Chromosomes or Culture?

Stanford’s Carl N. Degler’s In Search of Human Nature tells the story of the contest between biological and cultural determinists in the social sciences. Much of late 19th-century social science was shaped by a crude Darwinian paradigm. Biological factors like race and sex were considered to be the chief determinants of social behavior. Mental traits and even social customs were thought to be biologically derived. Much Darwinian social science was, in a most precise sense, racist and sexist.

In the first half of the 20th century, biology retreated before the onslaught of cultural determinists, led by anthropologist Franz Boas and his students. Boas insisted that all races have equal mental capacities. Primitive peoples are no less intelligent than civilized peoples. Culture is the essential cause of differences among peoples. Thus, argued Boas’s disciple Margaret Mead, Western adolescents have problems with sex because of the cultural echo of “Puritan self-accusations.” In more sexually permissive cultures, like Samoa, teens adjust readily to the stages of sexual development.

In the past several decades, however, a renewed attention to biological factors has spread throughout the social sciences. Sociobiology, hailed by one admirer as “the most important theoretical contribution of the second half of this century,” is thought by some to have the potential of providing a unified evolutionary social science, embracing every field from psychology to political science. Most of the claims for biology have been more modest, and even sociobiologists admit that culture is a significant factor in human evolution. Though it has taken a more sophisticated form, a genuine “revival” of Darwinian social theory is underway.

The new and improved biologism has been pressed into service by various contestants of the cultural war. In her book, Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia derives an entire theory of culture from meditation on the differences between male and female genitals, and analyzes a large chunk of Western cultural history from this viewpoint. In France, sociobiology has been taken up by the left, while in the U.S. it has been deployed by some conservatives in defense of traditional Western family structures and sex roles. Ironically, Harvard’s E.O. Wilson, the leading proponent of sociobiology, has written that the most suitable family order is not monogamy but polygyny. Even nominally monogamous societies tend toward the biological telos of polygyny. Because homosexuality is a form of bonding, moreover, Wilson argues that the Jewish and Christian views are “inadequate and probably wrong.”

Degler’s book can be read as a cautionary tale about the recurrent danger and persistence of reductionistic ideologies, a danger all the more acute in our self-consciously interdisciplinary intellectual environment where ideas circulate across disciplinary boundaries with increasing velocity. Marxist materialism has produced political and economic horrors of mind-numbing proportions, but it continues to squeeze its way into theology and the humanities. Freud may be discredited as a scientific psychologist, but he has been rehabilitated as a master of postmodern literary criticism. Darwinian evolution may be subjected to brilliant scientific dismemberment, but unarticulated Darwinian assumptions continue to animate attacks on Western civilization.

Degler shows that recent efforts to give place to biological factors have been balanced by a recognition of the place of culture. But it is questionable whether, on purely materialist assumptions, these theories can provide a coherent account of the interaction of biology and culture. It is not clear that the social sciences have outgrown the threat of reductionism. Placing final judgments and determinations in the hands of an all-wise Creator frees one to acknowledge the relative determinations of both chromosomes and culture, and at the same time to insist on their relativity.