Ethology and Culture

Since we are a kind of animal, there are answers in our case to the question that can be asked about any animal, "How does it live?" Some of these answers are more or less the same for all human beings wherever and whenever they live, and of those universal answers, some are distinctively true of human beings and do not apply to other animals. There are other answers to the question, how human beings live, that vary strikingly from place to place and, still more significantly, from time to time. Some other species, too, display behavior that varies regionally—the calls of certain birds are an example—but the degree of such variation in human beings is of a quite different order of magnitude. Moreover, and more fundamentally, these variations essentially depend on the use of language and, associated with that, the nongenetic transmission of information between generations, features that are, of course, themselves among the most important universal characteristics distinstice of human beings. This variation in the ways that human beings live is cultural

variation, and it is an ethological fact that human beings live under culture (a fact represented in the ancient doctrine that their nature is to live by convention).

With human beings, if you specify the ethnological in detail, you are inevitably led to the cultural. For example, human beings typically live in dwellings. So, in a sense, do termites, but in the case of human beings, the description opens into a series of cultural specifications. Some human beings live in a dwelling made by themselves, some in one made by other human beings. Some who make dwellings are constrained to make them, others are rewarded for doing so; in either case, they act in groups with a division of labor, and so on. If one is to describe any of these activities adequately and so explain what these animals are up to, one has to ascribe to them the complex intentions involved in sharing a culture.

There are other dimensions of culture and further types of complex intention. Some of the dwellings systematically vary in form, being fourbedroom Victorians, for instance, or in the Palladian style, and those descriptions have to be used in explaining the variations. Such styles and traditons involve kinds of intentions that are not merely complex but self-referential: the intentions refer to the tradition, and at the same time, it is the existence of such intentions that constitutes the tradition. Traditions of this kind display another feature that they share with many other cultural phenomena: they imply a consciousness of past time, historical or mythical. This consciousness itself has become more reflexive and complex in th course of human development, above all, with the introduction of literacy. All human beings live under culture; many live with an idea of their collective past; some live with the idea of such an idea.

All of this is ethology, or an extension of ethnology; if one is going to understand a species that lives under culture, one has to understand its cultures. But it is not all biology. So how much is biology? And what does that question mean? I shall suggest a line of thought about similarities and differences.

The story so far implies thar some differences in the behavior of human groups are explained in terms of their different cultures and not in biological terms. This may encourage the idea that culture explains differences and biology explains similarities. But this is not necessarily so. Indeed, in more than one respect, the question is not well posed. First, there is the absolutely general point that a genetic influence will express itself in a particular way only granted a certain sort of environment. A striking example of such an interaction is provided by turtles' eggs, which if they are exposed to a temperature below 30 degrees Celsius at a certain point in development yield a female turtle but if to a higher temperature, a male one. Moreover, the possible interactions are

complex, and many cases cannot be characterized merely by adding together different influences or, again, just in terms of triggering.^[1] Changes in the environment may depend on the activities of the animals themselves. In the case of human beings, the environment and changes in it may well require cultural description.

Granted these complexities, it may not be clear what is meant by ascribing some similarity or difference between different groups of human beings to a biological rather than a cultural influence. But insofar as it makes sense to say anything of this sort, it can be appropriate to ascribe a difference in human behavior to a biological factor. Thus, the notable differences in the fertility rates of human societies at different times (a phenomenon that defies simple explanation) may be connected to a differential perception of risk.^[2] This would provide a strong analogy to differences in the reproductive behavior in groups of other species, and in this sense, it would suggest a biological explanation. But many features of the situation would demand cultural description, such as the reproductive behaviors so affected, the ways in which risks are appreciated, and, of course, what events counted as dangerous (e.g., war).

In the opposite direction, it has been a pervasive error of sociobiology to suppose that if some practice of human culuture is analogous to a pattern of behavior in other species, then it is all the more likely to be explained biologically if it is (more or less) universal among human beings. If this follows at all, it does so in a very weak sense. Suppose (what is untrue) that the subordinate role of women were a cultural universal. This might nevrtheless depend on other cultural univrsals and their conditions, for example, the absence up to now of certain kinds of technology; it could turn out to be biologically determined at most to this extent, that if roles related to gender were to be assigned in those cultural contexts, biology favored this assignation.

We cannot be in a position to give a biological explanation of any phenomenon that has a cultural dimension, however widespread the phenomenon is, unless we are also in a position to interpret it culturally. This is simply an application, to the very special case of human beings, of the general truth that one cannot explain animal behavior biologically (in particular, genetically) unless one understands it ethologically.