The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [157]
Anthropology’s turn was next. With the publication of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928, the discipline was transformed. Mead asserted that sexual and cultural variety was effectively infinite and was therefore the product of nurture. She did little to prove nurture’s predominance – indeed what empirical evidence Mead did adduce was largely, it now seems, wishful thinking8 – but she shifted the burden of proof. Mainstream anthropology remains to this day committed to the view that there is only a blank human nature.9
Psychology’s conversion was more gradual. Freud believed in universal human mental attributes – such as the Oedipal complex. But his followers became obsessed with trying to explain everything according to individual early childhood influences, and Freudianism came to mean blaming one’s early nurture for one’s nature. Soon psychologists came to believe that even the mind of an adult was a general-purpose learning device. This approach reached its apogee in the behaviourism of B. F. Skinner. He argued that brains are simply devices for associating any cause with any effect.
By the 1950s, looking back at what Nazism had done in the name of nature, few biologists felt inclined to challenge what their human-science colleagues asserted. Yet uncomfortable facts were already appearing. Anthropologists had failed to find the diversity Mead had promised. Freudians had explained very little and altered even less by their appeals to early influences. Behaviourism could not account for the innate preferences of different species of animal to learn different things: rats are better at running mazes than pigeons. Sociology’s inability to explain or rectify the causes of delinquency was an embarrassment. In the 1970s a few brave ‘sociobiologists’ began to ask why, if other animals had evolved natures, mankind would be exempt. They were vilified by the social science establishment and told to go back to ant-watching. Yet the question they had asked has not gone away.10
The principal reason for the hostility to sociobiology was that it seemed to justify prejudice. Yet this was simply a confusion. Genetic theories of racism, or classism or any kind of -ism have nothing in common with the notion that there is a universal, instinctive human nature. Indeed, they are fundamentally opposed, because one believes in universals, the other in racial or class particulars. Genetic differences have been assumed just because genes are involved. Why need that be the case? Is it not possible that the genes of two individuals are identical? The logos painted on the tails of two Boeing 747s depend on the airlines that own them. But the tails beneath are essentially the same: they were made in the same factory of the same metal. You do not assume that because they are owned by different airlines, the two aeroplanes were made in different factories. Why then must we assume that because there are differences between the speech of a Frenchman and an Englishman that they must have brains that are not influenced by genes at all? Their brains are the products of genes – not different genes, the same genes. There is a universal human language-acquisition device, just like there is a universal human kidney and a universal 747 tail structure.
Think, too, of the totalitarian implications of pure environmentalism. Stephen Jay Gould once caricatured the views of genetic determinists thus: ‘If we are programmed to be what we are, then these traits are ineluctable. We may, at best, channel them but we cannot change