Chagnon Does Needlepoint

James Brody, Ph.D., jbrody@compuserve.com
8/7/02-11/08/02

Culture and genes warp and woof our stories about other societies. My sense lately is that of too much culture and too little genetics.

First, keep in mind the examples of imitative learning that de Waal gave us in The Ape and the Sushi Master. Primates copy behavior...sometimes for years and with little primary gain...simply because mother or a shaman displayed it. Implication: some cultural rituals may depend more on the personal traits of their founder and his descendants than on efficacy of the ritual itself. And imitative series in professional organizations can last ad infinitum.

Second, elements of culture will sometimes be one more type of shared environment. We might expect that most cultural effects, like being in the Marines, will operate only so long as you are immersed in that culture. Implication: don't take studies of culture too seriously because the larger sources of variance lie elsewhere. Shared environments are imposed features that make occupants act the same. Shared environment is often transient and puny, accounting often for 1-2% of the variance in long term outcomes, having more influence for the first several years of a human life and often gone by early adolescence.

Third, we can also expect that there will be genetic loadings for individuals who prosper and those who fail in any stable culture, loadings that may vary in a circular way with cultural content. As Sterelny & Griffiths (1999) point out, we are foolish to expect a universal human nature when we cannot identify a universal human hemoglobin. After all, separate a group of fish or birds and a new species emerges. Humans should resemble birds or fish in this regard. We should expect genetic differences to be revealed in the environments that migrating groups choose and in the microenvironments that individual members create. The experiences in those environments then exert a selective effect on the next generation of occupants.

Some cultural differences may fall into the category of nonshared environments (NSE), environments that look the same to an independent observer but are actually unique for each person. NSE accounts for the differences that emerge between identical twins who are presumed to have identical genes. (The twins "identity" assumption erodes every time I think about it!) NSE plausibly has two, usually unspecified components. Some of it occurs because we have a different teacher than our sibling: the teacher is a part of NSE. She, however, ought to contribute no more to long term outcomes than is contributed by our sharing parents: about 2%. The power of NSE is less in that which is imposed on us and more in that which we choose. Seekers of NSE grasp, retain, and embellish the details that they find to be meaningful.

Thus, the creation of nonshared environments is not random. They are woven by the individuals who occupy them. Nonshared environment often accounts for 40% of outcome variance, and, in some models, genetic contributions (including this segment of NSE) could account for as much as 80%. Implications: sort the biological differences between individuals and how those differences interact with success or failure in different cultures. Prepare for the eventual demonstration that meaningful biological differences exist between the occupants of different societies, differences that align strongly with behavioral differences. Biomedical research already hints of these things.

NSE and Culture Watchers
There is probably a genetic loading to every measure of environment that has ever been taken (Rowe, 1994, 2001). This factor probably influences both the questions that we ask subjects and the reports that we get from them. Even identical twins who were reared by different families have in later years very similar memories of their upbringing. Bouchard (1990), Plomin (Plomin et al, 2000), and their peers tell us that reported similarities in families usually vary according to similarities in genes. A very conservative assumption is that the effects reported by behavior geneticists for American, European, and Australian families will be duplicated within and between societies. We can also expect them to be duplicated in the individual memories and tests of psychologists and anthropologists who study those societies.

Thus, the nature of the Yanomami drives their conduct as much as it is driven by the nature of their environment. Further, the Yanomami and Nap Chagnon may have recognized each other as soul mates, neither side offended by nor finding a need to suppress the other's behavior. Similarly, Mead's undertaking a mission for Boas reflected her nature as much as it reflected her nurture, Boas recruited a student who was inclined to share his view of human development and, therefore, neither of them challenged what she thought she found.

Implication: we must ignore our instincts and randomly assign anthropology students to advisors and anthropologists to cultures. We will save a lot of grant money because fewer people will like what they study. The amplifying effects of bias will dampen and we will then learn nothing that anyone wants to discover or to believe. Imagine: Chagnon and a long term study of Amish needlepoint...

References

Bouchard T.J., Lykken D.T., McGue M., Segal, N.L., & Tellegen, A. (1990) Sources of human psychological differences: The Minnesota study of twins reared apart. Science, 250: 223-228.
Plomin, R., DeFries J, McClearn G, & McGuffin, P. (2000) Behavioral Genetics (4th ed.) NY: Worth.
Rowe, D. (1994) The Limits of Family Influence: Genes, Experience, and Behavior. NY: Guilford.
Rowe, D. (2002) Biology and Crime. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury.
Sterelny, K., & Griffiths, P. (1999) Sex and Death: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
de Waal, F. (2001) The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist. NY: Basic Books.

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