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Χρήσεις και καταχρήσεις της βιολογίας: Μια ανθρωπολογική κριτική της κοινωνιοβιολογίας
Ο Σάλινς θεωρεί ότι η ιστορία και η βιολογία δεν είναι κατά κανένα τρόπο αναγώγιμες η μία στην άλλη. Όμως, ο λόγος για την ιστορία και ο λόγος για τη βιολογία είναι συγκρίσιμοι μεταξύ τους ως παράγωγα του πολιτισμού: άλλοι πολιτισμοί-άλλες ιστορίες, όπως άλλοι πολιτισμοί-άλλες βιολογίες.
Επί τρεις αιώνες, με αφετηρία τον Χομπς, τον Άνταμ Σμιθ και τον Δαρβίνο, το δυτικό, καπιταλιστικό πρότυπο του ανθρώπου μεταφέρεται στο ζωικό βασίλειο. Έτσι η οικονομική δραστηριότητα παρουσιάζεται ως γενετικό φαινόμενο, την ίδια στιγμή που μια τέτοια σύλληψη της ζωικής φύσης του ανθρώπου χρησιμοποιείται για να εξηγήσει την κοινωνική πραγματικότητα. Πρόσφατη εκδήλωση αυτού του ιστορικού φαινομένου, η κοινωνιοβιολογία βρίσκει ευρύτατη απήχηση αναδιατυπώνοντας τις αρχές του βιολογικού ντετερμινισμού και του κοινωνικού δαρβινισμού. Η κριτική ανάλυση της επιστημονικής και της αγοραίας κοινωνιοβιολογίας (των Ε.Ο. Ουίλσον, Ντέσμοντ Μόρις, Ρόμπιν Φοξ κ.ά.), που επιχειρεί εδώ ο Μάρσαλ Σάλινς, στηρίζεται στην ανθρωπολογική κατανόηση του πολιτισμού ως αυτόνομου συμβολικού φαινομένου, μοναδικού στη φύση. Απ’ αυτή τη σκοπιά, η ζωή, η αναπαραγωγή και οι κοινωνικές σχέσεις στις ποικίλες μορφές τους οργανώνονται σύμφωνα με τις αντιλήψεις των ανθρώπων για τον εαυτό τους και για τα πράγματα, και όχι σύμφωνα με το γενετικό ίδιον συμφέρον που οι κοινωνιοβιολόγοι εκλαμβάνουν ως θεμέλιο της ανθρώπινης κοινωνίας και ιστορίας.
Με αυτή την καίρια παρέμβασή του, ένας σημαντικός στοχαστής του αιώνα μας διαγράφει με εγκυρότητα τα όρια ανάμεσα στις επιστήμες του ανθρώπινου πολιτισμού και την επιστήμη της βιολογίας.
Επί τρεις αιώνες, με αφετηρία τον Χομπς, τον Άνταμ Σμιθ και τον Δαρβίνο, το δυτικό, καπιταλιστικό πρότυπο του ανθρώπου μεταφέρεται στο ζωικό βασίλειο. Έτσι η οικονομική δραστηριότητα παρουσιάζεται ως γενετικό φαινόμενο, την ίδια στιγμή που μια τέτοια σύλληψη της ζωικής φύσης του ανθρώπου χρησιμοποιείται για να εξηγήσει την κοινωνική πραγματικότητα. Πρόσφατη εκδήλωση αυτού του ιστορικού φαινομένου, η κοινωνιοβιολογία βρίσκει ευρύτατη απήχηση αναδιατυπώνοντας τις αρχές του βιολογικού ντετερμινισμού και του κοινωνικού δαρβινισμού. Η κριτική ανάλυση της επιστημονικής και της αγοραίας κοινωνιοβιολογίας (των Ε.Ο. Ουίλσον, Ντέσμοντ Μόρις, Ρόμπιν Φοξ κ.ά.), που επιχειρεί εδώ ο Μάρσαλ Σάλινς, στηρίζεται στην ανθρωπολογική κατανόηση του πολιτισμού ως αυτόνομου συμβολικού φαινομένου, μοναδικού στη φύση. Απ’ αυτή τη σκοπιά, η ζωή, η αναπαραγωγή και οι κοινωνικές σχέσεις στις ποικίλες μορφές τους οργανώνονται σύμφωνα με τις αντιλήψεις των ανθρώπων για τον εαυτό τους και για τα πράγματα, και όχι σύμφωνα με το γενετικό ίδιον συμφέρον που οι κοινωνιοβιολόγοι εκλαμβάνουν ως θεμέλιο της ανθρώπινης κοινωνίας και ιστορίας.
Με αυτή την καίρια παρέμβασή του, ένας σημαντικός στοχαστής του αιώνα μας διαγράφει με εγκυρότητα τα όρια ανάμεσα στις επιστήμες του ανθρώπινου πολιτισμού και την επιστήμη της βιολογίας.
160 pages, Paperback
First published December 3, 1976
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About the author
Marshall Sahlins
53 books153 followersMarshall David Sahlins was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.
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August 11, 2024
Whereas an early chapter deals with pre-sociobiological writers such as Konrad Lorenz and Desmond Morris, whose views are largely rejected by modern sociobiologists, and later chapters focus on the supposed ideological inspirations for and implications of sociobiology, the substance of Sahlins’s critique of sociobiology in ‘The Use and Abuse of Biology’ lies in his chapter on kin selection.
He writes:
However, while it is questionable whether, as Sahlins claims, the success of sociobiology depends on the theory of kin selection, it is certainly that case, given the disproportionate emphasis he places on this concept, that Sahlins’ attack on sociobiology must itself stand and fall on the basis of his critique of this concept. It is therefore this critique upon which my review focuses
Kinship Classification
At the heart of Sahlins critique of the sociobiological concept of kin selection is his emphasis on the cross-cultural variability in kinship classifications.
Methods of classifying kin, he emphasizes, vary a great deal from culture to culture. However, he claims:
Moreover, if kinship terminology does not perfectly mirror biological relatedness, the two systems do nevertheless strongly correlate. This is, of course, why both anthropologists and biologists chose to refer to the two systems by the same word—i.e. ‘kinship’.
Therefore, the importance of kinship, howsoever precisely defined, as a basis of social organization across so many diverse cultures itself demands an explanation.
Indeed, as Sahlins himself observed in a previously authored paper:
Indeed, Sahlins’ own summary of the ethnographic record in the 1965 paper quoted above, coincides remarkably with sociobiological predictions, Sahlins writing:
Moreover, it bears emphasizing that selective pressures act on behaviours rather than terminology. It is not whether we describe someone as ‘kin’ that matters; but rather how we behave towards them
Thus, Chagnon, in his celebrated studies of the Yąnomamö, notes:
Kinship terminology may also be distorted for purposes such as mate competition (Chagnon 1988) or by elites to enhance the willingness of subjects to sacrifice themselves during wartime (e.g. reference to the ‘motherland’ or ‘brothers in arms’: see Johnson et al 1987).
Other groups, such as members of trade unions, and African-Americans in the USA, have also been known to refer to refer to one another as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, co-opting the language of kinship to enhance solidarity.
Indeed, even some of the cultural variability in kinship classification on which Sahlins lays such stress may be explained in Darwinian terms as examples of what David Buss has termed ‘evoked culture’ (see Evolutionary Psychology).
Thus, for example, the so-called avunculate, whereby property is inherited down the female line from uncle to nephew (i.e. via one's sister’s son), may be adaptive in societies with high levels of marital infidelity because, in these circumstances, men may be unsure of the paternity of their own putative offspring but, since maternity is never in doubt, inheritance down the female line will ensure that those who inherit family resources and status also inherit at least some the family’s genes (Hartung 1985 – see also Human Family Systems).
In short, over the past thirty years, kin selection has been found to explain a vast diversity of behaviours among humans as among other species, from patterns of support in an axe fight among the Yąnomamö (Chagnon and Bugos 1979), to patterns of violent crime (see Homicide by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson) and inheritance patterns in modern industrial societies (Smith et al 1987).
It has even been implicated as the basis of ethnocentrism and racism (see Pierre Van Den Berghe’s The Ethnic Phenomenon: reviewed here).
The ‘Sahlins Fallacy’
The most infamous passage in ‘The Use and Abuse of Biology’ comes when Sahlins claims that there are, in his words
Then, Sahlins continues with a snide aside, concluding:
These mechanisms of kin recognition include ‘phenotype matching’ (i.e. detecting kin by recognising similarity in scent or appearance: e.g. Holmes 1986); or simple natal proximity (i.e. if someone occupies the same nest as you in infancy, they are probably your kin).
The crudeness of this latter heuristic explains both the vulnerability of some bird species to brood parasitism (i.e. the practice whereby bird species such as cuckoos surreptitiously lay their eggs in the nests of other birds so that the latter provide the necessary parental care), as well as the so-called ‘Westermarck effect’ in humans, whereby people are rarely sexually attracted to those with whom they are brought up in close proximity (e.g. in the same household or Israeli Kibbutz: see Incest: A Biosocial View).
Sahlins’s error has since been christened the ‘The Sahlins Fallacy’ in his honour (Dawkins 1979) and is written up in several introductory-level textbooks on both animal behaviour and evolutionary psychology.
Had Sahlins indeed “refrain[ed] from comment” (to comment that one will “refrain from comment” is itself a comment) he may well have saved himself from being a laughing stock to subsequent generations of biology students.
Conclusion
The only value of Sahlins’s book was that it inspired research falsifying its claims.
For example, Sahlins claimed that:
Likewise, whereas Sahlins saw infanticide as biologically maladaptive (p49-51), Martin Daly and Margo Wilson show that infanticide is practised by precisely those mothers for whom deferring reproduction is adaptive—namely those currently lacking the resources or male support to successfully raise offspring to adulthood (i.e. poor and unmarried), but with much of their reproductive careers still ahead of them (i.e. young teenage mothers) (see Daly and Wilson’s Homicide).
Sahlins began the book by acknowledging in his Preface:
However, contrary to Sahlins’s prediction, sociobiology has not “disappear[ed] as science”, but rather, over forty-five years after Sahlins penned these words, thrives as an underlying theoretical foundation for both the study of animal behavior and, increasingly, human behaviour as well.
In contrast, Sahlins’s discredited critique, still occasionally cited by aging professors of cultural anthropology as the castle crumbles around them, gathers dust on the shelves of university libraries around the world.
References
Chagnon (1979) Mate competition, favouring close kin and village fissioning amongst the Yanomamo Indians (pp86-131) In Chagnon and Irons (eds.) Evolutionary Biology And Human Social Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective (Belmont: Duxbury Press).
Chagnon (1988) Male Yanomamo manipulations of kinship classifications of female kin for reproductive advantage (pp23-48) In Betzig, Mulder & Turke (ed.) Human Reproductive Behaviour: A Darwinian Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Chagnon and Bugos (1979) Kin selection and conflict: An analysis of a Yanomamo axe fight (pp213-137) In Evolutionary Biology And Human Social Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective, Irons W and Chagnon N (eds.) (Belmont: Duxbury Press)
Dawkins (1979) Twelve Misunderstandings of Kin Selection. Z. Tierpsychol., 51: 184-200
Hartung (1985) Matrilineal inheritance: new theory and analysis. Behavioural and Brain sciences 8: 661-88
Holmes (1986) Kin recognition by phenotype matching in female Belding's ground squirrels. Animal Behaviour 34:38-47
Irons W (1979) Kinship (pp79-85) in Evolutionary Biology And Human Social Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective (1979) Irons W and Chagnon N (eds.) (Belmont: Duxbury Press 1979).
Johnson, Ratwik and Sawyer (1987) The vocative significance of kin terms in patriotic speech (pp157-174) In Reynolds, Falger and Vine (eds) The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism: Evolutionary Dimensions of Xenophobia, Discrimination, Racism, and Nationalism (London: Croom Helm)
Sahlins (1965) On the Sociology of primitive exchange. (pp139-227) In The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology M.Barton (ed) (Association of Social Anthropologists).
Silk (1980) Adoption and Kinship in Oceana. 82(4) American Anthropologist 799-820
Smith, Kish and Crawford (1987) Inheritance of Wealth as Human Kin Investment. Ethology and Sociobiology 8: pp171-82.
He writes:
“Whether sociobiology will succeed in its ambition of incorporating the human sciences depends largely on its theory of kin selection” (p17).Actually, sociobiology has contributed various insightful and empirically productive theoretical concepts (e.g. differential parental investment theory, which appears to underlie many observed sex differences) and most research in human evolutionary psychology focuses on mating behaviour rather than kin-directed altruism.
However, while it is questionable whether, as Sahlins claims, the success of sociobiology depends on the theory of kin selection, it is certainly that case, given the disproportionate emphasis he places on this concept, that Sahlins’ attack on sociobiology must itself stand and fall on the basis of his critique of this concept. It is therefore this critique upon which my review focuses
Kinship Classification
At the heart of Sahlins critique of the sociobiological concept of kin selection is his emphasis on the cross-cultural variability in kinship classifications.
Methods of classifying kin, he emphasizes, vary a great deal from culture to culture. However, he claims:
“No system of human kinship relations is organized in accord with the genetic coefficients of relations as known to sociobiologists” (p57).However, it is consistent with sociobiological theory that individuals related by, for example, marriage should ally together as kin because, although not themselves biologically related, they share a common genetic stake in offspring emanating from the union. This is why political marriages between royal dynasties were so often arranged to cement alliances.
Moreover, if kinship terminology does not perfectly mirror biological relatedness, the two systems do nevertheless strongly correlate. This is, of course, why both anthropologists and biologists chose to refer to the two systems by the same word—i.e. ‘kinship’.
Therefore, the importance of kinship, howsoever precisely defined, as a basis of social organization across so many diverse cultures itself demands an explanation.
Indeed, as Sahlins himself observed in a previously authored paper:
“Kinship is… the organising principle or idiom of most groups and most social relations” (Sahlins 1965: p150).Thus, anthropologist Robin Fox contended:
“Kinship is to anthropology what logic is to philosophy or the nude is to art; it is the basic discipline of the art” (Kinship and Marriage: p10).Yet, as William Irons observes, prior to the rise of sociobiology:
“Anthropological research… left unanswered the basic question of why kinship is important in every human society” (Irons 1979: p79).The ubiquity, if not universality, of kinship as a primary form of social organisation in every known society invites an evolutionary explanation. In short, the tendency to affiliate on the basis of kinship appears to be a universal and innate facet of human nature, one imminently explicable in terms of the theory of kin selection.
Indeed, Sahlins’ own summary of the ethnographic record in the 1965 paper quoted above, coincides remarkably with sociobiological predictions, Sahlins writing:
“Kindred goes with kindness, ‘two words whose common derivation expresses in the happiest way one of the main principles of social life’. It follows that close kin tend to share, to enter into generalized exchanges, and distant and nonkin to deal in equivalents or in guile. Equivalence becomes compulsory in proportion to kinship distance lest relations break off entirely, for with distance there can be little tolerance of gain and loss even as there is little inclination to extend oneself. To nonkin - ‘other people’, perhaps not even ‘people’ - no quarter must needs be given: the manifest inclination may well be ‘devil take the hindmost’” (Sahlins 1965: p149).This is almost precisely what would be predicted on the basis of sociobiological models of kin selection and reciprocal altruism theory. Moreover, that Sahlins’s observations were made independently and in ignorance of sociobiological theory (that was being independently formulated by biologists on a different side of the university campus) means the convergence cannot be dismissed as mere confirmation bias.
Moreover, it bears emphasizing that selective pressures act on behaviours rather than terminology. It is not whether we describe someone as ‘kin’ that matters; but rather how we behave towards them
Thus, Chagnon, in his celebrated studies of the Yąnomamö, notes:
“I was always struck by the degree to which actual genealogical relatedness, as distinct from fictive kinship, seemed to be important to the Yanomamo. They discriminated in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways against non-kin, no matter how they classified them. I concluded, after a detailed analysis of their kinship relatedness, that closeness of kinship, measured genealogically, was an important variable in predicting village fissioning and that group size and cohesion had something to do with the amount of genealogical relatedness withing the group” (Chagnon 1979, p87).By analogy, we might observe that, in modern societies, although stepparents may refer to their stepchildren as ‘their’ children, there is still evidence that the latter suffer disproportionately high rates of abuse (see The Truth about Cinderella).
Kinship terminology may also be distorted for purposes such as mate competition (Chagnon 1988) or by elites to enhance the willingness of subjects to sacrifice themselves during wartime (e.g. reference to the ‘motherland’ or ‘brothers in arms’: see Johnson et al 1987).
Other groups, such as members of trade unions, and African-Americans in the USA, have also been known to refer to refer to one another as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, co-opting the language of kinship to enhance solidarity.
Indeed, even some of the cultural variability in kinship classification on which Sahlins lays such stress may be explained in Darwinian terms as examples of what David Buss has termed ‘evoked culture’ (see Evolutionary Psychology).
Thus, for example, the so-called avunculate, whereby property is inherited down the female line from uncle to nephew (i.e. via one's sister’s son), may be adaptive in societies with high levels of marital infidelity because, in these circumstances, men may be unsure of the paternity of their own putative offspring but, since maternity is never in doubt, inheritance down the female line will ensure that those who inherit family resources and status also inherit at least some the family’s genes (Hartung 1985 – see also Human Family Systems).
In short, over the past thirty years, kin selection has been found to explain a vast diversity of behaviours among humans as among other species, from patterns of support in an axe fight among the Yąnomamö (Chagnon and Bugos 1979), to patterns of violent crime (see Homicide by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson) and inheritance patterns in modern industrial societies (Smith et al 1987).
It has even been implicated as the basis of ethnocentrism and racism (see Pierre Van Den Berghe’s The Ethnic Phenomenon: reviewed here).
The ‘Sahlins Fallacy’
The most infamous passage in ‘The Use and Abuse of Biology’ comes when Sahlins claims that there are, in his words
“Epistemological problems [for sociobiology] presented by a lack of linguistic support for calculating r coefficients of relatedness which amount to a serious defect in the theory of kin selection. Fractions are a very rare occurrence in the world's languages, appearing in Indo-European and in the archaic civilizations of the Near and Far East, but they are generally lacking among so-called primitive peoples. Hunters and gatherers generally do not have counting systems beyond one, two and three.” (p44-45).In other words, Sahlins is arguing that, since fractions are “a very rare occurrence in the world's languages”, primitive peoples cannot possibly be capable of calculating the relevant coefficients of relatedness for particular classes of kin in order to behave adaptively in accordance with sociobiological theory.
Then, Sahlins continues with a snide aside, concluding:
“I refrain from comment on the even greater problem of how animals are supposed to figure out that r [ego, first cousins] = 1/8” (p45).Of course, there is now substantial research on the mechanisms underlying kin recognition in both humans and animals, none requiring conscious mathematical calculation.
These mechanisms of kin recognition include ‘phenotype matching’ (i.e. detecting kin by recognising similarity in scent or appearance: e.g. Holmes 1986); or simple natal proximity (i.e. if someone occupies the same nest as you in infancy, they are probably your kin).
The crudeness of this latter heuristic explains both the vulnerability of some bird species to brood parasitism (i.e. the practice whereby bird species such as cuckoos surreptitiously lay their eggs in the nests of other birds so that the latter provide the necessary parental care), as well as the so-called ‘Westermarck effect’ in humans, whereby people are rarely sexually attracted to those with whom they are brought up in close proximity (e.g. in the same household or Israeli Kibbutz: see Incest: A Biosocial View).
Sahlins’s error has since been christened the ‘The Sahlins Fallacy’ in his honour (Dawkins 1979) and is written up in several introductory-level textbooks on both animal behaviour and evolutionary psychology.
Had Sahlins indeed “refrain[ed] from comment” (to comment that one will “refrain from comment” is itself a comment) he may well have saved himself from being a laughing stock to subsequent generations of biology students.
Conclusion
The only value of Sahlins’s book was that it inspired research falsifying its claims.
For example, Sahlins claimed that:
“[Polynesian] adoption practices… violate the moral [sic] logic of kin selection with regard to parental care, concern for one’s own offspring as against those of genetic competitors, etc” (p48).However, in response, Joan Silk showed Polynesians almost always only adopt close biological relatives (Silk 1980).
Likewise, whereas Sahlins saw infanticide as biologically maladaptive (p49-51), Martin Daly and Margo Wilson show that infanticide is practised by precisely those mothers for whom deferring reproduction is adaptive—namely those currently lacking the resources or male support to successfully raise offspring to adulthood (i.e. poor and unmarried), but with much of their reproductive careers still ahead of them (i.e. young teenage mothers) (see Daly and Wilson’s Homicide).
Sahlins began the book by acknowledging in his Preface:
“I have written this essay with some sense of urgency, given the current significance of sociobiology, and the good possibility that it will soon disappear as science” (pxv).That he wrote with such haste may perhaps partially explain—but certainly not excuse—Sahlins’s sloppy thinking.
However, contrary to Sahlins’s prediction, sociobiology has not “disappear[ed] as science”, but rather, over forty-five years after Sahlins penned these words, thrives as an underlying theoretical foundation for both the study of animal behavior and, increasingly, human behaviour as well.
In contrast, Sahlins’s discredited critique, still occasionally cited by aging professors of cultural anthropology as the castle crumbles around them, gathers dust on the shelves of university libraries around the world.
References
Chagnon (1979) Mate competition, favouring close kin and village fissioning amongst the Yanomamo Indians (pp86-131) In Chagnon and Irons (eds.) Evolutionary Biology And Human Social Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective (Belmont: Duxbury Press).
Chagnon (1988) Male Yanomamo manipulations of kinship classifications of female kin for reproductive advantage (pp23-48) In Betzig, Mulder & Turke (ed.) Human Reproductive Behaviour: A Darwinian Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Chagnon and Bugos (1979) Kin selection and conflict: An analysis of a Yanomamo axe fight (pp213-137) In Evolutionary Biology And Human Social Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective, Irons W and Chagnon N (eds.) (Belmont: Duxbury Press)
Dawkins (1979) Twelve Misunderstandings of Kin Selection. Z. Tierpsychol., 51: 184-200
Hartung (1985) Matrilineal inheritance: new theory and analysis. Behavioural and Brain sciences 8: 661-88
Holmes (1986) Kin recognition by phenotype matching in female Belding's ground squirrels. Animal Behaviour 34:38-47
Irons W (1979) Kinship (pp79-85) in Evolutionary Biology And Human Social Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective (1979) Irons W and Chagnon N (eds.) (Belmont: Duxbury Press 1979).
Johnson, Ratwik and Sawyer (1987) The vocative significance of kin terms in patriotic speech (pp157-174) In Reynolds, Falger and Vine (eds) The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism: Evolutionary Dimensions of Xenophobia, Discrimination, Racism, and Nationalism (London: Croom Helm)
Sahlins (1965) On the Sociology of primitive exchange. (pp139-227) In The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology M.Barton (ed) (Association of Social Anthropologists).
Silk (1980) Adoption and Kinship in Oceana. 82(4) American Anthropologist 799-820
Smith, Kish and Crawford (1987) Inheritance of Wealth as Human Kin Investment. Ethology and Sociobiology 8: pp171-82.
May 24, 2011
Published in the thick of the Sociology debates in the late 70s, Sahlins argues that that particular redition of cultural evolutionary theory suffers from some glaring problems. Specifically, he points to the broad assumptions about kinship made in 'kin selection' models and the explanations of trade, labor, and symbols that sociobiologists were crafting, which bore an uncanny resemblance to market capitalism.
The book is an artifact of its time, but still a clearer examination of evolutionary reasoning about culture than you'll get from most of its proponents. It is brief, engaging, and Sahlins is an entertaining wordsmith within a discipline that is infamous for didactic arguments and hot air. The first 15 pages only are - in my opinion - the most well-reasoned criticism of cultural evolutionary theories that has yet been published. I recommend it anyone pursuing research in cultural evolution, as well as historians of science and technology. While sociobiology has been largely replaced by its siblings (evolutionary psychology, mimetics, evolutionary neuroscience, etc), these daughter disciplines share many of the shortcomings of their predecessor. Taking Sahlins seriously is a must for anyone who would like to see a more self-critical, rigorous science come from evolutionary theories of human conditions.
The book is an artifact of its time, but still a clearer examination of evolutionary reasoning about culture than you'll get from most of its proponents. It is brief, engaging, and Sahlins is an entertaining wordsmith within a discipline that is infamous for didactic arguments and hot air. The first 15 pages only are - in my opinion - the most well-reasoned criticism of cultural evolutionary theories that has yet been published. I recommend it anyone pursuing research in cultural evolution, as well as historians of science and technology. While sociobiology has been largely replaced by its siblings (evolutionary psychology, mimetics, evolutionary neuroscience, etc), these daughter disciplines share many of the shortcomings of their predecessor. Taking Sahlins seriously is a must for anyone who would like to see a more self-critical, rigorous science come from evolutionary theories of human conditions.
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July 27, 2011When I saw that this book was written in the late seventies I was at first slightly disappointed because I thought it might be somewhat dated. However, I was soon proved otherwise. Sahlins shows very clearly how social sciences not necesserily have to rely on biology. And futhermore, how biology makes mistakes in interpreting nature with anthropological terminology and then projecting it again on humanity. This is a well argued and well researched critique on sociobiology and really and critique of evolution's ability to be applied to humans. I wonder if Dawkins has ever read it. It should certainly be included in any serious sociobiologist's bibliography.
December 10, 2025
sahlins does it again but his failure to understand the Hegelian philosophy leaves open ground for the right wing Dawkinite biologists. Sahlins needs dialectics to escape the traps of assumptions that are available to the malevolent.
January 15, 2026
Dawkins' 'Selfish Gen' with marxist steroids.
August 30, 2025
Sahlins, a cultural anthropologist who's shown himself to be a very clear thinker on other issues such as his book on Cook et al., here gives a brief early critique (1976) of sociobiology as envisioned by E. O. Wilson in his Sociobiology, published the year before. This book overall says that human culture is so rich, and creates so many emergent phenomena above the raw biology, that culture introduces another important operational and explanatory hierarchy. It becomes important not to uncritically apply explanatory features from evolutionary biology, like kin selection or indeed even natural selection, uncritically when culture is important as it is in hominids.
There is a deeper point about selection that those who are not evolutionary biologists, and even those who are, often miss. There is much more evolution going on than occurs by positive selection. Lots and lots more. Background selection is an extremely important evolutionary force. As is genetic drift. As is stabilising and diverging selection. How might we analogise these? Most popular treatments are very, very poor. And most invented selection scenarios in the popular press never consider the many factors that determine whether a scenario is truly plausible.
As is the way biologists handle culture. Culture introduces another emergent level to the operational and explanatory hierarchy. The analogy Sahlins makes is to consider how it is correctly said that biology is just the emergent properties of chemistry, which is the emergent properties of physics. We can analyse the flight of an apple in much the same say we would analyse the flight of a stone, but if we are to analyse features of the apple such as the presence of its ovules, well there biology is where we must place ourselves to find useful explanations.
So it is with culture. We cannot uncritically apply biological explanations in hominids without considering culture. Such analyses are crude and, to cultural anthropologists and physiologists, make the same impact as when physicists "explain" biology to biologists. I am certain that in many animal societies, natural selection- and kin selection-based analyses are not nearly so careful as they should be.
Sahlins spends about half the book or more discussing the inapplicability of kin selection to human culture because concepts of kin are so very complex among human societies. This is true, this is absolutely true, and you cannot use Richard Dawkins' extraction of a paragraph of from this book as an example of misunderstanding of kin selection as somehow invalidating all that Sahlins discusses. Dawkins makes a narrow point, as Dawkins would admit, but Dawkins' fans and the strength of his own rhetoric tends to make people overapply Dawkins' criticism. Sahlins' point about cultures seeing people living apart but with equal kinship coefficients as more distantly related goes directly to the point. That paternity is also not nearly the issue among other cultures as it is in the fevered brains of white supremacist males who throw around "cuck" is also relevant here.
When critiques of Sahlins' work come from reviewers pushing biological determinism in many forms, including supporting a book published by a white supremacist press describing how an individual's "physiognomy" is a useful guide to their behaviour, well fuck that racist bullshit. Sahlins makes clear that there are political dimensions to this, and obviously he is spot on. Wilson did lots of good work with ants but their brains are tiny tiny tiny, about as tiny as the racist J Philippe Rushton's, which might be why Wilson found some kinship there.
There is a deeper point about selection that those who are not evolutionary biologists, and even those who are, often miss. There is much more evolution going on than occurs by positive selection. Lots and lots more. Background selection is an extremely important evolutionary force. As is genetic drift. As is stabilising and diverging selection. How might we analogise these? Most popular treatments are very, very poor. And most invented selection scenarios in the popular press never consider the many factors that determine whether a scenario is truly plausible.
As is the way biologists handle culture. Culture introduces another emergent level to the operational and explanatory hierarchy. The analogy Sahlins makes is to consider how it is correctly said that biology is just the emergent properties of chemistry, which is the emergent properties of physics. We can analyse the flight of an apple in much the same say we would analyse the flight of a stone, but if we are to analyse features of the apple such as the presence of its ovules, well there biology is where we must place ourselves to find useful explanations.
So it is with culture. We cannot uncritically apply biological explanations in hominids without considering culture. Such analyses are crude and, to cultural anthropologists and physiologists, make the same impact as when physicists "explain" biology to biologists. I am certain that in many animal societies, natural selection- and kin selection-based analyses are not nearly so careful as they should be.
Sahlins spends about half the book or more discussing the inapplicability of kin selection to human culture because concepts of kin are so very complex among human societies. This is true, this is absolutely true, and you cannot use Richard Dawkins' extraction of a paragraph of from this book as an example of misunderstanding of kin selection as somehow invalidating all that Sahlins discusses. Dawkins makes a narrow point, as Dawkins would admit, but Dawkins' fans and the strength of his own rhetoric tends to make people overapply Dawkins' criticism. Sahlins' point about cultures seeing people living apart but with equal kinship coefficients as more distantly related goes directly to the point. That paternity is also not nearly the issue among other cultures as it is in the fevered brains of white supremacist males who throw around "cuck" is also relevant here.
When critiques of Sahlins' work come from reviewers pushing biological determinism in many forms, including supporting a book published by a white supremacist press describing how an individual's "physiognomy" is a useful guide to their behaviour, well fuck that racist bullshit. Sahlins makes clear that there are political dimensions to this, and obviously he is spot on. Wilson did lots of good work with ants but their brains are tiny tiny tiny, about as tiny as the racist J Philippe Rushton's, which might be why Wilson found some kinship there.
August 28, 2008
Sahlins does a good job of showing the influence of capitalist ideology on the theory of natural selection. Sociobiology sure is bogus.
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