The phylogenetic construction of sociocultural phenomena

Abstract

In this paper I argue that many sociocultural phenomena are best explained by the comparative (phylogenetic) method, which consists of using information on other species, notably our closest relatives, the nonhuman primates, as a means to understand the evolutionary history and biological underpinnings of human traits. The social phenomena considered here embody the unitary social configuration of humankind, the set of traits common to all human societies. Those traits could not be explained by sociocultural anthropology, or the other social sciences, because even though they have a highly variable cultural content, they are not cultural creations but rather the products of human nature, or natural categories. I argue that some of those traits resulted from the cognitive enhancement of specific primate traits in the course of human evolution and others evolved as by-products of the coalescence of several primate traits, and I illustrate each process with a number of examples. I also show that even though many of those traits are crossculturally universal, they need not be: culture may modulate the expression of primate legacies and produce various sociocultural patterns from the same set of universal biological underpinnings, or biological constants. Finally, I discuss the importance for the social sciences of integrating biological constants in their models and theories even when they seek to explain cultural differences.

Keywords:

• comparative method
• culture
• homologies
• kinship
• primates
• universals

Acknowledgements

I thank Iara Sandomirsky and the other guest editors of the present issue of the Israel Journal of Ecology and Evolution for inviting me to participate in this project, and Peter Kappeler and Michael O’Brien and the editors for helpful comments on the manuscript.

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Bernard Chapais

Bernard Chapais is a professor of anthropology and former director of the University of Montreal Laboratory of Behavioral Primatology. After spending 25 years studying primate behavior, he has devoted the past 10 years to interdisciplinary research on human social evolution in an attempt to bridge evolutionary and sociocultural anthropology.