Review of Marshall Sahlins,
The Use and Abuse of Biology:
An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology
University of Michigan Press, 1977
Reviewer: Herbert Gintis
June, 2010
Marshall Sahlins is one of the finest anthropologists of the post-WW II period. Edward O.
Wilson, the butt of his critique in this slim volume, is perhaps the most celebrated living
naturalist and animal behaviorist. The bone of contention, Wilson's monumental Sociobiology
(1975) was the opening shot of a forty year (to date) attempt to create a theory of social
organization relevant to all social species, not just humans. Wilson is well equipped for this task,
as the leading world expert on ant societies. Sociobiology, the book, dealt almost exclusively
with ant societies, but the final chapter broached the subject of human society. The chapter is
brilliant and still worth reading, although I think overly influenced by Robert Ardrey, Konrad
Lorenz, Desmond Morris, Lionel Tiger, Robin Fox, and others who attempted to explain war,
aggression, and other anti-social but typically human behavior in terms of primordial emotions
and behaviors we share with other animals. Sociobiology has matured in succeeding years,
sometimes under the rubric of evolutionary psychology, or behavioral ecology, and more
recently, gene-culture coevolutionary theory.
The reaction of mainstream social scientists to Wilson's suggestion that biology might have
something to do with human behavior was enormous and mostly viciously critical. You can read
about this debate in Ullica Segerstrale's beautiful and exciting book, Defenders of the Truth: The
Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (Oxford 2001). Sahlins is no less
critical of Wilson that Science for the People, Richard Lewontin, or Stephen Jay Gould, but in
this nicely written, witty, and insightful book, the author tries to present a dispassionate critique--light rather than heat. By and large he does so in the first three quarters of the book, only to
descend into inanity in the last quarter, which argues that sociobiology is an ideological defense
of capitalism. "Sociobiology," Sahlins proclaims, "contributes primarily to the final translation of
natural selection into social exploitation." (p. 73) Many social theorists shared this sentiment
because the early sociobiological models dealt with competition and conflict rather than
cooperation and altruism. This one-sidedness has been completely reversed in recent decades,
especially since the recognition that multicellular organisms are themselves cooperative
societies, as well as the publication of John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary's great book,
The Major Transitions in Evolution (1997). At any rate, I believe there is no place in scientific
debates about modeling social organization for dwelling on such irrelevancies as the ideological
impact of a doctrine, so I will not discuss this part of Sahlins' argument.
Sahlins' main argument is that sociobiology treats human culture as a simple side-effect of
human biological organization, and hence reduces the social sciences to biology. "In place of a
social constitution of meanings, [sociobiology] offers a biological determination of human
interactions with a source primarily in the general evolutionary propensity of individual
genotypes to maximize their reproductive success." (p. x) Sahlins asserts emphatically that
"biology...is completely unable to specify the cultural properties of human behavior or their
variation from one group to another." (p. xi) For E. O. Wilson, by contrast, "any Durkheimian
notion of the independent existence and persistence of the social fact is a lapse into mysticism.
Social organization is rather, and nothing more than, the behavioral outcome of the interaction of
organisms having biologically fixed inclinations." (5) This critique does really hit the mark. Until
quite recently the denigration of culture and the critique of social theories for which human
culture are central and independent variables were characteristic of sociobiology and its
offshoots. Even E. O. Wilson's recent insightful attempt at integrating the behavioral sciences,
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998) amounted to little more than reducing culture to
biology.
Tragically, but no surprisingly, Sahlins simply reverse Wilson's causal order. "The structure of
determinations is a hierarchical one set the other way round," he says, meaning that in humans,
biological issues are strictly subordinate to cultural issues. Moreover, he asserts "I am making no
more claim for culture relative to biology than biology would assert relative to physics and
chemistry." (p. 63)
This view, to my mind, is the cardinal sin of pre-sociobiology social science: relegating human
genetic composition to a purely infrastructural role in human behavior. The correct position, I
believe, was articulated by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus W. Feldman, Cultural
Transmission and Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Robert Boyd and
Peter J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985); Robin M. Dunbar, "Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in
Humans", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16,4 (1993):681-735 and other gene-culture
coevolutionists. Because of the importance of culture and complex social organization to the
evolutionary success of Homo sapiens, individual fitness in humans depends on the structure of
social life. Because culture is both constrained and promoted by the human genome, human
cognitive, affective, and moral capacities are the product of an evolutionary dynamic involving
the interaction of genes and culture. We call this dynamic gene-culture coevolution. This
coevolutionary process has endowed us with preferences that go beyond the self-regarding
concerns emphasized in traditional economic and biological theory, and with a social
epistemology that facilitates the sharing of intentionality across minds. Gene-culture coevolution
is responsible for the salience of such other-regarding values as a taste for cooperation, fairness,
and retribution, the capacity to empathize, and the ability to value such character virtues as
honesty, hard work, piety, and loyalty.
When environmental conditions are positively but imperfectly correlated across generations,
each generation acquires valuable information through learning that it cannot transmit
genetically to the succeeding generation, because such information is not encoded in the germ
line. In the context of such environments, there is a fitness benefit to the epistatic transmission of
information concerning the current state of the environment; i.e., transmission through nongenetic channels. Several epistatic transmission mechanisms have been identified, (Eva Jablonka
and Marion J. Lamb, Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Case, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), but cultural transmission in humans and to a lesser extent in
other animals (John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1984; and Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, "The Evolution of
Ultrasociality", in I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt and F.K. Salter (Eds.) Indoctrinability, Ideology and
Warfare, New York: Berghahn Books, 1998:71-96), is a distinct and extremely flexible form.
Cultural transmission takes the form of vertical (parents to children) horizontal (peer to peer),
and oblique (elder to younger), prestige (higher status influencing lower status), popularity, and
even random population-dynamic transmission, as in Stephen Shennan, Quantifying
Archaeology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997) and James M. Skibo and R.
Alexander Bentley, Complex Systems and Archaeology (Salt Lake City: University of Utah
Press, 2003).
The parallel between cultural and biological evolution goes back to Thomas Huxley (1955), Karl
Popper (1979), and William James (1880)--see Alex Mesoudi, Andrew Whiten and Kevin N.
Laland, "Towards a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29
(2006):329-383for details. The idea of treating culture as a form of epigenetic transmission was
pioneered by Richard Dawkins, who coined the term "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) to
represent an integral unit of information that could be transmitted phenotypically. There quickly
followed several major contributions to a biological approach to culture, all based on the notion
that culture, like genes, could evolve through replication (intergenerational transmission),
mutation, and selection.
I do not know what Sahlins would think if he returned to view the current state of sociobiology,
which is much more balanced than the fragments that existed in 1976. He might well be as
hostile as ever, but his grounds for criticism would have to be considerably different from those
presented in this volume.