Computer problems prevented my normal blog posting. It was difficult to find a topic as well. The news, and the reported reactions to that news, fit better into a satirical sketch than journalism, even as practiced by Fox News.

1. Since when is it acceptable to carry loaded automatic weapons to a US President's speaking engagement? Or wave signs calling for his, his wife's, and his two children's assassination?

2. The Scottish legal code allows release of a prisoner on compassionate grounds when the prisoner is dying. The law applies to all - or at least should. What business is this of Obama's? Or Gordon Brown's?

3. Bankers eat humble pie? Not when they're back to champagne bonuses. Billions to bail out banks, but we can no longer afford social programs.

Jon Stewart gives the only satisfactory response to the daily headlines and I'm going to leave him to it.

I shall return to my anthropological roots. Nature versus Nurture: which maketh the man? (Embracing woman of course - an old anthro joke...) (Of course I realize how important linguistic sensitivity is... and approve... but I always liked the joke. I think it's a Malinowski quote defining anthropology as the study of man embracing woman...)

My husband, with some irritation, sums the whole thing up: there's no such thing as a split between nature and nurture. From the beginning, the fertilized egg develops in response to the environment within the womb, the nest, the water and those conditions interacting with DNA result in the actual individual. DNA always develops within an environment, not a vacuum. This environment can be optimal, adequate or inadequate in terms of what the unfolding DNA is programmed to expect, with consequences to the development of the organism in question.

So this is one of the non-questions people waste much time on. I intend to waste some time on it myself so shall ignore the non-problematic nature of the beast. I shall pursue the question where it leads - always an interesting way of writing although I admit it doesn’t result in the best reading material. So: Nature v Nurture and detours, many many detours.

Standard wisdom when I took introductory anthropology was that human beings shared a biological inheritance; we don't really understand how much behavior is due to biology, but, for the present, we can ignore it.  We see a world of tremendous diversity: what brings about the diversity? What elements seem to go together? How does history and the past enter into it? What about cultural borrowing? This particular approach produced great ethnographies.

Metaphorically speaking, it was nature avoiding nurture. A people or group were treated as an entity; social organization and culture were treated as systems and internal relationships between elements were examined. I think everyone concerned recognized that it was a kind of fiction but it was a very productive fiction; if what we studied was 'nature' the studying was subject to the dictates of ‘anthropological nurture’. This was influenced by 'salvage anthropology'. These groups, these peoples, were disappearing - find out and document practices now before they're gone. This sometimes resulted in the ethnographer talking to the elders who repeated the stories their grandfathers told them about life in the olden times. Among Native American groups, particularly, you were never quite sure when the ethnographic present actually was.

Our tribal elders were themselves well aware of problems in their representation and methodology. They sometimes referred to them. Evans-Pritchard, for example, wrote a companion volume to The Nuer called The Nuer Speak. He said that he viewed the Nuer through his own culturally induced myopia and it would be useful to see how they represented themselves. He taped a sample of Nuer talking about their own society and explaining it. He transcribed it. He also said that he omitted an important section of Nuer society - women - because as a male he didn't have access to them and he expected they would give very different narratives.

(I get pissed off at people that lack respect for the elders. especially those that haven't read them.)

Back to Nature and Nurture. There's social darwinism. Vulgar social darwinism consists of those doing very well indeed assuming it is because they are more fit, more capable than the rest and deserve their exalted positions. Natural selection! It selected them! There is more to it than that; it shades into a kind of evolutionary determinism, where societies which exhibit some behaviors are more successful than those that don't. A kind of natural selection, parallel to that proposed by Darwin, occurs at the level of societies rather than individuals.

At the level of the individual, it works fairly obviously. Variation between individuals results in some individuals being more successful in reproducing than others. It the variation is genetically based, the trait becomes more prominent in the population ultimately resulting in the development of different species.

Natural selection always occurs within a context. Pity the poor kiwi. It evolved most successfully in New Zealand until the introduction of dogs and cats. The consequences of context and natural selection are probably most obvious looking at non-natural selection. Let us observe the dairy cow.  Or the honey bee. Or the dog. Or the rose. They spread the earth. Very successful.  Natural selection in these instances consists of human beings breeding for certain traits. How well the most successful of these would be in a world without humans is answered easily: not very. (The roses might be OK; the french bulldogs wouldn't have a second generation.)

The questions we can ask about social groups are similar to those about species. How do we explain increasing complexity through time and the enormous diversity of social and cultural organization between groups? Thus far, parallel to the questions Darwin asked. But where’s the parallel to natural selection?

In a social group, what's the equivalent of impregnating more women? Seizing the lands of another group?  The Zulu age grades were militarily successful; so were Middle Eastern acephalic clans. The Romans, the Turks, the Chinese, the British, the Americans all had empires. They didn’t have a lot in common. Empires come and go but, unlike a successful species. do not remain.

Another difference: there's nothing to prevent a less successful group from adopting traits demonstrated by a more successful group. Technology spreads quickly. What's not adopted is more interesting. When I worked in Pakistan, educated Pakistanis tended to see the difference between the West and East as purely technological - you got the power because you got the guns. Americans, on the other hand, found this attitude irritating. We got the guns because we've got free speech, a more equalitarian society, mass education and advancement based on merit.

There is something to be said for both points of view. I shall not pursue this - except to say that both Americans and Pakistanis thought as privileged individuals they thoroughly deserved what they had and were, for the most part, suspicious of sharing. Neither were Levellers. I myself probably find the Levellers offered the most appealing of political agendas. As a political agenda, it was a non-starter. On the other hand, a certain Leveller mentality is fairly prominent in both Islam and Christianity. Another thing not to pursue.

Back to biology: what's universal in human societies? Societies continuing through time are (or can be defined as) successful. What traits do they share in organizing their societies? Not a lot, actually.

All societies have a division of labour based on age and sex. Sex refers to biology; gender refers to the social construction based on biology. So gender roles are universal. Presumably, any society which ignored age and sex in their working would be unsuccessful and die out. Age is obvious; expecting a three year old to get on with survival would result in a dearth of four year olds. Among the old, strength fades but skills remain. So a society where the elderly were supported and passed on their skills and did light work would probably be more successful than one where gran is driven from the campfire. (This all depends on a surplus. In times of great scarcity, the old are expected to do the decent thing and wander off on their own.)

Traditional organization of London Dockers seems a modern demonstration of this at more than the level of the family. London dockers acted as independent work gangs, usually based on kinship or close friendship. Young men came into the group and didn't have the necessary skills to successfully unload cargo. The older members of the group had the skills but not the strength. Mature, adult males did the greater part of the actual work: carry the young while they learn, as you were carried; carry the old when they get more feeble. They were once strong men and carried you; you owe them. They're organized around extended kinship and friendship because that's the way long term reciprocity is best guaranteed.

Let's look a moment at gender. Gender prescribed (and proscribed) behavior is universal. Once you leave the fact of gender roles and look at the implementation, it seems there are a very large number of actual ways of behaving that are equally satisfactory in leading to a successful society. Women, in general, are 90% the size of men (except among those of East Asian descent.) Male roles, in general, involve heavy labour and dangerous work when examining most hunter and gatherer groups. But if you look at developments among horticultural, agricultural and industrial groups, the tie is broken. Female sweepers in India do a number of dangerous jobs that involve heavy labour. Trade, involving travel, on the West Coast of Africa was traditionally a women's work. What does seem to remain constant is the necessity for both male and female skills. Reciprocity again. A farmer needs a wife.

What seems to me remarkable about looking at human beings organized into groups is how many ways there are to do the same thing successfully. Social groups make the biological imperatives of being an animal easier to satisfy: food and reproduction.

There are a lot of ways of improving one's chance of having enough to eat - you could settle down. In the great  river valleys, like the Nile, where the river floods every year and renews the soil  and plant crops. That works well. Or you can practice slash and burn agriculture, leaving exhausted lands for new ones. Or you can decide to have herds rather than crops and move around. Or you continue hunting and gathering but always stick a bit of the sweet potato vine back in the ground so it grows again next year. Or you can rape and pillage. Or you can have a constant, stable population  and  not need to increase food supply. Or you have agribusiness where most of the population buys food rather than produce it. These are all ways of balancing a population and its resources and many have been tried, often in combination. Reproduction, too, has a number of successful socially dictated ways of  proceeding.

In the long term, some of these are more successful than others; in the long term, I have some doubts about how successful capitalism and romantic love - both recent innovations  - will be. (Can they maintain themselves? Not proven.)

What does seem clear, to me at least, is that evolution and natural selection, individual or social, does not result in the best of all possible worlds. At best, it results in a possible world.

Return to Social Darwinism and recent headlines: denying medical care and social services to the poor does not result in the less fit out-breeding those we should encourage to breed. Holding elections in Afghanistan will not turn Kabul into Kansas City. (Science has few, if any, Neo Social Darwinians. The political classes have a number of them.)

Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut offers the best long term prediction for the human species. In Galapagos, he traces the evolution of the human species into seal like creatures with small brains who are happy as can be. Big brained humans are an unsuccessful evolutionary dead end. He makes a good, plausible case for his human evolution, accommodating nature, nurture and natural selection (including genetic drift and the bottle neck effect). If I were still an anthropologist, I'd put on the reading list.