Posted on 02/13/2008 3:37:16 PM PST by Mr. Silverback
Ten years ago, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker offered a Darwinian explanation for infanticide. Pinker wrote, “A new mother will first coolly assess the infant and her situation and only in the next few days begin to see it as a unique and wonderful individual.”
This nonsense prompted the late journalist Michael Kelly to reply, “Yes, that was my wife all over: cool as a cucumber as she assessed whether to keep her first-born child or toss him out the window.”
Pinker, the celebrated Harvard professor and science popularizer, is still at it, and the results are no less nonsensical.
In a recent New York Times Magazine article titled, “The Moral Instinct,” he gave a Darwinian account for what Nietzsche called the “genealogy of morals.”
Pinker characterized both the “content” of our “moral judgments” and the “way we arrive at them” as “often questionable.” Far from being the product of reason, much less divine revelation, morality is an “an abstract spec sheet” that has been hardwired into our brains by evolution, as if senses could be hardwired by a random process.
But according to Pinker, this “spec sheet” is the source of such universal human moral concerns as not doing harm, being fair, and altruism. Somewhere in what is called the “environment of original adaptation,” these behaviors gave our ancestors an advantage in the struggle for survival.
This leads Pinker, like other Darwinians, to redefine altruism and fairness as little more than enlightened “self-interest.” We are generous toward others because evolution has “taught” us that this is the best way to ensure their generosity toward us. What we call “fairness” is really an unwritten pact not to cheat each other and, thus, promote social harmony and community.
The problem with these superficially plausible explanations is that real human beings, as opposed to theoretical ones, do not live this way. If altruism is “hardwired,” many people are poorly wired, indeed: They are stingy and cheat their neighbors with regularity.
Other people are profoundly generous, not only to their friends and family, but also to complete strangers. They are willing to make do with less and even go without, to help others in need. And they would much rather suffer an injustice than commit one.
It is not that these people are unaware of the advantages to be gained from being selfish and unfair—it is that their morality is rooted in something that enables them to be good, even when being good comes at a cost.
Because Pinker fails to describe people as they really are, he does not answer the question, “Why be good?” Why be generous or honest when all the incentives point the other way? Why give your life for someone else? His utilitarianism can neither compel nor inspire people to go beyond self-interest.
To do that, you need the Christian account. What Pinker calls “hardwiring” is what we call being created in the image of God. Since we know that this life is not all there is, we can transcend self-interest.
Without these, we have only morality as a “spec sheet” and humans as moral calculators. As Kelly put it, quoting Orwell, “You have to be an intellectual to believe such nonsense. No ordinary man could be such a fool.”
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BreakPoint/Chuck Colson Ping!
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FWIW, "evolutionary psychology" is a vapid autistic sort of speculation, devoid of empirical data or theoretical significance, but highly valued by those who would replace scholarship with armchair theorizing. We thought we'd outgrown this a century ago, but some ideas are just too bad to die.
btt
Is “evolutionary psychology” a science to begin with? It isn’t like anyone can revive a tribe of Neandertals and study their behavior. People like this probably have to drum up a little controversy routinely in order for their premise to be taken seriously at all instead of ignored. But leave it to places like Harvard to give them tenure.
Er.... Chuck... you might want to ip-skay the oints-pay that are every bit as fatal to your position as they are to the position you are attacking.
I certainly doubt it. It makes paleontology look like chemistry, if you get my meaning.
How is Colson's position only tenable if all of us are shiny, happy people holding hands? If one position is "Altruism is the result of evolutionary development of the brain and is hardwired into the species" and the other position is "Altruism is a result of God's moral law" then an example of people ignoring that law does nothing to undermine his position.
Thanks for posting.
It is precisely as much, or as little, an objection as an example of some people having defective wiring.
Well, no, not necessarily. Suppose one accepts evolution as scientific fact; and anyone can observe that behavior seems to have at least some heritable aspects (e.g., golden retrievers tend to be sweet-tempered; pit bulls are dangerous). There would seem to be a plausible scientific basis for theorizing about "evolutionary psychology."
Of course, the problem (as you suggest) is that there is plenty of room for mental masturbation on the topic; and it's easy to let one's personal opinions (such as atheism) get in the way of theorizing. And of course, because "behavior" is an incredibly complex thing, it's beastly difficult to test any of those theories, and there's no particular penalty for not testing.
But Colson's complaint is similarly flawed -- he seems to insist that behavior would be required by this theory to be hard-wired to a particular cause/effect relationship ... something easily swatted aside by a Pinkerite, who would point out that evolution would most likely select against animals that only reacted one way to a variety of different stimuli.
Where Pinker's flaws result from his atheism, Colson's problem is that he cannot accept the idea that behaviors may be heritable traits, at least in part ... and both guys seem to want to treat something as incredibly complex as behavior, into nice neat packages to support their personal biases. It precludes a rational discussion.
The problem is that Colson's position is just as weak as Pinker's (as Colson describes it): both fellows want to treat the topic of "animal behavior" as something neat and tidy, made up of discrete little elements that can be picked up and examined without reference to the whole package.
The problem is, of course, that behavior -- regardless of how it comes about -- is enormously complex, and it has to be so, because we live in a world where we have to be capable of responding to an extremely wide variety of situations. We have to be able to surive things that are unexpected -- so the ability to achieve a certain randomness in our responses would seem to be an essential capability.
It's not really valid for Colson to argue that Pinker is wrong, because real behavior is more complex than "hard-wiring" to a fixed cause/effect response. Pinker would no doubt admit as much. Colson's argument loses, because it is quite evident that behavior is partly heritable -- and anyway, you can't look at something like "altruism" in isolation from the larger package.
Great, then Pinker should have a study any day now showing verifiable brain structure differences between stingy people and generous people, and he’ll be sure to do those MRI scans really early in their lives so we can be sure the bad wiring was the cause of the behavior and not the other way around.
Glad to! Thanks for the bump.
The bible says the heart of man is continuously sinfull.
the Article is anti-God
I mean the Article shows the Evolutionists as anti-God
There is a vast difference between saying that all people are basically good at heart and saying that we bear God's image and, as a result, do some good things.
Your post is silly at best.
OK then, disregard my last post. I thought you were saying that it’s anti-God to say there’s any instinct for good. I should have kept it in the holster.
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