Jerome Barkow
Introduction
Jerome Harvey Barkow (January 18, 1944 – April 30, 2024) was a Canadian anthropologist and one of the early figures in evolutionary psychology (obituary, Dignity Memorial Halifax, 2024; Canadian Anthropology Society in memoriam). He was born in Brooklyn, New York, spent his career at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and died there of cancer of the esophagus at the age of eighty.
Barkow was a social anthropologist by training and by fieldwork, not a psychologist, and his importance to psychology comes from the argument he pressed for four decades: that human culture is generated and constrained by an evolved psychology, and that the social sciences cannot explain either without taking that psychology into account. He is best known for Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind and Culture (1989) and for co-editing The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (1992) with Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, the book generally treated as the founding text of evolutionary psychology.
Early Life and Education
Barkow was born in Brooklyn on January 18, 1944, to Philip and Betty Barkow. He took a BA in psychology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 1964, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and spent a period working for the New York City Department of Welfare before graduate study.
He then moved to the University of Chicago, where he completed a master's degree and, in 1970, a doctorate. Sources describe the degree differently: Dalhousie and archival records specify the Committee on Human Development, while some tributes describe the doctorate as being in social anthropology. The discrepancy reflects the interdisciplinary character of the training rather than a disagreement about where or when, and Barkow's subsequent career resolved the ambiguity in favour of anthropology.
Academic and Professional Career
Barkow was appointed to a lecturing post at Dalhousie University in 1971 and taught there for thirty-seven years, rising to full professor and retiring as professor emeritus in 2008. He was part of the group that founded the Canadian Ethnology Society and served as its past president during the organization's first year. From 2010 to 2017 he was an honorary professor in the Institute for Cognition and Culture at Queen's University Belfast, and he served on Dalhousie's Senate.
His fieldwork was conducted among Hausa speakers in Nigeria and Niger, and among the Bugis of Indonesia, with additional research in his adopted Nova Scotia, where he also carried out contract studies of health care delivery. That field experience mattered to his theoretical position: Barkow came to evolutionary explanation as a working ethnographer, and he never treated culture as an epiphenomenon. One study from this period, conducted with colleagues, asked why the Bugis know more about cuisine than about child nutrition, and answered it in terms of what social competition makes it profitable to know.
His move toward evolutionary explanation came early. In a 1973 paper in Current Anthropology he called for a Darwinian psychological anthropology, arguing that social anthropology had cut itself off from biology and that the discipline needed a biosocial framework. The argument was unfashionable at the time and became the program he pursued for the rest of his life.
In his seventies he combined an interest in science fiction with evolutionary theory to write about what psychology on other worlds might look like, publishing on extraterrestrial altruism and ethnocentrism and sitting on the board of directors of METI International, an organization concerned with messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. He also co-edited, with Lance Workman and Will Reader, the Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior (2020).
Major Contributions to Psychology
Evolved psychology beneath culture
Barkow's organizing claim, stated most directly in his chapter "Beneath New Culture Is Old Psychology," is that culture is not a free-floating system of symbols but a product of minds that evolved. On this view, the interesting question is not whether biology or culture explains a practice but how an evolved psychology shapes what gets transmitted, learned, and valued. He treated this as a correction to what the field called the standard social science model, the assumption that psychological phenomena are overwhelmingly products of socialization.
Status, prestige, and self-esteem
In Darwin, Sex, and Status Barkow argued that primate social dominance had been transformed in the human lineage into self-esteem and symbolic prestige, and that the goals anthropologists describe in particular societies can be traced to natural and sexual selection. His most-quoted claim concerned status: that men in particular compete for standing because it raises their apparent value in the mating market. He also drew out the political implication, warning that status competition among men who command the resources of modern states could produce brinkmanship and war.
The Adapted Mind
As co-editor of The Adapted Mind, Barkow helped assemble the volume that gave evolutionary psychology its name, its programmatic statement, and much of its early research agenda. The book argued against domain-general accounts of cognition, proposed that the mind contains many functionally specialized mechanisms shaped by selection, and applied the framework to topics from mating and parenting to perception and coalitional behavior.
Missing the Revolution
Barkow returned to an institutional question in Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists (2006), asking why the social sciences had remained largely untouched by evolutionary theory decades after the modern synthesis. His answer was sociological as much as intellectual, and his prescription was engagement rather than replacement: he wanted social scientists to use evolutionary reasoning, not to be replaced by biologists. His own contribution to the volume, "Sometimes the Bus Does Wait," set out the case for patience about a revolution he expected eventually to arrive.
He also applied an evolutionary lens to small-scale social behaviour, including an analysis of what people gossip about, which he treated as a window onto the dimensions of status that matter in a community. The connecting thread across a publication record spanning more than fifty years is the single claim that our evolved psychology underlies human society and culture.
Cultural transmission and the mass media
In later work with Rick O'Gorman and Luke Rendell, Barkow argued that mass media may be altering how culture is transmitted, shifting the balance away from the local, kinship-based transmission on which much human cultural accumulation rested. He also wrote on prestige as a driver of culture revision, returning to the status theme of his 1989 book from the side of cultural dynamics rather than individual motivation.
Major Publications
- Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind and Culture (1989)
- The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (1992), edited with Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
- Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists (2006), edited by Barkow
- The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior (2020), edited with Lance Workman and Will Reader
Impact and Legacy
Barkow's legacy is institutional as much as theoretical. The Adapted Mind is widely regarded as the book that consolidated evolutionary psychology as a research program, and his insistence that an evolved psychology generates rather than bypasses culture gave the program an anthropological warrant that most of its early advocates lacked. The ideas he promoted — sexually selected status competition, prestige as a human motive, culture as a product of evolved minds — are now standard fixtures in the field.
They have also been contested, and the criticisms are substantial. The most sustained came from the philosopher David Buller, whose Adapting Minds (2005) takes its title, with deliberate inversion, from Barkow's edited volume. Buller's charge is that the program substitutes armchair reasoning for empirical work: the adaptive problems faced by Pleistocene ancestors cannot be reconstructed in enough detail to support specific mechanistic claims; what counts as a problem depends partly on the psychology one is trying to explain, which makes the argument circular; and in any case adaptive problems do not determine unique solutions, because evolution co-opts and modifies whatever machinery is available. Buller further argued that the three foundations of the program — massive modularity, minds arrested in a hunter-gatherer environment, and a universal human nature — are all questionable, and that the evidence points instead toward cortical plasticity and widespread behavioral polymorphism. Related objections, such as those catalogued by Jaak Panksepp and Jules Panksepp, target the same habits of explanation, and the older adaptationist critique by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin remains the canonical statement of the general worry.
Some of the criticism bears directly on Barkow's own proposals. His account of self-esteem as a readout of dominance rank competes with an alternative that has been more extensively tested in social psychology, in which self-esteem functions as a monitor of social acceptance and belonging rather than of rank; the two accounts generate different predictions about what raises and lowers self-esteem, and the evidence is not settled in his favour. The mass-media argument he advanced late in his career is a theoretical model about long-run changes in cultural transmission, and it is difficult to test with the historical data available.
Barkow and his allies could reply, and did, that the most common version of these objections attacks a position he did not hold. He was a fieldworking anthropologist who built his argument on ethnography from West Africa and Indonesia, and the central thesis he defended was that evolved psychology shapes culture, which presupposes that culture has to be explained rather than explained away. His later writing on prestige and culture revision treats cultural change as a genuine causal process. Missing the Revolution was explicitly a plea for dialogue with the social sciences, not a manifesto for their absorption. Even his critics concede the general point: Buller's objection is to one paradigm within the evolutionary study of mind, not to the enterprise, and the productive empirical work the program has generated in areas such as mating, kinship, and cooperation is not invalidated by the claim that some of its founding arguments were under-evidenced.
The fair verdict is that Barkow helped found a research program whose ambitions have consistently outrun its evidence, and that he was unusually sensitive among its founders to the cultural complexity that any adequate version of the program will have to accommodate.
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References
- Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.). (1992). The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford University Press.