Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire–Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do by Alan S. Miller, Satoshi Kanazawa
Authors: Alan S. Miller, Satoshi Kanazawa
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(to fight predators and catch prey) or clothing and shelter (to protect us from extreme cold). We donât need fangs or fur, because we have culture. And just likeâdespite some minor individual differencesâall tigers have more or less the same fangs and all polar bears have more or less the same fur, all human societies have more or less the same culture. Fangs are a universal trait of all tigers; fur is a universal trait of all polar bears; so culture is a universal trait of all human societies. Yes, culture is a cultural universal.
Three Examples of Exotic Culture That Never Was
The recent (and somewhat shameful) history of the social sciences is very instructive in this respect. It shows that every time there was news of a discovery of a new, exotic culture in a remote region of the world, completely different from the Western European culture, it turns out that the discovery was a hoax. Every time, it turns out that there are no human cultures that are radically and completely different from other cultures. Weâll share three such examples.
Margaret Mead and the Samoa 16
In 1923, Margaret Mead (1901â1978), one of the most celebrated anthropologists of all time, was an anthropology graduate student of Franz Boas at Columbia University. Boas was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, and was therefore politically and personally motivated to prove wrong the Nazi policy of eugenics. While this is an admirable goal in and of itself, Boas unfortunately chose the wrong tactics to achieve it. He wanted to show that biology had nothing to do with how humans behave, and that environmentâcultureâdetermines human behavior entirely. He was a strong proponent of cultural determinism.
In order to demonstrate that culture and socialization determine human behavior in its entirety, Boas gave his graduate students (including Mead) the impossible task of finding a human culture radically different from the Western culture, where people behave completely differently from Americans and Europeans. Margaret Mead was sent to Samoa with this mandate from Boas.
On August 31, 1925, Mead arrived in American Samoa to conduct her research. She was to spend six months doing her field work. Unbeknownst to Boas, however, Mead was involved in another, secret research project, and spent almost all of her time in Samoa doing this other work. She was to leave Samoa in a month, and she had not done any of the fieldwork for Boas on the topic of cultural and behavioral variability to find evidence that Samoan behavior was completely different from American behavior. She decided to finish this work quickly by interviewing two young local women about the sexual behavior of adolescents in Samoa on March 13, 1926.
Mead knew that in the United States and the rest of the Western world, boys were sexually aggressive and actively pursued girls, while girls were sexually coy and waited to be asked out on dates by boys. âHow different are things in Samoa? How are Samoan boys and girls when it comes to sex?â Mead asked her two young female informants, Faâapuaâa Faâamu and Fofoa Poumele.
Faâapuaâa and Fofoa, just like young women everywhere, were quite embarrassed to talk about sex to a total stranger. So they decided to make a big joke about it out of sheer embarrassment. They told Mead the opposite of how things were in Samoa. They told her that boys were quite shy, and girls actively pursued boys sexually. It was a hoax, but in the minds of Faâapuaâa and Fofoa, the story that they were telling Mead was so outrageous and so obviously untrue that they couldnât believe anyone in her right mind would believe them.
Except that Mead did, for this was exactly the type of âevidenceâ that Boas had sent her to Samoa to gather. Here now was evidence that sexual behavior of adolescents could be completely different from (nay, the opposite of) how it is in the United States. So culture
Three Examples of Exotic Culture That Never Was
The recent (and somewhat shameful) history of the social sciences is very instructive in this respect. It shows that every time there was news of a discovery of a new, exotic culture in a remote region of the world, completely different from the Western European culture, it turns out that the discovery was a hoax. Every time, it turns out that there are no human cultures that are radically and completely different from other cultures. Weâll share three such examples.
Margaret Mead and the Samoa 16
In 1923, Margaret Mead (1901â1978), one of the most celebrated anthropologists of all time, was an anthropology graduate student of Franz Boas at Columbia University. Boas was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, and was therefore politically and personally motivated to prove wrong the Nazi policy of eugenics. While this is an admirable goal in and of itself, Boas unfortunately chose the wrong tactics to achieve it. He wanted to show that biology had nothing to do with how humans behave, and that environmentâcultureâdetermines human behavior entirely. He was a strong proponent of cultural determinism.
In order to demonstrate that culture and socialization determine human behavior in its entirety, Boas gave his graduate students (including Mead) the impossible task of finding a human culture radically different from the Western culture, where people behave completely differently from Americans and Europeans. Margaret Mead was sent to Samoa with this mandate from Boas.
On August 31, 1925, Mead arrived in American Samoa to conduct her research. She was to spend six months doing her field work. Unbeknownst to Boas, however, Mead was involved in another, secret research project, and spent almost all of her time in Samoa doing this other work. She was to leave Samoa in a month, and she had not done any of the fieldwork for Boas on the topic of cultural and behavioral variability to find evidence that Samoan behavior was completely different from American behavior. She decided to finish this work quickly by interviewing two young local women about the sexual behavior of adolescents in Samoa on March 13, 1926.
Mead knew that in the United States and the rest of the Western world, boys were sexually aggressive and actively pursued girls, while girls were sexually coy and waited to be asked out on dates by boys. âHow different are things in Samoa? How are Samoan boys and girls when it comes to sex?â Mead asked her two young female informants, Faâapuaâa Faâamu and Fofoa Poumele.
Faâapuaâa and Fofoa, just like young women everywhere, were quite embarrassed to talk about sex to a total stranger. So they decided to make a big joke about it out of sheer embarrassment. They told Mead the opposite of how things were in Samoa. They told her that boys were quite shy, and girls actively pursued boys sexually. It was a hoax, but in the minds of Faâapuaâa and Fofoa, the story that they were telling Mead was so outrageous and so obviously untrue that they couldnât believe anyone in her right mind would believe them.
Except that Mead did, for this was exactly the type of âevidenceâ that Boas had sent her to Samoa to gather. Here now was evidence that sexual behavior of adolescents could be completely different from (nay, the opposite of) how it is in the United States. So culture
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