[extropy-chat] Somewhat pessimistic view of teaching EP

[Keith Henson]

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=xm3c4mgmb8b6fhkn54zhzwxfcgbzpjdl

The Social Responsibility in Teaching Sociobiology

By DAVID P. BARASH

Socrates was made to drink hemlock for having "corrupted the youth of 
Athens." Is sociobiology or — as it is more commonly called these days — 
"evolutionary psychology" similarly corrupting? Although the study of 
evolution is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting and illuminating of 
all intellectual enterprises, there is at the same time, and not just in my 
opinion, something dark about the implications of natural selection for our 
own behavior.

Should we revise Pink Floyd's anthem "Another Brick in the Wall" — with its 
chorus "No dark sarcasm in the classroom/Teachers leave them kids alone" — 
to "No dark sociobiology in the classroom"? To answer this, we need first 
to examine that purported darkness.

Basically, it's a matter of selfishness. For a long time, evolution was 
thought to operate "for the good of the species," a conception that had a 
number of pro-social implications; that may be one reason why "species 
benefit" was so widely accepted, and why its overthrow took so long and was 
so vigorously resisted. Thus, if evolution somehow cares about the benefit 
enjoyed by a species, or by any other group larger than the individual, 
then it makes sense for natural selection to favor actions that contribute 
positively to that larger whole, even at the expense of the individual in 
question. Doing good therefore becomes doubly right: not just ethically 
correct but also biologically appropriate. In a world motivated by concern 
for the group rather than the individual, altruism is to be expected, since 
it would be "only natural" for an individual to suffer costs — and to do so 
willingly — so long as other species members come out ahead as a result.

Then came the revolution. Beginning in the 1960s with a series of 
paradigm-shifting papers by William D. Hamilton, a notable book by George 
C. Williams (Adaptation and Natural Selection), and with further 
clarifications in the early 1970s, especially by Robert L. Trivers and John 
Maynard Smith, and magisterially summarized in Edward O. Wilson's 
Sociobiology, the conceptual structure of modern evolutionary biology was 
changed — maybe not forever (it's a bit premature to conclude that), but 
into the foreseeable future. Sociobiology was born on the wings of this 
scientific paradigm shift, whose underlying manifesto holds that the 
evolutionary process works most effectively at the smallest unit: that of 
individuals and genes, rather than groups and species.

At first glance, none of this seems especially threatening. Moreover it has 
been liberating in the extreme, shedding new light on a wide range of 
animal and human social behavior. But at the same time, the individual- and 
gene-centered view of life offers, in a sense, a perspective that is 
profoundly selfish; hence Richard Dawkins's immensely influential book, The 
Selfish Gene. The basic idea has been so productive that it has rapidly 
become dogma: Living things compete with each other (more precisely, their 
constituent genes struggle with alternative copies) in a never-ending 
process of differential reproduction, using their bodies as vehicles, or 
tools, for achieving success. The result has been to validate a view of 
human motivations that seems to approve of personal selfishness while 
casting doubt on any self-abnegating actions, seeing a self-serving 
component behind any act, no matter how altruistic it might appear. 
Sociobiologists have thus become modern-day descendants of the cynical King 
Gama, from Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida, who proudly announces his 
cynicism: "A charitable action I can skillfully dissect; And interested 
motives I'm delighted to detect."

Scientifically, such "detection" works. Ethically, however, it stinks: If 
the fundamental nature of living things — human beings included — is to 
joust endlessly with each other, each seeking to get ahead, then we're all 
mired in selfishness — a dark vision indeed.

It might ease the blow by noting that such a vision of human nature is 
hardly unique to modern evolutionary science. Thus, in An Enquiry 
Concerning Human Understanding (1748), David Hume wrote that "should a 
traveller, returning from a far country, bring us an account of men wholly 
different from any with whom we were ever acquainted ... who were entirely 
divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge; who knew no pleasure but 
friendship, generosity, and public spirit; we should immediately, from 
these circumstances, detect the falsehood, and prove him a liar, with the 
same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs 
and dragons, miracles and prodigies." Hume also noted, albeit playfully, 
"It is not irrational for me to prefer the destruction of half the world to 
the pricking of my finger." More than 200 years ago, people were made 
uncomfortable by such sentiments, and they still are.

Just as nature is said to abhor a vacuum, it abhors true altruism. Society, 
on the other hand, adores it. Most ethical systems advocate 
undiscriminating altruism: "Virtue," we are advised, "is its own reward." 
Such sentiments are immensely attractive, not only because they are how we 
would like other people to behave, but probably because at some level, we 
wish that we could do the same. As Bertolt Brecht notes in The Threepenny 
Opera, "We crave to be more kindly than we are," so much so that purveyors 
of good news — those who proclaim the "better angels of our nature" — 
nearly always receive a more enthusiastic reception than do those whose 
message is more dour.

Although people are widely urged to be kind, moral, altruistic, and so 
forth, which suggests that they are basically less kind, moral, altruistic, 
etc., than is desired, it is also common to give at least lip service to 
the precept that people are fundamentally good. It appears that there is a 
payoff in claiming — if not acting — as though others are good at heart. 
"Each of us will be well advised, on some suitable occasion," wrote Freud, 
in Civilization and Its Discontents, "to make a low bow to the deeply moral 
nature of mankind; it will help us to be generally popular and much will be 
forgiven us for it." Why are people generally so unkind to those who 
criticize the human species as being, at heart, unkind? Maybe because of 
worry that such critics might be seeking to justify their own 
unpleasantness by pointing to a general unpleasantness on the part of 
others. And maybe also because most people like to think of themselves as 
benevolent and altruistic, or at least, to think that other people think of 
them that way. It seems likely that a cynic is harder to bamboozle.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, perhaps his most pessimistic book, 
Freud went on to lament that one of education's sins is that "it does not 
prepare [children] for the aggressiveness of which they are destined to 
become the objects. In sending the young into life with such a false 
psychological orientation, education is behaving as though one were to 
equip people starting on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps 
of the Italian Lakes. In this it becomes evident that a certain misuse is 
being made of ethical demands. The strictness of those demands would not do 
so much harm if education were to say: 'This is how men ought to be, in 
order to be happy and to make others happy; but you have to reckon on their 
not being like that.' Instead of this the young are made to believe that 
everyone else fulfills those ethical demands — that is, that everyone else 
is virtuous. It is on this that the demand is based that the young, too, 
shall become virtuous."

At the same time, we can expect that society will often call for real 
altruism, not because it is good for the altruist but because it benefits 
those who receive. (If it were clearly good for the altruist, then society 
wouldn't have to call for it! In fact, cynics point out that it is 
precisely because altruism is generally not good for the altruist that 
social pressures are so often focused on producing it.) Friedrich Nietzsche 
was probably the most articulate spokesman for the view that society 
encourages self-sacrifice because the unselfish sucker is an asset to 
others: "Virtues (such as industriousness, obedience, chastity, piety, 
justness) are mostly injurious to their possessors. ... If you possess a 
virtue, ... you are its victim! But that is precisely why your neighbor 
praises your virtue. Praise of the selfless, sacrificing, virtuous ... is 
in any event not a product of the spirit of selflessness! One's 'neighbor' 
praises selflessness because he derives advantage from it."

If Nietzsche is correct, then there is probably a distressingly 
manipulative quality to morals, to most religious teachings, to the 
newspaper headlines that celebrate the hero who leaps into a raging river 
to rescue a drowning child, to local Good Citizenship Awards and PTA prizes.

"That man is good who does good to others," wrote the 17th-century French 
moralist Jean de La Bruyère. Nothing objectionable so far; indeed, it makes 
sense (especially for the "others"). But La Bruyère goes on, revealing a 
wicked pre-Nietzschean cynicism: "If he suffers on account of the good he 
does, he is very good; if he suffers at the hands of those to whom he has 
done good, then his goodness is so great that it could be enhanced only by 
greater suffering; and if he should die at their hands, his virtue can go 
no further; it is heroic, it is perfect."

Such "perfect" heroism can only be wished on one's worst enemies.

Exhortations to extreme selflessness are easy to parody, as not only 
unrealistic but also paradoxically self-serving insofar as the exhorter is 
likely to benefit at the expense of the one exhorted. Yet the more we learn 
about biology, the more sensible becomes the basic thrust of social ethics, 
precisely because nearly everyone, left to his or her devices, is likely to 
be selfish, probably more than is good for the rest of us. The philosopher 
and mathematician Bertrand Russell pointed out that "by the cultivation of 
large and generous desires ... men can be brought to act more than they do 
at present in a manner that is consistent with the general happiness of 
mankind." Society is therefore left with the responsibility to do a lot of 
cultivating.

Seen this way, a biologically appropriate wisdom begins to emerge from the 
various commandments and moral injunctions, nearly all of which can at 
least be interpreted as trying to get people to behave "better," that is, 
to develop and then act upon large and generous desires, to strive to be 
more amiable, more altruistic, less competitive, and less selfish than they 
might otherwise be.

Enter sociobiology. With its increasingly clear demonstration that Hume, 
Freud, Brecht, and Nietzsche (also Machiavelli and Hobbes) are basically 
onto something, and that selfishness resides in our very genes, it would 
seem not only that evolution is a dispiriting guide to human behavior, but 
also that the teaching of sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology) should 
be undertaken only with great caution. The renowned primatologist Sarah 
Hrdy accordingly questioned "whether sociobiology should be taught at the 
high-school level ... because it can be very threatening to students still 
in the process of shaping their own priorities," adding: "The whole message 
of sociobiology is oriented toward the success of the individual. ... 
Unless a student has a moral framework already in place, we could be 
producing social monsters by teaching this."

What to do? One possibility — unacceptable, I would hope, to most educators 
— would be to refrain altogether from teaching such dangerous truths. 
Teacher, leave them kids alone! Preferable, I submit, is to structure the 
teaching of sociobiology along the lines of sex education: Teach what we 
know, but do so in age-appropriate stages. Just as we would not bombard 
kindergartners with the details of condom use, we probably ought not 
instruct preteens in the finer points of sociobiology, especially since 
many of those are hidden even to those expected to do the teaching. For one 
thing, a deeper grasp of the evolutionary biology of altruism reveals that 
even though selfishness may well underlie much of our behavior, it is often 
achieved, paradoxically, via acts of altruism, as when individuals behave 
in a manner that enhances the ultimate success of genetic relatives. Here, 
selfishness at the level of genes produces altruism at the level of bodies. 
Ditto for "reciprocity," which, as Robert Trivers elegantly demonstrated 
more than three decades ago, can produce seemingly altruistic exchanges and 
moral obligations even between nonrelatives. Yet genetic selfishness 
underlies it all. Alexander Pope concluded, with some satisfaction, "That 
Reason, Passion, answer one great aim; That true Self-love and Social are 
the same."

Sociobiologists understand that there is an altruistic as well as a selfish 
side to the evolutionary coin. A half-baked introduction to the discipline, 
which pointed only to the latter, would therefore do students a substantial 
disservice. Moreover, gene-centered evolutionary thinking can also expand 
the sense of self and emphasize interrelatedness: Altruism aside, just 
consider all those genes for cellular metabolism, for neurotransmitters and 
basic body plans, all of them shared with every living thing, competing and 
pushing and somehow working things out on a small and increasingly crowded 
planet. There, by the grace of evolution, go a large part of "ourselves."

"Gene-centered theories are often reviled," writes the gene theorist David 
Haig, "because of their perceived implications for human societies. But 
even though genes may cajole, deceive, cheat, swindle, or steal, all in 
pursuit of their own replication, this does not mean that people must be 
similarly self-interested. Organisms are collective entities (like firms, 
communes, unions, charities, teams) and the behaviors and decisions of 
collective bodies need not mirror those of their individual members." To 
some extent, in short, we may even possess — gulp! — free will.

Beyond the question of what our genes may be up to and the extent to which 
we are independent of them, those expected to ponder the biology of their 
own "natural" inclinations ought also to be warned (more than once) about 
the "naturalistic fallacy," the presumption that things natural are, ipso 
facto, good. I'd even suggest pushing this further, and that the real test 
of our humanity might be whether we are willing, at least on occasion, to 
say no to our "natural" inclinations, thereby refusing go along with our 
selfish genes. To my knowledge, no other animal species is capable of doing 
that. More than any other living things, we are characterized by an almost 
unlimited repertoire; human beings are of the wilderness, with beasts 
inside, but much of the beastliness involves gene-based altruism no less 
than selfishness. (Recall the paradox that genetic selfishness is often 
promoted via altruism toward other individuals insofar as these recipients 
are likely to carry identical copies of the genes in question.)

Moreover, as Carl Sandburg put it, each human being is "the keeper of his 
zoo." Even that is not evidence of a lack of evolutionary influence; 
rather, it is a result of selection for being a good zookeeper. Socrates, 
we are told, elected to drink the hemlock when he could have followed a 
different path. Human beings are capable not only of understanding what the 
evolutionary process hath wrought, but also of deciding, in the clear light 
of reason as well as ethics, whether to follow.

David P. Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

(I have a considerable list of objections to the article.  Can any of you 
guess where?  HKH)