During the first quarter of the twentieth century many scientists adhered to the doctrine of environmental determinism. These scholars believed that the physical environment, especially the climate and terrain was the active force in shaping cultures, emphasizing that humans were essentially a passive product of the physical surroundings. As analyzed by Jordan and Rowntree (1990), the logic of the deterministic view considered humans equivalent to clay, to be moulded by nature. Similar physical environments were likely to produce similar cultures. Environmental determinists thus viewed human ecology as a ‘one way street’. Hussain (1994) and Jordan and Rowntree (1990) gave a number of examples of determinists’ beliefs. Determinists believed that people of the mountains were predestined by the rugged terrain to be simple, backward, conservative, and unimaginative and freedom loving. Dwellers of the desert were likely to believe in one God, but to live under the rule of tyrants. Temperate climates produced inventiveness, industriousness and democracy, whereas coastlands produced great navigators and fisherman (Gulia,2005).
Perhaps the most pervasive theme is the belief that the physical environment plays the role of “prime mover” in human affairs. Personality, morality, politics and government, religion, material culture, biology- all of these and more have at one time or another have been subject to explanation by environmental determinism. The humour theory of Hippocrates was probably the single, most important foundation for environmental determinism until the nineteenth century. Hippocrates saw the human body as housing four kinds of “humours”- yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood, representing fire, earth, water, and blood, respectively. The relative proportions of the four humours caused variation in individual physique and personality, as well as in sickness and health. Climate was believed to be responsible for the “balance” of the humours and, therefore, for geographic differences in physical form and personality. Thus, people living in hot climates were passionate, given to violence, lazy, short-lived, light and agile because of an excess of hot air and lack of water. The effect of climate on personality and intelligence determined other human affairs, particularly, government and religion. Both Plato and Aristotle associated climate with government, viewing temperate Greece as the ideal climate for democratic government and for producing people fit to rule others. Despotic governments, on the other hand, were best suited for hot climates because the people lacked spirit and a love for liberty and were and given to passionate excesses. Cold climates had no real form of government because the people lacked skills and intelligence and were strongly given to a love of individual liberty. The eighteenth century Frenchman Montesquieu continued this line of reasoning and applied it to religion. Hot climate create lethargy, according this scholar, and are apt to be associated with passive religions. Buddhism in India was given as a classic example. By contrast, Montesquieu believed that religions in cold climates are dominated by aggressiveness to match the love for individual liberty and activity. (Christianity, Montesquieu’s religion, was elevated above environmental determinism because it was revealed). The geographer Ellsworth Huntington (1945) carried this thinking well into the twentieth century by arguing, in the Mainsprings of Civilization, that the highest forms of religion are found in temperate regions of the world. His basic argument was that temperate climates are more conducive to intellectual thinking. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought a decline in the popularity of humour theory but no less vigorous apologists for environmental determinism. There are several reasons for its persistence. The developing method of science was marked by the search for simple, linear, cause-and effect relationships; that is A causes B causes C, and so forth. There was no recognition of the complex interactions and feedback processes that make today’s science. Anthropologists and geographers searched for simple causes of the geographical distribution of cultural traits. Some proposed environment while others favoured diffusion. Both offered simple, straightforward explanations that were consistent with linear science. Therefore, it is not surprising to see the resurgence of environmental determinism at this time. The rise of “technological determinism”, as espoused by Marxist social philosophy, also contributed to the resurgence. Environmental determinism was a rebuttal to the anti -environmental position of Marxist writers. Finally, an explanatory model of this kind was the simple way to categorize and explain the mass of data on human diversity being accumulated as a result of world exploration, in much the same way that the “Three-Age system” helped classify ancient artefacts. The “culture area” concept was particularly suitable for this purpose, allowing diverse cultures within large geographical areas to be classified into a single type because some traits are held in common. Some early geographers and anthropologists quickly noted the general correspondence between culture areas and natural areas and argued that environment caused the occurrence of distinct cultural areas. Material culture and technology were believed to be most affected by the environment. For example, in a discussion of the prehistory of the American South west, William H. Holmes, (1919) a turn-of the century-anthropologists, states that: it is here made manifest that is not so much the capabilities and cultural heritage of the particular stock of people that determines the form of material culture as it is their local environment. However, nonmaterial culture was also explained environmentally. F.W Hodge (1907) in his bookHandbook of American Indians North of Mexico explained with regard to the American South west, that the effects of this environment, were to influence social structure and functions, manners and customs, aesthetic products and motives, lore and symbolism, and, most of all, creed and cult, which were conditioned by the unending, ever-recurring longing for water. Perhaps the most lucid proponent of environmental explanation for nonmaterial culture was J.W Fewkes, another turn-of-the-century American Anthropologist, who was particularly interested in the origins of ritual behaviour. However, unlike most of his contemporaries, Fewkes was aware of the complexities underlying the study of man-environmental interaction and did not assume a simple one-to-one relationship. Today the theme of environmental determinism has been largely replaced by the emergence of man environmental models that assign environment a “limiting” but uncreative role or that recognize complex mutual interaction. However, the explanation of biological diversity in humans continue to have a strong, deterministic orientation. Models of genetic change in human populations, for instance, are still dominated by the theory of natural selection, a theory that assigns to environment a strong and active role in shaping gene pools. Thus, the most popular explanation for the distribution of skin colour is based upon “selection” for pigment granules that help block out excessive ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Models of physiological adaptation to altitude and temperature are also marked by environmental determinism. On the other hand, a number of recent investigators have suggested models that greatly limit the role of environment as an agent of biological change. “Genetic drift”, that is, vagaries due to sampling errors in small populations, is an important part of most of these models. The role of natural selection is particularly being questioned because of the recognition that genes are not isolated entities subject to easy manipulation by environmental factors but are part of complex systems of interaction.