Race, history and culture - Ethics - March 1996

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 2001 by Claude Levi-Strauss

The nature-culture debate

[But] one fact cannot be too strongly emphasized: while selection makes it possible for living species to adapt to their natural environment or to resist its changes more effectively, in the case of man this environment ceases to be natural in any real sense. Its characteristics arise from technical, economic, social and psychological conditions which, through the operation of culture, create a particular environment for each human group. We can go a step further, and consider whether the relation between organic evolution and cultural evolution is not merely analogical, but also complementary....

In the dawn of humanity, biological evolution perhaps selected such pre-cultural traits as upright posture, manual dexterity, sociability, the capacity to think in symbols, speech and the ability to communicate. But once a culture existed, these traits were consolidated and propagated by cultural factors. When cultures became specialized, it was again cultural factors which consolidated and encouraged other traits, such as resistance to heat or cold for those societies which had willy-nilly to adapt themselves to extreme climatic conditions; aggressive or contemplative dispositions, technical ingenuity etc. None of these traits, as perceived at a cultural level, can clearly be attributed to a genetic basis, although we cannot exclude the possibility that such a connexion--even if partial, remote and indirect--may sometimes exist. In that case, it would be true to say that every culture selects genetic aptitudes which then, by reflex action, influence those cultures by which they were at first stimulated.

An ideological cover

By pushing back the earliest beginnings of humanity to an ever more remote past-- according to recent estimates, some millions of years ago--physical anthropology has undermined one of the principal bases for racialist theory, since the number of unknowable factors concerned thus increases much more rapidly than the number of landmarks available to stake out the paths followed by our earliest ancestors in the course of their evolution.

Geneticists delivered even more decisive blows to these theories when they replaced the concept of type by that of population and the concept of race by that of the genetic stock, and again when they demonstrated that there is a gulf between hereditary differences attributable to a single gene-- which are of little significance from the point of view of race, since they probably always have an adaptive value--and those attributable to the combined action of several, which makes it virtually impossible to determine them....

Only in the last ten years have we begun to understand that we were discussing the problem of the relation between organic and cultural evolution in terms which Auguste Comte would have described as metaphysical. Human evolution is not a by-product of biological evolution, but neither is it completely distinct from it. A synthesis of these two traditional points of view is now possible, provided that biologists are not content with answers not based on fact, or with dogmatic explanations, and realize both the help they can give each other and their respective limitations.