Sexual evolution and human culture
Resolving the ideological problems with fitness indicator theory
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Resolving the ideological problems with fitness indicator theoryHow is it possible for one biological concept to affront so many of our fundamental values? It seems quite astounding that a scientific idea should so consistently fall on the wrong side of the ideological fence. I think it is no coincidence. Look at it this way: our human norms and values developed as reactions to patterns of natural human behavior that we decided should be discouraged. If a great deal of human behavior consists of advertising one’s fitness, and if many ways of doing that impose social costs on others, and if moral norms develop to minimize social costs, then a lot of moral norms should be aimed directly against the irresponsible use of fitness indicators. For example:
These social norms do not just fall randomly from the sky. They emerged as moral instincts and cultural inventions to combat the excesses of sexual self-advertisement and sexual competition. Our moral aversion to fitness indicators may tempt us to reject them as an important part of sexual selection. But if we reject them, then it is hard to see how our moral norms evolved in the first place. It is possible, perhaps even necessary, to admit that much of human behavior evolved to advertise fitness, while simultaneously realizing that the essence of wisdom and morality is not to take our fitness indicators too seriously. This is not to say that our capacities for wisdom and morality are cultural inventions that liberate us from the imperatives of our genes. Our moral instincts may be just another set of evolved adaptations. It is not question of “us” over-riding our genetic predispositions, but of using one set of predispositions to over-rule others – just as our evolved desire to preserve our looks can over-ride our evolved tastes for fats and sugars. A major prediction of fitness indicator theory is that in every culture, and perhaps in every individual, there should be a dynamic balance between our mating instincts for fitness-display, and our moral instincts for restraining the social and personal costs of runaway fitness-display and sexual competition. In many societies, certain groups of people tend to become advocates for one side or the other. Often, it seems to me that the advocacy groups break down as follows – on average, in most places and times: Against runaway fitness signaling: For runaway fitness signaling: Women Men Conservatives Liberals Fascists, Communists Libertarians Marxism Consumerism The bourgeoisie The bohemians Monotheists Pagans Obsessive-compulsives, Paranoids Narcissists, Psychopaths Group-minded do-gooders Irresponsible individualists Economists Marketers, Advertisers Ecologists Sexual selection theorists Sociologists Socialites Volkswagen-drivers Porsches-drivers Immanuel Kant Friedrich Nietzsche Tipper Gore Britney Spears If this amateur sociology is even vaguely correct, then we need not worry that the advocates of fitness indicator theory will cause any permanent injury to the social fabric. There will remain a dynamic ideological balance between those in favor of runaway fitness signaling and those opposed to it, as long as we have a demographically balanced society. Some social benefits of the fitness indicator view Of course, one is not likely to win over many hearts and minds by pointing out that a scientific theory is not quite as horribly unsettling as it first appears. One must offer some positive social benefits of adopting the new view. I believe there are several such benefits to emphasizing the role of sexual selection in human mental evolution. These benefits seem to fall into five categories: intellectual, educational, economic, aesthetic, and spiritual. Intellectual benefits. To scientists, the intellectual, theoretical, and empirical benefits of a new viewpoint are paramount – indeed, other ideological considerations are considered irrelevant at best, and corrosive at worst. In most of my other writings, my focus has been on the purely scientific benefits of fitness indicator theory as a framework for understanding human nature. In this paper, my focus is on the non-scientific, “ideological” issues, so I will just mention one major intellectual payoff offered by the fitness indicator viewpoint: “consilience” (Wilson, 1999), which is the potential to integrate seamlessly the biological and social sciences with the arts and humanities (Miller, 2000a). Signaling theory offers a common language and functionalist framework that spans the realms of the biological, the economic, and the cultural. Of course, the proof is in the pudding, and it remains to be seen whether this potential for consilience is fulfilled over the coming decades of research. Educational benefits. Ever since Darwin, most theories of mental evolution have stressed the economic and technological payoffs for human creative intelligence. This can easily lead to a sort of nerd’s eye view of public education, in which business management and computer programming are viewed as the pinnacles of human cognitive achievement, and in which art, music, sports, social life, and sexual education can be marginalized as “extra-curricular activities”. The fitness indicator view inverts this cognitive hierarchy by pointing out that economic success and technological invention are just two among many natural ways that individuals advertise their fitness – and they are not even considered the most sexually attractive or romantic ways by most people. If educational policy recognized that training individuals to be socially and sexually successful was at least as important to their subjective well-being and quality of life as training them to be technically proficient at some employable skill, then fitness indicator theory would offer a strong argument for putting the arts and humanities at the core of the curriculum. At the moment, the interests of corporate employers seem to dictate much of educational policy in many industrialized nation, and those interests typically demand that young humans spend thousands of hours learning frustrating, counter-intuitive, evolutionarily novel skills such as mathematics, word processing, and accounting. The corporate world is not much interested in promoting fitness-indicating skills that young people seems intrinsically motivated to learn and practice, which are socially and sexually rewarding, and which tap their naturally evolved cognitive abilities – such as art, music, story-telling, drama, natural history, humor, sports, and socializing. At the very least, fitness indicator theory can help educational policy-makers become less hypocritical and self-deceiving about whose interests are being served by current educational practices. Economic benefits. Early theories of human evolution coincided with the peak of industrial capitalism based on heavy industry – the world of coal, oil, steel, railroads, automobiles, armaments, and factories. In this world, the economy seemed to be based upon the transformation of raw materials into physical tools, weapons, vehicles, and buildings. Materialism – whether Marxist or capitalist, dialectical or techno-scientific – seemed an appropriate way to describe how the world works and how the human brain evolved to understand that world. However, with the rise of sexual selection theory and fitness indicator theory, the world appears not so much a set of raw materials and physical products, as a system of signals, advertisements, status games, and socio-sexual transactions. This new view seems much better suited to understand the global 21st century economy as it is – a system that delivers service, entertainment, education, experience, and information – rather than as it was in the mid-19th century world of heavy industry. Indeed, without the fitness indicator perspective, it is very difficult to understand modern marketing phenomena, which are at the heart of modern business practice (Miller, 2000d,e; Saad & Gill, 2000). All successful contemporary businesses understand that profits arise not from commodifying their products (i.e. stripping them of brand identity, advertising associations, and fitness-signaling potential), but from ‘adding psychological value’ to their products by increasing their fitness-signaling, status-signaling, and identity-signaling potential (Frank, 1999; Klein, 2000; Twitchell, 1999). The fitness indicator view also helps us why status has become so dematerialized in advanced economies – why it is based much more on one’s experiences of education, travel, entertainment, and self-fulfillment, than on what physical products one owns (see Brooks, 2001; Conniff, 2002; Pine & Gilmore, 1999). By adopting the new signaling-based view of human mental evolution, it is much easier to see the connections between prehistoric life and post-industrial life, between fitness-signaling and status-signaling, between personal identity and brand identity, and between the social functions of products for consumers and the profitability of products for manufacturers and marketers. Aesthetic benefits. Art theory and art criticism throughout the 20th century was dominated by the novelty-obsessed doctrines of Modernism, Post-modernism, and social-constructivism. This often led to the privileging of elite, often arcane forms of culture – whether the “high art” of the New York/London axis or the fashionably obscure forms of “pop culture” – over the ordinary folk arts enjoyed by most people across culture. Since folk arts everywhere tend to value virtuosity over novelty (Boas, 1955; Gombrich, 1977, 1979), clarity over obscurity, and pragmatic sexual signaling-power over theoretical “meaning”, this 20th century emphasis often left folk arts out in the cold. A major benefit of fitness indicator theory is that it puts folk art – ordinary ornamental and representational forms of visual display – back to the heart of aesthetic theory (Miller, 2000a, 2001). It gives art theorists and critics a richer new language for describing the forms of art and ornamentation that have been most popular and widely appreciated across cultures and across history. The fitness indicator perspective makes it as easy to talk about the aesthetics of the Aeron office chair, the BMW 540i automobile, and the suburban tract mansion as it was for Modernist theorists to talk about Picasso, Pollock, and Pei. Also, it reconnects contemporary aesthetic theory to an alternative, non-Modernist intellectual tradition that runs from Aristotle through a long list of rather neglected biophilic theorists:
This tradition of biophilic aesthetics overlaps perfectly with modern evolutionary psychology research on the beauty of human faces and bodies (e.g. Etcoff, 1999; Thornhill, 1998). Spiritual benefits. I can’t stand the word “spiritual”, and I have no idea what it really means, but some people seem to think it’s important. Many such people seem highly motivated to understand their place in the cosmos, and to feel the sense of oceanic oneness with the universe described so well by William James (1902) in The varieties of religious experience. The fitness indicator view might be useful in promoting such feelings, insofar as it:
In these ways, the fitness indicator view is profoundly anti-reductionist and anti-materialist, while still being scientifically precise, testable, empirically well-supported, and theoretically fruitful. Yüklə 89,57 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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