Family, Socio-Ethno-Genetic Concepts
The concept of family extends across virtually all cultures and all documented time periods, and family structures organize groups as diverse as primitive hunter/gatherer communities and modern, industrial societies. The word family originally referred to a group of slaves, which marks this concept's early association with authority relations. But for modern societies, family has increasingly referred to a unit organized by love, marriage, and the blood ties that result from these customs.
Members of a family typically function according to their specific role in the unit. The roles that members play out in the family have to do with the division of labor, which results from both natural patterns (women bearing children) and cultural customs (such as the male's tradition of dominance in the industrial marketplace). Social scientists have argued that the family system enhances an individual's survival. For instance, scientists claim that marriage increases life expectancy by as much as five years, and a higher percentage of married people survive cancer, regardless of their age.
Sociobiology, or the combined study of biology and the social sciences, considers the effect of family orders on Darwinian evolutionary theory. American sociobiologist Pierre L. van den Berghe described the family as a system that developed through a complicated interplay between genetic and environmental determinants.
Ethnologists who study the family concentrate on the differences between family structure in a particular culture and family patterns that are general to the human race. Following this perspective, they work to isolate what familial behaviors constitute ecological or cultural adaptations. Polish-born British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski is credited with initiating the study of ethnography (the observational work of ethnology) in his 1915-1918 study of the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia. Malinowski, observing of the matrilineal (descent or inheritance through female lines) organization of Trobriander families, determined that this familial organization naturalized the culture's economic system. The exchange of women (and the children that were linked to them) paralleled the commodity exchange between Trobriand men.
Cultural studies of the marriage relationship constitute an important part of ethnological research, as they yield information about the effect of reproductive patterns on social and biological evolution. For example, societies that embrace polygyny, or the marriage of one man to multiple women, maximize their number of offspring, which is particularly stabilizing to patrilineal societies that are organized by the descent between men. Among the Tiwi of Australia, a man who has more than one wife increases the food production of his household as well as the number of his children.
While accepted marriage practices differ widely among human societies, virtually all human groups disallow the practice of incest. This repudiation of sexual relations between close family members appears to have an evolutionary basis in addition to or informing its cultural taboo. That is, the genetic weaknesses bred by inbreeding, (reproduction between close family members resulting from the pairing of genes that are too similar-- also called consanguineous), explains to sociobiologists the customary rejection of this form of intimacy on a social level.
With the development of the Human Genome Project, a scientific project that in February 2001 successfully identified the 30,000-40,000 genes that determine human traits, familial relationships have become increasingly significant to geneticists who study inherited disorders. Mapping of human DNA will contribute information about the genetic basis of a range of diseases and disorders including diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and schizophrenia.
Genetic relatedness in the case of twins has greatly contributed to the scientific knowledge of hereditary influences. For instance, studies of identical twins, which have all of their genes in common (called monozygotic, as opposed to fraternal or dizygotic twins, who share approximately 50% of their genes) have focused on the relative influences of biological versus environmental factors. The case of identical twins raised in different environments but share common abilities or traits provide clues that these characteristics are biologically driven. Such studies allow for the measurement of heritability, or the percentage of variation shown in a genetically inherited characteristic.
English biologist William Hamilton studied the effect of family relationships on an individual's altruistic behavior. Hamilton noticed that Darwin's logic of competition--survival of the fittest--did not explain altruistic acts performed for the benefit of someone else. But what Hamilton did find in his discovery of a pattern he called "kin selection" was that the rate of altruism increases when the unselfish act benefits a relative. Kin selection theorists thereby find biological evidence for family caretaking, such as a mother's decision to sacrifice her own energies, or food supply, for her child. What looks like purely selfless behavior, Hamilton argued, actually serves the sacrificing individual by perpetuating his or her genes through the family member that she or he benefits.
Other patterns of family behavior can be found outside the nuclear or even extended family --a phenomenon that anthropologists call "fictive kinship." When parents name a non-family member the godparent of their child, for instance, they are acculturating that person into a familial order without the tie of blood or marriage. In doing so, they are extending the family bond as a functional relationship that acts akin to actual family ties. Such customs suggest that the biological, family relationship is the model to which all social relationships that stress loyalty and affiliation, including national, political, and religious organizations, refer.
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