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7. Others
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7 Others Laurie Lassiter Whereas dogma once insisted that natural selection operated only “on the level of the individual,” some current analyses focus on genes, populations , and species as units of selection. Here Lassiter introduces us to the work of Murray Bowen—a psychiatrist who never treated individuals in isolation, but always as members of human groups, specifically families . Bowen’s theory of the family as a unit of natural selection involves a measure he calls “differentiation of self.” The extent to which each of us responds to new social situations relatively independent of our early family experience is measurable. The notion that individuals (or their genes) are the only bona fide objects of natural selection is deeply entrenched in neo-Darwinism. It is obvious, however, that human beings live, prosper, reproduce, and die in group settings—families, tribes, nations—that crucially affect the chances of an individual’s survival. Moreover, the importance of the group to which the individual belongs, and in which he or she survives, is pan-biological: group membership matters not only to humans, but also to other animals and even microbes. Attempts to understand ourselves as individuals are doomed if we fail to take account of the overwhelming influence of the social groups in which we developed. In most populations, individual organisms that live in the same place at the same time tend to form identifiable groups. The relationships between members of these groups often determine the health and fate of the entire group, even over more than a single generation. Murray Bowen (1978), a scientific investigator of human behavior for many years, recognized the transition from herds, flocks, and families of nonhuman animals to the tribes, clans, and families of humans. Years of studying the behavior of socially impaired, often institutionalized young people in the context of their families, along with later observations of 72 Chapter 7 “normal” families, led Bowen to document unnoticed regular processes of development in families based on systematic variation in siblings. He agreed with Charles Darwin (1898) that the “emotional system” (in this case the human family), not any individual person, is a minimal unit of natural selection in the evolution of the genus Homo. Bowen was especially interested in quantitative descriptions of automatic behaviors that involved four fundamental responses to social relationships. He noted that all people, to differing extents, use these responses: distance, or avoidance of emotional pressure capitulation, yielding, or giving in to emotional pressure from others conflict, or refusal to give in to emotional pressure while attempting to force the other to capitulate involvement of another person (often a vulnerable child) or persons through emotional pressure. Bowen (1978) invented and refined a measurement called Differentiation -of-Self (DoS). Bowen’s concept refers to the extent to which an adult responds to the environment based on perception and judgment (high score) or reacts as a member of his or her original familial group based on emotional programming (low score). The four types of responses, often hidden behaviors, can be observed after appropriate training. Behaviors of individuals may be predicted by means of Bowen family systems theory (ibid.). Not only do the analyses of Bowen and his colleagues apply to our species and to other social animals (e.g., chimpanzees , dolphins, wild and domesticated dogs); they seem to apply to microbes, including myxobacteria and heterocystous (nitrogen-fixing) cyanobacteria. Natural social phenomena such as altruism, aggregation into complex societies with shifting alliances, gang rape, mass deception, and crowd madness long antedate the appearance of primates, let alone humans. Some of this social behavior can even be detected in the fossil record. The dismissal of the observable phenomenon of “group selection ” as not scientific unnecessarily turns a blind eye to a large and growing literature on the differential survival of animals as members of social units (families, tribes, or herds) relative to their more solitary close relatives. The worldwide expansions of both ants and humans are attributable to the effectiveness of their groups. If the species Homo sapiens is unique, different from the rest of life, the study of human social groups—family, work, social organizations— is not related to behavioral science of other species. But if, as Darwin insisted, we humans evolved from nonhuman primates and, like them, [54.165.248.212] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:42 GMT) Others 73 are connected through evolution to common microbial ancestors, then human social behavior may be illuminated by study of other...