Recently I read a article by Martin Gardner that drew on the scholarship of an anthropologist who claims that cannibalism tales are basically one of those cultural universals that get projected to the “Other.” In other words, anthropologists rarely document genuine cannibalism, but only reccount what others have told them. As Gardner wrote the article for The Skeptical Inquirer, his piece was offered in that spirit. I tend to think that the human mind, with its many modules and “under the hood” processes is fully capable of stumbling upon a common cultural motif repeatedly because of some particular bias in our mental faculties, so I don’t totally discredit this opinion (mythologies tends to be filled with cannibalism, sometimes in a really bizarre way, as the Greek tale I recall where a man serves the gods human flesh out of his own caprice).
Nevertheless, we know that genetics proves that cannibalism is part of our common heritage. Right? Well, perhaps not. The evidence in question relays on the sniffing out of balancing selection, that is heterozygote advantage, on a particular gene. This paper (PDF) reviews the research and suggests more caution, and offers that a null hypothesis of neutrality can not be rejected offhand. We’ll see. The great thing of science is that it tends to march onward, even if haltingly on occassion.
Posted by razib at 01:54 AM