Biological culture and cultural biology

[Pythagorean]

TL;DR Summary

It's difficult to find research about how culture influences biology or biology influences culture, those keywords are saturated with nature vs. nurture discussions

Curious if there's a good keyword or named discipline for these kinds of questions:

To what extent does biology determine culture? For example, if you took two cultures, one raised by the sea and another in the mountains, then rewound and switched places, how much would their culture simply swap vs. how much would stay the same vs. how much would new cultural paradigms arise?

Can we separate happenstance cultural paradigms from those that have tendencies to arise from particular environments or genetic lines?

 

[BillTre]

I would start with the history of biology. Its full of interactions between biological thought and the culture things were embedded in.
Darwin in a religious environment would be a good example.

I think there is a sociological branch of history of science. That might be useful.

 

[pinball1970]

Specifically on mountainous verses sea fairing people I would check this out.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2599997/

Also, sickle cell and malaria and the back drop to Jenner’s work.

 

[Rive]

To what extent does biology determine culture?

Interesting thought, but I can't recall anything for this direction.

On the other hand, for the reverse thought that culture might have a shot in biology - well, I seem to recall a case about crowd-tolerance genes and the rise of cities... Also, the lactose-tolerance story...

Though it's a bit of a chicken or the egg kind of question that what came first

 

[Laroxe]

I would tend to think about how humans meet their basic biological needs this would include things like survival, getting food, finding a mate, child care, development of skills. Perhaps the most important feature of humans is that they are intensely social and they need to be, identification with membership of particular groups and belonging are extremely important. Getting food, care of children etc mean social factors often override survival needs. Living in cities was really dependent on the development of agriculture and to expand your own groups population required resources, so conflict and the need for social organisation was needed. So our culture developed to support our biology though there are lots of possible ways to achieve the same aims.
There are a lot of ideas about some specific biological features but for most of human history our beliefs about biology didn't seem to have much power, it was the effect of the belief that was important.

 

[Pythagorean]

I would tend to think about how humans meet their basic biological needs this would include things like survival, getting food, finding a mate, child care, development of skills. Perhaps the most important feature of humans is that they are intensely social and they need to be, identification with membership of particular groups and belonging are extremely important. Getting food, care of children etc mean social factors often override survival needs. Living in cities was really dependent on the development of agriculture and to expand your own groups population required resources, so conflict and the need for social organisation was needed. So our culture developed to support our biology though there are lots of possible ways to achieve the same aims.
There are a lot of ideas about some specific biological features but for most of human history our beliefs about biology didn't seem to have much power, it was the effect of the belief that was important.

An interesting observation here is that those same kinds of themes (survival, food, reproduction) are well preserved in linguistics (you can see this if you compare cognates between French and English using Grimm's law) and factors important to survival get encoded in the names of gods (e.g. - it's common to see weather based gods in early agricultural societies where everyone is a farmer, but then themes like personal salvation become more important once cities are established and role differentiation occurs). So that's one way in which biology effect society: it determines the nature of the signals between members of that society including their utility and stability.

We could probably go full circle and explore, then, how society has been able to use written words to establish institutions like health care, economic balance, and information technology - all of which undeniably relieve many survival pressures on humans and give nature less opportunities to select. It's also allowed us to participate in selection ourselves from unintentional breeding via economic pressures to direct and intentional manipulation with CRISPR.

 

[Pythagorean]

I would start with the history of biology.

This worked surprisingly well and falls in line with themes explored so far:

The earliest humans must have had and passed on knowledge about plants and animals to increase their chances of survival. This may have included knowledge of human and animal anatomy and aspects of animal behavior (such as migration patterns). However, the first major turning point in biological knowledge came with the Neolithic Revolution about 10,000 years ago. Humans first domesticated plants for farming, then livestock animals to accompany the resulting sedentary societies.

To this day, the agricultural sciences are able to stand up whole college towns in the middle of farmland given the broader impact on society (maximizing yield, minimizing environment damage, safety and health, etc. All very impactful to human survival.

I shouldn't find this particularly surprising, I suppose, that science itself plays a huge rule in the feedback between biology and society especially with respect to survival, but it does help establish a baseline - I think the more interesting (and difficult/elusive) discussion will be how sprandels arise and whether they are common across cultures or if there are tendencies and trends in certain cultures.

For example (again returning to linguistics) it's common for the word for the maternal parent to start with "ma" - not because all modern language arose from one language, but because if you close your mouth and try to make a sound, its "mmmm" and if you happen to open your mouth while doing that it comes out "mmmaa". So "ma" is more likely to be the first sound an infant makes. This would be an example of a more ubiquitous spandrel. (This is opposed to Grimm's law referenced earlier which outlines a whole system of transformation that applies to many words - such that it would be unlikely to happen by chance. For this spandrel, we might ask, why did the Germanic tribes innovate p -> f?)

 

[jim mcnamara]

Two links:

#1
Ben-David, Joseph; Teresa A. Sullivan (1975). "Sociology of Science". Annual Review of Sociology. 1 (1): 203–222. doi:10.1146/annurev.so.01.080175.001223. Retrieved 2006-11-29.

A compendium of papers some of which may be of help.

#2
Stocking, Holly (1998). "On Drawing Attention to Ignorance". Science Communication. 20 (1): 165–178.

The second link deals with agnoiology

..the study of ignorance.

The conclusion (IMO) is that people have a well founded fear of the unknown and so they gratefully accept explanation especially if that explanation logically follows other tenets of existing cultural knowledge.

 

[Pythagorean]

That Stocking paper sounds really interesting - I'm going to have to get onto a campus so I can get a copy.

 

[Laroxe]

Two links:

#1
Ben-David, Joseph; Teresa A. Sullivan (1975). "Sociology of Science". Annual Review of Sociology. 1 (1): 203–222. doi:10.1146/annurev.so.01.080175.001223. Retrieved 2006-11-29.

A compendium of papers some of which may be of help.

#2
Stocking, Holly (1998). "On Drawing Attention to Ignorance". Science Communication. 20 (1): 165–178.

The second link deals with agnoiology

..the study of ignorance.

The conclusion (IMO) is that people have a well founded fear of the unknown and so they gratefully accept explanation especially if that explanation logically follows other tenets of existing cultural knowledge.

I was wondering about the conclusion, I think its true that humans are motivated to explain what they see in the natural world. Accurate (and sometimes inaccurate) allow us to predict future events and their possible outcomes, it reduces the fear of facing a future full of unknown threats. However the links are focussed on the sociology, rather than the effects of an individuals state of knowledge, it focusses on the authority of social institutions in providing explanations. While anoiology is about ignorance, it is often used in relation to what is considered unknowable, more metaphysics than science.

When I first read your comment, I got the term mixed up with agnotology a related term which refers to the deliberate, culturally induced state of ignorance induced by the control of the information people are given, usually through the media. I suspect that this provides a better framework for understanding the current issues in the public's understanding of science which plays to a range of different motives than a fear of the unknown. The range of cognitive distortions that may be involved are seen across all human cultures, in one form or another. This seems to suggest that there are other, shared predispositions that serve social needs beyond and individuals anxiety.

 

[Pythagorean]

Something that stood out to me was that bodily parts and functions, familiar relationships, violence, sex, and resources often have well preserved phonemes in linguistics. E.g. it's fairly easy to reconstruct words like mother, father, fart, feet, etc. And they are probably among the things that we are least ignorant about.

compare it to something as ubiquituis as "earth". I made this one using Wiktionary for reference, so grain of salt on some of them (especially with dotted lines). You can see meaning and morphology of "earth" shifts quite a bit (such that we have terra, gaia, earth in our modern borrowed languages).

For example, Latin "terra" is cognate with English "thirsty" so we see lots of shifting in meaning and morphology (and potentially starting from different root Proto-Indo-European words).

 

[Pythagorean]

Tying up my thoughts here on how the above relates to ignorance. Human words and meanings around early forms of cosmogony were severely limited by our perspective. They had no idea what a planet was. So you get more limited definitions of our larger dwelling space, like Miðgarðr. Where we imagine the more accurate boundaries of our dwelling space to be an atmosphere, the Old Norse imagined the boundary to be a giant snake, Jörmungandr.

In other words, the explanation for things we come up with in ignorance can vary wildly from person to person since it's tapping the imagination (colored by personal experience) and you can see this reflected in the linguistic record, compared to more stable (and accurate) mental models (like especially those of our own bodies, but also things like social relationships, agriculture, and technology that would have been important to survival and reproductive success.

These words are so stable you can often use the linguistic lineage to trace back which technologies the Proto Indo Europeans had. For example, we know they had solid body wheels, carts, and horses. The spoked wheel was likely made later, after the PIE tribes split into Germanic, Italic, Celtic, Greek, Indi-Aryan, etc. because they all came up with different names for the new technology, rather than inheriting it from PIE.