When Biology Is Culture

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As readers of this Cat in the Stack blog know, one of my pet peeves is really bad extrapolation from an instance of human behavior to a reductionist biological explanation to evolutionary hoo-ha (I mean, theory). As I've said once (or maybe a thousand times?) before, such oversimplification gives evolution a bad name and gives fodder to the creationists. It's a new tactic of creationists to find silly arguments by evolutionary psychologists and biologists and then use those to make evolution, as a theory, seem ridiculous. We have to be more rigorous in our extrapolations, more logical, wiser, more sane.

Here's today's entry ino the "No, It's Not Really Biological, My Friend" sweepstakes. It is in the Health section of the New York Times, September 2, 2008, by Ohn Mar, and is titled "Proud is Proud, Sighted or Not, Researchers Find": "Scientists have long assumed that nonverbal expressions associated with pride and shame are learned socially, but new research shows otherwise."

Well, not really.

This essay uses the fact that visually impaired athletes at the Paralympics raise their arms in triumph to argue that raising arms in triumph is a biological gesture that we share with primate ancestors. But the athletes pictured, and the focus of the article, are judo champions. Judo, for goodness sake! If ever there were a more gestural, biological sport than judo, I can't think of what it is. Those blind athletes are mastering hundreds of complex moves. Someone, a judo master, is teaching them. And, although blind (this is a ridiculous article), they are mastering these complex and subtle moves well. So, we think, given all that training over all those years, that no one bothered to also say, "You won! Raise those arms! You are a champion!" Geeeeez. This is insulting to visually impaired  people in particular, insulting to anyone with any kind of sophisticated theory of learning. (The image above is meant to be satirical towards the argument--even this furry mascot knows to raise his arms in victory.  Biological, no doubt, for stuffies.)

The same article notes that Asian athletes bow their heads to designate a shame-gesture more than Western athletes. The conclusion isn't drawn out here . . . are we supposed to think that they descend from different, more shame-ridden primates than Westerners who do not share this biological (they said it, not me!) gesture?

I don't even want to go there. I just need to say this article irritated me a lot. It's bad science that gives science a bad name. But don't trust me on this. See for yourself. Here's the url: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/health/02prid.html?ei=5070&emc=eta1

I often recommend the ethnographic study of preschoolers called THE FIRST R by Joe Feagin and Debra Van Ausdale, and, well, here's a good occasion to mention again this interesting study that shows at how early an age infants are already mastering the values, practices, and beliefs of their culture. I wish, before anyone made a generalization about what is "biological," that they would read the increasingly extensive research on infant knowledge aquisition to think about how early and how thoroughly we are learning the concepts valued by our specific culture, long before we have the words to say what it is we've been learning in the nursery.

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--Special thanks to Mr. Wright for posting this image to the Flickr community. By clicking on the photo, see his entire photostream and all proper documentation.