Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the issue of evolution

Derek Freeman argues that the central issue in the Mead-Freeman controversy is evolution and that Margaret Mead was anti-evolutionary. A review of Mead's writing on evolution demonstrates that she favored an evolutionary approach throughout her career. Freeman simply omits Mead's views on evolution in his attempt to discredit her work.

After reading a recent article by Derek Freeman, I had a curious sense of deja vu. The article was entitled "Paradigms in Collision: Margaret Mead's Mistake and What It Has Done to Anthropology" (1997), and it reminded me that Freeman had published an article with almost the same title and similar content five years earlier (1992). But then Freeman has been relentlessly criticizing the work of Margaret Mead for the past fifteen years. And he shows no signs of tiring.

One of the most interesting aspects of Freeman's critique is that a number of intelligent people have come to believe it. Initially, Freeman argued that a young, gullible Mead mistook Samoan jokes about sexual conduct for the truth, and that this alleged mistake led to the false doctrine of absolute cultural determinism, which in turn had profound intellectual consequences. Recently, Freeman has given more attention to the issue of evolution, which he believes is at the heart of the controversy. Specifically, he holds Mead responsible for the anti-evolutionary paradigm in which only cultural variables are important and in which "all human behavior is the result of social conditioning." For Freeman, evolution has become the ultimate issue in his critique of Mead and is the central focus of "Paradigms in Collision."

Freeman rejects the "Mead paradigm" in favor of an interactionist one that recognizes biological as well as cultural variables. Freeman also deplores the dominance of the "Mead paradigm" which, due to a cult-like loyalty to her, has perpetuated a "tabula rasa anthropology" from which the discipline has yet to recover. He believes that only when anthropologists recognize Mead's initial error and its disastrous intellectual consequences will the discipline have a promising future.

There is high drama in Freeman's account: A lone dissenter from the conventional wisdom uncovers a great anthropologist's original sin in his search for truth. Her reputation is tarnished. What ensues is an epic struggle for the soul of a discipline held hostage by the ghost of a legendary figure. Margaret Mead, symbol of American anthropology, was anti-evolutionary. What could be worse?

Unfortunately, like so much of his critique of Mead, Freeman relies on a caricature of Mead's views and her influence on anthropology. Granted that it is an entertaining caricature full of implications about Freeman's own place in intellectual history. Yet a closer look at this argument demonstrates that on the fundamental issues of biology, culture, and evolution, Mead and Freeman are in substantial agreement. Mead was not anti-evolutionary; she held what are now conventional views on evolution, just like Freeman. So there are no "paradigms in collision." Freeman has simply omitted much of what Mead actually wrote on evolution. In this article, Freeman's and Mead's views on biology, culture, and evolution are reviewed. Freeman's misrepresentation of Mead's views raises questions about his scholarship, which is now the real issue in this long-running "controversy."

Mead's View of Biology, Culture, and Evolution

Mead's views on the interaction of biology and culture were complex, not simplistic, and developed over her long career. Early on, she emphasized the importance of culture, stating that differences between cultures arose from a common biological basis. This was the crux of Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), in which Mead argued that adolescence was a universal biological process, but that there were differences in the way that this process was handled by different cultures. Cultural differences arose from a common biological basis, yet they could not be explained by biology alone. These differences suggested to Mead that there was no single way to manage adolescence. Americans could therefore make choices about handling this stage in the human life cycle.

In her early work, Mead did argue that human nature was extremely malleable. However, as historian Carl Degler (1991) found in his comprehensive review of Darwinian thought in the twentieth century, Mead's views on human nature developed over four decades during which the political and intellectual climate was changing. Thus, when she argued against racial and biological explanations, she emphasized culture; when she was discussing sex roles, biology received more attention. For example, in Male and Female (1949), Mead discussed the significance of biological differences in sex roles and sexuality.

Far from naively embracing the "tabula rasa" point of view, Mead specifically pointed out its weaknesses in the 1940s (1942, 1947), while noting the importance of the interaction of biology and culture in the human maturation process. Furthermore, in her presidential address to the American Anthropological Association in 1960, Mead stated that genetics is "enormously relevant to problems absolutely central to our discipline" and was concerned that research on genetics had been largely confined to physical anthropology (1961, 480). She also urged her colleagues to take advantage of "the opportunity provided by the new upsurge of interest in the whole field of evolution, in which human evolution is one part and cultural evolution a smaller one" (1961, 481). And she reminded anthropologists that Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, and other natural scientists were interested in communicating with them about evolution (1961, 481). Given such public statements, can anyone take seriously Freeman's assertion that Mead believed that "all human behavior is the result of social conditioning" or that she was anti-evolutionary? Of course not. Freeman has simply neglected those parts of Mead's work that do not support his current views.