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The Archaeology and Philosophy of Health: Navigating the New Normal Problem

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Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy

Part of the book series: Synthese Library ((SYLI,volume 433))

Abstract

It is often taken for granted that notions of health and disease are generally applicable across the biological world, in that they are not restricted to contemporary human beings, and can be unproblematically applied to a variety of organisms both past and present (taking relevant differences between species into account). In the historical sciences it is also common to normatively contrast health states of individuals and populations from different times and places: e.g., to say that due to nutrition or pathogen load, some lived healthier lives than others. However, health concepts in contemporary philosophy of medicine have not been developed with such cross-lineage, non-human, or diachronic uses in mind, and this generates what I call the ‘new normal’ problem. I argue that the new normal problem shows that current naturalistic approaches to health (when based on biological reference classes) are worryingly incomplete. Using examples drawn from evolutionary archaeology and the human fossil record, I outline an alternative, function-based strategy for naturalizing health that might help address the new normal problem. Interestingly, this might also reconstruct a certain uniqueness for humans in the philosophy and science of health, due to the deep history of obligate enculturation and cultural adaptation that archaeology demonstrates.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See for example Murphy (2020), and the absence of such considerations in significant handbooks and collected volumes (e.g., Carel and Cooper 2014; Humber and Almeder 1997; Huneman et al. 2015; Marcum 2016; Schramme and Edwards 2017; Solomon et al. 2017).

  2. 2.

    It should be noted that this casts doubt on the biological objectivity of the reference classes used in medical practice, as ‘you are healthy for a man/woman your age’ typically carries with it an implicit ‘… in your country/territory/ethnic group’.

  3. 3.

    Approaches appealing to common accounts of biological function (such as the selected effects account) include Chin-Yee and Upshur (2017); Griffiths and Matthewson (2018); Matthewson and Griffiths (2017); Neander (2016); Wakefield (1992, 2007). The organizational account of function has also been appealed to for health-naturalist purposes (Saborido and Moreno 2015). The arguments in this chapter are intended to be broadly compatible with any of these, though I err on the side of language friendly to the selected effects account. 

  4. 4.

    Boorse, when pressed, makes a similar suggestion: “to the problem of typical disease, I see no solution but to retreat to a concept of ideal design which, so far, I am unable to define” (Boorse 2014, p. 707).

  5. 5.

    I am using ‘homology’ here in a very loose sense. Functionally homologous groups (in my sense) would be the result of both common selective pressures that explain the origin of that function, and subsequent maintaining selection. They would therefore often be paraphyletic, i.e., subsequent divergent selective pressures could split some lineages away from the functionally homologous group. This may be a problematic use of the terminology (Griffiths 2006).

  6. 6.

    Though this should not be over-stated, see Pearson et al. (2006).

  7. 7.

    However, tooth shape in early Homo species had already changed to become more capable of eating tougher and more elastic foods than the hard, brittle foodstuffs that Australopithecus afarensis specialized in (Ungar 2004).

  8. 8.

    Though lack of convergence is by no means definitive proof—drift and other evolutionary processes can be sources of variation that are fitness-neutral and not pathological.

  9. 9.

    As hypothesized by Ogilvie et al. (1989), the widespread underdevelopment of the tooth enamel in their sample (of 699 crowns) is indicative of nutritional stress from weaning to adolescence.

  10. 10.

    Cultural evolution theory is divided regarding whether ‘selection’ is the best way (or even necessary at all) to describe the mechanisms by which successful cultural traits are propagated and/or upregulated. See for example Tim Lewens’ taxonomy of cultural evolutionary thinking and related discussion (Brusse 2017; Heyes 2016; Lewens 2015). Indeed, clarifying relevant notions of success and cultural analogues of fitness and adaptiveness are non-trivial (Ramsey and De Block 2017), meaning that the idea of a cultural adaptation should be approached with reasonable caution. I am assuming that some such useful account is possible for the purposes of this discussion, though perhaps only in a very loose sense.

  11. 11.

    This is not to say that the basic cognitive capacities to acquire traits did not evolve through biological natural selection, but even this is disputed (e.g., by Heyes 2018, who argues that there is a degree of cultural propagation even for the enabling capacity-traits of cultural propagation).

  12. 12.

    For example, we might perhaps understand cultural adaptations as adaptations proper to the degree that they are intergenerationally stable and partake in other paradigmatic features of adaptations, in a multi-dimensional conceptual space (à la Mitchell 2000), though this obviously presents further challenges.

  13. 13.

    Famously culminating in the conference and subsequent book Man the Hunter (Lee and DeVore 1968).

  14. 14.

    This is of course also bracketing off exogenous drivers like climatic change.

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Acknowledgements

My thanks to Paul Griffiths and to the editors of this collection for written comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Thanks also for insights and feedback from Benjamin Jeffares, John Matthewson, Emily Parke, an audience at the New Zealand Association of Philosophy, and the team at Theory and Methods in Bioscience at the Department of Philosophy and Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney. This publication was written while a visiting fellow at the School of Philosophy and Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences at the Australian National University, and was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation (Grant ID 60811). The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Carl Brusse

  2. School of Philosophy, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia

    Carl Brusse

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Mount Allison University, Sackville NB, Canada, School of Philosophy and Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University, Acton ACT, Australia, Acton, ACT, Australia

    Anton Killin

  2. Department of Philosophy, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA

    Sean Allen-Hermanson

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Brusse, C. (2021). The Archaeology and Philosophy of Health: Navigating the New Normal Problem. In: Killin, A., Allen-Hermanson, S. (eds) Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy. Synthese Library, vol 433. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61052-4_7

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