Brothers and sisters I have none, but that man’s father is my father’s son
Most people can solve this familiar puzzle if they think about it for a little while, but only slightly more complex versions have them floundering. Yet the problem described isn’t much more difficult than naming the day after the day after yesterday, which (I think) most people can do instantly. The fact that such a simple problem can be posed as a puzzle is just one piece of evidence that people (at least people in modern/Western societies) have trouble learning about and reasoning about kinship relations.
I’m generally sympathetic to the Cosmides-Tooby idea of the mind as a collection of special-purpose gadgets rather than a general-purpose computer. The work of Kahneman and Tversky on probability judgements (also my own main area of theoretical research) supports this idea. And I’ve occasionally put forward evolutionary arguments to support the view that people are likely to overweight low-probability extreme events.
So, there is a bigger puzzle here for me. Assuming that the set of gadgets with which our minds are now equipped is the product of evolution, shouldn’t we (at least in some phase of our lives) be as good at learning about kinship systems as young children are at learning about languages? After all, it’s hard to imagine that we can be acting to promote the survival of our genes if we don’t know who is carrying them.
It’s often asserted that modern/Western society has a particularly minimal kinship system and that the systems prevailing in other societies are considerably more complex. This certainly seems to be true of the Aboriginal Australian systems I’ve seen described, but I don’t know whether it’s true more generally. Has the kinship instinct atrophied over time, and, if so, what are the implications?
John Quiggin 
THe puzzle* is cute, but this type of problem has little to do with evolutionary selection.
Men dont have to worry about “who is carrying [their] genes”, so long as lots of women are carrying them, a certain serial of their gene line will survive. Hence men arent that choosy about who they bonk. Hence they dont have to worry too much about kinship networks.
Women, OTOH, are very diligent family tree constructors. And women are much more voracious gossips. Both activities fit with womens role as the “choosier sex”, who must know about the bloodlines of various groups in and out of the immediate family.
These activities are more empirical than logical, so their is not much need to develop mental modules that encorporate kinship sorting algorithims.
*”that man” being the speakers son.
This puzzle is not about kinship relations, but rather about contrivances of speech. We ordinarily do rather amazing feats in deciphering the meanings of complicated sentences, but we’re thrown off when the language does not follow expected patterns. People do not ordinarily refer to themselves as “my father’s son” except in an expression such as “I am my father’s son”. The juxtaposition of “this man’s father” with “my father’s son”, where the relationships sound similar but go in opposite directions, is confusing because it is not where people expect to have to pay close attention. The rhyme and rhythm also interfere with getting the meaning easily. Also: with something that’s obviously pedantic, you have to wonder at least momentarily whether the catch could be that the person speaking has only one brother, not brothers.
It would not be a puzzle at all if expressed as:
“I’m an only child, and he’s my fathers grandson”
or
“I’m an only child, and he’s the son of the son of my father.”
I agree with all the points you make Bill.
But I still think that if we had a special-purpose kinship gadget similar to what we have for speech and vision it ought to be enough to compensate for minor verbal misdirection.
JQ, your special purpose machinery for speech needed training, and the training doesn’t work well later in life. You only ever get good at what was needed in your environment at the crucial stages. So, if kinship doesn’t need much work, you don’t end up with personal experience of a complicated gadget. It’s bound to depend on your customs – and ours don’t need much kinship recognition, since we have large pools to draw on.
I did once hear of a tribe that had a peculiar (to me) set of rules. They expressed it in a verbal form I found hard to follow, but I rearranged it into a graphical scheme I found easier. The thing is, you couldn’t apply the diagram in the field so easily though it was easier to memorise (I have in fact forgotten the original – maybe someone else knows it?).
The diagram form went like this: you have a 2 by 2 table, with entries NW, NE, SW, and SE. Everybody is allowed to breed with anyone in the same table entry. Boys go into the other entry in the same column as their parents, and girls go into the other entry in the same row as their parents. This greatly lowers the odds of consanguinity in reproduction. Notice, my description is resting on my own cultural experience and I have forgotten the original description.
Couple of points that may be productive.
Jack Strocchi’s argument about ‘men not needing to be choosy’ has been turned on it’s head by feminist scholarship(notably Mary O’Brien “Politics of Reproduction”). As she observes(following Margaret Mead originally I think), kinship rules are the concern of men because ‘paternity is a social construct and maternity is a biological fact’. Hence the outcome of kinship rules – namely their social recognition through marriage – is a patriarchally mediated institution whether it exists in a Pitjatjantjarra arranged marriage or a wedding in St Paul’s Cathedral.
I’m not up with the work behind your gloss; ‘mind as a collection of special-purpose gadgets’. I presume this is an extension of Minsky’s ideas?? I don’t think that ‘special purpose gadgets’ can be equated with a gene for kinship instinct. As I said elsewhere this is like talking about a ‘selfish’ word. It’s a confusion of langauge games as Wittgenstein would say.
My current favourite theory of the mind, comes from a pop psychologist(dare I admit it) who postulated that the reptilian limbic brain is continuously ‘bubbling up’messages about food, fear and fornication which are in turn processed by the cortex. This makes more sense than ontologically derived gadgets to me.
In this context, kinship avoidance can be seen as a pre-literate, pre-mammalian limbic system urge which is mediated by language and related concepts of the cortical brain.
In my work with Indigenous groups kinship rules are all about language. They are deeply embedded in the structure of languages and these languages evolve as a result of an individual historical dialectics.
PML’s diagram sounds like an example of one of a number of systems used by various Aboriginal people. These systems, generally characterised as totemic, make rules not just about people but about the whole world in which people are embedded. Thus, these kin systems define human/animal and human/place interactions as well as human/human interactions.
The result is that, in traditional (and transitional)societies, there is a very different way of thinking about things and behaving. If a special purpose gadget exists then it is being used for a different set of purposes when you compare Pitjtatjarra to St Paul’s.
kyan gadac makes my dreams come true:
Next time I wind up in a night club at some ungodly hour, single, drunk and desperate, I shall keep those words in mind.
kyan gadac continues in the same ideological vein:
Paternity is a social construct alright, but social constructs have been built precisely to block men’s natural urge to bonk anything that moves. Mary O’Brien might want to stick to the common-sense of Reproduction, rather than follow a mug like Margaret Mead.
kyan gadac presumes not quite rightly:
Minsky believed that the mind was a society of entities that had evolved to solve entity-relevant survival problems.
MM rejected the notion of a core executive self with a permanent identity, which stood at the centre of affairs directing traffic so to speak. Rather he looked at the minds decision making capabilities as a sort of parliament which was subject to shifting coalitions of interest.
The Evo-Psychos, particularly Pinker, accept this functionalist view of the mind, but go further by drawing on neurobiology to denote that some of the factions that run the mind have industrial special interest agendas ie they are modules that have evolved to solve typical problems that came up in our evolutionary history: eg how to avoid being eaten by dinosaurs, where to find the best water hole to hang out at.
Miller takes the Darwininan theory of Sexual Selection to imply that the most important problem the mind had to solve was how to engineer the genes reproduction ie how to bonk that groovy looking chick in the bearskin
C’est plus ca change…
Hard to know where to start.
Firstly, I think the “special purpose gadgets” metaphor of the brain is too mechanical. It picks up the notion of the special functions of parts of the brain but suppresses the interactivity between the parts. Kyan’s pop psychologist does raise an important issue of the distinction between the limbic brain and the cerebral cortex. The psychoanalylist Neville Symington makes a distinction between emotional acts and reason. To him all acts are at base emotional. Reason is used for feedback, reflection and apparent choice, but a choice even based on logic is essentially emotional. In brief we like the pattern and symmetry of logic, but if it tells us to leave our mum in a burning house and rescue a scientist who will invent a cure for cancer(a dilemma posed by John last year), we ignore logic. But again the interactivity between emotion and rationality is too often ignored these days.
I think it is likely that instincts are imprinted on the reptilian limbic part of the brain and I’m inclined to think there is an intinctual element against sex with blood relatives. I understand that sans the pill and modern perfumes we are attracted by smell to members of the opposite sex with immune systems maximally different, thus strengthening the species. (Incidentally, this is reversed by the pill – like immune systems attract.) Also we don’t like out parents’ BO.
How these instinctual elements work out in the rules of various groups is obviously influenced by culture. As PML says, we now act in a bigger pool so we don’t need to focus so much on kinship.
So we may conclude that either the instinctual element has atrophied, or it was always weak and needs little expression in our culture. I’d opt for the latter.
Jack’s notion of bonking everything that moves is all very well, but I don’t think it is a good survival strategy. If the natural biological results of such activity regularly turned up looking for support, care and sustenance, I would think our rational capacities would soon curb our biological urges. Capitalism has provided for or physiological needs so copiously that for the first time in the last 30 or so years most people have felt free to pursue the pleasure principle, if they so choose, released from the consequences by birth control.
How successful this is as a survival strategy may be measured by the increasing tendency of “advanced” nations to fall behind the replacement rate in the reproduction stakes. First there was the nuclear family to provide mobility of labour, now the nuclear family is breaking down.
I’m coming to the conclusion that the basic organisational unit of human society is the tribe or a subtribal group. Perhaps we survived about 70,000 years ago, somewhere in Africa, when there were fewer than 2,000 of us on the planet, in the middle of an ice age, not because of pleasure seeking on an individual basis, but because of the power of our communication capabilities and our cooperative efforts in small affiliated groups.
As children we learn language very early. That is when our need for communication is most critical as we can’t be fully human without it. We also used to learn cooperative behaviour early, but we are losing that now. Following Erik Erikson’s broad developmental stages, we then focus on the basic skills of our civilisation during the primary school years, followed by a focus on identity, intimacy and are then able to make a fully productive contribution to the group.
Capitalism has reconstituted this whole process in order to groom us to become competitive, pleasure-seeking consumers, and is now demanding that we become entrepereurs, or one-person business centres to boot.
The only problem is that as a population we are disappearing because the infrastructure of care required for the big-brained animal to grow to maturity is failing to produce the modest 2.1 babies per female required for population replacement.
Unless we can reintegrate reproduction into the processes that satisfy our basic needs (physiological needs, safety needs, love and belongingness needs, esteem needs a la Maslow) so that reproduction is a natural outcome of how we live our lives, and not an optional extra, well then we’ll eventually be replaced by folks who do.
Brian Bahnisch makes a good case against Darwnian Fundamentalism, but does not quite hit the target:
Natural selection’s perfect 10 would be to engineer an organism that have evolved a survival strategy that guranteed immortality. But the environment, both macro- and micro- is too mutable for a fixed genome. The threat of trauma is too probable, from comets if nothing else. Also microbes tend to prey on organisms with static genomes.
So NS figured out a more reliable, in-built redundancy gene-propagation mode: sex.
This puts the evolutionary premium on sexual-fertility rather than survival-longevity. Low maintenance sperm-carrying males “bonking everything that moves” is a corollary of this. What have they got to lose, except the pound of flesh that might be taken of them by irate Alpha male competitors?
Women have more to lose by unrestrained promiscuity, in terms of reproductive fitness, because pregnancy and child-rearing is so expensive. So they are more choosy.
Brian Bahnisch blames the traditional target, when the fault is in ourselves, dear Brian.
The evolutionary demographic equation has changed radically since the establishment of civil society, which has allowed stores of food to buffer enviro inastability, together with improved modes of fertility control and paternity determination.
THere is no longer a premium to eat as much as possible as quick as possible, or to wander far and wide in search of greener pastures.
Nor is there a need to constrain sexual activity since fertility can be controlled. Male sexual jealousy looks to be on the way out, given precise means of paternity determination.
We are left with the survival instinct untrammelled by food shortages and the sexual instinct untrammelled by mate choosiness.
Capitalism (economic selection) now engineers its processes to reward the underlying pleasure mechanisms that generated longevity and fertility ie hungriness and horniness. Thus we have become a nation of lard-arsed wankers.
NS originally evolved hedonism to make us serve higher gods than our own base needs, ie family, kin, state. But our techno-eco system has cut out the middle man leaving us with only our desires to satisfy.
We must now choose to sacrifice ourselves to others, rather than feel the need to do so.
If you are a gene in a male, paternity is a biological fact, not a social construct.
Apropos of nothing — it’s ironic that we use the word ‘cuckold’, when the cuckoo cheats the female at least as much as the male…
Some follow up comments:
Firstly, thanks Jack for the basic summary of EV etc. You and I will never, I think, agree about feminist related issues so let’s try to avoid a flame war:-)
Mary O’Brien also makes the point that the pill(as a metaphor for the control of reproduction) was a critical moment in women’s history. Her book was written before the invention of DNA testing but I’m sure that she would equally recognize the importance of this discovery in reducing jealousy etc. But, as Brian points out, if you forget your male responsibility for contraception(i.e. you didn’t ask, or carry a condom etc.) then she will turn up on your doorstep with a court order for paternity testing and a Centrelink form demanding that you pay for your offspring’s uptake.
Also several scholars have pointed out(Susan George for one)that in Western Cultures the cost of bringing up children has risen astronomically(schooling, not working until 16 etc. etc.) and that this cost along with the guarantee of old age security through pensions has reduced the imperative of having children. The cost/benefit ratio has changed markedly. It’s not simply a question of affluence that has stopped children being born.
The other affect that is worthy of serious consideration is the long term drop in male fertility that has been occurring since the 1960’s. The most likely cause of this is exposure to various toxic chemicals. This affect is comparable(in a cultural/historical sense) to the affect of lead plumbing in the Roman Empire.
I think it’s important to also recognize that the costs of child rearing are shared between both male and female in the animal world. Also the relative cost of pregnancy/birth as compared to upbringing varies enormously from species to species. So the idea of men contributing nothing but their sperm is not realistic. It depends upon what species and what culture and some men do all the child rearing (emus for instance). Similarly there are many counterexamples from nature of animals forming couples for life as opposed to alpha males dominating a harem. It depends entirely on the species. There is fallacy in arguing that because some men are stronger than all women therefore all men are stronger than all women.
To get back to the question of kinship and incest avoidance. The specific change that I think matters in the loss of kinship knowledge is the development of modern transport. Consider that dispersal is also a means of avoiding incest avoidance in the plant kingdom.
My family all grew up in Melbourne and lived their until the 1950’s. Although I was only young, I still remember my grandmother’s bewilderment when my parents moved to Canberra away from the rest of the extended family. HOw would she keep in touch etc.?
Kinship matters when you can’t leave town.
Kyan, you make the point about paternity and responsibility very well. Actually I was going to accuse Jack of evincing a sexist and exploitative attitude towards women, but it is so obvious one wonders whether he is being deliberately provocative. I had some women who worked for me once who commanded much respect up the line and partly reconstructed my male chauvinism.
Size does not equate to dominance. I knew a teacher who was a slip of a woman but commanded total respect from larger teenagers, and any-one else as well!
The cost of child-rearing is interesting. The standards of child consumption are way above what I grew up with in the 40s and 50s. Also now, whether because of credentialism or a more complex society, modern kids need to be educated many years longer to be work-ready. At the same time the age of menarche has fallen from late teens in the mid-19C to the early teens in mid-20C. At that time the graph was still heading south, not sure where it is now. The effect of this is to enable sexual activity before the identity focus of the (in our society) troubled teen years and well before people can function autonomously economically.
Jack, while you have been piling on the big words, which I suspect are meant to intimidate me (and they do a bit – I’m just a simple fellow) we’ve been having an Bigpond outage in bananaland. I’ve got to go, but a few points.
I guess my big point is that we are mainifestly falling short in the reproductive survival stakes, the situation is deteriorating, and I’d like to see some clever and well educated people apply their minds as to what we can do about it.
Yes the fault is in ourselves, but I would contend also that the cultural/social/economic environment is not conducive to reproduction and child-rearing.
How the fault got there is part of the analysis necessary before clever and creative people can imagine and devise solutions. Or are you saying, Jack, that the fault in ourselves is an inherent design fault?
The point about capitalism shaping us as individualistic entrepreneurs came most recently from an essay by the Californian sociologist Wendy Brown (‘Neoliberalism and the end of liberal democracy’ 2003, available I think only through university library systems). In a chapter entitled ‘On the edge’ in a book “What is Political Theory?” ed by S K White and J D Moon, Sage 2004, Wendy reckons that the determining force of capitalism in shaping our lives is so great that (pace Marx) no person or group of people can do anything effective about it.
If she’s right then if we’ve got a problem with reproductive performance it may be a very intractable one. But not as intractable as an inherent design fault would be.
I’m sure that whoever puts up some decent ideas to rectify the fault (whether in ourselves, in our constructed ideational environment, or both) will reap much intrinsic pleasure, don’t you agree Jack?
Brian I did not mean to intimidate you with big words. If I did so unintentionally then I apologise.
Capitalism is not the cause of the fall off in reproductive fertility. The USSR also had low birth rates, whereas birthrates in free market Victorian ENgland were between 4 and 6 children.
The problem is womens lib, females do not want to have to spend most of their lives caring for others when they could be having a career.
Ditto for men, who would rather have more sex than more children.
Secual activity is thus recreational rahter than procreational.
This is the key sign of modernity, whether capitalist or socialist.
Jack, it’s OK about the big words. I don’t mind them except when small ones will do just as well.
What you said reminded me that the French controlled their fertility quite well in the 19C in a catholic country without large scale emigration.
Also I heard about a British study on the radio where they found 20% of women wanted to have lots of kids, 20% wanted none and 60% were somewhere in between. If this is a genetically caused predisposition then clearly those predisposed towards kids will prevail and the whole thing will adjust nicely over time.
Calling it “a key sign of modernity” does not solve the problem (I still think it’s a problem) it just whacks a particular label on it. I repeat, if we are not prepared to do the hard work of looking after kids, then we’ll make way for those that do.
I think it has to do with increased individualism and the pursuit of pleasure as a legitimate preeminent goal in life. In your American foundational values of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” the last two are problematic IMHO, and not just because I came out of a Prussian culture although a 4th generation Aussie.
The “liberty” bit is conceived as a negative freedom, ie get out of my way and let me do my thing, rather that an intersubjectively constituted identity with obligations as well as rights. Happiness, Neville Symington reckons, if pursued directly on an individual basis leads directly to what he calls the “narcissistic constellation” or “a pattern of madness” (the name of his book). He reckons most of us are on the wrong track, not the least because the prevailing ontology, based on an all-powerful monotheistic god, is downright crook. We should always ask our shrink what he thinks of Spinoza’s ontology apparently and shoot out the door if he/she gives the wrong answer.
Seriously, I think Symington is onto something although he himself makes a bit of a mess of the ontology thing. He reckons we do the god thing even without the religious baggage and it becomes a kind of metaphor for what he thinks is wrong. But he reckons you have to read his book twice if you want to know what he’s on about and I can’t do it justice here.
I do think capitalism pushes us in the wrong direction but so too do the modern state and all institutions in fact. Which takes you back to tribes and pre-agriculture and settlement, or at least anarchism, in search of a better way. It isn’t going to happen!
“What you said reminded me that the French controlled their fertility quite well in the 19C in a catholic country without large scale emigration.”
No, it was far lower than they collectively wanted and actually needed (for defence, etc.). Their institutions had gone too far in the wrong direction and they tried a lot of things to increase the birt rate – without success.
The observations on Victorian birth rates ignore the time lag between improvements in standards of living and falls in birth rates. People who simplistically claim that birth rates drop with wealth are actually wrong; they drop a generation or so later, and not even then in cultures that override that with yet stronger customs (as in some parts of Africa).
PML thanks for that. I like the notion of a cultural override. It means there’s hope. But does the override come with what I would think of as unacceptable negatives like monotheistic religions (or any other theistic sort)? And does capitalism actually work to the general good in any of these places, or are there just pockets or strata of wealth?
Just to introduce a bit of lowbrow anecdotal stuff here, I have to say, Jack S. does love a stereotype, doesn’t he? This time it’s the gossipy women who monopolise the family history. I have to point out that my dear old uncle Jim, now deceased, was obsessed with the family tree and collected an invaluable amount of info. The female members of that generation were fairly ho-hum on the topic. My male cousin has now taken over the project and is pestering me to do family-history stuff which I don’t really have the time for. As for my parents, my Dad is the one who goes on and on about the ancestors and their doings.
But don’t let actual experience get in the way of a good stereotype.
Jack has a natural exuberance and strength of statement that gets us all going a bit. May he continue to prosper!
This thread is running out of puff, but if any-one is still around they would do themselves a favour by reading an amazing post David Tiley did on 14 Jan called What’s love got to do with it? over at barista based on some work by the ev psychos Immerman and Mackay. It picks up many of the themes mentioned above.
It seems our male habit of bringing back the grub from afar is a defining characteristic of our species amongst the apes and it is this that grabs the attention of the girls. We males seem to have a broad interest in the other sex and will mate broadly, but the girls are selective. This is a more delicately phrased version of Jack’s “men arent that choosy about who they bonk.”
But Immerman and Mackay’s work is based on the notion that there are three distinct kinds of love: (i) lust or sexual passion (ii) romance and (iii) attachment (pair bonding over extended time).
Immerman and Mackay reckon that there are “neuro-hormonal correlates” and ” appropriate genetic material to properly construct the circuits and to govern the chemistry that, in turn, activates the circuits and lends motivation to affiliative behavior.” These are separate and distinct for each type of love, if I understand it right.
In terms of John’s original question I’d bet that the circuitry and chemistry, especially in the first two types of love, would steer us away from our close kin.
What I’d like to know is whether the second, romantic love, is actually dysfunctional. It may be pleasant for a while, but it seems to work against our interests, both personally and in terms of the species.
But go read David’s post – you’ll be glad you did!
Indigenous Australian kinship systems are better described as “intricate” rather than “complex”. When depicted visually, the Warlpiri* kinship structure is a set of relationships that would be easily understandable by a young child.
Unfortunately, from a quick search, I can’t find a URL with such a visual depiction (I’ve got mine from a clipping of unknown provenance). Depictions such as this http://www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/aust/wlp/skins.html
just make the system seem more complicated than it is.
A quasi-visual depiction is to start with this:
“In the Kukatja kinship system (as is the case in the Warlpiri kinship system) there are eight relationship terms which are subsections determined by where one’s mother fits into the kinship system. Each of the eight subsections have a male and a female iteration. The female form always begins with “N” whereas the male form always begins with “Tj”. Within this kinship structure there exist many regulations including a preferred marriage partner for members of each subsection.”
http://www.aboriginalartprints.com.au/SQLdefine_profile.cfm?artist=Nampitjin,%20Eubena
The eight subsections can be sub-divided into two matrilineal wheels, each of four points – so meaning that one’s (matrilineal) great-great grandmother will always be of the same subsection; as will a female’s (matrilineal) great-great grandchild. One of the wheels moves clockwise through the generations; the other anti-clockwise.
Marriage is only possible to one-eighth of the population; i.e. to one’s corresponding subsection in the other “wheel”.
Under the combination of these two parameters, patrilineality is quite straightforward and immutable – it toggles father-son-father-son, etc between two subsections; a man’s mother’s husband (“father”) is inexorably of the same subsection as his wife’s (and so his) children.
Obviously, kinship in the West has long (and probably always) worked very differently. Taboos against endogamy, or downright incest, are own thing, but restriction of marriage partner to one-eighth of the otherwise-eligible (in Western terms) is quite another. No Western society has ever done anything like it, AFAIK.
However, within the very demographic severity of Indigenous kinship systems lies a healthy (although at first paradoxical) appeal to exogamy. With the subset of potential marriage partners so confined, it makes sense to expand the pool overall.
Which helps to explain, I think, the conferring of skin names on non-Indigenous folk. Although I’m sure at least some of the recipients of such skin names see some sort of pan-shamanic, crystal-healing-type significance in the conferral, a more prosaic explanation could well be that the conferrers are after that person’s genes!
Finally, it can thus be surmised that the in West’s current free-for-all (more or less) kinship system lies less exogamy than might be statistically expected. Basic psychology has it that when humans are confronted with an overwhelming set of choices, they go for the default option.
* Most or all other Indigenous Australian kinship systems follow this structure, AFAIK (although obviously the names are different).
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