The Caveman’s Corner

This is a concept that reading Dennison’s Nash A Little Anthropology, 3rd ed has acquainted me with, and its extremely interesting. I don’t believe I’ve ever specifically considered it before.

Such a stoic.

I might as well quote Nash:

Daniel Freedman was an early investigator of the responses of different ‘ethnic’ groups. In ‘Personality and Development in Infancy,’ he reports that Caucasian (in this case, white American) infants tested shortly after birth tend to respond more readily, excitedly, and over a longer duration to a series of provocations (for example, holding a cloth over the nose) than do infants of Asian origin. [...] Some additional controls were needed to verify his findings, but it now seems to be a fair inference that Asian and Caucasian newborns do indeed differ in their reactions to various provocative stimuli and that this difference probably is biologically dictated.

Does this mean that Caucasian Americans and, say, Japanese individuals will exhibit what some might call racially determined differences in temperament? Yes and no. Freedman also analyzed communication between Japanese American mothers and their infants in the United States. First-generation mothers and their infants tended to behave as would be expected from the experiments; there was very little verbalization between them. However, the principal anthropologist involved in this particular investigation also reported that third-generation Japanese American mothers and their progeny were chattering away at a “super-American” rate. Since their biology had not changed (that is, there had been no gene flow with Caucasian American through intermarriage), some kind of environmental influence must have been responsible. [...] It would seem, therefore, that however they differ from Americans at birth in their level of ebullience, Japanese Americans are capable of changing more than enough to wipe out the difference in a lifetime. Freedman recognizes this in his concept of ‘reaction range,’ which specifies the range of possibilities for development of a particular behavioral trait.

p. 28-29

The actual study was Freedman, Daniel, “Personality Development in Infancy: A Biological Approach,” in Perspectives on Human Evolution, ed., S.L. Washburn and Phyllis Jap, pp. 258-87. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968.

I don’t know if anyone else cares or has already heard of that (it’s certainly not breaking science), but it struck me as really interesting, and it makes quite a bit of sense. It demonstrates eloquently the extremely high difficulty of identifying simplistic genetic bases for any element of human behavior. Even if a link between a gene and a pre-socialization predisposition can be found, that’s not guarantee that the amazingly elastic capacity humans demonstrate can’t wipe it out.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Human Evolution, Sociocultural Anthropology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.