Dealing with Diversity: Perspectives from the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology

Andrew Buskell (University of Cambridge) - Empirical approaches across the natural and social sciences assume well-individuated cultures; that is, that cultures are individuals that differ in key features. Cultural anthropologists, for instance, highlight kin structure, marriage customs, means of exchange and reciprocity, and folk taxonomy as salient dimensions for distinguishing and comparing cultures. Biocultural conservationists study the correlations between cultural and biological diversity, and argue that the "traditional knowledge" of different cultures plays a vital role in stabilising biodiversity hotspots around the globe. And within cultural evolution, researchers increasingly rely on cultural group-selection models, many of which assume that cultures vary and compete in their fitness. These empirical research programs explicitly or implicitly take a stand on what Mclaurin and Sterelny (2009) call the problem of "units and differences": how to individuate cultures on the basis of principled differences among populations. As Mclaurin and Sterelny note, these two questions go hand in hand. Decisions on the important differences among populations determines the units that one will find in nature. Thus when cultural anthropologists distinguish between Hawaiian and Omaha kinship systems, they are not only saying something about how family relations are perceived, they are also saying something about what it means to be a culture—namely, a regulated system of social exchange. Individuating cultures matters for empirical research. Carving up the complexity of human populations into distinct groups reveals patterns that researchers may be able to project forward into the future and backward into the evolutionary past. Issues of cultural individuation also matter for philosophers of science. Philosophers of science interested in normative accounts of "well-ordered science" worry about the representation of individuals from different demographic groups in situations of value-laden judgement. These situations include policy decisions regarding scientific funding as well as epistemic decisions concerning the nature of evidence. The worry is that without representativeness, decisionmaking bodies or whole epistemic communities may fail to adequately track the goals and values of populations as a whole. In this paper, I assess the empirical literature that assumes well-individuated cultures. I argue that there is a major fault-line in empirical work between ideational criteria and socioecological criteria. The cultural group-selection models of cultural evolutionary theory exemplify an ideational criterion: cognitive mechanisms perpetuate a core collection of ideations (beliefs, norms, values, and the like) over others. It is this "core culture" that serves to individuate cultures. Socioecological criteria offer a contrast. Seen in economics, biocultural conservation, and cultural phylogenetics, this approach identifies cultures with their distinctive ecologies. Here, geographic location, linguistic barriers, and ritualistic behaviour all serve as means of maintaining distinctive webs of socioecological exchange— and these webs serve as the basis for individuating one culture from another. Though these criteria can overlap in diagnosing populations as cultural individuals, I show that they are nonetheless distinct, and explore the ramifications of this for understanding cultural individuality and cultural diversity.

Helen Anne Curry (University of Cambridge) - In the 1930s, the plant biologist Edgar Anderson set out on an enormous research initiative. He was fed up with taxonomists' failure to devise methods appropriate for mapping the relationships of humans' companion plant species—that is, weeds and crops. In fact, he was fed up with their dismissal of these entities as even worthy of study in the first place. So he devised a research program that he believed would demonstrate clearly the usefulness of devising taxonomies for plant domesticates based on their evolutionary history. He would study and classify Zea mays, also known as maize or corn, the most important crop in the United States, a task he believed could have significant dividends for US corn production. At the time, the immense diversity of corn was only just beginning to be charted. American and European plant hunters were regularly identifying novel (to them) locally adapted varieties, today called "landraces" but described by Anderson and his peers as "primitive races" or "indigenous strains." To corral this barrage of biological specimens into a defendable taxonomic ordering, Anderson looked to earlier efforts made to classify humans into races. These provided a model for how to divide a freely interbreeding species into subpopulations using variations in specific phenotypic characteristics. Therefore, although "race" was a term long available to plant and animal breeders for discussing distinct breeds of domesticated plants and especially animals, the system of "racial classification" devised by Anderson was informed by ideas about how to carve up human groups. What's more, when applied beyond Anderson's own research program, the racial classification system for corn began to look like a method of classifying the indigenous peoples who grew these corns much as a botanical taxonomy. This paper explores the history of early efforts to devise an evolutionary history and contemporary taxonomy of corn landraces, looking in particular at Anderson's research program and its later application by scientists in the United States and Mexico. In the process it also explores ideas about human biological and cultural diversity. Although superficially absent from this taxonomic system as it developed, such ideas informed its assumptions at every turn and also confused efforts to apply it in practice. For example, the racial taxonomy of Mexican landraces celebrated the evolutionary history and especially the racial hybridization of corn in terms almost identical to those used in celebrating the historical mixing, mestizaje, of peoples that created modern Mexico. Similarly, the search for "primitive" and "indigenous" corn inevitably led collectors to "primitive" and "indigenous" peoples, and to disappointment and dismissal wherever these people were discovered to have "modernized" by adopting commercial corn varieties. In exploring such issues, the paper brings together the well-developed histories of human racial classification and botanical exploration and classification to develop a fuller account of the unique scientific and political complexities involved in charting crop diversity.

Sebastián Gil-Riaño (University of Pennsylvania) - Shortly after the publication of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, UNESCO appointed Alfred Métraux, a Swiss-American anthropologist, to become director of its "race division" and lead its international anti-racism campaign. Among anthropologists, Métraux has been lauded for his rigorous empiricism and extensive knowledge of the history, language, and culture of Amerindian groups in remote regions of South America. For instance, Sidney Mintz lauded Métraux as a "fieldworker’s fieldworker" with little interest in "grand theory." Soon after his UNESCO appointment, Métraux was thrust into an international controversy which raised fundamental questions concerning the categorization of human diversity into cultural and biological groupings. The controversy was provoked by scientists who criticized the 1950 Statement for its attempt to disqualify the scientific credentials of the "race concept" and it left Métraux scrambling to assemble a committee of geneticists and physical anthropologists to draft a second statement. Given his predilection for fieldwork and strict empiricism, Métraux’s appointment as director of UNESCO’s race division seems incongruous. What was it that qualified him to speak on questions of race, let alone lead an international campaign against racism in which the biological basis of race was supposedly at stake? This paper proposes an answer to this question by recovering the overlooked regimes of racial science that shaped Métraux’s career. Indeed, this paper argues that Métraux’s unheralded work in Polynesian anthropology reveals a close engagement with race science. Métraux spent the first five years of his career in Argentina where he frantically sought to document the culture, history, and language of the isolated indigenous groups of the Gran Chaco before they "disappeared." After this period of salvage research in Argentina, Métraux joined a Franco-Belgian scientific expedition to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in 1934 and spent six months on the island conducting ethnographic research. In contrast to his Gran Chaco research, where he relied on oral histories and colonial records to reconstruct the history of indigenous groups who had kept apart from encroaching settler states, in Rapa Nui Métraux encountered a population that had mixed extensively with European visitors and was almost entirely disconnected from its enigmatic past. Unable to reconstruct the culture and history of Rapa Nui through ethnographic research alone, Métraux turned to demographic, anthropometric, and blood group data to trace the history of the island. In doing so, he relied on research conducted by the Maori anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa and the American anthropologist Harry Shapiro, which sought to chart the physical differences between the populations in Polynesian and Melanesian islands and to carve out their distinctive racial types. By recovering these regimes of race science in Métraux’s work, this paper sheds light on the panel’s broader theme, exploring how scientists have construed the relation between biological and biocultural diversity in human populations. In characterizing Métraux as a race scientist and demonstrating his links to Te Rangi Hiroa—a prominent indigenous intellectual and activist—it also seeks to complicate received accounts about the retreat of scientific racism by putting these into conversation with indigenous histories.

Katie McShane (Colorado State University) - This paper explores difficulties that can arise when units of analysis from one field (in this case, philosophy of biology) are employed by a second field (in this case, ethics). Using as a case study the debates about the nature of biological interests in ethics, the paper illustrates a general problem: that categories helpful for biological explanation can have unintended effects in other fields. In the 1980s and 1990s, conservationists sought a theoretical grounding for claims commonly made within conservation about what is beneficial or harmful to superorganismic entities such as ecosystems, biomes, communities, and species. Environmental ethics took up this task, hoping to find an account of well-being that could be applied to a wide range of biological phenomena. At the time, the standard theories of well-being could not account for the well-being of nonconscious, nonsentient entities of any kind, organismic or superorganismic. Many ethicists looked to the then-emerging literature on biological functions from the philosophy of biology to explain what merely biological interests might consist in. Attracted by the ability of the etiological account of function to pick out the function of a particular part or trait of an organism, and the resultant account of functioning and malfunctioning, these theorists posited that biological interests consist in maintaining functioning, understood etiologically. However, the reliance on etiological accounts of function meant that only entities that were bearers of traits or parts with etiological functions—so-called units of selection—could have interests. Ethicists concluded that individual organisms, as reproducers and bearers of phenotypes, possessed traits that were selected for by natural selection and so could be bearers of interests. Meanwhile, ecosystems, communities, biomes, and species were ruled out. Since these superorganismic entities do not reproduce, they could not be units of selection, and thus could not possess interests. The result of this analysis was an individualism that persisted in environmental ethics for decades. Claims about harms to species or ecosystems are still typically regarded as, at best, merely a shorthand for claims about harms to their constituent organisms. While progress on the units of selection problem has created challenges for this view, authors continue to assert that ecosystems, etc., cannot have interests because they are not units of selection. Philosophers of biology discussing the units of selection problem aimed to find concepts that were useful for explaining the mechanisms of evolution; they did not aim to establish moral categories. Ethicists discussing the nature of biological interests aimed to find concepts that were consistent with the best scientific understanding of biological phenomena. However, in relying on claims about etiological function, ethicists imported biological categories that greatly constrained their ethical theorizing. They were left with the claim that only things that can reproduce have a well-being, and conservationists were left with the conclusion that their claims about the well-being of ecosystems, biomes, communities, and species were not theoretically sound.