learn it is just a put-on, and that Wrangham and Peterson really
do know better.
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