Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology

Darwin always understood that an animal’s behaviour is as much a part of its repertoire in the struggle for existence as any of its physical adaptations. Indeed, he was particularly interested in social behaviour, because in certain respects it seemed to contradict his conception of the struggle as taking place between, and for the sole benefit of, individuals. As noted above, he was inclined to think that nests of social insects should be regarded as superorganisms rather than as groups of individuals engaged in cooperative or (at times) self-sacrificing, or altruistic, behaviour.

In the century after the publication of On the Origin of Species the biological study of behaviour was slow to develop. In part this was because behaviour in itself is much more difficult to record and measure than physical characteristics. Experiment also is particularly difficult, for it is notoriously true that animals change their behaviours in artificial conditions. Another factor that hampered the study of behaviour was the rise of the social sciences in the early 20th century. Because these disciplines were overwhelmingly oriented toward behaviourism, which by and large restricted itself to the overt and observable, the biological and particularly evolutionary influences on behaviour tended to be discounted even before investigation was begun.

An important dissenting tradition was represented by the European practitioners of ethology, who insisted from the 1920s that behaviour must be studied in a biological context. The development in the 1960s of evolutionary explanations of social behaviour in individualistic terms (see above Levels of selection) led to increased interest in social behaviour among evolutionary theorists and eventually to the emergence of a separate field devoted to its study, sociobiology, as well as to the growth of allied subdisciplines within psychology and philosophy. The basic ideas of the movement were formulated in Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), by Edward O. Wilson, and popularized in The Selfish Gene (1976), by the British biologist Richard Dawkins.

These works, Wilson’s in particular, were highly controversial, mainly (though not exclusively) because the theories they propounded applied to humans. Having surveyed social behaviour in the animal world from the most primitive forms up to primates, Wilson argued that Homo sapiens is part of the evolutionary world in its behaviour and culture. Although he did allow that experience can have effects, the legacy of the genes, he argued, is much more important. In male-female relationships, in parent-child interactions, in morality, in religion, in warfare, in language, and in much else, biology matters crucially.

Many philosophers and social scientists, notably Philip Kitcher, Richard Lewontin, and Stephen Jay Gould, rejected the new sociobiology with scorn. The claims of the sociobiologists were either false or unfalsifiable. Many of their conjectures had no more scientific substance than Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories for children, such as How the Camel Got His Hump and How the Leopard Got His Spots. Indeed, their presumed genetic and evolutionary explanations of a wide variety of human behaviour and culture served in the end as justifications of the social status quo, with all its ills, including racism, sexism, homophobia, materialism, violence, and war. The title of Kitcher’s critique of sociobiology, Vaulting Ambition, is an indication of the attitude that he and others took to the new science.

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Although there was some truth to these criticisms, sociobiologists since the 1970s have made concerted efforts to address them. In cases where the complaint had to do with falsifiability or testability, newly developed techniques of genetic testing have proved immensely helpful. Many sociobiological claims, for example, concern the behaviour of parents. One would expect that, in populations in which males compete for females and (as in the case of birds) also contribute toward the care of the young, the efforts of males in that regard would be tied to reproductive access and success. (In other words, a male who fathered four offspring would be expected to work twice as hard in caring for them as a male who fathered only two offspring.) Unfortunately, it was difficult, if not impossible, to verify paternity in studies of animal populations until the advent of genetic testing in the 1990s. Since then, sociobiological hypotheses regarding parenthood have been able to meet the standard of falsifiability insisted on by Karl Popper and others, and in many cases they have turned out to be well-founded.

Regarding social and ethical criticisms, sociobiologists by and large have had no significant social agendas, and most have been horrified at the misuse that has sometimes been made of their work. They stress with the critics that differences between the human races, for example, are far less significant than similarities, and in any case whatever differences there may be do not in themselves demonstrate that any particular race is superior or inferior to any other. Similarly, in response to criticism by feminists, sociobiologists have argued that merely pointing out genetically-based differences between males and females is not in itself sexist. Indeed, one might argue that not to recognize such differences can be morally wrong. If boys and girls mature at different rates, then insisting that they all be taught in the same ways could be wrong for both sexes. Likewise, the hypothesis that something like sexual orientation is under the control of the genes (and that there is a pertinent evolutionary history underlying its various forms) could help to undermine the view among some social conservatives that homosexuals deserve blame for “choosing” an immoral lifestyle.

Moreover, it can be argued with some justice that “just so stories” in their own right are not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, as Karl Popper himself emphasized, one might say that they are exactly the sort of thing that science needs in abundance—bold conjectures. It is when they are simply assumed as true without verification that they become problematic.

In recent years, the sociobiological study of human beings has placed less emphasis on behaviour and more on the supposed mental faculties or properties on which behaviour is based. Such investigations, now generally referred to as “evolutionary psychology,” are still philosophically controversial, in part because it is notoriously difficult to specify the sense in which a mental property is innate and to determine which properties are innate and which are not. As discussed below, however, some philosophers have welcomed this development as providing a new conceptual resource with which to address basic issues in epistemology and ethics.

Evolutionary epistemology

Because the evolutionary origins and development of the human brain must influence the nature, scope, and limits of the knowledge that human beings can acquire, it is natural to think that evolutionary theory should be relevant to epistemology, the philosophical study of knowledge. There are two major enterprises in the field known as “evolutionary epistemology”: one attempts to understand the growth of collective human knowledge by analogy with evolutionary processes in the natural world; the other attempts to identify aspects of human cognitive faculties with deep evolutionary roots and to explain their adaptive significance.

The first project is not essentially connected with evolutionary theory, though as a matter of historical fact those who have adopted it have claimed to be Darwinians. It was first promoted by Darwin’s self-styled “bulldog,” T.H. Huxley (1825–95). He argued that, just as the natural world is governed by the struggle for existence, resulting in the survival of the fittest, so the world of knowledge and culture is directed by a similar process. Taking science as a paradigm of knowledge (now a nearly universal assumption among evolutionary epistemologists), he suggested that ideas and theories struggle against each other for adoption by being critically evaluated; the fittest among them survive, as those that are judged best are eventually adopted.

In the 20th century the evolutionary model of knowledge production was bolstered by Karl Popper’s work in the philosophy of science. Popper argued that science—the best science, that is—confronts practical and conceptual problems by proposing daring and imaginative hypotheses, which are formulated in a “context of discovery” that is not wholly rational, involving social, psychological, and historical influences. These hypotheses are then pitted against each other in a process in which scientists attempt to show them false. This is the “context of justification,” which is purely rational. The hypotheses that remain are adopted, and they are accepted for as long as no falsifying evidence is uncovered.

Critics of this project have argued that it overlooks a major disanalogy between the natural world and the world of knowledge and culture: whereas the mutations that result in adaptation are random—not in the sense of being uncaused but in the sense of being produced without regard to need—there is nothing similarly random about the processes through which new theories and ideas are produced, notwithstanding Karl Popper’s belittling of the “context of discovery.” Moreover, once a new idea is in circulation, it can be acquired without the need of anything analogous to biological reproduction. In the theory of the British zoologist Richard Dawkins, such ideas, which he calls “memes,” are the cultural equivalent of genes.

The second major project in evolutionary epistemology assumes that the human mind, no less than human physical characteristics, has been formed by natural selection and therefore reflects adaptation to general features of the physical environment. Of course, no one would argue that every aspect of human thinking must serve an evolutionary purpose. But the basic ingredients of cognition—including fundamental principles of deductive and inductive logic and of mathematics, the conception of the physical world in terms of cause and effect, and much else—have great adaptive value, and consequently they have become innate features of the mind. As the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) observed, those proto-humans who mastered inductive inference, enabling them to generalize appropriately from experience, survived and reproduced, and those who did not, did not. The innate human capacity for language use may also be viewed in these terms.

Evolutionary ethics

In evolutionary ethics, as in evolutionary epistemology, there are two major undertakings. The first concerns normative ethics, which investigates what actions are morally right or morally wrong; the second concerns metaethics, or theoretical ethics, which considers the nature, scope, and origins of moral concepts and theories.

The best known traditional form of evolutionary ethics is social Darwinism, though this view owes far more to Herbert Spencer than it does to Darwin himself. It begins with the assumption that in the natural world the struggle for existence is good, because it leads to the evolution of animals that are better adapted to their environments. From this premise it concludes that in the social world a similar struggle for existence should take place, for similar reasons. Some social Darwinists have thought that the social struggle also should be physical—taking the form of warfare, for example. More commonly, however, they assumed that the struggle should be economic, involving competition between individuals and private businesses in a legal environment of laissez faire. This was Spencer’s own position.

As might be expected, not all evolutionary theorists have agreed that natural selection implies the justice of laissez-faire capitalism. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), who advocated a group-selection analysis, believed in the justice of actions that promote the welfare of the state, even at the expense of the individual, especially in cases in which the individual is already well-favoured. The Russian theorist of anarchism Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) argued that selection proceeds through cooperation within groups (“mutual aid”) rather than through struggle between individuals. In the 20th century, the British biologist Julian Huxley (1887–1975), the grandson of T.H. Huxley, thought that the future survival of humankind, especially as the number of humans increases dramatically, would require the application of science and the undertaking of large-scale public works, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority. More recently, Edward O. Wilson has argued that, because human beings have evolved in symbiotic relationship with the rest of the living world, the supreme moral imperative is biodiversity.

From a metaethical perspective, social Darwinism was famously criticized by the British philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958). Invoking a line of argument first mooted by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76), who pointed out the fallaciousness of reasoning from statements of fact to statements of moral obligation (from an “is” to an “ought”), Moore accused the social Darwinists of committing what he called the “naturalistic fallacy,” the mistake of attempting to infer nonnatural properties (being morally good or right) from natural ones (the fact and processes of evolution). Evolutionary ethicists, however, were generally unmoved by this criticism, for they simply disagreed that deriving moral from nonmoral properties is always fallacious. Their confidence lay in their commitment to progress, to the belief that the products of evolution increase in moral value as the evolutionary process proceeds—from the simple to the complex, from the monad to the man, to use the traditional phrase. Another avenue of criticism of social Darwinism, therefore, was to deny that evolution is progressive in this way. T.H. Huxley pursued this line of attack, arguing that humans are imperfect in many of their biological properties and that what is morally right often contradicts humans’ animal nature. In the late 20th century, Stephen Jay Gould made similar criticisms of attempts to derive moral precepts from the course of evolution.

The chief metaethical project in evolutionary ethics is that of understanding morality, or the moral impulse in human beings, as an evolutionary adaptation. For all the intraspecific violence that human beings commit, they are a remarkably social species, and sociality, or the capacity for cooperation, is surely adaptively valuable, even on the assumption that selection takes place solely on the level of the individual. Unlike the social insects, human beings have too variable an environment and too few offspring (requiring too much parental care) to be hard-wired for specific cooperative tasks. On the other hand, the kind of cooperative behaviour that has contributed to the survival of the species would be difficult and time-consuming to achieve through self-interested calculation by each individual. Hence, something like morality is necessary to provide a natural impulse among all individuals to cooperation and respect for the interests of others.

Although this perspective does not predict specific moral rules or values, it does suggest that some general concept of distributive justice (i.e., justice as fairness and equity) could have resulted from natural selection; this view, in fact, was endorsed by the American social and political philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002). It is important to note, however, that demonstrating the evolutionary origins of any aspect of human morality does not by itself establish that the aspect is rational or correct.

An important issue in metaethics—perhaps the most important issue of all—is expressed in the question, “Why should I be moral?” What, if anything, makes it rational for an individual to behave morally (by cooperating with others) rather than purely selfishly? The present perspective suggests that moral behaviour did have an adaptive value for individuals or groups (or both) at some stages of human evolutionary history. Again, however, this fact does not imply a satisfactory answer to the moral skeptic, who claims that morality has no rational foundation whatsoever; from the premise that morality is natural or even adaptive, it does not follow that it is rational. Nevertheless, evolutionary ethics can help to explain the persistence and near-universality of the belief that there is more to morality than mere opinion, emotion, or habit. Hume pointed out that morality would not work unless people thought of it as “real” in some sense. In the same vein, many evolutionary ethicists have argued that the belief that morality is real, though rationally unjustified, serves to make morality work; therefore, it is adaptive. In this sense, morality may be an illusion that human beings are biologically compelled to embrace.