On Suffering and Waste
We were talking about Darwinism and morality, among other things. Here is George C. Williams in Plan and Purpose in Nature as quoted by Richard Dawkins in the title essay of A Devil’s Chaplain:
With what other than condemnation is a person with any moral sense supposed to respond to a system in which the ultimate purpose in life is to be better than your neighbour at getting genes into future generations,…in which that message is always ‘exploit your environment, including your friends and relatives, so as to maximise your genes’ success…?
Dawkins then quotes George Bernard Shaw doubting evolution because he didn’t like its cruelty, H.G. Wells rejoicing in the cruelty, and Julian Huxley trying to derive some kind of ethics from it, then quotes Julian Huxley’s grandfather T.H. Huxley getting it right in his lecture ‘Evolution and Ethics’:
Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.
And then Dawkins says what he thinks of the matter, and what he says would doubtless suprise the many people who think all evolutionary thinkers and especially Dawkins conflate is with ought:
As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian…But at the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs…I have always held true to the closing words of my first book, ‘We, alone on earth, can rebel agains the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’
So. This is part of the picture. People at Twisty Sticks have, it seems to me, been taking it as axiomatic that everyone who believes natural selection has had some influence on human nature has some sort of ruthless right-wing agenda, but that just is not true.
I just checked out that book, didn’t have time to finish it, but one bit stays with me, and that is where [as I recall] he said that nature (as dispenser of cruelty) had unwittingly blundered on its own undoing when humanity evolved. Took long enough doing it, but hey. A refreshing change from the usual line of how nasty old humanity is the death of poor helpless nature…The nastiness is on both sides, and only our side is smart enough to know better…
Are you not also fallaciously conflating rejecting EP explanations for cognition with rejecting Darwinian influences on human behaviour.
My reading of the debates you referred to, or at least the one about the research article on depression, is that most of those rejecting it, and taking potshots at EP in general, are rejecting the science on scientific grounds, not the idea that natural selection plays a role in human behaviour.
PM, no, I don’t think so. My comment (apart from the addendum about one exceptional individual) was about the original posts rather than the comments, and I do think there is some a priori dismissal of EP on political as opposed to scientific grounds in both of those. Such as –
From the first one –
“This is a near-perfect example of what might be dubbed (with no apologies whatsoever to Cosmides and Tooby) the Standard Evolutionary Psychology Model…Third, use your findings to justify some right-wing shibboleth or another, showing that hunter-gatherer societies hardwire us for perfectly competitive markets or the like (in fairness, Hagen, Watson and Thomson jr. don’t do this).”
The slam at Cosmides and Tooby, and the claim that bad EP is standard, and especially the stuff about right-wing shibboleths. Yes, there is some EP like that, but there is also plenty that is not like that, but you wouldn’t know it from that post. In short, the post strikes me as being a political claim dressed up as an epistemological one.
And from the other –
“As I said in Henry’s comments thread the ev psych analysis is essentially “realist”. This is the kind of style of social and political analysis that purports to strip away the illusions of idealistic rhetoric and reveal the underlying self-interest…All of these realist models are opposed to any form of idealism in which people or groups act out of motives other than self-interest.”
That post attributes an agenda to EP that just is not necessarily there. It may be in some individual EPists, but it’s not inherent to the field, at least not to the best of my knowledge.
“The slam at Cosmides and Tooby”
Not really, he’s parodying their SSSM.
“and the claim that bad EP is standard”
Again, not political, I’d say simply an accurate observation.
“and especially the stuff about right-wing shibboleths.”
Well, yeah, that is going a little beyond…I think sometimes it is easy to confuse the research and the popularisation/sensationalisation of it.
On the other hand, there does seem to be an elevated proportion of those who would like to either justify right wing views (or views that might be characterised as such), or who interpret their results thus, among the EPers. Also they have a tendency, perhaps just attributable to being a young field that wants to justify itself, to claim important ramifications from really quite flimsy studies without considering any of the extant work in that area.
Reading ‘the Blank Slate’ I got the impression, perhaps wrongly, that Pinker (great hair by the way), despite extensively making the case that is doesn’t mean ought, is also a little to the right himself. Not necessarily any reason to dismiss the field, but it seems plausible that those of a more rightwing bent would be drawn to it.
Hmm. I think the right-wing bias issue is difficult. It could simply be that the evidence of EP points to conclusions that are more agreeable to the right, and that avoiding that is denial. Alternatively, given the rather unsatisfactory evidence for much of EP it could equally be a matter of bias having skewed the theory in the first place (thinks of Pinker).
“People at Twisty Sticks have, it seems to me, been taking it as axiomatic that everyone who believes natural selection has had some influence on human nature has some sort of ruthless right-wing agenda, but that just is not true.”
Oh yeah, and to point out again that the people there, or at least the one called ‘Henry’ that didn’t like that depression paper, were maybe taking it as axiomatic that EPers are driven by rightwing motives but certainly not everyone who believes in natural selection, as indicated by the end of that post:
“Of course, at no stage of the process need you deign to provide convincing empirical evidence that might sully the clarity and vigour of your argument. It’s wretched stuff, that doesn’t do any favors to Darwinian theory. That our minds are undeniably the product of evolutionary forces doesn’t and shouldn’t provide a license for half-baked functionalist explanations of the psychology of everyday life.”
True, Henry wasn’t dismissing natural selection itself – but it would be a bit surprising if he were.
Yes, possibly; I don’t agree with every word of The Blank Slate myself; I don’t for instance share Pinker’s skepticism about social engineering. I think social engineering is in fact exactly the sort of thing Dawkins is talking about when he says we ought to fight our nature, not embrace it. But that doesn’t entail dismissing the whole field.
I don’t think Henry was just parodying Cosmides and Tooby, I think that ‘whatever’ was pointed. There is a kind of choose-sides aspect to all this; Cosmides and Tooby are on one side, and I take it that Henry was repudiating that side and expressing allegiance to the other one, the Gouldo-Lewontinian one.
I was just looking for ‘false dichotomy’ under the bad moves section but I can’t find it.
Yes, false dichotomy is pretty much what I’m talking about. I daresay you have a different false dichotomy in mind, but I remain skeptical.
I think ascribing motives to genes, i.e. selfishness, is pushing the bounds. But then when Dawkins says we should “rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” I start to wonder if he’s suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and he thinks the Borg are coming after him. Sometimes it’s best to throw away a metaphor after a certain point because it limits the understanding of what you’re trying to describe.
Not that I disagree with him about the importance of keeping Darwinism out of ethics.
The selfish gene is a metaphor. Objecting to it runs dangerously close to sounding like Midgeley in her laughable Gene Juggling…although I have to agree that saying we should “rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” is mixing his metaphors a little too much.
Yup, beware the Midgley trap.
And see definition of ‘metaphor’ in the Fashionable Dictionary, the one on B&W…
PM: The selfish gene is a metaphor.
Me: You’re kidding! And all this time . . .
Seriously, metaphors are often used in interface design, which is what I do and the problem with them is that they help the user but also limit the scope of the user’s imagination. For instance desktop folders are supposed to imitate real folders, but on the desktop you can put folders within folders within folders.
There is also the forced metaphor fallacy to contend with.
And in the Dawkins-Midgley debate I’m not afraid of taking Midgley’s side. Dawkins is certainly not a god who is beyond all criticism.
“Midgley debate I’m not afraid of taking Midgley’s side.”
Blimey, even Midgley doesn’t want to take Midgley’s side in that debate. She just got him wrong (*a small bird told me that she had flu when she wrote Gene Juggling, had been misinformed about Dawkins work by a colleague, and then she got a bit carried away).
What I specifically meant was that I support this statement by Midgley: “Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish.”
I overstated when I said I’m taking Midgley’s side.
“Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish.”
But Midgley, and maybe David Stove, are the only people in the world who thought that anybody thought they could be.
See Fashionable Dictionary: Midgley, and Quixote. Oh, and metaphor, too.
And further entries in the book version, but for that you’ll have to wait a few months.
To quote this paper
The heuristic device of a selfish gene
may have simplified the work of theoretical population biologists (Dawkins 1976). However, imbuing genes with fictional psychological characteristics (e.g. preferences,
intentionality, agency) eliminated the complexities of development and
environment, including social interaction and culture. These complexities are recognized
to be important by evolutionary biologists (Endler 1986) and central to
the concerns of psychologists generally.
“eliminated the complexities of development and environment, including social interaction and culture.”
But that’s just nonsense. Quoting something don’t make it so.
And as if Dawkins doesn’t realise these things are important.
You can’t underestimate the impact that the switch to a genes eye view (via the metaphor of the selfish gene) had on biology, although it was the product of a number of currents that had been around for a while.
But the selfish gene is a metaphor in a very limited sense, it is Dawkins metaphor for the gene-centric selection he was arguing for. It is not necessary for the theory itself, it just nicely sums it up. You cannot take it in isolation, there is a whole argument and theoretical approach behind it.
What has happened is that people have only taken the metaphor of the selfish gene and not the theory behind it. Which is why Midgley could be so mistaken – she obviously didn’t read/understand Dawkins. Scientists use metaphors all the time, but if you ignore what they’re trying to say and just run off with their metaphor you’re bound to run into difficulty – and its no good blaming the scientists.
PM
“You can’t underestimate the impact that the switch to a genes eye view (via the metaphor of the selfish gene) had on biology”
At the beginning of The Extended Phenotype, Dawkins argues that the genes eye view is just a different way of seeing the individual organism as the unit of selection (that’s a slight oversimplification, but he uses the analogy of the Necker cube).
If that’s the case, what exactly has been the impact on biology? When I asked him about his contribution, Dawkins said that The Selfish Gene just reflected the orthodoxy of the modern synthesis. (He’d rather – or would have rather, he might have changed his mind – be remembered for his idea of the extended phenotype than the selfish gene.)
Ok, I concede I’m not expert on the modern history of evolutionary biology but the popularisation, elaboration and systematisation of Hamilton’s work that Dawkins’ selfish gene represents marked the culmination of the new synthesis, yes, but it needed to be made – and brought modern evolutionary biology out of naive group selectionism and into rigorous theory.
The beauty of the selfish gene is that it is just another way of looking at individual selection – but a way that has so much more clarity.
‘People at Twisty Sticks have, it seems to me, been taking it as axiomatic that everyone who believes natural selection has had some influence on human nature has some sort of ruthless right-wing agenda, but that just is not true.’
Hello, I haven’t commented before, but I thought this was worth the effort.
It is undoubtedly the case that “everyone who believes natural selection has had some influence on human nature” includes a far greater number of research scientists than those who would call themselves evolutionary psychologists (which is essentially those of the Santa Barbara school, and the University of Liverpool in the UK, I think).
As far as I can see, it would cover all non-creationists, whilst suggesting nothing about the rigourousness of EP.
Why does everyone keep bringing up politics and no-one mentions jimj’s response on the 3rd April thread? This makes good critical points regarding EP in an entirely scientific framework and doesn’t once refer to anyone’s presumed politics.
Well the reasons I keep bringing up politics are 1) that that is B&W’s basic subject – the fact that people sometimes allow political judgments to determine scientific ones, and 2) that that seems to me to be what is going on with the discussion at CT. People do keep mixing together the scientific judgments and the political ones, often in the same phrase.
Hmmm.
Yes I’m well aware of the point of Butterflies and Wheels.
However, I still don’t see why jimj’s response hasn’t been commended/commented upon/even analysed. Given that as it eschews the politics, its surely the sort of comment Butterflies and Wheels wants to be occurring more often, yet its the one that seems to have been ignored.
tiger,
Because I didn’t set out to do an exhaustive study of the comments thread at Crooked Timber here. It might be worth commenting on a particular CT comment at CT, but I don’t feel any need to comment on or analyse every single reply in this comment. Note that I didn’t say that nobody at CT was saying anything of value – though now that I look again I see that I also didn’t make it clear that I wasn’t saying that. But I wasn’t saying that. The point of the comment was specifically to notice a certain type of comment, not to analyse the whole thread. That’s why I didn’t mention it. It’s a long thread, and commenters on blogs are many and various – it would be a bit tedious to discuss every reply. My comments were about the Twisty Stickers who made the original posts. Jimj’s does seem like a pretty good comment. (Though it’s interesting that in fact there does seem to be depression among chimps, at least if one can go by Goodall’s descriptions for a popular audience. Flint went into a deep depression when Flo died, and he died himself in a couple of weeks – despite apparent concern from his older sister, which might actually fit with the evolutionary explanation [which I don’t feel particularly concerned to defend, by the way, it may be nonsense, it was only the way the argument was being presented that I thought noteworthy]. Flint was definitely conspicuously miserable; he stopped eating; his sister did notice and attempt to help – if Goodall didn’t anthropomorphise all this stuff. I hadn’t thought of that until I went looking for jimj’s comment – so thanks for nudging me.)