work. Human biology begins with the fact that species members have stomachs and
genitals; they have to eat to survive (individually) and they survive (as a species)
through sex. Survival is the instinct, and sexual reproduction is the modality. So
much can be read into the panorama from the hilltop. But if what is happening on
the beach is to ‘make sense’ we need ‘a good deal more’.
Back at the beach level, it is possible to distinguish actual persons as opposed
simply to humans. But to make sense of what is going on at this level we need to
understand much more than features shared with other animals. We need to know
why some couples and family groups are speaking Welsh, others English, and yet
others Portuguese: why are there so many different types of linguistic com-
munication among the same species in such a small area? And what might explain
why these actual people have different types of clothes, and display different degrees
of personal affection? To make sense of what is happening at the beach level we
need to know more than natural selection. We need to understand cultural norms,
patterns of colonisation and globalisation, economic factors – as well as idiosyncratic
variables such as the health of the people on the beach (their ability to clamber down
steep steps) and their inclination to play. And this is just a start, for what can be seen
on one afternoon is merely a holiday snapshot in the archive of human anthro-
pology. To know ‘a good deal more’ about what we take to be today’s realities, we
also need to know about the area’s political, economic, and social history. The
picture from the hill therefore reveals ‘a few big and important things’ (to use
Waltzian terminology) related to human evolution, but a ‘good deal more’ (to use
Dupré’s words) is needed to make overall sense of it all.
Darwin and Waltz are big-picture theorists. Darwin of course worked on the
largest canvas imaginable, seeking to explain the origin of species. Waltz has sought
to explain one aspect of that panorama, the dynamics of the international system in
which certain units of human group survival have interacted. Big pictures can be
powerful, but they are unlikely to deliver as much detail as some observers demand.
Dupré commented on this in relation to Darwin: ‘Many scientists’, he wrote, ‘rightly
impressed by one of the most significant advances ever made in our understanding
of the world we live in, try to get more out of Darwin’s theory than it can provide.’^5
He went on:
Evolution can’t give us detailed explanations for the countless features of
organisms. One important reason for this is that these features are truly
countless: there is no limit to the number of features we can distinguish
because in nature organisms are unified wholes. There is no history of the
giraffe’s neck or the elephant’s trunk independent of the history of the giraffe
or the elephant. Sometimes it is useful to use models that abstract a tiny part
of this totality, but we must always remember that these are only models, and
that they only tell a partially true part of the truth.As with Darwin, so with Waltz. By analogy, a ‘few big and important things’ are
revealed by Waltz’s panoramic (view from the hill) picture of international politics
The inconvenient truth 327