New Neo-Darwinism

There's a quiet war going on as Western scientists and academics try to fertilize postcommunist Russia's fallow intellectual fields with their favorite theories. Last month I attended a scientific conference in Moscow where American and European Neo-Darwinists introduced Russian students to the controversial but fast-growing field of using evolution to explain human behavior.

Having assumed that Moscow girls all looked like Soviet lady shot-putters in danger of failing their chromosome tests, I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the students were young women who looked more like Anna Kournikova. The appeal of neo-Darwinism to coeds is only natural considering the subjects of the lectures: beauty, dancing, gossip, anorexia, childbirth, caring for babies, twins, the differences between men and women (pervasive and innate, according to evolutionary psychologists) and whether those newfangled perfumes with pheromones actually work as aphrodisiacs (they don't).

German anthropologist and MD Wulf Schiefenhoevel entranced the young ladies with a slide show of how Eipo tribeswomen deliver their babies in the New Guinea highlands. Most of what the Eipo do?give birth at home, walk around a lot during contractions, deliver in whatever position they feel like (generally upright) and use a female midwife instead of a male doctor?violates standard Western obstetrical procedures.

Yet it works better for them than Western medicine did until not too many decades ago. Primitive tribes' maternal death rates appear to be about 1 percent and infant death rates about 4-5 percent. In contrast, in European hospitals in the mid-19th century, doctors infected vast numbers of women with puerperal fever by failing to wash their hands between deliveries. Maternal death rates often reached 8 percent, sometimes even 12 percent. For a Darwinist, the relative effectiveness of Stone Age obstetrics is predictable. In the harsh survival-of-the-fittest environment of New Guinea, any tribe that birthed babies as badly as 19th-century European doctors would have eventually died out.

Schiefenhoevel's findings have, he claims, helped drive the trend toward "natural childbirth." He's dubious, though, of the current fad of insisting that Dad be in the birthing room. Traditional cultures never let the father anywhere near. The only males who drop by are shamans. (That's how Schiefenhoevel got in to take his pictures. As an MD, the Eipo granted him honorary witch-doctor status.)

My wife had our second child at home, with me in the room. This semi-Stone Age system worked superbly for mother and baby, but I felt like a complete schmuck, as any New Guinean could have told me I would. All I can remember is shouting crazed commands to our pair of lesbian midwives, commands such as, "No, not those towels! Those are the GOOD towels!"

National differences among evolutionary thinkers were clear at the conference. Primatologist Bernard Thierry was the only Frenchman. He said that French intellectuals all accept Darwinism (creationism is almost exclusively an American faith), but they just aren't interested in it. The French don't even like animals much, except for pets.

In contrast, the Germanic peoples love the beasts of the field and forest. Most of the German-speaking scientists in attendance, lead by the distinguished Dr. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, are human ethologists. The field grew out of the animal behavior studies of Dr. Dr. Dr. Konrad Lorenz. (He held doctorates in medicine, zoology and psychology). This 1973 Nobel laureate is most widely remembered for the charming footage of the ducklings who, because they had "imprinted" on him immediately after hatching, followed him everywhere as if he were their mother.

I expected that the Germanic scientists, the heirs to such system-builders as Hegel, Marx, Freud and Spengler, would be the most avid theoreticians among evolutionists, while the British and Americans would be the empirical pragmatists. Surprisingly, however, the opposite is true. The most Promethean system-builder is Harvard's Edward O. Wilson, author of such ambitiously titled tomes as Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

In contrast, the Germanic ethologists value intense observation. For example, Frank Salter, a Darwinian-oriented political scientist from Australia who has lived in Germany for 10 years, videotaped 60 hours of nightclubbers trying to talk their way past the doormen of Munich's exclusive Nacht-Cafe hotspot. Salter methodically measured from his videotapes how much skin each female supplicant was showing and found a correlation with how much they flirted with the bouncers.

The ethologists half-jokingly claim that British and American evolutionary psychologists get what little data they use from having their students fill out sex questionnaires. The Germanics also find the Anglo-Americans alarmingly infected with the speculative itch. Perhaps because in contrast to the many disastrous theories invented by Germans the two great theories proposed by British empiricists?Adam Smith's free-market economics and Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection?actually work, Anglo-American Darwinists are today more willing than Germans to toss out half-baked hypotheses.

For instance, an American evolutionary psychologist who spoke at the conference raised the baffling question of why natural selection doesn't make male homosexuality extinct. She noted a very recent theory that male gayness might be a side effect of an unknown gene that protects against smallpox, just as sickle cell anemia is a byproduct of genetic resistance to malaria. Because smallpox doesn't exist outside the laboratory anymore, however, this ingenious, if not particularly persuasive, conjecture seems destined to remain more of a monument to evolutionary psychology's fertile creativity than a testable idea.