Virpi Lummaa’s group has another paper, Offspring fertility and grandchild survival enhanced by maternal grandmothers in a pre-industrial human society:

Help is directed towards kin in many cooperative species, but its nature and intensity can vary by context. Humans are one of few species in which grandmothers invest in grandchildren, and this may have served as an important driver of our unusual life history. But helping behaviour is hardly uniform, and insight into the importance of grandmothering in human evolution depends on understanding the contextual expression of helping benefits. Here, we use an eighteenth-nineteenth century pre-industrial genealogical dataset from Finland to investigate whether maternal or paternal grandmother presence (lineage relative to focal individuals) differentially affects two key fitness outcomes of descendants: fertility and survival. We found grandmother presence shortened spacing between births, particularly at younger mother ages and earlier birth orders. Maternal grandmother presence increased the likelihood of focal grandchild survival, regardless of whether grandmothers had grandchildren only through daughters, sons, or both. In contrast, paternal grandmother presence was not associated with descendants’ fertility or survival. We discuss these results in terms of current hypotheses for lineage differences in helping outcomes.

The basic finding is that in Finland maternal grandmothers increase the fitness of their grandchildren. This is a big finding in Lummaa’s work but in the discussion this paper notes in other cultures a paternal grandmother effect may be operative. So how general is this result? Do we believe in the maternal grandmother effect?

Also, despite the possibility of a maternal grandmother effect, societies in the last 5,000 years seem to have shifted to strong patrilocality and patrilineality. Is this a multi-level selection problem? Basically, inter-group competition between groups hash out so that patrilineality wins on that scale, but within the groups, maternal grandmothers are more important?

Alice Dreger has a remembrance of Napoleon Chagnon in The Chronicle Review. This part jumped out at me:

The reason he was willing to work with me for over a year was not because he had a big ego — which he did. It was because he knew the “closest approximation to the truth” would exonerate him. He knew that Tierney had misrepresented so much.

…

The chair of the AAA task force knew it too. That was Jane Hill, former president of the AAA. During my research, Sarah Hrdy shared with me a previously confidential message, dated April 15, 2002, in which Hill responded to Hrdy’s concerns about the task force’s work.

“Burn this message,” Hill told Hrdy. “The book [by Tierney] is just a piece of sleaze, that’s all there is to it (some cosmetic language will be used in the report, but we all agree on that). But I think the AAA had to do something because I really think that the future of work by anthropologists with indigenous peoples in Latin America — with a high potential to do good — was put seriously at risk by its accusations, and silence on the part of the AAA would have been interpreted as either assent or cowardice. Whether we’re doing the right thing will have to be judged by posterity.”

It’s easy to understand the calculation Hill and others were making.

If you don’t know, the backstory is around the year 2000 the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon came under fire as having aided and abetted genocide in the course of his research in a fashion that would make Josef Mengele proud. On the whole, all the accusations were false. But until that was established Chagnon came under fire from colleagues, and members of the press. The New York Times Book Review gave the critique of Chagon a positive review, something which John Horgan does not seem to regret much.

Despite the storm and fury ultimately the whole episode came to a just conclusion: Chagnon and James Neel were exonerated. The AAA task force report was eventually rescinded.

Does anyone believe that if the same thing happened today in 2019 it would end in the same way? I don’t think it would at all. The accusation itself would have destroyed Chagnon’s career immediately. Associates and colleagues would have been called upon to denounce Chagnon. Silence would be seen as suspect.

Perhaps people would understand on some level that it was far far better that one individual’s reputation must die so that the field might live. But whereas in 2000 those who were making this calculation seemed embarrassed about what they were doing, today I doubt there would be such reluctance. Even if Chagnon and James Neel were not guilty of the specific crimes, they were born convicted in the eyes of critics as white males. The only way that it would work out for Chagnon today is if he turned on Neel and denounced him, sacrificing the dead for the living. A “struggle session” would be his only defense.

We all know this is true. I suspect this is why Horgan seems utterly unashamed about having given praise to a book in 2000 which aimed to destroy reputations but which we now know as false. By today’s standards what he did was not a big deal. Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

One of my favorite quotes is from the Roman playright Terence. He asserted: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I know of it through the English translation, “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.”

This truth was brought home to me in the early 2000s when I read Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Atran has a long section where he critiques a dominant mode of analysis and interpretation within American cultural anthropology which emphasizes differences in cognitive frameworks and paradigms, to the point of incommensurability. The simplest reduction of Atran’s critiques are that the logical conclusion of this line of thinking would make even the interpretive scholarship of this school of cultural anthropology totally worthless.

A more concrete issue where this form of thinking has crept into the broader discussion is confusion of terms for reality, and the reconceptualization of reality through diversification of terminology. Consider the discussion about democratic forms of governance. One can assert, with credibility, that the Greeks “invented” democracy. But, I think this masks the reality that the democratic impulse existed across many cultures and societies (e.g., the republics of ancient India). The Greeks had a genius for systematizing and formalization of social and political structures. But the basic elements and dynamics were already there.

Similarly, people are wont to say that one can’t understand Chinese or Indian religion from the Western perspective of religion. I understand where people are coming from when they say this (and in fact, it’s not a “Western perspective,” but often a post-Calvinist confessional Protestant conceptualization that they have in mind as “Western”), but the reality is that the broader category of religious phenomena is easy to identify. That is the reason that Portuguese Catholics initially though Indian Hindus were Christian. It is the reason that the Chinese and Japanese in the 16th century often confused Roman Catholicism with a sect of Pure Land Buddhism. Religions differ a great deal across cultures. But they are pretty recognizable.

But there is the reverse side to this equation: thinking that you understand the psychology of others so well that you misconstrue their motives and intentions.

Two concrete examples come to mind. My liberal friends often talk about conservatives in ways that seem totally wrong-headed, but, they behave as if they understand the conservative mind as experts, despite not knowing any conservatives besides myself or reading much about conservatives in a way that takes ethnography seriously. There is some evidence that liberals, in particular, have problems modeling conservative motivations, but the issue is general and not specific to any ideology.

To illustrate this, on the Say Goodnight Kevin YouTube channel, there is an analysis of Christian* films and media from a skeptical perspective. Kevin himself is an evangelical Christian who was homeschooled. One of his major criticisms is that in evangelical Protestant Christian media nonbelievers, especially atheists, are depicted in a way that is totally unrealistic, and in keeping with the prejudices of evangelicals about the low moral character and motives of nonbelievers.

Obviously, there is a spectrum here. Humans are not total islands from each other. The limits of my comprehension are not the limits of my culture. But neither are cultural and subcultural norms and idioms so transparent that one can always make very precise and deep inferences about the intentions of outgroups. Any analysis of human psychology and culture must always wrestle with this reality.

* “Christian” here refers to the American evangelical Protestant subculture.

Though we are taking a hiatus for the summer for The Insight podcast, we have many episodes already recorded and ready to go. The current plan is to launch season 3 with a discussion between Spencer and myself on the Tocharians.

One of the things I brought up is an observation about the changing lifestyles of proto-Tocharians and post-Tocharian peoples. It seems likely that the proto-Tocharians, the descendants of the Afanasevio people, were pastoralists. At some point, they settled down in the oases around the Tarim Basin. And, they became city-dwellers. Eventually, they were conquered by the Uygurs. They too were pastoralists, and they settled down to become city dwellers. The Uygurs were eventually conquered by other Turks, who also became city dwellers.

To my knowledge, the shift from pastoralism to a sedentary lifestyle seems to be far more common than the other way. Pastoralist peoples conquer sedentary peoples…and in their turn settle down, and are conquered by later pastoralists. Meanwhile, hunter-gatherers, such as Mongolians and Australian Aboriginals, adapt to pastoralism quite well.