Interesting and very difficult question. Human inclination, or social inclination- kind of like nature vs. nurture… maybe certain things are hardwired to be situational.
Like mating behavior, for example, being a social situation requiring social interaction in order to be accomplished. <insert masturbation joke here>
(By “hardwired to be situational” I mean requiring a certain set of circumstances in order to mainfest said behavior. Then if that situation never arises the behavior never develops. But I would think much of our social behavior is interwoven/inseparable from language, considering the link between brain development and exposure to language/social interaction. Then again the innate potential for individual development may be limited by nature/genetics, etc.) I hope that was clear.
I don’t know about any proverbial wild children, but if you wanted an actual case, there’s Victor, a wild child of France. If I recall correctly, he was said to show no discomfort about his surroundings regardless of how hot or cold or whatever he was. He also took to little boy-type tormenting of girls (pinching, pulling hair, etc.) when he reached puberty. It would be funny if that were universal. Also, interestingly, he was never known to sneeze…
I don’t agree with the killing children thing. I think it is rather natural for weak children to be killed, if one is to look at the animal world (which after all, we are part of).
I would suggest that killing adult clan is usually seen as a negative. So while killing an enemy tribesman would be fine, or killing an antisocial person (thief/abuser) might be acceptable, most human societies IMO would generally cringe at killing one of the clan.
Fairblue I (and probably many other females here) could sooooooooooooo bear witness to the difference between “man” and “social man”…
**What determines what exclusionary elements of a belief system, i.e. racial dominance, trump other commonalities?
But wouldn’t you say that Christians share a belief system? At least to group them and distinguish them from other inconsistent/competing belief systems?** ~ Dinsdale
Ok Dinsdale, but first we must mutually agree on what is meant by a “belief system”. I think as follows…
*For most of his career on earth man has been a social omnivore who moved about in packs.
*After the evolution of language, the packs became “clans” and the collective shared behavior of the clan became the prime instrument of surivial of the localized gene pool.
Through clan interactions, mostly wars, clans with the most advantageous collective mindset evolved into loose confederations of like-speaking groups.
The “belief system” of the Confederation is more all-encompassing than that of the clan, and the “belief system” of the clan is more encompassing than a single individual’s set of beliefs.
** So, this much is true: Our beliefs in force today have no non-objective reality. All “belief systems” have evolved only to advance to the “beliefs” of the “belief system” and nothing else. Sorry.**
But good news! The belief systems of most of the rest of the world are undergoing a time of intergration and transition. O happy day.
First, I think it needs to be pointed out that one wouldnt expect to see anything common to all, as in every single, human culture. What one could expect to see is common traits shared by most cultures throughout most of known history. Uniformity of adaptation in the biological world over spans of time is the exception rather than the rule.
But what the hell…in general and in broad scope, there are related cultural attributes that change and morph as technology increases/decreases depending on resources (assuming no influence from external cultures which can accelerate/decelerate the process). I would say these are roughly:
The pursuit of knowledge, or to be more specific, the understanding of ones environment in order to predict good times/bad times. This could be shown in a progression as;
Superstition = religon = philosophy = science.
Religons etc are mans first attempt to structure the world in ways they can understand in order to predict what to do/not to do. All religon stems from trying to figure out what the invisible people/animals/things liked or disliked so that they would keep droughts from happening, famines from happening, etc. In hunter gatherer societies, religons tend to be animal/nature based, or local superstitions; once agriculture is adopted there is a clear trend towards a sort of religous morphism wherein previous animal/nature gods slowly start taking on the attitudes/aspects of humans, finally becoming human in form (usually after the adoption/discovery of writing). Further technological advances, which may not be reached, result in the final and so far ultimate method of explaining the world; science.
Formalized or agreed upon system of revenge, corresponding roughly to honor codes = customs = centrally administered law/justice
Differing behavior/customs treatment among family members as opposed to non-family members.
Delineation of territory. Even nomadic hunter gatherer groups will agree before hand which group gets to hunt in which valley. Or they will fight.
The use of violance to advance/preserve well being (though its entirely possible there have been completely non-violant cultures, they dont tend to survive for some reason)
Monogomous relationships. While there are many examples to the contrary, this is often the result of environmental necessity at one point in time existing culturally long after the environmental necessity no longer applied, much like religon and philosophy still exist though their practical necessity is drastically dimished.
Humor.
Commerce. Most all cultures have developed some sort of mutually agreed upon standard of value that represents something else. Sea shells, beads, gold, whatever. Even completely isolated cultures have some sort of a system of trade within the group.
Individual status. Even hunter gatherer societies often give the best hunters the choice of best meats, or special status in ceremonies, etc. This is usually magnified in societies that develop agriculture, wherein more people exist who do not directly contribute to enhancing the food supply.
Games.
Sport. While games and sport may seem the same, Im drawing a distinction between contests designed to improve ones physical skills in things that may be needed for more practical matters and games that are played merely for enjoyment. Which leads to
Fun, or a sense of play.
Not eating ones own kind. However, this can be misleading in that one group may not consider another its ‘own kind’. Also, canabalism is largely adopted as a result of a shortness of an available protein supply at one point in time and then carried on culturally long after the practical necessity is gone, like non-monogomous relationships and religon/philosophy.
Language. There are no mute cultures.
Modification/control of environment. While pretty much all cultural beliefs and attitudes are the result of adaptations to particular environments in the cultures past, all cultures also to an extent manipulate their environment. From aboriginies and their burns to the Hoover dam. Any ones that didnt were at a severe disadvantage.
There are, Im sure a number of others. After all, there are only so many different environments out there to adapt to, and the situations wherein cultures were completely isolated from any nieghboring cultures are so rare, that many cultures in related environments dealt with those environments in similar ways, whether through borrowing ideas or just the plain fact that sometimes only one way works.
You guys (and girls,and hermaphrodites, and…well you people) are all overlooking the obvious: music. What culture doesn’t express it self in some sort of musical capacity?
I was planning on becoming an anthropologist and studied it as an undergrad, so I feel I know something about this. I’m going to point out the ones that I believe are not true.
This is too vague to be meaningful, but I want to point out that most human societies have been fairly egalitarian.
This one is way off. In fact, I would assert that Western culture is the only one that has considered the individual the basic unit of society. Most people have had no sense of themselves as individuals independent of their position in a web of relationships.
As others have pointed out, killing children is quite common. Infanticide is probably universal, in fact (though less commonly practiced in the open). You should also realize that the concept of “child” that we hold in our society today is unique. The concept of childhood as a period distinct from adulthood is not universal.
Definitely not.
Humans are universally found to be semi-monogamous. Interestingly, the difference in size between the male and the female in primates (or was it just apes?) indicates the degree of monogamy. Male and female chimps are very close in size and are pretty monogamous, while male gorillas are much larger than females and are less monogamous.
Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology try to answer the questions you are raising. To learn about about the former, look for books by Edward O. WIlson. In particular, On Human Nature is specifically written about things common to all cultures. There is one section where he lists them explicitly. I’m not sure who the dean of Evolutionary Psychology is, but one guy who publishes a lot recently is Stephen Pinker. Check out his newest book The Blank Slate. THis book was written to debunk the old Blank Slate (tabula rasa) theory of human behavior.
Some of this stuff is still controversial-- not universally accepted by all biologists, so you’ll have to do some discrimating reading to fiuger out what you buy into and what you don’t. I really like Wilson, and would recomend the above book to anyone interested in this subject. (He tends to promote the idea that much of what we see in cultures is innate to the human animal, and although we have a wide variety of cultures in the world , they are all constrained to opperate within certain biolologically determined constraints.)
I’m sure that’s interesting material, John, but just because a trait is common to all cultures does not mean it’s biologically determined. I just want to be clear on the fact that those are too separate issues. Very few of the practices that have been listed here have been shown to be biologically determined.
Another good read on precisely this topic is The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. He looks at cultural universals to explain our moral systems, whether it be prudish Victorianism or tribal culture or modern America. He uses the life of Charles Darwin and his travels to tribes of South America as a framework; he also compares chimpanzee behavior and human behavior to find commonality which is based in evolution.
He comes up with a few universals. Here’s what I remember off the top of my head.
Status seeking. In all cultures, there is a hierarchical power structure and it is considered beneficial to gain status. In some cultures outright status seeking is frowned upon, but it still happens in not so obvious ways.
-Differing values between men and women. He theorizes that much of morality is based on evolutionary differences between men and women. Women seek to find men who will make strong children, but also men who will be able to provide well for children. Men seek to make many children but also want to prevent raising children that are not their own.
-Friendship and protection of the tribe as a means to protect your own genes, even if indirectly.
This leads to a bunch of things common to most cultures. The first is that most cultures are polygynous and not polyandrous (many wives, not many husbands). To boil it down, it is easier for men with status to spawn and provide for many children. Since men have an aversion to being cuckolded, women with children have harder times finding husbands. This is similar to our closest primate cousins. Even in Western monogamous cultures, it is far more common for high-status older men to have serial divorces in order to marry young women and have children than for older women to marry younger men. This amounts to serial polygyny.
He finds evolutionary basis of many other more “complex” behaviors: levels of paternal commitment, sibling rivalry, non-zero-sum gain relationships of friendship, extended familiy relationships, protection of the elderly, the Madonna-Whore dichotomy, etc.
It is good read even if it is a little monolithic – evolution as the main powering force behind all aspects of our culture. He does address this point, saying that we don’t necessarily need to follow our basest instincts if we can identify them and work to counteract them.
When I received my BA in anthropology, the conventional wisdom was that some form of marriage was practiced by every known culture on earth, be it monogomy, polygamy, or polyandry. If that’s no longer thought to be the case, I’d be interested in hearing about a culture with no known system of marriage.
Thanks everyone. Lots of good food for thought. John, I also like Wilson, tho my past reading has been on the insect side. Time to go back to the library.
I’m certainly no expert, but my understanding (admittedly colored by my nontheistic humanist philosophy) is that science has been making impressive progress in theorizing about and identifying physical explanations for many human attributes such as emotions. And many human traits, previously attributed to the “soul” are being explained as evolutionary in nature.
If man is biologically hardwired to seek companionship, can we not say that universal patterns resulting from human social interaction (to the extent they can be identified) are biologically determined as well?
We touched upon this before - how surely can you distinguish between social conventions that result of human nature, as opposed to human interaction? If man has no choice but to be a social animal, how meaningful is such a distinction?
In that case, you’re using a really broad definition of “marriage.” If you make it too broad, you’re basically just saying that men and women hook up everywhere, which is too obvious to bother stating. I assumed you meant that there is an institution formally recognized by every society that resembles what we call marriage, and that’s not the case. It’s usually much more informal, without all the binding obligations we attach to it.
By the way, your examples were the best overall, IMO.
Yup, there are a whole lot of theories. The only time I recall being convinced by one of those theories was the one about the incest taboo being biological. If you’re the type that needs a scientific explanation (there seem to be a lot of those types on the SDMB), then I guess those theories have a certain appeal. But if you like scientific explanations, I would think you would look for something that has been proven, instead of just conjecture. These kinds of theories can’t easily be proven, since it would be unethical to do the necessary experiments on humans. How can you scientifically prove that souls don’t exist anyway?
I wouldn’t say that any human behavior (we are talking about humans, not men, right?) is biologically hardwired. Our physiology imposes a number of constraints, and humans around the world have found similar ways of adapting to them. It a stretch to say that anything that follows, no matter how indirectly, is “biologically determined.” One thing that sets us apart from other animals is that we have very little in the way of hardwired instinct. That’s exactly why we need culture, because we have almost no programming to tell us how to survive.
I don’t think it’s too important to make the distinction. I’ve never had too much of an interest in the nature vs. nurture debate (though I lean toward the nurture side). I say let’s call it 50/50 for the sake of argument. I just wanted to point out that by saying that any behavior that is universal is also biologically determined is opening a whole 'nother can of worms.
Yeah, Wilson is the insect man, for sure. In fact he does an interesting thougth experiment in On Human Nature. After listing the cultural atributes that he thinks are inate in humans, he predicts what similar cultural traits would emerge in a sentient insect society. Makes for some interestin reading.
