Biologising the Social Sciences

Challenging Darwinian and Neuroscience Explanations

David Canter, David Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317412205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

You can hardly open a paper or read an academic journal without some attempt to explain an aspect of human behaviour or experience by reference to neuroscience, biological or evolutionary processes. This 'biologising' has had rather a free ride until now, being generally accepted by the public at large. However, there is a growing number of scholars who are challenging the assumption that we are little more than our bodies and animal origins. This volume brings together a review of these emerging critiques expressed by an international range of senior academics from across the social sciences. Their arguments are firmly based in the empirical, scientific tradition. They show the lack of logic or evidence for many 'biologising' claims, as well as the damaging effects these biological assumptions can have on issues such as dealing with dyslexia or treating alcoholism. This important book, originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science, contributes to a crucial debate on what it means to be human.

"This collection of articles by David Canter and his colleagues, rigorously argued and richly informative […] are of immense importance. It is astonishing that, as Canter puts it in his brilliant overview of biologising trends […] there are those in the humanities who need to be reminded "that human beings can talk and interact with each other, generating cultures and societies that have an existence that cannot be reduced to their mere mechanical parts".

Professor Raymond Tallis FRCP FMedSci DLitt LittD in the Preface.

Challenging neuroscience and evolutionary explanations of social and psychological processes

David Canter
International Research Centre for Investigative Psychology, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield, HD1 3DH, UK

In order to provide the context for this special issue of Contemporary Social Science, a brief review of the biological and evolutionary explanations of psychological and socio-cultural phenomena is presented. This distinguishes five separate aspects of what may be characterised as 'biologising' the social sciences: Darwinian theories, neuroscience explanations, genetic causation, pharmacological and hormonal causes, and the less fundamentalist use of evolutionary ideas as analogies or metaphors. The remarkable range of phenomena that these biologically oriented perspectives try to address is cause for some scepticism and concern, forming the basis for an overview of the growing groundswell of arguments that challenge attempts at biologising the social sciences. At the heart of these challenges is the recognition that human beings can talk and interact with each other, generating cultures and societies that have an existence that cannot be reduced to their mere mechanical parts.

Introduction

Consider a Martian (as is usual in such discussions) but this time one from an intelligent but non-mechanical society, who cannot understand how a motor car works. Of course, we would never let this alien take a car apart, but we will allow him to observe it in motion and to measure which components heat up when different pedals are pressed. We could even point out what happens to a car's motion when the clutch is not functioning or there is a blockage in the fuel pipe. Could these measurements and reports allow our alien to go back to Mars and build her own motorised vehicle or even to explain to her colleagues how the vehicle works? Even if we provided a list of the component parts and how they were connected, our curious alien would have a hard time reconstructing a working vehicle.

Furthermore, if we showed aliens a history of the motor car from the earliest horse-drawn carriages, even with extended axonometric drawings of their elements, would this give them any better idea of how the modern Jaguars or Hyundais had come into existence, why they still use fossil fuels and what made them so very different from their forerunners? Without knowing about the social and economic roles of the motor vehicles and the development of roads for their use—their geographical and cultural contexts—just relying on the mechanics, it would be very difficult to appreciate how and why they had changed.

Yet it is commonly accepted that the present-day human, who is far more complex than any motorised vehicle, can be understood from assessments of what parts of the brain are active under different conditions and what happens when major faults are identified in brain regions. More recently, a detailed examination of brain structure has also been believed to be the route to understanding what it means to be human. In what Nelkin (2000) likens to a religious belief system, there is pervasive faith that speculations about humanity's evolutionary origins and associated biological substrates can throw light on just about every aspect of current behaviours and social processes.

The present paper briefly reviews these attempts at biological and evolutionary explanations of psychological and socio-cultural entities and overviews the growing scholarship that challenges these theories. Such challenges build on the problem of not being able to take a working person apart. They also go much further by recognising that, unlike motorised vehicles, it is fundamental to people that they have a rich and abstract communication system that allows complex interpersonal transactions out of which societies and cultures which generate a reality that is more than its biological components emerge.

Five aspects of biologising

Tsuda (2011) characterises theories that 'biologise' as 'the study of super-biotic entities—societies, cultures, detective stories—[which are the] inappropriate application of laws drawn from biotic processes to subjects which resist biological explanation' (p. 81). The term often has a rather dismissive quality, but it helps to encapsulate a very wide range of theories which are typically reductionist in attempting to explain, model or understand fundamentally human processes as varied as consciousness, culture, courtship, contemporary art or broader issues such as political or economic processes in terms of biology. In overviewing these theories, it is helpful to distinguish five different varieties of the biologising of the social sciences. I see these as sitting along a continuum from the most fundamentalist reductionist to the least.

Neuroscience reductionism

The most radical, and curiously least challenged, are all those neuroscience explanations that seek to account for aspects of humanity such as the examples that Tallis (2011) gives of'love, beauty, wisdom and (in the case of sub-prime mortgages) stupidity' (p. 79). Typically, these explanations are based on studies that use fMRI or other explorations of brain function to further the understanding of what people feel, think and do. Limbic circuits are proffered as the cause of human activity rather than as merely crude correlates of it. The research paradigm is usually to have subjects engage in some simple activity such as watching an image or thinking about a topic or making a decision and then to record the brain activity while that is going on. The brain activity of a number of subjects is then amalgamated to provide an indication of which part of the brain is 'responsible' for the target activity.

In recognition of the vast complexity of the brain, often characterised as having about as many component cells as the Milky Way has stars, there are increasing attempts being made to move beyond just recording brain activity to model all the connections in the brain. This has been called the Human Connectome Project (cf. Seung, 2010, 2012). It seeks to identify all aspects of human experience in the myriad interconnections in the brain, rather like determining how a car works from knowing which bits are joined to each other. So although the connectome may offer more insight than the cruder fMRI, it still looks for the causes of human experience, and variations between people, in brain structure, rather than recognising that what is being mapped are rudimentary correlates.

Geneticism

A further aspect of these strongly biological explanations is the search for clear and relatively simple genetic bases to being human. The range of human activities and experiences that have been claimed as having a genetic basis is legion. They include, for example, aggression (Warrior gene) homosexuality (e.g. Bancroft, 1994), female orgasm (Dunn et al., 2005) perfect pitch (Baharloo et al., 1998) and—to choose something at the end of the alphabets—Xenophobia (Flohr, 1987). The genetic argument has often been indirect, drawing on Darwinian possibilities to claim a genetic basis. But with the mapping out of the human genome, more specific efforts to find particular genetic markers have been attempted. In their most sophisticated form, these studies have attempted to unravel the ways in which the genetic constituents are likely to influence protein production and thus the phenomena that it causes, as illustrated by the claim for a genetic basis to alcoholism (e.g. Aktas et al., 2012).

Biochemical causation

The neurological and genetic theories about the causes of personal and social processes are often linked to hormonal and pharmacological explanations. The effects of biochemical agents, such as psychotropic drugs and alcohol, as well as the vast and often well-understood influences of many pharmacological agents, are not at issue here. Rather, what is at issue are the attempts such as the pharmacological explanations of phenomena as varied as aggression (Campbell et al., 1998), winning (reviewed by Robertson, 2012) and even pornography (Reisman, 2003) that are part of biologising that looks for causes within human biochemistry for the existence of many different aspects of being human. Even the collapse of the Roman Empire has been attributed to lead poisoning (Nriagu, 1983).

Biological evolutionism

Somewhat different forms of biologising, but conceptually linked to neuroscience and pharmacological explanations, are the Darwinian evolutionary explanations of many aspects of present-day human activity. They presuppose that there will be neurological and genetic bases to a person's actions and experiences, but in the absence of any evidence for these biotic underpinnings, they focus on presumed roots in humanity's evolutionary past. An illustration is the claim, admittedly by an advertising executive, that great art is directly analogous to the peacock's tail (Wight, 2007). The argument is that artists and their sponsors are proclaiming their genetic fitness and thereby increasing their chances of mating with the opposite sex or, more specifically, advertising the health of their company. The important point is that this explanation and the many other similar ones covering everything from the appropriate size of organisations (Dunbar, 1992) to rape (Thornhill & Palmer, 2000), jealousy (Buss et al, 1992) and many aspects of violence reviewed by Bloom and Dess (2003) seek causes in humanity's evolutionary past.

These claims, most often under the heading of 'evolutionary psychology', are not presented as rich metaphors that garner power from their link to dramatic animal displays, but from the assumption that the evolutionary origins elucidate the human process under consideration, being their cause. Mate selection and survival of some human characteristics over others, or in some sets of people more than in others, are deemed to be part of the same Darwinian process that enabled hominids to evolve from other primates and microorganisms to emerge from primeval sludge.

Selectionism

A fifth strand of biologising, although not as fundamentalist as neuroscience explanations and evolutionary psychology, is what Tsuda (2011) in a masterly review calls 'selectionist'. This seeks 'to explain historical phenomena not as the manifestation of the natural selection or organisms, but as the variation, selection and retention of autonomous cultural entities' (p. 81, italics in original). This is an explanation that is 'autonomous from, though structurally similar to, Darwinian biotic evolution. While the two are not mutually exclusive, they are conceptually distinct' (p. 81). These theories are less reductionist in that they do not presuppose any genetic, neurological or evolutionary history as the cause for what people do. Instead, they attempt to harness a Darwinian model to social processes.

The clearest, early articulation of these ideas was expressed by the psychologist Campbell (1960), but Runciman has elaborated this perspective calling it 'neo-Darwinism' (Gough et al., 2008). He distinguishes this clearly from nineteenth-century 'Social Darwinism', out of which eugenics emerged, and the 'sociobiology' of the 1970s that is the sociological wing of evolutionary psychology. Runciman (1989) eschews any claims that culture and society can be derived from knowledge of animal origins and the organic makeup of human beings. Instead, he uses evolutionary theory by analogy as a general model of how social development and change come about. Runciman (1989) and his followers see the theory of natural selection as providing a model for theories of cultural and social selection 'which have both significant analogies and disanalogies with it' (Gough et al., 2008, p. 68).

The analogy is couched in terms of cultures being formed by the information that affects behaviour being transmitted between people, through imitation and learning. This information is 'heritably variable and competitively selected' in much the same way as propensity for survival gives rise to the origin of species. At its heart, this theory is 'a repudiation of teleology'. It is presented as a fundamental challenge to all those sociological theories, most notably Marxist and Weberian, which argue for an inevitable progression towards some sort of definable outcome. Neo-Darwinism is evolutionary because it sees existing states of culture and society as being a natural outcome of earlier states through the process of the selection of the fittest ideas, norms and habits.

The range and fervour of biologising applications

In his remarkably wide-ranging exploration of what he calls 'Neuromania' and 'Darwinitis', Tallis (2011) reviews many aspects of biologising theories. He shows that, besides the example mentioned above, just about every other aspect of human enterprise and experience has been subjected to explanations drawn from biology. It is now perfectly acceptable to claim that murder, the poetry of Donne, Mondrian's paintings, teenage pregnancy, belief in God and financial planning, to list just a few examples, are all open to explanations drawn from biology.

Importantly, it is not just that these claims are intriguing speculations presented with a cautious consideration of their strengths and weaknesses; rather it is often the case that they are made with a fervour that would be more usual in a religious fanatic. An illustration of the vehemence with which these claims are made is the comment made by Konner (2004), 'Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have triumphed over their academic enemies; they are successful not only because of the power of theory but because of the relentless pursuit of relevant evidence'. The notion of 'enemies' and a 'relentless pursuit' of what is believed to be the truth emerges time and again in relation to any challenge to biological beliefs. Tallis (2011) gives a number of examples of the disdain with which his carefully formulated, evidence-based challenges to biologising had been dismissed.

Nelkin (2000) explores the fervour of the biologisers as reflecting a religious impulse. She outlines a number of aspects that are common to both religious faith and biologising:

• A belief that the central biological theories, especially evolution, will explain everything about humanity, including the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life itself.
• The forms of rhetoric used, for example, geneticists often draw on Biblical imagery, such as the genome being called 'The Book of Man' and 'The Holy Grail'. There is even speculation that DNA is God (Henderson, 1988).
• The explanations provide a basis for morality and social order, being directly converted into policy agendas (Walker, 2007).

As part of this process, the insights that emerge from biological explanations are given primacy over any other evidence that may be available. A typical example of this is the much quoted 'discovery' by evolutionary psychologists that the human brain has evolved to support social interaction (Dunbar & Shultz, 2007), based on correlations between brain size and location in the evolutionary pecking order. This is presented as a discovery that humans are fundamentally social animals. Two hundred and more years of social science is dismissed as irrelevant against the 'evidence' that comes from these studi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface: a suicidal tendency in the humanities
• 1. Challenging neuroscience and evolutionary explanations of social and psychological processes
• 2. The evolution of consciousness
• 3. The biological myth of human evolution
• 4. Defining addiction, with more humanity?
• 5. Education and neuroscience
• 6. The mismeasurement of youth: why adolescent brain science is bad science
• 7. Disordered selves
• 8. Biologising reading problems: the specific case of dyslexia
• 9. Postscript: the ethics of Darwinism
• Index