-Caveat Lector-
Empirical science has a methodology that takes no care for the beliefs of
the society around.
Science is not a conservative body and is quite willing to overturn the
dogmas of the past.
Today Galileo is regarded as a martyr for science search for the truth(in
fact it is more complicated as he was also in trouble for his religious
beliefs.)
The methods as outlined by bacon many years ago are
1Observation
2hypothesis to fit data
3search for data that confirms or denies hypothesis
4 theory-if correct the hypothesis is validated sufficiently to form a
theory .
>From the theory testable extrapolations can be made.
Added to this basis has been the work of Karl popper, that any theory must
be testable to be regarded as being scientific and that a theory can never
be fully confirmed, but can be disproved. That is newtonian theories of
movement have not been disproven, but rather have been supeseded by
relativity and quantum theories. The work of Popper was devastatating to
many of the popular theories of the 50's and 60's such as Freudianism amnd
marxism. Both claimed to be scientific, but neither searched for testable
data, or put forward testable hypotheses, nor accepted any criticism.
Freudianism has been moved into the realm of pseudo science/ religion along
with marxism.
The way science works however is not simple , cold and rational. The
existing view on a subject(paradigm) will become set and a whole range of
adherents. They in turn will become an interest group that wants(even
unconsciously) to maintain the status quo. However at some stage when
sufficient data has accumulated, and the theory is strong enough(both are
necessary) the whole paradigm of the scientific community will change(Kuhn'
paradigm shift). These are the revolutionary changes such as the copernican,
Darwinian, and quantum leaps in society.
There is one school of psychology however that is surviving and increasing
in strength even though it is refusing to accede fully to the rules of
science of testing and debate. That is the boasian school of anthropology.
Frans Boas was the leading anti darwinist anthropologist. His family
backgound was marxist. His leading publicist Ashley montague was very mixed
up with marxist organisations, and margaret Mead, probably his most famous
student was found to have been, at the least incompetent, at worst
completely fraudulent in her anthropological studies.
The boaz school of anthropology now dominates the field and studies that
contradict the hyper egalitarian viewpoint will not appear in any of the
main magazines, and this schools viewpoints are those presented in the
press. The most famous recent advocate is S J Gould Harvard paleontolgist(
and well known parasite from the stargate?- well his speciality is snails)
Against it comes repeatedly the London school of psychology. Founded by Mr
Galton, it has followed the scientific belief that if a thing exists, that
it is measurable and has then gone about trying to measure every human
attribute irrespective of politics.
Leader of this field were cyril Burt( in his 80's he made a few either few
mistakes or was consciously fraudulent- however his results have been
repeated and found to be correct), Hans Eysenk( refugee from the nazis) and
Art Jensen.
This school does not get the same press, but in the scientific journals
there is a major sniping war-see below from
Intelligence_ (26:3) Sandra Scarr
"The test performance of the Black/Black adoptees was not different from
that of ordinary Black children reared by their own families in the same
area of the country. My colleagues and I reported the data accurately
and as fully as possible, and then tried to make the results palatable
to environmentally committed colleagues. In retrospect, this was a
mistake. The results of the transracial adoption study can be used to
support either a genetic difference hypothesis or an environmental
difference one(because the children have visible African ancestry)."
And on Gould and other such "thugs with pens," she writes,
"Art has also endured abuse from thugs with pens instead of megaphones.
Personally, I have no empathy for politically dirven liars, who distort
scientific facts in a misguided and condescending effort to protect an
impossible myth about human equality(=identity). Art believes he
understands the motives of the Marcus Feldmans, Steven Jay Goulds, and
Leon Kamins of the intellectual world. They seem to speak his language,
albeit with forked tongues. I find them despicable, because they have
the knowledge and intellect to know that they deliberately corrupt
science. To deny falsely the scientific evidence that nearly all
measurable human traits are moderately to highly heritable is to deny
parents and policy makers essential knowledge to run their own lives and
the society as a whole. Self-appointed saviors of the equality myth are
far more dangerous to an honest psychological science than a hundred
outraged groupies who don't know that the lecture was supposed to be
about anyway."
So the battle commences. This also only briefly breaks into the popular
press before disappearing under the troubled water of modern science of
psychology. The paradigms are in a state of majorconflict and how the battle
continues will determine the likely course of society.
Darwin's Truth, Jefferson's Vision: Sociobiology and the Politics
of Human Nature
by Melvin Konner
The American Prospect, 1999 July-August
As the new field of sociobiology has emerged during the past
quarter century, it has met with firm and unrelenting opposition
from prominent liberal critics. Sociobiology-also known as
evolutionary psychology or neo-Darwinian theory-holds that many
patterns of human behavior have a basis in evolution. Because
this approach often suggests biological explanations of gender
roles, it affronts many feminists. It has also drawn opposition
from a group of biologists on the left who have raised general
scientific and philosophical objections and have had great
influence in shaping liberal opinion. The scientific critics have
included highly respected figures in biology: Ruth Hubbard,
Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Jonathan Beckwith, among
others. None in this group had done direct research on human
behavior when sociobiology first emerged in the 1970s.
Nonetheless, they immediately perceived a grave threat to liberal
values, and their opposition has persisted ever since.
However respected the source, the criticism from this group has
had little effect on the direction of scientific research:
sociobiology is now firmly established as an accepted branch of
normal science. As a result, liberal opinion about sociobiology
has increasingly diverged from scientific opinion. If liberals
are to understand why this has happened, they need to consider
the possibility that Gould, Lewontin, and other prominent
scientific critics were wrong in their attack on sociobiology in
the first place.
Liberal uneasiness about sociobiology is understandable. A bad
odor hangs about any social application of Darwinian ideas.
Right-wing intellectuals in the past have abused Darwin's legacy
in efforts to justify colonialism, imperialism, racism, and even
mass murder. But the old ideological associations of scientific
ideas are sometimes a poor guide to their present incarnations.
To be sure, some conservative intellectuals infer from
sociobiology that liberal reforms are doomed by human nature. But
sociobiology today is not nineteenth-century social Dar winism
reborn. As I intend to show, there is no conflict between liberal
political philosophy and sociobiology. Indeed, quite the contrary
is true. A deep understanding of the foundations of liberalism
and the fundamental processes of Dar winian reasoning will
readily show that the opposition to sociobiology has been based
on a superficial view of both. The across-the-board attack on
sociobiology was ill-conceived to begin with, and it is time to
put it to rest.
The Altruism Puzzle
Current intrusions of Darwin's theory into our awareness stem
from the mid-1960s, when the British geneticist W. D. Hamilton
proposed a solution to the problem of altruism. For traditional
social scientists who see societies as functioning organisms, the
existence of altruism does not pose a problem. In this view,
without altruism societies would not work; groups that lacked it
would not survive.
But this is no comfort to strict Darwinians, who see natural
selection as operating at the level of individuals, even to the
extent of disrupting the cohesiveness of societies. In their
view, natural selection should have long since erased altruism.
Hamilton's solution was that evolution selects for altruism if it
is directed at relatives in proportion to their relatedness, for
then the altruist's kin are more likely to survive to pass on the
contributing genes. Thus kindnesses are instances of universal
nepotism. Reciprocal altruism, proposed by Robert Trivers in the
early 1970s, was a
you-scratch-my-back-and-later-I'll-scratch-yours model. Like kin
selection, it required no real genetic generosity, only delayed
self-interest. With these ideas, biologists seemed to have little
further need for the metaphor of society as organism.
These and related ideas were organized and popularized in the
late 1970s by two scientists in particular. Edward O. Wilson, a
Harvard zoologist previously known for meticulous research on
insect behavior, published Sociobiology, a sweeping, voluminous
summary of the new field, and On Human Nature, which, like the
infamous last chapter of the earlier work, suggested some
implications for humans. Richard Dawkins, a young British
zoologist, wrote The Selfish Gene, which proposed that in
evolution properly understood, only replicators matter; that
genes are the fundamental biological replicators; and that an
organism is basically a gene's way of making another gene.
This postulate leads to a key conclusion: evolution is not mainly
about survival, but about reproduction. It is about keeping some
genes in the stream of hereditary material-or as Dawkins aptly
calls it, the "river out of Eden"-while culling others. Survival
is dandy-when it serves reproduction. But if the two are at odds,
reproductive demands will win every time. This conclusion in turn
bears heavily on the question of gender differences. Males should
in theory be less committed, more restless, and more aggressive
than females. Females should be more careful in choosing their
mates and less risk-prone in their lifelong reproductive
strategies. This is basically because females-in mammals, at
least-have much more to lose.
These and other claims of neo-Darwinian theory were scarcely
ignored in the wider culture. Sociobiology was heralded on the
front page of the New York Times, an extraordinary coup for what
was basically a technical treatise, and On Human Nature won the
Pulitzer Prize. The Selfish Gene became immediately popular and
has stayed in print as a staple of undergraduate courses ever
since. And a long excerpt from Robert Wright's fiercely Darwinian
1994 book The Moral Animal made a rare literary cover story at
Time.
Wilson, Dawkins, and Wright are prose stylists of rare
excellence, which contributed to the popularity of their work-and
the concern it evoked among liberal biologists. Although
Sociobiology was favorably reviewed in the New York Review of
Books in 1975-by the respected British geneticist C. H.
Waddington-a more common view was expressed in those pages later
that year, in a long letter from 16 scientists, teachers, and
physicians, including Steven Jay Gould, Ruth Hubbard, and Richard
Lewontin, all colleagues of Wilson's at Harvard. It was titled
"Against 'Sociobiology,'" and they were very much against it.
"What we are left with," they concluded, "is a particular theory
about human nature, which has no scientific support, and which
upholds the concept of a world with social arrangements
remarkably similar to the world which E. O. Wilson inhabits....
Wilson joins the long parade of biological determinists whose
work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by
exonerating them from responsibility for social problems."
Whether Wilson had done any such thing, inadvertently or
otherwise, is debatable; a fair perusal of the book supports no
such claim. But the letter set the tone for avowedly left-wing
criticism of sociobiology ever since.
Writing a decade later in the mid-1980s, Lewontin, Steven Rose,
and Leon Kamin had no doubt that sociobiology was popular because
it helped to justify the economic policies of the Thatcher-Reagan
era. In their book Not In Our Genes, they renounced the claim of
objectivity for any sort of science and declared, "We share a
commitment to the prospect of the creation of a more socially
just-a socialist-society." They called for a "radical science
movement" dedicated to "the possibility of a critical and
liberatory science." Of course, this hoary rhetoric did not
necessarily make them wrong, but their book was naive at best.
They tendentiously attacked long outdated research on
intelligence testing and struck out wildly against psychiatric
and even neurological medications. Guilt by juxtaposition served
in place of evidence and argument to make modern behavioral
biologists of all kinds seem as much as possible like
nineteenth-century racists.
Hardly anyone today would try to defend the positions on
intelligence testing or psychiatry that those authors took then.
Yet Lewontin, Gould, and other biologists with admittedly
left-wing goals have continued to criticize sociobiology in only
somewhat more muted terms. Criticism is welcome, of course. But
because these scientists are so well respected-deservedly so, in
the cases of Lewontin and Gould-their influence may extend beyond
the power of their arguments. Neither has ever engaged in primary
research in the human sciences, but both often proclaim
sociobiology inapplicable to them. Gould has a well-earned major
public platform in the form of a monthly column in Natural
History, and he and Lewontin write regularly for the New York
Review, which to its credit has also published the views of
evolutionists such as John Maynard Smith.
The danger, though, is that the "anti" position may become so
congenial for liberals that they ignore the almost universal
acceptance of neo-Darwinian or sociobiological theory among
researchers in natural history and animal behavior and among many
psychologists and social scientists. Studies motivated by such
theory and apparently confirming components of it have routinely
been published in leading refereed journals in all these fields
for many years. Indeed, one need only read regularly the rest of
the magazine for which Gould writes his column to see that this
body of theory is now routinely accepted.
Obnoxious but Useful
Contrary to predictions made by opponents in the 1970s and 1980s,
sociobiology was not a nefarious plot to give scientific credence
to a right-wing policy agenda. It was not nearly that important.
And contrary to early predictions of its greatest enthusiasts,
sociobiology has not pushed aside the rest of the behavioral and
social sciences, nor has it folded them all neatly into its wide
theoretical embrace. What has happened instead is something
neither side wanted to believe, but that was expected by
open-minded people with no direct stake in the controversy:
sociobiology has become a small but significant part of the
spectrum of behavioral and social science.
Like all good theories, it is sometimes unsuccessful in
particular situations. Even in the nonhuman world, nepotism is
imperfect and inexplicable acts of altruism occur. It may be in
the interest of males to control uteruses as theory predicts, but
females of many species, including allegedly monogamous ones,
cheat. Thus males, with the best will in the world, often get
flummoxed out of reproductive success. But such is evolution-
females have their interests too, and pursue them very nicely,
thank you. This is not a failure of neo-Darwinian theory, but a
legitimate adjustment of it.
That the theory is obnoxious I freely concede. That it often
leads to oversimplification there can be no doubt. But whatever
we may wish, the former cannot make it wrong, and the latter is
in the nature of theory. Proponents push it as far as they can,
and let others sweep up the failures after them-or, in the worst
case, sweep up the broken pieces of their theory. They are
willing to stumble, fall, look silly, get up and brush themselves
off, and push some more. So much the better for the rest of us,
who may eventually benefit in gained understanding without having
had to risk ridicule.
The theory's failures have been local; it has proven
uninformative in many instances, and specific hypotheses arising
from it have often failed empirical tests. As an overarching
viewpoint, though, it successfully organizes much of the behavior
and social organization of animals-including, to some extent, us.
For example, kin selection predicts that if males take over a
group in which females are caring for infants, they might benefit
from doing away with the infants and reimpregnating the females.
This has been seen in lions, langur monkeys, and many other
species. In other circumstances, however, males transferring into
a group might not be able to take over, but instead have to sue
for acceptance by the powers that be. In such instances these
relatively weak newcomers might have to befriend females by being
gentle and caring toward their infants, even though the infants
have been sired by other males. This has been seen in baboons,
among other species.
Needless to say, the theory sometimes seems eerily able to handle
any facts on the ground, a tendency Lewontin and Gould have aptly
labeled "Panglossian adaptationism," after Voltaire's character
who found everything for the best in this best of all possible
worlds. Neo-Darwinian theorists would like nothing better,
however, than to find ways to predict which species will turn out
like lions and which like baboons, rather than offering post hoc
explanations. In fact, they are working like beavers on this and
similar problems, which is what theories are supposed to make
scientists do. That is called heuristic value. This theory has
heuristic value in abundance.
Still, it is difficult to see what theory other than this one
would predict so costly and nasty a natural phenomenon as
competitive infanticide. That is why when it became impossible to
deny that it occurs in many species, opponents of the theory
insisted that it was just a breakdown in social relations-a form
of social pathology under stress. This didn't wash for two
reasons. First, no one showed that the likelihood of infanticide
was related to the amount of ambient stress. Second, and more
important, stress is ubiquitous in nature. Stress is what life is
about. Evolution thrives on it, and to treat its consequence as a
special instance-a pathology-just won't do. Call it pathology if
you like, it is nonetheless predictable, and neo-Darwinian theory
predicts it.
A more legitimate objection is that many things predicted by
sociobiology are predicted by other theories too. For instance,
sociobiologists suggest that incest should have been selected
against in evolution because it brings hidden genetic defects to
the surface. But such other theorists as Westermarck, Freud, and
Skinner give us reasons to expect incest avoidance. Even if
sociobiology makes more sense in such cases, it doesn't exactly
produce surprises.
Consider two instances in which, I believe, it does.
Over the past 15 years systematic research on child abuse and
pedicide by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson-research specifically
motivated by neo-Darwinian theory-has shown that a child is
between 10 and 100 times more likely to be assaulted or killed if
he or she lives in a household that includes an unrelated male.
Careful studies show that controlling the things we think of
first to explain such a finding-socioeconomic status, ethnicity,
religion, educational level, and so on-fails to abolish this very
large effect. Nor does the finding respect national borders; it
appears reliably in four or five countries. Although several of
these countries-Canada, the U.S., and Britain-are culturally very
similar, comparable effects are seen among the Yanomamo Indians
of Venezuela. Because it persists when cultural and sociological
variables are controlled, it is difficult to interpret these
findings without reference to neo-Darwinian theory. This, we
should emphasize, does not explain the mechanism in individual
households. But the theory directed researchers' attention to a
particular variable and led to a new discovery in a field that,
one might have thought, would have known about this phenomenon
for decades.
Second, David Buss and others have conducted studies of sex
differences in what they call mating strategies. In dozens of
different countries-37 and counting, the last time I checked,
including Nigeria and Malaysia-men and women consistently respond
differently to questionnaires on what they look for in their
romantic and sexual partners. All 37 samples are of literate
people in their twenties or younger, but these effects are
stronger, not weaker, in nonliterate cultures, such as the Ache
of Paraguay and the Kipsigis of Kenya, where modernization has
had less effect on gender roles. Men value physical appearance
more than women do, and women weigh status and income more than
men do. Men's ideal mates are a few years younger than they are
on average, and women's a few years older. Eleanor Maccoby, a
Stanford psychologist, has summarized a lifetime of research on
gender in a recent book, The Two Sexes: Growing Up Apart, Coming
Together, published by Harvard University Press. While she
details a complex interaction between initial biologically based
differences and the effects of voluntary sex segregation in play
(among other social and cultural influences), she concludes that
some psychological sex differences are extremely difficult to
change. This includes the greater tendency of males to resort to
physical measures in conflict, which also shows remarkable
cross-cultural consistency.
How should liberals react to such information, assuming that it
is scientifically reliable? Surely not by the ostrich method,
hoping it will go away. You need to ask yourself: How committed
am I to liberal philosophy and policy? Is my viewpoint contingent
on certain scientific discoveries, past or future, about how
biologically based human behavior and human differences are? Or
am I committed to policies based on human decency regardless of
how large a role biology may play? Do we have to justify equal
opportunity with the scientifically untenable claim that it will
cause everyone to end up in the same place? Or is it just a
matter of fair play, regardless of native ability? In order to
share power between men and women, do we first have to prove that
the sexes are psychologically equivalent? Or can we resolve,
along with "difference feminists" going back to the nineteenth
century, that both genders must be represented in any
organization not just in spite of, but also because of their
differences?
Fundamental or Fundamentalist?
There is something perversely comforting about the Daly and
Wilson finding. Child abuse in the presence of unrelated males is
an equal-opportunity scourge, crossing boundaries of class, race,
and religion. Sadly, biological mothers as well as stepfathers
are guilty of the abuse; it is the presence of the unrelated male
in the household that seems to count, whether or not he commits
the abuse. Theory notwithstanding, this is a disturbing and
puzzling phenomenon, but it is a human one. Or more precisely, it
is a human extension of an animal phenomenon, and that perhaps
disturbs us most of all.
In recent years, Gould and others have taken to criticizing
sociobiology for being overzealous in its application of
Darwinian principles. For example, in the New York Review of June
12, 1997, Gould pigeonholes his opponents as "Darwinian
fundamentalists" or "ultra-Darwinians" who cannot respect any
process in evolution other than natural selection. He correctly
points out that natural selection is not the be-all and end-all
of evolution. Asteroid impacts have drastically changed the
earth's climate, flora, and fauna; after one such event the
dinosaurs and many of their contemporaries became extinct. Also,
many DNA mutations are neutral-they have no adaptive or
functional consequence, and so they happen randomly. Finally,
there are inertial properties of organisms called developmental
constraints, which slow down evolution or shunt it along a finite
number of favored paths. These processes are not up for argument.
Everyone, including alleged ultra-Darwinians, agrees with Gould
that they are important.
The problem is only with Gould's straw man: a Darwinian thinker
so ignorant and rigid as to deny the reality of the
aforementioned, universally accepted facts. Do "ultra-Darwinians"
have difficulty with mass extinction by asteroid impact? Hardly.
In fact, such extinctions wipe the slate of life on earth more or
less clean, giving natural selection much freer reign for the
next few million years as the earth fills with life again. Do
"Darwinian fundamentalists" ignore neutral mutations? Of course
not, although the "selfish gene" theory itself provides an
interesting hypothesis about how DNA can change within a genome
without having any effect on the organism, or even having a
detrimental effect, by duplicating itself and "hitchhiking"
along.
But like asteroid impacts, neutral mutations are random processes
that help form the background noise of evolution. It's not that
those processes are unimportant, nor even that it's uninteresting
to find out how they happen. It's just that in evolutionary
biology, as in any other science, the aim is to detect the signal
amidst the noise. The signal in this case is natural selection.
The noise may be louder and more general, but the signal is more
interesting. Focusing on the signal instead of the noise is
scarcely proof of fundamentalism.
In a similar vein, in his recent criticism Lewontin has
exaggerated sociobiologists' inflexibility on the question of
group selection. In a review last October of a book about
unselfish behavior by Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson in the
New York Review, Lewontin praises the authors' work as
"subversive" and "radical" in the sense of requiring that current
orthodoxy be overturned. Lewontin is right to think that a great
deal is at stake here, especially for the human sciences. If
group selection is powerful and important, then so is group
functionalism. And if group functionalism is valid, then the
standard social science model-the organic model-is much less
vulnerable to Darwinian revision than many of us think. If groups
have been selected as functional entities despite individual
competition within them, then altruism and cooperation do not
need neo-Darwinian explanations.
But, actually, theoretical hostility to group selection has waned
considerably among evolutionists, and it has been given a
legitimate role even by many like E. O. Wilson, George C.
Williams, and John Maynard Smith whom Gould would call "ultras."
So when Lewontin characterizes group selection as "anathema" to
"nearly all evolutionary biologists," he is substantially behind
the curve. Sober and D. S. Wilson are far more open-minded about
levels of selection than Gould and Lewontin are; they offer their
theory not as a replacement for sociobiology but as an addition.
Indeed, the same intellectual developments that Sober and D. S.
Wilson call "great insights" and "advances" Gould and Lewontin
have viewed as products of reactionary cultural trends and
threats to liberal political philosophy-not to mention being
silly and wrong.
Proponents of group theory blur the distinction between kin and
group selection, a semantic move that does nothing to advance
understanding. The theory has a place, especially in simple
asexual organisms. But group selection theorists also aim to
change our minds about human altruism and cooperation. They cite
ethnographic materials that are unsystematic and biased, taking
at face value the claims of functionalist anthropologists of the
early twentieth century regarding how cooperative traditional
peoples are. Recent studies of the Yanomamo, Ache, Hadza,
Kipsigis, and other traditional peoples have tested hypotheses
arising from individual and kin selection theory, and these
hypotheses hold up as well or better in nonindustrial than in
capitalist societies.
In fact, anti-Darwinians, stressing the dangerous social
consequences of individual selection, ironically miss the social
dangers of group selection theory. Group selection can have been
important in human evolution only if groups of our ancestors were
quite isolated for long periods. This would suggest that human
groups evolved rather separately, a potential comfort to racists.
But of course, it is not on this basis that we evaluate the
theory, any more than we can evaluate individual selection on the
basis of whether or not it comforts capitalists. Either theory
stands or falls on the merits.
In the human case, there is no evidence that races, tribes, or
other ethnic groups were ever isolated for thousands of
generations during our evolution. On the contrary, genetic
analysis tells a tale of constant migration and frequent mixing.
Yes, there were group conquests and replacements. But these too
often resulted in genetic melding, as men and especially women
were integrated as servants or slaves. More important, there is
endless evidence of conflict within groups, and there is the
constant opportunity for defection.
This is key. Defection is the individual's ultimate negative
comment on the group, and in human affairs, whether primitive or
modern, it is resorted to early and often. Defection more than
anything exposes the soft underbelly of the conventional organic
model of social organizations. Cells and tissues cannot secede
from an organism and otherwise continue their evolutionary
process, but individuals can and do secede from groups. They
also, through deception, defect internally, enhancing their
reproductive success at fellow group members' expense. But it is
the act of transfer or group fission that makes group selection
implausible.
Marx vs. Darwin?
With a completed Das Kapital in hand, Karl Marx wrote to Charles
Darwin, requesting permission to dedicate it to the older,
world-famous biologist. Darwin's demurral showed that he was a
bourgeois, conservative sort of scientific revolutionary who had
troubles enough of his own; but it also showed that there is
evolution and then there is evolution. Marx's evolution was that
of successive waves of socioeconomic adaptation, each predictably
replacing the last through a process of revolutionary
transformation.
Marx, of course, was a kind of group selectionist; classes were
relentlessly pitted in dialectical conflict. This has proved
wrong, partly because of defection (opportunity?) and partly
because of the enlightened self-interest of ruling classes,
choosing conciliation over chaos. The utopian part of Marx-his
version of the Hegelian end of history-was even less compatible
with real evolutionary theory, since like all utopian visions it
was perfectly cooperative and free of selfishness. In art and
poetry the lion may lie down with the lamb, but in evolution the
lamb gets eaten. Likewise, within a species, bullies and victims
do not rest easily side by side.
For some critics, those last remarks alone make me an apologist
for exploitation. This criticism naively confuses "ought" with
"is." All major religions and many secular philosophies have
declared bad things to be natural and promptly declared a humane
war against them. In Judeo-Christian, Platonic, and Confucian
thought, among other traditions, we are first endowed with
selfish, greedy, and other wicked impulses and then must freely
exercise our force of will against them. Far from justifying the
impulses by calling them natural, the label does the opposite,
emphasizing the human, cultural need to control them.
Even Marxist thought has parallels, in which natural greed,
conflict, and oppression lead-through a peculiarly human rise in
consciousness-to a willed, chosen, improved course of history and
destiny. Indeed, in any body of thought that makes sense, human
choices are superimposed on and attempt to control natural
tendencies. Why sociobiology's discoveries or claims about what
is natural should determine what ought to and will be done is a
mystery that the theory's critics have not explained.
Sociobiology is trying to be a science, not a philosophy; if it
succeeds, any philosophy-including political philosophy-will have
to take its findings into account. But what is is merely a
starting point for determining what could or, certainly, what
should be.
A Social Machine for a Darwinian Creature
As Marx's admiration for Darwin shows, the implications of
evolution are not, and never were, inherently conservative. They
are, however, inherently materialist and fraught with conflict-
something conservatives and revolutionaries are comfortable with
but some liberals are not.
The revolutionaries of the nascent American republic certainly
were, although not because of evolution. In The Lost World of
Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boorstin shows that Jefferson's circle-
including psychiatrist-physician Benjamin Rush and other
Philadelphia intellectuals-had a strong, detailed concept of
human nature. They were scientific materialists. They believed
that all human beings were descended from a single pair, giving
unifying operational principles to the mind. Under Rush's
influence, they maintained a fascination with a fledgling brain
science. What Rush called "the anatomy of the mind" was an
attempt to put human behavior and psychology on a continuum with
the physical sciences and, even more so, with the lives of
animals, thus undermining human arrogance. Or as one of the
group, Tom Paine, put it, "all the great laws of society are laws
of nature," and order in human affairs stems from "the natural
constitution of man."
A 1789 monograph from the laboratory of Mad ison et al. (the one
that begins "We the people . . .") described what might be viewed
as an epochal social science discovery. It presented the plan for
an intricate, elegant device, a sociological invention for
keeping human nature in check, while allowing the conflict that
seethes in the human breast to leak out through various safety
valves. In fact, you could say that they harnessed conflict
itself to make the machine run. For unlike most machines, this
device was to be built out of people; therefore, its designers
had to have some notion of what these human building units were.
Despite agreeing with Paine about the tendency to order,
Jefferson-an affiliate of the lab, but absent in Paris when the
monograph appeared-had a dark view. "In questions of power," he
would write in 1798, "let no more be said of confidence in man,
but bind him down from mischief, by the chains of the
Constitution." Paine similarly saw the purpose of constitutions
as "to restrain and regulate the wild impulse of power." It was
these men's great gift to be able to take a Hobbesian view of
human life without applying a Hobbesian solution.
Their "natural" view even encompassed individual differences in
debate. Jefferson wrote that "the terms of whig and tory belong
to natural as well as civil history. They denote the temper and
constitution of mind of different individuals." For Rush, there
was "the same variety in the texture of minds, that there is in
the bodies of men." But if differences of opinion were really
differences in temper, and these in turn inherent brain
differences, what could be more hopeless than to seek universal
agreement? Instead, the laws would take for granted the
permanence of those differences, and create a government that
would harness the unremitting energy of conflict.
But we don't really need Boorstin's interpretation; we can read
the monograph and infer the theory from it. Human nature is
eminently corruptible. People seek power and abuse it, turning it
to selfish ends, regardless of how collective and representative
its roots. Nepotism, greed, self-aggrandizement, intractable
conflict, and suppression of dissent naturally and relentlessly
threaten human institutions. A democratic republic is inherently
improbable, and will tend to collapse into hereditary
dictatorship, oligarchy, or chaos, regardless of how good the
intentions of those who began it. As "Publius,"-either Madison or
Hamilton-asked in Federalist 51, "But what is government itself,
but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were
angels, no government would be needed."
What to do? Well-they seem to have thought-let us assume the
worst, and under that assumption, invent a device to bully human
nature into decency, a "policy of supplying, by opposite and
rival interests"-Federalist 51 again-"the defect of better
motives." They analyzed human nature, and built a sort of Rube
Goldberg machine-almost too complicated, yet so tightly and
intricately balanced that it could have been the cotton gin or a
mill wheel grinding corn kernels. At one end you could put in a
collection of greedy, power-mad people locked in angry conflict,
and at the other end something resembling order, peace, and
fairness would duly be chucked out.
Creaky, noisy, seemingly ready to crumple or burst at any moment,
the machine has more or less worked for a couple of centuries.
Brief in evolutionary terms, but a beginning. Inexact working
replicas are now cranking away in various places on the planet,
threatening to make order out of human nature elsewhere. For
those who think our nature is inherently good, unselfish, and
cooperative, the result is a poor substitute for a functional,
organically coherent, and completely fair society.
But for those of us who see human nature as the unpleasant
product of too many eons of individual selection, the machine
makes a decent stew out of some pretty iffy meat. Or in Isaiah
Berlin's metaphor, it makes from the crooked timber of humanity
an acceptable shack-shaky and of course nothing straight, but
with occasional repairs, livable. Some people are shut out of it,
but that probably means we should add another wing, not that we
should tear the thing down and start over. Given the grain of the
lumber, we could end up with something much worse.
This perhaps is the enduring implication of Darwin's theory for
liberal political philosophy: assume the worst and you can still
get something workable, based on Thomas Jefferson and not Thomas
Hobbes. Of course, I may merely be spinning pseudoscientific
tales to justify the status quo. But at present I fail to see the
evidence for a better way to look at evolution.
Personally, I favor political economies like those of northern
Europe over the one we have now in the United States, and I have
voted that preference to whatever extent possible for more than
three decades. Around halfway through that period, I concluded
that the neo-Darwinians had a very useful way of looking at
evolution, and I accepted it. Why didn't it change my vote?
First of all, because my political views are based as much on
"ought" as on "is." I support liberal economic programs because I
want to live in a decent community. My definition of "decent"
doesn't depend on one or another theory of evolution. But in
addition, because I do see human nature as an obstacle to
decency, I support programs that buffer us against the loss of
it. Newt Gingrich and Milton Friedman must have a far more
sanguine view of human nature than I do, or they would surely not
be heartless enough to want to give it the free rein of an
unalloyed market economy.
In part, it is because I take a dim view of human nature as an
evolutionary product that I reject their view. Virtually everyone
in the world has decided that economies don't work without more
or less free markets at their center. What is up for further
discussion is only how much we will care about those who lose out
in open competition-including the sick, the old, and the very
young. Human nature was not designed by evolution to take care of
the needs of these people automatically. Therefore only programs
and supports deliberately designed by a collective, humane,
political will-a will that also restrains the worst excesses of
markets-can, after wide debate, create a decent community and set
some limit on selfishness.
Melvin Konner is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology
and associate professor of psychiatry and neurology at Emery
University. He is the author of, among other books, The Tangled
Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit.
Copyright © 1999 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred
Citation: Melvin Konner, "Darwin's Truth, Jefferson's Vision:
Sociobiology and the Politics of Human Nature," The American
Prospect no. 45, July-August 1999
''In his celebrated book, 'On Liberty', the English philosopher John
Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the
opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error
for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding
of the truth in its "collision with error." If we know only our own side
of the argument, we hardly know even that: it becomes stale, soon
learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.''
Carl SAGAN, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle
in the Dark.''
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