Evolutionary Psychology and Its True Believers
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Evolutionary Psychology and Its True Believers BY ANDREW FERGUSON It's become commonplace to point out that of modernity's three most influential thinkers— Marx, Freud, and Darwin—only Darwin...
...Conservatives can at last find support for the traditional idea of natural moral law in the very latest findings of science rather than in the dreamy wish-fulfillment of metaphysics...
...Aside from being untestable, Cartwright's theorizing (which he has borrowed from other sociobiologists) tells us only that we like food that tastes good to us...
...The sociobiologists are unscientifically vague on these and other crucial ques-tions—so vague, indeed, that their "hypotheses" about the origin of sexual roles can't really be tested, as scientific theories are supposed to be...
...Laura Bet-zig, editor of a collection of sociobiolo-gy essays called, typically enough, Human Nature, introduces the book like so: "It's happened...
...This paraphrase comes from an essay in Alas, Poor Darwin by Anne Fausto-Sterling, a geneticist and professor of women's studies, who surveys the sociobiological literature and is not pleased...
...Another is to lower the moral status of human beings, like Alzheimer's victims, newborn infants, and the mentally disabled, who may not possess such attributes...
...His opposite number, Richard Dawkins, says that critics like Gould are "demonological theologians...
...an organism that conceives of itself as an independent entity, an enduring identity, will increase its chances of survival...
...But in the EEA the same evolutionary pressures worked on human behavior as well...
...They should abandon their belief in the perfectibility of man and other utopian schemes...
...It is interesting, but not surprising...
...A belief in a "self" is adaptive...
...But Peter Singer is the real thing: a True Believer in the new Darwinian faith...
...Hilary is a sociologist, Steven a biologist, but both, more pertinently, are grizzled veterans of the 1960s New Left...
...Singer catchily asked...
...This unhappy truth has political consequences, which sociobiology's most enthusiastic supporters are delighted to specify...
...Stephen Jay Gould calls sociobiologists "Darwinian fundamentalists...
...Kill them, die for them: Sociobiology explains it with the same set of theories...
...it is much thinner, and often much less suggestive, than socio-biologists pretend...
...Singer has no trouble advocating euthanasia for old people with reduced mental capacities...
...To spread his genes, however, the male organism requires only a woman young and healthy enough to bear children...
...Why isn't it just as likely that the females who passed on more genes to the next generation were the ones who hedged their bets and slept with more than one male...
...And sociobiology itself shows us why maintaining these fictions isn't so difficult...
...The left needs a new paradigm," he wrote, in a mirror image of Arnhart's assertion that "conservatives need Charles Darwin...
...The new Darwinism may tell us nothing about whether women should serve in the military, or whether family-friendly tax credits are a good idea, or how much income should be redistributed to whom and why...
...Or you can characterize it this way, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith does in Alas, Poor Darwin: The sociobiological method "is a process of self-enclosed speculation directed by a set of mutually determining, mutually validating assumptions, descriptions, and hypotheses . . . a virtual prescription for self-affirming circularity...
...And so we succumb...
...In a famous example, Steven Pinker accounted for mothers who kill their newborns by pointing to the pressures of natural selection and reproductive fitness that young mothers suffered back in the EEA...
...But this is the kind of heresy that cannot be allowed...
...Prominent among these is the distinction that has traditionally been made between human beings and animals...
...By means of a study, conducted and published in the 1980s, of the San bushmen in the Kalahari desert...
...It is the argument of the authors of this book," writes Rose in his introduction, "that the claims of [sociobiology] in the fields of biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and philosophy are for the most part not merely mistaken, but culturally pernicious"—not just bad science but bad politics, too: right-wing politics...
...Wilson himself has written On Human Nature and Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge...
...This is probably not progress, scientifically...
...As a branch of materialism, sociobiology teaches, of course, that life is random and pointless...
...Darwinian thinking," he writes, "tells us that we have been too ready to assume a fundamental difference in kind between human beings and nonhuman animals...
...We're chumps, duped by natural selection...
...it is thus quite rational for females to be more wary of casual sex than males are...
...the popularizer Robert Wright has even asserted that evolutionary psychology disproves the assumptions of feminism...
...Adopting a Darwinian view of human nature and ethics would have both theoretical and practical benefits for conservatism...
...As Rose points out, sociobiology has got into our "cultural drinking water...
...Programmed for self-interest, human beings will respond more efficiently to the incentives of the market than to schemes of economic redistribution...
...But it is not merely the suggestion of a universal human nature that unsettles the leftist critics...
...We agree that any being that Nothing in sociobiology requires infanticide or euthanasia, but Peter Singer is the real thing: a True Believer in the new Darwinian faith...
...It is time," Singer goes on, "for the Left to take seriously the fact that we are evolved animals, and that we bear the evidence of our inheritance, not only in our anatomy and our DNA, but in our behavior too...
...That understanding has both philosophical and practical effects...
...As it turns out, the workaday experience of human beings is a tangle of illusions...
...But what the left-wing critics understand that the right-wing enthusiasts fail to grasp is that sociobiology is a particularly pernicious religion...
...This would seem of particular interest to cultural conservatives, who claim to have a special interest in instilling virtue, maintaining civilization, securing the sanctity of life—that sort of thing...
...For example, sociobiology has come up with no explanation, plausible within its own system, for music ("auditory cheesecake," Pinker lamely calls it...
...He has no trouble advocating a twenty-eight-day waiting period for parents to assess the mental and biological health of a newborn, before deciding whether to let it live...
...If the theory of natural selection is correct," Wright wrote, "then essentially everything about the human mind should be intelligible in these [Darwinian] terms...
...Life was rough out there on the savanna...
...Which leaves us right back where we started...
...Even some sociobiologists acknowledge the problem...
...The seed of human nature is the "selfish gene...
...The practical consequences are just as direct...
...Of course, the same pressures, the same overriding criterion of reproductive fitness, are used to explain why mothers will die for their children...
...Sociobiology aims to identify human nature: genetic, irreversible, "hard-wired" in the current clich...
...The evolutionary psychologist Devendra Singh, meanwhile, discovered that waist to hip ratio (now known as "WHR" in the acronym-happy literature) is an important indicator of child-bearing ability among women...
...The socio-biologists answer with near unanimity: We are to pretend that what science tells us is true, is false...
...Like most religions, evolutionary psychology tells a story—a myth, in the sociological sense of the word...
...But the important point is to reduce all of human behavior to evolutionary (and hence genetic) process...
...Alas, Poor Darwin is merely the latest in a series of essay collections, going back to the late 1970s, that Steven Rose has edited for the purpose of placing socio-biology beyond the bounds of polite society...
...Sociobiology is a closed system...
...He will be more ambitious and more obsessed with status, since gaining status will make him more attractive, which in turn increases his sexual opportunities and his chances for spreading his genes...
...Maybe our preference for fatty foods didn't originate in the Stone Age, after all...
...At the same time, polemicists on the left compare it to Nazism (polemicists on the left compare lots of things to Nazism, of course, but now they seem to mean it...
...Evolutionary psychologists like to reduce human love to a genetic survival strategy: genes calling out to other genes in a bid for self-perpetuation...
...It cannot account for Mother Teresa...
...So of course the immodesty extends beyond the titles...
...Rose sums up the sociobiological view neatly: "It claims to explain all aspects of human behavior, and then culture and society, on the basis of universal features of human nature that found their final evolutionary form during the infancy of our species some 100,000-600,000 years ago...
...One possibility is that not all human behaviors are (or were once) adaptive in Darwinian terms—that our inconvenient food preferences are explainable by other, non-Darwinian means...
...But most other nonmaterial aspects of human experience elude them...
...can reason, that can recognize others, that possesses some form of self-consciousness is a being worthy of moral respect...
...Singer's line of reasoning goes roughly like this: If we leave aside the arbitrary bias of speciesism, we see that moral respect is owed to organisms on the basis of their attributes...
...One of the first things a layman notices upon wading into the literature is the grandiosity of its claims...
...The reason the newspapers nowadays tag Singer as a "controversial bioethi-cist" is that he is—to put it more plain-ly—the world's most celebrated advocate of infanticide...
...A gene's sole purpose is to survive, by whatever means necessary, and so to reproduce itself into further generations...
...There is no way to know whether or not this statement is true...
...But evolutionary psychologists extend Darwin's principle to bear on the mental life and cultural practices of human beings...
...Edward O. Wilson, a founder of sociobiology (and the "Darwin II," according to Tom Wolfe), has even argued that a taste for traditional artistic forms—classical architecture, for example—is planted in our genes...
...The hyperbole is more than a publisher's marketing ploy...
...from the relatively trivial to the cultural and the political...
...Subtly and quietly, it removes the barriers that have traditionally stood in the way of "controversial" views like his—barriers put in place by other, older religions...
...But this (rather obviously) begs the question...
...And that, says Singh, is the waist-to-hip ratio that men around the world, from all cultures, in all regions, prefer in their women...
...One of his earlier collections, Not in Our Genes (1984), drew such a blistering review from the sociobiolo-gist Richard Dawkins that Rose threatened to sue for libel...
...And as good a place as any to begin is with Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, a collection of essays edited by Hilary and Steven Rose and published late last year...
...Nothing in sociobiology requires an acceptance of infanticide or euthanasia, needless to say, any more than it requires political conservatism or liberalism...
...Nothing will budge them from their scientific discovery that men (on average) would rather have sex with young and pretty women than old and ugly ones...
...Perhaps the organism's most consequential mistake is the intuition that it possesses some kind of unitary, irreducible identity—a self...
...since then it has been slightly modified and rechristened "evolutionary psychology...
...Europeans first mingled with the !Kung San several hundred years ago, but certain groups within the larger native population have retained traditional cultural practices that might date back to the Stone Age...
...it thus programs the organism to favor some kinds of behavior and shrink from others...
...Men prefer women with childlike features, Cartwright notes, because a small chin and nose "indicate a low level of testosterone" and thus increased fecundity...
...A man is thus likely to be much less discriminating sexually...
...And it seems they understand the ramifications of their creed far better than its enthusiasts on the right...
...Sociobiologists are aware of this criticism, of course, and some have even tried to take it into account...
...No, no, no: The only thing that can be confidently said here is that in the 1980s, a small number of primitive women in the African desert (not even the savanna...
...We are programmed to think we're not programmed...
...And even then it might not be explaining what it thinks it's explaining...
...By sociobiology's own logic, natural selection should have "selected out" such cravings...
...He concedes that Darwinism doesn't "prescribe specific policies...
...In his well-written textbook Evolution and Human Behavior, published last year, John Cartwright summarizes the latest findings...
...But sociobiology delivers news even more startling than this...
...As Cartwright points out, the EEA is now most often considered "a statistical composite of the adaptation-relevant properties of the ancestral environments encountered by members of ancestral populations...
...The application of this view knows no limit...
...It cannot account, in other words, for the richness of life...
...Are they arguing forward from the conditions of EEA (the scarcity of resources and women's limited ability to produce offspring) to predict that women will be coy nowadays...
...Darwin's original version of natural selection was already comprehensive, claiming to account for almost all the physical attributes of the planet's animal and vegetable life...
...By puberty, most females recognize that even if they employ contraception, they are at risk of becoming pregnant during a sexual encounter...
...Under the pitiless investigation of the sociobiologist, the self turns out to be a conflation of material processes, all of which are themselves the product of natural selection...
...Sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology, or neo-Darwinism...
...But Darwin has troubles of his own...
...Culture, not stubborn nature, determines behavior...
...But he is also a self-described man of the "liberal left...
...Second, says Arnhart, a "Darwinian conservatism" would sustain conservative ideas in public policy...
...Pinker's infanticide speculation, published in the New York Times in 1997, offers a good example of how sociobiologists use ethnographic studies...
...The argument for traditional marriage, social hierarchies, and so on, and the arguments against radical egal-itarianism, left-wing feminism, and so on, will have to be made by other means...
...Given that every prominent sociobi-ologist, from Pinker to Dawkins to Wilson, has ardently declared his atheism, you might think Nelkin has a difficult case to make...
...This makes for one of the more unexpected disputes in recent intellectual history, though it's hard to keep the sides straight without a program...
...Maybe it's just coincidence, but there are few things on the right-wing wish list that don't seem to conform with the human nature that sociobiologists claim to have discovered...
...Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate," wrote the Darwin II, Edward O. Wilson...
...Surely they can be judged and decided on empirical grounds, among others...
...Stephen Jay Gould, one of the contributors to Alas, Poor Darwin, remarks on the flimsiness of this approach: "How can we possibly know in detail what small bands of hunter-gatherers did in Africa two million years ago...
...Right-wingers suddenly embracing Darwin, while left-wingers try furiously to contain him—we've come a long way from the Scopes monkey trial...
...Other sociobiology titles: The Web of Life, Evolution and the Meaning of Life, The Origins of Virtue, and The Biology of Morality...
...change the culture, and human behavior will change along with it...
...His answer is a resounding: You bet...
...He worries about "granting every member of our own species—psychopaths, infants, and the profoundly intellectually disabled included—a moral status superior to that of dogs, pigs, chimpanzees, and dolphins...
...In what sense, then, is evolutionary psychology a religion...
...As a consequence, women even today are more likely to select a mate for his ability to bring resources to the relationship, and more likely thereafter to savor the nurturing virtues of security and stability...
...Dorothy Nelkin is right that sociobiology is a religion, if one means by this a worldview that must invoke faith at those points where reason and evidence fail it...
...Darwinian theorizing about sex has led Robert Wright and many other sociobiologists to conclude, for example, that "women will never break through the glass ceiling because, biologically, they have less of men's innate ambition and willingness to take the risks necessary for success...
...But the belief is an illusion...
...Ethical theory, properly understood, is a game of as if: We proceed as if we were free, irreducible, unitary selves making choices for which we deserve to be held responsible, even though the sociobiologists know those selves and those choices to be nonexistent...
...But still, much to the chagrin of romantics, the archetypal human sociobiology posits isn't so much a sensitive, bearded NPR talkshow host as a loud, tank-topped announcer for WWF Smackdown...
...We have finally figured out where we come from, why we're here, and who we are...
...Similarly, sociobiologists stress the durability of family ties, and many trace the traditional family structure back to genetic impulses...
...This is the sociobiological imperative...
...Dawkins is the scourge of sociobiology's left-wing critics...
...The EEA is a Garden of Eden for materialists— unimaginably remote, cloaked in mystery, a place of origin where our earliest ancestors, in tribes of hunter-gatherers, did the things that have made us what we are...
...But so are the sociobiologists...
...You can't blame liberals for being upset...
...Scientists who call themselves evolutionary psychologists," Nelkin writes, "are addressing questions about meaning, about why things happen, about the ultimate ground of nature...
...And so, in place of the fossil record, they conjure up the EEA...
...Under the best conditions, women can reproduce only once a year...
...Like a good sociobiologist, Cartwright takes a leap into the speculative blue yonder...
...It seems just as plausible—if not more so—that these preferences derive from rational, conscious deliberation," writes the science writer John Horgan, in a thoughtful dissection of evolutionary psychology included in his recent book, The Undiscovered Mind...
...There's nothing particularly startling about bad science...
...Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist from MIT, says that phonics, as a method of language instruction, conforms much more closely to our mental architecture than the "whole language" approach favored by progressive educators...
...For the sociobiologist, the ramifications of this view of sexual roles range Nothing will budge sociobiologists from their scientific discovery that men (on average) would rather have sex with young and pretty women...
...The self too is a trick the organism plays on itself to survive...
...Slowly but unmistakably, a new world view is emerging," he went on...
...It's a particular kind of Darwinism that has the left-wingers worried...
...The same goes for Robert Trivers, a founder of sociobi-ology, and for two of the most prominent neo-Darwinian popularizers—the socialist economist Robert Frank and Peter Singer, the "controversial bioethi-cist," as the newspapers like to describe him...
...Does sociobiolo-gy suggest that many traditional social arrangements are rooted in evolution...
...But men can reproduce without limit...
...As a theory, it is one size fits all...
...To recreate the lives led by the earliest humans, sociobiologists bring in contemporary data about the behavior of primates and ethnographic studies of the few Stone Age tribes that survive today...
...It has gone (to switch to Steven Rose's metaphor) straight into the drinking water, and conservative publicists in particular have drunk deep...
...Both sexes prefer symmetry in facial features because "symmetry is an indicator of physiological precision, protein heterozygosity and hence resistance to or freedom from pathogens...
...When they get really mad the combatants hurl imprecations like "true believer" and "choirmaster...
...Nevertheless, he offers some ideas of how Darwinian insights might be applied in the areas of crime control ("channel the male propensities [of young, unmarried men] into socially acceptable behavior"), family life ("regulate sexual mating, conjugal bonding, and parental attachment"), and military policy ("natural differences . . . will always impede any attempt to eliminate sexual differences in military service...
...But it does try to tell us what a human being is—and isn't...
...Given their obvious physiological differences, human females and males developed different strategies for perpetuating their genes...
...Absolutely not, say the sociobiologists...
...And it isn't hard to see why sociobi-ology is Singer's religion of choice...
...Return once more to female sexual coyness: Even if one grants that it is found across cultures, can we be certain that the trait is instinctual...
...Evolution, say sociobiologists, has made women less aggressive and less inclined to sexual promiscuity, men more aggressive and more prone to philandering...
...The optimum WHR is 0.7...
...Similarly, the female preference for males with resources might simply reflect females' rational recognition of their relatively precarious economic status and prospects...
...But what does this sociobiologi-cal insight (assuming it is an insight) tell us about the merit, the justice of traditional social arrangements...
...nursed their children for four years...
...Dorothy Nelkin, a sociologist from New York University, is on Gould's side...
...Sociobiology routinely dismisses religious belief as a delusion that long ago may have had some "adaptive function," helping humans to survive and flourish, but which is no longer necessary...
...For example, an entire field of "Darwinian aesthetics" has sprouted from evolutionary psychology to explain why men like the types of women they do...
...Sociobiology is a theory of simply everything...
...Conservatives need Charles Darwin," wrote Larry Arnhart, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois University, in a recent issue of the journal First Things...
...The organisms that flourished were those whose genes disposed them to behave in ways best adapted to the environment...
...Even if you accept uncritically the claims of sociobiology, as its conservative champions always do, the support derived for particular policies is much wobblier than they might hope...
...The study showed that during the 1980s, !Kung San women on average had babies several years apart, nursed them for as many as four years, and averaged five births over their reproductive lives...
...Which makes it all the queerer that so many conservatives have rushed to embrace this latest manifestation of Darwinism...
...His Darwinian argument for the redistribution of wealth and the equalization of incomes is too elaborate to be recounted here, but it is no more implausible than the arguments made by right-wing Darwinians for, say, the free market...
...Perhaps the most amusing feature of the debates between sociobiologists and their critics is the ferocity with which each side accuses the other of harboring religious sentiments, as though nothing could be more contemptible...
...Conventional Darwinians, studying the physical development of organisms, have a fossil record (however imperfect) to pore over and argue about...
...Wilson is emphatic that religion and science are incompatible, and that the practical achievements of science make religion intellectually untenable...
...No matter...
...He believes that the enduring value of sociobiology will be its use in the "debunking or discrediting of politically influential, non-Darwinian beliefs and ideas...
...This hasn't happened with sociobiology...
...But do any of these policy ideas, vague as they are, really require bringing out the heavy artillery of either natural law or Darwinian science...
...Twenty-five years ago it ran under the name sociobiology...
...But the sociobiologist knows that this view is mistaken...
...The general features of a !Kung San woman's reproductive career," Wilson and Daly asserted, "are indeed representative of hunter-gatherers and of the life history that characterized Homo for thousands of millennia...
...Some of the essayists have another beef: Far worse than playing politics, sociobiologists are practicing religion...
...Luckily, a spate of recent books helps the layman put the bickering in perspective...
...He wonders, for example, why human beings crave salty and fatty foods...
...The organism's belief in its own free will is likewise fallacious: a trick that the organism plays on itself...
...And she has a point...
...Sociobiology, in other words, strikes at the heart of every large-scale progressive project to remake society...
...How did they discover this...
...He still hasn't explained why natural selection has programmed us to prefer unhealthy foods high in fat over healthier foods that are, say, high in protein or rich in complex carbohydrates...
...Robert Trivers, R.D...
...Roaming the African savanna for thousands of centuries, homo sapiens adapted to environmental challenges through the process of natural selection, developing the genetic tendencies that shape our behavior today...
...More often than not, though, good science intercepts it before the media conveyor belt can carry it into the popular imagination...
...It is crucial to the scheme of sociobi-ology that human organisms are utterly mistaken in their most fundamental understandings of themselves...
...Resources were scarce...
...Coyness," in the jargon of sociobiology, is the defining characteristic of female sexual behavior...
...First, it would "provide a solid basis for conservative political thought...
...Roughly half the essays in the book are explicitly political, though the political objections bubble unmistakably through the others...
...As the science writer Edward Skidelsky has pointed out, evolutionary psychologists can't seem to decide whether theirs is an inductive or deductive science—whether, that is, they are shaping a theory about the past to account for a contemporary fact, or whether they're asserting that what we know of the past will reveal something about contemporary behavior...
...The chief strategy proposed by evolutionary psychologists for identifying adaptation is untestable, and therefore unscientific...
...On average, under the same pressures of natural selection, he will also be more competitive than a woman, and more inclined to take risks, as were those hairy hunter-gatherers back in the savanna...
...We are designed to be chumps...
...It is a theory of everything, aiming to explain all of human life—but only in the most cramped and desiccated terms...
...Ethical precepts, as Wilson puts it, are "entirely material products of the mind," constructed as the organism tries to preserve and reproduce itself...
...Sociobiologists set themselves a trickier task: They hope to study the history of our behavioral and mental life...
...Singer believes, with good reason, that sociobiology validates his new, non-speciesist understanding...
...And before too long, after a few more years in the drinking water, its "controversial" views won't seem controversial at all...
...In his textbook, John Cartwright includes dozens of examples, with varying degrees of plausibility...
...It cannot account for acts of kindness performed between strangers...
...From the progressives' point of view, the objections are perfectly understandable...
...Or are they arguing backward from modern women's coyness to the conditions of the EEA...
...And the new paradigm is sociobiology (though he rejects the term itself, presumably because it is ideologically fraught...
...But once these concessions to science are granted, Singer makes clear, the old socialist agenda can advance unimpeded...
...This fact, says Singer, demands that leftists make a few concessions...
...Leaving aside the question of how those harsh winters reached the African savanna, she asks "the hypothesis-builders of evolutionary psychology at least to postulate at what point in human or hominid history they imagine contemporary reproductive behaviors to have first appeared...
...Evolutionary Psychology and Its True Believers BY ANDREW FERGUSON It's become commonplace to point out that of modernity's three most influential thinkers— Marx, Freud, and Darwin—only Darwin enters the twenty-first century with his reputation intact...
...The troubles come not only from the right, where creationists and other religiously minded conservatives nip around the ankles of evolutionary theory, but also from the left, where social scientists, and even some real scientists, worry about Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...But for sociobiologists, a system of moral values is just another genetic artifact, shaped by natural selection, a survival strategy cleverly disguised...
...These scientists don't fool around...
...They should acknowledge that certain kinds of behavior—sex roles in child-rearing, for example—are cross-cultural and probably arise from a fixed human nature...
...Pinker relied on the work of sociobiology's favorite ethnographers, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson...
...the ends to which Darwin's great idea might be put...
...No such identity can survive the universal acid...
...Robert Wright, who used to be a journalist before he moved on to much, much larger things, writes books with such subtitles as Why We Are the Way We Are and The Logic of Human Destiny...
...How then—in the absence of a self, without objective categories of right and wrong and the ability to choose freely among them—how is moral reasoning to proceed...
...With Darwin as our guide to understanding human beings, we are prepared for a "revolution in our attitudes...
...One philosophical consequence is to elevate the moral status of animals, like cats and dogs, who possess some form of self-consciousness and can recognize others over time...
...Surely this is "non-adaptive," unhealthy behavior...
...Anyone familiar with evolutionary psychology will see her point...
...Consider, for instance, differences in sexual roles —sex being a favorite point of dispute for sociobiologists and their critics...
...But Pinker then passed it on to his popular audience in the New York Times: "Until very recently in human evolutionary history," Pinker announced confidently, "mothers nursed their children for two to four years...
...More than a scientific theory, evolutionary psychology is a quasi-religious narrative, providing a simple and compelling answer to complex and enduring questions concerning the case of good and evil, the basis of moral responsibility and age-old questions about the nature of human nature...
...The titles of the books, by both popularizers and scientists, are spectacular...
...Once truly grasped . . . it can entirely alter one's perception of social reality...
...Horgan is guessing, of course...
...She devotes her essay in Alas, Poor Darwin to arguing that socio-biology is merely religion in disguise and, for that reason (though she doesn't have to say so explicitly), illegitimate as either science or philosophy...
...Surely this demonstrates that our ancestors, from whom we got our genetic tendencies, behaved likewise, with women favoring coyness as a strategy for survival in the Pleistocene...
...So are their contributors, among them the postmodern theorist and architect Charles Jencks and the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould...
...It turns out that what we consider beautiful in the opposite sex is merely a measure of reproductive fitness...
...By the late Pleistocene, natural selection had already conditioned the human body into the organism we know today—giving it opposable thumbs, upright posture, an enlarged cerebral cortex...
...As the journalist Matt Ridley puts it in Genome (subtitled, with typical sociobiological modesty, The Autobiography of a Species), they are "necessary fictions...
...Coincidence...
...Under either name it is an ambitious enterprise that claims to explain the patterns of human behavior—everything from child-rearing practices to religion to shopping habits—as a consequence of Darwinian natural selection...
...Can the left swap Marx for Darwin...
...it is just surmise...
...What is most interesting is the depth of Singer's devotion to sociobiology, to the "Darwinian paradigm...
...Many of sociobiology's speculations rest on similar question-begging and circularity...
...This is really the way sociobiologists think...
...Speciesism" is a word that Peter Singer, like many sociobiologists, takes seriously and employs liberally as an imprecation...
...Then again, they might not...
...We have learned nothing with any certainty about "human evolutionary history...
...it is the nature of that nature they really don't like...
...A belief that moral precepts are rooted in something beyond mere self-interest can be adaptive, too...
...Just don't tell anybody...
...Students of Singer will be familiar with this argument, and where it leads...
...that is, organisms who ate too much fat and salt should have perished earlier and so passed on fewer of their genes...
...A female organism who was more sexually selective—who chose her mate for his ability to protect her and her offspring, for example, rather than for his physical attractiveness—enhanced her chances of passing along her genes...
...Among its desiccations, one of the most ominous is its account of morality...
...Our taste buds," he says, "were probably a fine piece of engineering for the Old Stone Age when [salty and fatty] foods were in short supply and when to receive a lot of pleasure from their taste was a useful way to motivate us to search out more...
...we can use the terms interchangeably) has become a favorite of such conservative polemicists as Charles Murray, James Q. Wilson, Tom Wolfe, and Francis Fukuyama...
...Here's an example of how difficult it is to keep the sides straight in the sociobiology debates...
...To answer Fausto-Sterling's objec-tion—that natural selection might just as easily have favored promiscuous women over coy women—Cartwright and other sociobiologists can adduce reams of contemporary evidence that show, anecdotally and statistically, that women are indeed, on average, less sexually promiscuous than men...
...The political agenda," writes Rose, "is transparently part of a right-wing libertarian attack on collectivity, above all the welfare state...
...Alexander, and many other well-known sociobiologists claim to have proved that deceiving ourselves on precisely these matters is an evolved adaptation...
...Of course sociobiologists, especially those with a popularizing bent, rouse themselves occasionally to sing hymns to the beauty and complexity and elegance of life as revealed by their discoveries, rhapsodizing about how ennobling it is to live in a random, pointless universe, where a person's most basic beliefs about himself are misinterpretations of purely material activities...
...In an interview quoted in Ullica Segerstrale's Defenders of the Truth, a very long account of the sociobiology wars, Richard Dawkins goes on at some length about this mis-take—an error made, as he notes, by both critics of sociobiology and its most enthusiastic supporters, who "are too stupid to understand the distinction between what one says about the way the world is, scientifically, and the way it ought to be politically...
...As it happens, one behavior that the selfish gene favors is altruism, since an organism's willingness to help its pals can often serve to perpetuate its genes...
...Darwinian theory, especially as applied in sociobiology, has been hailed by its enthusiasts as the "universal acid" that erodes all such mental errors...
...But this is how sociobiology works: A conjecture becomes an assumption, an assumption morphs into fact, and the fact is then used to prove the conjecture...
...Without this greater specification," she continues, "evaluating competing hypotheses becomes very difficult...
...Nothing, alas...
...Essential to the progressive world view, however, is the belief that such an intractable human nature doesn't exist...
...A plausible reconstruction of the EEA is essential to their discipline, since it was there that our genetic natures were formed...
...As several essayists note in Alas, Poor Darwin, the ascendancy of evolutionary psychology in the late 1970s and 1980s coincided with the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism in our politics...
...If we wish to understand human characteristics," Daly and Wilson had written, "we should study the hunting and gathering lifestyle in which and for which those characteristics have been shaped by natural selection...
...It cannot account for literature, poetry, the arts generally, or, for that matter, religion itself...
...Dawkins, who is the most outspoken in this regard, calls religious belief a "virus of the mind" and says that anyone who believes that the existence of the universe implies the existence of a creator is by definition "scientifically illiterate...
...But it's fair to say that the sociobiological worldview strikes ordinary people as pretty creepy...
...This is especially true of Singer, whose 1999 monograph A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation, offers a fitting note on which to close this survey of sociobiology and its critics...
...The assumption that every "universal" disposition is a product of natural selection and thus genetic, rather than a consequence of cultural influence or shared experience or accumulated wisdom, creates as many problems as it solves...
...Together they constitute a left-wing rump of the sociobiology movement...
...It's not at all unusual to switch on, say, the Today show—if you're the sort of person who switches on the Today show—and see one or another pop psychologist tracing, say, the American male's love for golf to the evolutionary development of the species: The golf course's rolling landscape, dotted with water and clumps of trees, appeals to our genetic memories of the long-ago savanna...
...In practice, sociobiology moves in both directions, forward or back, depending on what's required to sustain the reductionist premise: Natural selection must be shown to be the root cause (and often the proximate cause) of whatever tendencies human behavior exhibits...
...The EEA has thus been evolving, too—from a real place, the African savanna, to a "statistical composite...
...Full responsibility for one's actions," Ridley writes, "is a necessary fiction without which the law would flounder, but it's a fiction all the same...
...Maybe it has nothing to do with natural selection...
...Killing Babies Isn't Always Wrong" was the title of a famous essay he published in the London Spectator in 1995...
...But now here we are, millennia after the close of the Pleistocene, neck-deep in chilicheese fries...
...In their book Homicide, to which sociobiolo-gists return again and again, they claimed to have discovered, through a dazzling extrapolation, how our prehistoric ancestors raised infants a million years ago...
...Evolutionary psychology generates this kind of unbridled speculation—often it is nothing but speculation—because its standards of evidence are unusually low...
...Nor does the "ethnographic record" really help...
...She quotes one prominent sociobiol-ogist's overview of Darwinian sexual roles—that women in the EEA solved the problem of food scarcity during "harsh winters" by "preferring mates who show the ability to accrue resources and to share them...
...The story begins during the late Pleistocene era back (of course) in the African savanna, or the "Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation," as the sociobiologists call it...
...Marvelous—how nice to learn that they are not, after all, the consequence of the powerful classes exploiting the weak...
...Yet a belief in life's purpose is often "adaptive"—a way of preserving the organism and spreading its genes...
...Up next: Sociobiology proves Alger Hiss was guilty...
...What happened...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 26
