Neoteny and the Sense of the Natural

2006

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In his thoughtful article, “Human Diversity and Human Nature: The Life and Times of a False Dichotomy” Bradd Shore discusses the wrong-headedness of dividing concepts of human nature from concepts of human diversity (Shore 2000).  A complex issue that lies at the heart of anthropology, theorists have unnecessarily divided the idea about a universal human nature from the variety of human expressions in both thought and culture.  Shore hopes to illustrate the excluded middle between these two illusory poles by highlighting (among other things) the process of neoteny, an unusual aspect of human development.  But taking Shore’s line of argument and extending it outwards, one comes to find that neoteny lies at the heart of human ontology and can thus be used as a tool to understand the need for anthropology in general. 

Shore begins his article with a diachronic study of the ways in which thinkers have sought to reconcile similarity and difference between peoples.  In general, two competing schools of thought emerged regarding this question: monogenesis and polygenesis (Shore 2000). 

The first, monogenesis, found its basis in theological traditions which presumed that all humankind, because fashioned by God, shared a basic nature.  Using Judeo-Christian mythology as its primary tool, the seeming difference in peoples and their cultures could be attributed to first, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the subsequent spread of peoples from that point to all others and second, to the destruction of the Tower of Babel with the resultant diversity in human language from its original Hebrew to all other tongues.  The variety apparent in human cultures (a word not even in their discourse) could be attributed to God’s punishment and to climactic adaptation as people moved into diverse realms.  The monogenetic view held that all humans were ‘ensouled’ and thus possessed a similar, God-given unity in their basic nature.

Polygenesis, a subsequent school-of-thought and the competing viewpoint to monogenesis, held that the diversity apparent in humankind resulted from the fact that humans were differentially created.  The early forms of this argument utilized hierarchical ideas of ontology (such as the Great Chain of Being) to suggest that different types of people were created by God along a continuum from the more bestial to the more angelic.  Soame Jenyns, an eighteenth century English essayist, writes:

He (God) constantly unites the highest degree of the qualities of each inferior order to the lowest degree of the same qualities belonging to the order next above it; by which means, like the colours of a skillful painter, they are so blended together, and shaded off into each other, that no line of distinction is anywhere to be seen.  …it unites so closely with the lowest degree of that quality in man, that they cannot easily be distinguished from each other.  From this lowest degree in the brutal Hottentot, reason, with the assistance of learning and science, advances, through the various stages of human understanding, which rise about each other, till in a Bacon or a Newton it attains the summit. (cited in Lovejoy 1936, 197)

Not quite a racialist doctrine yet, the Great Chain of Being still held, in the eighteenth century, a primarily theological orientation which would have precluded making suppositions that ran too far afield from humankind’s genesis in Adam.  After all, Jenyns does not specifically say that the Hottentots are inferior in reason to all Englishmen (a truly racialist doctrine) but that Hottentots, compared to the specific Englishmen, Bacon and Newton, represent a lower order in reason (as does virtually everyone else British or not).  In a statement like Jenyns, one sees the very transition from this monogenetic viewpoint to the polygenetic one.  But to incite this rupture, a fundamental transformation in understanding was required: namely, an evolutionary one. 

With evolution polygenesis achieved a racialist basis.  Taking God and Judeo-Christian mythology out of the reasoning process, early evolutionists and philosophers could now theorize freely about the polygenetic foundations of human difference.  In the mind of even so great an anthropologist as Tylor:

Contemporary examples of ‘backwards’ peoples could be  understood as ‘survivals’ of earlier stages of cultural evolution, peoples whose evolutionary development was retarded, and who could be considered ‘primitive’ forms of human life.  Such ‘primitive people,’ in this view, provided us with a window on ourselves at an earlier times, living relics of our own evolutionary history. (Shore 2000, 90)

Thus did anthropology begin its passionate study of ‘primitive’ cultures, both as a study of peoples in and of themselves and as analogies for human evolutionary development. 

But thinkers such as Bastian opposed these racialist ideas, proposing instead a ‘psychic unity’ to humankind.  By this he meant that by evolution or other means all humans possessed the same mental equipment.  The presence of universal themes in the mythologies of the world proved to him that human beings were ontologically similar, in spite of their local and apparent differences. 

As the twentieth century began, and anthropology developed apace with it, debates about racial differences and psychic unity went underground.  Seeing, and generally disliking, the racialist ideas that had accompanied anthropology from the nineteenth century, 20^th century anthropologists affirmed both the equality and the diversity of all peoples in something akin to Bateson’s “double-bind.”  On the one hand, anthropologists did not want to affirm a simple psychic unity to all human cultures (a task taken up, instead, by biological reductionists) but on the other hand, if they overemphasized human diversity they might be seen as upholding the racialist differences that marred the early development of the discipline.  Such, then, was an underlying contradiction or irresolution throughout much of 20^th century anthropology. 

But thanks to visionary theorists such as Weston LaBarre, Ashley Montagu, and Stephen Jay Gould, as well as receptivity by the burgeoning field of cognitive anthropology, a peaceful compromise between similarity and difference came to be brokered—namely, the developmental concept of neoteny.  A peculiar aspect of both human phylogeny and ontogeny, neoteny (variously called heterochrony or pedomorphosis) is the retarded physiological development of the human organism.  As Gould puts it, the human being is essentially an “extrauterine embryo,” still growing and developing outside of the womb at staggering rates (Gould 1977, 361).  Neoteny may explain how the appearance and traits of man, despite coming from a genome that is ninety-nine percent similar to the chimpanzee’s, can so differ from his cousin ape.  While a concept like neoteny could only develop from biological theories, we can see it picked up in the farsighted work of anthropologists like Irving Hallowell and Weston LaBarre.  In “The Self in its Behavioral Environment” Hallowell writes:

…aspects of ontogenetic development in man are, of course, universal.  And, since human experience occurs in a social milieu, in the sense that intimate and continuing contacts with other human beings are the major sources which mediate the influences that mold the development of the child, the self has often been referred to as a ‘social product.’ (1955, 81)

And a year before Hallowell wrote this, the visionary anthropology Weston LaBarre discussed neoteny at length in his classic The Human Animal: “…’infantilization’—the extravagantly prolonged period of human dependency—is a still further kind of neoteny: one that is at the root of our peculiarly human nature.  It means that matured animal instincts are replaced in man by learning and socialization” (LaBarre 1954, 304).  So even though the concept of neoteny failed to be integrated in anthropology more generally, it was applied and developed by some of the best minds in 20^th century anthropology.

Of central importance to this model is the human brain.  The most distinctive aspect of the human organism—as well as the engine for culture—the infant’s brain is astonishingly premature at birth.  Our closest relative, the chimpanzee, has finished about forty-one percent of its brain growth by birth.  By comparison, a newborn’s brain possesses only twenty-three percent of its final mass.  And the critical myelination necessary for long nerve fibers to communicate effectively continues well into early childhood (Gould 1977, 372).  Neoteny allows us the largest brains possible while keeping the size of a woman’s hips tolerably wide and the shape of her pelvis reasonably efficient.  As a smaller newborn, the maximally spherical head of the human neonate can barely fit through the mother’s hips.  Compared to other mammals, human birth seems egregiously difficult and dangerous.  As an evolutionary compromise, then, the viable width of a female human’s has been maximized but still remains too narrow to birth a more fully developed neonate brain.  The result, then, is a phenomenally immature organism which requires many years of protection and care before it has approached sexual maturity.  Furthermore, since genes (especially developmental sequences) must be activated in relation to other genes, the entire process of development must be retarded if one complex organ (i.e. the brain) is to be developmentally decelerated.  The result, a juvenalized ape that seems a lanky prepubescent in contrast to its cousin gorillas needed to increasingly rely on its enhanced mental capacities (and properties) over and against physical prowess.  The biologist, Louis Bolk, conveys this in a provocative way, “If I wished to express the basic principle of my ideas in a somewhat strongly worded sentence, I would say that man, in his bodily development, is a primate fetus that has become sexually mature” (cited in Gould 1977, 369).  But of especial importance to the anthropologists is that this developmental model made humans out to be a creature whose physical being necessarily relied upon its cultural being, its adaptive educability.  Montagu states this forecefully in Growing Young: “No other species is comparable to the human in its ability to acquire new behavior patterns and discard old ones in consequence of training.  To repeat what has already been stated, considered socially as well as biologically, the outstanding capacity of humankind is its educability.”  In short, the ontology of human existence blends physical necessities with cultural realities.

In this model, LaBarre, Montagu, Gould, and Shore present a resolution to the unnecessary division between human nature and human variety.  For the consequences of neoteny illustrate that mental development occurs within the context of culture.  Just as the various sensory systems of the human brain must develop within certain critical periods in order to wire themselves appropriately, so do more recursive processes—like language and social development—depend upon the human ecology within which the human develops.  Though exceptions are thankfully rare, a few tragic cases exist to illustrate that without the complex stimuli of human culture, children miss critical stages of development and seem precluded from becoming ‘normal’ human beings (Pinker 1994).  That is, human brains do not possess the requisite ‘instincts’ to develop on their own; rather, they must encounter the specific stimuli present within a human community in order to develop appropriately.

How, then, does neoteny resolve the debate about human similarity and difference that the theories of monogenesis and polygenesis formerly contested?  By illustrating a universal developmental process unique to the human species, neoteny proves that humankind—always and everywhere—develops within the confines of culture.  Culture, because it is based in the body (which LaBarre quips as a “…reliably cross-cultural phenomena”), emerges wherever there are humans; it is an ontological fact of human being.  The prolonged ‘extrauterine’ development that the human brain requires, proceeds through important stages of growth bathed (as it were) in the rich stimuli of human culture.  As such, its mental capacities and identity take on the particular character of the culture into which it is born and become ‘wired’ for this culture, specializing in its phonemes, for instance, while generally losing the ability to generate most others.

Of great importance in such a model is the ‘exchangeability’ of human infants.  In other words, an infant born in London to Anglo-Saxons but raised exclusively in New Guinea (say by the Ilahita Arapesh) will end up speaking the language, ‘thinking’ the thoughts, and embodying the character of the Ilahita.  Neither British ‘instincts’ nor affectations would be observed in such a child.  The apparent variety, then, of human cultures derives not from any biological ‘programming’ (as the racialist polygenists would have it) but from the contingent responses of human organisms to their social ecologies and environmental niches.  Within such a model there is ample room for individual difference, so that, for instance, the Bacons and Newtons that Jenyns referred to above can always be expected to show up in each generation to illustrate how people with stratospheric IQs, or linguistic aptitudes, or athletic/physical abilities may put the rest of us to shame.  But, for any such individual abilities to take root and flourish, far more basic (and universal) stages of development must take place.  These processes, common to the human endeavor since the first humans strolled out of Africa and began to people the planet, remain physiologically necessary whether one is born in America or Amazonia, and allow the individual to take on the cultural particularities of its caregivers.

While the developmental process of neoteny can reconcile human similarity with human diversity, it may also explain the irreconcilability of difference and ‘the sense of the natural.’  That is, because as human organisms we develop within a particular culture and language, we possess from our earliest years a sense of what is ‘natural’ (which, ironically is the doxic).  When we encounter cultures, languages, and physical appearances that significantly diverge from our own we find them to be uncanny.  Were this not the case, it is doubtful whether such a debate as that between monogenesis and polygenesis could ever emerge.  In fact, the need for theory emerges from the fact that, for all our similarities, we do perceive differences between cultures.  And the difference we perceive derives not from an innate tendency to divide human ‘types’ (after all, we have more skin color variation, height and weight differences, hair colors, etc. within many populations than between populations) but from a culturally-mediated sense of what is ‘natural’ (our language, the way we think, the way we act, the way we sing).  So, in the ultimate irony, it is due to our universally standard developmental retardation sequence (neoteny) with its recursively developed creation of culture that human differences can be perceived.  Unlike the dog, we do not identify the ‘other’ to be of our own kind through smell; rather, from a panoply of gestures, vocalizations, and other contingent signs do we call the person human (consider the number of tribal self-identifications which ‘translate’ to mean ‘the people’).  Ethnocentrism, which seems to be as universal a trait as any, is an epiphenomenon of a process which physiologically identifies us as a species.

The startling differences we perceive when our native cultural environments are disrupted by outsiders arouses the need to theorize about difference.  Hegel phrased this eloquently when he wrote, ““Dichotomy is the source of the need for philosophy” (Hegel 1977, 89).  It is no surprise, then, that we encounter the most prolific periods of theorizing whenever our communities are overrun with cultural diversity.  The ancient Greeks, a trading people foremost, were known for their marketplace philosophers.  Traditional norms and ways of thought, challenged by the existence of diverse responses to existential questions and social organization, led to a need to theorize about difference and seek a higher level order above the apparent diversity.  From such intellectual responses, anthropology eventually came onto the scene.  By studying cultural difference and rendering it intelligible to the student’s culture, anthropology seeks to placate the disruption caused by such difference.  And with a theory such a neoteny, anthropology may finally be on the right track towards a higher order which intersects both physiological and cultural realities and proves an underlying similarity of process beneath all the appearance of human diversity.

References

Gould, S.

1977  Ontogeny and Phylogeny.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hallowell, A. Irving 

1955  "The self in its behavioral environment."  In Culture and experience, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hegel, G. 

1977  The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy.  Trans. H.S Harris and Walter Cerf. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

LaBarre, W.

1954  The Human Animal.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lovejoy, A. 

1936  The Great Chain of Being.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Montagu,  A. 

1989  Growing Young, 2^nd edition.  Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey.

Pinker, S. 

1994  The Language Instinct.  New York: William Morrow.

Shore, B.

2000  "Human diversity and human nature: the life and times of a false dichotomy."  In N. Roughley, ed., Being Humans.  New York: Walter de Gruyter.