Is evolutionary science due for a major overhaul – or is talk of ‘revolution’ misguided?

The food preferences of different groups of orcas are thought to be driving them to split into several different species. Photo by Mike Korostelev/Getty

Kevin Laland is professor of behavioural and evolutionary biology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a fellow of the Society of Biology. His latest book, co-authored with Tobias Uller, is Evolutionary Causation: Biological and Philosophical Reflections (2019).Listen here

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17 January 2018 (aeon.co)

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When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes, any more than a mouse that loses its tail in an accident should give birth to tailless mice.

If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet as novel ideas flood in from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology, most evolutionists agree that their field is in flux. Much of the data implies that evolution is more complex than we once assumed.

Some evolutionary biologists, myself included, are calling for a broader characterisation of evolutionary theory, known as the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). A central issue is whether what happens to organisms during their lifetime – their development – can play important and previously unanticipated roles in evolution. The orthodox view has been that developmental processes are largely irrelevant to evolution, but the EES views them as pivotal. Protagonists with authoritative credentials square up on both sides of this debate, with big-shot professors at Ivy League universities and members of national academies going head-to-head over the mechanisms of evolution. Some people are even starting to wonder if a revolution is on the cards.

In his book On Human Nature (1978), the evolutionary biologist Edward O Wilson claimed that human culture is held on a genetic leash. The metaphor was contentious for two reasons. First, as we’ll see, it’s no less true that culture holds genes on a leash. Second, while there must be a genetic propensity for cultural learning, few cultural differences can be explained by underlying genetic differences.

Nonetheless, the phrase has explanatory potential. Imagine a dog-walker (the genes) struggling to retain control of a brawny mastiff (human culture). The pair’s trajectory (the pathway of evolution) reflects the outcome of the struggle. Now imagine the same dog-walker struggling with multiple dogs, on leashes of varied lengths, with each dog tugging in different directions. All these tugs represent the influence of developmental factors, including epigenetics, antibodies and hormones passed on by parents, as well as the ecological legacies and culture they bequeath.

The struggling dog-walker is a good metaphor for how EES views the adaptive process. Does this require a revolution in evolution? Before we can answer this question, we need to examine how science works. The best authorities here are not biologists but philosophers and historians of science. Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) popularised the idea that sciences change through revolutions in understanding. These ‘paradigm shifts’ were thought to follow a crisis of confidence in the old theory that arose through the accumulation of conflicting data.

Then there’s Karl Popper, and his conjecture that scientific theories can’t be proven but can be falsified. Consider the hypothesis: ‘All sheep are white.’ Popper maintained that no amount of positive findings consistent with this hypothesis could prove it to be correct, since one could never rule out the chance that a conflicting data-point might arise in the future; conversely, the observation of a single black sheep would decisively prove the hypothesis to be false. He maintained that scientists should strive to carry out critical experiments that could potentially falsify their theories.

Everything from diet to air pollution to parental behaviour can influence gene expression

While Kuhn and Popper’s ideas are well-known, they remain disputed and contentious in the eyes of philosophers and historians. Contemporary thinking in these fields is better captured by the Hungarian philosopher Imre Lakatos in The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (1978):

The history of science refutes both Popper and Kuhn: on close inspection both Popperian crucial experiments and Kuhnian revolutions turn out to be myths.

Popper’s arguments might make logical sense, but they don’t quite map on to how science works in the real world. Scientific observations are susceptible to errors of measurement; scientists are human beings and get attached to their theories; and scientific ideas can be fiendishly complex – all of which makes evaluating scientific hypotheses a messy business. Rather than accepting that our hypotheses might be wrong, we challenge the methodology (‘That sheep’s not black – your instruments are faulty’), dispute the interpretation (‘The sheep’s just dirty’), or come up with tweaks to our hypotheses (‘I meant domesticated breeds, not wild mouflon’). Lakatos called such fixes and fudges ‘auxiliary hypotheses’; scientists propose them to ‘protect’ their core ideas, so that they need not be rejected.

This sort of behaviour is clearly manifest in scientific debates over evolution. Take the idea that new features acquired by an organism during its life can be passed on to the next generation. This hypothesis was brought to prominence in the early 1800s by the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who used it to explain how species evolved. However, it has long been regarded as discredited by experiment – to the point that the term ‘Lamarckian’ has a derogatory connotation in evolutionary circles, and any researchers expressing sympathy for the idea effectively brand themselves ‘eccentric’. The received wisdom is that parental experiences can’t affect the characters of their offspring.

Except they do. The way that genes are expressed to produce an organism’s phenotype – the actual characteristics it ends up with – is affected by chemicals that attach to them. Everything from diet to air pollution to parental behaviour can influence the addition or removal of these chemical marks, which switches genes on or off. Usually these so-called ‘epigenetic’ attachments are removed during the production of sperm and eggs cells, but it turns out that some escape the resetting process and are passed on to the next generation, along with the genes. This is known as ‘epigenetic inheritance’, and more and more studies are confirming that it really happens.

Let’s return to the almond-fearing mice. The inheritance of an epigenetic mark transmitted in the sperm is what led the mice’s offspring to acquire an inherited fear. In 2011, another extraordinary study reported that worms responded to exposure to a nasty virus by producing virus-silencing factors – chemicals that shut down the virus – but, remarkably, subsequent generations epigenetically inherited these chemicals via regulatory molecules (known as ‘small RNAs’). There are now hundreds of such studies, many published in the most prominent and prestigious journals. Biologists dispute whether epigenetic inheritance is truly Lamarckian or only superficially resembles it, but there is no getting away from the fact that the inheritance of acquired characteristics really does happen.

By Popper’s reasoning, a single experimental demonstration of epigenetic inheritance – like a single black sheep – should suffice to convince evolutionary biologists that it’s possible. Yet, by and large, evolutionary biologists have not rushed to change their theories. Rather, as Lakatos anticipated, we have come up with auxiliary hypotheses that allow us to retain our long-held beliefs (ie, that inheritance is pretty much explained by the transmission of genes across generations). These include the ideas that epigenetic inheritance is rare, that it does not affect functionally important traits, that it is under genetic control, and that it is too unstable to underpin the spread of traits through selection.

Unfortunately for the traditionalists, none of these attempts to bracket epigenetic inheritance look credible. It is now known to be widespread in nature, with more and more examples appearing every day. It affects functionally important features such as fruit size, flowering time and root growth in plants – and while only a fraction of epigenetic variants are adaptive, that’s no less true of genetic variation, so it’s hardly grounds for dismissal. In some systems where rates of epigenetic change have been measured carefully, such as the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the pace has been found to be low enough to be selected and lead to cumulative evolution. Mathematical models have shown that systems with epigenetic inheritance evolve differently from those solely reliant on genetic inheritance – for instance, selection on epigenetic marks can cause changes in gene frequencies. There’s no longer any doubt that epigenetic inheritance pushes us to think about evolution in a different way.

Epigenetics is only part of the story. Through culture and society, all of us inherit knowledge and skills acquired by our parents. Evolutionary biologists have accepted this for at least a century, but until recently it was considered to be restricted to humans. That’s no longer tenable: creatures across the animal kingdom learn socially about diet, feeding techniques, predator avoidance, communication, migration, and mate and breeding-site choices. Hundreds of experimental studies have demonstrated social learning in mammals, birds, fish and insects.

In a single mating season, ‘fads’ can develop in the qualities that individuals find attractive in their partners

Among the most compelling data are studies that cross-fostered great tits and blue tits. When raised by the other species, these birds shifted numerous aspects of their behaviour towards the behaviour of their foster parent (including the height in trees at which they foraged, their choice of prey, foraging method, calls and songs, and even their choice of mate). Everyone had assumed that the behavioural differences between these two species were genetic, but it turns out that many are cultural traditions.

Animal cultures can be sustained for surprisingly long periods. Archaeological remains show that chimpanzees have used stone tools to crack open nuts for at least 4,300 years. However, as for epigenetic inheritance, it would be a mistake to assume that animal culture must exhibit gene-like stability to be evolutionarily important. In the course of a single mating season, ‘fads’ can develop in the qualities that individuals find attractive in their partners; the process has been experimentally demonstrated in fruit flies, fish, birds and mammals, and mathematical models show that such ‘mate-choice copying’ can strongly affect sexual selection.

Another illustration comes from studies of birdsong. When young male birds learn their songs (usually from nearby adult males), they modify the natural-selection pressures of genes that affect how songs are acquired (in males) and which songs are preferred (in females). The cultural transmission of song is known to promote the evolution of brood parasitism – where birds, such as cuckoos, don’t make nests but lay eggs in other birds’ nests – as some brood parasites rely on cultural learning to figure out whom to mate with. It also facilitates speciation, since preferences for particular birdsong ‘dialects’ help to maintain genetic differences between populations.

Likewise, the diverse, culturally learned foraging traditions of orcas – where different groups specialise in particular types of fish, seals or dolphins – is thought to be driving them to split into several species. Of course, culture reaches its zenith in our own species, where it is now well-established that our cultural habits have been a major source of natural selection on our genes. Dairy farming and milk consumption generated selection for a genetic variant that increased lactase (the enzyme that metabolises dairy products), while starchy agricultural diets favoured increased amylase (the corresponding enzyme that breaks down starch).

All this complexity can’t be reconciled with a strictly genetic currency for adaptive evolution, as many biologists now acknowledge. Rather, it points to an evolutionary process in which genomes (over hundreds to thousands of generations), epigenetic modifications and inherited cultural factors (over several, perhaps tens or hundreds of generations), and parental effects (over single-generation timespans) collectively inform how organisms adapt. These extra-genetic kinds of inheritance give organisms the flexibility to make rapid adjustments to environmental challenges, dragging genetic change in their wake – much like a rowdy pack of dogs.

Despite the excitement of all the new data, it’s unlikely to trigger an evolution revolution for the simple reason that science doesn’t work that way – at least, not evolutionary science. Kuhnian paradigm shifts, like Popper’s critical experiments, are closer to myths than reality. Look back at the history of evolutionary biology, and you will see nothing that resembles a revolution. Even Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection took approximately 70 years to become widely accepted by the scientific community, and at the turn of the 20th century was viewed with considerable skepticism. Over the following decades, new ideas appeared, they were critically evaluated by the scientific community, and gradually became integrated with pre-existing knowledge. By and large, evolutionary biology was updated without experiencing great periods of ‘crisis’.

The same holds for the present. Epigenetic inheritance does not disprove genetic inheritance, but shows it to be just one of several mechanisms through which traits are inherited. I know of no biologist who wants to rip up the textbooks, or throw out natural selection. The debate in evolutionary biology concerns whether we want to extend our understanding of the causes of evolution, and whether that changes how we think about the process as a whole. In this respect, what is going on is ‘normal science’.

Why, then, are traditionally minded evolutionary biologists complaining about the misguided evolutionary radicals that lobby for paradigm shift? Why are journalists writing articles about scientists calling for a ‘revolution’ in evolutionary biology? If nobody actually wants a revolution, and scientific revolutions rarely happen anyway, what’s all the fuss about? The answer to these questions provides a fascinating insight into the sociology of evolutionary biology.

Revolution in evolution is a misattribution – a myth propagated by an unlikely alliance of conservative-minded evolutionists, creationists and the press. I don’t doubt that there are a small number of genuine, revolutionarily minded evolutionary radicals out there, but the vast majority of researchers working towards an extended evolutionary synthesis are simply ordinary, hardworking evolutionary biologists.

We all know that sensationalism sells newspapers, and articles that portend a major upheaval make for better copy. Creationists and advocates of ‘intelligent design’ also feed this impression, with propaganda that exaggerates differences of opinion among evolutionists and gives a false impression that the field of evolutionary biology is in turmoil. What’s more surprising is how commonly conservative-minded biologists play the ‘We’re under attack!’ card against their fellow evolutionists. Portraying intellectual opponents as extremist, and telling people that they are being attacked, are age-old rhetorical tricks to win debate or allegiance.

I had always associated such games with politics, not science, but now realise I was naive. Some of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans I have witnessed, seemingly designed to prevent new ideas from spreading by fair means or foul, have truly shocked me, and are out of kilter with practice in other fields that I know. Scientists, too, have careers and legacies at stake, as well as struggles for funding, power and influence. I worry that the traditionalists’ rhetoric is backfiring, creating confusion and inadvertently fuelling creationism by exaggerating division. Too many reputable scientists feel the need for change in evolutionary biology for all to be credibly dismissed as fringe elements.

If the extended evolutionary synthesis is not a call for revolution in evolution, then what is it, and why do we need it? To answer these questions, we need to recognise what Kuhn got right – namely, that every scientific field possesses shared ways of thinking, or ‘conceptual frameworks’. Evolutionary biology is no different, and our shared values and assumptions influence what data is collected, how that data is interpreted, and what factors are built into explanations for how evolution works.

That is why pluralism in science is healthy. Lakatos stressed that alternative conceptual frameworks – what he called different ‘research programmes’ – can be valuable to the extent that they encourage new hypotheses to be generated and tested, or lead to novel insights. That is the primary function of the EES: to nurture, or even open up, new lines of enquiry, and new productive ways of thinking.

What if some ways of building a fish are just more probable than others?

A good example concerns what’s known as ‘developmental bias’. Consider the intriguing cichlid fishes of East Africa. For tens, perhaps hundreds, of the cichlid species in Lake Malawi, there exists an independently evolved, ‘duplicate’ species in Lake Tanganyika, with a strikingly similar body shape and way of feeding. Such likenesses are usually explained through convergent evolution: random genetic variation has bubbled up as usual, but similar environmental conditions have selected the genes to produce equivalent results. The way that organisms grow and develop might limit which traits arise, but the variation itself is assumed to be essentially random.

However, the extraordinary level of parallel evolution seen in these two lakes suggests that something else might be going on. What if some ways of building a fish are just more probable than others? What if trait variation skews towards certain solutions? Selection would still be part of the explanation, but parallel evolution would be much more likely.

Cheek teeth (molars) in mammals provide some of the most convincing data for bias. Studies show that it’s possible to use a mathematical model, based on laboratory mice, to predict the size and number of teeth in a sample of 29 other rodent species. Rather than being free to make any shape or number of teeth, it appears that natural selection is pushing species along a highly specific pathway created by the mechanisms of development. The existence of exceptions – rodents such as voles with different ratios of teeth – demonstrates that the old way of thinking (that developmental ‘constraints’ restrict selection) isn’t quite right. The effect of development is both more subtle and more interesting: developmental mechanisms bias the landscape for selection, and help to determine which features evolve.

Such studies are exciting as they help to make evolutionary biology a more predictive science. Why, then, have these ideas received comparatively little attention until recently? We come back to conceptual frameworks. Historically, evolutionary biologists have treated bias in phenotypic variation as a ‘constraint’ – an explanation for why evolution or adaptation has not occurred. The way that organisms grow restricts what sorts of features it is possible or adaptive to possess. Traditionally minded evolutionists have been far more reticent to embrace a positive role for development as a cause of evolutionary direction and change.

It took a different perspective (in this instance, that of evolutionary developmental biology, so-called ‘evo devo’), to motivate this kind of experimentation. From the evo-devo perspective, bias partly explains what evolution and adaptation has occurred. Rodents’ teeth and fishes’ bodies look the way they do because the way that creatures grow makes those characteristics more likely to arise. Bias thus becomes a much more significant concept in evolutionary explanation. By bringing the phenomenon to the fore, the EES hopes it will be investigated.

The EES, at least as my collaborators and I frame it, is best viewed as an alternative research programme for evolutionary biology. Inspired by recent findings emerging within evolutionary biology and adjacent fields, the EES starts from the assumption that developmental processes play important roles as causes of novel (and potentially beneficial) phenotypic variation, causes of differences in fitness of those variants, and causes of inheritance. In contrast to how evolution has traditionally been conceived, in the EES the burden of creativity in evolution does not rest on natural selection alone. This alternative way of thinking is being used to generate fresh hypotheses and establish new research agendas. It’s early days, but there are already signs that this research is starting to yield dividends.

If evolution is not to be explained solely in terms of changes in gene frequencies; if previously rejected mechanisms such as the inheritance of acquired characteristics turn out to be important after all; and if organisms are acknowledged to bias evolution through development, learning and other forms of plasticity – does all this mean a radically different and profoundly richer account of evolution is emerging? No one knows: but from the perspective of our adapting dog-walker, evolution is looking less like a gentle genetic stroll, and more like a frantic struggle by genes to keep up with strident developmental processes.

EvolutionHistory of ideasHistory of science

BY WALT WHITMAN

I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

2
The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account,
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.

The expression of the face balks account,
But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him,
The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards,
The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water,
The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horseman in his saddle,
Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,
The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting,
The female soothing a child, the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard,
The young fellow hoeing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six horses through the crowd,
The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sun-down after work,
The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance,
The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes;
The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps,
The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert,
The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv’d neck and the counting;
Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s breast with the little child,
Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count.

3
I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons,
And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons.

This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person,
The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness and breadth of his manners,
These I used to go and visit him to see, he was wise also,
He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome,
They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him,
They did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal love,
He drank water only, the blood show’d like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his face,
He was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sail’d his boat himself, he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had fowling-pieces presented to him by men that loved him,
When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang,
You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.

4
I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

5
This is the female form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed,
Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable,
Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.

This the nucleus—after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman,
This the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and the outlet again.

Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest,
You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

The female contains all qualities and tempers them,
She is in her place and moves with perfect balance,
She is all things duly veil’d, she is both passive and active,
She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters.

As I see my soul reflected in Nature,
As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty,
See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see.

6
The male is not less the soul nor more, he too is in his place,
He too is all qualities, he is action and power,
The flush of the known universe is in him,
Scorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance become him well,
The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is utmost become him well, pride is for him,
The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul,
Knowledge becomes him, he likes it always, he brings every thing to the test of himself,
Whatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail he strikes soundings at last only here,
(Where else does he strike soundings except here?)

The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred,
No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanest one in the laborers’ gang?
Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?
Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you,
Each has his or her place in the procession.

(All is a procession,
The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion.)

Do you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant?
Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight, and he or she has no right to a sight?
Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float, and the soil is on the surface, and water runs and vegetation sprouts,
For you only, and not for him and her?

7
A man’s body at auction,
(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.

Gentlemen look on this wonder,
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it,
For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant,
For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.

In this head the all-baffling brain,
In it and below it the makings of heroes.

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve,
They shall be stript that you may see them.

Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,
Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized arms and legs,
And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs blood,
The same old blood! the same red-running blood!
There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations,
(Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms?)

This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns,
In him the start of populous states and rich republics,
Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries?
(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?)

8
A woman’s body at auction,
She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers,
She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

Have you ever loved the body of a woman?
Have you ever loved the body of a man?
Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the earth?

If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,
And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful than the most beautiful face.

Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool that corrupted her own live body?
For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.

9
O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems,
Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,
Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids,
Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges,
Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,
Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest,
Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,
Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails,
Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,
Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,
Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
Leg fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,
Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female,
The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,
The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,
Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,
Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,
The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,
The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,
The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,
The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,
The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!

(poetryfoundation.org)

Lawrence Maxwell Krauss is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist who founded the ASU Interplanetary Initiative to investigate fundamental questions about the universe.

Krauss is an advocate for public understanding of science, public policy based on sound empirical data, scientific skepticism, and science education. Krauss is the author of several bestselling books, including The Physics of Star Trek (1995) and A Universe from Nothing (2012), and chaired the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Board of Sponsors.

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation.  His writing on aesthetics, morality, and psychology have influenced many thinkers and artists. Those who have cited his influence include philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein, scientists such as Erwin Schrödinger and Albert Einstein, psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Mark Victor & Crystal Hansen’s chuckles (via William P. Chiles)

+++++

In a London department store:
BARGAIN BASEMENT UPSTAIRS 

In a Laundromat:
AUTOMATIC WASHING MACHINES: PLEASE REMOVE ALL YOUR CLOTHES WHEN THE LIGHT GOES OUT
TOILET OUT OF ORDER. PLEASE USE FLOOR BELOW

In an office:
WOULD THE PERSON WHO TOOK THE STEP LADDER YESTERDAY PLEASE BRING IT BACK OR FURTHER STEPS WILL BE TAKEN 

In an office:
AFTER TEA BREAK STAFF SHOULD EMPTY THE TEAPOT AND STAND UPSIDE DOWN ON THE DRAINING BOARD 

Outside a second hand shop: 
WE EXCHANGE ANYTHING – BICYCLES, WASHING MACHINES, ETC. WHY NOT BRING YOUR WIFE ALONG AND GET A WONDERFUL BARGAIN?

Notice in health food shop window:
CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS

Spotted in a safari parkI sure hope so)
ELEPHANTS PLEASE STAY IN YOUR CAR

Seen during a conference:
FOR ANYONE WHO HAS CHILDREN AND DOESN’T KNOW IT, THERE IS A DAY CARE ON THE 1ST FLOOR

Notice in a farmer’s field:
THE FARMER ALLOWS WALKERS TO CROSS THE FIELD FOR FREE, BUT THE BULL CHARGES.

Message on a leaflet:
IF YOU CANNOT READ, THIS LEAFLET WILL TELL YOU HOW TO GET LESSONS

On a repair shop door:
WE CAN REPAIR ANYTHING. (PLEASE KNOCK HARD – THE BELL DOESN’T WORK) 

Sure, lovers and children are great. But friends are more than ever the heart of happiness, of family and of love itself

Photo by Didier Ruef/LUZ/Headpress

Anna Machin is an evolutionary anthropologist, writer and broadcaster whose work has appeared in the New Scientist and The Guardian, among others. She is the author of The Life of Dad: The Making of the Modern Father (2018) and Why We Love: The New Science Behind our Closest Relationships (forthcoming, 2022). She lives in Oxford.

4 June 2021 (aeon.co)

Edited by Pam Weintraub

Aeon for Friends

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As an evolutionary anthropologist, I have wrestled with the question ‘What is love?’ for more than a decade. At first glance, the answer is straightforward. After all, my many research subjects all have their own answers to share. And herein lies the fundamental problem for someone who would like to find a nice straightforward answer: love is complicated. My 10 years of work have led me to conclude that there are at least 10 very well-supported answers to this question, but give me another 10 years and I’m sure I can get you at least 10 more. There is no neat formula.

This is at once hugely frustrating and immensely pleasing because this complexity, this unknowable aspect of love, motivates us to create great art and to repeatedly embark on the exhilarating journey that is love, despite the end point being the possibility of great pain and rejection.

And what makes human love even more awe-inspiring is that we get to experience it in so many ways. I began my research life rather predictably with a consideration of romantic love but, as I started to explore the love lives of my subjects more broadly, it became clear that, yes, there might be lovers, parents, children but there might also be a god or gods, pets, celebrities, and even holograms. We are capable of loving so many beings both human and nonhuman and in physical and nonphysical form. When you understand how important love is to our very existence, you realise how immensely lucky we are. Love has got our back.

In many cultures, this full spectrum of love is fully embraced; as an anthropologist, you get used to being welcomed as one of the family you’re observing, kin name and all. But in the West, we’re missing out on experiencing everything that love has to offer because our field of view is too narrow. As a consequence, we’re in danger not only of limiting the fullness of our life experience but endangering our health. This blinkered view is a result of our tendency to conceive of a hierarchy of love. The top position is occupied by parental love with dad regularly relegated to assistant parent, whether he likes it or not; parental love is usually embodied in the love between mother and child. Running a close second is romantic love, with an overwhelming focus on finding your ‘soulmate’. Fail at this and you supposedly live only half a life. Following that, we have the immediate family – siblings, parents, grandparents – and maybe even the extended family.

After all these, the next category comes a rather distant fourth – our friends. It is fair to say that, when considering love, we can neglect our friendships. Indeed, in carrying out interviews for my next book, I found that those based in the UK or the US were often very happy to quickly declare their love for their cat or dog, but ask them whether they loved their friends and many had to pause and think.

This dismissal is based on a misunderstanding of how foundational friends are as members of our social network – they are its largest group – and how they hold the key to our health and survival. My work has shown that our friendships can provide a level of understanding and emotional intimacy that can eclipse any we might experience with a lover. Indeed, friends are often the most reliable source of an interpersonal ease, allowing us to be our true selves, something that we’d do well to embrace in this 24/7 social media world where ‘curating’ your image can be a full-time job.

At the same time, our society has profoundly changed in the past 50 years, putting the established hierarchy of love on shaky ground. It’s no longer the case that you have to be ‘coupled up’ to fit society’s norms, to have children or, as a woman, to make sure you’re economically provided for. As a consequence, within the West – although not necessarily elsewhere – romantic love has become a choice rather than a necessity. If children aren’t your thing, then greater control of your own fertility means that you can also dispense with parental love. But you discard the love that exists within your friendships at your peril, because, new findings show, friends are your key to a long, happy and chilled life.

Being within a supportive social network reduced the risk of mortality by 50 per cent

More than two decades of research into the nature of human social networks, including studies carried out within my group at the University of Oxford, has led us to two important and robustly evidenced conclusions. The first is that, regardless of age, personality, gender, ethnic background or any number of possible individual differences, we all interact with the members of this network in a broadly similar way. This is the magic number of 150, Dunbar’s number (named after my colleague, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar who discovered it), and it reflects the fact that, on average, the maximum size of an individual’s social network is stable at 150.

But not all is equal in the 150 club. Some people are allowed to get closer to us, and take up more of our time, than others, and it’s particularly within the two innermost layers of this network that we find our closest relationships, including our key friends. At the very core of our network sit our central support clique, the four or five people to whom we’re emotionally closest and to whom we will dedicate 40 per cent of our time. Many of us tend to have daily contact with this core, including our romantic partner, our children, maybe our parents or a best friend. Next we have the 10 or so people known as our sympathy group. These are our go-to people for a break away from the immediate family or a good night out, and we interact with them weekly. These are our close friends and maybe the occasional sibling or cousin. Together, the 15 people who make up our central support clique and our sympathy group get 60 per cent of our time. The remaining 40 per cent of time is spread thinly over the remaining 135 people who constitute the rest of our active network, and the further out you are, the less of this slim sliver of time you will receive.

There’s a powerful relationship between the characteristics of your social network and your mental and physical health, your longevity and your general life satisfaction. Way back in the knife-edge environments of our evolutionary past, having a strong social network was essential to survival, and there are still areas of the world today where having the help and support of others is the difference between life and death.

Here in the West, where our environment is relatively benign and everything we need to survive is becoming increasingly accessible at the click of a button from our sofa, cooperation, and in particular our closest relationships, are less about survival and more just about good fun and belonging – or so it seems. We know what’s important for a healthy life: exercise, a balanced diet, not smoking, and maintaining a healthy weight.

But a seminal study carried out in 2010 by the psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad at Brigham Young University in Utah and her colleagues would beg to differ. Holt-Lunstad collected together the data from 148 studies that had explored rates of mortality following chronic illness – cancer, cardiovascular disease and renal failure being the most prominent – and aspects of an individual’s social network. For some studies, this was the size of their network, their actual or perceived access to social support, their social isolation or the extent to which they were integrated into their network. Holt-Lunstad concluded that being within a supportive social network reduced the risk of mortality by 50 per cent. That places it on a par with quitting smoking, and of more influence than maintaining a healthy BMI measure. Since Holt-Lunstad and colleagues reported their findings, study after study has reinforced this conclusion, to the extent that we can now argue that the nature of your social network, and the strength and health of the relationships within it, is the biggest single factor influencing your health, happiness and longevity. They are your survival.

Over the past year, as I wrote my book Why We Love: The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships (forthcoming, 2022), I conducted many interviews with people, whose comments on love are quoted throughout this piece. One such was Margaret:

There is a weird idea that you are supposed to get everything from your romantic relationship but I realise the huge amount of love I have in my life. Living in a house share with real friends makes me realise that a lot of what I thought I wanted from a relationship was really a close, daily friendship.

But what has all this got to do with your friendships? Why does neglecting your friends place you at considerable risk of ill health and guarantee that your life will be much less joyous and satisfying? Because for a significant number of people – a number that’s growing year on year – their friends fulfil the role of a romantic partner, a child and even a whole family. Their friends are those key 15 people they see and rely on most. As a consequence, they are the survival-critical relationships that will have a profound influence on their health, happiness and longevity.

Data from the 2015 US census has predicted that 6 per cent of the current adult population of Americans will remain single their entire lives. And the number of never-married singletons in their 40s has doubled in the UK between 2002 and 2018. Globally, we’re experiencing a significant downturn in the birthrate, which has led to panic among some governments as the increased costs of an ageing population go unmet by rapidly reducing tax revenues. In Japan, deaths can outstrip births by nearly 500,000 a year, meaning that by 2050 the population might have shrunk by 30 million people.

When we focus our love on our friends, we’re actively choosing to do so

Many people will remain childless. In the US, the rate of births in women between the ages of 20 and 29 dropped a massive 15 per cent in the five years between 2007 and 2012, with this trend not limited to any one ethnic group. In some cases, these declines are due to women choosing to have children later in life or, in Japan’s case, a fall in the number of women of reproductive age in a shrinking population. But, in many cases, women, particularly those of the millennial generation, are actively choosing to not have children. Instead, they’re deciding to focus their energies on building a good career and directing their caring skills to the community. For these people, their central support clique isn’t populated by a lover or children. It’s populated by their friends. As June, another study participant, said:

I love my friends. It is different because it is a love that is chosen and quite special. People talk about unconditional love but I think there is something special about conditional love because you are always opting into it. It is an obligation but there is something special about day by day by day you are choosing to stay in those relationships.

I love this quote from June about the nature of friendship love. It’s a brilliant, and quite rare, way of thinking but it makes such perfect sense. That we have an instinct, driven by our shared genetics, to love our children and family – for some, this is a duty love – but, when we focus our love on our friends, we’re actively choosing to do so. We’re taking our precious time and energy, and consciously committing it to them, so important are they to us.

Perhaps as a reflection of our perception that friends are relatively unimportant, compared with the attachment between lovers or a parent and child, research on the power of the friends’ attachment is still only in its early days. However, in her 2017 study of female singles, Claudia Brumbaugh, a psychologist in New York, found that best friends played a crucial role for them – both because, as June points out, of the freedom to choose them, and because of the close similarity to them. Brumbaugh found that, when it comes to choosing our friends, there’s none of the familial obligation or cultural pressure that can influence our choice of lover or our commitment to our family.

Indeed, when you’re a child and enter preschool for the first time, your world opens up dramatically, and you get to initiate friendships yourself, making your own choices rather than being forced to play with your parent’s best friend’s kid while the adults chat over a coffee. And when you’re at secondary school, your friends become your primary attachment figures, the people you turn to to influence your behaviour and thoughts as you establish your autonomous identity. In adulthood, friendships might ebb and flow as you reach life stages at different points, but they will remain a source of comfort, advice, fun and freedom. They might even become your family.

With such unfettered choice, what draws us to the people who ultimately become our friends? One of the first studies I carried out at Oxford was an analysis of how heterosexual people chose their romantic partners and their best friends. I asked the participants to what extent they shared a range of attributes with their lover and their best friend, including levels of physical attractiveness, creativity, intelligence, education, sense of humour, outgoingness and optimism. What was important in each case? I was trying to understand whether there was a ‘friendship market’ much like a ‘dating market’. Since our friends contribute so much to our chance of survival, shouldn’t we be taking some care in choosing them?

What I found surprised me and challenged the idea that our friends can never be as close to us as our lovers. For many heterosexual women, their same-sex best friend was someone with whom they shared more emotional intimacy than with their male lover. For many heterosexual men, their same-sex best friend represented ease of interaction and a sense of humour – someone you could truly relax with. Further, both sexes had more in common with their best friend – that is, they were more similar to them in terms of education, interests, etc – than with their lover. These results perhaps point to the inherent tension that exists at the centre of all heterosexual romantic relationships. Cross-sex cooperation is cognitively the costliest of all cooperation ­– the most time-consuming and emotionally draining of relationships ­– because of the need to trade unequal currencies, and because you must ‘mind read’ a brain that probably operates in a distinctly different way than yours. With best friends, particularly of the same sex, these tensions aren’t there, meaning that you can truly relax and reveal your authentic self. And, because we’re so similar, we approach life from the same perspective, meaning that our friends know us at least as well as we know ourselves.

Evidence that our friends know us that well comes from a 2019 study in which people were asked to consider their own personality, and the personalities of 10 friends, while inside a brain scanner. The psychologists Robert Chavez and Dylan Wagner found that when an individual, let’s call her Sarah, reflected on her own personality, her brainscan pattern matched the pattern seen in the scans of her 10 friends while thinking about Sarah’s personality, but not when they thought about their other friends’ personalities. It would appear that Sarah’s friends knew her as well as she knew herself.

These families were bound by a shared identity rather than shared blood – they were fictive kin

And the extent of these similarities between friends can stretch beyond a shared love for French avant-garde films or a shared school experience to the fundamental way in which we make sense of our world. In 2018, the researchers Carolyn Parkinson, Adam Kleinbaum and Thalia Wheatley recruited 279 students – the entire cohort from one year of a graduate programme. They asked them to complete a questionnaire listing everyone in the programme they deemed to be a friend. The researchers then set about creating a social network for the class, illustrating every link between the students. Their prediction was that the closer two people were to each other in the network, indicating a stronger bond, the more similar their neural responses would be. A subset of 42 students was used for a scanning study. Once in the scanner, everyone watched the same set of videos in the same order. And the results confirmed the researchers’ hunch: similarities between friends extended way beyond hobbies, ethnicity, age or sex. The signals seen in the brains of friends – both in the unconscious and conscious brain – were more similar than those between people who were more distant in the network. They were also able to predict just how close two people were in the network simply by comparing scans. Now that is a concrete finding.

I am a firm believer that friends are God’s way of apologising for our family. I do not come from a high-functioning family, and even though I love my family and I accept them for who they are, it is really my friends that are my family. I have been predominantly on my own but my girlfriends have been that emotional touchstone, that physical presence in my life when my family was largely absent.
– Carol

The term ‘chosen family’ was first coined in the US during the 1970s and ’80s to describe the networks of friends that provided emotional support and nurture to those who’d been rejected by their own family or who were excluded from legally sanctioned methods of creating a family such as marriage or parenthood. In the vast majority of instances, these were gay men and women who had been excluded by their culture and/or disowned by their biological family, and whose need for support was made all the more urgent by the arrival of HIV within their communities.

These families were bound by a shared identity rather than shared blood – they were fictive kin. While those who pioneered this new form of ‘friend’ family in the 1970s have now grown old within the bosom of their chosen family, recent work among younger communities in the US has shown that chosen families are as important to the lives and as vital to the security and development of young people as they’ve always been, particularly when it comes to one of the trickier aspects of growing up – exploring your sexuality.

In 2013, the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health (ICAH) carried out a study exploring the role of chosen and given family in discussions with adolescents about sexual identity, health and rights. They used individual interviews, online surveys and focus groups to explore the experiences of nearly 500 adolescents as they navigated this at times rocky and confusing stage of their development. The results showed that, while there was a role for both family types, the chosen family was the first port of call when discussing these potentially tricky topics.

In fact, of those interviewed, 80.7 per cent reported that they’d formed a chosen family. When it came to discussing sex and sexuality, 73.4 per cent of young people spoke to their chosen family compared with 52.8 per cent who spoke to their given family. But when it came to how comfortable they felt while doing this, 63.2 per cent were more comfortable talking to their chosen family as opposed to only 9.7 per cent who felt comfortable speaking to their given family. There were topics, for instance, personal sexual experiences, about which participants wouldn’t speak to their given family. Yet three-quarters said they could speak to their chosen family about anything. These friend networks were especially important for transgender, gender nonconforming and genderqueer youth, who were overall more likely to speak to their chosen family (81 per cent) than their given family (59.1 per cent). Because members of Generation Z (ie, those born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s) explore their gender and sexuality more freely than any previous generation, it’s clear that the love and understanding found in a chosen family is as vital as it’s always been.

As our Western world becomes slowly more tolerant, the options for creating your family become broader. While the statistics seem to point to a world where fewer of us choose to find a romantic significant other, this doesn’t mean that we must spend our lives alone or miss the opportunity to become parents. I spend a lot of time exploring the changing world of parenting, and it’s fair to say that today’s reality is far from the Victorian nuclear ideal.

But what’s particularly holding my focus at the moment is the rise of platonic co-parenting relationships and queer platonic partnerships (QPPs). These are both relationships where the foundation is not of romantic but of friendship love. In the first case, the core is usually a man and a woman who’ve chosen to have a child together and raise it as a co-parenting team. In the simplest manifestation, this is how the family remains, with two parents who love each other as friends and use this as the foundation for raising their child. In more complex arrangements, the parenting team can expand to include the partners of the biological mother and father, an egg or sperm donor and sometimes a surrogate. All of these people are focused on the raising of a child but their ability to do this successfully is based upon a strong tie of friendship.

I came across the queer platonic partnership as I explored the world of aromanticism. An aromantic is someone who doesn’t experience romantic love. Often, a misunderstanding of what it means to be aromantic leads others to characterise those who have this identity as incapable of loving anyone and, as a consequence, of living in a world devoid of love. But aromantics are as capable of love for their family, their children, their friends or their god as any of us. And, because of this, many don’t want to live a life devoid of a companion or a co-parent. To do this, they must look beyond the conventional to the QPP, someone with whom to build a life on the basis of friendship love. And, just as there are dating sites, so there are now areas of the internet dedicated to helping those who wish to pursue a QPP.

It’s clear that, in opposition to the accepted order of things, for many of us, it’s our friendships that need to be at the top of our love hierarchy if we want to live long and happy lives. Friends can be our sources of intimacy and nonjudgmental support, they can be our life’s companions, they can be our family and our co-parent. Put bluntly, they’re our survival. But this means that we must decide to actively nurture and invest in them to benefit from their many rewards. Our unique ability to love many beings in many ways means that we all have the opportunity for love in our lives. We just have to lift our eyes to the horizon and broaden our perspective to see all the love that is on offer. And for many of us that will mean celebrating, treasuring and reasserting the love we have for our friends.

To read more about love and relationships, visit Psyche, a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophical understanding and the arts.

This Essay was made possible through the support of a grant to Aeon from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. Funders to Aeon Magazine are not involved in editorial decision-making.

Love and friendshipFamily lifeMeaning and the good life

The Origins Podcast Lawrence joins acclaimed film director Werner Herzog at his home in Los Angeles to discuss societal norms, consumerism, cancel culture, the colonization of Mars, the philosophy behind his art and films, and much more. Consider supporting the podcast and the Origins Project Foundation at https://www.originsprojectfoundation…. To see commercial-free, full HD video episodes, join us at www.patreon.com/originspodcast Thank you for your support! iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast… Website: https://TheOriginsPodcast.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheOriginsPod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/TheOriginsPod Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheOriginsPod The Origins Podcast, a production of The Origins Project Foundation, features in-depth conversations with some of the most interesting people in the world about the issues that impact all of us in the 21st century. Host, theoretical physicist, lecturer, and author, Lawrence M. Krauss, will be joined by guests from a wide range of fields, including science, the arts, and journalism. The topics discussed on The Origins Podcast reflect the full range of the human experience – exploring science and culture in a way that seeks to entertain, educate, and inspire. Full Episodes Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXLv1…

Werner Herzog (born September 5, 1942) is a German film director, screenwriter, writer, actor, and opera director. Herzog is considered a figure of the New German Cinema. His films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who are in conflict with nature. Wikipedia

“Plato was a fascist.”

–Chris Hedges

Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Presbyterian minister, author and television host. Wikipedia

Shaking off Nazism was no simple matter: the work to create a plural and peacable Germany was prolonged and painful

German citizens protest outside the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany’s 1967 congress in Hanover. The poster reads: ‘Again? Not with us!’ Photo by Wolfgang Kunz/ullstein bild via Getty

Helmut Walser Smith is the Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History and professor of history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. His books include The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Antisemitism in a German Town (2002), The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long 19th Century (2008) and Germany: A Nation in Its Time (2020).

3 June 2021 (aeon.co)

Edited by Sam Haselby

Aeon for Friends

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After 12 years of fascism, six years of war, and the concentrated genocidal killing of the Holocaust, nationalism should have been thoroughly discredited. Yet it was not. For decades, nationalist frames of mind continued to hold. They prevailed on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain and predominated in the Global North as well as in the developing world of the Global South. Even in the Federal Republic of Germany, the turn away from ‘the cage called Fatherland’ – as Keetenheuve, the main character in Wolfgang Koeppen’s novel The Hothouse (1953), called his depressingly nationalistic West Germany – didn’t commence immediately.

When the turn did begin, however, Keetenheuve’s country would set out on a remarkable journey – not one racing down the highway to cosmopolitanism, but rather a slow one that required a series of small steps leading to the gradual creation of a more pacific, diverse and historically honest nation – a better Germany.

After the collapse of the Third Reich, Germans widely blamed other countries for the Second World War. ‘Every German knows that we are not guilty of starting the war,’ asserted the Nazi journalist Hildegarde Roselius in 1946. With ‘every German’, this acquaintance of the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White certainly exaggerated. But in 1952, 68 per cent of Germans polled gave an answer other than ‘Germany’ to the question of who started the Second World War, and it was not until the 1960s that this opinion fell into the minority.

In the mid-1950s, nearly half of all Germans polled said ‘yes’ to the proposition that ‘were it not for the war, Hitler would have been one of the greatest statesmen of the 20th century.’ Until the late 1950s, nearly 90 per cent gave an answer other than ‘yes’ when asked if their country should recognise the Oder-Neisse line, the new border with Poland. Perhaps most revealing of all was their stance on Jews. On 12 June 1946, Hannah Arendt hazarded the opinion to Dolf Sternberger, one of occupied Germany’s most prominent publicists, that ‘Germany has never been more antisemitic than it is now.’ As late as 1959, 90 per cent of Germans polled thought of Jews as belonging to a different race – while only 10 per cent thought of the English in these terms.

The sum of these attitudes suggests that Keetenheuve’s cage called Fatherland remained shut for more than two decades after the fall of the Third Reich.

Like most of Europe and indeed the world, Germany lacked a powerful alternative discourse to nationalism. Until the 1970s, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights possessed little traction in postwar Europe. Regional affiliations, such as those to Europe (or Pan-Africanism or Pan-Arabism), were more viable but as yet confined to a small number of elites. Strident defences of capitalism also did little to deplete the store of nationalist tropes. And on the western side of the Iron Curtain, anti-Communism supported rather than undermined Nazi-inspired nationalism.

The postwar world was, moreover, awash in new nation-states, especially as it shaded into the postcolonial era. In 1945, there were only 51 independent countries represented at the UN: 30 years later, there were 144. Whether in Jawaharlal Nehru’s India or Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, nationalism and promises of self-determination fired anti-colonial independence movements in Asia and Africa. In Europe, nationalism also continued to shape claims to group rights and territorial boundaries. In Germany, divided and not fully sovereign until 1990, it informed discussion over eventual unification, the right of the ethnic German expellees to return to their east European homelands, and the validity of Germany’s eastern borders. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1970, a quarter-century after the war, that the Federal Republic of Germany finally recognised as legitimate the German border (established at the Potsdam Conference in 1945) with Poland. And still nearly half the citizens of West Germany opposed the recognition.

The habits of thought of a once-Nazified nation-in-arms constituted one set of reinforcements

The pervasiveness of exclusionary nationalism in the postwar period also reflected a new underlying reality. The Second World War had created a Europe made up of nearly homogeneous nation-states. A series of western European countries, now thought of as diverse, were at that time just the opposite. The population of West Germany who were born in a foreign country stood at a mere 1.1 per cent, and the minuscule percentage proved paradigmatic for the tessellated continent as a whole. The Netherlands had a still smaller foreign-born population, and foreigners made up less than 5 per cent of the population in Belgium, France and Great Britain. In the interwar years, eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary had significant ethnic minorities and large Jewish populations. In the postwar period, both were all but gone, and Poles and Hungarians were largely on their own.

Nor, in the trough of deglobalisation, did Europeans often get beyond their own borders, and Germans were no exception. In 1950, most Germans had never been abroad, except as soldiers. Some 70 per cent of the adult women had never left Germany at all. Travel, a luxury enjoyed by the few, didn’t begin to pick up until the mid-1950s, while international travel became a truly mass phenomenon only in the 1970s, when most people had cars of their own. In the first decades of tourism, Germans mainly visited German-speaking destinations, such as the castles on the Rhine or the northern slopes of the Alps. In these decades, few Germans, save for the highly educated, knew foreign languages, and most other Europeans, unless migrant workers, were no different.

The cage called Fatherland was thus reinforced. The persistence in a world of nationalism of the habits of thought of a once-Nazified nation-in-arms constituted one set of reinforcements. The relative homogeneity of postwar nations and the lack of peacetime experiences abroad constituted another. There was also a third reinforcement keeping the cage shut. This was that Germans had something to hide.

In the postwar period, Germany was full of war criminals. The European courts condemned roughly 100,000 German (and Austrian) perpetrators. The sum total of convictions by the Second World War allies, including the United States, the Soviet Union and Poland, pushes that number higher still, as does the more than 6,000 offenders that West German courts would send to prison, and the nearly 13,000 that the much harsher judicial regimen of East Germany convicted.

Nevertheless, there was still a great deal left to cover up. Lower down the Nazi chain of command, a dismaying number of perpetrators of various shades of complicity got off without penalty or consequence. Two jarring examples might suffice. Only 10 per cent of Germans who had ever worked in Auschwitz were even tried, and only 41 of some 50,000 members of the murderous German Police Battalions, responsible for killing a half a million people, ever saw the inside of a prison.

Trials and sentences reveal only part of the story of complicity. Many Germans not directly involved in crimes had come into inexpensive property and wares. Detailed reports from the north German city of Hamburg suggest that, in that one city alone, some 100,000 people bought confiscated goods at auctions of Jewish wares. Throughout the Federal Republic, houses, synagogues and businesses once belonging to Jewish neighbours were now in German hands. Mutatis mutandis, what was true for the number of people involved in the murder and theft activities of the Third Reich also held true about what people knew. ‘Davon haben wir nichts gewusst’ (‘We knew nothing about that [the murder of the Jews]’), West German citizens never tired of repeating in the first decades after the war. Historians now debate whether a third or even half of the adult population in fact knew of the mass killings, even if most scholars concede that few Germans had detailed knowledge about Auschwitz.

The Germans shared a European fate here as well, even if they had the most to hide. In his trailblazing article ‘The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe’ (1992), the late Tony Judt pointed out the stakes that almost all of occupied Europe had in covering up collaboration with Nazi overlords. This wasn’t merely a matter of forgetting, as is sometimes assumed. Rather, it involved continuing and conscious concealment. After all, many people (especially in eastern Europe, where the preponderance of Jews had lived) had enriched themselves – waking up in ‘Jewish furs’, as the saying went, and occupying Jewish houses in what was surely one of the greatest forced real-estate transfers of modern history.

For all these reasons, the cage called Fatherland wasn’t easy to leave and, rather than imagine a secret key opening its door, it makes more sense to follow the hard work involved in loosening up its three essential dimensions: a warring nation, a homogeneous nation, and a cover-up nation. It wasn’t until West Germans could take leave of these mental templates that they could even begin to exit the cage. Fortunately, in the postwar era, Germany was blessed with prolonged prosperity, increased immigration, and the passing of time. When brought together with small, often courageous steps of individuals and institutions, these factors allowed West Germans eventually to embraced peace, diversity and the cause of historical truth: in short, to exit the cage.

Typical of nations cognitively still at war, the problem for many Germans was perceived treason

The vision of ‘a living, not a deathly concept of Fatherland’, as Dolf Sternberger put it in 1947, had already been laid in the early years of occupation. Sternberger, who cut off the ‘A’ from his first name, argued for a different kind of nation, one that commanded openness and engagement but didn’t end in the glorification of killing and dying in war or in the marginalisation and persecution of others. The nation as a source of life, as a caretaker of its citizens, and not as a vehicle for power, expansion, war and death: this was Sternberger’s initial vision.

It was a conception of Germany that West Germans slowly embraced, symbolically replacing the warfare state with the welfare state, swapping barracks and panzers for department stores and high-performance cars. Enabled by a velvet transition in which GDP per capita essentially quadrupled between 1950 and 1980, Germans came to conclude that their recent democratic past was far preferable to even the peace years of the Third Reich. Forgetting how solid and confining the cage was in the immediate postwar period, contemporary critics often scoffed at this shallow embrace of ‘fair-weather democracy’. Yet with a wider aperture, we now know that prosperity, and the absence of war, is the fundamental precondition of the global transition to democracy, most of which has transpired in the postwar era. In 1939, roughly 12 per cent of the population of the world lived in democracies, but by the end of the 20th century nearly 60 per cent did.

Germany’s slow exit from a nation-at-arms mentality was essential to it joining the democracies of the world. But the exit was by no means easy. The contentious memorialisation of the conservative resisters who’d tried and failed to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944 is instructive in this context. In 1951, some 40 per cent of Germans said that they were for the resisters, while some 30 per cent were against them, with the rest ignorant of the so-called Operation Valkyrie or unsure. Typical of nations cognitively still at war, the problem for many Germans was perceived treason during wartime. This was especially true of men. More than half of all German men thought that the assassination attempt was morally wrong. And even of those who did approve of it, a significant number thought that the resisters should have waited until after the war.

The persistence of this nation-at-arms mentality shadowed one of the most contentious issues of the early Federal Republic: the reconstitution, in 1955, of an army. A broad coalition, ranging from church organisations to trade unions, emerged to warn against the resulting remilitarisation of German society. When it became clear that the army would be revived, the same activists worked to ensure that soldiers be ‘citizens in uniform’ ready to refuse patently unethical orders. In conception, then, the new army, the Bundeswehr, personified the rejection of Prussian and Nazi traditions. Yet some 80 per cent of the officers of this newly created federal defence had once served in the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of Nazi Germany.

The basic coordinates of the nation-at-arms held – as it would for the first quarter-century after the end of the Second World War. Gradually, however, Europeans ‘invented peace’, in the words of the military historian Michael Howard, and came to think of war as an unnatural state, unbefitting civilised societies.

The debate was not if foreign workers should be allowed to stay, but under what terms and with what support

In postwar Germany, conscientious objection to military service was a reliable index of this new regard for peace. In the first years of the Bundeswehr, almost all the young men who were drafted showed up for duty. But by the early 1970s, the number of applications for recognition as conscientious objectors climbed above 20,000, and would continue to climb throughout the 1970s and ’80s, so that in the two years before unification, the number of applicants was close to 80,000. By this time, German peace movements, reacting to the Superpowers making the two Germanies into armed camps, had eroded the prestige of all things military among young people. By 2000, Germans were among the least willing to pick up arms and fight for their country: only a third of those polled said they would do so.

The exit from the cage called Fatherland also took longer for those who saw belonging in terms of ethnicity and conceived of nations as ethnically homogeneous units. This second exit also started later than the confrontation with Germany’s militarist past and, ironically, it was the building of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 that powerfully accelerated it. Intended to end East Germany’s haemorrhaging of qualified young people to the West, the wall inflamed national passions in the short term, but not in the long run. The next generation of young West Germans came to see the solution of ‘two-states, one nation’, as West Germany’s chancellor Willy Brandt would later put it, as permanent. The wall also accelerated West Germany’s efforts to bring in Gastarbeiter (guest workers), as the massive influx from East Germany (more than 3 million people between 1945 and 1961) suddenly came to a halt.

As if with the turns of a kaleidoscope, the ethnic constellation of West Germany began to change, at first slowly, then rapidly. The so-called Worker Recruitment Stop of 1973, meant to reduce the influx of foreigners to a trickle, actually doubled the number of workers coming to West Germany and encouraged them to bring their families. By 1982, with West Germany still reeling from the Oil Crisis and unemployment hovering at 10 per cent, the country suddenly had a foreign-born population of 7.5 per cent. Almost 80 per cent of West Germans thought that too many foreigners now lived in their country. Even 60 per cent of West Germans identifying with the new Green Party held this opinion.

A debate, which continues until this day, had already emerged about the degree to which West Germany had become what Heinz Kühn, commissioner for foreigner affairs in Helmut Schmidt’s government, would call ‘an immigrant nation’. An irreversible situation had occurred, Kühn wrote in 1979, and ‘those who are willing to stay … must be offered unconditional and permanent integration.’ The Kühn Memorandum, forgotten about by all except specialists in German immigration history, effectively shifted the ground of the debate – not whether foreign workers should be allowed to remain in Germany, but under what terms and with what support. It also furthered an incipient discussion about the extent to which foreigners were not guests but Mitbürger, fellow citizens.

In the life of nations, small openings can have profound effects. In these postwar years, general prosperity allowed Germans to travel as tourists, not as soldiers, and indeed no major European nation supplied so many tourists to other European nations as West Germany. More important, prosperity continued to draw workers to the Federal Republic. By the end of the century, a united Germany would have a foreigner population roughly eight times as large as it had in 1950; in percentage terms, the foreign-born population in the year 2000 was not far behind that of the US.

Yet if the insularity of earlier decades was gone, ethnic segregation remained, and anti-foreigner sentiment continued to poison the private and public sphere alike. Indeed, after unification in 1990, it erupted in greater violence than ever before. Beginning in cities in the east where unemployment was high, prospects bleak and experiences with foreigners limited, vicious and often lethal anti-foreigner violence occurred in Hoyerswerda, Dresden, Rostock-Lichtenhagen, and many other communities, and soon spilled into west Germany. By 1993, anti-foreigner extremists had murdered nearly 50 non-Germans and, by the end of the decade, more than 100.

Was the concept of an immigrant nation at an end, as many warned? The best evidence suggests otherwise. In reaction to the killings, hundreds of thousands of German protesters (more than a million in some estimations) went out on to the streets in order to publicly oppose the violence. They were men and women of all ages, walks of life and political persuasions. Many had never demonstrated before. But they wanted the world to know that ‘This is not who we are.’ The ‘we’ was important to them. For theirs was an appeal against the xenophobic nationalists in their midst and for a more inclusive nation. And by the end of the 1990s, this general appeal began to transform into hard policy. In 2000, new citizenship regulations reflected the new inclusive discourse by making significant concessions to jus soli, the idea that you are a citizen of the place where you are born, as opposed to jus sanguinis, the older German measure, defining citizenship by blood. Almost immediately, roughly a million immigrants became German citizens. Since the mid-1990s, bi-national marriages have doubled, making up more than 7 per cent of all heterosexual marriages in Germany. The new immigration nation was far from being uncontested terrain, however, as the rise of xenophobic populists in the midst of the refugee crisis of 2016 showed. And yet here, too, as in the 1990s, the number of Germans who came out in order to publicly demonstrate for tolerance and lend a helping hand was commendable.

The patient work of commemoration missing in earlier decades was now being pursued with a vengeance

The most remarkable transformation was, however, the third: how Germany faced its past. It didn’t face it right away. Certainly, it’s defensible to argue that it wasn’t until the major war trials had passed, and the restitution of property was regulated and settled, that a genuine and honest turn to the past could even begin. Following this logic, one might have expected a surge of interest in the National Socialist past after the trials of the late 1950s and early ’60s. But in the late 1960s, passionate conviction, not patient reconstruction, was the order of the day, and political ideology, rather than deepening historical analysis, often occluded insight. It remains controversial to assert that serious and sustained interest in the National Socialist period didn’t take off in the late 1960s, and that, instead, a ‘second forgetting’, as one leading West German historian has described the 1970s, set in.

An interpretation that de-emphasises the breakthrough of the late 1960s puts the turn at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the ’80s, as four events converged. The first was the 40th anniversary in 1978 of the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht) of 1938; it brought forth a great number of commemorations, especially in West Germany’s larger cities. The second was the airing of the US TV miniseries Holocaust (1979). As many as 20 million Germans, mainly in the Federal Republic, saw some part of it, and its very narrative structure invited them to identify with the main character – the intrepid Inga Helms Weiss, played by Meryl Streep, who married into a Jewish family and did everything she could to save them. The third event, less often discussed, was the end of a two-decades-long debate about the statute of limitations for Nazi crimes, with a close vote in the West German parliament – 255 for the cancellation of such legal shields, 222 against – allowing West Germany’s authorities to continue the hunt for Nazis guilty of murder. And finally, the fourth event: a major, nationwide essay contest for high-school students in 1981, with some 13,000 submissions on the subject of ‘Everyday Life in National Socialism’.

The confluence of these four events created a tsunami effect. Research – in schools and communities – soared. Across the country, literally thousands of schoolteachers, archivists, retirees, interested citizens and school students – such as the real-life Anna Rosmus, whose story was told in Michael Verhoeven’s film The Nasty Girl (1990) – dug into local records and researched what happened in their own communities, often working with Jewish people who’d once lived in these cities and towns and were now in Israel, France, Great Britain, Argentina or the US. Suddenly, the patient work of commemoration that had been missing in earlier decades was being pursued with a vengeance. People restored synagogues, exposed abandoned barracks that had once been used to house forced labourers, and discovered literally hundreds of subcamps of concentration camps throughout the German countryside. They held speeches, wrote articles, published books. Hardly any town in Germany with a population over 20,000 and where Jews once lived is now without an account of what happened then, and what fate befell the Jews who lived there – former Jewish Mitbürger, as many Germans now began to call them.

The story of how Germany faced its past has been told often, most recently in Susan Neiman’s book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019). Less common is to bring it together with Germany’s confrontation with its militarist past and its transformation into an immigrant nation. It was the confluence of these three ways of attempting to construct Germany anew – making it into a pacific nation, an immigrant nation, and a truthful nation – that allowed Germans to exit the nationalist cage Keetenheuve called Fatherland.

Granted, the metaphor isn’t a perfect one. In the main, Germans didn’t exit that cage by leaving the nation behind them; they didn’t, in the main, become cosmopolitans or Europeans, even if this was the path for some. When, in an opinion poll in 2001, Germans were asked to choose between identities, the overwhelming number (c75 per cent) picked ‘German’ over ‘European’ or ‘citizen of the world’ as their principal identifier. Germans, these polls suggest, exited the cage by becoming better Germans. What they tried to leave behind was not their nation but their nationalism. Certainly, there is more of the path to walk down. But that many postwar Germans have even begun to take this path ‘less travelled by … has made all the difference’, to borrow from the poet Robert Frost – and not just for Germany, but for other countries seeking a way out of the nationalist cage.

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