Why We Are What We Are

FEW SCIENTISTS WOULD tackle the subject of this book "Why we are what we are, why we do what we do, why we feel what we feel." And probably fewer could have dealt with it as successfully as Harvard anthropology professor Melvin Konner has in The Tangled Wing.

Konner calls his book "a treatise on the biology of the emotions," but the book is really concerned with the biological basis of behavior The Tangled Wing aims for that same elusive understanding as E O Wilson's On Human Nature, Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden, and Robert Andrey's The Territorial Imperative, and it touches on the subjects of many other less sweeping books which have tried to solve the age-old debate between "nature" and "nurture."

In graceful, flowing prose, Konner sides with neither. Instead, he shows clear impatience with those who are content to deal with human behavior as a determinate product of the two distinct forces, heredity or environment, or some set mix of the two. He sees the so called "nature nurture" mix as an infinitely complex relationship. "Now that the discussion of heredity versus environment has transcended the 'versus,' passing beyond the question. Which and the only slightly less useful question. How much to the mature question. How we must prepare ourselves to face the fact that this last is not one question at all, but thousands."

Konner surveys and synthesizes a tremendous amount of data, including his own observations of hunting gathering life made during twenty months spent with the 'Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert in Africa. He distrusts a great deal of previous scientific writings and finds much of the literature "superficially impressive but historically impossible." Ever on his guard against "the dangers of behavioral biology," he includes an encapsulated history of the misuse of "science" to justify social aims--nineteenth century racial theories, the Nazis' view of the Jews as genetically interior, and Shockleyian notions about the inherent intellectual superiority of some people over others.

The book proceeds through examinations of the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, general patterns of human behavior, the biological basis of gender differences (a delicate subject), and the evolutionary role of language Konner then looks at the implications of behavioral biology's latest contribution to the understanding of seven human emotions rage, fear, joy, lust, love, grief, and gluttony.

Some of Konner's analysis shows the strong impact of environmental experience Jogging, for example, can influence the body a muscles and improve one's running speed, and this is not a product of (though it may be limited by) the body's genetic code. Similarly the structure of the brain of a rat is meticulously spelled out in its genes, but experiments have shown that the environment the rat is raised in has a profound effect on the ultimate state of its brain "Look," Konner says frankly. "Experience changes the brain." Indeed, in many cases, "the nongenetic sources of variation in behavior may be so large as to swamp any effects of the genes."

Yet the genes and their far-reaching impact always loom large in Konner's analysis. He notes that males are inherently more aggressive than females and explains this as a result of certain set differences in the structure of the hypothalamus, an important part of the brain which controls hormone levels. Males simply have more testesterone and so are simply--genetically--more violent (on average) than females. But to Kronner, this knowledge is promising, since it tells us. "Serious disarmament may ultimately necessitate an increase in the proportion of women in government. We would all be safer if the world's weapons systems were controlled by average women instead of by average men."

Indeed, even while noting the impact of experience and emphasizing the irrelevancy of the nature-nurture dichotomy. Konner seems to be saying much of the importance of environmental conditions exists precisely because the human genes allow for a great deal of flexibility. There has been, he says, an evolutionary tendency towards organisms with greater flexibility: penguins, for example, naturally live in Antarctica but are not able to live elsewhere: humans don't live there naturally, but can, if they wish, survive there. Konner believes that "it is impossible be to read even a single chapter of this book without coming away with a strong sense of the flexibility and modifiability of human behavior. True, but one can come away with an even stronger sense of awe at the chromosomes and all they control.

KONNER'S lucid style is easy to understand even when he ranges into a discussion of nerve cell structure or hormone levels in the blood. It is refreshing to hear from a scientist who can convey so many wide-ranging concepts, and many of them are not that simple so clearly and, at times humorously. In his discussion of the roots of language, he writes. "It is possible that some selection pressure for its emergence came from sexual selection operating on the courtship behavior of males that is to put it bluntly, the male who talked the best line got the girl. "But Konner does not just cite scores of scientists and theories to make his points, somehow Shakespeare. Henry James Wallace Stevens, U.S. Eliot, Dante, Marx, Engels, and others find their way into his argument and are at times, as important and appropriate as the neuro anatomists and physiological psychologists he cites so often, indeed almost endlessly.

What is so striking and impressive about The Tangled Wing is that even as Konner shows how much of behavior is already known to be the result of certain chemical and physical laws in action, and even as he confidently predicts that science will, certainly within the next few decades, unravel almost all the mysteries of human behavior, he still holds onto a sense of wonder at Homo sapiens as some sort of gestalt, a sum greater than and transcending its component parts. And it is just this sense of wonder, he believes, which makes us human. There is, Konner stresses, something that goes by the name of the "human spirit," something which even science--if we are wary--cannot take away from us. He writes. "At the conclusion of all our studies we must try once again to experience the human soul as soul, and not just as a buzz of bioelectricity: the human will as will, and not just as a surge of hormones: the human heart not as a fibrous, sticky pump, but as the metaphoric organ of understanding.

We must stand in awe of them as unassailable, even though they are dissected before our eyes."

Konner believes humans are losing their sense of wonder but denies that this is due to the increasing advances of science and technology. The latter point is debatable, but if, as he advocates, we chose for "the further evolution of the human spirit," our success will be measurable only in geological time. Perhaps it is a positive reflection on our species that Konner, like any other human being, can only speculate. And wonder.