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From: carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.singles,net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Intelligence (sociobiology: are humans clever ants?)
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Date: Sat, 22-Jun-85 15:43:53 EDT
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Posted: Sat Jun 22 15:43:53 1985
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[Follow-ups should probably go to net.philosophy.]

In his interesting article, Eric Roskos writes:

>Why can't I as easily define "monogamy" in geese, let us say, as being the
>same cultural phenomenon as "monogamy" in humans?  How do you define culture,
>other than your current definition as "a peculiarly human institution"?  I
>would define culture to be "a behavior or custom practiced, by convention,
>by a group of like organisms."  

Although "culture" is a notoriously ambiguous term, animal
ethologists do not, as far as I am aware, apply the term to animals.
Now, you can apply the term "monogamy" to geese as long as it is
understood that it cannot be applied in the anthropological sense.
"Monogamy" as applied to humans means the practice or state of being
married to one person at a time.  Animals don't get married.

If you're still not convinced that animals don't possess the
institution of marriage or any other cultural forms, the best I can
do is quote from Marshall Sahlins's excellent (but tough) book *The
Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of
Sociobiology* (pp.  61ff.): 
_________________

The final, most fundamental conclusion must be that culture is the
indispensable condition of this system of human organization and
reproduction, with all its surprises for the biogenetic theory of
social behavior.  Human society is cultural, unique in virtue of its
construction by symbolic means.  E. O. Wilson says, "the highest form
of tradition, by whatever criterion we choose to judge it, is of
course human culture.  But culture, aside from its involvement with
language, which is truly unique, differs from animal tradition only
in degree" (1975, p. 168).  Literally, the statement is correct.  If
we were to disregard language, culture would differ from animal
tradition only in degree.  But precisely because of this "involvement
with language" -- a phrase hardly befitting serious scientific
discourse -- cultural social life differs from the animal in kind. It
is not just the expression of an animal of another kind.  The reason
why human social behavior is not organized by the individual
maximization of genetic interest is that human beings are not
socially defined by their organic qualities but in terms of symbolic
attributes; and a symbol is precisely a meaningful value -- such as
"close kinship" or "shared blood" -- which cannot be determined by
the physical properties of that to which it refers.

Wilson pays lip service (if one may so put it) to this famous
"arbitrary character of the sign."  But for him the theoretical
importance of human speech lies in its FUNCTION OF COMMUNICATION
rather than its STRUCTURE OF SIGNIFICATION, so it is primarily
understood to CONVEY INFORMATION rather than to GENERATE MEANING.  As
communication, language is not distinguishable from the class of
animal signaling, it only adds (quantitatively) to the capacity to
signal.  What is signaled is information.... So far as its concept or
meaning is concerned, a word is not simply referrable to external
stimuli but first of all to its place in the system of language and
culture, in brief to its OWN environment of related words....

I am making no more claim for culture relative to biology than
biology would assert relative to physics and chemistry.... The same
kind of hierarchical relationship holds for culture vis-a-vis
biology.... Culture is biology plus the symbolic faculty.  If we were
to ask how a given system of kinship, chieftanship, or religious
beliefs acquired its properties, we would have to have a theory of
symbolic attribution.  [end of quote from Sahlins]
_____________

>... you are claiming that humans magically have
>some set of properties no other animal has, rather than just incrementally
>having MORE of some property.  You can safely argue this from a religious
>standpoint, but not from a biological one, given existing evidence.  

I think most biologists would agree that only humans possess a
symbolic faculty, i.e. a capacity for language, and that this claim
can be made quite apart from theology or metaphysics.  Humans are
animals all right, but animals with a BIG DIFFERENCE in KIND:  only
humans can create the structure of meanings attached to symbols 
known as "culture."  

>For
>example, the fire ants we have here in Florida attack an ant hill, kill the
>queen, take the ant hill over, and make the workers work for them.  How is
>that different from some people going to a country, killing its ruler,
>and making the people work for them?

Do you mean to suggest that, mutatis mutandis, there is NO
difference?  There are enormous differences.  The ant queen isn't a
ruler in even a metaphorical sense.  Human warfare takes place in a
political (and thus a cultural) context.  Consider the aggression of
Nazi Germany or the wars chronicled by Herodotus and Thucydides.  The
individual soldiers fought because they were conscripted or enslaved
or paid good wages or because they were motivated by patriotism or
other ideals.  The political leaders who conducted the wars were
motivated by the ideology of Lebensraum for Aryans or the ideals
expressed in Pericles's funeral oration or the Realpolitik of the
Melian Dialogue or the intention of exacting just vengeance for a
grievance or any number of other reasons.  Nothing remotely like this
occurs in ant societies.  Is anyone prepared to claim that ants
possess a political life?  

It is potentially quite misleading to apply ethnographic terms such
as slavery, marriage, monarchy, warfare, etc. to animals.  These
terms can be correctly applied to animals by metaphor *only*, because
their meanings imply a culturally constituted world of meanings that
is possessed by the human species alone.  As Lewontin et al. write in
*Not In Our Genes*, "...`slavery' does not exist in ants.  Slavery is
a form of production of economic surplus, and slaves are a form of
capital.  Ants know neither commodities nor capital investment nor
rates of interest nor the relative advantage to industrial capital of
a free labor market."

Lewontin et al. draw a political moral, with which I concur:  "E. O.
Wilson has identified himself with American neoconservative
libertarianism, which holds that society is best served by each
individual acting in a self-serving manner, limited only in the case
of extreme harm to others.  Sociobiology is yet another attempt to
put a natural-scientific foundation under Adam Smith.  It combines
vulgar Mendelism, vulgar Darwinism, and vulgar reductionism in the
service of the status quo."

In summary, "we used to be apes" is not a sufficient answer to the
question "What are human beings?"  [ I wish I had time to pursue this
discussion further, but I probably won't, at least for a few weeks. ]

Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes