Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Synthesis. Part of this agenda is to explain the precise mechanisms of
evolution—population genetics, kin selection, adaptationism, punctu-
ated equilibriums, sociobiology—but another part of the agenda is to
understand the implications of these explanations for understanding
ourselves and how we behave, in short, understanding human nature.
A major battle in the 1950s, for example, was the implicit prohibition
of hereditarian explanations for human behavior and a focus on cultural
or social explanations. The cultural explanation was given official status
by the “UNESCO agreement in 1952, which effectively put a ban on
biological research in human behavior.”
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Socially, Ullica Segerstråle
relates this to the influence of immigrant groups in the United States and
the Great Depression that made establishing a relation between economic
success and biological fitness harder to maintain. Additionally, the
anthropologists Franz Boaz, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead made
a successful argument for the prominence of culture over biology. Finally,
biological or hereditarian explanations of differences were seen as racist,
a view made easier by the excesses of the uses of genetics in Nazi
Germany as well as at least the rhetoric of the eugenics movement.
In the 1980s, however, genetic or behavioral explanations gained
ascendancy, a position for which Segerstråle gives several reasons. A
major share of the credit for this goes to the HGP, which focused atten-
tion again on the role of genetics. The field of anthropology also focused
on the commonalities of human behavior rather than the diversity, and
this gave more credence to some biological explanations. Language
was understood as an adaptive response rather than a purely cultural
artifact. And we humans were more frequently described as being in
continuity with animals than before, with the emphasis on nonverbal
communication and emotions, particularly the emotion of morality.
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A second shift is in the perspective on genetics: from nature-
nurture to gene and environment to gene-environment (including culture)
interaction. The critical issue here is a shift from the role of single genes
and their frequency in a population or their random recombination (in
which evolution is mainly an additive phenomenon) to a perspective that
sees multifaceted feedback loops between and among genes and their
environment—a perspective that highlights the complexity of the
interaction as well as decreases the role of single genes (except for some
diseases).
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