AbstractThe Annual Review of Anthropology presents Dr. Irven DeVore, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Harvard University, in conversation with Dr. Peter Ellison, Co-Editor of the Annual Review of Anthropology and Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology, also at Harvard University. In this interview, Dr. DeVore talks about his life and career, describing how he went from social anthropology to studying and filming baboons and other primates in Africa, to observing the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Pygmies. Dr. DeVore was one of the first to incorporate sociobiological theory into his work, a decision that would prove as fundamental as it was challenging. In his own words, he would have to “turn [his] back on everything [he’d] understood until that point in anthropology.”

This interview was conducted on May 22, 2012.

A Conversation with Irven DeVore

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Annual Reviews Conversations. 2012First published online on November 14, 2012

The DOI of this article is: 10.1146/annurev-conversations-010913-100006

Annual Reviews Audio interviews are online at www.annualreviews.org/page/audio

Copyright © 2012 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

Annual Reviews Conversations Presents

View video of interview online.

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A CONVERSATION WITH IRVEN DEVORE

Peter Ellison: I’m Peter Ellison, John Cowles Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and Co-Editor of the Annual Review of Anthropology. I’m talking today with my long-time mentor and friend, Professor Irven DeVore, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Anthropology, emeritus, at Harvard University. Professor DeVore and I have known each other for all of my professional career and a good portion of his.

Professor DeVore, your career has been truly remarkable. It reads as if it were three people’s careers, covering some of the most pivotal events in biological anthropology, including primate behavior, hunter-gatherer studies, and the introduction of evolutionary theory into the understanding of human behavior. And yet, you were trained as a social anthropologist. I’d like to start, if we might, by asking you to recall the beginning of your relationship with the late Sherry [Sherwood] Washburn, and explain to us how you ever decided to study the social behavior of baboons.

Irven DeVore: It was an accident, really; I was a social anthropology major as an undergraduate at the University of Texas and was admitted into the social program at Chicago for graduate school, and [that was] all I ever intended to do. At the end of my first year, I went out to do fieldwork with the Mesquakie Indians and had a quite an eventful summer, but one that was not terribly satisfying. I began to think seriously about social anthropology and whether I was really fitted for it. I’ve been equally interested in animals since I was young. At the age of six, I had 25 different animals; my parents are very long suffering.

I’ve always been interested in understanding their behavior. I was a social anthropology major as an undergraduate, and then I was admitted into Chicago, and I had never given any thought to animal behavior as a serious enterprise; it was a hobby. I didn’t know that you could do that. I came from a pretty impoverished part of east Texas. But during that summer of fieldwork after my first year—I had a summer out on the Mesquakie Indian Settlement in Tama, Iowa—for the first time I had to confront seriously what it was like to do serious social anthropology.

I began to feel, more and more, that I was not suited for it, at least, the way it was understood at that time; this feeling grew over the years. I’ll explain. I felt like I was not ready to be a really good parent until I was about 40. That’s a strange time in the human career, but by then I knew that, in our culture, a good parent had to fill in for the aunts and uncles, the grandparents, the nephews and nieces, the cousins—all of those people who were a support group. We banish, so to speak, our nuclear families to isolation in tall apartment buildings, and anyone who’s had a child with colic for two straight nights and is trying to go to graduate school knows why the temptation is almost overwhelming to smother it. For millions of years, hundreds of thousands of years, we had this tight social group around us. Almost immediately, when the mother was getting frazzled, one of these women—it was almost always a woman—would come over and take the baby, feed it and calm it down, and maybe sleep with it. We don’t have that, and we don’t even think that we should be prepared to give those kinds of things.

Then I thought, “Social anthropology is wearing on me because I don’t think that the people who write up the monographs are really prepared to do it. They’re just too young.” Here you have a graduate student just out of college—probably about 22, or 23, early or midtwenties—going out to a strange place, when maybe they’ve never been more than two states away from home.

Here they are in Fiji, and they’re sitting and talking to people who have been grandparents and parents since they were 14, and trying to understand them. What happens is the anthropologist discovers herself or himself reflected in all of these conversations, but you’re not allowed to write

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that up, or you shouldn’t, because who wants to read about brown-skinned Americans, so to speak? You’ve got to find an angle, and always the anthropologist finds an angle that is new. It’s an original contribution and knowledge—well I’m rambling on about this, but I came to feel it very strongly, only I never gave up that feeling, really. Of course there are people who can rise above those limitations, but it is a serious limitation.

The other thing that bothered me particularly was that—as opposed to science, where if you perform an experiment and find something novel and it’s important, five or six other people are down at the labs early the next morning trying to replicate it—in anthropology, if you dare to go to the village that some anthropologist has been to before, you would have been driven out of the profession. That’s just not a gentlemanly thing to do. So what are we left with? A gazillion individual accounts of cultures and no comparative work at all.

That was the mood that I was in when I came back from that fieldwork. Sol Tax was a marvelous man, one of the great men of the twentieth century in many, many ways. Anyway, he was head of something called action anthropology, which we were doing out in Mesquakie country in Tama. By the way, they were called Sac and Fox during the Plains Indian days, and they call themselves Mesquakie, so I’m sorry if I’ve confused people. We talked about my experience, and he said, “We’d like you to take over the project.” This was very flattering. I thought, “Wow, this might be my big chance,” so I said, “Let me think about it over the weekend.”

Sol and I had gotten to be very close, so I came back in, and I said, “I’m just not the person to do that.” He said, “I’m sorry to hear that. Do you like animals?” I said, “I love animals.” He said, “I want you to meet someone.” We walked down the hall. He opened the door, put his hand in the middle of my back, shoved me in, and said, “Sherry, here’s your man,” and turned and left. Here’s a guy whom I’d never seen before. He turned out to be Sherwood Washburn, one of the two or three most eminent physical anthropologists in America. He bounded up out of his chair and came over and shook my hand.

He said, “So you’re going to be my teaching fellow.” I said, “There’s some mistake.” I had four years of public speaking in high school and four more in college; I was a national debate champion. “I don’t feel like I need the teaching experience, and I have a fellowship that pays all of my expenses. I just don’t want to do it.” He said, “I didn’t ask you.”

Peter Ellison: Sounds like Sherry.

Irven DeVore: That’s Sherry. Sherry was a man of strong opinions, but he was not usually that brusque. Anyway, that was the best thing that ever happened to me. Within two or three weeks, I just adored the man. He had more ideas per day than I had heard from all of my other contacts in anthropology in my whole career, which was not that long. He just spun ideas off, and they were original, and they were fun, and they were not all true or all even worth following up. Part of the job of a graduate student was to help separate the dross from the gold. Anyway, he was just so exciting to be around. If he had tried to recruit me to go on a Mars expedition and study paramecia, I would have done it. If he said it was important, I would know it was.

The interesting thing was that he had just come back from a field trip in Africa, and he was over there doing anatomy on baboons. They were doing vermin control operations and bringing these baboons in, and they got so interested in watching their behavior. He would dissect a baboon very quickly. They wouldn’t even have a day to sit on the veranda of the Victoria Falls Hotel and drink Pimm’s Number Ones and watch the baboons in the garden. They so fascinated him. Then he came back, and he was determined to get somebody to study the behavior of the baboons.

The way that he explained it to me was that he said, “Primates are wonderful.” By the way, he

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had been on the original Asiatic ape expedition with Adolph Schultz and C. Ray Carpenter; he was the graduate student from Harvard who was on it. He had watched behavior off and on for various reasons, and he said, “Nobody who is sophisticated about behaviors ever studies primates. It’s always a physiological psychologist or an experimental psychologist. I want somebody who is accustomed to thinking about complex social organizations because that’s what they’ve got.” I said, “I’m your man.”

I had a wonderful time in Kenya. Sherry joined me toward the end; his family and my family were out there together for a little while. But it’s hard to tell you how isolated, how pioneering, I felt. Nobody was studying animal behavior in any country—that is, seriously studying it. When I finally taught my first course in primate behavior at Berkeley, I didn’t have a single book on primates to assign, so I assigned virtually every good monograph there was on animal behavior: Fraser Darling on the red deer, [George] Bartholomew and [J.B.] Birdsell on elephant seals, J.P. Scott on sheep. That was a very good way to approach primates, in a way, but when I got to Africa, there was nobody studying animals or filming them.

The best film was one called “African Lion,” and for its day it was wonderful, the first really good animal behavior film to come out of the wild. It was shot by two amateurs, who were a retired couple, and they just camped at a water hole for three years and shot lion footage. They came back and got help editing it, and it was great.

Peter Ellison: You also used film in your own studies of baboons. People in my generation grew up watching Irven DeVore’s 16-millimeter baboon behavior films.

Irven DeVore: As in so many things, Sherry Washburn was behind that. He was absolutely determined that other people see these fabulous animals; it had so turned him on. He wanted me to make a film on my first study, and I didn’t have a camera. I finally figured out that there were these amateur cameraman in Nairobi, Kenya, who would go out and shoot the great white hunter spotting his lion or his elephant. I hired one of these guys for a week, and we went out every day and shot footage. I came back and edited it, and it got what they called, grandiosely, the Oscar in those years, the blue ribbon in educational film.

There was one of those that I remember. I also had a botanist with me from the [Kenya National Museum in Nairobi] because I was identifying the plants that they ate, and I had some that I didn’t have samples of. We pulled up by this little pool, and there was this lioness just across it. The pool was no bigger than this room—hardly this big—and she was very close to the other side. I wanted a water lily that baboons eat, so I started to get out and she hunkered down and growled, and I thought, “Is she bluffing? How much do I want to know? I’ll try a little bit more,” so I opened the door a little bit more and put one leg out, and she cowered again.

The [botanist] is sweating buckets. He said, “Never mind. I know the genus; we can just let the species go.” Years later, when I was working in Cambridge with a very, very hands-on group called Education Development Center, we got an extraordinary man in my team named Gerald Zacharias, who decided to siphon some of the large amounts of money being thrown at the curriculum after Sputnik went up. America had panicked, and he saw that one of the things that needed help most was not just math and engineering, but social sciences.

A group at Harvard—I had hired a lot of helpers—started this very ambitious project. We were going to do kindergarten–through–twelfth grade social studies. Boy, were we naïve. As part of this, they hired me to basically do the baboon story for fifth graders. They got a lot of money to do a film. In Washington, by the way there was a unit of measure called the Zack. The Zack was $250,000—that was the smallest amount he would talk in terms of in any budget he was

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negotiating. Anyway, Zack got me money, and I was able to hire a top Disney photographer, director, and sound man, and we did it right.

I used those films for many, many years. Particularly in my case—-and this is proven to be what’s lasted about them, to show individuality in films. It was easy to show in the males because they were so bravura, but that was true in the females as well. I showed that in a film called “Dynamics of Male Dominance,” which was not for fifth graders. I made all of these films for fifth graders, and then I said, “May I make one for my peer group, so to speak?” I also trained—we took them in real time and with sound. It was the first time that any of us knew—or that Disney knew, because this was their big animal director—that synchronized sound had ever been taken in the wild. They had always laid the soundtrack in separately, which is why you get an elephant yawning and in the soundtrack it’s trumpeting, and vultures are symbolic: They hover in a dead tree over the dead animal or person. It’s a silent death. Vultures are among the noisiest animals on Earth, and they fight over every scrap. It’s a cacophonous sound. Kids in the fifth grade began to get the idea—and we didn’t put any narration in the films. We showed them really authentic films, and they were so eager to know more. We said, “We have these booklets. Here are booklets on organization; here are booklets on child development, infant development, and so on.”

I could go on talking, as you can see, all day about that, but there is no way to bring home the animal that you are talking about better than in a film.

Peter Ellison: It certainly did that.

Irven DeVore: In many ways [it was] better than having [the students] visit you out there. First of all, you will get a very small sample for that person, and very likely you will disturb the animals in some way, et cetera.

Peter Ellison: Very likely you’d have to wait a long time to see the behaviors of interest. I wonder if we can skip ahead. It strikes me that at the same time, through your work with the

baboons, through your interaction with a community of primarily European ethologists who were studying animal behavior—all of this was making your name synonymous with primate behavior within anthropology. Even as that was happening, you were launching something else and something equally new. Based on your relationship with Richard Lee and Sherry, again, you started to launch the Kalahari Project, the study of the !Kung San Bushmen in Botswana. This project also broke tremendous new ground and, I think, established a new paradigm for fieldwork, breaking the mold of that one-anthropologist, one-culture paradigm that you were mentioning before. You decided to bring a team of experts—not a S.W.A.T. team all at once, but rotating through people studying child development and demography and archaeology, and all kinds of things—to build up a really multilayered, multidisciplinary view. How did this strategy come to be?

Irven DeVore: Again, it goes way back. In a way, it’s interlocked with Sherry Washburn. When he was trying to recruit me, he was dangling various things in front of me, as if he needed to. I had assumed that I was going to do hunter-gatherers, and he said, “If you go and do this baboon job for me, I will guarantee you that I will get you a Ford Foundation grant to go to the pygmies, and it will be wonderful because in the park out there they’re now being allowed to hunt so long as they hunt with natural weapons.” He was a good friend of a man named François Bourlière, who was head of two institutes in Paris, a wonderful man. He came and visited me in Nairobi Park, and we had a fabulous time.

By the time that I got back—I was on the back of a tiger or a baboon, and it was hard to get off.

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By the time that I could, Richard Lee had applied to come to Berkeley, where I was teaching with Sherry, to work with us. He had an MA from Toronto, and Sherry and I talked it over and decided to let him. He was quite excited about it. So Richard Lee came, and he thought in order to work with us he had to do baboons—he had to do primates. It was a perfectly reasonable assumption because everybody else working with me was doing that.

He told me that his real dream was to do hunter-gatherers. I said, “Richard, this is your lucky day. That’s exactly what I want to do, so let’s plan it together.” He became the point man, putting things together and goading me along, and it was an incredible experience. Because of my own attitudes and social anthropology, I had a lot to live up to, but even for Richard and me—we had been told pretty much what to expect. Everybody was a hunter-gatherer; they were going to be patrilineal, tracing through males; patrilocal, living around the father; territorial; and exogamous. They were none of those things. Their kinship was not strictly patrilineal or matrilineal; it was bilateral, like ours, in fact. There are many, many aspects of the !Kung San that are just like the American, middle-class, nuclear family orientation, but within a large group of close relatives. That’s the part that we’ve hived off, the small group.

The other thing that we had been told—we knew it was a chestnut in anthropology—was that there’s a big difference between the hunter-gatherer way of life and what came later, specialization. Every male hunter in the band knows how to do all of the same things that another male does. They’re interchangeable. Same thing for the women, the weaving and the food gathering. That was silly, too. From the first day—of course, I didn’t speak the language, but we had a very good interpreter—it was clear that these people were as different as any middle-class community in Massachusetts that I had ever encountered. They even had specialists, not just curers, which you expected, but even that was strange because every young man was expected to practice doing the trance dance and, if possible, go into a trance because, in that state, he could then heal people.

The remarkable thing is that probably one-quarter of all the young men did become trancers. Some are great famous ones. A lot of them were serious trance healers, a much higher percentage than in any other group that I know of who have medicine men. There were specialists among the !Kung San who just blew me away. I was sitting around the campfire at night after we had been there awhile. I looked up at the stars and I said, “What do you make of all of that, the Milky Way?” “Well, that’s the backbone of the sky.” “And all of those little pricks of light—what’s that?” “Those are dead men’s eyes.” I said, “That’s kind of creepy.”

Anyway, this is what any Bushman will tell you. If you ask some young person in Cambridge what’s up there, they wouldn’t [be able to] tell you much more than that—maybe Venus and the Moon. I kept pushing because I’d read a paper by the Marshall family, a family who had been studying the Bushmen just across the border, about cosmology, and it was rich. They finally said, in exasperation, “Why don’t you go over to !King’s band and ask Tingka, because he’s the one who knows all about the stars.” I was very suspicious throughout most of our studies because every group you go to tries very hard to find out what it is you want to know or want to hear.

Peter Ellison: Right.

Irven DeVore: They’re very good at it because they’ve had a lot of practice with groups that are more powerful than they are. So I remained skeptical throughout most of the San study because we really wanted to just get the facts, and we didn’t want to overlay it with theory and didn’t want to lead the witness. We kept each other honest, but that wasn’t hard, because Richard and I are both very empirically oriented.

We developed methods of interviewing, in which we would interview a woman about important

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events in her life—say, we’d spend all of one day and half the next day. Then we would interview her sisters and her mother and her grandmother, and go over the same incidents and see what their point of view was. We found the Bushmen remarkably candid and honest. But we also found that they could repress things—understandably, like an infant that had died at birth, or they’d had to commit infanticide, which was a terrible, crushing thing, but their female relatives knew about it.

There was another guy who was the plant expert. Every Bushman, man or woman, can name for you the 20 most common plants and the 20 most common animals, and that’s about it. This guy could rattle off !Kung San names for everything, and I thought, “Oh boy, this guy is really putting us on. He’s going to expect a big deal,” but we checked it out, and there was another guy who knew a lot of [the plants and animals], and they were the same words. The same went with cosmology, although we didn’t have another cosmologist to check it with, but at least he was consistent from the decade before.

I’m sorry I’m taking so long on this; I’m just trying to say the Bushmen were so rich. We saw these “poor” people had not been well represented, and we were not going to be able to do that very well all by ourselves. So we proposed this broad-range thing of ecology and archaeology and kinship, child-rearing, medicine, and so on. We were able to sell it because we had this mantra, almost, which is that for 100,000 years—certainly more—we were hunter-gatherers, and we had only been something else in the last 10,000 years. As late as the time of Christ, 2,000 years ago, half the world was still hunter-gatherers. We are really hunter-gatherers; never mind that some of us wear Brooks Brothers suits. We don’t know that life, and we have completely misinterpreted it.

One of the first “gee, whiz” things we found was that the women were, on average, throughout the year, bringing in more calories to the camp than the men were. All of the models of hunter-gatherers had been of people who were hungry all of the time and that hunters getting game was not an everyday occurrence; you staggered from one antelope to the next to stay alive. It’s not that way at all. First of all, we found that they eat more meat than Americans; it just has one-quarter of the fat or less. Lean people chasing lean animals. The women were bringing in rich foods, and especially mongongo nuts, which are extremely rich and very abundant out there. It takes a lot of technology to roast them and crack them, but they have more protein than beefsteak and more fat than bacon. All by themselves they are very good. As you can see, I could talk about these things forever. That was why our project became so popular—that, and we chose who to go out there very carefully.

Peter Ellison: Remarkable people. A remarkable cohort of people came out of that project.

Irven DeVore: Now they’re members of the National Academy, chairmen of departments. I’m so proud of them.

We had set up a model training program, which was this. As you said, we did not want to swamp the Bushmen, destroy them through the Heisenberg effect; we didn’t want to destroy the very data we came out to gather. The idea was two couples at a time. One of those would be Lee and his wife, or me and my wife. Then that couple would come back; there was a seminar going on all the time on the Bushmen. The ones who had been to the field would then teach the ones who were preparing to go out.

That engendered a lot of in-group bonding. We also set up a master file. National Cash Register had a patent on pressure paper that would make carbons. We had two crates of notebooks printed with three pages: the original and two carbons. The original went into the master file, which was open to everybody. That was a really big change.

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Peter Ellison: Wow.

Irven DeVore: Then there was a carbon for the person and a carbon to do whatever we wanted to with. That more or less worked; I mean, nothing ever works perfectly, but that was pretty close. We used something very like that some years later with the Whitings to do the seven-culture study.

Peter Ellison: Those studies pioneered so much, not only the multidisciplinary approach. I hadn’t realized that even antedates the open-access data and file sharing, as it were, that were going on back then. It’s not hard to appreciate why the !Kung San became such a paradigm within anthropology. They were hunter-gatherers for so many people and for so many generations; there was no other study that came close to that richness of detail.

Irven DeVore: That’s right. I don’t know of any culture, outside the West, that has as much fine-grained data on it—probably 30 books by now. I can’t keep up with it all. It’s still going on.

Peter Ellison: I was fortunate to get on the tail end of that with another project that you started with Bob Bailey, finally getting into the Ituri Forest and some encounters with the pygmies. Were they what you expected when you finally got there?

Irven DeVore: I didn’t have the same expectations because they were not as nominally well known. After all, the Bushmen had been described by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, and so on—I won’t name all of the people. The irony of this was that I did finally make it to the pygmies, but for years, people would say, “Can’t we join your Kalahari Project?” and we would say, “We’re full up,” which was true. But for heaven’s sake, this was a dry savannah adaptation. It’s silly to have this stand for all hunter-gatherers everywhere, at all times, just because it’s the best documented.

I said, “Why don’t you go and study the pygmies? That’s the next-biggest intact hunter-gatherer population.” Pygmies are still somewhat enigmatic, even their language. Their culture absolutely makes sense; we just didn’t know what to expect. What we found was that the pygmies, as they have always been said to be, were in a very close relationship with some Bantu- or Sudanic-speaking group. Patrons, so to speak, intermarrying. I spent very little time out there, but Bob Bailey, who was the Richard Lee of the pygmies, and his wife, Nadine, who got a PhD in our department, were the key people.

The time I remember most vividly is when we got Richard Wrangham out there for awhile with his wife. They studied the Leses, while Nadine and Bob studied the Efe pygmies. We would have seminars every night where we would hash out how we were going to describe the behavior, resting, and moving and so on, so that they can be compared. That’s not easy, and it was very exciting. We wanted to know things like the amount of leisure time and the contribution of males versus females or adolescents, all of that. Sometimes they would act these things out. “If a mother squats down by the fire, then hops up and goes to her baby and comes back by the fire, how do you code that?” “Do we need to break that down into squats?” “No, let’s not do that.” I’m just pulling that out of the air, but they were exciting seminars. Richard, whom I idolize, is one of the best people for methodology in biology or anthropology. All of these people are so good.

Peter Ellison: I know.

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Irven DeVore: Everything I did I learned from my students. I learned very early on that if you wanted wisdom, then chances are you’d want to go to the facility. But if you really wanted to know what is going on in the field, you’d go to the graduate students because they have so much on the line. They know they have to be up to date on the literature, and they want to be. They’re not jaded; they’re not burned out. I surrounded myself with graduate students, and the epitome of that is something that came to be called the simian seminar. The simian seminar, actually, was suggested by one of the graduate students. Every chance I got, I would snag a prominent biologist or anthropologist—Jane Goodall, whoever—to come and give an informal talk in my living room. I’d invite the graduate students. Then they needed to give talks to each other, and we wanted more local people. I had a meeting like that on average twice a month in my living room. It got bigger and bigger and bigger, until we were finally getting 40 and 50 people squeezed into—

Peter Ellison: I remember those days.

Irven DeVore: —a lot of sitting on the floor and on each other’s laps. We showed slides and the whole shtick.

Peter Ellison: That simian seminar became the crucible for so many ideas. During that period, you also started working closely with Robert Trivers, E.O. Wilson, and students of your own like Sarah Hrdy in incorporating into anthropology, into the study of human behavior, some of the very exciting new Darwinian syntheses that were coming from D.W. Hamilton and J. Maynard Smith and J.C. Williams. You were pulling that together into what became known for awhile as sociobiology. It generated quite a stir.

Irven DeVore: Especially at Harvard.

Peter Ellison: Especially at Harvard. Were you surprised by that stir, or did you ever worry that you’d poked a hornet’s nest?

Irven DeVore: I suspected it wouldn’t go down easily, partly by my own experience. Trivers led me in this from the beginning, and most importantly all the way through. I’ll never forget he called me up—we often got together for sometimes all-night sessions in my house—he called me on a Thursday night and said, “Irv, I’ve been wanting to tell you this. I’ve been reading such exciting stuff. He can be very straight to the point, and he’s clear, but this stuff was so novel it blew my mind. This was the very first time I’d heard of modern evolutionary biology as we now understand it. Take two aspirin and call me again Monday, you know.

I’m stubborn, and I think that I’m careful, and I don’t embrace a belief in theory in the broadest sense until I’m completely convinced, and then I hold on to it tightly; I don’t abandon it easily. What Trivers was saying to me was so fundamentally challenging that I realized very quickly, within weeks, that in order to embrace it fully I would have to turn my back on everything I had understood up until that point in anthropology: my thesis; my professors, including Washburn. This was such a scary step to take. I was in the transition of generations, so to speak. Robert Hinde in England and Peter Marler in Berkeley, who are friends of mine, were both students of [William] Thorpe. They were now coming into their own. They were the great paragons of behavioral biology, and they didn’t like this at all because they were going to have to change the way they looked at the world as well. They took a long time, but Peter finally came around. Hinde still used to get up and make embarrassing statements about me in meetings. Unfortunately, I

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used the expression “conversion experience.” I didn’t mean anything mystical by that. Saul on the road to Tarsus has a vision, and he falls down and stands up, and he’s Paul the Apostle. That’s what a wrench it was.

But once you began to get it and realized that this was a series so much more powerful than anything that we had before, you could actually now predict things. If you knew several things about a species, you could make a very likely assumption that you’re probably going to find these things as well. Not all of them, but it turns out most of them. The world began to make sense, and very curious, anomalous behavior suddenly was understandable. It couldn’t have come at a worse time for social anthropology. I think that social anthropology largely lost its way. Villages were more and more closed to them; they were doing basically some sociology that was quite good. But they were also doing a lot of philosophical, plain-language—I don’t know how to characterize it—things that led to such silly conclusions because there was no such thing as truth, objective truth. “Everything that we know or believe is filtered through our culture.” Well, of course it is. But that doesn’t mean that in physics there’s no such thing as truth, because there damn well is!

Peter Ellison: What is sociobiology?

Irven DeVore: Glad you asked. The essence of it is very, very simple. Darwin saw, very clearly as we now know, the operation of natural selection on individuals and how it shaped them in niches and environments, how they competed. That tells most of the story we need to know about most behavior. But now that genetics is so important to our understanding, we realize that behavior that is inherited in the genes is not just inherited from the grandparents and the parents down to the kids. In fact, it’s the genes that are traveling down, and it affects all the people who are connected to you by genes from common descent. Your cousins: You’re one-eighth related to them. Nephews and nieces: You’re one-quarter. Kids: one-half. We usually stop at about cousins because one-eighth is about as far as anybody wants to do the math.

So that whole bundle around ego is the inclusive fitness; kin selection, it used to be called. Once you have that, then that helps you understand even more about behavior, strange things like birds that grow up but the next spring they don’t go off and found their own nest, but stay with the parents and help rear the new kids. Why do they do that? Well, it turns out that they share their genes with their parents and with the parents’ new kids, and if you do the math, it makes sense for them to do that because nesting sites are scarce.

We had a whole bunch of sterling people in the simian seminar, and one couple whom I got to know very, very well was Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. John Tooby applied to Harvard—he was out at Stanford in Palo Alto. I was going out there to a Center function of some sort, and we had lunch. I started interviewing him to see if he was suitable to come to Harvard because I really feel strongly not to admit anybody without an interview. I suddenly realized about 15 or 20 minutes into this that I was not interviewing him; he was interviewing me. Of course, I admired him. Those stories are told about Edwin Land and the faculty at MIT: He just got fed up with them and stalked off and made the Polaroid.

Tooby and Cosmides have written a whole series of very influential papers. I wrote a very early one with John. They gave a name to what we should be thinking about, and it was not natural selection or even kin selection, because behavior is not inherited genes. When the environment is what differs, then the gene gets expressed. We’ve been leaving out that middle connection, and we’ve sloppily talked about genes, saying “It’s behavior that’s inherited.” Strictly speaking, true. Genes that will tend to make it easier for the animal to follow that pathway in some environment are what’s inherited.

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That makes a difference too, as it turns out. It’s clear that it does because it caught on like wildfire. Leda, by the way, graduated from Harvard—they’re married now—in psychology, and John in anthropology. Calling it evolutionary psychology was a brilliant stroke, not only a good descriptor. Suddenly, psychology began to feel like it was part of the enterprise, and with an open door that they could come into without losing face. So the transition there [was] so much easier than it was in the behavior, in the strict sense, in anthropology.

I tried to be a bridge between sociobiology and anthropology, but, boy, they made it hard. I had a lot of sympathy for them because I go back to a time when there were still very angry debates over races, ideology, and especially genetic determinism, which of course is terribly ill informed. But that had reared its head so many times—genetic determinism about humans over the years, sometimes with dreadful results, like the Holocaust—that the social sciences were just spooked as hell about it. I don’t blame them, because never had biology done them any favors. It had done nothing but cause tragedy, and they had nothing to take from it. They tried to turn sociobiology into yet another manifestation of the old-fashioned, just more sophisticatedly put—and it was not that at all.

Ironically, we had in Dick [Richard C.] Lewontin and Steve [Stephen Jay] Gould two of the most outspoken critics of sociobiology, and then in Ed Wilson and Trivers outstanding proponents. We were all actually within wings of the same building, and things got a little dicey for awhile. But I think the thing is over, and anthropology has come to the point where, more and more, people have embraced the fundamental principles of social organizations and of sociobiology and seen that it’s not a terrible thing; it’s something that you can grow accustomed to and that may even give you some insights. There are some who don’t accept anything and will never. I must say, I actually have sympathy for them too, but I think that they are terribly misinformed, or as Ed Wilson would say, “willing to remain willfully ignorant,” which pretty well describes fundamentalists and evolution—let’s not go there.

Anthropology is going to continue to grow apart. I tried to look up today how many anthropologists there are in faculties in universities now. It’s in the thousands. The first two or three national meetings I went to in anthropology were so small and intimate that you could know by name almost everyone there, except the students showing up for the first time, of course, and we all had on name tags. There was a real sense of camaraderie, and it was a feeling about anthropology, mutually supportive, in which there was an agreement that we do culture anthropology, which is to say that we do physical anthropology, archaeology, social anthropology, and linguistics—at least those four. That had grown out of the giants in this country like [Franz] Boas and [Alfred] Kroeber. It went under the banner of cultural anthropology, and they used to have very serious debates in anthropology over whether we were cultural anthropologists or social anthropologists. Well, come on, folks; who cares?

I did come to realize several things. One is that American anthropology was basically based on salvage anthropology, salvage ethnography, because the way of life was long gone and the Indians had been herded onto reservations. You picked the oldest people to be your informants, and found a chair under the shade of a tree, and you sat there and said, “Tell me about the old days.” They were only too happy to tell you about the good old days, and it was almost as bad as asking fundamentalists to tell you about the Garden of Eden. It wasn’t that people were trying to mislead anybody; it’s just that the roseate hue of the past is hard to get past, whereas social anthropologists in England couldn’t have been a bigger contrast. First of all, they weren’t students; they were adults. Second, they were all basically minions of the state department, the British foreign office, and they were studying cultures that are absolutely vital. The British had a very rambunctious empire to run, and they wanted to know what all this stuff is about the Golden Stool in West Africa, in Ghana. You had people who barely hang on to the facts of social anthropology. They

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didn’t have time for child development or archaeology. You had two visions that grew up between the two, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. As we know—because you were one of the instrumental people in doing it—the so-called Biological Anthropology Department split apart from the Anthropology Department here quite recently. It will have 14 faculty members when it’s fully staffed. It’s got 10 of those now, as I recall.

Peter Ellison: That’s right.

Irven DeVore: It’s the apple of my eye. When I was chair, I finally bit the bullet and divided the department into three wings, as we called them—archaeology, social, and biological—because people with such divergent interests, who had almost no interests in common but just camaraderie (and you can’t get very far on that, not past a cup of coffee), fought over all of the resources: number of graduate students that could be admitted, number of junior faculty, support for graduates, and so on. Faculty meetings were rancorous, so I just sat down, took the resources of the three, and announced, “We now have three different wings.” Each had a wing chairman who reported to me, and I reported to the dean, and that was the first big fissure in the Balkonis fault zone, and it’s now come about as far as it’s going to go for awhile.

If I knew where the future of anthropology was, I wouldn’t be in it; I would be on the stock market in New York. I think that it will survive, but it will survive because it has been somewhat adroit at changing with the times. When I first came to Harvard, we couldn’t hire a paleoanthropologist because there were just three or four fossils and no jobs. The undergraduates all wanted to have a course, but that was it. Now half of the physical anthropologists are working for the paleontologists. We’ve got so many fossils; it’s a different world. That’s what geezers always say, but it is strange.

Peter Ellison: Wherever the future of anthropology lies, if it flourishes and if it’s adept at changing, some of that, I think, can really be traced back to your influence, your career, and the pivotal changes that you saw go on as you were shifting ground from primate behavior to hunter-gatherer studies to sociobiology to evolutionary psychology. Even though the department at Harvard may have split into two now, I think the grand vision of some really sophisticated, complicated, synthetic understanding of human beings as animals, as very complex social beings, remains very alive and vital in the field.

Irven DeVore: Well, I agree, and people are becoming more open minded. I think partly that the more that you can separate your vital territory and feel comfortable in that and feel like it’s respected, the more you can then reach out. John Whiting did a lot toward teaching me that. He and Beatrice are very close to me, and I collaborated with them in several cross-cultural—what he liked to call jet-age anthropology, with more or less good results.

Well, my father was a minister, as was yours, as I recall.

Peter Ellison: That’s correct.

Irven DeVore: He always said, “Not many souls were saved after five o’clock,” so I think it’s time to call this one off, if that’s all right.

Peter Ellison: That’s excellent.