Academic OneFile - Document

10/28/14 8:15 PM

Title:

Sizing up 'secular creationism': why are some academics declaring that humans possess a unique
and miraculous freedom from biology?
Author(s):
Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh
Source:
Free Inquiry. 18.2 (Spring 1998): p23.
Document Type:
Article
Copyright:
COPYRIGHT 1998 Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism, Inc.
www.secularhumanism.org/
Full Text:
There is a strange tension in academia that goes far deeper than spats over "political correctness." A trend has arisen - in
anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and other departments across the nation - to dismiss the possibility that there are
any biologically based commonalities that cut across cultural differences. This aversion to biological or, as they are often
branded, "reductionist" explanations commonly operates as an informal ethos limiting what can be said in seminars, asked at
lectures, or incorporated into social theory. Extreme anti-innatism has had formal institutional consequences as well: at some
universitics, like the University of California, Berkeley, the biological subdivision of the anthropology department has been
relocated to another building - a spatial metaphor for an epistemological gap.
Although some of tile strongest rejections of the biological have come from scholars with a left or feminist perspective,
antipathy toward innatist theories does not always score neatly along political lines. Consider a recent review essay by
centrist sociologist Alan Wolfe in the New Republic. Wolfe makes quick work of Frank Sulloway's dodgy Darwinist claims
(in Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives) about the influence of birth order on personality, but
can't resist going on to impugn the motives of anyone who would apply biology to the human condition. In general, he
asserts, "the biologizing of human beings is not only bad humanism, but also bad science."
For many social theorists, innate biology can be let in only as a constraint - "a set of natural limits on human functioning," as
anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has written. It has, from this point of view, no positive insights to offer into how humans
think, act, or arrange their cultures.
For others, the study of innate human properties is not merely uninteresting but deeply misguided. Stanford philosopher of
science John Dupre, for example, argues that it is "essentialist" even to think that we are a biological species in the usual
sense - that is, a group possessing any common tendencies or "universal properties" that might shed some light on our
behavior. As feminist theorist Judith Butler puts it, "The very category of the universal has begun to be exposed for its own
highly ethnocentric biases."
THE OTHER CREATIONSM
But the notion that humans have no shared, biologically based "nature" constitutes a theory of human nature itself. No one,
after all, is challenging the idea that chimpanzees have a chimpanzee nature - that is, a set of genetically scripted tendencies
and potential responses that evolved along with the physical characteristics we recognize as chimpanzee-like. To set humans
apart from even our closest animal relatives as the one species that is exempt from the influences of biology is to suggest that
we do indeed possess a defining "essence," and that it is defined by our unique and miraculous freedom from biology. The
result is an ideological outlook eerily similar to that of religious creationism. Like their fundamentalist Christian
counterparts, the most extreme antibiologists suggest that humans occupy a status utterly different from and clearly "above"
that of all other living beings. And, like the religious fundamentalists, the new academic creationists defend their stance as if
all of human dignity - and all hope for the future - were at stake.
The new secular creationism emerged as an understandable reaction to excess. Since the nineteenth century, conservatives
have routinely deployed supposed biological differences as immutable barriers to the achievement of a more egalitarian
social order. Darwinism was quickly appropriated as social Darwinism - a handy defense of economic inequality and
colonialism. In the twentieth century, from the early eugenicists to The Bell Curve, pseudo-biology has served the cause of
white supremacy. Most recently, evolutionary psychology has become, in some hands, a font of patriarchal social
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prescriptions. Alas, in the past few years such simplistic biological reductionism has tapped a media nerve, with the result
that, among many Americans, schlock genetics has become the default explanation for every aspect of human behavior from
homosexuality to male promiscuity, from depression to "criminality."
Clearly science needs close and ongoing scrutiny, and in the past decade or two there has been a healthy boom in science
studies and criticism. Scholars such as Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, Emily Martin, and Donna Haraway have offered
useful critiques of the biases and ethnocentric metaphors that can skew everything from hypothesis formation to data
collection techniques. Feminists (one of the authors included) have deconstructed medicine and psychology for patriarchal
biases; left-leaning biologists such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Ruth Hubbard have exposed
misapplications of biology to questions of social policy. However, contemporary antibiologists decry a vast range of
academic pursuits coming from very different theoretical corners-from hypotheses about the effects of genes and hormones,
to arguments about innate cognitive modules and grammar, to explorations of universal ritual form and patterns of linguistic
interaction. All these can be branded as "essentialist," hence wrong-headed and politically mischievous. Paradoxically,
assertions about universal human traits and tendencies are usually targeted just as vehemently as assertions about differences.
There are no differences between groups, seems to be the message, but there is no sameness among them either.
It was only with the arrival of the intellectual movements lumped under the term postmodernism that academic antibiologism
began to sound perilously like religious creationism. Postmodernist perspectives go beyond a critique of the misuses of
biology to offer a critique of biology itself, extending to all of science and often to the very notion of rational thought In the
simplified form it often takes in casual academic talk, postmodernism can be summed up as a series of tenets that include a
wariness of meta-narratives (meaning grand explanatory theories), a horror of essentialism (extending to the idea of any
innate human traits), and a fixation on "power" as the only force limiting human freedom - which at maximum strength
precludes claims about any universal human traits while casting doubt on the use of science to study our species or anything
at all. Glibly applied, postmodernism portrays evolutionary theory as nothing more than a sexist and racist story line created
by Western white men.
The deepest motives behind this new secular version of creationism are understandable. We are different from other animals.
Language makes us more plastic and semiotically sophisticated, and renders us deeply susceptible to meanings and ideas. As
for power, Foucault was right: it's everywhere, and it shapes our preferences and categories of thought, as well as our life
chances. Many dimensions of human life that feel utterly "natural" are in fact locally constructed, a hard-earned lesson too
easy to forget and too important not to publicize. The problem is that the combined vigor of antibiologism and simplified
postmodernism has tended to obliterate the possibility that human beings have anything in common and to silence efforts to
explore this domain. Hence, we have gone, in the space of a decade or two, from what began as a healthy skepticism about
the misuses of biology to a new form of dogma.
As a biologically oriented researcher who has made controversial innatist claims, Rutgers social theorist Robin Fox notes
with irony that secular creationist academics seem to have replaced the church as the leading opponents of Darwinism: "It's
like they're responding to heresy." Stephen Jay Gould, who has devoted much of his career to critiquing misuses of biology,
also detects parallels between religious and academic creationist zeal. While holding that many aspects of human life are
local and contingent, he adds, "Some facts and theories are truly universal (and true) - and no variety of cultural traditions
can change that . . . we can't let a supposedly friendly left-wing source be exempt from criticism from anti-intellectual
positions."
The new creationism is not simply a case of well-intended politics gone awry; it represents a grave misunderstanding of
biology and science generally. Ironically, the creationists invest the natural sciences with a determinative potency no
thoughtful scientist would want to claim. Biology is rhetorically yoked to "determinism," a concept that threatens to clip our
wings and lay waste to our utopian visions, while culture is viewed as a domain where power relations with other humans are
the only obstacle to freedom.
AGAINST SENSE

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But these stereotypes of biological determinism and cultural malleability don't hold up under scrutiny. For one thing, biology.
is not a dictatorship - genes work probabilistically, and their expression depends on interaction with their environment. As
even Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and a veritable Antichrist to contemporary creationists of both the secular
and Christian varieties, makes clear: "It is perfectly' possible to hold that genes exert a statistical influence on human
behavior while at the same time believing that this influence can be modified, overridden or reversed by other influences."
And if biology is not a dictatorship, neither is culture a realm of perfect plasticity. The accumulated lessons of ethnography and, paradoxically, postmodern theories of power themselves - suggest that, even in the absence of biological constraints, it
is not easy to remold human cultures to suit our utopian visions. In fact, in the extreme constructivist scenario borrowed by
secular creationists, it's hard to imagine who would have the will or the ability to orchestrate real change: the people in
power, who have no motivation to alter the status quo, or the oppressed, whose choices, preferences, and sentiments have
been so thoroughly shaped by the cultural hegemony of the elite? Judged solely as a political stance, secular creationism is
no less pessimistic than the biologism it seeks to uproot.
Milder versions of the "nature/nurture" debate begat a synthesis: "There is no biology that is not culturally mediated." But
giving biology its due while taking cultural mediation into account requires inclusive and complex thinking - as Phoebe
Ellsworth puts it: '"You need a high tolerance of ambiguity to believe both that culture shapes things and that we have a lot in
common." Despite the ham-fisted efforts of early sociobiologists, many (probably most) biologically based human universals
are not obvious to the naked eye or accessible to common sense.
Finally, many secular creationists are a few decades out of date on the kind of "human nature" that evolutionary biology
threatens to impose on us. Feminists and liberal academics were perhaps understandably alarmed by the aggressive "man the
hunter" image that prevailed in the sixties and seventies; and a major reason for denying the relevance of evolution was a
horror of the nasty, brutish cavemen we had supposedly evolved from. But today, evolutionary theory has moved to a more
modest assessment of the economic contribution of big-game hunting (as opposed to gathering and scavenging) and a new
emphasis on the cooperative - yen altruistic - traits that underlie human sociality and intelligence. We don't have to like what
biology has to tell us about our ancestors, but the fact is that they have become a lot more likable than they used to be.
In portraying human beings as pure products of cultural context, the secular creationist standpoint not only commits
biological errors but defies common sense. In the exaggerated postmodernist perspective appropriated by secular creationists,
no real understanding or communication is possible between cultures. Since the meaning of any human practice is
inextricable from its locally spun semiotic web, to pluck a phenomenon such as "ritual" or "fear" out of its cultural context is,
in effect, to destroy it. Certainly such categories have different properties from place to place, and careful contextualization is
necessary. to grasp their local implications. But as Ellsworth asks: "At the level of detail of 'sameness' that postmodernists
are demanding, what makes them think that two people in the same culture will understand each other?" The ultimate
postmodern retort would be, of course, that we do not, but this nihilism does not stand up to either common sense or deeper
scrutiny. We manage to grasp things about each other - emotions, motives, nuanced (if imperfect) linguistic meanings - that
couldn't survive communicative transmission if we didn't have some basic emotional and cognitive tendencies in common.
The creationist rejection of innate human universals threatens not only an intellectual dead end but a practical one. In writing
off any biologically based human commonality, secular creationists undermine the very' bedrock of the politics they' claim to
uphold. As Barbara Epstein of the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, remarks:
"If there is no human nature outside social construction, no needs or capacities other than those constructed by a particular
discourse, then there is no basis for social criticism and no reason for protest or rebellion." In fact, tacit assumptions of
human similarity are embedded in the theories of even such ostensible social constructionists as Marx, whose theory of
alienation assumes (in some interpretations, anyway) that there are authentic human needs that capitalism fails to meet.
Would it really be so destructive to our self-esteem as a species to acknowledge that we, like our primate relatives, are
possessed of an inherited repertory of potential responses and mental structures? Would we forfeit all sense of agency and
revolutionary possibility if we admitted that we, like our primate relatives, are subject to the rules of DNA replication (not to
mention the law of gravity)?

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Barbara Ehrenreich is a biologist, a magazine columnist, and the author of The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes
from a Decade of Greed and Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. Janet McIntosh is a graduate student in
ethnology at the University of Michigan.
Abstract:
The use of evolutionary principles to justify inequality among societies gave rise to a drastically different treatment of studies
on human beings. Academics' antibiological stance produced secular creationist advocates with the same unrelenting
philosophical dogmatism as those of religious creationists of the 19th century. These academics, however, should heed the
voice of reason. Culture cannot be the sole influence on human nature. Just as in other species, environment and genes, mold
man's personality.
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Janet McIntosh. "Sizing up 'secular creationism': why are some academics declaring that humans
possess a unique and miraculous freedom from biology?" Free Inquiry Spring 1998: 23+. Academic OneFile. Web. 28 Oct.
2014.
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