Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Gary Tomlinson. Culture and the Course of Human Evolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. 208 pp. 

Review by Miriam Piilonen

22 February 2019

Clifford Geertz once dismissed the idea that a “deep gulf” separates the humanities from the sciences. But then Geertz was uniquely skilled at speaking across party lines. So too is Gary Tomlinson. His Culture and the Course of Human Evolution traverses the traditional domains of “the sciences” and “the humanities” to offer a new interdisciplinary evolutionary history of modern Homo sapiens.

In Tomlinson’s account, late hominin evolution is defined by a proliferation and diversification of “culture.” Culture denotes “social transmission of learned behavior or knowledge across generations” (p. 4). Interactions of cultural and biological forces provided the conditions from which human modernity emerged. Note my impersonal use of the verb to emerge:  Tomlinson treats “the modern human” as an emergent property of evolutionary forces rather than its goal, thereby advancing the view that evolution is contingent and nonlinear, not teleological, and that human modernity is one of many possible evolutionary developments.[1]This lays the groundwork for a conception of human diversity and difference that is not reducible to genetic or environmental phenomena and that cannot be reverse-engineered from present-day human capacities, like language. What is needed, then, is a method for analyzing culture and its entwinement with biology that can accommodate a radically wide range of socially transmitted practices and knowledges, including “animal cultures” (p. 11). Tomlinson’s answer is a theory of semiosis adapted from the thinking of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). This struck me as an odd choice at first. Tomlinson’s interest in Peircean semiotics stems from its emphasis on the processof signification rather than thestructure of the sign, which accords with Tomlinson’s own effort to dislodge language from its privileged place in evolutionary narratives. Tomlinson, a musicologist, has long been critical of evolutionary scientists’ tendency to place language and symbolic cognition at the center of accounts of human evolution.[2]With Peircean semiotics, he offers to evolutionary theory a framework for theorizing a broader realm of meaning making than the advent of symbols. 

Advocacy for the humanities is a feature of the book. Tomlinson goes out of his way to perform the intellectual habits of humanists: close-reading and thick description, sensitivity to the situated nature of knowledge, and the like. He offers useful critiques of, for instance, evolutionary science’s facile “out of Africa” narrative (for its racist assumptions about the source and inevitability of “progress”), Richard Dawkins’s concept of the “meme” (for its reductivist view of human culture), and John Shea’s investigations of behavioral variability (for tying behavior too tightly to genetics). Unfortunately, his engagement with actual humanities literature is limited. For instance, he offers a “corrective to anthropocentrism” (p. x) while also working to explain what makes “late hominin evolution fatefully and fundamentally different” (p. 6)—he simultaneously decenters and centers the human. I wanted him to confront this paradox head on and, in doing so, to respond directly to post- and antihumanistic critiques of evolutionary science.[3]

Ultimately, I believe efforts to elaborate upon evolutionary narratives are urgently needed, both to bring the sciences up to speed on cultural matters and to help combat rhetorical damage done to “truth” by certain strains of social conservatism. Gone are the days when Bruno Latour could wring his hands in worry that efforts to expose science’s “lack of scientific certainty” would lead to a widespread mistrust of matters of fact;[4]the true threat to science was hardly science studies but rather conservative political efforts to corrode its cultural value. Tomlinson’s home discipline of music studies has done its part to deconstruct facts, expose the ways that knowledge is constructed, and put to rest tired notions of objectivity. But when he demonstrates the fallaciousness of certain scientific “facts” he does not then conclude that there is no truth to be had; instead he asserts a humanistic enrichment of evolutionary science that I see as a razor-sharp “anti anti-relativism,” to invoke Geertz again.[5]

[1]This perspective is not unique to Tomlinson. Charles Darwin himself described natural selection as contingent and nonlinear. See Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London, 1859), p. 435. For discussion of the “undirected” nature of evolution in Darwinian thought, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), pp. 144-46, 1218-29.

[2]See Gary Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 2015) and “Sign, Affect, and Musicking Before the Human,” boundary 2 43 (2016): 143–72.

[3]See, for instance, Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (Fall 2003): 257-337.

[4]Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225–48.

[5]Clifford Geertz, “Distinguished Lecture: Anti Anti-Relativism,” American Anthropologist 82 (Jun. 1984): 263–78.