The biological and the social
Eric Hobsbawm's defence of objective historical knowledge reproduced in Saurday's Guardian has rightly been highlighted across the blogsphere (too many links to mention). It is well worth reading in full. What struck me, however, was the way he chose to ground his claim:
"While postmodernists have denied the possibility of historical understanding, developments in the natural sciences have put an evolutionary history of humanity firmly back on the agenda.
"Firstly, DNA analysis has established a firmer chronology of the spread of the species from its original African origin throughout the world, before the appearance of written sources. This has both established the astonishing brevity of human history and eliminated the reductionist solution of neo-Darwinian socio-biology.
"The changes in human life in past 10,000 years, let alone the past 10 generations, are too great to be explained by a wholly Darwinian mechanism of evolution via genes. They amount to the accelerating inheritance of acquired characteristics by cultural and not genetic mechanisms.
"In short, the DNA revolution calls for a specific, historical, method of studying the evolution of the human species. It also provides us with a rational framework for a world history. History is the continuance of the biological evolution of homo sapiens by other means.
"Secondly, the new evolutionary biology eliminates the distinction between history and the natural sciences and bypasses the bogus debates on whether history is or is not a science.
"Thirdly, it returns us to the basic approach to human evolution adopted by prehistorians, which is to study the modes of interaction between our species and its environment and its growing control over it.
Hobsbawm's take on the state of population genetics and the new biology is simplistic but the willingness of a figure like this to use biological knowledge in this way is striking.Those searching for other examples of the new biologism do not have to look far. The same edition of the Guardian contains a review by Steven Rose of The Wayward Mind by Guy Claxton. Rose writes:
"His agenda becomes more transparent as the book proceeds. First, he must once more topple Freud from his pedestal. Not merely were his ideas about the tripartite division of the self between ego, id and superego crude, and his reductive approach to the interpretation of dreams often bathetic, but he wasn't even really original (Claxton unearths a variety of intellectual precursors, from Schopenhauer onwards).
"Then comes the dénouement. Modern neuroscience can, it seems, as tidily explain "the unconscious" as it can consciousness. Goodbye demons; goodbye the analyst's couch. It is really all about the way in which different regions of the brain, especially the massive frontal lobe, are integrated, so that each region can either activate or inactivate others. "The brain," he concludes, "actually produces two kinds of thing: physical effects and mental experiences."
Also in the same edition is Jonathon Porritt's review of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond. Porritt writes:
"In Collapse, Jared Diamond uses that elemental power of nature as his background, but fills his foreground with an astonishing cavalcade of different peoples and cultures from across the planet. They are linked by Diamond's inquiry into what caused some of these societies (such as the Mayan civilisation or the people of Easter Island) to collapse, while others facing similar challenges managed to survive.
"He admits to having started out on this inquiry assuming it would prove to be straightforward abuse of their physical environment that precipitated their demise. In other words, serial ecocide. It turned out to be a lot more complex, with several equally influential factors involved, such as climate change, the presence of hostile neighbours, any involvement in trade, and a host of different response mechanisms on the part of those facing potential collapse. Each collapse or near-collapse throws up a different balance of those key factors.
"While postmodernists have denied the possibility of historical understanding, developments in the natural sciences have put an evolutionary history of humanity firmly back on the agenda.
"Firstly, DNA analysis has established a firmer chronology of the spread of the species from its original African origin throughout the world, before the appearance of written sources. This has both established the astonishing brevity of human history and eliminated the reductionist solution of neo-Darwinian socio-biology.
"The changes in human life in past 10,000 years, let alone the past 10 generations, are too great to be explained by a wholly Darwinian mechanism of evolution via genes. They amount to the accelerating inheritance of acquired characteristics by cultural and not genetic mechanisms.
"In short, the DNA revolution calls for a specific, historical, method of studying the evolution of the human species. It also provides us with a rational framework for a world history. History is the continuance of the biological evolution of homo sapiens by other means.
"Secondly, the new evolutionary biology eliminates the distinction between history and the natural sciences and bypasses the bogus debates on whether history is or is not a science.
"Thirdly, it returns us to the basic approach to human evolution adopted by prehistorians, which is to study the modes of interaction between our species and its environment and its growing control over it.
Hobsbawm's take on the state of population genetics and the new biology is simplistic but the willingness of a figure like this to use biological knowledge in this way is striking.Those searching for other examples of the new biologism do not have to look far. The same edition of the Guardian contains a review by Steven Rose of The Wayward Mind by Guy Claxton. Rose writes:
"His agenda becomes more transparent as the book proceeds. First, he must once more topple Freud from his pedestal. Not merely were his ideas about the tripartite division of the self between ego, id and superego crude, and his reductive approach to the interpretation of dreams often bathetic, but he wasn't even really original (Claxton unearths a variety of intellectual precursors, from Schopenhauer onwards).
"Then comes the dénouement. Modern neuroscience can, it seems, as tidily explain "the unconscious" as it can consciousness. Goodbye demons; goodbye the analyst's couch. It is really all about the way in which different regions of the brain, especially the massive frontal lobe, are integrated, so that each region can either activate or inactivate others. "The brain," he concludes, "actually produces two kinds of thing: physical effects and mental experiences."
Also in the same edition is Jonathon Porritt's review of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond. Porritt writes:
"In Collapse, Jared Diamond uses that elemental power of nature as his background, but fills his foreground with an astonishing cavalcade of different peoples and cultures from across the planet. They are linked by Diamond's inquiry into what caused some of these societies (such as the Mayan civilisation or the people of Easter Island) to collapse, while others facing similar challenges managed to survive.
"He admits to having started out on this inquiry assuming it would prove to be straightforward abuse of their physical environment that precipitated their demise. In other words, serial ecocide. It turned out to be a lot more complex, with several equally influential factors involved, such as climate change, the presence of hostile neighbours, any involvement in trade, and a host of different response mechanisms on the part of those facing potential collapse. Each collapse or near-collapse throws up a different balance of those key factors.
posted by David Skinner at 10:45 AM
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