AT THE SAME TIME Boas and his anthropological cohorts were winning the field for cultural determinism, reinforcements from another discipline, psychology, were arriving with a similar anti-inheritance system. In the 1920s John B. Watson launched the behaviorist school of psychology—later championed by B. F. Skinner—which denied the importance of inherited traits, claiming instead that the primary determinants of behavior were early learning and conditioning. The theory harmonized beautifully with the cultural determinists, not to mention the progressive political currents, so took hold and rapidly came to dominate American psychology.
Looking back at this period, Robert Plomin and his coauthors of Behavioral Genetics: A Primer summed it up by saying, “… the legacy of John Watson’s behaviorism from the 1920s was the detaching of the study of behavior from the budding interest in heredity.” Since behaviorist theory acknowledged culture as an important conditioner, the new psychology could align itself with the Boas group of cultural determinists. Further reinforced by the Freudians and their preoccupation with childhood experience, the three intellectual juggernauts were able to drive from the field those who believed in any degree of biological determinism. Psychologists could now say, “The environment is all powerful and if you don’t believe us, just ask anthropologists and psychoanalysts.”
By the 1930s the door was effectively closed on investigations into inheritance of behavior and personality. In the first two decades of the century, a number of eminent psychologists had studied instinctive behavior in animals, always with the hope of gaining insight into human behavior. In 1916 Ada Yerkes, working with albino and normal rats, carried out one of the first studies on the inheritance of learning capability. Other prominent psychologists, such as William McDougal and Edward C. Tolman, also among the early “rat-runners” (as they were affectionately dubbed), dedicated themselves to breeding experiments that threw light on the mechanisms by which behavioral traits were transmitted from generation to generation.
But the influential Watson, whose background was also in animal research, went to war against the entire instinct concept. Behavior in rats, mice, and humans might appear instinctive, he said, but in reality it resulted from learning, which in turn resulted from rewards and punishments. Behavior, therefore, was totally environmental, derived from the “culture”—whether human or animal. For a time the two opposing schools of psychological thought progressed side by side-conducting experiments, producing papers, holding meetings—and the whole subject could have settled into a stimulating scientific debate had not a third element intruded: political ideology. Sadly for the spirit of unbiased inquiry, both positions became identified with specific political outlooks, and this linkage wrenched the debate from science to ideology. The destructive effects of this counterproductive and mostly false association of ideas are still being felt to this day.
IN THE EARLY PART of this century, when the instinct-versus-learning argument thrived, political turmoil brought on by the Industrial Revolution was shaking the social and economic stratifications that had been in place for centuries in both Europe and America. Appalling worker conditions and rampant poverty (and the crime and violence that came with it) made clear the need for drastic reform, if not for altogether new social structures. Movements for fundamental change gained momentum, particularly among intellectuals and other socially aware men and women. By the 1930s the largest universities and most scholarly journals were dominated by those committed to these political programs, all lumped under the term progressive.
It soon became a basic tenet of progressive thought that the biological view of human nature was antiegalitarian, counterprogressive, and, in the view of some, nothing more than bogus science tricked out to justify the status quo. To substantiate the latter view, the progressives pointed to the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher who seized on Darwin’s discovery as proof of the inevitability of social stratifications. Spencer also believed that the theory of natural selection demonstrated the folly of governmental attempts at interfering with “the natural order.”
Spencer’s nasty spin on Darwinism was a comforting theory for rapacious capitalists in that it implied that their heartless exploitation of their fellow man was a manifestation of nature’s design. Spencer’s “Social Darwinism” was also agreeable news for the privileged classes, since it held that poor laborers—whose joyless lives might otherwise have inspired pity, perhaps assistance—had evolved to be poor. On the other hand, those whose main effort in life was collecting Chinese porcelains in the family’s Belgrave Square mansion were so blessed because they had more of that fitness stuff, whatever that might be.
But robber barons and British aristocrats did not determine the prevailing intellectual wisdom. Writers and academics did, and within that group progressive thinking, including the doctrines of behaviorism and cultural determinism, ruled the day. While no one, then or now, doubted the sincerity of the scientists behind those doctrines, it now appears that their scientific judgments were strongly influenced by their utopian visions. The thinking seems to have been that in order to implement their ideal societies, they had to first disconnect human behavior from intractable biology.
In spite of worthy motives, their easy victory for rigid environmental determinism—now believed by almost no one—stands as a warning of the way in which erroneous science can be buoyed to broad acceptance if in tune with the political zeitgeist (which, of course, is the argument now used by the retreating environmentalists, who explain the successes of behavioral genetics with a swing toward conservatism). It also shows the ease with which valid science, if it appears to challenge the political temper, can be ignored or buried. The most flagrant example of this occurred in Soviet Russia, the country to which most progressives in the 1930s were looking for leadership in advanced social thinking. During the first decades of the century, Russian science had produced a number of the world’s finest geneticists. Their promising research was brought to an abrupt halt, however, by the rise to party favor of T. D. Lysenko, a biologist who subscribed to Lamarckism (the opposing theory to Darwin’s), which held that acquired traits could be inherited. (Giraffes have long necks because of generations of straining for upper branches, and so on.) Not only did this deny Darwin’s natural selection as the evolutionary engine, but it was also incompatible with Mendel’s theory of genetics.
Rather than take on the Mendelians with scientific argument, Lysenko adopted the more effective strategy of political banishment. He branded his opponents idealists and obstructers of the revolution. Even worse, the Mendelian system they espoused—self-copying genes and random mutations—worked against the Party’s plan to control and change nature, in particular, human nature. Once Lysenko had convinced Stalin that Mendelian genetics threatened communist ideology, the science was virtually outlawed in Russia. Russian geneticists who had worked for years with experiments that refined and illuminated Mendel’s laws were not merely bullied into silence like American hereditarians during the same period, they were either forced to leave the country or were tried and imprisoned.
Lysenko and his politically correct, but bogus, theories survived Stalin’s death and maintained an iron grip on Russian science for three decades. He was finally brought down, but only when agricultural dictums he imposed on Russian farmers led to the crop failures of 1964. It is widely believed that Lysenko’s disgrace contributed to the fall of Nikita Khrushchev, who supported his theories. With Lysenko gone, Mendelian genetics returned to Russia, and Lysenko’s work is now totally discredited by Russian scientists. The sorry tale of his rise and fall stands as a grim warning about the politicizing of science.
AMERICA’S ENVIRONMENTALLY ORIENTED social scientists did not need the mailed fist of a Stalin to triumph over their opponents. With such forceful intellects as Boas, Kroeber, Mead, Benedict, Watson, and Skinner fighting their cause, they sailed to victory, greatly aided by the political winds at their rear. Heady with success, they made ever wilder claims f
or the environment’s molding power over humans—and made ever more disdainful dismissals of genetic contributions. As with many who announce new concepts about human behavior, the innovators, emboldened by the cordial reception their insights received, leap from moderate positions of partial environmental influence to sweeping pronouncements of total governance. And if the founders themselves didn’t raise the stakes in this way, their disciples were sure to do it for them.
This dynamic held true for the theories of Freud, Boas, and Watson. In the latter case, Watson did the escalating himself. While Watson’s writings continued to acknowledge inherited traits, his euphoria at having unlocked the secrets of human behavior moved him to make the now famous statement: “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocation, and race of his ancestors.”
To make model humans, Watson, in effect, needed nothing from genetic endowment. All he needed was an individual who was “well formed”; he could do the rest. If this sounds like Henry Higgins run amok, it should be remembered that Watson was no isolated visionary but the leading psychologist of his day, one who had reversed the course of American psychology as laid out by William James along Darwinian lines of inherited instincts. Watson’s theories, with an assist from B. F. Skinner and others, became the reigning orthodoxy in America on human behavior and remained so for many years.
The three dominant themes on behavior for a good part of the century were Freudianism, which said aberrant behavior was produced in the childhood environment; Boasism, which said behavior was produced by the cultural environment; and behaviorism, which said behavior resulted from environmental conditioning and learning. All were united in enthroning the environment as the determinant of human behavior and in relegating biological inheritance to insignificance. This three-pronged environmentalism was the accepted wisdom that was taught in all universities and that informed serious writing on human behavior—social problems, psychological problems, mental illness—or normal child development. Professor Higgins may have run amok, but he had also taken over—and remained in control until only recently.
THIRTEEN
SHORT AND HAPPY LIFE OF THE TABULA RASA
THROUGHOUT THE DECADES of environmentalism’s rule, the biological view of human nature survived, but its adherents were either driven into silence or they changed the subject. The few who persisted in airing theories about “instincts”—or any other term for inherited behavior—were all but ignored, or considered too fringe for polite society. Shortly after the end of World War II, this group made what may have been a stab at a comeback. In September 1946 a conference entitled “Genetics and Social Behavior” was organized in Bar Harbor, Maine. In the context of the day’s intellectual certainties, that was akin to holding a conference today on the scientific applications of astrology.
Knowing the unpopularity of their views, the participants were perhaps emboldened by the respectability that the biological perspective of behavior still enjoyed in Europe, where behaviorism, like Freudianism, never achieved the supremacy it enjoyed in America. The Watson/Skinner doctrine had such a tight grip in the U.S. that the Maine conference proved no threat to its monopoly on psychological wisdom. Historically, the meeting’s significance is not that it launched an opposition movement but rather that it offered a rare glimpse of the day’s handful of social scientists who rejected the dictates of behaviorism and cultural determinism.
The first counterdevelopment arrived during the 1950s, when word came from Europe of intriguing animal-behavior studies, most particularly those of Oxford’s Nikolaus Timbergen and German ethologist Konrad Lorenz. All of their research—which emphasized mating patterns, pecking orders, territoriality—offered fascinating information on the complexities of animal behavior but always with obvious parallels to human behavior. At the same time that these new ideas were intriguing European circles, the discovery in 1953 by another Watson, James, and his Oxford colleague Francis Crick of DNA’s double-helix structure opened the door to vast new areas of genetic research. It would, however, be another twenty years before the scientific world gave broad consideration to the link between Crick and Watson’s twisted-ladder molecule and human behavior. And today, forty-six years later, there are still scientists who deny the connection.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the animal-behavior studies of the European ethologists were quietly, almost surreptitiously, advancing the notion of biological underpinnings to human actions and social arrangements that had long been thought cultural. Although the authors avoided talk of humans and stuck to safe, neutral species, the relevance to humans jumped from every page and launched the slow, massive shift in how we thought about ourselves. It should be pointed out that the ethologists owe a portion of their success to an interest in their work from the enemy camp, prominent members of the environmental and cultural-determinist school. Some leaders of this school, such as anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, were rethinking their strict environmentalism and, in an admirably ecumenical sense, reopened the door to alternative explanations of human behavior that they had been instrumental in closing.
One reason for their open-mindedness was the setbacks of the behaviorist school. Among the group’s “proofs” that behavior was learned rather than innate were experiments that had altered animal behavior by a series of rewards and punishments. The mere act of changing an animal’s behavior was taken as hard evidence there was nothing innate in it. To the dismay of the Watson/Skinner group, it was found that in the months following the experiments the reeducated animals invariably returned to the behavior they had been conditioned to abandon. The wholesale backsliding on the part of stubborn rats and mice had upsetting implications for the no-instinct, blank-slate crowd, who could not easily explain the animals’ recidivism as nostalgia for tradition. Although some behaviorists were willing to grant instinct to animals but denied instinct in the human, Watson and his followers had claimed that for animals as well as humans, instinct was of no importance; learning was everything. But if that were true, what made the animals revert to their old patterns?
One of the strongest blows to beleaguered behaviorism came in experiments with rhesus monkeys conducted by Harry Harlow of the University of Wisconsin that were reported to the American Psychological Association in 1958. Harlow’s experiments involved infant monkeys that were offered two alternative “mothers,” both of which Harlow had constructed. One mother was a wire contraption that dispensed milk; the other was a cuddly monkey made of terry cloth that had no milk, only softness. Despite the tasty reward from the wire mother and the lack of one from the cuddly mother, the baby monkeys all clung to the terry-cloth mother.
The infant monkeys’ choice was bad news indeed for the behaviorists in that it demonstrated clearly that punishment and reward were not the whole story, as Skinner and Watson claimed for both animals and humans. Something else was clearly going on within the monkeys, in this case it appeared, an innate preference for warm and cuddly. It also carried a relatively new message that the “something” built into the baby monkeys was not just a sweeping trait like ranking-order or territoriality but a trait as specific as a predilection for a particular physical form—which, incidentally, few humans could deny having in another context. Once again monkeys had made monkeys of the behavioral theorists. (Harlow’s discovery might also suggest something about human children’s affinity for teddy bears and other furry toys.)
Like most American psychologists who experimented with animals, Harlow worked with monkeys that had been reared in captivity. The European ethologists, on the other hand, studied animals in their natural habitat. This would become an important difference. Eighty years after Darwin, humans were still having difficulty with the concept that they were just another animal,
that they shared behavioral patterns with rats and mice. The monkeys’ artificial existence in laboratories was seized on by the resisters as a face-saving explanation. These lab creatures, after all, were reared in a totally artificial environment and may have been made more human by prolonged human contact. Differences from their free-roaming cousins had, in fact, been noted. We could shrug off any relevance to human behavior of these laboratory hybrids, who were clearly the Uncle Toms of their species, faking human traits and otherwise playing along to please their human masters.
The excuse was short-lived. When animals in the wild were also found to behave and organize themselves in complex ways—regardless of contact with each other and with all but no contact with humans—a conclusion of built-in behavior mechanisms became unavoidable. Lorenz and Timbergen worked with creatures like bees and geese that were relatively easy to observe in unmolested states, but their research led to more ambitious ethological studies, such as Jane Goodall’s years in the wild with chimpanzees and Dian Fossey’s with gorillas. All of the fieldwork left no doubt about the instinctive nature of animal behavior and social organization, some of it highly complex—and strikingly, tellingly, poignantly close to our own.
IN 1961 a curious and remarkable book burst upon the American consciousness. It was titled African Genesis, and it was written by a playwright and screenwriter named Robert Ardrey, who had become fascinated by the paleontological research then in progress on man’s African origins. Abandoning Broadway and Hollywood in 1956, Ardrey went to Africa and set out to educate himself in this science. The book that resulted five years later provided an overview of all the animal-behavior research that had been progressing quietly for the preceding twenty years, particularly that which focused on territoriality and social hierarchies. Ardrey emphasized that within species after species a powerful aggressiveness was an instinctive part of a territory-status-sex “bundle of instincts.” The ethological and zoological groundwork led him to his main thesis: Humans are a product of this possessive-combative lineage, that we are descended from killer apes from whom we have inherited strongly aggressive, even homicidal inclinations.
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