Evolution and Human Behaviour: Helping to Make Sense of Modern Life

Abstract

Biological or genetic explanations of human behaviour tend to make people nervous, and not without reason. The promotion of eugenics and racist science by leading biologists and anthropologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century produced some deeply shameful outcomes, culminating in the Nazis’ appropriation of eugenic ideals to justify the Holocaust (Beckwith 1993; Marks 2017). Following World War II, UNESCO issued a statement disavowing the idea of biological/genetic differences in behaviour across different racial groups, emphasizing instead that all variation was environmental in origin (UNESCO 1952); we are all nurture, with no apparent nature. While understandable and, in some ways, laudable, such statements cannot erase the fact that we are biological organisms – for what else could we be? Like all other life forms, we are evolved creatures, the product of both genes and our environments (see Chapter 1). If you doubt this, try building an organism of any kind without using DNA. Clearly, then, the objections raised cannot be about biology or genetics per se – even the most dedicated environmentalist accepts that they will die without oxygen, and that babies are not delivered by the stork. Instead, resistance lies in the way that genetic and biological processes are theorized, studied and interpreted in the human context. Similar objections are made to the application of evolutionary theory to modern humans (although there is no apparent problem applying it to the extinct versions of our genus). Again, there is a general acceptance that humans are evolved creatures while, at the same time, there is entrenched resistance to the idea that evolutionary processes influence contemporary human behaviour. At least some of this resistance reflects the way that evolutionary thinking has been applied to humans, rather than resistance to evolutionary thinking itself. In both cases, there remains a worry that labelling a trait or behaviour as genetic/biological or evolved is to suggest that it is immutable and predetermined. There is also the tendency for lay people to equate the words ‘genetic’ and ‘biological’ with the word ‘natural’, which can, and often does, lead to the conflation of what just happens to be the case with normative claims of what should be the case, otherwise known as the naturalistic fallacy (also see Chapter 1). Evolutionary biology and genetics are, of course, inextricably linked – one of the most prominent definitions of evolution is that of changes in allele frequencies over