Transcript Slide 1

ES3217: Loss of Childhood
Robert Yerkes’ Laboratory for
Primate Biology:
foundational studies in human
engineering?
Amongst the notes for last week was an account of
an earlier attempt to produce a biology of the
social; today it is usually referred to as Social
Darwinism. When you get round to the notes you
will find that the eugenic policies which stemmed
from the theory had disastrous consequences for
certain groups that were deemed to belong to
undesirable ‘races’. The problem has not gone
away. Stephen Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate,
identifies a social science argument which says, in
effect, that any social policy based on some form
of genetic determinism relating to a particular
social group is bound to lead to inequality (the
pejorative term used is ‘genetic underclass’).
One could, of course, go back much
further than these interpretations of
Darwin. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau
were all ready to produce speculative
accounts of human nature which posited
a specific genealogy in order to justify
the revised forms of society they
advocated. (Compare, for instance,
Hobbes view that before society human
life was ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ with
Rousseau’s version of the Noble Savage.)
During the Nineteen twenties, before the
‘modern synthesis’ of Darwinism with
Mendelian genetics had taken root, Robert
Yerkes proposed a different model for
humanity: the chimpanzee. The details,
including such matters as political
funding and university patronage, are
covered in Donna Haraway’s book of
1989, Primate Visions, pp. 59-83. As
an overview, the following bullet points
summarise some of the main aspects of
Yerkes’ project.
• The
main difficulty faced by any social scientist
attempting to produce theoretical generalisations
about human nature is that its characteristics are
always veiled by human culture. Even a new-born
infant enters this world via a pre-existing cultural
context.
• One therefore needs some special means to
penetrate to the core of human nature which must
surely underpin all human cultures. Equally, one
cannot side-step this difficulty by relying on
speculative reconstructions of embryonic human
mental capacity, or by assuming that ‘primitive’
societies are, by definition, bereft of culture.
• Our
nearest animal ‘cousins’ are the primates, and
amongst these, those showing the highest form of
‘natural’ sociality are the chimpanzees – but their’s
is a culture devoid of language or artefact.
(Yerkes’ ideas were formulated long before the
later, ethnographic studies of primate social life.)
• After initial studies to establish the ‘teachability’
of chimpanzees (their status as an ‘ideal’
experimental ‘child’) – and hence their social
malleability – it may be possible to use the
chimpanzee as an ideal model for experimental
social engineering.
• Ultimately,
if the initial and subsequent studies are
promising, it should be possible to identify those designs
of social life that ‘go with the grain’ of primate nature,
and those that run up against it. Through such studies it
should eventually become possible to design an ideal
society fit for human nature and growth.
As Haraway establishes, it is impossible to disentangle
this scientific enterprise from the rest of the human
social context from which it sprung. If for no other
reason, this is why you need to think about this example
and then review your understanding of the equivalent
social contexts that make, first sociobiology, and then
evo-devo, seem appropriate. In the case of Yerkes, the
clearest statements of his life’s work are given in the
1943 publication, Chimpanzees: a laboratory colony,
published by Yale University Press.
But of course one has to step ‘outside’ of Yerkes’
biography. Haraway offers the following: ‘the
fundamental duality of Yerkes as rational,
progressive leader and dependent servant of
power; the ape laboratory as pilot plant in the
service of human engineering; and the structural
ambiguity between object and image, servant and
master, child and man, model and reality in the
scientific relation of ape and human being’
Haraway, 1989: 61). This is a useful once one
relates each duality to a specific context within
America in the Twenties and Thirties. Haraway
also offers a more philosophical perspective –
‘Yerkes meant to refer unambiguously to the chimpanzee
as the servant of science; but before the prologue was
complete, the servant and the animal, the master and the
human being were tangled threads in the social fabric.
‘Man’s curiosity and desire to control his world impel him
to study living things’ (Yerkes, 1943:1). With that banal
but crucial assertion about the foundation of human
rationality in the will to power, Yerkes opened his book.
For him the tap root of science is the aim to control. The
full consequences of that teleology become apparent only
in the sciences of mind and behaviour, where natural
object and designed product reflect each other in the
infinite regress of face-to-face mirrors, ground by the law
of Hegel’s master-servant dialectic’ (Haraway, 1989: 61).
Again, having reflected upon this, think about the
equivalents for sociobiology and evo-devo today:-
We can review some of Yerkes’ context during
the lecture, i.e., the idea that the apes could be
‘re-designed’ so as to produce ‘useful’
knowledge, and much of this can be researched
on the web and in our own library.
Here are some themes to pursue:The domination of mind over body, the contrast
between culture (messy) and social engineering
(rational, economically effective), human nature
as ‘plastic’, docility equals co-operative and
‘teachable’, ontology and phylogeny, progressive
reform, social superiority, dominance, leadership.
And here are some social headings for
America in the Twenties and Thirties:Taylorism (and Fordism), the ‘madness’
of the Great War, psychobiology, the Jazz
Age, the Wall St. Crash, the Great
Depression, the Dust Bowl, The Fram
Security administration, the rise of the
European dictators, the Works Progress
Administration, the New Deal, the
impotence of the League of Nations.