Biology, Man, and Culture: A Unified Science Based on Hierarchy Levels

BIOLOGY, MAN, AND CULTURE: A UNIFIED SCIENCE BASED ON HIERARCHY LEVELS COLLEEN D. CLEMENTS* Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond; But is there anything Beyond? This life cannot be All, they swear, For how unpleasant if it were! One may not doubt that, somehow, good Shall come of Water and of Mud; And, sure, the reverent eye must see A Purpose in Liquidity. And in that Heaven of all their wish, There shall be no more land, say fish. Rupert Brooke, "Heaven" Introduction Many core assumptions in the humanities and social sciences work against a unified science and accordingly imply an unworkable dualism. This article proposes a scientific and philosophic model based on hierarchy theory, but any proposal must identify and address those humanities assumptions if it wishes to have any chance at success. Not only must the sciences make clear their evolution from early assumptions about knowing the purely objective (the "thing-in-itself"); the humanities must also evolve and critically reexamine their traditional assumptions that produce this epistemological and metaphysical dualism. Currently, the humanities are not only comfortable with but also foster a dualism. The The author acknowledges the helpful correspondence with E. O. Wilson and Derek Freeman for identifying the real issues in the science/humanities division, and the helpful conversations with Norman Pointer for identifying culture's pathologies. ?Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester Medical Center, 300 Crittenden Boulevard, Rochester, New York 14642.© 1989 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/90/3301-0658$01.00 70 I Colleen D. Clements ¦ Biology, Man, and Culture result is a conceptually distorted separation of the human "being" from other members of the biosphere, the denial of the possibility of a biological explanation ofhuman nature, the creation of a cultural reality disengaged from scientific reality, and an uncrossable chasm between human activities and biological understanding. There are code words for this dualism, and many contain a strong emotive component: scientism, biologism, reductionism, two cultures, human agency theory, intentionality , the naturalistic fallacy, meaning, and the hermeneutic method [1, 2]. This ongoing problem can be focused, and I will suggest solved, by considering the question ofthe valid construction ofhierarchy levels and by the critical role of reductive methodology. The purpose of this article is to sketch a framework for integrating experience (a unified science) and for understanding and correcting the resistance of the humanities to such an integration. The Humanities, Tradition, and Split Levels Behaviors are different if by different we mean species specific. Cultural behaviors (human social and symbolic activities) can be thought of in a unified theory of behavior that is not anthropomorphism or illicit importation of terms from one systems level to another. Instead, this unified theory is a systems theory generalization based on similarities among the members of the population of a particular level. For example , schooling [3, pt. 2, chaps. 2, 6], flocking [4], mobbing [3, pt. 3, chap. 3], and crowd behavior [5] can all be expressed in the generalized terms of a particular level without violating hierarchy theory [6] or a standard of meaningfulness, and the same could be done for cultural behavior. But there is a predictable reaction against any such generalized theory of behavior, precisely because it is an integrative theory. Humanities specialists have insisted on a difference of hind between culture and the rest of the natural world and will assume that any model that does not respect such a dualism is wrong. Since their reasoning begins with the intuition that there must be such a dualism, I want to very briefly look at some of the humanities disciplines that exhibit this two-culture separation of scientific knowledge and humanities knowledge and to identify some underlying reasons for this separation, particularly the core assumptions that would have to change before a unified science were feasible. philosophic assumptions blocking a unified science theory Much of contemporary philosophic theory rests on the concepts of autonomy, agency, mentation, necessity and intuitive certainty, and the ethical is/ought dichotomy [7, 8, 9]. These rationalist concepts are usuPerspectives in Biology and Medicine, 33, 1 ¦ Autumn 1989 | 71 ally formal and linguistic. They are particularly vulnerable to the unified science of general...