Culture as a Variable, and Its Interactions

The following is my fourth-week reaction paper from a Fall 2006 class, Biological Approaches to Political Behavior, taught by Professors John Hibbing and Kevin Smith.

The unifying theme of most of this week’s readings is culture – how personality traits that contribute to it can be positively selected (Ding et al.), how it can interact with genes (Harpending and Cochran), how it can affect the economic behavior of groups (Henrich et al.), how it can, through the promotion of egalitarian values, defeat attacks on groups based on innate differences (Pinker); how it can develop through demographic disasters (Sapolsky); how it can set in-group/out-group boundaries that can lessen the number of people who will be targeted for coalitional killing (Wrangham). Two other readings, on force escalation and prospect theory, help explain why the conflicts addressed in Pinker, Sapolsky and Wrangham can intensify.

While Ding et. al. and Harpending and Cochran focus most on the role allele variation in the DRD4 gene plays in the incidence of ADHD, an associated personality trait they mention more in passing -- novelty seeking – is of more interest in explaining cultural variation. Greater prevalence of the 7R allele in some cultures than others could lead to greater exploration, leading to greater exposure to diversity, leading to decreased ethnocentrism. This could explain why Japan kept its society closed to others for so long – its population had a lower incidence of the 7R allele associated with novelty seeking, as Ding et. al. report is the case in Asia today – but then exploded forth in imperial aggression motivated by an ideology of Japanese racial superiority. The 7R allele’s much higher frequency in the Americas could explain the American pioneer spirit, and perhaps the American penchant for capitalist entrepreneurship.

Cultures can define illness and perhaps shoot themselves in the feet competitively if they make the wrong choices. American culture has defined ADHD as a mental illness and is attempting to medicate it out of our children. But perhaps ADHD is a positive adaptation that leads its “sufferers� to be dissatisfied with sitting patiently waiting for good things to come to them, and leads them to seek out new things. In the Pleistocene, such exploration could have been adaptive. A person with the 7R allele, upon returning from an exploratory adventure, could have led his hunter-gatherer tribal fellows to a new food source, such as a fruit-tree grove, or a better environment, such as caves that offered protection from predators. But frequency-dependent selection may have been operating, in that not everyone can be explorers – someone, probably a lot of someones, have to stay put to nourish and protect the young. What happens if we medicate the exploratory instinct out of a generation of children?
The role of the 7R allele, or some analogue of it, in coalitionary killing merits study in non-human primate populations. Wrangham finds that chimps go on lethal raids to seek out enemies they can dominate, because it is adaptive to winnow down the population of competitors when one has enough of an advantage to do so at little risk. But are these chimps actually going out only with the intent to explore? Encountering an enemy during their explorations, they may attack for reasons consistent with the imbalance of power hypothesis (and also with prospect theory); but their aggressive actions do not prove premeditation. This calls for investigating whether chimps who go on “lethal raids� have something akin to the human 7R allele variation.

The readings provide hope that culture can mitigate conflict. A culture of early and frequent female attention to male transfers made one group of baboons less aggressive. As Sapolsky indicates, individuals may not be able to transcend their natures, but societies can. Change the definition of the out-group, and you change the potential for aggression and war.