Just Our DNA Talking; or, Why Do They Hate Our Science?

Human nature has been Mary Midgley's primary philosophical topic since her first book, Beast and Man, was published in 1978.  She always does a good job of criticizing scientific pretension and confusion, but as I know very well, criticism is much easier than constructing a better alternative.  As I reread Heart and Mind, her second book, I began having reservations about a lot that she said about human nature.

It's fun to take apart the absurdities peddled by biological imperialists, of course.  Midgley gives us these gems from Edward O. Wilson, who "with endearing abandon ... shows his flag:"

The time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized (Sociobiology p. 562).  Having cannibalized psychology, the new neurobiology will yield an enduring set of first principles for sociology (p. 573).  We must shift from automatic control based on our biological properties to precise steering based on biological knowledge (On Human Nature p. 6).  Neurobiology cannot be learnt at the feet of a guru ... Ethical philosophy must not be left in the hands of the merely wise (p. 7) [Heart and Mind, 19].

Ethical philosophy must not be left in the hands of the merely stupid either.  Oh well, that's just his DNA talking.  I recall how many defenders of sociobiology's newer avatar, evolutionary psychology, lament that social scientists, leftists, and feminists simply dismissed Wilson's scientific truth out of hand, attacking him personally because they Hate Science.  If Wilson wanted his ideas to be taken seriously, he should have come up with something other than these simple-minded Village Atheist cliches.

It appears that Wilson shared Richard Dawkins's fantasy that human beings, especially scientists, are somehow able to "transcend" our genes.  As the molecular biologist Gunther S. Stent wrote of Dawkins at about the same time Midgley published Heart and Mind,

The notion of transcendence of our evolutionary genetic heritage has, in fact, been a characteristic, essentially apologist, stance taken by many ethologists that have made claims for the moral relevance of animal studies. Such ethologists usually first show why evolution has endowed us with a selfish, aggressive, and on the whole, rather nasty set of genes. They then reject the seemingly justified accusation that they are providing a naturalistic justification for an immoral society. To make this rejection, they claim that, on the contrary, they are paving the way for the City of God by pinpointing those beastly aspects of our human genetic heritage that we must struggle to “transcend.”  But the idea of any organism, including man, transcending its genes is a biological absurdity. Within the context of biology as a branch of natural science, and upon proper consideration of any conceivably scientifically valid relation between the genome and phenome, transcendence of genes is no more possible than natural selection of the unfit.*

But Midgley also quotes Wilson walking back from the precipice of genetic transcendence (page 22):

If the brain is a machine of 10 billion nerve cells and the mind can somehow be explained as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, boundaries limit the human prospect -- we are biological and our souls cannot fly free (On Human Nature, p. 1).  [Italics Midgley's.]

The other thing to notice is that Wilson demands that biologists be allowed to steer society when they have not (not then and not since) come up with any findings that would justify their doing so. This is like someone with no flight training experience -- or indeed, someone who has already crashed several planes -- demanding to pilot an airliner.  As Richard Lewontin wrote in his introduction to Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense,** "Despite its recurring failure, the ideology of genetic reductionism persists."

If the mind could be explained -- the "somehow" acknowledges that it hasn't been, yet, and (more important) that Wilson has no idea how it might be done in the first place -- as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions then, maybe, neurobiologists might have something to contribute to ethical discourse.  (Probably not, though, since it would then follow that neurobiology is the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, and control by neurobiologists would be merely automatic control based on our biological properties.) That will have to be seen if they ever actually produce their explanation.  But Wilson merely postulates that it can be done, and as Bertrand Russell said, postulating has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Midgley generously allows that Wilson coudn't possibly believe that, "as his language constantly suggests, genes or DNA were conscious agents, sitting in some inner Kremlin and masterminding events."  (I'm not nearly as generous.)  She concludes that he must mean that "the essential or real self is the biological self, that what biology tells us about ourselves matters supremely, and is the only sort of psychology that does matter" (23-4).  But she stresses that "Wilson has no idea at all of the scale on which conceptual analysis is needed, or the enormous part it plays in life" (20), and concludes that "Not to mince words, Wilson's impression that no special methods of thought are used or needed in this area is a monstrous piece of ignorance, as bad as the ignorance of science which he rightly deplores in humanists" (21).

I completely agree that human beings are "biological" and our brains are "biological," but we are biological in a way that current biology has not yet begun to grasp fully.  It would be different if Wilson had a fully-worked out biology for human beings that could explain everything that the social sciences and humanities try to work with now; but he doesn't, and no one does, so he's laying claim to a territory he doesn't even know how to map, and trying to deny other explorers access to it.  This is a scientific dog-in-the-manger attitude, which needn't be respected.

It would be as churlish to declare dogmatically that biologists never will be able to explain human society purely in terms of brain function, as it would be to say that Christ will never return on clouds of glory, seated at the right hand of power.  But it's not churlish, and in fact it's obligatory, to stress that contrary to their hints and suggestions and sometimes explicit claims, they haven't yet explained it.

To be continued.

* From his introduction to Gunther Stent (editor), Morality as a Biological Phenomenon (Berkeley: University of California Press, rev. ed. 1980), p. 12.
** Edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Gregory Gruber (Harvard, 2013).

Let's Get Critical

I didn't notice at first, but look at those faces.  Are they supposed to represent critical thinkers?  If so, they don't look empowered to me, they look half-asleep, drugged, out of it.  A great advertisement for the power of critical thinking!  But maybe that's just me.

This image was posted on Facebook with the following quotation:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. Carl Sagan

Now, appealing to authority is a very common failure of critical thinking.  (Sagan said it, I believe it, that settles it!)  But I've noticed that many people who fuss about the lack of critical thinking in our society seem rather ... vague ... about what they're asking for.

A good example of what I'm talking about is a book called Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior by Kevin N. Laland and Gillian R. Brown, published a decade ago by Oxford University Press.  It's on a subject that interests me and on which I've read quite a lot over the years, but I got bogged down in the first chapter.

Laland and Brown introduce the sociobiology debates of the 1970s and 1980s, which were sparked by the publication of Edward O. Wilson's textbook Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Harvard, 1975).  Most of the book was solid enough, even according to its critics: it dealt with work on the biology of social behavior among other species, especially insects.  But in the final chapter Wilson tried to apply the same approach to human behavior, which led to problems because while he may have known a lot about the behavior of insects, he was flat wrong in many important respects about the behavior of human beings.  Here's how Laland and Brown tell it, though.

In the final chapter of the book Wilson described how the latest advances in the study of animal behavior, particularly the insights of biologists Robert Trivers and Bill Hamilton, might explain many aspects of human behavior. He provided biological explanations for a broad range of controversial topics, including the differences between the sexes, human aggression, religion, homosexuality, and xenophobia. He also predicted that it would not be long before the social sciences were subsumed within the biological sciences. Wilson’s book provoked an uproar and launched what is now known as the ‘sociobiology debate’, which raged throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Social scientists bitterly disputed Wilson’s claims, found fault with his methods, and dismissed his explanations as speculative stories.  Intriguingly, among the most prominent critics were two members of Wilson’s own department at Harvard, evolutionary biologists Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould, who vehemently attacked the book in the popular press as simple-minded and reductionist. Yet most biologists could see the potential of the sociobiological viewpoint, which had paid great dividends in understanding other animals, and many were drawn into using these new tools to interpret humanity. The debate became polarized and highly political, with the sociobiologists accused of bolstering right-wing conservative values and the critics associated with Marxist ideology [4-5].

There are several problems here.  The "explanations" that Wilson provided for those controversial topics were, as his critics charged, speculative stories.  I'm best acquainted with the "explanation" for homosexuality, which attempted to explain the survival of a non-reproductive form of sexual behavior like homosexuality by postulating that maybe men who didn't have children were more helpful with their heterosexual siblings' children, thus increasing the chances of people who shared their genes.  This is a pretty notion, and neither implausible nor illogical.  It got a lot of attention in the gay press at the time; I remember seeing it touted in an article in Christopher Street.  But it was pure speculation, a Just-So Story invented to show how a certain result came to be.  There was no evidence whatever to support it, and in science the way I learned it at my mama's knee, it isn't a scientific explanation until you have evidence that supports it, preferably to the exclusion of alternative hypotheses.  Wilson's speculations were a tad more sophisticated than those of his Social-Darwinist forebears, but still unfounded.  (The same hypothesis is still with us, but still without sufficient evidence to support it.  Notice that in that 2010 story Wilson's idea is clearly and accurately labeled a speculation, "toyed with" in the field since he "raised it.")

So it was quite proper of social scientists to point out that Wilson got a lot of important things wrong in their field, but Laland and Brown suggest that they were just anti-science or at least anti-biology.  They admit that Wilson's speculations also were criticized by other biologists, but they too were just being bad sports who "vehemently attacked the book in the popular press as simple-minded and reductionist."  But this is incorrect.  I read a lot of Gould at the time (didn't get to Lewontin until much later), along with other writers in the debates, and as I remember it Gould (like other scientists) granted that Sociobiology was a valuable and important book when it dealt with insects, but went astray when Wilson addressed human behavior.  (P.S. I recently reread Gould's review of Wilson, and I remembered right.  It's interesting that Laland and Brown got it wrong.) There's nothing wrong per se with calling the book simple-minded and reductionist; perhaps it was; certainly Laland and Brown have mustered no reason to suppose it wasn't, though they promise to address the topic in more depth in a later chapter.  As for "vehement," though, Gould and Lewontin always seemed to me to be quite civil in their criticisms, focusing on evidence rather than personalities.  (Take a look at this 1975 letter to the New York Review of Books for a sample of the criticism Wilson's book received.  I suppose it's vehement, but it's not abusive.  It focuses on the scientific faults of Wilson's argument before it points out its political ramifications.)  It was mostly their opponents who resorted to abuse.  Michael Ruse is a good example; see his attack on Gould I quoted here, and his fussing in an interview that "You don't make progress by sitting on your bum farting on about spandrels" (quoted here). Richard Dawkins, with his idiotic hawker style as Andre Pichot calls it, didn't really join the lists until later, but he did nothing to advance civility in the debates.  Steven Pinker's another late arrival who prefers to attack his opponents for their politics rather than their science.  For that matter, Wilson himself would later rant that "Multiculturalism equals relativism equals no supercollider equals communism."  Laland and Brown do the same thing, only more mildly, and with false equivalence between sides (both of them were polarized).

"Yet most biologists," Leland and Brown write, "could see the potential of the sociobiological viewpoint, which had paid great dividends in understanding other animals, and many were drawn into using these new tools to interpret humanity."  As far as I can tell, the critics of sociobiology didn't deny that the approach had "potential."  They were critical of the results sociobiologists claimed to have produced, but that is not merely normal in science, it's normative: scientists are supposed to try to tear each other's claims to bits.  So why did sociobiologists cry "no fair" when their work received precisely the scrutiny that every scientist officially expects?  My own guess is that it's because they weren't doing good science, for political reasons, and they knew it.

Laland and Brown then cite a corrective to all this polarization and fussin' and fightin'.  (Again, it's significant that they see critical disagreement as a bad thing.) 

In the midst of this controversy, when emotions were raised, and knee-jerk reactions common, the position of John Maynard Smith, one of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists, stands out for its balanced judgment and fairness. In the heat of the debate, Maynard Smith retained a dignified intermediate position, supporting science over politics and being angry at much of the unjust criticism directed at Wilson, while at the same time remaining very conscious of the dangers of an inappropriate use of biology. In an interview in 1981, he stated:

I have a lot of the gut feelings of my age of being horrified and scared of the application of biology to the social sciences – I can see … race theories, Nazism, anti-semitism and all of that. So that my initial gut reaction to Wilson’s Sociobiology was one of considerable annoyance and distress (1981: quoted in Segerstråle, 2000, pp. 240-1).

Maynard Smith confessed to finding some of Wilson’s views on human behavior ‘half-baked’, even ‘silly’. Yet in a balanced review of Sociobiology he described the book as making ‘a major contribution’ to an understanding of animal behavior and was careful to stress its many positive features [5] ...

Here Laland and Brown make a very common and popular error: they confuse moderation of tone with moderation of content, and they confuse both with being correct.  To put it crudely, suppose I say that 2 plus 2 equals 2, and you say that 2 plus 2 equals 4.  We disagree 'vehemently,' voices raised, and are near blows when along comes Maynard Smith to settle the debate by suggesting equably that 2 plus 2 equals 3.  Since he is in the middle of the road, balanced and careful to stress the many positive features of both our positions, we embrace him and his answer, joyously renouncing polarization and all its works.  Two plus two equals three, praise Pythagoras!  Let the lion lie down with the lamb!

In fact, it's Laland and Brown who place politics over science: Can't we all get along? they ask. Can't we be nice to each other? There's no need for anyone to raise their voices.  But while civility and calm are nice to have, they are irrelevant to truth in a debate.  Laland and Brown are also incorrect in ascribing "balance" to Maynard Smith alone.  Stephen Jay Gould was not alone in admitting the value of much of Wilson's book.  This did not, however, in any way, mean that Wilson's chapter on human behavior wasn't mistaken, simple-minded, reductionist, or pernicious.  Tone and content are two separate issues.  The content must be addressed on its merits, not by throwing tantrums about socialist feminists who hate science.

I don't deny that people let their emotions (or politics or wishful thinking) cloud their reasoning and arguments.  That should be a given when you're applying critical thinking.  Among the many things you learn in learning how to think critically is how to peel away the layers of emotion to try to get at the underlying argument -- which may or may not be rational.  It's not that people always try to obfuscate in order to distract attention from the flaws in their reasoning; I don't think Laland and Brown are doing that, for instance.  But they do obscure the issues by laying stress on tone and politics, all the while evidently convinced of their own reasonable rationalism.  Once you have laid bare the bones of your opponent's argument, you can then wax polemical, but only as long as your own argument remains correct.  Personally I like polemic, an admission that should surprise no one who reads this blog; but I demand that my polemics be rational and well-informed.  But I've also observed that any criticism, no matter how calm and mild in tone, will be perceived by its subject as mean and hateful -- and it will feel all the meaner and more hateful the more correct it is.

Finally, bear in mind that Laland and Brown are both scientists themselves, a research fellow and a research scientist respectively at the University of Cambridge.  Supposedly they have been trained in critical thinking and scientific method.  One reason for the stylized form of scientific publication, much like a recipe, is to try to keep emotion and politics out of the product so that fellow scientists can focus on the scientific substance.  Still, this usually works only in what Thomas Kuhn called "normal science," the routine work that doesn't upset any apple carts.  When someone comes along with a radically new theory, no matter how routine the presentation, it will still arouse emotion.  And once a scientist ventures outside the paradigm of the scientific journal article, he or she usually finds it difficult to stay rational and critical, and the scientist's temperament comes to the fore.  For Laland and Brown, the temperament involved prefers to avoid conflict and raised voices, to the extent that they find it difficult to cope with temperaments that delight in dialectic; their training fails them the minute they most enter unfamiliar territory.  But the failure isn't their subjects' rationality, it's their style.  Which has nothing much to do with scientific substance.

At the time of the 1990s Sex Panic, largely targeting gay men in New York, some people pointed out that "unsafe sex" was simply sex. Safe sex, whatever its necessity in certain circumstances, was not the default setting.  It occurred to me the other day that "magical thinking" is ordinary, vernacular, commonsense thinking, not some bizarre marginal (worse yet, "primitive") variety of thought.  Learning to think of the universe as not alive, not purposive, not something like a person, is very difficult, probably impossible.  Some people can manage this trick better than others, but they too fall back into natural language and natural thought when they're off the clock.

Of course I'm not suggesting that "natural" is always better.  What I hope to warn against is the assumption that it's only necessary to brush away a few conceptual cobwebs, obsolete heirlooms of our tribal, Stone Age past, to think clearly and See the World As It Is.  Because here's the thing about Critical Thinking: neither the world (or "Nature" -- at any rate, the impersonal Out There) or other human beings are going to hand you problems neatly on a platter.  (See?  Here's your Major Premise, and here's your Minor Premise, and here's your Conclusion.  And I've trimmed away the fat of emotion, politics, and wishful thinking for you, so all you have to do is look at the bare structure.  I think that because this is how Logic is taught, many people who should know better believe that it's how Logic works.  But once you're out of the playpen of Logic 101, you have to learn to trim away the extraneous matter yourself -- and that's not easy.)  You're going to have to look at them, think them over a while, and then try to figure out what is going on here.  Nature, not being a person, doesn't have likes or dislikes; people often do.  But more often they don't realize how they're obfuscating.  Because they are scientists, they are rational and critical by ascription.  But you only need to watch them a while to see how wrong they are.

The Genealogy of Morals

I can't now remember how I came across Morality as a Biological Phenomenon: the Presuppositions of Sociobiological Research, edited by Gunther S. Stent and published by the University of California Press in 1980, but I'm glad I did. Stent's introductory essay, which I want to write about later, is especially interesting, and I'm still working my way through the book.

"The Biology of Morals from a Psychological Perspective," by P. H. Wolff, seems at odds with the general approach of the collection. Wolff, a developmental neuropsychologist in Boston, puts his foot in it on the very first page.

Like other natural scientists, biologists are guided by an ethical code of procedure, but they usually take for granted the values implicit in the scientific method. The scientific study of human morals, however, makes values themselves the subject matter for investigation, and therefore requires an explicit definition of morality and of the criteria by which various behavior patterns can be categorized as moral. The ultimate criterion applied by biologists to evaluate the relevance of social behavior is survival of the genotype. Natural selection operates on social behaviors that promote reproductive advantage, whereas the individuals whose moral behavior has evolved are not, or need not be, aware of the reasons for the selective fitness of their behavioral genotype.

By contrast, moral philosophers, and at least some psychological theories of morality, consider as moral only those forms of human behavior for which intention, deliberate choice among equally determined actions, and awareness of the social consequences of alternative actions can be assumed. Social behavior that is so rigidly determined by biological mechanisms as to be involuntary is considered to have no more moral content than the human sucking reflex or the gaping response of the herring gull. Yet, from a rigorous biological perspective, both reflex behaviors would have moral relevance. The biological and psychological approaches to human morals may therefore diverge so greatly as to be irreconcilable.

By positing survival of the genotype as a necessary and sufficient sufficient criterion of moral behavior, the biological approach either trivializes the central problems of human morality, or dismisses them as irrelevant epiphenomena. ... We are inclined to absolve transgressions of responsibility when medical diagnosis identifies the physiological causes of antisocial behavior, but we insist on moral responsibility when no such causes can be demonstrated. Thus, we arrive at a classification of human morals under which only social behavior is considered to have moral content for which no causal mechanisms can be demonstrated. Should progress in biological research eventually all varieties of pro- and antisocial behavior in terms of metabolic processes, the belief in moral autonomy and freedom of choice would itself be shown to have genetic determinants, and the traditional views of human morality would evaporate as historical curiosities [83-85].

It's true that the ultimate criterion in evolutionary theory is survival of the genotype, but I can't see any reason to call it moral. Scientists are of course free to grab any term they like, redefine it to suit their research program, and use it happily. Physicists who refer to the "color" or "beauty" of subatomic particles are in little danger of confusing non-physicists or themselves with the possibility that beauty in a quark is the same as beauty in a person, let alone that quark beauty is True Beauty, and that traditional views of human beauty are curiosities suitable for museums and the scrap heap of history.

When biologists and wannabes borrow terms like "moral" or "selfish" for their own use, though, trouble usually ensues. Not only the ignorant masses but the scientists themselves have trouble distinguishing between the different meanings, and it doesn't help when scientists claim that their definition is the real deal, and the "traditional view" just a superstitious vanity. So you get someone like Richard Dawkins insisting that the "selfish gene" isn't selfish in the same way people are, that in any case having selfish genes doesn't make individuals selfish, though he also says that we are born selfish, but are able to "transcend" our genes in some mysterious way.

While "the sucking reflex" that enables a newborn to get nourishment from its mother's breast is valuable for its own survival and so for the survival of Homo sapiens as a species, it really doesn't make any sense to call it "moral", even biologically moral. I suspect that behind such redefinition there lurks a Platonic conception of "species" as some sort of transcendental entity more real than individuals, whose survival isn't just a metaphor but a higher truth. I also suspect that the biologists who do this believe that they really are using "moral" correctly according to its platonically true meaning, and that any other use is not just unscientific but wrong, and superstitious nonsense to boot.

To put it bluntly, where the biological and psychological approaches to human morality clash, the biological approach should lose. Wolff should have included the philosophical approach among the alternatives, though, because moral philosophy is the field of study that actually addresses the meaning of human morality on its own terms (however badly it often does its job).

The really bad thing about positing biological morality as genotype survival is that biologists are perennially tempted to apply biological morality to social morality. If survival of the genotype is true morality, then anyone who chooses not to have offspring is immoral for not doing their part -- except for biologically inferior individuals however they are defined, who should not reproduce at all. Homosexuals, the celibate, all are biologically immoral if they don't reproduce; the sick, the lame, the halt are biologically immoral if they do. It also means that biological morality, far from applying to social behavior -- that is, between individuals of the same species -- is really about the relation between the individual and the Genotype. We've been there before.

Also, it doesn't take Darwinian theory or modern medicine to claim that some individuals, because of their physiological condition, are not responsible for their acts. What we suppose to be the true cause of that condition has changed over the centuries, but it's not a modern development to make allowance for people who aren't in their right mind. What is somewhat new is the scientific notion that biology determines behavior totally, and that no behavior whether pro- or anti-social is the result of "metabolic processes," so that choice is an illusion.

I'm not sure to what extent Wolff actually believes all this. After surveying "social learning theory" for a few pages, he advocates "a more flexible approach to sociobiology," and concludes that

The capacity to reflect on and choose among alternative outcomes is inherent to mature human intelligence. ... Biological evolution does not specify what forms of social action regulate moral conduct, but it defines the boundaries of ethical behavior compatible with species survival. Biology does not specify the choices made, but it prepares the structural conditions without which there can be neither intention or deliberate choice [91-92].

It seems, then, that Wolff considers intention and deliberate choice to be realities, rather than the illusions many sociobiologists and other scientists suppose them to be. His conclusion is basically a platitude, though, which requires neither biology nor psychology to state. Like too many scientists, he seems to think that a person with scientific training doesn't need to be informed philosophically about issues like morality, even though science is nowhere near encroaching on them. That was true in the 1970s when Wolff wrote his paper, and it's still true now.

I Like A Girl With Spirit!

There’s a story I’ve been hearing for some time now, from Golda Meir’s days in the Israeli cabinet, before she became Prime Minister. I haven’t had much luck tracking it down, but I have found this direct quotation (unfortunately unsourced):

Once in the Cabinet we had to deal with the fact that there had been an outbreak of assaults on women at night. One minister (a member of an extreme religious party) suggested a curfew. Women should stay at home after dark. I said: "but it's the men attacking the women. If there's to be a curfew, let the men stay at home, not the women."

Of course the proposed curfew was not enacted; contrary to what most people who tell this story seem to think, I wonder if it had a chance to begin with, since Meir singles out the minister who suggested it as “a member of an extreme religious party” (this was the 1950s, when the ultraorthodox were not the force they are today in Israeli politics). But everyone loves Meir’s comeback, because despite her general anti-feminism, she put her finger on the key issue: why should women, but not men, have to adjust their behavior?

Remember that one result of such a curfew would be that any woman who was raped after curfew would be legally assumed to be “asking for it,” thus letting off the rapist. (I’m not just speculating; such blaming the victim has been traditional in American practice, unquestioned until feminists fought it.) This would also be a consequence of Thornhill and Palmer’s suggestion, in A Natural History of Rape, that girls be taught not to dress provocatively, which is not just stupid and malevolent, it’s regressive. (The same is true, by the way, for their suggestion of mandatory rape-prevention classes for boys, teaching them that they are biologically prone to sexual assault. You don’t have to be a professional psychologist to know that such teaching would encourage rape, not discourage it. But Thornhill and Palmer are scientists, so they must know what they’re talking about.)

Martha McCaughey, in The Caveman Mystique, page 94, quotes two more guys who

remind readers that they do not mean to imply that women should begin to forgive sexual harassers:

It is simply our hope that the more we understand about the evolution of human psychology, the closer we will be to developing appropriate and effective solutions for such unfortunate and deplorable side effects of human nature and behavior as sexual harassment.

Their solution involves changing

the structure of the organizational environment which would reduce the stimulus and opportunity for evolved male sexual psychology to motivate the initiation of sexual advances, and allow women more freedom to change jobs or change their working environment, as they feel is necessary.
Allowing harassers more “freedom” to get fired is not mentioned as a solution, nor is equal pay, although earlier the authors state that women’s economic position relative to men’s makes this male strategy surface (the way lots of gardening makes calluses come out). …

Notice the pious beginning, followed by the assumption that “the organizational environment” should be rearranged around men’s immutable “evolved” obnoxiousness, and that women should be freer to “change jobs” or, in some unspecified way, “their working environment.” (Certainly not in any way that would inconvenience the men.) It’s never clear in such discussions how we – that is, evolutionary psychologists -- know that women are so malleable, so flexible, compared to men’s “evolved” rigidity, which will go all limp if it’s not given free rein. I suspect that malleability is simply assumed, on the male-supremacist postulate that women exist to give service to men; not merely sexual and domestic service, but emotional service as well. (There are echoes of behaviorism in McCaughey’s targets: they want to structure the work environment so as to “reduce the stimulus and opportunity for evolved male sexual psychology to motivate the initiation of sexual advances,” which is right out of Skinner.)

Richard Dawkins exploded (he tends to explode a lot) in a 1997 interview quoted by McCaughey (122f):

[T]he opponents of sociobiology 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. They look at what we say about natural selection, as a scientific theory for what is, and they assume that anybody who says that so and so is the case, must therefore be advocating that it ought to be the case in human politics. They cannot see that it is possible to separate one’s scientific beliefs about what is the case in nature from one’s political beliefs about what ought to be in human society.

It is, however, Dawkins who is clearly too stupid to understand the difference he harps on. In his bestseller The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976, p 126) he wrote:

Since we humans do not want to return to the old selfish ways where we let the children of too-large families starve to death, we have abolished the family as a unit of economic self-sufficiency, and substituted the state. But the privilege of guaranteed support for children should not be abused. … Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.

I found this bit of old-fashioned scientific racism (the Pope is ordering the stinking Irish to breed like rabbits so he can take over England!) quoted in Not in Our Genes (Pantheon, 1984) by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In its original context it’s even worse, deranged in fact: to start with, Dawkins believes that there is a gene “for having too many children”, which makes no sense. Evolutionary theory is based on the assumption that all animals have “too many children”: “All species overproduce offspring, not all of which can survive to reproduce in their turn. Thus, there is inevitable competition among the individuals of each species for the means to survive and reproduce, and any inherited advantage in this competition will be naturally selected” (Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, quoted in McCaughey, p. 27). Further, “the family” is not the “unit of economic self-sufficiency”, communities are, and “the old selfish ways” are a figment of Dawkin’s imagination: societies have always made provision for people who need help, and adults limited the size of their families long before modern contraception. Infanticide, especially, is very old, both as a means of culling and as a means of redistributing children to parents who can and want to support them. (Exposed children didn’t always die, as exemplified by the fictional but realistic case of Oedipus.) I’ve often observed that people who like to think of themselves as hard-headed realists tend to be soft-headed fantasists, and Dawkins fits the mold.

“Men must stop prostrating themselves to science,” McCaughey says (136), but “hiding behind” might express it better. It seems to be typical for evolutionary psychologists to begin their sermons by deploring the amorality of “nature.” (They also tend to personify “nature” and “evolution,” but that’s a topic for another day.) They think that doing so proves they don’t justify rape or male promiscuity, and they get very self-righteous when their magic shield doesn’t work. Considering that they have no real evidence that all men are genetically predisposed to abuse women, they shouldn’t be so surprised when feminists (and not only feminists) suspect that they aren’t as disinterested as they’d like to think. When your conclusions aren’t supported by your evidence, it is only reasonable to suspect that you have a personal investment in your conclusions. As Dorothy Dinnerstein wrote over thirty years ago in her brilliant (though, I admit, uneven) book The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976, 215ff):

I have seen on the faces of some men who are on the whole quite likable a certain smile that I confess I find deeply unattractive: a helpless smile of self-congratulation when some female disadvantage is referred to. And I have heard in their voices a tone that (in the context of what women put up with) is equally unattractive: a tone of self-righteous, self-pitying aggrievement when some male disadvantage becomes obvious. This sense of being put upon that many men feel in the fact of evidence that the adult balance of power is not at every point by a safe margin in their favor seems based on the implicit axiom that to make life minimally bearable, to keep their very chins above water, to offset some outrageous burden that they carry, they must at least feel that they are clearly luckier and mightier than women are.

I detect just that kind of smirk in David Barash’s complaint, “If Nature is sexist don’t blame her sons,” quoted by Hilary Rose in Alas Poor Darwin (Harmony Books, 2000, 139). Notice first the personification of “nature”; Nature is not a person and cannot be sexist. But “her sons” can be, and often are; hiding behind Mother’s skirts won’t help them.

Won't Get Fooled Again

I just finished reading Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture debate in the twentieth century, by Aaron Gillette, published last year by Palgrave Macmillan. Gillette, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston-Downtown, has another book awaiting publication, on “the development of a ‘Latin’ variety of eugenics in the early 20th century. Latin eugenics was ultimately used as a tool by Fascist Italy in an attempt to dominate the scientific life of Latin America and other Latin countries.” Ooookay.

The best I can say for Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture debate in the twentieth century is that it’s frustrating. Like many scholars, Gillette gives good research: he’s dug into the archives of twentieth-century biology and eugenics, and has unearthed some interesting material, especially on eugenics in Fascist Italy. (Historians usually focus on the US, Britain, and Germany for this topic.) I’m no expert, but I’ve read a fair amount in this area, and I’m not sure how much light he really casts on the usual US/UK suspects; Daniel Kevles’s In the name of eugenics, for example, a careful and thoughtful study of the same era, isn’t even mentioned in his bibliography. What seems to be Gillette’s main argument, that 19^th and early 20^th century biologists did important work in what would now be called “evolutionary psychology”, doesn’t feel like news to me.

But research is only half of the work of scholarship, and like many scholars, Gillette stumbles when he interprets his data. This produces some bloopers from the beginning of the book, which largely set its tone. He begins by telling how,

On February 15, 1978, Edward O. Wilson sat on the stage of an auditorium, waiting to address an audience. Suddenly, a young woman leapt onto the stage, grasped a pitcher of ice water, and poured it onto Wilson’s head. Others ran onto the stage and waved anti-Wilson placards, chanting, “Wilson, you’re all wet!”

Several weeks before, two of Wilson’s colleagues, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, wrote an attack against him in the New York Review of Books. They claimed that Wilson was an ally of eugenicists, and his theory was a dangerous pseudoscience associated with “the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.”

It’s not clear who is being quoted here. Gillette gives no citation for Lewontin and Gould’s “attack”; an endnote cites John Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (Oxford, 2003), p. 3, and Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (Viking, 2002), p. 109. But he seems to be quoting from a letter published in the New York Review of Books on 13 November 1975 – three years earlier than the date he assigns to it – “prepared by a group of university faculty and scientists, high school teachers, doctors, and students who work in the Boston area” and signed by Gould and Lewontin along with many others. Sloppy, Aaron, sloppy.

I can’t see where the letter calls Wilson “an ally of eugenicists.” It does say at the outset that not Wilson’s but earlier biological-determinist theories “provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.” I suspect that Gillette drew on partial quotations from this letter in Alcorn and Pinker without reading the whole text, which took me about five minutes to find on the web.

More damaging to Gillette’s account, the bulk of the letter criticizes the substance of Wilson’s theory, a critique that would be extended and developed in years to come. It also undermines Gillette’s main thesis, that the non-eugenic work of early 20^th-century biologists had been suppressed for ideological reasons and forgotten: the writers of the letter note the existence of that work, and comment that “Each time these ideas have resurfaced the claim has been made that they were based on new scientific information. Yet each time, even though strong scientific arguments have been presented to show the absurdity of these theories, they have not died.” The amnesia was actually to be found among the sociobiologists, and later evolutionary psychologists, who thought, or claimed for PR reasons, that they were offering new insights into human nature. (Among those PR reasons would have been the wish to dissociate themselves from the discreditable racism of their predecessors.)

Gillette undermines his own case by using the term “evolutionary psychology” anachronistically for all biological-determinist science from Darwin’s day to the present; the idea is presumably to stress the continuity of Wilson and Pinker with Robert Yerkes, Madison Grant, Julian Huxley, and other eugenicists – but that continuity is exactly what, for PR reasons, contemporary evolutionary psychologists want to deny. (I’m reminded of the way that Intelligent Design’s proponents hope that label will distance them from “Scientific Creationism”, also for PR reasons.)

Another important point from the letter (my italics, by the way):

We are not denying that there are genetic components to human behavior. But we suspect that human biological universals are to be discovered more in the generalities of eating, excreting and sleeping than in such specific and highly variable habits as warfare, sexual exploitation of women and the use of money as a medium of exchange.

This is important because one standard riposte to criticism of biological determinism is the claim that the critic believes that human beings are a “blank slate,” or as Gillette puts it, “that human behavior is almost entirely molded by environment and culture, rather than instinct or heredity” (171 note 4). Attempting to settle the question by labeling, Gillette lumps together all critics of biological determinism under the rubric of “behavioral environmentalism.” This is disingenuous, to put it gently, since among those critics are people like Noam Chomsky, who believes that language is innate and is famous for his attacks on B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism; geneticists like Richard Lewontin and Ruth Hubbard, and other biologists. Those interested might look at Alas, Poor Darwin, edited by Steven Rose and Hilary Rose (Harmony Books, 2000) which covers most of the issues Gillette believes to be settled.

The other standard move is to associate criticism of biological determinism with “the Left.” (For example, the Publishers Weekly review of Alcock’s The Triumph of Sociobiology identifies the field’s critics as “many feminist and socialist thinkers” who embrace “the competing blank-slate ‘culture is all’ theory.) If true, this only implies that leftists have better sense than rightists. But its purpose is to avoid addressing the substantive criticisms of the critics by attacking their ideology – exactly what Gillette, Pinker, and so many others accuse the critics of doing. One suspects projection.

Gillette also relies on overwrought rhetoric to present his eugenicists and sociobiologists as pitiful victims (or “casualties”) of behaviorist ideologues. Early on he tells of a hapless fellow named Craig Stanford, who,

while attending a seminar on primate societies, made the mistake of claiming that chimpanzee communities had cultures. The infuriated cultural anthropologists attending the seminar “fairly leaped across the seminar table” to verbally garrotte Stanford.

“Verbally garrotte”? Gillette continues through the book with terms like “the battle”, “the melee”, the “conflagration”; well, at least he didn’t use “Holocaust.” But only the biological determinists are haloed with such terminology. When he discusses Franz Boas, the influential anthropologist who opposed and criticized biological determinism in the first half of the 20^th century, Gillette clucks disapprovingly over Boas’s adversary, the eugenicist Madison Grant:

Grant would tell anyone willing to listen how much he loathed Boas[, who] “naturally does not take stock in any anthropology which relegates him and his race to the inferior position that they have occupied throughout recorded history."

Sound familiar? See the pattern? When Boas publicly criticized government censorship during World War I,

Boas’s enemies were delighted. They maneuvered the American Anthropology Association into censoring [sic] him, in 1919, for his “anti-American statements.”

But Gillette never uses his rhetoric of violence to describe the attacks on Boas, nor does he see it as ideological suppression of dissent that, though “Boas’s troops may have been gaining control over the American Anthropology Association, the hereditarians gained control over that most critical resource of modern science: money.”

More serious, Gillette minimizes the connection of American eugenics with Nazi “race science,” which is difficult to do since as he admits, the major American eugenicists endorsed Hitler’s eugenic programs. For example, he quotes Paul Popenoe, who wrote:

Not even Hitler proposes to sterilize anyone on the ground of racial origin. My impression is that the Germans are much more anxious to weed out the undesirable elements among the non-Aryan groups. The law that has been adopted is not a half-baked and hasty improvisation of the Hitler regime, but is the product of many years of consideration by the best specialists in Germany. I must say that my impression is, from a careful following of the situation in the German scientific press, rather favorable.

Gillette comments:

Hitler’s policies and the lukewarm support he received from some American eugenicists doomed eugenics in the United States.

To which I can only say: Jesus H. Christ – you call that “lukewarm”?

Gillette mentions just once, in passing, the American sterilization laws that influenced and inspired the Nazi programs, and which continued to be implemented through the 1970s: the Italian eugenicist “Corrado Gini also rejected the practice of American sterilization in a response to Davenport’s presidential address” at the Third International Congress of Eugenics in 1932, but Gillette never draws the connecting lines. That has to be deliberate, and it doesn’t speak well for him. (And really, why did John Alcock choose a title like The Triumph of Sociobiology? It calls up such unfortunate associations.)

Nor does his claim that

Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have absolutely no interest in creating ideological movements or becoming involved in politics. With a few notable exceptions, they even eschew making policy recommendations to improve society. Such is the beneficial result of the reaction against eugenics and racism.

Well, maybe this is true if you overlook the ballyhooed tract The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, which said and did exactly what Gillette claims isn’t being done or said, and which got a lot of favorable media attention even before its publication in 1994. (It also got a lot of fierce criticism, from the usual “feminist and socialist thinkers.”) But maybe it’s one of Gillette’s “few notable exceptions.” The Bell Curve was another example of the pattern described by Wilson’s critics in 1975, where the same old claims are recycled periodically as new and exciting science.

Gillette’s repeated claims that evolutionary psychology today has nothing to do with eugenics don’t convince me. The eugenicists he exhumes would surely have rejected his thesis, and reasonably so. They insisted that the behavior determined by biology included things like criminality, poverty, and other kinds of deviance, and that such defects should be extirpated from society by eugenic measures, including sterilization of the carriers, whether voluntary or involuntary. Today’s biological determinists prudently refrain from making such recommendations, at least most of the time; they may, like Herrnstein and Murray, just shake their heads in sorrow and ask rhetorically, “What Is To Be Done?” This division of labor shouldn’t fool anyone who doesn’t want to be fooled. Evidently Aaron Gillette does want to be fooled.