JOHN HENDRIX HINSHAW

REVIEW ESSAY

Darwinian Evolution and Social History

On Deep History and the Brain. By Daniel Lord Smail (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008. xiv plus 271 pp.). Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. By Nicholas Wade (New York: Penguin Books, 2006. 314 pp.). War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires. By Peter Turchin (New York: Plume, 2007. viii plus 405 pp). Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. By David Sloan Wilson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 268 pp.).
As a rule, historians have no quarrel with Darwin's theory of evolution. We accept the enormous amount of physical evidence that humanity emerged in Africa and that we share common ancestors with other great apes. Historians also tend to believe evolution is a matter of the human frame, rather than the brain; it is a matter of little direct relevance for our discipline. Furthermore, we remain decidedly uneasy at attempts to apply evolution to the study of the present or the recent past. We are quite aware of the sordid history of Social Darwinists and their role in the rise of the eugenics movement, segregation, and the final solution.1 Yet there are a growing number of social scientists, particularly in psychology, but also in sociology, linguistics, or anthropology, who incorporate evolutionary theory and evidence into their research.2 It may be time for historians to revisit the taboo that maintains that evolution is a fact in terms for pre-history and a racist hoax in terms of social history. There is considerable evidence that understanding the evolution of the brain is of critical importance to understanding both past and present.
Address correspondence to John Hendrix Hinshaw, Department of History and Political Science, Lebanon Valley College, Annville, PA 17003-1400. Journal of Social History vol. 45 no. 1 (2011), pp. 261273 doi:10.1093/jsh/shr023 The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Downloaded from http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ by bramdathan pm on February 8, 2013

262

Journal of Social History

Fall 2011

For instance, our almost irresistible preference for calorically dense, fatty foods is one of the banes of modern life. In an era of fast food and all-you-can-eat buffets the food preferences of our brain appear irrational and perverse. But our collective preference for Dunkin Donuts makes great sense in terms of most of human history where starvation was a real threat. It is quite likely that the reason our brains register pleasure at rich foods is that during our hunting and gathering past, individuals with a preference for rich foods provided an advantage compared to their abstemious counterparts. Gluttons and their genes survived famines. Consequently, that preference for fatty or sweet foods was likely inherited by their descendants, which is to say, most humans. Likewise, it is not hard to see why our brains would have evolved to experience sex as pleasurable. That most of this occurs at the unconscious level makes it no less real. This is a survey of recent works in what could be termed evolutionary history. Daniel Lord Smail is a historian, and has written an elegant treatise on the philosophy of history, arguing that historians need to incorporate evolution into their work and break down the barriers between pre-history and history. The journalist Nicholas Wade answers Smail's call, surveying the explosion of scientific research that blurs the line between evolutionary and social history. This field is at best an infant one, and much of what there is has been written by non-historians. Biologist Peter Turchin offers an example of how evolutionary theory and the scientific method could help explain the rise and fall of empires. Another biologist, David Sloan Wilson, explains the history of complex social institutions such as religion within an evolutionary framework. Because this field is so new, the last section suggests how social historians might incorporate evolutionary approaches in their research. * * * The historian Daniel Lord Smail argues that our discipline should rethink the divide between history and pre-history. Until the nineteenth century, historians viewed human history beginning only after God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. In that century, historians became more secular, but kept the basic narrative framework of sacred history in place. Historians simply replaced God with cities and writing and Eden with Mesopotamia. Historians operate on the implicit assumption that prior to writing, humanity lacked agency, and had no real history. History began exactly at that moment when humans ceased to be animals and started being humans (69). Even today, typical world history textbooks relegate hundreds of thousands of years to a few pages with headings such as The Threshold of History, The Birth of Civilization, Out of the Darkness, The Step Into History (40). However, Smail finds it difficult to justify maintaining this line between our illiterate and literate ancestors. Historians have abandoned the great man theory of history, writing histories of illiterate peasants, the enslaved, or colonized peoples throughout the world. There is no real reason to believe that in the era before humanity learned to write or lived in cities that people lacked agency. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that pre-historical humanity did make choices, although the evidence is in how our brains work. Crossing the boundary to understanding pre-history,

Downloaded from http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ by bramdathan pm on February 8, 2013

Review Essay

263

or what Smail terms deep history, requires historians to acquire some level of scientific literacy, but doing so will prove liberating. Smail surveys the scientific research and debates about the evolution of the brain, because a deep history requires that we acknowledge a genetic and behavioral legacy from the past (118). Brains possesses an innate emotional architecture, which motivates and guides human behavior in complex ways. For instance, facial expressions of disgust are universal, but what Darwin found disgusting to eat differed from a native of Tierra del Fuego. Smail emphasizes that our genetic inheritance only lays down general parameters and that there is a complex interaction between genes and culture. My own view is that human cultures are not just products of our genes: they are, like beaver dams, the product of both evolution and our current environment. Modern Americans do not face predators, but our brains still register alarm (albeit unconsciously) when we recognize a leopard. This arousal is general, a fact that many women have discovered when choosing leopard prints for their clothing. As befitting a species of generalists, human culture is plastic, but it falls far short of being infinitely so; cultural change interacts within, and with, the broad parameters laid down by evolution. For example, modern industry could manufacture any color of lipstick, but in fact 99% of it comes in shades of red. This suggests some limits on culture and agency, or as E.O. Wilson wrote, genes hold culture on a leash.3 Of course, particular social environments can produce wildly different neural responses. The epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson has found that because of humanity's sensitivity to disparities in social status, much ill health, infant mortality, and mortality can be explained by economic inequality.4 Margo Wilson and Martin Daley have found that those born into the poorest of Chicago's neighborhoods will live, on average, twenty years less than those born into the wealthiest. It is not too much to argue that the same brain, born in different social environments, becomes wired differently, and then can be rewired yet again in response to new settings.5 Smail argues that understanding the science behind how the brain works is necessary since historians habitually think with psychology we are prone to making unguarded assumptions about the psychological states of the people we find in our sources (159). He then goes on to sketch out the outlines what he terms neurohistory, something that would require an understanding of our deep history, but allow historians to continue to study more recent periods. Smail argues that humans have proven quite adept in altering our own neural chemistry through an increasingly wide variety of chemicals (alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, opiates) and activities (such as gossip, novel reading and shopping). Global trade over the last few hundred years has been increasingly shaped by our collective pursuit of pleasure. Indeed, our assiduousness in stimulating ourselves has grown exponentially as the industrial revolution has given way to the post-modern. Smail finds an evolutionary logic behind these historical patterns, as well as a lesson about the role that historians could play in understanding human evolution. Evolutionary psychologists often argue that we have stone age brains maladapted to our modern world. Why we love fast food is a classic example of that field. By contrast, Smail suggests that we have consistently remade our world into one that is more in line with what we find pleasurable. Smail argues that while psychology has much to offer historians in the way of theory and evidence,

Downloaded from http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ by bramdathan pm on February 8, 2013

264

Journal of Social History

Fall 2011

historians have reason to be cautious about their assumptions. Chief amongst these is that evolutionary change stopped after the Pleistocene. As Smail observes, evolutionary psychology is naturally ahistorical the mental modules that are the object of the evolutionary psychologist's quest fossilized long ago, in the deep past. They become relevant again only when they resurface as misfits in the modern cultural environment (148-49). Smail suggests that it highly likely that both genetic and cultural change occurred in the deep history between the Pleistocene and the Neolithic Revolution, and perhaps even later. On Deep History and the Brain is an elegantly written work that seeks to free historians from the grip of sacred history and open them up to new possibilities. Smail argues that historians have been isolated from the great historical disciplines, including geology, evolutionary biology and ethology, archeology, historical linguistics, and cosmology, [that] all rely on evidence that has been extracted from things. Lumps of rocks, fossils, mitochondrial DNA, isotopes, behavorial patterns, potsherds, phonemes: all these things have information about the past (48). Smail makes the case for the kind of history that, as we will see, Nicholas Wade has written. * * * Wade is a science writer for the New York Times. In Before the Dawn he argues that biologically modern humans emerged more than 100,000 years ago; psychologically modern ones began to emerge fifty thousand years later. Our biologically modern ancestors were likely too violent to live in settled communities. A variety of evidence suggests a world in which almost a third of males died violent deaths. Wade suggests that beginning about fifty thousand years ago, humanity underwent a process of genetic change, including gracilization, or a thinning of the skull. In essence, the human race domesticated itself, leaving its descendants better suited to live among strangers and resolve disputes without resorting to bloodshed. These changes were likely in response to catastrophic climate changes that made greater social cooperation and perhaps language skills more adaptive. Trade became more important, offering a means of garnering more resources without resort to war. Thus it is likely that human choice has imposed a direction on the blind forces that hitherto have shaped evolution's random walk (180). Wade provides evidence for the agency that Smail argued probably existed in deep history. Wade argues that our pre-gracilized ancestors lived in a world closer to Hobbes than Rousseau. Wade quotes Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, the authors of Demonic Males, on humans and our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees:
[o]nly two animal species are known to wage war with a system of intense, male-initiated territorial aggression, including lethal raiding into neighboring communities in search of vulnerable enemies to attack and kill. Out of four thousand mammals and ten million or more animal species, this suite of behavior is known only among chimpanzees and humans. (149)

Downloaded from http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ by bramdathan pm on February 8, 2013

Wade could have observed that this kind of activity describes the less-lethal forms violence of pre-modern mobs, soccer hooligans, and urban gangs, as well

Review Essay

265

as the skirmishes around nineteenth and twentieth-century picket lines. Wade points to studies of numerous traditional societies, such as the Yanamamo, that indicate that 30% of male deaths came from war (140), about the same rate as among chimps (150). Furthermore, male Yanamamo who killed a man in battle left two and a half times more wives and three times more children than men who did not (150). Likewise, one twenty-year study of DNA testing amongst chimps in the wild indicated that dominant males accounted for 36% of all conceptions (45% if we exclude their close kin) (145). Of course this pales in comparison with Genghis Khan, who was reported to have left as many as twenty thousand progeny (236). Doubtless this figure is exaggerated, but probably by a low factor. Wade writes that an astonishing 8% of males through the former lands of the Mongol empire carry the Y chromosome of Genghis Khan, or as much as .5% of all males in the world (236). Genetic research has found that an Irish king may have left two to three million descendants. These cases raise the question of whether large-scale procreation isn't just a perk of political power, but may be a salient, if unconscious, motivation for it (237). Laura Betzig found that kings and emperors from the Incas to the Romans, from Morocco to Polynesia, routinely maintained large harems and sought to sire numerous children. For instance, the Incan king had as many as 700 wives or concubines; caciques were given 50 for their service and multiplying people in the kingdom, and on down the hierarchy.6 Modern politicians are pikers by comparison. Primatology offers evidence about humanity's closest relatives, which most evolutionists view as offering important clues to humanity's past. Primatologist Sarah Hrdy has spent decades examining the varied ways that primates nurture their young. She argues that while we share much in common with chimps, humans have a unique capacity for empathy, since along among the great apes our young are raised by mothers and allomothers who can be kin or simply close friends. If chimps were to engage in behavior that humans find unpleasant and stressful, such as airplane travel, Hrdy guesses that a plane full of chimps would be a recipe for mayhem. In that case, any one of us would be lucky to disembark with all ten fingers and toes still attached.7 Of course another close relative to humans are bonobos. In contrast with chimps, bonobos resolve potential conflicts with consensual sexual unions. Wade quotes primatologist Frans de Waal who observes that being both systematically more brutal than chimps and more empathetic than bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. De Waal goes on to observe that Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral (148). An important source of information that Wade relies upon to make inferences about the past comes from genetics. For instance, when did humanity develop clothing? Archeology offers limited information, as skins, textiles and needles deteriorate after 10,000 years. The genetic mutations of lice offer us a clue. Humans remain afflicted by head lice, the same species that feed on other apes, and almost certainly our hominoid ancestors. Yet body lice are a mutation of head lice. While body lice live on blood, they live in clothing. The genetic mutation that makes them possible is roughly 72,000 years old. This fits other information that suggests that human evolution accelerated due to dramatic climatic change.

Downloaded from http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ by bramdathan pm on February 8, 2013

266

Journal of Social History

Fall 2011

Wade also borrows from medical researchers who are rapidly exploring the genetic sources of disease specific to ethnic groups. For instance, scientists have found that non-African populations possess sickle cell anemia, a situation once considered possible only for those of more recent African descent. Sickle cell develops if both parents possess resistance to malaria, and Wade uses that research as further evidence of the genetic changes over the last tens of thousands of years. European resistance to malaria is 2-7,000 years old; African resistance is older, roughly 4-12,000 years old. This offers clues about the history of agriculture, as it was only in settled communities that resistance to the disease would have become a factor in natural selection. Wade delves into arguments that many historians would avoid such as the intersection of genes, intelligence, and ethnicity. Medical researchers are aware that Ashkenazi Jews suffer from several heritable diseases. Wade surveys the research conducted by scholars that suggest that those diseases may have arise in response to malaria, or perhaps much later, perhaps in response to the centuries of European anti-Semitism, which encouraged intellectual pursuits and entrepreneurial skills. In today's world, Ashkenazi Jews make up 3% of the US population, but have won 27% of Nobel prizes, and more than half of world chess championships. Wade is careful to suggest that such research is not conclusive, but it suggests that human diversity cannot be a purely cultural phenomenon, as many social scientists sometimes seem to believe. It has a genetic component too. The component remains to be defined and quantified, but it could prove to be substantial (271). Like Smail, Wade argues that the boundary separating history and evolutionary change is a false one. In the last several thousand years, subtle genetic and profound cultural changes have occurred due to the pressures of natural selection through disease and climate. Evolution has continued as the human genome bears many marks of recent evolution, prompted by adaptations to events such as cultural changes or new diseases (9). Human agency offers another avenue of genetic change. For instance, the pressure of sexual selection helps to explain some of the phonotypical variety within the human family. In short, Wade offers a careful survey of scientific evidence and debates that historians would find useful. Some of his arguments, such as on ethnicity and race, will doubtlessly infuriate some historians. But Wade suggests that historians cannot ignore the revolutions occurring in genetic research, historical linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and other fields. If they do, the emerging evolutionary history will continue to be written by non-historians. It is worth recalling Daniel Lord Smail's observation that in order to write evolutionary history, historians will have to become more scientifically literate, and biologists and physiologists, many of whom have ceased to be historically minded, will have to learn to think again with history (73). With that in mind, let us consider the books of two historically-minded biologists. * * * One common argument about evolution is that the survival of the fittest applies solely to individuals. This view of evolution owes much to Social Darwinists. Yet in The Descent of Man, Darwin observed that herds, flocks, or tribes with high levels of cooperation could win out compared to other groups

Downloaded from http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ by bramdathan pm on February 8, 2013

Review Essay

267

filled with individualists. This view dominated biology until the late 1960s, when biologists argued that group selection was nave, and that natural selection could occur only at the level of the gene or the individual. Furthermore, cooperation could be largely explained as a function of genetic relatedness.8 In recent years, what biologists term multi-level group selection, that is that evolution can occur at the level of the individual or group, has reemerged.9 Both of the following books work within that general theoretical framework. Peter Turchin argues that the processes inherent in social cooperation and individual competition explain much about the rise and fall of empires. Clues to those dynamics can be found in the history of war, or war and peace and war, as the title would suggest. Befitting a population biologist, Turchin takes an approach influenced by Malthus. Malthus found that when animals or humans discovered a new source of food, their population rose and quickly exhausted the resource. Populations decreased due to starvation, disease, or predation and then stabilized. For Turchin, a similar cycle occurred throughout most of human history, particularly as a result of conquest. But barring some new technology or disease, la Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, why did one tribe or nation prevail over another?10 The answer lies in the fact that some societies are more cohesive, allowing them to prevail on the battlefield. Turchin hypothesizes that warfare was more endemic in zones where ethno-linguistically distinct groups (meta-ethnicities) were brought into repeated contact and conflict. Some groups in conflict zones developed high levels of internal cohesion. Turchin labels this collective solidarity asabiya, a term borrowed from the 14th century polymath and historian Ibn Khaldun. All things being equal, high levels of asabiya facilitate martial success, which facilitates the growth of empire. However, over time, imperial success lays the ground that undermines asabiya. The descendants of winning tribes develop into a society separated into classes of winners and losers within their group. Following the Matthew principle, kings, emperors, and aristocrats absorb the lion's share of the new-found wealth and status, undermining the sense of collective cohesion that made their wealth possible in the first place. Large empires themselves reorder the geography of ethno-linguistic conflict zones. The old ones are often overwhelmed; new ones may well be created on the frontier between the empire and barbarians or another empire. New tribes emerge with high levels of asabiya, organized around religion, language, or trade. Turchin finds validity in the observation of the 16th century writer George Puttenham, who found that so peace brings warre and warre brings peace (8). The case of Rome is instructive. The Roman city state emerged south of the fault line that separated the Hellenistic cultural zone from the Gauls to their north. The sack of Rome in 390 BC by the Gauls haunted Roman culture for hundreds of years. Yet Rome developed renowned levels of social solidarity and martial fanaticism which allowed them to best other city states on the Italian peninsula, and in time the Gauls. Indeed, Roman asabiya allowed them to conquer the entire Mediterranean basin. In the Republic, elites vied to go to war, and dying in battle conferred enormous honor on them and their families. Indeed, if Romans were losing a battle, the leader would devote himself in what looked like a suicidal one-man attack. Yet the devotee was understood to have taken all ill fortune upon

Downloaded from http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ by bramdathan pm on February 8, 2013

268

Journal of Social History

Fall 2011

himself and cursed their enemies with the gods of the underworld. Devotion may have taken that individual out of the gene pool, but it roused the spirits of the legions and generally disconcerted their enemies. Roman asabiya permeated the upper classes. At the battle of Cannae, Rome lost tens of thousands of men, and at least one quarter of its Senate to Hannibal. Rome simply raised a new army. But Rome's success created the seeds of its own destruction. The relative egalitarianism of the Republic gave way to the extremes wealth and poverty in the imperial period. The Emperor accumulated fantastic amounts of wealth. For instance, Octavian annexed Egypt as something akin to a personal possession. Aristocratic wealth was often invested int Italian estates, worked by slaves. The plebs, once the backbone of the legions, became dependent on the grain dole in the cities. Imperial Senators were perhaps 100 times richer than their Republican counterparts. In the Republic, both plebians and patricians volunteered for the legions. As patricians built large estates throughout the Italian peninsula, the plebs became impoverished. Eventually, Rome paid its soldiers. By the time of Hadrian, it was rare that Roman aristocrats served in the military; chiefly, it was upwardly mobile aristocrats from the provinces who served in the legions. But the borders that the empire often created new conflict zones. For instance, a new conflict zone emerged on the frontier between Gaul and Germania. It was there that legions, often made up of mercenaries from the frontier zones, battled the various Teutonic tribes. Even after Rome fell, its frontier zone was the incubator of numerous empires, such as those of the Franks, Visigoths, Arabs, and Huns. Turchin also suggests that the low levels of Roman asabiya proved difficult to overcome in the centuries to come, particularly in Southern Italy. Turchin suggests that his work offers numerous insights into our world, notably the disturbingly disparate levels of self sacrifice between radical Islamic terrorists and the US military, and the relative abilities of the US and China to incorporate and inspire loyality from immigrants or minority ethnic groups. Moreover, Turchin argues that his approach offers a new model for history, one that can be based on the scientific method. In short, Turchin offers a Diamondesque macro-history that will inspire some historians and exasperate others. Doubtlessly, there will arise questions as to how well his argument holds up in one or another area (or why he took up the case of imperial Russia and not Mali). The most important aspect of Turchin's work is that it offers an example for how historians might synthesize evolution and history. One more effort can be found in the work of David Sloan Wilson. * * * It will not surprise readers to discover that members of certain religions express enormous hostility to the theory of evolution. Some evolutionists return the sentiment and dismiss religion as mere superstition.11 Other evolutionary scholars argue that religion originates in the evolution of the human brain.12 Still others, such as Edward O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson (no relation), take religion as a given part of the human brain and condition, rather like the nuclear family, selfishness and cooperation.13

Downloaded from http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ by bramdathan pm on February 8, 2013

Review Essay

269

Like Turchin, David Sloan Wilson advocates that history and culture can be studied within an evolutionary framework. Wilson suggests that throughout the past and present, a steady stream of religions emerge. These are the cultural equivalent of genetic variation; some mutations are adaptive to local conditions: they help individuals and groups of people to survive. Consequently, those religions thrive and spread their mores. In short, Wilson marries Darwinian evolution with Durkheimian functionalism. Wilson provides a useful summary of biological and psychological research relevant to the study of society. Evolution has bestowed upon humans enormous brains possessing a capacity for symbolic thought and communication. This is part of why human evolution can occur through culture as well as genes. Neanderthals were larger and stronger than humans, but apparently possessed lower communication skills. This inhibited passing along valuable cultural changes, such as specialized tools or knowledge, such as which plants to harvest during severe famines. Consequently, individuals cooperate to produce goods that they could not obtain by themselves. However, individuals can free ride or cheat. Thus arises the fundamental problem of social life. In successful groups, some individuals take on the cost of punishing violations of group norms; this facilitates altruistic behavior within the group. One on one, cheaters will consistently best altruists; yet groups of solid citizens invariably defeat groups of rugged individualists or cheaters. This explains how and why natural selection can function at the level of the group as well as the individual. This is not simply a function of larger human evolution; in the insect world, hives function as a superorganism, allowing even genetically unrelated individuals to thrive and spread. Wilson hypothesizes that amongst humans, religion functions as a kind of superorganism, adapting to both the environment of its time and the evolved psychology of humans, and allowing individuals to accrue advantages to themselves. Wilson randomly selects several religions to test his hypothesis, choosing such disparate religions such as Judaism, Calvinism, Christianity, and the water temple system of Bali. Relying on anthropological and historical studies, Wilson finds that major religions spread not because humans share the God delusion, but because those religions are functional. For instance, the Balinese religious system efficiently allows the distribution of water through canals, and provides for the control of pests, and the resolution of conflicts. Wilson develops his case by examining his other cases. Jewish religious law encouraged Jews to procreate and to be charitable to each other; it also allowed them to function as warriors during their ancient history. This seeming contradiction is part of a general pattern; Wilson points out that religions generally reveal the in-group bias that balances love towards co-religionists with hostility towards others. After the Diaspora, Judaism allowed Jews to remain a cohesive ethnic group despite centuries of living among others. Indeed, recent genetic research indicates that most Jews are essentially fourth cousins, a degree of relatedness ten times what one would expect in a heterogeneous society.14 Early Christianity provided not only emotional support, but encouraged its members to care for each other during the pandemics that wracked Roman society. Unlike elite Romans, Christians were encouraged to be fruitful and multiply; Christianity's rapid spread was as much demographic as ideological. Prior

Downloaded from http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ by bramdathan pm on February 8, 2013

270

Journal of Social History

Fall 2011

to Calvin, Geneva was notoriously fractious and individualistic. Calvin demanded that his adherents subordinate their individual wants and desires to those of the group, and in the process created a cohesive and highly productive society. Wilson's case studies are less important than the theoretical and empirical background for the study of social institutions. Evolutionary psychology, while imperfect, provides historians with important tools and evidence to understand the way the brain functions. In some regards, that field points historians in directions that they already know. People are not simple rational actors, as neoclassical economics would posit, but complex and contradictory beings that think as more with their emotions than their reason. Much of their emotional architecture is subconscious, but no less powerful for that. Wilson is aware that the endeavor of incorporating psychology into history is no simple one as the brain is too complex to be reduced to a few principles or subroutines. Moreover, the physical and social environments that humans have made and remade are also quite complex. If evolution provided humanity with innate emotional architecture, people have used it to fashion a wide variety of societies, which in turn bring out certain behaviors. As Wade observes, just 1000 years separate the Viking warriors from the gentle denizens of the world's most advanced welfare states. * * * As these works indicate, a nascent Darwinian history has begun to emerge. In the near term it seems unlikely that many historians will take it up. Historians tend to dislike theory and are still wary of evolution because of the experience of Social Darwinists. As Martin J. Wiener observed, in theoretical terms, historians are essentially living in the 1960s, when reference to evolution marked one at best as unprofessional and at worse a cryto-Nazi.15 There are real dangers of facile explanations using evolutionary language as the history of Social Darwinists suggests. Yet evolution possesses enormous power to explain the natural world and to synthesize information from a variety of disciplines. Moreover, evolution is a dynamic theory of historical change. As Smail suggests, an awareness of the deep history of the brain makes it possible to write evolutionary social histories in the modern period. There are a number of areas where this could be done, and one or two where it has already started. Evolution is most easily applied to the study of sex, gender, and the family. Approximately half of all studies in evolutionary psychology focus on sex, such as the different mating strategies between men and women. Historians could use evolutionary theory as a guide in their research, and indicate how and why people have changed behaviors or mores in response to, or increating new, social environments. Historians, with their renowned sensitivity to the role of context in shaping behavior could provide a useful corrective to psychology's over-reliance on laboratory or computer studies involving college students. For instance, a recent psychology study found that women on college campuses expressed far less reluctance towards casual sex (aka hooking up) than they did in traditional laboratory studies.16 Historians could and should dialogue with

Downloaded from http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ by bramdathan pm on February 8, 2013

Review Essay

271

evolutionists about how and why parenting strategies have changed across time and space. Evolutionists are well aware of Hamilton's rule that finds that the price of altruistic behavior is divided by the degree of genetic relatedness. As one wag put it, I wouldn't die for my brother, but I would for eight cousins.17 Sarah Hrdy's body of work on mothering strategies among primates and humans provides historians with much useful information and a template. One issue she addresses, among many others, is how and why parents abandon children, a central question in the history of single mothers. Hrdy relies on the work of historians of orphanages to show the dangers of strangers raising infants.18 Given the importance of genetic relatedness in social cooperation in the natural world, one would expect to find nepotism in the patterns of slave manumission or the complex relationships between the white and black branches of the same family. Sally Heming may be just the tip of the iceberg. To communicate effectively with other disciplines, historians will probably need to overcome their habit of joyfully finding exceptions to every rule. For instance, Smail argues against the incest taboo, a universal feature of all documented societies, by pointing out, in effect, that incest does happen on occasion.19 In ancient Egypt, cultural evolution led to a preference, albeit short-lived, for brother-sister marriages (152). Evolutionary theory should prove useful in studies of dating, pornography, or the subcultures that men and women developed in different places, or at different points in time. Of course a sizeable minority of humanity does not pass their genes to the next generation. The study of gay and lesbian identities is a bit of a gray area in evolutionary theory, and will likely prove an exciting area of dialogue with evolutionists. One area of research where historians have addressed evolutionary psychology is the study of violence. Two historians have addressed the work of Wilson and Daley in the role of social environments making violence more or less possible. Adler found evolutionary psychology a useful way to understand why some men resorted to violence, although he found the theory was also too reductionist.20 A historian of violence in Europe, John Carter Wood, found evolutionary psychology an important discipline that historians should consider.21 His article sparked a lively exchange, with one historian cautioning against the use of the theory, although calling for wider adoption of biological approaches, and another finding Wood too cautious in how evolution could be applied.22 Evolutionary approaches could have much to say about collective forms of violence. Turchin borrowed from historian Trevor N. Tuvey who studied the relative levels of unit cohesiveness in the British, American and German militaries during World War Two, and found that the German Wehrmacht was almost one and a half times more effective, once equipment was taken into account, than the British (322). One wonders what social historians of, say, the British navy will make of this. How did the navy turn impressed colliers, criminals and seamen into such a remarkably successful enterprise? Asabiya could prove an important way to try and measure the consensus and conflict schools that pervade social history. Those interested in social cooperation and competition could also benefit from an evolutionary approach. There are studies of both primates and humans that indicate that both are highly sensitive to social hierarchies. High status

Downloaded from http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ by bramdathan pm on February 8, 2013

272

Journal of Social History

Fall 2011

chimps and humans live longer than lower status ones.23 As noted above, Richard Wilkinson found considerable evidence that people find extremes in social status stressful.24 This reviewer wrote a study that found that local union presidents had shorter lives than their members, and that female labor leaders were far less likely to have children.25 There are other areas where labor historians might use evolutionary findings. Was picket line violence partly a function of male risk taking, a form of warfare updated to modern times? The social aspects of evolution should interest historians of social and ethnic clubs or those conducting community studies. For instance, one study found that as long as a close-knit Italian immigrant community in Pennsylvania stayed socially isolated, they not only ate fattier foods and smoked more than WASPS in surrounding communities, but had lower rates of heart disease and mortality. When the Italians Americanized, their heart disease rose rate despite healthier habits.26 These works indicate that evolutionary approaches, already well developed in the social sciences, could be applied to the field of history. Evolutionary theory is powerful; it provides the basis for synthesis between the biological and psychological sciences, and ethology and anthropology. It is also a theory of historical change. At the same time it is prone to facile and dangerous conclusions, as the history of Social Darwinism makes abundantly clear. Yet it opens up the possibility to dialogue with other disciplines, as well as providing greater unity in the study of human history. Endnotes
1. For instance, see Daniel E. Bender, American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (Ithaca, 2009). 2. Jerome H. Barkow, Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists (New York, 2005). 3. Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA, 1978), 167. The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behaviorlike the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide itis the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. 4. Richard G. Wilkinson, Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier (New York, 2005). 5. Margo Wilson & Martin Daly, Life Expectancy, Economic Inequality, Homicide, and Reproductive Timing in Chicago Neighbourhoods, British Medical Journal 314 (1997): 1271-1274. For a discussion on this point, see David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think (New York, 2007), 94-96. 6. Laura Betzig, Despotism and Differential Reproduction: A Darwinian View of History (New York, 1986), 76-77. 7. Sarah Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, 2009), 2. 8. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York 1976). 9. Edward O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson, Rethinking the Theoretical basis of Sociobiology, The Quarterly Review of Biology 82 (2007): 327-348.

Downloaded from http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ by bramdathan pm on February 8, 2013

Review Essay

273

10. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (New York, 1997). 11. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York, 2006). 12. Richard Wright, Evolution of God (New York, 2009). Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (New York 2001). 13. Edward O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (New York 2007). 14. Nicholas Wade, Studies Show Jews' Genetic Similarity, New York Times, June 9, 2010. 15. Martin J. Weiner, Evolution and History Writing: A Comment on J. Carter Wood, 'The Limits of Culture?' Culture and Social History 4 (2007): 545. 16. J. R. Garcia and C. Reiber, Hook-up Behavior: A Biopsychosocial Perspective, Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology 2 (2008): 192-208. 17. J. S. Haldane, Population genetics, New Biology 18 (1955): 34-51. 18. S. B. Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (New York 2000), 301-3. 19. See Donald E. Brown, Human Universals, (New York, 1991). 20. Jeffrey S. Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt: Homicide in Chicago, 1875-1920 (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2006); Adler, On the Border of Snakeland: Evolutionary Psychology and Plebian Violence in Industrial Chicago, 1875-1920, Journal of Social History 36 (2003): 541-560. 21. John Carter Wood, The Limits Of Culture? Society, Evolutionary Psychology And The History of Violence, Cultural and Social History 4 (2007): 95-114. 22. Wiener, Evolution and History Writing, 454-551. Barbara H. Rosenwein, The Uses of Biology: A Response to J. Carter Wood's 'The Limits of Culture?' Culture and Social History 4 (2007): 553-558(6). J. Carter Wood, Evolution, Civilization and History: A Response to Wiener and Rosenwein, Culture and Social History 4 (2007): 559-565(7). 23. Hrdy, Mother Nature, 334. 24. Wilkinson, Impact. 25. John Hinshaw, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin: Towards an Evolutionary History of Labor, The Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology (2008): 260-80. 26. Brenda Egolf, Judith Lasker, Stewart Wolf, and Louise Potvin, The Roseto Effect: a 50-year Comparison of Mortality Rates, American Journal of Public Health 82 (1992): 10891092.
Downloaded from http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ by bramdathan pm on February 8, 2013