Cultivating human nature

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New Ideas in Psychology 25 (2007) 189–206 www.elsevier.com/locate/newideapsych

Cultivating human nature Maarten Derksen Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, Grote Kruisstraat 2/1, 9712 TS Groningen, University of Groningen, The Netherlands Available online 28 February 2007

Abstract Evolutionary psychology claims to offer a unified perspective on human nature and culture, which can serve to further the integration of psychology and the social sciences. I describe four approaches to evolutionary psychology, and note increasing attention to the agency of the individual in constructing the biological and cultural environment. These approaches, however, share a problematic conception of culture as information. I explore the possibility of using Latour’s concept of mediation to analyse the relation between human nature and culture without restricting the latter to information, and collect a number of recent studies and essays that illustrate the way individuals mediate nature and culture. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Disciplinary integration; Mediation; Evolution; Culture

1. Introduction: wholeness One of evolutionary psychology’s main selling points is its promise to restore wholeness. Readers of the many popular and semi-popular works by evolutionary psychologists are put back in touch with their inner mammal: their natural propensities to choose youthful and slim-waisted, or mature and well-off mates, to prefer realist over abstract art, and family life over the commune, in short: human nature, from which they have been alienated by decades of political correctness. For the academic audience the message of wholeness is focussed on overcoming the disciplinary boundaries that have sustained this alienation. Evolutionary psychology presents itself as the foundation of an integrated social science, tying sociology, anthropology, economics and other disciplines to the anchor of biology, from which they have been drifting away since the 1920’s. Tel.: +599 7 3636338.

E-mail address: [email protected]. 0732-118X/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2006.09.001

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In this paper, I will question the ideals of wholeness and integration, focussing on evolutionary psychology’s claim to a unified perspective on nature and culture. I begin by describing four evolutionary approaches to psychology, each with a different view of the relation between human nature and culture, and thus a different idea of what it means to integrate biology, psychology and the social sciences. I go on to point out that there appears to be increasing attention to the interaction of natural and cultural processes in evolutionary psychology. However, the ideal of integration that all four approaches endorse, depends on a definition of culture as information and its transmission between individual minds. As such, culture is something that works through but is not done by people. Their emphasis on the natural and cultural processes that construct the subject leads evolutionary psychologists to ignore the role that ordinary people play in making up nature and culture. I then collect a number of studies that focus on the work that individual human beings perform to mediate between nature and culture. I propose to call this mediating work self-cultivation, and conclude that it implies a need for pluralism in social science, rather than integration. 2. Dualism and the call for integration Although many are critical of Darwinian approaches to psychology and social science, and there is much debate among proponents (resulting in different schools and disagreement about labels such as ‘evolutionary psychology’), there is broad agreement that integration of the various sciences that deal with human beings is of crucial importance.1 This seems to be in keeping with academic common sense. It is fair to say that disciplinary integration is generally seen as a good thing, ‘the most cherished aim of science’ (Van der Steen, 1993, p. 259). The existence of different ‘schools’ has long been a reason to speak of a ‘crisis’ in the social sciences; Thomas Kuhn declared consensus about a research paradigm to be typical of mature sciences, and deemed psychology pre-paradigmatic because it lacked such consensus; funding agencies, always eager to adopt a policy over and above just giving money to good research and capable researchers, are fond of encouraging interdisciplinarity and collaboration. Critics and evolutionary psychologists also agree that the main priority should be to link up the social sciences with the life sciences. Only an integrated bio-psycho-social approach can avoid such regrettable errors as biological or social determinism, and the counterproductive, politicized debates they lead to. Finally, there is broad consensus that underlying the disintegration of psychology and the social sciences is the philosophical problem of dualism. Social scientific provincialism is said to be supported, implicitly or explicitly, by a world view that goes back to Descartes. It has many guises, but all its dichotomies—mind-body, nature-nurture, nature-culture, to name but the best known— are variations on the same theme, that of a fundamental split in the world that runs through human beings, as a result of which they belong only partly to the natural world. The natural sciences therefore have only limited purchase on humans, and must be complemented by a fundamentally different approach.

1 Some exceptions: Dupre´ (2001), Burian, Richardson, and Van der Steen (1996) Burian et al. (1996), Mitchell (2002), Van der Steen (1993). The last three argue that biology is not and need not be integrated, which I take to imply that, a fortiori, further integration with other disciplines is not called for.

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According to evolutionary psychologists, this world view has found a scientific incarnation in the ‘Standard Social Science Model’(SSSM). The SSSM is a common backdrop for the presentation of evolutionary psychology. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides pioneered this rhetoric in the text that is seen as evolutionary psychology’s manifesto, ‘The psychological foundations of culture’ (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). The paradigm of the SSSM allegedly has ruled psychology and the social sciences ever since the 1920’s, and is said to hold that human beings are born as blank slates and acquire their personalities, their behaviour repertoire, their propensities, biases, attitudes and so on, by learning in and from their social context.2 According to the SSSM, culture and behaviour are independent of human nature and therefore psychology and the social sciences are independent of biology. To put psychology and the social sciences on the road to unity, Darwinian psychologists of various stripes agree that this dualism of nature and culture must be overcome. Culture must be brought under the umbrella of evolutionary theory to offer a template for collaboration and theoretical integration. At the same time, culture functions as ‘the hard case’: if culture can be shown to offer no insurmountable obstacle to integration, then nothing will. Ironically, however, culture has become a divisive issue among proponents of evolutionary psychology. I believe four approaches can be distinguished, but my classification may not be shared by the researchers themselves. As often happens in debates and controversies, the definitions of ‘the issues’ and ‘the parties’ are themselves at stake.3

3. Classical evolutionary psychology Common to all varieties of Darwinian psychology is the idea that culture depends on evolved mental mechanisms for its functioning. The faculty of language (the Language Acquisition Device) is an example of an evolved, inherited, biological mechanism that is obviously essential to the way our culture works. We have many more. The human mind consists of ‘hundreds or thousands of mechanisms’ (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p. 40), which, contrary to popular and academic misconceptions, should not be seen as limiting factors: ‘evolved structure doesn’t constrain; it creates or enables’ (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p. 39). Without this sophisticated mental architecture cognition would be both aimless and incapable of processing information. We would neither know what to do with the information around us, nor how. This basic fact, evolutionary psychologists believe, is a decisive breach in the boundary between nature and culture, and renders dichotomies such as cultural flexibility versus natural inevitability nonsensical. Variability, then, is not a threat to a natural science of culture. The variability of culture, the existence of cultures in the plural, is ‘the product of a common, underlying evolved psychology, operating under different circumstances’ (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p. 45). Thus, psychology is an obligatory point of passage4 for all students of culture, even those who study its variations, change, and flexibility: any 2

Hilary Rose (Rose, 2000) offers a critique of Tooby & Cosmides’ SSSM-history. Two different classifications: Caporael (2001) and Laland & Brown (2002). 4 A term from the Actor Network Theory of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon – see below. Obligatory points of passage are those nodes in sociotechnic networks that have made themselves indispensable as entry points into the network. 3

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explanation of cultural phenomena must at least be consistent with evolutionary psychological theory, because culture is made possible by evolved mental architecture. To further contain the potential threat of cultural variability, Tooby and Cosmides demarcate three kinds of cultural phenomena: ‘metaculture’, ‘evoked culture’, and ‘epidemiological culture’. Metaculture consists of universal cultural phenomena such as gift giving and gossip; evoked culture is cultural variation triggered by local circumstances (attitudes to food sharing for example may differ depending on ecological variables); epidemiological culture finally are the cultural changes due to the spread of representations from individual to individual: particular jokes, songs or stories for example. The SSSM, it is said, falsely conflated these three kinds of culture, but Tooby and Cosmides insist that they be kept separate. Variation and change are thus contained by restricting them to two kinds of culture. Moreover, they depend on our universal, evolved psychological organization. ‘The heterogeneous mechanisms comprising our evolved psychological architecture participate inextricably in all cultural and social phenomena and, because they are contentspecialized, they impart some contentful patterning to them’ (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p. 121). With this text and its model of the relation of nature and culture, Tooby and Cosmides had produced the constitution of what has become the largest, and, through the work of a.o. Steven Pinker and David Buss, best known school of evolutionary psychology. Usually it is simply called ‘evolutionary psychology’.5 It is not without its critics however, and much of the criticism has focussed on the interaction between nature and culture, or the lack thereof, in this theory. 4. Interaction In Tooby and Cosmides’ version of evolutionary psychology, the direction of causality is up from nature to culture, and then sideways through the epidemiology of cultural representations. To all intents and purposes there is no feedback, no causal influence from culture back to nature. Evolution is thought to be much too slow a process to have been influenced by the fast-paced development of human culture. As a result, humans are adapted to a Pleistocene environment, not to the modern world our culture has created, a fact that is thought to explain many individual and social problems.6 However, in Culture and the evolutionary process Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson had already proposed their ‘dual inheritance theory’, which states that behaviour is determined by both genetic and cultural determinants, and that genes and culture are both ‘inheritance systems’ of replication, variation and selection. (Boyd & Richerson, 1985) Culture, in other words, is a second evolutionary process.7 They describe the particular features of the cultural inheritance system, how it is structurally different from the transmission of genes, and what consequences this has for the evolution of culture and the way it determines behaviour. Boyd and Richerson are less concerned than Tooby and Cosmides, E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, or Steven Pinker, with positioning themselves, identifying opponents, celebrating precursors, defining their approach, and differentiating it from 5

The monopoly on the label is challenged by Caporael (2001). See Hampton (2004) for an analysis and critique of this central issue in classical evolutionary psychology. 7 Similar theories about the interplay of genetic and cultural evolution have been proposed by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, and by Wilson and Lumsden. See Laland and Brown (2002) for an overview. It is fair to say that Boyd & Richerson’s work has been the most influential. 6

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errors of others.8 However, their goal is the same as that of those more publicly visible proponents of evolutionary theories of human behaviour: ‘Ultimately, the human sciences must be unified with the physical and biological ones. [y] Any theory of human behavior must be consistent with what we know about evolution in general and the evolution of behavior in particular.’ (Boyd & Richerson, 1985, p. 12). Boyd and Richerson define culture as ‘the transmission from one generation to the next, via teaching and imitation, of knowledge, values and other factors that influence behavior’. (Boyd & Richardson, 1985, p. 2) People acquire their beliefs, values, and views by cultural inheritance, i.e. they learn them from others, usually without giving the process much thought. Like other Darwinian psychologies (Laland & Brown, 2002, p. 314), dual inheritance theory sees social learning as the central process of culture. What sets dual inheritance theories apart is that they allow for the interaction of cultural and genetic evolution. Fairly complicated mathematical models are used to generate explanations and predictions about the coevolution of genes and culture. Among its successes is an explanation of the way lactose-tolerance evolved in tandem with dairy farming in a few human cultural groups. Although dual inheritance theory joins the processes of natural and cultural evolution and offers tools to predict their mutual influence, it has little to say about the actual mechanisms which sustain this influence. This is not unusual in biology, indeed Darwin could only guess about the mechanisms of inheritance when he developed his theory of evolution by natural selection, but it is seen generally as an unsatisfactory state of affairs in the long run. Henry Plotkin has emphasized that knowledge of both mechanisms and processes is necessary to link the biological and social sciences, and in fact attributes to mechanism the more fundamental role, because ‘all processes are driven by specific causal mechanisms’ (Plotkin, 2002, p. 16). He has taken it upon himself to develop a theory that includes mechanism as well as process in its explanation of the interaction of nature and culture, with the ultimate aim of ‘marrying the biological and social sciences’ (Plotkin, 2002, p. 1), via a ‘natural-science account of human culture’ (Plotkin, 2002 p. 7). Plotkin draws on a variety of approaches in his unifying effort, including evolutionary psychology and dual inheritance theory, but he adds cognitive mechanisms to the model.9 It is human intelligence, broadly speaking, that gives rise to our culture, and thus forms the interface between the evolutionary forces that molded and therefore constrained it, and the social constructions, ‘imagination made real’, that make up our culture. Thus, social constructionism10 and the developmental psychology of Vygotsky are brought into line with neurology and genetics. In principle, that is, because it may be decades before all the details are filled in and we can say that ‘social constructions are group level adaptations that arise from the workings of x, y, and z psychological mechanisms, which are present in m, n, and o regions of the brain, which are linked with particular suites of genes located on chromosomes 2, 3, 7, 9 and 11’ (Plotkin, 2002, p. 287).

8 Perhaps as a result, no one takes aim at them. Unusual in the field of evolution and human behaviour, Boyd and Richerson seem to have no enemies. 9 A comparable approach, emphasizing cognitive mechanisms as interfaces between nature and culture, is proposed by Dominic Murphy (2001). 10 Plotkin draws on John Searle and on Berger and Luckmann for his account of social constructions. He rejects any implications of epistemological relativism: our social reality may be a construction, but the natural world definitely is not.

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Finally, a fourth Darwinian approach to culture has been developed, in which a central place is given to the ‘products’ of culture as a crucial link in the interaction between natural and cultural evolution. Niche construction theory (Laland, Odling-Smee, & Feldman, 2000) extends dual inheritance theory to include the effect that organisms’ modification of their environment has on their genetic evolution. Human beings are not unique in having an effect on their environment, although it is certainly more spectacular than in any other case. Many other organisms also change the environment they live in to suit their needs, often passing on these changes to their offspring (ecological inheritance, as in the case of the burrows of prairie dogs). In so doing, they effectively change their selective environment, thus creating a feedback loop from biological evolution to a constructed niche and back again. In human beings, culture has become the main force behind niche construction: culture is ‘the principal way in which we humans do the same thing that most other species do’ (Laland et al., 2000, p. 137). Thus, the modified environment is the link through which cultural evolution affects genetic evolution. One example Laland et al. give is an increase in brain size during hominid evolution, allowing at some point the invention of cooking, which saved energy in digesting food, which in turn allowed a further increase in brain size. Here cooking is the niche that is constructed and that modifies the selective environment (the nutritional value of food) in such a way that a constraint on the evolution of the hominid brain is lifted. Like the other three approaches described above, niche construction theory aims to bring the biological and social sciences together, although the authors formulate their intentions more cautiously than many others: ‘our perspective may be regarded as part of a movement working towards a framework for integrating biology and the behavioural sciences’11 (Laland et al., 2000, p. 139). It also has in common with the other approaches that culture is defined in informational terms. Laland and Brown conclude from their survey of the field that a definition of culture as socially transmitted information is the common core of all Darwinian approaches to human behaviour, and different views of social learning the issue that divides them. (Laland & Brown, 2002, p. 314). Indeed, each approach is supported by boundary work demarcating the proper conception of culture. Boyd and Richerson, for example, devote an entire chapter to their definition of culture and defending it against rivals. They acknowledge, referring to Kroeber & Kluckhohn’s classic inventory of the culture concept (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952), that the word ‘culture’ can be used in many senses, but claim that their emphasis on social transmission is shared ‘by virtually all of the definitions of culture used in the social sciences’ (Boyd & Richerson, 1985, p. 33). They point out that this excludes behaviour and its ‘products’ from culture, in favour of the ‘mental states’ that lie behind it: culture is primarily a property of individuals (it is they who do the learning), not of the groups they live in. Plotkin too insists on distinguishing culture from its products, including tools and other artifacts, and social systems. ‘Culture is knowledge’ (Boyd & Richerson, 1985, p. 110) and thus it is ‘in minds and brains’ (Boyd & Richerson, 1985, p. 113). Despite his forays into social constructionism and Vygotsky’s theory of development, the mind remains the principal source of agency in his model, and information the currency that circulates among the agents. Finally, Laland et al. stretch the informational definition of culture to its breaking point with their emphasis on the material environment that organisms create 11

That is five hedges away from ‘we integrate biology and the social sciences’: ‘may be’, ‘regarded as’, ‘part of’, ‘a movement towards’, and ‘a framework for’.

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for themselves, but they nevertheless cling to it: in humans, they insist, our niche is a product of culture, but it is not itself a part of it. Culture is information. Thus it may seem that cognitivism is our only hope of avoiding dualism. Only cognitive psychology, properly biologized, seems to offer an escape from the untenable, but tenacious metaphysics of a world split into two fundamentally different domains. Only a natural, cognitive science of culture can be non-dualist, and the biological, psychological, and social sciences must be integrated in one evolutionary, cognitive-psychological perspective. Yet I believe we can also discern in the approaches I have described a move toward a different view of culture. At its heart is a conception of the organism as an active mediator between genes and environment, and it offers an alternative to dualism that does not depend on cognitivism. 5. From intermediaries to mediators Recent Darwinian psychologies are moving away from the rather passive organism depicted by classical evolutionary psychology. In the latter, the organism is a mere intermediary between genes and environment: the genes can only touch culture via the individual minds they help to build. Dual inheritance theory adds the reverse process to the model: cultural evolution can influence biological evolution, but it does so only via the minds of the individuals that receive, process and transmit the information that makes up culture. The mind however remains a conduit, a channel that links two evolutionary processes. Characteristics of the channel do modify their mutual influence, but the amount of agency granted to the organism remains small. Niche construction theory and Plotkin’s cognitive psychological approach, however, stress that the individual organism or mind plays the role of a mediator, rather than a mere intermediary, between the two evolutionary processes that shape it. Niche construction theory draws attention to the way individual organisms construct their own natural environment, and Plotkin accords the human mind the power of socially constructing its cultural milieu. The organism does more than relay information between two evolutionary processes, it shapes its own environment, the nature and the culture it finds itself in, and in so doing becomes an active player in both biological and cultural evolution. I have borrowed the concepts of intermediary and mediator from Bruno Latour, who uses them in the context of his critique of dualism. Trained in anthropology, Latour first came to prominence in the late 1970s as a pioneer of ‘laboratory studies’, the extension of empirical studies of science to the actual laboratory practices of scientists (Latour & Woolgar, 1979). Although he continued to do empirical work, he started focussing increasingly on methodological, theoretical, and philosophical themes. His Actor Network Theory12 describes science and society in terms of heterogeneous, sociotechnical networks. Essential in Latour’s approach is his insistence on a symmetrical analysis of the roles of human and non-human actors: any difference in their attributes can only be the result of a particular sociotechnical network, not its precondition. Over time, Latour has developed this principle into a full-fledged attack on dualism. Latour’s critique13 is to some extent similar to that of the many other critics of dualism: once the world has been divided into two fundamentally different domains, it becomes 12

Developed in collaboration with Michel Callon. For Latour’s version, see for example Latour (1987). See in particular Latour (1993).

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impossible to bring the two sides together again. He adds, however, that the dualist metaphysics of Modernism hides from view the increasing number of hybrids or quasiobjects that it has bred. An entity such as the ‘hole in the ozone layer’ is not a purely natural object, nor a social construction, but a hybrid of natural scientific research, political concerns, economic considerations, industrial activity and consumer behaviour. The best one can do in the dualist paradigm is to conceptualize it as an intermediary, a mix of natural and social ‘elements’ or ‘aspects’. This assumes that nature and society have an existence prior to and independently of such intermediaries, but it ignores the creativity of hybrids. They are not mere blends of nature and society, they are genuine events, they possess novelty, and thus change both nature and society. They are mediators instead of mere intermediaries. The hole in the ozone layer reconfigures natural relations at the same time as it restructures social relations. The unique contribution of Science and Technology Studies lies in unveiling this co-construction of nature and society by the hybrids that modern science and technology breed. I will not go further into Latour’s critique of Modernism and the neo-realist philosophy that he puts in its place, except to note two points that are relevant to this paper. Firstly, despite the fact that he uses the pair ‘humans and non-humans’ synonymously with society and nature, Latour emphatically places ‘us’ in the middle among the hybrids, rather than at the human or society pole. We are neither pure subjects nor pure objects, neither essentially social nor essentially natural creatures. This meshes well with Darwinian psychologists’ criticism of humanism and dualism in the social sciences14, but on closer inspection Latour does attribute a distinctive character to humans. It lies in the fact that we ‘mediate the mediators’ (Latour, 1994, pp. 794, 806). It is unclear in Latour’s account what gives humans this reflexive power, which moreover seems to reinstate ‘the unique position of humans’ that Latour says is disputed by everything we do (Latour, 1994, p. 794). Apparently, we are not ordinary hybrids. But regardless of the question how this fits in the rest of Latour’s theory, it is an apt expression for the way that people, moderns in particular, constantly create new hybrid, sociotechnical networks. It also invites an exploration of human mediation (and mediation of mediators) as a ‘psychotechnical’ rather than a sociotechnical activity: if what we used to call ‘society’ (and used to oppose to nature) consists in fact of sociotechnical networks, is there also a sense in which what we like to call mind or self (and tend to separate from brain and body) is a psychotechnical network? Is Latour’s analysis of mediation applicable to individuals? In that context, secondly, it is clear that the cognitivism of Darwinian psychology is at odds with Latour’s account of mediation. Basing the integration of human beings and their culture in the natural world entirely on information and its processing ignores the role of non-humans in culture. As we have seen, Darwinian psychologists insist on defining culture as information (ideas, beliefs, etc.) and consider tools and other artefacts only, if at all, as ‘products of culture’. In this, they are remarkably similar to many of the social scientists they criticize. As Latour has pointed out on numerous occasions, social scientists 14 Latour has in fact expressed approval of sociobiology’s rejection of traditional sociology. Criticising sociobiology for being ‘reductionist’ is misguided: the real reductionists are those who want to explain the whole range of social phenomena with a small number of broad social variables such as ‘class’ or ‘interests’. Biological approaches on the other hand are notable for increasing the number of entities (or ‘actants’) and thus provide much richer accounts. (Latour in Strum & Fedigan (2000, p. 313–315)) Earlier however (Latour, 1993, p. 59) he had criticized E. O. Wilson’s naturalistic account of human behaviour as simply prioritizing one side of the dualist scheme, and missing the importance of mediation.

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have neglected to study the role of ‘non-humans’ in society and as a result have been blind to the fact that it is non-humans as much as humans that hold our ‘collectives’ together.15 It is difficult to explain the stable, enduring quality of social order without recognizing the function of material objects as delegates of human roles (Johnson, 1988). Relations within collectives of humans and non-humans are stabilized by, for example, technological artefacts. Culture possesses materiality, and not just in the restricted sense that Plotkin gives to it, namely that all that information has to be instantiated in and processed by human brains. (Plotkin, 2002, p. 110). Artefacts are not mere products of culture, they are producers of culture. To sum up, Latour’s concept of mediation underlines the need to answer the challenge posed by evolutionary psychology, but may also point the way there. The exclusion of the material from the definition of culture that the four Darwinian approaches share are problematic from a Latourian perspective. Niche construction theory and Plotkin’s work do move away from classical evolutionary psychology’s relatively passive organism, but nevertheless keep relying on an ideational concept of culture. In what follows, I will collect a number of recent studies and proposals that contribute to a non-cognitivist view of the relation between human nature and human culture. They all describe various aspects of the mediation between nature and culture that human beings perform. I categorize these aspects as developmental, normative and political. Together, these studies and proposals constitute an alternative to the Grand Integration proposed by Darwinian psychologists. 6. Development An emphasis on ‘limits’ or ‘constraints’ is part and parcel of Darwinian approaches: human culture is limited or constrained by human beings’ cognitive architecture, which in turn is constrained by the genes that control the development of the brain. It is not the case that human nature determines culture—cognitive architecture after all ‘enables’ culture— but nevertheless there are limits of a kind. For example, Tooby and Cosmides stress that the relevant distinction is not between biologically determined and culturally variable but between open and closed behaviour programme: mental mechanisms can be more or less open to environmental influence. (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p. 46) However, if they are open, they nevertheless specify which environmental information is relevant, and thus they demarcate their context. Evolution, moreover, has supplied ‘machinery that defends the developmental process against disruption’ (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p. 80), precisely because development is so dependent on environmental input. In other words, development is an intricate interaction of nature and nurture, but its variability is genetically limited. Proponents of developmental systems theory (DST) deeply disagree with this view of development. They fiercely dispute the idea of a genetic programme or blueprint and the primacy it accords to genes in the development of organisms. The gene-centred view, which sees genes as the central actors in development, surrounded by layers of ‘context’ (cellular, whole organism, physical environment, kin, etcetera) that influence the exact way in which they regulate development, is fundamentally wrong. The genes do not have a special, central place in the developmental system as controllers of the process. The developmental system consists of a ‘matrix of resources that serve as the actual causes of development’ 15

See also Benton (1991, p. 21).

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(Griffiths & Stotz, 2000, p. 34) and there is no sense in which genes uniquely control or constrain development. This critique has also been applied to evolutionary psychology’s view of cognitive development, while at the same time trying to avoid an environmental constructivism that denies constraints altogether. Instead, the ‘softness’ of developmental constraints is emphasized: soft because they are probabilistic, not deterministic (a point often conceded by evolutionary psychologists), but also because ‘the constraints themselves emerge (and dissolve) as part of the developmental process’ (Griffiths & Stotz, 2000, p. 33). Thus, ‘what individuals inherit from their ancestors is not a mind, but the ability to develop a mind’ (Griffiths & Stotz, 2000, p. 31), and the ‘modules’ of the mature mind are a product of development, not of the genes. ‘Mental mechanisms’ only become domain specific by actually functioning in a particular domain (Karmiloff-Smith, 2000, p. 145). Rationality, moreover, is not produced by mental mechanisms alone. The dependence of cognition on its surroundings is not restricted to development. Griffiths and Stotz draw on the literature on ‘situated cognition’ to underline the embeddedness of reason: we depend on ‘external scaffolding’ to achieve rationality. (Griffiths & Stotz, 2000) The naked brain would be quite powerless without the help of tools and artefacts such as language, or pen and paper, that mediate between mind and environment. Andy Clark (2003), basing himself (albeit loosely) on among others Latour and Donna Haraway, uses the ‘cyborg’ concept to explore the situatedness of cognition, and to emphasize that with a different situation, with new tools, what we are will change as well. This process will accelerate as these tools—such as search engines—become more transparent, i.e. more adapted to us and easier to adapt to. In sum, from the perspective of DST and allied approaches such as Clark’s, there is no ‘human nature’ in the usual sense of a set of human characteristics that do not depend on culture. ‘It is a mistake to posit a biologically fixed ‘human nature’ with a simple wraparound of tools and culture; the tools and culture are indeed as much determiners of nature as products of it.’ (Clark, 2003, p. 86). Human beings of course are broadly similar, because they descend from common ancestors and share similar developmental systems, but culture is itself an integral part of the human developmental matrix, given our dependence on the tools, artefacts and institutions that culture offers. ‘Human nature must inevitably be a product of a developmental matrix which includes a great deal of cultural scaffolding’ (Griffiths & Stotz, 2000, p. 45, see also Ingold, 2001). Our ‘nature’, both at a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic level, is constructed, rather than constrained. That does not make it infinitely malleable, since elements of the developmental system are interlinked and cannot be modified in isolation, but it does mean that ‘the extent and nature of these limitations cannot be determined by observing how minds typically turn out, only by understanding how the mind grows.’16 (Griffiths & Stotz, 2000, p. 47). According to developmental psychologists who work in the Vygotskian tradition, the social interaction between the child and its parents and siblings is a crucial part of the developmental system. It is by way of these interactions that the child appropriates the 16 Griffiths and Stotz are not convinced by evolutionary psychologists’ claims, quoted above, that the developmental process is buffered against disruption: ‘The most we can expect is that evolved traits will be buffered to various degrees against the sorts of fluctuations developing organisms actually had to cope with in evolutionary history.’ (Griffiths & Stotz, 2000, p. 37) Anything outside that might easily change the course of development.

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cultural scaffolding that its cognitive development requires. Development is neither the unfolding of the inherent potential of the individual brain/mind, nor the imprinting of cultural rules and categories on the child, but a process in which the child, interacting with others, gains the tools to construct its own mind. Development takes place in the ‘epistemic triangle’ of an ‘active subject, the object of knowledge, and a (real or implicit) interlocutor’ (Carpendale & Lewis, 2004, pp. 84–85). The tools and artefacts of culture mediate between mind and environment, as noted above, but the child is called on to mediate the mediators, assisted at first by others. As Jack Martin puts it in his exposition of ‘emergentism’, personal development in ontogenesis ‘lies in the linkage of biophysical beings with their sociocultural settings, routines, and conventions through activity’ (Martin, 2003, p. 97; my italics) One example is the way children learn to use ‘plans’, such as maps, recipes or assembly instructions (like the ones that come with toys for instance). Mary Gauvain studied the social interactions between children and experienced users, such as their parents, in which this learning takes place (Gauvain, 2001). She found that children are active agents in the acquisition and employment of such cultural tools. Thus, adults are responsible for teaching children the use of maps, but the latter play an active role in the interactive process of learning and teaching by informing the adults of their current knowledge, deficiencies and interests. In other words, children are agents in their own formation, negotiating between their biological capabilities and acquired capacities, and the tools their culture expects them to use. Another example of the active role that children play in their own formation is the development of the kind of social understanding that is known as ‘theory of mind’, the insight that others have a unique perspective on the world and may hold beliefs different from one’s own. Carpendale and Lewis, in a recent article, dispute both the various ‘theory of mind’ theories, that picture a full ToM as the child’s individual accomplishment 17, as well as enculturation theories, that see social understanding as ‘passed on’ from the group to the child. ‘Concepts about the mind are not just passed on from the social group, nor are they completely formed by individual child-theorists. Instead, children gradually construct social understanding through the regularities they experience in interacting with others.’ (Carpendale & Lewis, 2004, p. 84; see also Chesnokova’s comment about ‘agency mediation’ (Chesnokova, 2004, p. 102) A crucial stage is the change from dyadic interaction between caretaker and infant, to triadic interaction that includes the world of objects. Interaction becomes referential, and the child slowly begins to differentiate between itself, other people, and the world. Now it can discover that others sometimes have different beliefs about the world. Carpendale and Lewis emphasize that this process does not require some kind of ‘implicit’ understanding of other minds to kick off from, but builds on very simple behaviours: action comes before (reflexive) knowledge. From a developmental perspective18 then, Latour’s analysis of tools and artefacts as mediators, and human beings as mediators of mediators, is an apt description of important parts of the process of psychological development. Culture is not opposed to human nature, nor outside of it. During development, the tools of culture become a part of the child’s patterns of reasoning, her brain shaped by their use and dependent on them. The

17 These include an evolutionary psychological variant as well, according to which the theory of mind is hardwired as a brain ‘module’. 18 One informed by Developmental Systems Theory and/or Vygotsky, at least.

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child plays a mediating role in this process, actively steering the triadic interactions on which it depends. 7. Norms Evolutionary psychologists, in their effort to naturalize culture, have put great emphasis on the evolutionary history of human morality, on its universality, and on the impotence of politics or cultural fads to change its basic norms. Free love and common ownership of the means of production may have seemed good ideas at one time, but they were bound to succumb to the forces of human nature. Our evolutionary history constrains the norms we can live by. I believe the dichotomy of naturalism versus utopianism that the evolutionary psychologists set up, is another unfortunate consequence of their neglect of the mediating work that people perform. A consideration of morality, the relation between norms and human limitations in particular, that takes this mediation into account, can avoid dualism without naturalising ethics. Interestingly, it also takes us some way back to an old conception of culture that was rejected last century by both evolutionary psychologists and cultural anthropologists. When the word ‘culture’ began to be applied to people in the early 16th century (Williams, 1976/1988), its primary meaning was self-cultivation in the sense of individual or social improvement, the refining and polishing of manners, to become cultured, educated and civilized. It was often the opposite of spontaneity, and the synonym of selfcontrol. It was a strongly normative conception of culture, that contained a definite idea of what true culture is, of who was cultured and who was not, with Western European civilisation as the vanguard of cultural progress from savagery. It has, understandably, become unpopular in academic circles in the 20th century. Kroeber and Kluckhohn single it out as the pre-scientific precursor of the modern concept of culture, an absolutistic, ethnocentric idea that had to be overcome to make a scientific study of culture possible (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952). The science of culture should have nothing to do with distinguishing civilized from uncivilized people, or art from entertainment. Disparaging remarks are then made about Matthew Arnold, who defined culture as ‘the study and pursuit of perfection (y) or, in other words, sweetness and light’. (Arnold, writing in 1869, quoted in Kroeber & Kluckhohn (1952, p. 29)) Scientific anthropology, in contrast, ‘assumes that every society through its culture seeks and in some measure finds values’.19 (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952, p. 32) Evolutionary psychologists share with cultural anthropologists this aversion for the distinctive connotations of culture. Plotkin actually locates the ‘elitist usage’ of culture pioneered by Arnold in ‘the anthropological literature’, but equally insists that it has ‘absolutely no place in an analytic, explanatory approach to what Culture is. It is simply not science of any kind’ (Plotkin, 2002, p. 103). The idea of a battle between morality and desire, between the ego and the id, has a long history and remains a powerful topos. Here we see it in action in the final pages of Berger and Luckmann’s The social construction of reality: ‘social existence depends upon the continuing subjugation of biologically grounded resistance in the individual’ (Berger & Luckmann, 1967, p. 203), the ‘‘lower’ self’ being ‘whipped into submission’ by the higher self (Berger & Luckmann, 1967, p. 204). This biological resistance is ‘progressively broken 19

In their text Kroeber and Kluckhohn are clearly concerned to demarcate their social science from the ‘humanities’.

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in the course of socialization’ (Berger & Luckmann, 1967, p. 203), but never entirely vanquished. Evolutionary psychologists are not the only ones to object to this picture of nature and culture locked in a violent struggle: culture theorists are also trying to move away from it. Baerveldt and Voestermans, building on the work of Merleau-Ponty, have argued that normativity presumes embodiment. Rules owe their compellingness, their normative force, to their affective nature. (Baerveldt & Voestermans, 2005). Culture is an inherently normative order and emotions are ‘the primary way in which we are tied to that order’ (Baerveldt & Voestermans, 2005, p. 468). Terry Eagleton, criticizing the strangely exalted and absolutist interpretation of ethics that postmodernism has produced, also holds that morality is ‘rooted ultimately in the body’ (Eagleton, 2003, p. 155). ‘It is the mortal, fragile, suffering, ecstatic, needy, dependent, desirous, compassionate body which furnishes the basis for all moral thought,’ (Eagleton, 2001) Eagleton decries what he sees as the excessive value attached to plasticity, not only in the writings of many social scientists and philosophers, but also evident from such phenomena as ‘total make-overs’ and body art.20 In as much as nature is fixed and unchangeable, this stability is often highly valued, Eagleton points out. Secondly, culture can be quite as resistant to change, as predictable, as inert, as the hardest facts of nature, while the latter can be surprisingly brittle. It has proven to be a lot easier to change the global climate than to change the culture that contributes to this process. The normative bonds of culture can be very hard to break. To steer the discussion around nature and culture away from the dichotomy between freedom and determinism, Eagleton has proposed to put the notion of ‘cultivation’ at the heart of our concept of culture. This in fact conforms with the etymology of ‘culture’: ‘Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals’21 (Williams, 1976/1988, p. 87). More importantly, it offers a perspective on culture that does not depend on a definition of culture as information, and yet discourages dualism. As Laland et al. stress in their theory of niche-construction, culture as cultivation is an extension of a phenomenon that is widespread in nature: organisms actively changing their environment to suit their needs.22 Human culture then has its roots deep in natural history. It may still be said to have unique features, those having to do with language for example, but by itself, culture connects us with other organisms rather than putting us apart from them. As far as avoiding dualism is concerned, cultivation seems a more promising starting point than information for a consideration of culture. Eagleton spells out the intriguing two sidedness of the relation between nature and cultivation. Culture relates to nature in a way that dialectically combines apparent opposites. On the one hand, culture tends, shapes and changes nature, but the tools of cultivation are themselves derived from nature. ‘Nature itself produces the means of its own transcendence’ (Eagleton, 2000, p. 4)23 Cultivation, moreover, suggests both spontaneous growth and its regulation, both unruliness and rules. Culture implies the

20

Eagleton also considers this ‘remorseless voluntarism’ to be typically American. (Eagleton, 2000, p. 90). According to Eagleton, ‘law’ and ‘justice’ had a similar meaning. (Eagleton, 2000, p. 1). 22 Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952, p. 17) note that Weber also saw a continuation of biological processes in what he termed ‘civilisation’, which according to him was equally geared towards ‘man’s control over nature’. 23 Although I draw here on Eagleton, others before him have thought along similar lines about the relation of human nature and culture. To name but two: Huxley, in Evolution and ethics (Huxley, 1989/1894) stressed the antagonism inherent in cultivation, Mead (1934) focussed on the social process of communication that allows the ‘biologic individual’ to become reflective. 21

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uncultivated that comes before it. Finally, cultivation shapes and transforms nature, but as every gardener knows, only up to a point. Culture, in its quest to widen its domain, constantly encounters natural limits. In sum, he writes, ‘it is less a matter of deconstructing the opposition between culture and nature than of recognizing that the term ‘culture’ is already such a deconstruction.’ (Eageleton, 2000, p. 2). When one adopts this concept of culture, it becomes possible to consider self-cultivation, perhaps psychologically the most interesting aspect of culture, in a new light. It may have acquired connotations of ‘sweetness and light’, but it also points to a real and central aspect of the relation between human nature and culture. The concept of self-cultivation offers a perspective on human nature that avoids both objectivising its limits and wishing them away. Whatever the precise nature of evolved human limitations (constraints, enabling constraints, etc), in Darwinian psychology they are objective facts—they have an existence independent of human perception or action—and their discovery is a scientific task, a responsibility that evolutionary psychology has taken upon itself. Darwinian psychology will discover the ‘perennial limitations of human nature’ (Pinker, 2002, p. 295) just as materials science discovers the tensile strength of a metal, and it advises politicians to take them into account when devising new social arrangements rather like materials science advises engineers. People will break if they are submitted to the strain of a social order that is too unnatural. The concept of cultivation however draws attention to the central, mediating role of the human agent in determining human nature and relating it to culture. The limits of human nature are first and foremost an everyday topic of concern for ordinary people. It is everyone’s business to find out what one is capable of and what not, what people in general can be brought to do, and what is beyond them. Likewise, conceptual pairs such as reasons and causes, free will and determinism, are everyday topics of discussion as much as they figure in professional philosophy and psychology: does a troubled youth explain an adult’s crimes; when can I hold my child responsible for its behaviour, and when is it ‘just a child’; should men be encouraged to participate in child care, or is this against their nature. In such discussions, the terms and theories offered by academics are freely used and abused, without conceding jurisdiction on these matters entirely, or even to a significant extent, to them. The limits of responsibility, the extent of human nature, remain primarily a common concern, rather than a specialized topic. Selfcultivation is increasingly done with the help of experts, but it is not done by experts. The relation between culture and art, obvious to scholars before cultural anthropology turned culture into something possessed by all people, is restored to some extent by this approach to self-cultivation. Foucault, in his History of Sexuality, made extensive use of the ancient concept of ‘arts of existence’, which he defined as ‘those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria’ (Foucault, 1992, p. 10). Steve Brown takes it up in answer to the question how the nondiscursive can be approached in psychology without recourse to mundane realism. It is an answer that emphasizes the aesthetic, and approaches self-cultivation as self-stylizing. The art of living is ‘an active process of composition where discursive and non-discursive elements are arranged together’ (Brown, 2001, p. 180), and such compositions ‘perform’ truth rather than stating it discursively. An art of living, if skillfully performed, brings together discursive elements, such as moral codes, and non-discursive, such as behaviours, in an ensemble that strikes us, aesthetically rather than rationally, as true.

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It seems reasonable and fruitful to see self-cultivation as a form of what Latour has termed mediation. It could be termed a ‘psychotechnics’,24 analogous to the sociotechnics that Latour has analysed in his case studies. Whereas sociotechnics refers to the process of creating hybrid collectives of humans and non-humans, self-cultivation is a psychotechnical process of creating a bio-cultural hybrid, a person. By cultivating behaviour, i.e. by shaping, training, repressing it, by seeking out or avoiding situations in which it is evoked, by setting up one’s environment to facilitate or discourage it, by using tools to expand, modify, or constrict it, the individual gives shape to her own nature, guided by her culture’s discourse about human nature, simultaneously adding to that discourse by creating an instance of what human nature can be. One of the implications of this psychotechnical perspective, is that human nature becomes an inherently political matter.

8. Politics ‘Everything that every individual has ever done in all of human history and prehistory establishes the minimum boundary of what is possible. The maximum, if any, is completely unknown’ (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p. 40). In this remarkable passage, Tooby and Cosmides seem to be saying something close to the point of this article: that the boundaries of human nature are everyone’s work. But they do not wish it to remain so. Eventually neuroscience, guided by evolutionary psychology, will discover the ‘computational specifics of the hundreds or thousands of mechanisms that comprise the human mind’ (ibidem), and then we will know what our possibilities are, the maximum amplitude of human culture. Politics then becomes a matter of choosing between the options that human nature offers, as determined by science.25 Evolutionary psychology’s emphasis on the limitations set by human nature stands in contrast to what many see as the thrust of modern biotechnology. Recently, the challenges that biotechnology poses to traditional ethical and political discourse have sparked much discussion. (Blackman, 2005; Rabinow, 1992; Rose, 2001) Modern biomedicine is considered to have fundamentally changed our perspective on our biology. The traditional association of nature with fixity has been undermined by, for example, drugs such as Prozac, which promise to make us not just better, but ‘better than well’. ‘(N)ature is being reconfigured (y) as a site of mutability, plasticity and change’ (Blackman, 2005, p. 186). Blackman warns that this shift is creating new forms of personhood, in which we become responsible for our biological selves and are actually required to be flexible and plastic. According to her and authors such as Donna Haraway and Nikolas Rose the modern biomedical approach to self-cultivation embodies a ‘neo-liberal’ normativity that effectively still opposes nature and culture, with its ‘basic engineering logic of ‘human’

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I am aware that the term psychotechnics was used for practical psychology in the first half of the 20th century. There is considerable ambivalence surrounding politics in evolutionary psychology. Some authors carrying the flag of evolutionary psychology deny committing what they call the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ of drawing political conclusions from scientific facts (see Dupre´, 2001 and Wilson, Dietrich, & Clark, 2003 for criticism of this interpretation of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’), others insist that political decisions must be informed by knowledge of human nature. Edwards (2003) argues that a political interpretation of evolutionary psychology must be the starting point of its critique. 25

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domination of ‘nature’’ (Haraway, 1991, p. 67).26 In response, Blackman has called for attention to ‘the space in between the biological and the social, where both are subject to change’ (Blackman, 2005, p. 202), and Haraway has urged us to turn our attention to the boundaries constructed between biology and culture, human and animal, mind and body. Evolutionary psychology emphasizes limits rather than flexibility, and the fact that it and biotechnology have captured the popular imagination simultaneously deserves some study. However, the political import of both is the same in one key respect: in as much as the individual can be an effective actor in the play of natural (both biological and cultural) processes, it is only through the resources that science offers, as a consumer of scientific knowledge and technological skill. But from the perspective on culture that I have sketched above, the individual is a mediator of biological and cultural processes, a producer as much as a consumer. Mediation, as Latour emphasizes, is an event, it ‘always exceeds its condition’ (Latour, 1999, p. 307).27 It would be unwise therefore to put too much store in the putuative limits of human nature put forward by Darwinian psychologies. As Dupre´ (2003) has warned, there is always a danger that an emphasis on limits is understood normatively. Rather than turning the politics of human nature into an interplay of science and technology (representing the object) on the one hand, and free choice (the subject) on the other hand, the political character of the everyday mediation between nature and culture must be recognized. 9. Conclusion There is in recent Darwinian psychologies a trend discernible towards a view of behaviour as shaped by the complex interaction of two evolutionary processes, biological and cultural. They attribute a prominent role to culture in the production of behaviour, human behaviour in particular, and seek to analyse and model the mechanisms that enable the interaction of culture and human nature. They remain wedded to an ideational conception of culture and a cognitivist approach to psychology: culture is comprised of information and its transmission, and is carried by the information-processing mechanisms of the brain. The integration of the biological, psychological and social sciences that they seek, is based on this concept of information. At the same time, there is a growing body of research that focusses on the individual as a mediator between nature and culture, rather than on the brain as an intermediary. I have proposed to call this mediation ‘self-cultivation’, and have emphasized that it is a creative process, one that produces novelty, however slight. From this perspective, the integration of human nature and culture that evolutionary psychology promises, is primarily the lifeproject and responsibility of every individual. It is heterogeneous work involving material culture as well as ‘information’, social interaction as well as individual action. If integrating human nature and culture is common, everyday work of mediation, the grand integration of biology, psychology and the social sciences that evolutionary psychology promotes as the indispensable condition for scientific and social progress, loses much of its urgency. Because the cultivation of human nature is first and foremost a matter 26

Hacking (2005) has also remarked that our bodies only become more object-like the more we can manipulate them. Paul Rabinow (1992), on the other hand, does believe that biotechnology will help us ‘overcome the natureculture split’. 27 See also Michael (1997) for an argument why Latour’s theory is a fruitful perspective on cultural innovation.

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of personal and social history, it is important to foster disciplines that address the issue at a personal and social level. Traditionally, this has been the task of the humanities, and later also the social sciences.28 They offer resources for self-cultivation by clarifying cultural practices, describing ways of self-cultivation different from our own, or uncovering power structures behind familiar discourses on human nature. They offer, in other words, critical resources that encourage and allow reflection on the boundary between nature and culture, rather than leaving the matter to science alone. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Anne Beaulieu, Trudy Dehue, Sarah de Rijcke and Douwe Draaisma for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. The constructive and precise commentaries of the two anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal have been very valuable in determining its final form. References Baerveldt, C., & Voestermans, P. (2005). Culture, emotion and the normative structure of reality. Theory and Psychology, 15(4), 449–473. Benton, T. (1991). Biology and social-science: why the return of the repressed should be given a (cautious) welcome. Sociology, 25(1), 1–29. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality. A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Blackman, L. (2005). The dialogical self. Flexibility and the cultural production of psychopathology. Theory and Psychology, 15(2), 183–206. Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. (1985). Culture and the evolutionary process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, S. D. (2001). Psychology and the art of living. Theory and Psychology, 11(2), 171–192. Burian, R. M., Richardson, R. C., & Van der Steen, W. J. (1996). Against generality: Meaning in genetics and philosophy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 27(1), 1–29. Caporael, L. (2000). The hybrid science. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 9(2), 209–220. Caporael, L. (2001). Evolutionary psychology: Toward a unifying theory and a hybrid science. Annual review of psychology, 52, 607–628. Carpendale, J. I. M., & Lewis, C. (2004). Constructing an understanding of mind: The development of children’s social understanding within social interaction. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 79–96. Chesnokova, O. (2004). Agency mediation and understanding of the mind. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 102. Clark, A. (2003). Natural-born cyborgs, minds, technologies, and the future of human intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dupre´, J. (2001). Human nature and the limits of science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dupre´, J. (2003). On human nature. Human Affairs, 13(2), 109–122. Eagleton, T. (2000). The idea of culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Eagleton, T. (2003). After theory. London: Allan Lane. Edwards, J. (2003). Evolutionary psychology and politics. Economy and Society, 32(2), 280–298. Foucault, M. (1992). The use of pleasure. The history of sexuality, Vol. 2. London: Penguin. Gauvain, M. (2001). Cultural tools, social interaction and the development of thinking. Human Development, 44(2-3), 126–143. Griffiths, P. E., & Stotz, K. (2000). How the mind grows: A developmental perspective on the biology of cognition. Synthese, 122, 29–51. 28

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