The Nekked Ape

I've been reading S.J. Gould's Mismeasure of Man for the first time since I got it 16 years ago. It's a much more straightforward read than I expected.

Chapter Four, subtitled "The Apishness of Undesirables," is about Kuhnian normal-science efforts to demonstrate the similarity of women and non-Caucasian races to apes. The basic premise of such arguments is, the more apelike characters a subject has, the more primitive it is. The first 70 years of such efforts occurred under the paradigm of "recapitulation," wherein the biological development of an individual was supposed to involve passage through all of the evolutionary forms that gave rise to the individual's species. This is nonsense, of course — since evolution can do more with more-evolutionarily-pliable material, specialized forms tend to arise from generalized forms. Unsurprisingly, generalized forms tend to resemble one another.

After the collapse of recapitulation, there was a Kuhnian paradigm shift to "neoteny," wherein part of evolutionary (populational) change is accomplished not by adding new parts but by changing their rate of development in individuals such that adult members of a given species retain juvenile characteristics lost during development by adults of an ancestral species. With respect to humans, neoteny manifests in certain shared characteristics of adult H. sapiens and juvenile pongids. So, the less neotonous the population, the more "apish" it is and, therefore, "lower." Thus, the exactly opposite reasoning used in "recapitulation" was employed to maintain the same conclusion.

The point of all of this is that "objective" science is in fact stongly influenced by social practices and beliefs. (Yes, I know – big deal. Old news. But bear with me.) In the Introduction, Gould quotes Gunnar Myrdal:

A handful of social and biological scientists over the last 50 years have gradually forced informed people to give up some of the more blatant of our biological errors. But there must still be other countless errors of the same sort that no living man can yet detect, because of the fog within which our type of Western culture envelopes us.

These two ideas – apishness of "lower" populations and cultural blindness to bias – seem to bear somewhat on the rhetoric of universal human rights. That which is levelled at countries whose governments violate EuroAmerican norms of human rights often tends to impugn their evolutionary condition: use of terms like barbaric, uncivilized, savage come immediately to mind. [N.B. The raison d'être of this blog is my desire to muse about things in public. I am not writing research papers here. I point this out because I don't know if I would find further support for my idea in, say, Bush's "War on Terror" rhetoric, if I looked.] I'm not saying we compare them to apes (especially since the contemporary model of ape society emphasizes individual relationships), but that we use a similar rhetorical device. But because it's a non-scientific subject, it can't be scientifically refuted. That is, the same rhetorical device, when used to frame dissimilar aspects of humanity, survives in one arena (social/political) its refutation in another arena (scientific). Gould even offers several examples showing the continued use of "apish" reasoning among scientists, despite its having been repudiated. And because human rights are not a biological character, it does not occur to us that we are employing a rhetorical strategy to make social and political arguments, similar to one once accepted as biological fact in support of racism (and sexism). This is the cultural bias. At least with the racial arguments, they thought they were working with material facts. The same strategy in human-rights disputes is merely argument by insult. (Again, no big surprise. But what inspired this posting was the connections, not the conclusions.)

(The title of this post refers in part to the difference between 'naked' and 'nekked': 'naked' is when you just don't have any clothes on. 'Nekked' is when you don't have any clothes on and you're up to something.)