Stories science tells: defining the human quest - Cover Story

Christian Century, May 10, 1995 by Philip Hefner

Near the end of PBS's recent series The Human Quest, we look over a Southwestern Chaco Canyon landscape that contains the ruins of the extinct civilization of the Anasazi while listening to Nobel physicist Murray Gel-Mann, director. of the Santa Fe Institute, comment on this 12th-century culture as a failed adaptive system. As the camera moves to a long shot of the and the soundtrack fills with the beat of drums, the mournful music of a flute and the hum of insects, a muscular young man in shorts appears rapidly advancing toward us - a long-distance runner. The narrator speaks: "It's easy to assume that evolution has peaked with the creation of humans, as if we've broken some imaginary winner's tape. But evolution is an ongoing process, the race is never won. We're always being judged by the forces of natural selection, and we have no more guarantees than the people whose ghosts haunt the ruins of Chaco."

This scene captures the view of human being that gives coherence to The Human Quest: scientific understanding is both exciting and necessary; human cultures are vulnerable systems whose survival is threatened, in the face of which threat we seek moral values embedded within our scientific knowledge. The interweaving of the scientific quest with the search for moral resources that will help us confront threats to human survival makes this four-hour series more than just a glimpse of cutting-edge research. The science is presented with breathtaking appeal; the moral concern is uttered with breathless earnestness. But it is the daring with which the interweaving is carried out that gives the series a sense of weight and urgency.

The gaping holes that appear in the final woven fabric remind us of how far we have yet to go in integrating knowledge and values. These holes bear even more telling witness to the absence of religious faith from our societies struggle to enlist both science and moral wisdom in efforts to resolve today's most pressing issues.

The science examined in the program occurs at the dauntingly complex intersection of the neurosciences, psychology, human behavioral ecology (sometimes called ("sociobiology"), linguistics, human development, anthropology, the sciences of complexity and chaos, and the philosophy that attempts to interpret these disciplines. Roger Bingham, creator and host of the venture, is an experienced guide. One of his earlier television efforts, The Addicted Brain, was an exceptionally well-done piece that also brought together science and social commentary in a way that spurred deeper reflection.

The Quest's social commentary and moral concern are elicited by several recent developments: Cultural diversity threatens the human community with disintegration. Violence disrupts social cohesion, and cultural systems are frequently dysfunctional in their interactions with larger environments, including natural ecosystems. Beyond all these developments, though, is the challenge presented to our understanding of self and its place in the world by the cognitive sciences. This challenge impinges immediately upon our understanding of the mind and spirituality. If nothing else, The Human Quest provides a checklist of some of the most urgent questions of the day.

Let us return to the highly evolved runner amid the Anasazi ruins and the question of natural selection. The key to this view of human being lies in what Bingham calls the "second Darwinian revolution," through which we have learned that evolution shapes not only our bodies but also our minds. Important concepts are at work here that rely heavily on an emerging new interdisciplinary science that goes under the name evolutionary psychology, among whose leading thinkers are Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (they edited, along with John Barkow, The Adapted Mind, an important text for the field). Robert Wright popularized this new science in his 1994 book The Moral Animal. Combined with sociobiology, the explanatory potential of evolutionary psychology is enormous. It provides the foundation for the now widely accepted hypothesis that human development can be viewed in terms of biocultural evolution.

Adaptation is a key concept for Bingham's evolutionary scenario, and the term has a distinct meaning: adaptation is a survival strategy. It is actually a bundle of such strategies - behavioral responses that serve the survival of culture and which are transmitted via the evolutionary process. Growing specific foods in certain ways and preparing them in certain ways are examples of adaptations that are selected for and possibly bequeathed to later generations.

These adaptations are cultural phenomena, and hence they are significant activities of the brain. The brain maps the world and makes the connections out of which adaptations emerge and take form. The most important cultural adaptations were forged in the preagricultural Stone Age, the Pleistocene (extending from 10,000 to 1.5 million years ago). Our brains were "road-tested in the Stone Age," quips the narrator.