DAN SPERBER is a social and cognitive scientist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. He is the author of Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach.
A number of us—biologists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, philosophers—have been trying to lay the foundations for a truly naturalistic approach to culture. Sociobiologists and cultural ecologists have explored the idea that cultural behaviors are biological adaptations, to be explained in terms of natural selection. Memeticists, inspired by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, argue that cultural evolution is an autonomous, Darwinian selection process enabled, but not governed, by biological evolution.
The evolutionary psychologists Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Mark Feldman, Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, and I are among those who, in different ways, argue for interactions between biology and culture that are more complex. These naturalistic approaches have been received not just with intellectual objections but also with moral and political outrage: This is a dangerous idea, to be strenuously resisted, for it threatens humanistic values and sound social sciences.
When I am called a reductionist, I take it as an unearned compliment. A genuine reduction is a great scientific achievement, but—too bad—the naturalistic study of culture I advocate does not reduce to biology or psychology. When I am called a positivist (an insult among postmodernists), I acknowledge without any sense of guilt or inadequacy that indeed I don’t believe that all facts are socially constructed. On the whole, having one’s ideas described as dangerous is flattering.
Dangerous ideas are potentially important. Braving insults and misrepresentations in defending these ideas is noble. Many advocates of naturalistic approaches to culture see themselves as a group of free-thinking, deep-probing scholars besieged by bigots.
But wait a minute! Naturalistic approaches can be dangerous: After all, they have been. The use of biological evidence and arguments purporting to show profound natural inequalities among human “races” or ethnic groups, or between women and men, is only too well represented in the history of our disciplines. It is not good enough for us to point out (rightly) that (1) the science involved is bad science; (2) even if some natural inequality were established, it would not come near justifying any inequality in rights; and (3) postmodernists criticizing naturalism on political grounds should begin by rejecting Heidegger and other reactionaries in their pantheon who also have been accomplices of policies of discrimination. This is not enough because the racist and sexist uses of naturalism are not exactly unfortunate accidents.
Species evolve because of genetic differences among their members; therefore you cannot leave biological difference out of a biological approach. Luckily, it so happens that biological differences among humans are minor and don’t produce subspecies or “races,” and human sexual dimorphism is relatively limited. In particular, all humans have minds/brains made up of the same mechanisms, with just fine-tuning differences. (Think how very different all this would be if, however improbably, Neanderthals had survived and developed culturally as we did, so that there really were different human races.)
Given what anthropologists have long called “the psychic unity of the human kind,” the fundamental goal for a naturalistic approach is to explain how a common human nature—and not biological differences among humans—gives rise to such a diversity of languages, cultures, and social organizations. Given the real and present danger of distortion and exploitation, it must be part of our agenda to take responsibility for the way this approach is understood by a wider public.
This, happily, has been done by a number of outstanding authors capable of explaining serious science to lay audiences and who typically have warned their readers against misuses of biology. So the danger is being averted, and let’s just move on? No, we are not there yet, because the very necessity of popularizing the naturalistic approach and the very talent with which this is being done creates a new danger—that of arrogance.
We naturalists do have radical objections to what Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have called the “standard social science model.” We have many insightful hypotheses and even some relevant data. The truth of the matter, however, is that naturalistic approaches to culture have so far remained speculative, only beginning to throw light on fragments of the extraordinarily wide range of detailed evidence accumulated by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and others. Many of those who find our ideas dangerous fear what they see as an imperialistic bid to take over their domain.
The bid would be unrealistic, and so is the fear. The real risk is different. The social sciences host a variety of approaches, which, with a few high-profile exceptions, contribute to our understanding of the domain. Even if it involves some reshuffling, a naturalistic approach should be seen as a particularly welcome and important addition. But naturalists full of grand claims and promises but with little interest in the competence accumulated by others are, if not exactly dangerous, at least much less useful than they should be, and the deeper challenge they present to social scientists’ mental habits is less likely to be properly met.