Demons and Dawkins So You Think You Are a Darwinian?
Darwinism's Dilemma (part I: Cave Man)
Darwinism's Dilemma (part II: Hard Man)
An exerpt from Altruism and Shared Genes
David Stove
WE ARE NOW in a position to identify what the irresistible attraction is that the theory of inclusive fitness holds for every modern Darwinian Mind.
If a man openly denies the reality of altruism, then, as well as incurring the deserved ridicule of people of common sense, he incurs the moral indignation of people of common decency; as Hobbes, Mandeville, and Machiavelli (among others) found out by experience. He deserves it, too. Now the Darwinian theory of evolution is a theory which logically impels whoever believes it to deny the existence of altruism. But for more than a hundred years (as we have seen), Darwinians all shrank from that denial: restrained, no doubt, partly by fear of the evil reputation of a Hobbes or a Machiavelli, but also by their own decency.
But then came Hamilton's theory, and in the second half of the 1960s--those five fell years for Western civilization!--it brought into existence, in the way I have described, what is now called sociobiology. These Darwinians are not restrained either by common sense or common decency, and they do openly deny the existence of altruism. They thus announce themselves as the new Hobbists, Machiavels, or Man-devils (as someone called the followers of that once famous selfish theorist).
In consequence, sociobiologists have incurred at least a sizable fraction of the moral condemnation which they deserve. And they have failed (at least up till now) to carry with them, in their open denial of altruism, the great majority of their fellow-Darwinians, either professional or lay. Darwinians without exception nowadays, to be sure, swear by the theory of inclusive fitness. But very few let it lead them to say things of the kind which it leads the Hard Men of sociobiology to say. For example, "Scratch and 'altruist' and watch a hypocrite bleed"; or "Nice Guys Finish Last"; or that conscience "tells us, not to avoid cheating, but how we can cheat socially without getting caught."[32]
But a denial of the reality of altruism which did not openly offend either common sense or decency: that, by contrast, would be exactly "what the doctor ordered" for all present-day Darwinians. It would give them what no Darwinians had ever had before: freedom to profess their Darwinism fully, without getting a bad name, and with a conscience that, if not quite unclouded, is not in revolt either. A combination "devoutly to be wished."
Now this combination is exactly what the theory of inclusive fitness does offer to Darwinians of the present day. For that theory is (as we have seen) a denial of the reality of kin altruism; but on the other hand it is not an overt one. It is covert, and in two ways. First, it is esoteric, since it is entirely in terms of genes, any knowledge of which must be esoteric. Second, it is indirect; since it directly ascribes selfishness not to people or other animals, but only to genes. Now, if genes, and only they, are accused of selfishness, what is there in that which could reasonably arouse the moral indignation of people of common decency, or even of one's own conscience?
This, then, is what constitutes the irresistible attractiveness of the inclusive fitness theory to every modern Darwinian mind: it allows you to deny the existence of altruism, even in its most conspicuous form, without giving unmistakable offense either to common decency or to your own self respect. This had been a great desideratum ever since 1859 (as I have said): it was just that no one before Hamilton had been clever enough to find a way to do it.
The objections I made to the inclusive fitness theory in the previous section were made, of course, on the assumption that it is a theory of what causes kin altruism. In the present section, however, we have seen compelling reasons to think that it is not that, but is a denial of kin altruism. If so, then my earlier objections were based on a mistaken assumption.
But they are very easily adapted so as to become good objections to the inclusive fitness theory as we now understand it to be. In fact all I need to do is to insert the word "apparent" before the word "altruism" (and before "kin altruism," "parental altruism," etc.) in each of the objections which I made in section III.
Thus, for example, where the objection previously was that sibling altruism is not nearly as common or strong as parental, it will now be that apparent sibling altruism is not nearly as common or strong as apparent parental altruism. Where the objection previously was that there is no altruism between genetically identical sister bacteria, it will now be that there is no apparent altruism between them. And so on.
Then every one of my objections will be found to be true still, and directed this time, towards the right target. In other words, even if the selfish theorists of all the ages are right, and there is no such thing as kin altruism, shared genes are just as bad an explanation of the appearances of kin altruism, as we earlier found them to be of the thing itself.
Yet almost every other line which inclusive fitness theorists write about altruism implies that I was right the first time: that is, they do intend their theory as a causal explanation of kin altruism.
This is so evident everywhere that it would be ridiculous to assemble quotations to prove it. It will be sufficient if I draw attention again to some words of Dawkins quoted above (the text to note 2). He said that it had long been clear that the greater than average chance of a gene being shared with close relatives "must be why altruism by parents towards their young is so common." If this is not causal talk then I cannot understand English. And it is perfectly representative of 50 percent of what inclusive fitness theorists write about kin altruism.
And yet these are the same authors who, in other parts of their books or articles, imply that altruism does not exist! They say, like Hamilton, that a mother seems to put a positive value on her baby's fitness against her own. Or they say, like Ghiselin, that so-called altruists are hypocrites. Or they refer, like Dawkins, to "altruism--something that does not exist in nature."[33]
What can we possibly make of this bewildering, and yet systematic, inconsistency? A proposition--the theory of inclusive fitness, or any other proposition--cannot be both a causal explanation of something and a denial of its existence. A causal theory of the tides cannot deny the reality of tides; nor can a causal explanation of polio myelitis imply that there is no such disease. A causal theory of x implies the existence of x, and cannot consistently deny it as well.
But that is not at all to say, alas, that people do not sometimes confuse a causal explanation of something with a denial of its existence. On the contrary they often do, as philosophers to their sorrow know. A man puts forward a causal theory to explain something, and another man thinks that he is denying the existence of that thing. Or a man says he is going to explain what causes something, and fails to notice that, in the course of his "explanation," he has implied that there is actually no such thing as that which he had undertaken to explain. Confusions of this kind are certainly common enough.
If you want an example of how easily people can confuse a causal explanation of something with a denial of its existence, then talk to a man in the street, or to an average physicist for that matter, about one of the secondary qualities: color, for example. Try to get him to be (a) clear and (b) consistent, about whether he is (1) putting forward a causal explanation of things having the colors they do, or (2) denying that things have any color. You will need to allow a good deal of time for this job. And it is a thousand to one that, however much time you allow, it will not be enough.
A third possibility therefore suggests itself. Perhaps the inclusive fitness theory is neither a theory of what causes kin altruism, as I took it to be in section III; not yet a denial of kin altruism, as I tried to show in secion IV that it is. Perhaps it is sometimes one and sometimes the other. Do inclusive fitness theorists just confusedly oscillate, between thinking of shared genes as what causes kin altruism, and thinking of shared genes as the reality which underlies the illusory appearances of kin altruism?
This hypothesis is somewhat disrespectful, I must admit, to inclusive fitness theorists. But then better scientists than they are certainly have often fallen into exactly this kind of confusion about color. So the disrespectfulness of the hypothesis can hardly be a decisive objection to it.
In fact this hypothesis has much to recommend it. For it would explain very well a certain feature of the literature of inclusive fitness, for which no other explanation suggests itself. The fact, namely, that that literature contains two violently inconsistent estimates of the amount of kin altruism that there is in the world.
An inclusive fitness theorist, if you accuse him of denying the reality of kin altruism, will almost certainly dismiss the accusation as an elementary misunderstanding of his theory. He will defend himself somewhat as follows. "Of course kin altruism is real, at the level of the individual organisms. It is very common and strong, too: think, for example, of parental altruism in humans, of siblin altruism in hymenopteran workers, and so on. What Hamilton taught us was what it is that causes kin altruism: namely, the selfishness of genes."
This defense is certainly "full of whole wheat words"; no cynical suggestion of universal selfishness here. And, taking the inclusive fitness theorist at his word, we adopted his causal explanation of kin altruism in section III above. It led us to a number of surprising results. For example, that there is twice as much sibling altruism between bacterial as between human sisters; that sibling altruism in our species is as common and as strong as parental altruism; that every parent bird will sacrifice its own life in order to save three of its nestlings; and so on. And the combined result of all these discoveries was that there is in fact far more kin altruism in the world than anyone had ever supposed before the inclusive fitness theory came along. In fact it turned out that animal life is saturated with kin altruism: drips the stuff at every pore.
And yet, in the literature of the inclusive fitness theory, what do we actually find? Why, more often than not, the universality of "dog eat dog," of "dirty tricks," of the self-interested manipulation of offspring by their parents, of parents by their offspring, of siblings by each other, of strangers by everyone; of apparent altruism revealed as hypocrisy (even, no doubt, in those luckless hymenopteran workers who had previously been portrayed as paragons of kin altruism). There is no pretense, in this part of the literature, of admitting the reality of kin altruism and confining selfishness to the gene level. On the contrary, it is the Hobbesian war of all against all, openly installed (not for the first time) as the last word in Darwinian biology. There is not, it turns out, one atom of kin altruism in the world: it is an illusion.
In any discussion of the inclusive fitness theory with an adherent of it, the same extraordinary phenomenon of "Janus faces" will be met with. On one face of the theory, arising out of the idea that kin altruism is caused by shared genes, there is an extravagant exaggeration of the amount of kin altruism that exists; on the other, there is the idea that kin altruism is an illusion, the underlying reality of which is shared selfish genes. Any discussion of altruism with an inclusive fitness theorist is, in fact, exactly like dealing with a pair of air balloons connected by a tube, one balloon being the belief that kin altruism is an illusion, the other being the belief that kin altruism is caused by shared genes. If a critic puts pressure on the illusion balloon--perhaps by ridiculing the selfish theory of human nature--air is forced into the causal balloon. There is then an increased production of earnest causal explanations of why we love our children, why hymenopteran workers look after their sisters, etc., etc. Then, if the critic puts pressure on the causal balloon, perhaps about the weakness of sibling altruism compared with parental, or the absence of sibling altruism in bacteria--then the illusion balloon is forced to expand. There will now be an increased production of cynical scurrilities about parents manipulating their babies for their own advantage, and vice versa, and in general, about the Hobbesian bad times that are had by all.
In this wa critical pressure, applied to the theory of inclusive fitness at one point, can always be easily absorbed at another point, and the theory as a whole is never endangered. A defender of the theory does need, it is true, a certain mental agility: an ability to make sudden and extreme "gestalt switches" (as the best authors in the philosophy of science now say), from a picture in which animal life is swimming in kin altruism, to one in which there is no kin altruism at all. But this ability, it has turned out, is by no means uncommon; and it is the only one which a defender of the inclusive fitness theory needs. Given that, his theory is stable under any criticism whatever.
My hypothesis--that inclusive fitness theorists are just confused about kin altruism, and oscillate between denying it and trying to explain it--has at least the merit, therefore, of explaining something otherwise improbable: the Janus-faced character of their theory. But it also has in its facor a historical fact which I point out in Essay VI[35]: that selfish theorists have always oscillated between a version of their theory which is shocking but not true, and a version which is perhaps true, but certainly not shocking, or even interesting.
When an inclusive fitness theorist tells us that kin altruism does not exist, then that is shocking all right; but it is not true. When, on the other hand, he only tells us that kin altruism is caused by shared genes, then that happens not to be true (as we saw in section III) but even if it were true, it would not be shocking, or even interesting. If kin altruism is caused by shared genes, that is well--it exists, anyway; it is caused by something entirely different, well again. Who doubts that it is caused by something? Nor can its cause be of a very rare or elevated character, in view of the extreme commonness of kin altruism which (at least in its parental form) extends even to such low spirituality types as alligators. The fact that kin altruism has a cause does not prevent it from being sometimes an admirable thing, either. By that too severe rule, there would be nothing to admire anywhere, not even in, say, The Selfish Gene, which presumably had its causes like everything else in nature.
If inclusive fitness theorists do, as I believe, constantly oscillate between explaining and denying altruism, this must still further enhance the attractiveness of their theory to every Darwinian mind. For every such mind needs either an explanation or a denial of altruism. A theory which offers both of those things at once will therefore be doubly attractive.
And then, think how easy it is, and always has been, to convince many people of the selfish theory of human nature. It is quite pathetically easy. All it takes, as Joseph Butler pointed out nearly three centuries ago, is certain coarseness of mind on the part of those to be convinced; though a little bad character on either part is certainly a help. You offer people two propositions: "No one can act voluntarily except in his own interests," and "No one can act voluntarily except from some interest of his own." The second is a trivial truth, while the first is an outlandish falsity. But what proportion of people can be relied on to notice any difference in meaning between the two? Experience shows very few. And a man will find it easier to mistake the false proposition for the evidently true one, the more willing he is to believe that everyone is as bad as himself, or to belittle the human species in general. (Darwinians call the latter "bridging the gap between man and the animals.")
It is even easier nowadays to convince people that, even within families, there is nothing but selfishness. All you need to do is tell them that "what appears as kin altruism is really gene selfishness." If "appears as" means here "seems to be but is not," then the statement is a denial of the reality of kin altrusim. But "appears as" can also mean "result in," or "has as one of its effects": as when we say, for example, that the moon's gravitational attraction appears as tides in the ocean. If this is what "appears as" means hear, then the statement is a theory of what causes kin altruism. But what proportion of people can be relied on to notice this abiguity of the phrase "appears as," or to notice the results of it: that the given statement can equally well be a denial of kin altruism, or a causal explanation of it? Again, very few.
Well, how could inclusive fitness theorists not oscillate between those two things? If they were to adhere consistently to the causal version of their theory, the result would be (as we saw in section III) far more kin altruism than actually exists, and Darwinism's problem of altruism would actually be far worse than it was before Hamilton supposedly solved it. If they were to adhere consistently to the denial of the reality of kin altruism, that would indeed solve the problem of altruism with supreme eclat, but would be considered by everyone of common sense to be a reductio ad absurdum of their theory, rather than a scientific discovery. So what can inclusive fitness theorists do, except what they do do? That is, publish hundreds of articles every year, in which kin altruism is both denied and causally explained in terms of shared genes. These two things may be logically inconsistent with one another. But what of that? It's a "successful research program," isn't it?
At any rate some explanation is required of the Janus faces of the inclusive fitness theory: on one side an immense exaggeration of the extent of kin altruism, on the other a denial that there is any at all. My hypothesis is: mere confusion in the minds of inclusive fitness theorists. This is, at least, a better suggestion than the only other hypothesis I have been able ot think of: that inclusive fitness theorists deliberately try to deceive their readers, by passing off a denial of kin altruism as a causal explanation of it. This is an eminently sociobiological hypothesis, of course; but like all such things, it has nothing to recommend it. Confusion is always more likely than elaborate cunning and "dirty tricks."
So if (for example) you cannot work out by reading The Selfish Gene--as you cannot work out--whether the author is denying the existence of kin altruism or offering a causal explanation of it, then easily the likeliest reason is that the author's thoughts on that subject are in exactly the same state of incoherence as his book is. It is a rule with very few exceptions that the book is the man; and even, the man when intellectually at his best.
Besides, if that book had said, clearly and consistently, either that kin altruism does not exist, or that it does, how much of its piquancy, and its sales, would have been lost! Its inconsistency on this fundamental point, while no doubt faithfully reflecting the author's mind, was one of the very things which kept its readers interested and guessing. A source of interest to the readers, it was a source of income to the writer, and consistency would have cost him money.
[32] M. T. Ghiselin, The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex (University of California Press, 1974) pg. 247. G Hardin, Sociobiology and Human Nature (Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1978), pg 183, 194. R. D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs (University of Washington Press, 1979) pg. 133.
[33] The Selfish Gene, pg. 215.
[35] Tax and the Selfish Girl or Does Altruism Need Inverted Commas?, Darwinian Fairytales, pg. 79-117.
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