Abstract
The incorporation of niche construction theory (NCT) and epigenetics into an extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) increases the explanatory power of evolutionary analyses of human history. NCT allows identification of distinct social inheritance and cultural inheritance and can thereby account for how an existing-but-dynamic social system yields variable influences across individuals and also how these individuals’ microlevel actions can feed back to alter the dynamic heterogeneously across time and space. An analysis of Chinese footbinding, as it was ending during the first half of the twentieth century and China was industrializing, illustrates the evolutionary dynamics of niche construction across inheritance tracks and explains regional heterogeneity as well as the persistence of a cultural belief that was socially inaccurate. Incorporating anthropological and sociological insights into an EES with NCT has the potential to proffer source laws for relationships between individual actions and macro-patterns in beliefs, structures, climate, and demography.
Abstract
缠足、工业化和进化论的解释: 有关生态位构建论与社会遗传途径的一个实证案例研究
鮑梅立
哈佛燕京學社
摘要: 把生态位构建理论和表观遗传学引入扩展演化综合论加强了以演化论来解析人类历史的能力。生态位构建理论可以鉴别出独特的社会遗传和文化遗传途径, 并因此能够解释一个现存的但又呈动态的社会系统怎样给不同的个体带来各种影响, 也能解释那些个体怎样以其微观层面的活动来作反馈, 并进而以不同的方式来改变运作于不同时空的动态过程。20 世纪上半叶, 当中国进入工业化的时候缠足习俗不再继续, 对中国缠足习俗的研究诠释了跨遗传途径的生态位构建的动态演化论, 同时也对文化信念的区域异质性和持久存在的状态做了解释。而这些文化信念并非准确反映当下的社会现状。为扩展演化综合论引入生态位构建理论和人类学、社会学的见解, 具有为个体行动与信仰、结构、气候、人口中的宏观模式之间的关系研究贡献源法的潜力。
关键词:文化演化、扩展演化综合论、缠足、生态位构建理论、妇女劳动
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Notes
We can think of inheritance as “legacies of change . . . bequeathed by niche-constructing organisms to subsequent populations, which modify selection pressures on descendent organisms” (Odling-Smee et al. 2013:5). As discussed later in the main text, “social” refers to structural or organizational aspects of populations, whereas “cultural” refers to meaningful beliefs shared across a significant proportion of the population.
By contrast, footbinding ended as a custom in Taiwan because the Japanese colonial administration effectively enforced its prohibition (e.g., Brown 2004); none of the various attempted enforcements of prohibitions across republican China by different political regimes (warlords, Nationalists, Communists) appears to have been particularly effective in stopping footbinding as a custom (Brown and Satterthwaite-Phillips 2016; cf. Harrison 2000).
Functionally generalized societies are those in which closely related groups with small numbers of members perform all aspects of what is needed to survive. Functionally specialized societies are those in which production of the means of subsistence is spread over a vast number of highly specialized groups, usually consisting of large numbers of unrelated people, which interact in complex and hierarchical social relations. In a functionally specialized society, no group can survive without the contributions of other groups. See Dunnell 1978, 1980:64–66, 1995:41; Dunnell and Wenke 1979.
Sociologists have used the concept of a niche to represent the position and function of “social entities”—usually organizations—in approaches they call “the population ecology of organizations” and “the ecology of affiliation.” See Popielarz and Neal 2007 for a review.
Societies and ecosystems are more than just aggregations; they have a macrolevel material reality owing to their emergent properties. By contrast, gene pools and ideational pools are macrolevel analytic constructs, derived from methodological individualist aggregation.
A phenogenotype is a phenotypic manifestation of a genotype; this concept incorporates the heterogeneous phenotypes possible for a single genotype (e.g., Odling-Smee et al. 2003:365–66, 420).
For an NCT model of stratified mixing, see Lipatov et al. 2011.
I thank Professor Runciman for taking the time to meet with me in March 2010 to discuss our independently conceptualized 2009 publications.
Postmodern criticisms of the concept of culture as falsely bounded (e.g., Brightman 1995; Fox and King 2002) criticize a notion of “a culture” as having a clear boundary. By contrast, in my terms, a concept of culture is “unbounded” when it is unclear what entities (units, acts, etc.) are included within the category of “culture” and what are not (Brown 2008a:6–7, cf. Runciman 2009:212).
Source laws describe the properties of processes, in contrast to consequence laws, which focus on the outcomes of processes (Sober 1984:50–51).
And footbinding as erotic is even more problematic (e.g., Gates 2008).
包小脚才能纺条子; ID 2301006 (all ID numbers are unique identifiers for research subjects in the BBG dataset).
ID 2902045.
ID 1501025.
For example: IDs 2301177, 2902001, 2902075, 2903024, 1501028, 2301025.
For a general introduction to China’s transformation during this time period, see Spence 1990.
For example, in Ding County, Hebei; ID 1701036, b. 1924.
IDs 2001142, 2001143, 2001145.
ID 2001017.
Buck (1956 [1937]:395–97) expresses concern that the survey did not capture sojourning, female migration, or the migration of families. In another major limitation, Buck (1956:x) reports that they regional investigators were his students (trained graduates of the prestigious University of Nanjing) and that sampling was “as representative of major types of farming in China as possible.” This focus on farming types, as well as the practical necessities (for safety) of using personal connections and avoiding territories held by the Chinese Communist Party, explains why Buck’s sample is not representative of China’s economic distribution at the time.
Buck (1956:13, 291–92) states that women contributed about 13% of all agricultural labor performed during the study period and blames footbinding for limiting that contribution. He also reports that 24% of all women did farm work and 42% of all women did “subsidiary” work, including spinning and weaving (Buck 1956:290–91). However, these figures come from surveys answered usually by the male head of the household (Buck 1937[3]:429), who almost certainly would have considered most female labor as “help” (Brown, 2016) and thus underestimated actual female labor inputs. Buck’s consideration of spinning and weaving as “subsidiary” further demonstrates that bias because, in my own oral surveys, I found that handicraft production often brought in the bulk of the cash in rural households—hardly “subsidiary” in economic terms (cf. Gates 2001:136).
Rural villagers had a similar disjuncture between cultural beliefs about widow remarriage and social role expectations for actual practice. “The remarriage of young widows was legitimized [i.e., normalized in practice] by economic necessity. So long as there was no promiscuity and the arrangement was stable, they [villagers] cast no slur on the woman’s character. Yet this [social acceptance] did not affect the rigid [cultural] ban on widow remarriage, which people accepted ideologically and kept in a separate compartment of their consciousness. It [the cultural belief against widow remarriage] lingered on in people’s thinking, quite untouched by mundane reality” (Crook et al. 2013:85).
I thank Rob Weller for first suggesting that labor changes may have led to changes in crops produced.
Thus another 44 girls (25%) died potentially from less food, lack of medicine, greater workloads, or some combination of these forms of relative neglect (problems that have been recurring in China over centuries and right up through the present day, cf. Sommer 2015).
Also ID 290302.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Siobhán Mattison, Rebecca Sear, Jane Lancaster, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. John Odling-Smee, Kevin Laland, and Marc Feldman have all been generous in discussing niche construction theory and social theory with me. The U.S. National Science Foundation funded my 2006–2011 China research (BCS-0613297, BCS-1238999) with the collaboration of Hill Gates, Laurel Bossen, Xu Wu, Damian Satterthwaite-Phillips, and the many research colleagues and assistants in China and North America as well as the thousands of rural Chinese women who generously shared information about their lives. My collaborative project was also supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University and Stanford University’s Center for East Asian Studies.
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Brown, M.J. Footbinding, Industrialization, and Evolutionary Explanation. Hum Nat 27, 501–532 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-016-9268-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-016-9268-5