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"The Parasite-Stress Theory of Values and Sociality: Infectious Disease, History and Human Values Worldwide"
by Randy Thornhill, Corey L. Fincher
goodreads.com/book/show/2228…
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by Randy Thornhill, Corey L. Fincher
goodreads.com/book/show/2228…
.
“This book grew out of our intensive research collaboration over the last 9 years. […] Our shared interests also include the long-standing, unsolved scientific problem in the social and behavioral sciences of the causes of social prejudice and its flipside, equalitarianism.”
“The central ideas and empirical evidence in the book comprise what we have called “the parasite-stress theory of values” or “the parasite-stress theory of sociality.” ”
“This theory is a general theory of human culture and of the range of human values, including prejudicial and egalitarian values.”
“The theory proposes that, both on the evolutionary time scale and the ecological time scale, humans interfacing with infectious diseases cause many core human values.”
“On both time scales, infectious diseases account for a huge amount of human morbidity and mortality, and hence cause strong natural selection for traits that reduce contact with the diseases and manage their negative effects upon contact.”
“The parasite-stress theory of values provides new and encompassing ways to understand the wide range of regionally variable cultural patterns in the values dimension of collectivism–individualism and the similar values dimension of conservatism–liberalism, as well as […]”
“[…] as well as patterns across the world in religiosity, personality, sexual behavior, marital systems, cooperative breeding and family organization in general, interpersonal violence, intergroup violence (warfare), and cognitive ability.”
“The theory also reveals how infectious diseases and the values they cause generate geographic variation in governmental systems (e.g., autocracy versus democracy, governmental corruption versus transparency), […]”
“[…] economic outcomes (e.g., wealth per capita, and wealth inequity), and the creation and diffusion of innovations and technologies.”
“[Joseph A.] Vandello and [D.] Cohen’s (1999 ["Patterns of individualism and collectivism across the United States"]) subdivision of the USA into cultural regions identifies 11 states with high collectivist (conservative) ideology as comprising the Deep South region: […]”
“[…] Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.”
“These 11 states [that make up the Deep South] are the same ones that seceded from the USA and formed the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865.”
“southern hospitality, politeness and manners, emotionally rich Southern American English, marital durability, family duty and honor, female modesty and sexual continence, reverence of hierarchy, elder respect, localism or parochialism, lifelong friendships, […]”
“[…] hygiene, religiosity, conformity, obedience of norms, and traditionalism are seen often as benevolent values of the [Deep South] region.”
“mental rigidity or dogmatism in the ideologies of sexism with assumed male superiority, classism (elitism) & associated authoritarianism, & racism & other prejudices are considered widely the [Deep South] region’s malevolent values, b/c they are undemocratic/anti-egalitarian.”
“Although the [Deep] South’s culture of male honor is sometimes viewed as a positive cultural feature, male honor seems to be a cause of the high male-on-male homicide rate in the region and thus is discussed sometimes as a morally negative southern value”
“People’s values in a region yield that region’s culture and cultural history. Hence, a big question for the history of the [Deep] South is why these people’s values were the way they were but not another way.”
“This is answerable only from evidence of the functional organization of peoples’ value systems—i.e., the effects that values are designed by evolution by natural selection to accomplish […]”
“[…] and therefore how the people of the [Deep] South fit into the overall empirical picture of variable value systems across the world and history.”
“Understanding what evolved purpose values serve will illuminate why they exist and why they vary across individuals, time, and geographic regions.”
“[Pierre L.] van den Berghe (1981 ["The Ethnic Phenomenon"]) discussed the similarities between African-American slavery and servitude in the Old South and the caste systems in other countries.”
“Why did strongly hierarchical social systems with strict boundaries between social strata & extreme prejudice against people of a particular color, caste, or hereditary background arise independently in Old South & Asia, as well as in some other places but not in other regions?”
“Why did the Old South stand out in the USA in its highly conservative value system and show similarity in values to other conservative regions of the world?”
“Why was the [American] Old South’s culture more similar to that of contemporary Guatemala or Syria than to that of contemporary Sweden?”
“Why is the southeastern USA today more conservative than other regions of the same country and other regions of the West?”
“In some forms, the particularistic–historical approach relies fundamentally on a view of acquisition and transmission of culture that not only ignores the evolved design of human psychology, but is spiritual as well.”
“Certain traditions in anthropology and related fields view the transmission of values between generations as automatic, inevitable, and passive […]”
“[…] resulting from culture itself as an incorporeal force with an inertia that drives it within and across generations in an often unchanging course.”
“In essence, this view sees culture as a ghost explicable only in terms of itself, and hence there is no need to consider people as decision-makers that affect the adoption and transmission of culture.”
“William Irons (1979 ["Natural selection, adaptation and human social behavior"]) wrote a masterful early critique of this supernatural perspective on culture.”
“See also similar critiques by Tooby and Cosmides 1992 ["Psychological foundations of culture"] and Buss 2001 ["Human nature and culture: An evolutionary and psychological perspective"].”
“Recently, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson (2010 ["Cultural inertia, economic incentives and the persistence of “Southern violence.” "]) discussed the currently widespread advocacy of a similar view by some culture theorists.”
“humans are evolved cultural strategists with psychological adaptations placed in the human nervous system by past Darwinian selection favoring individuals who learned cultural items, including ideologies, that ancestrally maximized personal reproductive success […]”
“[…] as measured by the number of produced descendant and nondescendant kin.”
“Hence, such psychological adaptations are responsible for, i.e., cause, selective assessment, and use of cultural items by individuals.”
“Such adaptations also guide individual decisions about discarding or retaining and modifying/not modifying cultural items, including values.”
“Moreover, such adaptations determine people’s decisions that affect the fate of cultural items that arise de novo within a society or diffuse into a society from another society.”
“Certainly, culture is transmitted between and within generations and between societies.”
“This transmission, however, is caused by historically adaptive and highly discriminative psychological learning adaptations of individuals, not by arbitrariness or by the ghost of cultural inertia.”
“These discriminative adaptations positively bias culture-item adoption and use toward those items that maximize the benefit-to-cost ratio […]”
“[…] where benefits and costs are measured in terms of reproductive success of individuals in evolutionarily ancestral environments.”
“Our view of cultural acquisition does not assume that individual people are always free agents to adopt whatever available cultural items will maximize their reproductive success.”
“Manipulation and/or coercion from parents or other family sources, and from peers, allies, and enemies often become part of the context in which individuals decide among values and other cultural items.”
“Nor do we assume that cultural choices are made primarily with conscious calculation, although this oftentimes is one cause of the selection, retention, and use of cultural items.”
“Conservatives support and value traditional thinking more than liberals do.”
“honest signaling of traditionalist values assists conservatives in social navigation in conservative culture”
“conservatism is ideological defense against infectious diseases”
“we predict [that] the degree of belief in tradition as the basic cause of one’s being will correlate positively with scores on questionnaires that measure people’s concern about contracting infectious diseases”
“We predict also that the importance of the historical–particularistic ideology across countries of the world or states of the US will correlate positively with regional severity of infectious diseases.”
“regional severity of infectious disease is robustly related positively to the importance of traditionalism, a component of conservative ideology, in the value systems across the globe”
