What Does it Mean to be Human? A Conversation with Erika Milam, Part 2
In Part One of Marginalia’s conversation with Erika Lorraine Milam, Charles C. and Emily R. Gillispie Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University, she discussed how the way we practice science is inseparable from our narratives of race, gender, and class.
In Part Two, Professor Milam and Meanings of Science Project Director, Samuel Loncar, continue to discuss Milam’s latest book, Creatures of Cain, and the crucial moment in history that shaped how we talk about evolution, anthropology, science policy, and who represents the scientific community.
Samuel Loncar
You brought up some of the debates about authority and science, and I think that is where things are most exciting.
In Creatures of Cain, you present this incredible history, a kind of cultural and scientific history of a pivotal (and recent) part of our culture. As your opening answer indicated, your focus is as a historian, and I find your work as a historian illuminating and highly relevant to our own contemporary concerns in science policy
At the same time, in providing that beautifully written history, you're actually introducing a context that we have not had before because you bring all of the disparate factors together: the racial factors, the religious factors, the gender factors, and the authority factors in science.
So, when it comes to anthropology, could you help us understand why people felt that anthropology needed rescuing from its cultural anthropological side and root it in the physical aspects of science? Was it connected the social sciences having a weaker status? What was going on that made this academic turn?
Erika Milam
An anthropologist who reviewed the book wrote that he found Creatures of Cain a refreshing change from many histories of anthropology—instead of just looking at how social norms and assumptions influenced the science, here was a tale of anthropologists with cultural cachet, weighing in on the major issues of the day. And people were listening! When we look back to this Cold War moment, the scientific community that seemed to have the most relevance answering “what does it mean to be human” was very different than the nexus of scientists who are attempting to answer that question, or ones like it, right now.
Since the end of the 1970’s, we've seen the rise of behavior, genetics, and especially neurobiology. Answers to questions about the nature of humanity are now are seen to rest in some combination of the trolley problem, fMRI machines, neuroplasticity, and building computer models of the brain. Iain McGilchrist, who I know is part of the project, can speak to contemporary interests in neurobiology more concretely.
To return to the 1960’s and 1970’s, within anthropology, traditionally, there were the four fields: archaeology, linguistics, and then cultural and physical anthropology. All four of these fields were fascinated by explaining a commonly held area of inquiry: the emergence of humanity.
The 1960’s, for me, were a moment when origin stories were phenomenally important to the way that academic and popular readers thought about what it meant to be human – this is still true. The hope is that if you can explain the origin of something, then you can understand the essence of its being. As a result of that, you can then understand the impact that that idea or object has in the present. This conception of history underpinned the authority of disciplines that could look further into the past to understand the present—for human origins, that meant paleoanthropology. This was coupled with the discovery of exciting, new hominid fossils in eastern and southern Africa. The physical side of anthropology therefore seemed like a solid, scientific alternative to the complexity of cultural differences in the present.
For similar reasons, early long-term studies of primates in the wild—especially baboons and chimpanzees—held the possibility of understanding what it meant to be human by analyzing the similarities and differences of human and non-human primates. In the colloquial scientific press, stories of primate behavior returned scientists to an even earlier moment of hominid evolution, where the lineages that would become modern chimpanzees and modern humans diverged.
Professional historians are often skeptical about the explanatory sufficiency of origin stories for a couple of reasons. We understand that although things are called into being in the historical past, they maintain relevance only as long as society is interested in maintaining them. So, in order, for example, for a concept like race to continue to exist, it requires constant attention to and reification of race as an idea in society. It’s a social process; it isn't a static thing that is called into being by scientists, and then it continues to exist in that form for the rest of its existence. So if we take a framework like thinking about these historical objects as processual, then we understand what it means to be human.
When people look back to origins, as a moment of explaining a static present, that, as a historian, makes me extremely skeptical. Current anthropological theory, current evolutionary theory, also understands that humans, of course, change over time, and we are a constantly evolving species, and our cultures and traditions are ever-changing. As species, that is fascinating behavior. Who (or what) we are is always a process; it is not static.
Samuel Loncar
Yes, though part of what you show in the book is that how people conceptualize that origin is the massive change happening from the 1950-60’s, and as you’ve said, that falls at the end of post-WWII America. There is a historical story from origins to an optimistic story of progress.
As a historian, you're deeply skeptical. But I'm curious; could you explain from your standpoint—and I may be asking too much for our time together, but it's connected to what you said—what do you make of the emergence and fate of sociobiology as a scientific program at this time? What do you make of why do we change?
You've answered it, of course, in many ways. But you get this narrative of these very aggressive stories about human nature and sociobiology as this focal point for much of the scientific legitimation of that. What do you think was happening? Or why did that appeal to people so much in the 70’s?
Erika Milam, Cretaures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America. Princeton University Press, 2018.
Erika Milam
These are all great questions! Sociobiology, in my reading, is a fascinating theory of what it means to be human, because it eats history. Sociobiology provides, by comparing what it means to be “animal” to what it means to be “human,” a static vision of the essence of human nature.
In comparison to evolutionary theories of humanity common just a decade before, sociobiology is a profoundly ahistorical explanation of human nature. That is a surprising statement to make because sociobiology is based in evolutionary theory, which we tend to assume is deeply historical. I think that it's a tricky thing to wrap your mind around; how does an evolutionary theory come to erase history?
This is part of why so many social scientists and biologists pushed against sociobiological reasoning and its conclusions—it provided an essentialist rendition of what it means to be human. And yes, I find that to be really interesting.
Samuel Loncar
That is a remarkable insight and framing into this incredibly important scientific theory. The idea of an a-historical evolutionary theory, it's wonderfully paradoxical.
Erika Milam
It is; it is! That's part of why it was an appealing as a framework for understanding what it means to be human.
Sociobiology obviated the need for historical inquiry—scientists could interpolate the past without studying it directly. For some traits that they were interested in, this was crucial. How did early humans behave? There was little to no direct evidence in the fossil record, so answers had to be triangulated from different forms of evidence. Sociobiology provided a set of possible answers through the comparison of behavior in humans and non-human animals. This, in turn, reinforced the idea that there were species-typical behaviors: men behave like this, women think like that, etc.
My current research is on the history of long-term studies of animal social behavior. Several studies begin in the 1960’s and are still going today. These are projects that explore the behavioral interactions of marmots in the American Rockies, the social behavior of baboons in Kenya, and many, many other species. One of the things that I found fascinating in interviewing a number of scientists about their work was how much their perspective on animal behavior changed as a result of the publication of sociobiology.
As a historian of science, I have, like other historians of science before me, concentrated most of my intellectual gaze on the final chapter of sociobiology, which is about human evolution. There are over twenty other chapters in the book, before you get to humans. Those earlier chapters profoundly changed the way that scientists worked with and conceptualized animal behavior and the evolution of social behavior.
When talking to behavioral ecologists who were actively pursuing research at that time, I was surprised to discover how often I heard people say “oh, I never read the final chapter” or “I just ignored it.” Without long-term studies, the best proxy for time is to compare two different populations of the same species (or two different species) and attribute observable, heritable differences to the passage of time. Long-term studies of animal behavior enabled scientists to measure the effects of time directly, and to provide new answers to the kinds of questions Wilson was asking in Sociobiology. As a result, there are two extraordinarily distinct legacies to sociobiology in a way that I am only now coming to appreciate.
One of the other questions that you have asked is, why is it that disciplines change, in terms of who is seen as the authority to answer these big questions about human nature. In the book, I don’t try to settle the question for myself of what it means to be human. Instead I ask, how is it, and why is it, that members of the reading public change in whom they are investing the capacity to answer these questions?
In the 1960's and ’70's, this changing authority was visible in a number of different places, all at the same time. People designing curricula for science classes for high school students, and for elementary school students, changed the sources that they were using, in order to spark new conversations in the classroom; university professors changed the way that they taught courses for undergraduates; scientists changed the questions that they asked; and as a result, publishers changed the kinds of books they were publishing, and the reading public drew on all of these, and funding agencies changed which research projects they thought were the most exciting. Intellectual historians are deeply interested in answering your question, how do ideas change over time? For science, the answer has to be found in all of these different realms. They all synergize. That means looking to colloquial scientific sources as a key part of understanding scientific authority rather than dismissing them as mere popularizations.
Samuel Loncar
This is so helpful. What do you make of the authority of scientific disciplines yourself? At least, the ones that you’re studying in evolutionary biology and evolution, given that you see the rate at which they change, the ways in which their own change makes them in a sense illegible to their own past.
How do you think we should be thinking differently about science, or how should we be helping the public, for example, understand science differently?
We have these problems of representation—who is in power and who gets to count as the “we” and who represents the scientific community—your work speaks to all of those concerns.
Erika Milam
Permit me a short digression. I became interested in the history of science when I was a graduate student in biology. I came to the history of science late, one might say. I was enrolled in an ecology and evolutionary biology PhD program, and already developing a plan for my thesis—the evolution of reproductive modes in fishes.
Fishes are great because they have all sorts of different modes of internal fertilization. You cannot look at the evolution of internal fertilization in mammals, for example, because they're all internally fertilized and there's no variation. So, I studied fishes. I was fascinated by all of the different theories purporting to explain how internal fertilization evolved and why it evolved in the natural world. Despite this plethora of theories, nobody disagreed on the data. Everybody disagreed on how to interpret the data.
I approached my thesis advisor, and I said that I would like to write an introduction to this dissertation, where I tackled this question of how it is that people come to see different things in the world; how it was the case that even when we see the same data points, we do not agree on what they mean.
He responded, “Erika, I think that's a great idea. I cannot help you. What you need to do is walk over to the history department and do an independent study with someone who can guide you on how to think historically about this question.” Greatest advice ever!
I start an independent study in the history of science, and was totally captured by it. Then I completed a second independent study in the history of science, and again am totally gripped. My second independent study was with John Carson, a thoughtful historian of the social sciences at the University of Michigan, who turned to me and asked: “Do you know that there is an entire discipline called the history of science? Would you potentially be interested in talking to other people who were equally obsessed with these ideas?” It was really just a wonderful moment.
What drew me to history, as a scientist, a biologist, were exactly these kinds of questions about the relationship between science and society, how scientific ideas change over time, and why they have such epistemic authority to begin with? Why does that change? In the mid-1990’s, when I am considering such questions for the first time, such questions were actively debated in the biology department: what is the place of evolution? Who has the authority to say what evolution is, as opposed to creation science? Where are the boundaries of legitimate science?
When I became a professor at the University of Maryland a decade later, I was eager to teach a class on the history of evolution, because I thought it would allow me to get students to talk and think about similar questions. They were signing up for the class for different reasons, however. Many more were interested in discussing the intertwined histories of religion and science, for example. The intellectual place where students today want to have the kinds of epistemic conversations that drew me into the history of science in the first place is the history and politics of the environment, climate change, and conservation. At Princeton, where I now teach, I have replaced my course on the history of evolution with Thinking with Nature: Histories of Ecology and Environmentalism. In that class, we explore the historical debates over wilderness preservation, population control, invasive species, urban pollution, and more. The underlying concerns are the same—how is scientific authority negotiated? how do scientific and colloquial understandings of concepts change?—but with new subject matter.
When it comes to resolving these debates, more information does not always help. If you are someone who is persuaded by data, scientists and those of us who write about science are extraordinarily good at providing convincing facts and narratives. We're great on data! As the study of science communication clearly indicates, however, many people cannot be persuaded to change their minds when presented with new information. Historian David Kirby once wrote that it is not facts that legitimize narratives, but narratives that validate facts. The question becomes, how do we narrate questions like climate change in new ways? How do we narrate questions like conservation, in a way that people are persuaded?
Literary scholar Allison Carruth is very interested in the question of narrating nature and science. She argues, and I have seen this at work in my classroom, that the kinds of stories that persuade are often those where people can see themselves in the narratives.
One of the difficulties with universalizing narratives (whether about the environment or human nature) is that they can often feel like they're taking place from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, and they reflect the demographics of the people who are deep in the data already rather than the demographics of the people who are affected by the issues. If people do not see themselves as part of these narratives, they are much less likely to be convinced.
Samuel Loncar
That itself is such a profound point.
This is where I think your work leads us directly into a much more enhanced understanding of science in its broadest sense and of our current narration problem. For example, is this a problem about communicating the data? Or is it actually a problem about the way the stories we are told about science are themselves a part of science?
This seems to be the point of your book in particular. You make this incredible indirect argument that you can't separate narratives and disciplines from their scientific content.
Erika Milam
I think that's right. The historian’s job is to reflect on scientific debates and narratives decades after they take place, which is a lot easier than trying to tease them apart in real time. As historians, I hope we can use the past to understand how questions were resolved (or not!) about the relationship between science and society, about the importance of narration, and about how evidence gets used, about the relationship between fact and theory, etc. Debates in the present are a consequence of past resolutions, they too are historically contingent in origin and continue to morph based on current politics. These analytical tools honed on the past are useful for unpacking the present.
Let me step back a moment. There are two main ways that historians use the past to understand the present, I think. One of them is similar to how evolutionary biologists, in a sense, use the past as a way of conceptualizing the origins of the present. How did this thing come into being, and how has it changed over time into its present form? The second uses the past to defamiliarize the present, to say that in the past, things worked differently. And what that means is that the present is contingent.
The present need not be the way that it is. The past in this case gives us a set of intellectual tools for imagining the present as otherwise. Both of those are incredibly powerful and can be mobilized within the historical narratives that we tell.
Samuel Loncar
Thank you, Erika, for such an incredible conversation!
Erika Milam
Thank you, Samuel! I have so enjoyed speaking with you today.
Erika Lorraine Milam is the Charles C. and Emily R. Gillispie Professor of the History of Science at Princeton University. Her work explores how and why scientists and public audiences have used studies of animal behavior to understand human behavior, from sex to aggression. She has published two books, Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), as well as co-edited two major projects, with Suman Seth, Descent of Darwin: Race, Sex, and Human Nature (BJHS Themes 6, 2021) and with Robert A. Nye, Scientific Masculinities (Osiris 30, 2015).
Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale) is a philosopher and writer, the Editor-in-Chief of the Marginalia Review of Books, the Founder and Director of the Institute for the Meanings of Science, the Architect and Co-founder of The Writing College, and the host of Becoming Human: A Show for a Species in Crisis, featuring his work as a teacher and interviewer. He has taught at Yale University and as consultant speaker, he has worked with clients like the United Nations, Oliver Wyman, and Red Bull Arts. His book, Becoming Human: Philosophy as Science and Religion from Plato to Posthumanism is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Tweets @samuelloncar
