"Let's Wilson It"

Was listening to the podcast version of CBC’s Quirks and Quirks science program. The latest episode has some interesting segments, two of which are with men called D. Wilson. Just a coincidence, I’m sure, but it’s kind of funny. Especially since one of those Wilsons’ homepage mentions another Wilson: E.O. Wilson (who gave a TEDtalk recently).

Hence my cryptic title. Kind of a way to put things together in an apparently arbitrary fashion. Fun!

With these science shows, I guess attitude is everything. The first Wilson interview was with biological anthropologist Daniel H. Wilson, a roboticist whose Where’s My Jetpack? book sounds like a fascinating look at mid-20th C. futurism in the current context. Apart from the content of that interview, I truly enjoyed DHW’s cheeriness. While listening to him, I thought about blogging just about that. He sounds like a humanist, a technology enthusiast, and a critical thinker all wrapped into one person. IOW, he just sounded like an interesting and well-rounded person. Neat! I’m somewhat jealous of the fact that he makes a living writing non-fiction books, but who knows where life will be leading me in the next few years. 😉
The second Wilson interview was with David Sloan Wilson about his book Evolution for Everyone. Now, as a culturalist, I had some apprehensions when I heard the description of the book by the Q&Q host. In ethnographic disciplines, we’re extremely wary of the application of ideas from biological evolution to cultural phenomena. Many of us have a knee-jerk reaction to evolutionary claims on culture. Not because we want to protect culture. But because we typically find those theories reductive and simplistic. Add to this wariness the intricacies of the nurture/nature debate on the disciplinary level and you’re likely to get tensions between evolutionary biologists and culturalists on those issues. IOW, I was prepared for the worst but I thought I should listen to the interview anyway.

And I’m glad I did. Not that there was a lot of new ideas in what DSW said. But he sounded open-minded enough that his explanations didn’t rub too hard against my skin. In fact, I found a few things about which I can easily agree with him, including the fact that people should pay attention to both genetics and culture. Interestingly enough, DSW’s harsher words were directed at his colleagues in biological fields, especially Richard Dawkins.

Those idea with which I most readily agreed in the DSW interview were quite similar to what I got from music and cognition researcher Ian Cross. Simply put, biologically-savvy people seem to agree with us (culturalists) that human culture is adaptive. Where we differ has more to do with issues of causality and determinism than with the basic phenomena. It makes it easy to “set aside our differences” and talk about the actual relationships between culture and adaptation without reacting viscerally.

As is often the case with more biologically-oriented scholars, David Sloan Wilson’s concept of culture sounds fairly limited in scope or even sophistication. In the interview, he mentioned music and other things listed by the Q&Q host and then mostly talked about religion. It would have been useful if DSW had defined his concept of culture anthropologically but I’m not surprised that he didn’t do so on a science show. The reason I care is that I’m thinking about using this segment in some future cultural anthropology courses and I don’t want students to think that culture is limited to what we usually call “superstructure.”

Ah, well…

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