Farewell to Adaptationism: Unnatural Selection and the Politics of Biology

MERRILL SINGER Hispanic Health Council

Farewell to Adaptationism: Unnatural Selection and the Politics of Biology

This article argues that human adaptation has lost its utility as a conceptual tool for either biological or medical anthropology, despite the recent eforts of practitioners in these subdisciplines to rescue it by considering the influences of power, history, and global social processes. It draws on cases from diverse fields, including evolutionary studies, ethology, genet- ics, and epidemiology, to suggest new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between humans and their physical and biotic environments; environments that they, and to a lesser degree other species, are not so much “adapting to” as transforming, while being transformed themselves in the process. Central to this reconceptualization is an understanding of human behavior and environmental relationships in political-economic context. [human adaptation, human biology, political economy, critical medical anthropology]

mong the lesser celebrated of the seminal and influential works of Charles Darwin, father of both modem biology and adaptationist thinking, is a book A with the quaint but intriguing title The Formation of Vegetable Mould

through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits (1 88 1). In this text, whose abundant title no less than its content suggests the profound influence of society, Darwin sought to explain what some might consider a minor problem for such a prodigious mind, namely the marked increase in ground clover in rural England during the 19th century. In Darwin’s engaging analysis, which is said to have provided him with more sheer delight than his troubled efforts to understand human evolution (Eiseley 1977). the great naturalist traced the expansion of clover to a significant improvement in the quality of soil due to a parallel increase in the earthworm population, as well as to enhanced opportunities for pollination occa- sioned by a synchronous growth in the number of bumblebees. Darwin tied these faunal changes to a drop in the number of predatory rodents, such as the dormouse, that was triggered by a rise in the number of rodent-eating domestic cats. Cats, he explained, had undergone a population boom of their own because of their senti-

Medical Anthropology Quarterly 10(4):49&515. Copyright @ 1996 American Anthropological Asso- ciation.

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mental selection by rural British women as favored pets to ease the aggrieved loneliness of spinsterhood, a condition that was also rising at the time.

Lest this account begin to sound too much like the old woman who progres- sively swallowed a host of wiggling and squiggling creatures, I turn quickly to the ultimate causes of population changes brought to light in Darwin’s analysis. In the 19th century, rural spinsterhood in Britain, he observed, was a social product of the Industrial Revolution. Central to this radical social transformation was a broad demographic restructuring. As Frederick Engels reported in his angry account of the living and working conditions of the 19th-century British working class, “The rapid extension of manufacture demanded hands, wages rose, and troops of work- men migrated from the agricultural districts to the towns” (1969[1845]:50). Thus Manchester, the site of the young Engels’s urban ethnography, had in 1773 “a mere 24,000 inhabitants; by 1851when the majority of the inhabitants of the British Isles were living in towns-its population had increased more than tenfold, to more than 250,000” (Wolf 1982:276).

An immediate product of this rapid labor migration under conditions of capitalist hegemony were the urban slums documented in gory detail by Engels. But no less than urban Manchester, which Engels described as “a planless, knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness, whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external surroundings” (1969[ 1845]:85), was the so-called natural ecology of the British countryside shaped by the Industrial Revolution, in all of its political, economic, and cultural dimensions. Both these so-called human and natural environments bore the deep imprint not only of human cultural activity and human labor, but also of changing human social relationships.

In this simple country tale lies a basic point I wish to stress in this article. It is a point alluded to by Raymond Williams in his sagacious observation that “the idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history” (19806). Indeed, I shall argue, it is not merely the idea of nature-the way it is conceived and related to by humans-but also the veryphysical shape of narure, including of course human biology, that has been deeply influenced by an evolutionary history of hierarchical social structures-that is to say, by the changing political economy of human society. While Darwin’s theory of natural selection has since the 1930s been the dominant scientific understanding of the driving force of biological evolution, a narrow cultural conception of “nature” packed into this theory has restricted attention to the effects of what might be called unnatural selection, that is, the process of differential survival and reproduction under precarious conditions created to serve the interests of dominant social groups. There is, to borrow Duden’s (1991) apt phrase, an entire “history beneath the skin,” and an important part of that history is the story of human social inequality and oppression. As a result, it is my belief that biological anthropology, no less than medical ecology (Singer 1989), must move beyond the reigning acceptance of nature as a given and separate phenomenon to which human biology is adapted. Critical to this transition, in fact, is a thoroughgoing reexamination of the whole adaptationist perspective and its dominant place in biological anthropology, a dominance that is being questioned increasingly in biology (Gould 1982; Gould and Lewontin 1984; Lewontin 1984; Lewontin et al. 1984; Rose and Rose 1976).

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For much of its recent history, biological anthropology has attempted to bracket the question of political economy on the grounds that this topic raises issues beyond its subdisciplinary purview. As Wiley comments, in analyzing environmental change, biological anthropologists

tend not to explore research questions about why the environment was disrupted, by whom, and for what ends, but instead focus on the process of responding to or coping with such disruptions.. . . This focus steers researchers away from contemporary social ills such as inequality and maldistribution of resources and power differentials, which are couched in such terms as “culture contact” and “modem- ization.” Instead of factors originating in social forces, “culture contact” or “diseases of modernization” are put forth as stresses, while the roots of these forces remain unexamined. [ 1992223-2241

Why might such fundamentally important issues remain unexamined? What are the forces that set the conservative agenda of biological anthropology or biology itself for that matter? One answer is that “the problematic of science-what questions are thought to be worth asking and what priority will be awarded them-is . . . strongly influenced by social and economic factors” (Levins and Lewontin 1985:4). At any historic moment, “what pass as acceptable scientific explanations have both social determinants and social functions” (Lewontin et al. 198433). The politics of society, in other words, helps to shape the politics of biology, including its dominant institutions (e.g., university departments, journals, professional associa- tions), career paths, funding patterns, and research directions. Consequently,

To do science is to be a social actor engaged, whether one likes it or not, in political activity. The denial of the interpenetration of the scientific and the social is itself a political act, giving support to social structures that hide behind scientific objectivity to perpetuate dependency, exploitation, racism, elitism, colonialism. [Levins and Lewontin 198541

Of late, an effort has been made to challenge the timorous character of biological anthropology. An objective of recent work by a creative vanguard of biological anthropologists interested in political economy, especially the political economy of health (e.g., Armelagos et al. 1992; Goodman 1992; Leatherman 1992; Thomas 1992; Wiley 1992). is to rescue the concept of human adaptation from the shackles of conventional understanding. There is, in other words, a mounting concern to pour new wine into the old wineskin of adaptationism by sensitizing the concept to the influences of power, history, and global processes. For example, Armelagos et al. (1992) introduce the “adaptive process model” as part of their attempt to construct a new, politically aware, biocultural synthesis. They argue:

The adaptive process can be generally characterized as the production and reproduction of behaviors and strategies directed at meeting particular ends with limited resources and options within changing, multiply-constrained environments. It is a notion of relative benefit and compromise. Critical to this approach is an idea of adaptive cost and conflict. . . . Thus, we are concerned with how adaptive compromise is negotiated among agents, the congruence and conflict inherent in responses to competing problems and constraints, and how the conse- quencesof responses serve to alter host behavior. . . . Options for response to insult are not infinite. They are constrained by wealth, clasqposition, social relations, and ideology. [Armelagos et al. 1992:42]

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In this article I argue that it is necessary to take such efforts an additional step away from conventional ecological models. This step, in part, involves questioning the usefulness of the adaptive process model’s exercise in conceptual salvation. The synthesis of political economy and biology will be more readily achieved, I argue, through a comprehensive reconceptualization that includes jettisoning adaptationism and forging new ways of thinking about the relationship between human biologies and physical and social realities. Indeed, in saying farewell to vulgar adaptationism there is opportunity to embrace a non-Cartesian dialectical perspective on humadenvironment interaction and on human evolution itself.

Before unfolding this argument and illustrating it with a range of examples drawn from diverse comers of bioanthropology’s broad subject matter, it is important to clarify what this article is nor arguing. Writing of events at the Sixth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies held in Fairbanks, Alaska, Eric Alden Smith commented that “the current anthropological ideology will not allow more than a modicum of ecology or biology to be heard among the multiple voices of postmodern inquiry” (1991:73). Although I have expressed my own strong reservations about aspects of postmodernism (Singer 1990a. 1990b. 1994b). the suggestion has been made that I, too, view biological categories merely as emic categories of Western culture and question the value of the natural science paradigm in medical anthropology (McElroy 1990). However, it is my sense (Singer 1993), to borrow the words of Richard Lee (spoken at the above-mentioned conference), that there is room and a desire for a synthesis that integrates science and critical reflection, an “empiricism tempered with reflexivity” (quoted in E. Smith 1991:75).

Cartesianism and the Cases of Biston Betularia and Pneumoconiosis

Adaptationism, as Levins and Lewontin (1985) demonstrate, is an expression of Cartesianism, that Western epistimological tendency to see independent parts as composing and determining a summary whole. Parts in the Cartesian perspective are viewed as atomic units with intrinsic properties, as independent things-in-themselves, as smaller wholenesses merely lumped together as aggregates the way a group of individual potatoes when packaged together (to use a famous example from Marx) constitutes a sack. From the adaptationist perspective, there are two primary parts, preformed ecological niches and the organisms fitted to them, with adaptation being the process by which organisms adjust biologically and behavior- ally to external conditions. As Levins and Lewontin cogently argue, however.

To maintain that organisms adapt to the environment is to maintain that such ecological niches exist in the absence of organisms and that evolution consists in filling these empty and preexistent niches.. . . But the external world can be divided up in an uncountable infinity of ways, so there is an uncountable infinity of ecological niches. Unless there is a preferred or correct way in which to partition the world, the idea of an ecological niche without an organism filling it loses all meaning. . . . Adaptation cannot be. a process of gradual fitting of an organism to the environment if the specific environmental configuration, the ecological niche, does not already exist. If organisms define their own niches, then all species are already adapted, and evolution cannot be seen as the process of becoming adapted. [1985:68]

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The whole notion of niches overlooks the shaping effects of “organisms” on the “environment.” When these effects are considered, it is clear that “the environment is a product of the organism, just as the organism is a product of the environment” (Levins and Lewontin 198569). Neither of these so-called parts has a privileged existence; both are changing and changing each other in the process. This understanding is grasped quickly in a consideration of the relationship between predator and prey species, where a drop or rise in the size of either group has immediate effects on the size of the other, raising questions about which is to be treated as “organism” and which as “environment.” Yet the interrelationship is greater still. For example, “it is often forgotten that the seedling is the ‘environment’ of the soil, in that the soil undergoes great and lasting evolutionary changes as a direct consequence of the activity of the plants growing in it, and these changes in turn feed back on the organism’s conditions of existence” (Levins and Lewontin 1985: 134). Indeed, the very oxygenation process that sustains life on Earth is a product of living organisms, reflecting the “co-evolution of the biosphere and its inhabitants” (Levins and Lewontin 198547).

The underlying problem in traditional adaptationist thinking in this sense is the tendency to separate organism from environment by treating them as the dependent and independent variables, respectively, of a causal relationship. As Jones notes, “underlying the notion of a variable is a vision of the universe as a collection-a collection of relatively discrete and encapsulate items” (1 976:388) that can be extracted without harm from their surrounding context. In this understanding, as in the generally dominant Western worldview, the environment, or, more commonly, Nature, is conceived as constituting an autonomous reality that operates in terms of its own principles and its own dynamics. This understanding traces to the effort of Enlightenment thinkers to disengage from the reigning spiritual framework of the 18th century.

Where once nature was seen as sacred, the reflection of a divine plan or the embodiment of Ideas. . . , the Enlightenment task was to ‘disenchant’ nature and see ‘God’s world’ as a mechanism, composed of physical matter obeying natural mechanistic laws rather than spiritual ones. . . . In the naturalist view, the universe consists of discrete material essences . . . which are fixed and stable in their identity. [Gordon 1988:24]

Central to the resulting naturalist vision is the idea that nature is autonomous from society. That which is labeled “natural,” observes Deborah Gordon, “is beyond the sphere of social influence” (1988:28). Consequently, processes “in nature” are discussed as independent from the workings of the social order. Nature, in fact, is seen as standing “not only independent from culture but prior to it” (Gordon 1988:27). Indeed, in common parlance the term nature often is used to refer to all that is wild and allegedly untouched by human hands. Nature is where we are not. In this way the world is divided into two discrete and contrasting realms, the natural world and the human order, and, heeding Adam Smith’s dictum that speculation is most productive when subdivided into a great number of different branches, scholarly disciplines have emerged to study these at least somewhat independently.

For example, within and beyond biological anthropology the field of ethology has flourished since the late 1950s. producing a series of field studies of free-living

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nonhuman primates. It is generally acknowledged that such research by individuals like Jane Goodall, Toshisada Nishida, George Schaller, and Dian Fossey have revolutionized thinking about the behavior and character of the primates. As summarized by Campbell,

As each new fact is unearthed, old prejudices are dispelled. The gorilla, whose size and appearance cast it for more than a hundred years as a fearsome forest monster, is now known to be shy and usually gentle. And the chimpanzee is not merely an amiable muncher of bananas but an enthusiastic hunter and murderous adventurer on occasion. [ 1992: 1291

A critical element in the new understanding of primates is the belief that field studies have revealed the “true” nature of these animals. This unveiling is possible, it is assumed, because they are finally being studied in their natural habit as parts of nature rather than in man-made unnatural environments that distort their “authen- tic” behavioral patterns. Campbell continues:

Ordinarily, when we look at the great apes in zoos, our vision is clouded by seeing them through the distorting glass of modem human eyes and in a setting that is so overwhelmingly humanized that the apes tend to look a great deal more simple- minded, a great deal more vulnerable, a great deal less competent than they actually are. [ 1992: 1631

For example, as noted, field studies have demonstrated the reticent, introverted nature of gorillas. Based on her field experience, Fossey writes:

During the early days of the study . . . it was difficult to establish contacts because the gorillas were not habituated or accustomed to my presence and usually fled on seeing me. . . . Probably one of the most publicized pictures of gorillas in the wild was taken. . . during the second month of my study. It shows a line of sixteen gorillas.. . . The group had been day-nesting and sunbathing when I contacted them, but upon my approach they nervously retreated to obscure themselves behind thick foliage. [1983: 11-12]

Yet recent research by Japanese primatologist Masazumi Mitani in the secluded Ndoki region of northern Congo suggests that the gorillas observed by Fossey at the Karisoke Research Centre in Rwanda may not have been exhibiting the most “natural” of behaviors after all. Mitani found that gorillas are not particularly shy or fearful of humans in an area where human presence has been minimal for centuries. As the nature journalist Eugene Linden comments, in Ndoki “gorillas stare and scream. . . ,and sometimes charge, but almost never run away”( 199264). A likely interpretation of this finding is that Fossey’s gorillas, long subject to human predation and poaching, have learned to be fearful, the hard way. In Ndoki, where natural barriers have limited human penetration of the forest, this change has not occurred. If this interpretation is correct, the “genuine nature” of gorillas will have to be redefmed once more, with recognition that nature is often less natural than we like to pretend.

Indeed, as Raymond Williams comments: A considerable part of what we call natural landscape. . . is the product of human design and human labour. . . . Some forms of this popular modem idea of nature . . . depend on a suppression of the history of human labour [and] they often confuse us about what nature and the natural are and might be. [ 1980781


As an example, consider the oft-cited textbook case of Bisron berulariu, the pepper moth. Rare it is to find an introductory biological anthropology text that fails to discuss or at least mention demographic transition in the pepper moth as a classic case of “natural” selection. As is well known from the studies of H. B. D. Kettlewell (1955,1956,1958), in the early 19th century most of the pepper moths in England were a mottled grey color, causing them to be hard to spot by predators when they rested on lichen-covered tree bark. Due to a dominant point mutation, however, an occasional black individual appeared in the population. These were readily visible and were quickly consumed by birds. However, following the Industrial Revolu- tion, as soot pumped out from the innumerable smokestacks of British factories began to cover and darken surrounding trees, the grey moths became increasingly conspicuous while their black counterparts gained a man-made camouflage. The well-known result was, within a few decades, the near replacement of grey moths by black moths.

While this transition regularly is cited to illustrate the workings of natural selection, the environmental change underlying changes in the frequency of moth color forms, of course, was anything but natural, as that term generally is used. Although this fact is never fully hidden in the introductory texts of biological anthropology, in that the key environmental change generally is attributed to industrial pollution, the profound social and environmental significance of the Industrial Revolution is disregarded. Like the Industrial Revolution itself, pollution is treated as a given, an unremarkable and automatic feature of social development. Thus, after an initial mention, the Industrial Revolution is left behind in most texts as the patterns and principles of a natural selective process are explored. In this way, pollution is treated as being as “natural” to the human order as wilderness is to nature. The popularity of the pepper moth case, in fact, may lie in its affirmation of basic ideological tenets about the nature of nature and the nature of society. The example at once affirms fundamental differences between the human and natural realms while ultimately submerging both the humadnature coevolutionary interrelationship and class conflicts of industrial society. And, lest the race conscious be symbolically disturbed by the growing numerical dominance of black moths under human influence, there is hope: recent texts celebrate the return of grey moths with the regulation of factory discharge.

Perhaps the real significance of the pepper moth case can be seen by juxtapos- ing it to an inverse example: the pollution of human biology and the biomedical handling of pneumoconiosis. In the United States, between the two world wars in those parts of the country dominated by the mining of coal, the coal industry functioned much like a Goffmanesque total institution for its workers. Coal companies controlled public schools, police departments, churches, the monetary system, roads, housing, and doctors in mining towns. The company doctor, who was the only source of medical care for coal workers and their families, commonly viewed the accidents and diseases common to mining as natural or ascribed them to the fault of the individual miner, or collectively to miners as a wretched and drunken lot. For example, widespread breathlessness, chest congestion, and pro- longed coughing spells among coal workers commonly were termed “miner’s asthma.” This condition was seen as a normal part of miner’s life rather than a

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disabling disease. Writing in a reputable health journal, one company doctor noted during this period:

As far as most of the men in this region are concerned, so called ‘miner’s asthma’ is considered an ordinary condition that needs cause no worry and therefore the [medical] profession has not troubled itself about its finer pathological and associated clinical manifestations. [quoted in B. Smith 1986531

As a result, chest X rays conducted by coal company doctors showing massive lung legions commonly were labeled “normal miner’s chest” (Aronson 1971). Miners who cited respiratory symptoms as a cause for missing work were diagnosed as malingerers or sufferers of the social disease called “compensationitis.” Those who persisted in these complaints often were referred to psychiatrists, and until the 1950s the Journal of the American Medical Association printed articles (e.g., Ross 1954) on the psychological origin of miners’ lung disease.

Again, humans are removed from nature, or more exactly, in this inverse case, nature from humans, and the heavy hand of society from both. This is achieved through a Cartesian split into distinct parts, a surgical procedure with various social objectives, some of them decidedly political. Whereas, in the case of the pepper moths, critical social transformations are left unattended in the attempt to illustrate natural processes of Darwinian selection and fitness, in the case of pneumoconiosis, disease processes within humans are submerged under a veneer of social Darwin- ism. Both of these examples appear to suggest, as Gordon has argued, that “[n]aturalism . . . is not very natural” (1988:33) after all. Notes Williams:

Out of the ways in which we have interacted with the physical world we have made not only human nature and an altered natural order; we have also made societies. It is very significant that most of the terms we have used in this relationship-the conquest of nature, the domination of nature, the exploitation of nature--are derived from the real human practices: relations between men and men. [I980841

And, it should be added, relations between men and women. As Williams suggests, nature as we know it is socially constructed and, like

society itself, serves interests distributed unequally across critical social divisions. Further, it is the impact of a class-based political agenda, I suspect, that explains why “[iln our complex dealings with the physical world, we find it very difficult to recognize all the products of our own activities” (Williams 198083), including, most assuredly, the impress of our own tortured history.

The Making of Human Beings and the Construction of Narure

How then are we to talk of the humanlenvironment interaction, to lay boundaries around these terms and analyze relationships? In the first volume of Capital, written by Marx over a hundred years ago, an attempt was made to address this issue squarely and in a fashion that is no less compelling today because of the passage of so much time or the passing away of particular social systems. Central to Marx’s concern was the nature of human labor and the contribution of labor to the making of the laborer. Labor, he explains,


is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. [ 1967: 1771

In this complex account, labor emerges as a creative activity that has a far-reaching, simultaneous, and interrelated impact on the making of human beings and the construction of the nonhuman environment: the two are forged in tandem in labor (Woolfson 1982). In Engels’s words, “the Specialisation of the hand . . . implies the tool and the tool implies specifically human activity, the transforming reaction of man on nature, production” (1940: 17). As these statements suggest, Marx and Engels talked of the relationship of concern not as adaptation of one part to the other but as interplay and cocreation, or, more exactly, as a dialectical relationship with consequence in both directions. In this sense humans are a product of the workings of nature, just as nature is a product of the work of humans. Humans and the nonhuman environment constitute an intertwined, dynamic, and often conflicted whole. The dialectical materialist paradigm developed by Marx and Engels views this whole “as a contingent structure in reciprocal interaction with its own parts” (Levins and Lewontin 1985: 136). The whole plays a role in determining the part and vice versa, as each part is itself a whole to its constituent units. Derived from this approach is an understanding of the physical world that has been elaborated in critical medical anthropology in terms of various levels of social complexity (e.g., Baer et al. 1986; Singer and Baer 1995) in which

the microlevel is embedded in the the macrolevel, while the macrolevel is the embodiment of the microlevel but is not reducible to it. However, there is no empirical separation, rather, a heuristic division is made to facilitate examining the connection between unique configurations and general processes. [Singer 1990c: 18 11

Biological anthropology, traditionally, has been extremely powerful at the microlevel. However, as Wolf reminds us, “the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality” (1982:3). Failure to reassemble the complex humadenvironment totality is thefirsr major shortcoming of conventional adaptationist biological anthropology.

Among humans, of course, involvement with the environment is socially determined. For example, class plays no small role in determining exposure to particular microbes (Singer 1994a). Thus, to take one jarring example, the rate of pediatric AIDS among the poor is many times higher than among the wealthy. Summarizing data on HIV seroprevalence for newborns in New York City, Novick et al. (1989: 1749) note that the areas of the city with the highest levels of infection are poor inner-city neighborhoods, where low-income ethnic minorities constitute a substantial portion of the population. These are the same neighborhoods that have suffered the highest rates of AIDS-related deaths. Yadira Davila, a drug addict from the lower East Side of New York City, describes the impact of the AIDS epidemic on her neighborhood in the following words:

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Everybody is dead. The lower East Side is almost entirely empty. The only people left are the crackheads. Everybody at the Essex Street market are gone. Before we would pass by and it would be crowded. Everybody selling this and that. Now everything is empty. [Davila and Rosett 1989:46]

In a series of articles, Roderick Wallace (1990, 1991) and Deborah Wallace (1990) analyze the social distribution of AIDS in New York City in terms of the social disorganization of poor neighborhoods caused by changes in social policy, such as the withdrawal of essential municipal services like fire protection, imple- mented with the intention of lowering population densities and achieving planned population shrinkage in targeted areas. Following utility and social service withdrawal by the City Planning Commission and other agencies, they have documented a mass migration of refugees from burned areas into nearby neighborhoods, which themselves become overcrowded and are targeted for service reduction and subsequent burnout and migration. In these areas undergoing urban desertification, social networks and other forms of support are severely disrupted. These changes are associated with heightened rates of substance use and HIV infection. At the heart of one of the most devastated urban zones studied by Roderick Wallace (1 990), the Momsania section of the south-central Bronx, 25 percent of emergency room patients in the local hospital now test positive for HIV infection. He concludes that social policies, which are fairly direct expressions of social relations among contending social groups, propelled the urban environmental changes that contributed to skyrocketing rates of HIV morbidity and mortality in that population (199081 1).

Indeed, on an even grander scale, the prevalence and impact of AIDS world- wide is directly shaped by political economic factors. As Thomas Coates, director of the Center for AIDS prevention Studies at the University of California at San Francisco, has noted,

AIDS disproportionately affects the poorer people in the industrialized countries, and it has become a predominant problem of developing countries, where more than 75 percent of persons infected with HIV-1 are now found. Clearly, HIV-1 disease hits hardest the people and the countries that are least able to sustain the blow. [ 1993:73]

In the words of Lewontin and Levins, every change in society, including the structure of social relations among the classes that compose society, “is also apublic health event with its own pattern of diseases” (1 996: 104). It is in this same sense a biological event and should, therefore, be of keen interest to biological anthropologists rather a topic beyond the pale of objective scientific interest.

As the case of AIDS suggests with sharpening clarity, human biology, which is affected in each generation by differential survival and reproduction, is in no small part a product of political economy. Thus, while the emergence of the human species must be analyzed in tenns of the emergent capacity to “mix our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces,” and to shape Nature and be shaped by Nature in the process (Williams 198083), with the development of inequality and differential access to valued resources, including control of labor, human biological evolution took on a new dimension. From the moment that social hierarchies (of whatever form) emerged as significant determinants of survival and reproduction, it became misleading to speak of the human species as a seamless whole, a critical


change that is lost when the biological term population is applied unmindfully to contemporary humans. As Moran notes, in the conventional perspective, “genetic or evolutionary adaptation involves a slow adjustment to environmental change and is studied at the level of populations” (1979:70). Human groups fractured along lines of class, racial inequality, or other stratification, however, do not constitute populations in the customary biological sense. In such groups, “what is good for the elite is not a function of the survival needs of dominated [strata]” (Friedman 1980254). Indeed, what is good for the elite, what benefits this sector, may cost the oppressed dearly and usually does. This, precisely, was Engels’s whole argument, based on his Manchester research; namely, that the ruling class benefits materially from placing workers “under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that. . . undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so humes them to the grave before their time” (1 969[ 18451: 127). In such contexts, unnatural selection is a primary arbiter of genetic inheritance. Inattention to the fundamental importance of political economy in shaping humadenvironment coevolution is the second major shortcoming of conventional adaptationist biological anthropology.

The meaning of the concept “unnatural selection,”’ which is central to the argument I am making, can be made clearer by way of a commonly discussed example in biological anthropology and the health social sciences: hypertension among African Americans. In their book Medical Anthropology in Ecological Perspective, McElroy and Townsend (1989) review the relevant issues, noting that while hypertension is found among 15 percent of white adults, the rate is 28 percent among African American adults. Consequently, they observe, hypertension is the number one health problem of African Americans. Why might this be so? As they indicate, the etiology of hypertension is not yet fully understood. They emphasize, however, that “it is probable that the increased susceptibility of blacks to hypertension is partly genetically determined; blood pressures also tend to be high in West African and Caribbean blacks, though not as high as among blacks in the United States” (198954). Thus they conclude:

To develop an understanding of the epidemiology of high blood pressure, it is clear that we have to work with a rnulticuusul model rather than expecting to come to a neat correspondence between a single cause and a single effect. The causal mosaic includes both genetic and environmental factors, and the environmental factors of diet and stress interact with each other in ways not yet fully understood. [ 1989:57]

While they use the term environmental factors to label influences that seem better described as social forces, thereby limiting recognition of the role of political economy in shaping diet and stress, it is clear that McElroy and Townsend are well aware of the importance of social relationships in health. As they elsewhere note, “The health of blacks in this country is poor not because of genetic disabilities, but because of discrimination, inadequate health care, poverty, and psychological stress” (1989: 116). For example, one type of structurally imposed stress, lifestyle incongruity (i.e., living above one’s means and level of education because of capitalism’s relentless social pressure to achieve and exhibit economic success while blocking equal opportunity access), has been found by Dressler (1990a, 1990b) to be significantly associated with higher arterial blood pressure among

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African Americans. However, if the environmental component in McElroy and Townsend’s multicausal model is recognized as a set of variables that are intimately shaped by the forces of political economy, what of the other half of their equation, the genetic component in their model?

Here, I turn to recent work by the historian-epidemiologist Thomas Wilson and Clarence Grim, his physician collaborator, at the Hypertension Research Center of Drew University. They point out that there may be important genetically determined physiological differences underlying salt metabolism among whites and African Americans. African Americans, they note, tend to retain salt far longer than whites before secreting it into the urine; moreover, blood pressure in African Americans is more sensitive to immediate salt intake, rising or falling in direct relationship to changes in dietary salt levels. In other words, there appear to be genetic differences in how the kidneys of whites and African Americans process dietary salt with definite health consequences, most notably a hypertension rate among African Americans that is almost double that of whites. In biomedicine, differences of this sort that predispose a population to a particular disease are commonly referred to as “defects,” suggesting thereby that it is not only society that is unequal in race relations but nature as well. A political-economic understanding of nature, however, suggests an alternative conclusion.

The work of Grim and Wilson (1993) suggests that the starting point for developing such an understanding lies in asking: Under what conditions might African Americans have been selected for having efficient salt-retaining kidneys? For an answer they look to the selective pressure created by the slave trade. First, they point out that forced marches to export sites along the African coast and toil in a blazing sun in Plantation fields would have contributed to significant salt loss and a resulting high rate of death among slaves. Second, a review of historic accounts suggests that one of the most common causes of death among slaves during the trans-Atlantic passage was “fluxes,” or diarrhea. Gastrointestinal infec- tions, which would have been abysmally common on crowded slave ships and in coastal holding pens, were likely sources of diarrhea among bound slaves. Cholera, for example, causes massive diarrhea, leading to dehydration from a sudden loss of large quantities of salt and water. Consequently, a high percentage of Africans forced into slavery died before or shortly after arrival at their intended destination (Bennett 1%6; Mannix and Cowley 1962). This process began early as captives were bound with chains, loaded down with cargo, and forced to walk for as long as two months to reach the African coast. Based on historic sources, Wilson and Grim report that 25 percent died on this cruel march. Upon arrival at the shore, slaves were crowded into unventilated barracoons or holding cells and forced to await the appearance of the ships of prospective buyers. It is estimated that of those who survived the march to the coast, at least I2 percent died during this imprison- ment. Once slaves were purchased, they were loaded aboard ships that sailed for several weeks along the African coast until their cargo decks were full. As a result, another 5 percent perished. Next began the treacherous Middle Passage across the Atlantic, during which at least 10 percent of the slaves on board died at sea. Once in the West Hemisphere, 5 percent of the voyage survivors died while awaiting sale, and another 12 percent of the remainder succumbed while being marched or shipped to a plantation. Finally, it is estimated that between 10 and 40 percent of those who

508 MEDICAL ANTHROWLOGY QUARTERLY

reached plantations died during the first three years of enslavement in the New World. In sum, as many as 70 percent of the individuals who were originally captured in Africa were dead within four years. In addition, about half of the infants bom to slave mothers died within a year of birth. Losses were so great that slave populations were unable to sustain themselves, leading to a continued reliance on new slave raids on the African continent.

Under these brutal conditions, Grim and Wilson argue that salt-retaining kidneys offered a significant survival advantage (also see Jackson 1991). As individuals with salt-releasing kidneys collapsed and died from dehydration and salt depletion, a disproportionate number of individuals with highly efficient salt-retaining kidneys survived and, to the degree that this trait was genetically determined, passed it along to the next generation. The benefit derived from this selection process, however, disappeared and in fact became a liability with the end of slavery, the development of effective treatment for diarrhea, and greatly increased access to salt in the Americas. The result, according to Grim and Wilson, is the high rate of hypertension and associated disorders among African Americans, individuals whose ancestors were unnaturally selected for the retention of a limited level of salt intake. While individuals in any population vary in their sodium tolerance, and while sodium tolerance may be affected by the general balance of other minerals in one’s diet (Frisancho et al. 1984), African Americans on average appear to be less sodium tolerant than whites.

In this example we catch a glimpse of how humans have been shaped biologically by their structural position in society and their deployment in a particular form of labor under a given (and evolving) set of environmental conditions. Slave interaction with the environment was socially determined, as was their far greater exposure than other social strata (living in the same environment) to deleterious conditions. At the same time, this form of production and the set of social relations it created, shaped local environments in notable ways. There evolved, in short, a dynamic interrelationship between a rigidly stratified human society, a particular mode of production, and a physical environment in which changes in one of these factors had consequences for the other two. It is in this sense that a dialectical model offers a useful corrective to conventional adaptationist inattention to political economy.

Political Economy and the Environment

Thus far I have argued for discarding the adaptationist perspective. But to reiterate, this is not a rejection of biology or a devaluing of the importance of either the environment or evolution; hence this article is not a call for an idealist or postmodem shift away from a materialist perspective in science. Rather, this stance is motivated by recognition that science and its concepts are culturally created and socially situated, and as a result cannot help but incorporate tenets of the dominant ideology (Gould 1977; Habermas 1971). Laurie Price (1992), in her analysis of federal funding for scientific research, has attempted to elucidate part of the hegemonic process in the production of scientific knowledge. As she observes,

Typically, scientists operate as though their research were independent of socially constructed reality and as though their moral and political selves were expressed only in extraprofessional activities. But conventional knowledge and cultural


values pervade the enterprise of scientific investigation. Values dictate choice of research problems, hypotheses, operationalization of variables, and selections of methods for data collection and analysis. [ 1992: 1291

Others have analyzed changes in reigning scientific paradigms in terms of politicaleconomic transformations. The historic paradigm shift, for example, from conceiving of objects in the material world as but a set of rough and imperfect approximations of underlying ideal type (a worldview inherited from Plat0 and Aristotle), to the more contemporary materialist conception of real forces interact- ing with real objects, has been tied to the transformation of social relations inherent in the bourgeois revolution (Levins and Lewontin 1985). Similarly, Sahlins (1977) has analyzed the development of sociobiology in terms of the penetration of biological thinking by a late capitalist economic theory of action, just as Engels (in Schmidt 197 1 :47) earlier had noted the influence of capitalist ideology on Darwin’s thinking about the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest.

In this light, the call for a shift from adaptationist thinking advocated here should be understood as asserting the need for greater, not lesser, attention to bioenvironmental factors in the development of a political economy of health. The inattention to such factors thus far in the political economy of health literature, I suggest, is an example of the impact of dominant ideology even upon a counter- hegemonic perspective. Fortunately, as Baer (1991) notes, under the impact of Green politics in Europe, the ecology movement in the United States, and various antipollution struggles in the Third World this pattern is changing. Bodley’s (1 975, 1985) critique of the progress theme in cultural ecology and cultural evolutionary thinking, in light of the environmental crisis and the deterioration of environmental quality, provides an important starting point for further efforts to create what O’Connor (1989) has termed apolitical economy ofecology. As Bodley points out, human reshaping of the environment is not new: ‘Tribal hunters have contributed to the creation of grasslands; pastoral nomads have overgrazed their lands; peasant farmers have caused deforestation and erosion” (198527). Human cultures no less than human biologies have coevolved with local environments, and transformations have occurred in both directions in response to a constant feedback process. The emergence of inequality and class stratified societies in combination with advanced technologies, however, has radically accelerated this process, with increasingly drastic effect upon the nonhuman environment. A starting point for understanding the character of the culturehature dialectic is an examination of society itself. As C. L. Lewis observed, “man’s power over Nature is really the power of some men over other men [and over women], with nature as their instrument” (cited in Zola 1986:387).

Conclusion: Toward a Dialectical Biological Anthropology

In summary, there is a need to move biological anthropology, indeed all of anthropology, toward an alternative conception of its subject matter. The type of dialectical biological anthropology advocated here would see the part in light of the whole and thus view nature and political economy as interpenetrating, “so that both are at the same time [understood as] subjects of the historical process” (Levins and Lewontin 19854). In this reconceptualization, the notion of adaptation, a concept that lends itself too easily to vichm-blaming (Singer 1989), would give

5 10 MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY

way to a less fragmenting, less reductionistic, and non-Cartesian understanding that allows focus on specific organisms or relationships without blocking awareness of their location in larger wholes and in history. For example, the genetically controlled red blood cell sickling trait found in sub-Saharan Africa is commonly described as an adaptation to the presence of malaria, in that the Plasmodium parasite that causes malaria does not survive or reproduce well in sickled cells (Livingstone 1958). It is generally recognized that the presence and behavior of the Anopheles mosquito that serves as vector for the parasite was greatly influenced by human environmental reshaping for purposes of food cultivation, a development that reflected and expressed significant political economic changes, including a transformation of social relationships associated with producing a surplus and storing food. Cultivation, which was introduced approximately two thousand years ago in tandem with more centralized political authority and the paying of food tribute by subordinated strata, created sunlit pools of stagnant water favored by Anopheles mosquitoes for breeding and allowed the concentration of a large number of human victims in settled villages. The question is raised as to whether this example is best understood within a model of human population adaptation to a natural environment; or, as McElroy and Townsend (1 989) see it, as a series of concomitant adaptations by various species; or, finally, within a framework of a dialectical and political economic ecology that incorporates diverse parts of a complex set of processes and relationships within a unified understanding and in which change is seen as emerging in response to the dynamic tension within and between parts of the larger whole. The last of these alternatives, the dialectical model presented in this article, offers the opportunity to transcend the narrow, reductionistic, and politically naive efforts of much past work in biological anthropology. Thus McElroy and Townsend identify two principles in their account of the “chain of adaptations” that underlies the malaridsickling complex: (1) “adaptation must always be assessed in the context of a specific environment,” and (2) “adaptation is rarely without costs” (1989:88). Yet there are further lessons to be drawn from this example. For example: (3) human-environment interactions must always be assessed in the context of political economy, and (4) the costs of particular (biological or social) responses to environmental contingencies must be assessed in terms of their differential effects across existing social strata.

Raymond Williams argued at the conclusion of the essay cited earlier that

It will be ironic if one of the last forms of the separation between abstracted Man and abstracted Nature is an intellectual separation between economics and ecology. It will be a sign that we are beginning to think in some necessary ways when we can conceive of these becoming, as they ought to become, a single discipline. [ 1980841

Whatever we call this emergent discipline, it is clear that the new biological anthropology must embrace as deep an awareness of political economy as it does of biology or ecology. Similarly, it must weave these together tightly in light of culture and social meaning and in terms of human experience and embodiment (Scheper-Huges and Lock 1987). In short, it will be guided by what Paulo Freire (1970) has called a “hinged-theme.” As he notes, by way of a tembly pertinent example, “The anthropological concept of culture is one of these hinged themes. It clarifies the role of men [and women] in the world and with the world as transform-

FAREWELL TO ADAITATIONISM 51 1

ing rather than adaptive beings” (1 970 1 14; emphasis added). These issues have special pertinence in the realm of health, and attention to them spotlights the special contribution of medical anthropology and the other health social sciences to human health. As Ewald notes in his account of the evolution of infectious diseases, “Because evolutionary changes in disease organisms depend on past, present, and future cultural [and hence political-economic] environments, historians, sociolo- gists, anthropologists, and psychologists need to be involved” (19949; emphasis added).

NOTES Acknowledgments. Sections of this article were presented at “Political-Economic

Perspectives in Biological Anthropology: Building a Biocultural Synthesis,” a symposium sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Cab0 San Rios, Mexico, October 1992, and at the 90th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, Illinois, November 1991. I would like to thank participants in both those conferences who provided a receptive ear and useful comments. No doubt, suggesting transcendence of a concept as central to several sciences as adaptation will be seen as foolhardy by some, or, at a minimum, as unwisely throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The strength of science, of course, lies in its commitment to a radical course of regular reassessment with reference to established truths.

Correspondence may be addressed to the author at the Hispanic Health Council, 175 Main St., Hartford, CT 06106.

1. Use of the term unnutural selection might imply a retention of the notion that society or human behavior is separate somehow from nature and the concept recently has been criticized on this as well as on other grounds (Clarence Grim, personal communication, 1995). In this article, however, the term is used specifically to underline selection that is not caused by a nature explicitly or implicitly conceived of as having an existence beyond and isolated from human political economy.

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Farewell to Adaptationism: Unnatural Selection and the Politics of Biology

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