Humans often deliberately behave in
ways which are not conducive to their personal genetic fitness.  They can be
altruistic to non-kin, sending support to people in distant lands who will
never be in a position to reciprocate, adopting and raising children that are
not their own, even sacrificing their lives to save complete strangers.  Further,
in the self-interested pursuit of various values, people often limit the
size of their families, and their peers frequently place a high value on these
behaviors, doing their best to imitate them and pass them on to their own (few)
children.  We value altruism, affluence, and education; yet, on average, the
poor and the uneducated have higher differential rates of reproduction, while
altruism and self-interest can go either way.  Still more paradoxically, these seemingly
mal-adaptive values (from a gene’s-eye point of view) have actually contributed
to the immense fitness and dominance of our species on the planet.

How this has come about is the
topic anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt, addresses in The Bridge to Humanity:
How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene.  Various accounts have been
offered concerning what sets us apart from our primate relatives, and indeed, from
the rest of the animal kingdom.–our capacity for tool-making, our capacity for
language, our capacity for imitation, etc. Goldschmidt’s central thesis is that
affect hunger, the basic need for recognition and affection from others, is a
crucial but overlooked key in the transition to the human capacity for
subordinating genetic imperatives.   

Goldschmidt has written a monograph
that is short, yet wide-ranging; both readable and erudite.  He draws on, and
integrates, extensive knowledge not only from anthropology, but from biology
and psychology as well.  He argues for an ecological, evolutionary view of
human cultures, while still doing full justice to the plasticity of our
constructs.  He illustrates abstract principles with vivid, concrete examples
gained over a long and impressive career as a cultural anthropologist; and yet,
ultimately, the reader comes away feeling that Goldschmidt has laid too much
stress on mammalian features too pervasive to be what really sets us apart.  Affect
hunger, as Goldschmidt points out, is biologically rooted in the nurturing bond
between mothers and neonates in virtually all mammals, and, to a lesser extent,
avians also.  In the case of human children, Goldschmidt writes, "[I]t
continues as a wish for acceptance, approval, and influence in the
ever-expanding community in which every child is to live." (37)  Hence, it
is what makes us social; but it is not affect hunger that distinguishes us from
other mammals, it is what we do with it.  Goldschmidt’s examples on the
comparative "ethnography of infancy" illustrate this.  By inculcating
and maintaining certain childcare practices, different cultures manipulate the
affective needs of their children, thereby molding their personalities to fit
the norms of their societies.  He cites a striking example observed by Gregory
Bateson and Margaret Mead before the Second World War in a Balinese village:

Among the actions they found was the
mothers’ regular practice of teasing their babies by fondling their genitals
and, after they were aroused, withdrawing their attention and leaving the
infant frustrated in its desire for affective response.  They wrote, "the
mother continually stimulates the child to show emotion–love or desire,
jealousy or anger–only to turn away, to break the thread, as the child, in
rising passion, makes a demand for some emotional response."  They said
that this leads to a sense of distrust of others and t a Balinese personality
characterized by flat affect. (66)

Goldschmidt then connects this to, among others, his own
observations of the child-rearing practices of the Sebei people of Uganda, whose mothers enfold their babies in their arms, "the left hand grasping the
right wrist, so that neither hand, so that neither hand is contact with the
baby." (67)  The Sebei persona is also characterized by a flat affect.  Such
psychological engineering in turn may serve some wider function in the ecology
of community, which Goldschmidt goes on to discuss in a chapter on culture. 

But while environmental pressures
may exercise a Darwinian-like selective pressure on cultures and variations in
child-rearing that differently exploit the mammalian drive for affect, these
practices are not encoded in our genes, they are learned behaviors.  This is
where Goldschmidt needs to place more emphasis on imitation–not that he
doesn’t mention it, he does, and what he says about it is important–but he
still doesn’t devote the attention to it that it deserves, relative to the
attention he places on affect.    He writes, "Imitation is essential to
culture," and goes on to relate how human infants can imitate a variety of
facial expressions within weeks or even days after birth. (50)  But he does not
explicitly link this point either to his discussion of "mirror neurons,"
even though there he states, "The transfer of information from one living
being to another is an essential quality of culture…," (31)[1]
nor to his observation that our nearest surviving cousins, the apes, while
capable of learning words, have no capacity at all for acquiring grammar or
syntax. (24)  But before language really took off, the human capacity for
imitation was the main way in which information would have been transferred
from one being to another, and our vastly superior capacity for imitation
(ironically, humans are far better than apes at aping) plays an
undeniable role in the phylogeny and ontogeny of language and culture.  

Goldschmidt defines culture as, "the
shared perception of the universe and its contents, seen as a systematic whole,
including the perceptions of self and the delineation of behavioral propriety."
(77)  While this will work well for an anthropologist studying an isolated,
homogenous society, it seems too intellectual and optimistic for a postmodern
era.  As Goldschmidt later notes, "multiculturalism is an inevitable
product of urban life." (115)  And while a heterogeneous society may still
accept a politically and legally based definition of itself as a unity, the
prospect of "a shared perception of the universe" becomes ever more
unattainable.  In at least some contexts, ‘culture’ might be better understood
as the whole body of information and behaviors transmitted by language and
imitation within a population, whether this body of information produces a
unified vision or not.  In those relatively isolated, pre-urban cultures a
unity of vision is likely because the transmission of information is mostly
vertical (parent to child) or diagonal (close kin like uncles, aunts, and older
cousins); but in urban environments horizontal transmission of ideas, values,
and behaviors from an ever-wider body of peers comes to predominate. (These
different paths by which information may be culturally transmitted, and their
implications for cultural evolution, are ably and accessibly discussed in Susan
Blackmore’s The Meme Machine, OUP, 1999; see esp. Ch. 11, "Sex in
the Modern World." )   

Goldschmidt refuses to downgrade
social constructs as somehow "less real" than physical phenomena.  In
so doing, he avoids the fallacy of what philosopher Daniel Dennett calls "greedy
reductionism;" (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Simon & Schuster,
1995; 82-3) but there are times when he takes this too far.   "Souls,"
he writes, "do not obey the laws of thermodynamics, being the product of
human belief, and so we need not look for logic and reason in their actions."
(132)  This is fine if one is treating the soul as a purely imagined entity,
but questionable as a statement about the self as a socially constructed
identity with real effects in the world; and the trouble is that Goldschmidt
seems to equivocate here, not only between these two senses of ‘soul’, but also
between these mind as an activity of the brain, the last of which is an
entity that definitely does have to obey all the physical laws.  One at
least wants to say that the soul, in the psychological sense, must have some "logic"
all its own; but Goldschmidt’s way of putting it raises specters of the kind of
social science he ostensibly disavows: a humanism disconnected from its
evolutionary roots, one that makes the difference between Man and animal
magical.  This tendency is also betrayed in the author’s preface, where he
writes, "This books shows how our hominid ancestors broke a fundamental
law of evolution, namely, that every physical and behavioral trait of every
living thing is ultimately motivated to maximize the survival advantage of its
progeny…" (vii) One wants to ask, can a fundamental law of nature
really be broken?  So, although Goldschmidt the anthropologist has tried to
give biology its due, traces of "Cartesian Theater" seemingly to remain,
a difficulty that might have been avoided if he had paid some attention to
Dawkins’s other Big Idea, the meme. 

© 2007 Andrew V. Jeffery

Andrew V. Jeffery, Green River Community College