The problem of analogical reasoning is particularly acute in making comparisons
between the behaviours of humans and non-human animals. Unlike early hominids,
animals are available for psychologists to observe and record their behaviour.
This has made it very tempting to draw analogies between animal and human
behaviour. Fighting between troops of chimps is like tribal warfare. A male
orangutan's attack on a female is akin to rape. Anal intercourse among rats
is homosexuality. In their book Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham and
Dale Patterson, suggest that the relationship between different troops of
spotted hyenas amount to 'foreign policy' and that chimps exhibit 'imperialistic'
tendencies. EO Wilson has suggested that the behaviour of overcrowded rats
is similar to that of concentration camp victims.
John Maynard Smith has pointed out that such anthropomorphism does little
harm as long as our only interest is in animal behaviour. The problems, he
observes, begin when we assume that animal 'rape' or 'war' can help illuminate
human behaviours of the same name. This is exactly the assumption that evolutionary
psychologists do make: that human and animal behaviours are more than simply
analogous, but are governed by the same laws and forces. Or, to put it another
way, they assume that since only natural selection can shape human behaviour,
it is valid to compare human behaviours with those of animals with whom we
are evolutionarily related.
Natural selection and divine intervention, however, are not the only explanations
for the development of the human mind. There are material causes and motivations
to human behaviour that are entirely absent from animal life. Unlike animals,
humans are social and cultural beings, and human behaviour can only be understood
within a social and cultural context. Of course, many animals are also social.
But one of the fundamental mistakes of evolutionary psychology is to assume
that the sociability of humans is of the same form as the sociality of non-human
animals. This is not so. We may use the same word, but they describe two processes.
'Social' conduct in animals refers to any behaviour exhibited by a group that
interacts with each other. It can range from zebras moving as a herd to minimise
the effects of predators, to bees performing designated roles in a highly
organised hive. One of the triumphs of modern Darwinism has been its explanation
of how selfish genes give rise to social behaviour, including altruism.
Human sociability is entirely different. At its heart lies a skill that is
uniquely human - language. Language allows humans to create a symbolic representation
of the world, a picture of the world separate from the world itself. Without
such a symbolic mode of expression, an animal may be able to react to the
world, but it cannot, in any significant sense, think about it. It can have
beliefs about the world, but it cannot know it has such beliefs. In other
words, without language animals cannot possess self awareness. (There is a
continuing debate as to whether chimpanzees are self-aware, and the extent
to which they can manipulate symbols. This debate does not affect my argument
here because, even should chimps possess both qualities, they do not make
use of them during the normal course of their existence.)
Humans, on the other hand, because we possess language, do not simply have
experiences, desires and needs, and react to them. We are also aware that
we have them, that there is an 'I' which is the subject of these experiences,
and which is a possessor of experiences, desires and needs. In other words
humans are aware of themselves as agents, and of the world towards which their
agency is directed.
Language and self-awareness transforms humanity's relationship to its evolutionary
heritage. Take a basic biological response such as pain. All animals show
pain. It is usually an automatic reflex and utterly recognisable - we are
rarely in doubt when a horse, a dog or even a lizard is in pain. Yet the faculty
of language transforms such a basic instinct within humans. One does not have
to be a Baron Masoch to recognise that pain can sometimes be pleasurable,
that sometimes we may seek pain, as part of sexual or other forms of gratification.
In other words, as basic a physiological response as pain can be mediated
through language and through social conventions, such that the human response
to pain becomes different to that of other animals.
Similarly with anger. In Philip Roth's latest novel I Married a Communist,
Lorraine, the niece of the central character Ira Ringold, refuses to salute
the American flag at school in protest at the McCarthyite witch-hunt against
her uncle. Years later, Lorraine's father, Murray, remembers how he pleaded
with her. 'It's not being angry that's important, it's being angry about the
right things. I told her, look at it from a Darwinian perspective. Anger is
to make you effective. That's its survival function. That's why it's given
to you. If it makes you ineffective, drop it like a hot potato.'
Murray is right: anger is a Darwinian response and has a survival function.
But the very fact that he can recognise this, and understand also that there
are other forms of anger available to human beings, reveals that here, too,
the meaning of a simple Darwinian response has been transformed for humans
through the existence of language and social conventions.
If basic emotions, such as pain and anger, can be given new meanings by being
mediated through language, how much more is this true of more complex emotions
such as guilt and shame? This is not to deny that emotions are evolved traits,
many of which we share with our evolutionary relatives, or that they are universal
to all cultures. But it is to suggest that even basic human emotions cannot
understood in a purely naturalistic fashion, shaped as they are by human social
development. And, if this is so, how is it possible that complex relationships
such as power or love, whose very meanings are specifically human, can be
understood in purely evolutionary, through analogies drawn from non-human
animals, who possess neither language nor self-awareness?
Language and self-awareness transforms human life by making us conscious of
ourselves as agents. Because we are conscious of ourselves as agents, we are
aware of our capacity to transform the world around us. Human history is different
from evolutionary history because it is Lamarckian not Darwinian in form.
The nineteenth century French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck believed
that changes that occur to an individual during its lifetime, in response
to a 'felt need', can be inherited by its progeny. This, he claimed, was the
basis of evolution. The long neck of a giraffe, for instance, evolved by the
animal stretching its neck to browse on the foliage of trees, and its offspring
being subsequently born with longer necks.
Darwin rejected this idea of the 'inheritance of acquired characteristics'.
Instead he argued that random variation exists within a population of organisms,
and that some of these variations will make the individual more successful
in its struggle to survive and reproduce. If individuals are more successful
in reproducing themselves, their characteristics will be passed on to the
next generation.
Lamarckism describes a conscious or willed change, Darwinism an evolutionary
process based on chance variation. We now know that natural evolution works
in a Darwinian fashion. But development in human society is Lamarckian in
form. Because humans possess the capacity for representing the world symbolically,
and because we have created institutions which allow us to possess knowledge
not simply as individuals but collectively as a society, so acquired habits
and knowledge can be passed from generation to generation, transforming human
life - and human nature - in the process. Humans are different because we
are makers of our own history. In attempting to view human society in terms
of natural selection, evolutionary psychologists conflate Darwinian and Lamarckian
forms of evolution.
Human nature is dynamic, something that changes through history, a fact which
evolutionary psychologists fail to grasp. Because they wish to understand
human nature in a purely biological sense, so they have a static notion of
what it means to be human. Human nature was constituted in the Stone Age and
there it stopped. The most important aspect of what it means to be human -
our sense of agency - is missing from Darwinian accounts.
I am not denying the influence of evolution upon human conduct. I am questioning
the adequacy of evolutionary psychology as a means of understanding that influence.
Humans certainly have an evolved psychology, but it cannot be understood in
the same terms as the evolved psychologies of non-human animals. Nor can it
be understood simply as an evolved psychology.
Take for instance, racism. It has become commonplace for evolutionary psychologists
to view it as the product of an evolved trait - the innate propensity to categorise
objects, and to view certain objects as 'natural kinds'. Without such a propensity,
racism certainly could not occur - but nor could science and much else of
human thinking. In any case, as many historians have pointed out, racism has
not existed throughout history. It is a social form specific to modern society.
And even within modern society, the nature and meaning of racism has developed
and changed to a considerable degree. An evolutionary explanation of racism
makes little more sense than an evolutionary explanation of racial difference.
Both the SSSM and evolutionary psychology have a common failing - an inadequate
methodology with which to understand the relationship between our biological
and social aspects. While the one denies Man's biological heritage, the other
subsumes culture to biology. What both fail sufficiently to appreciate is
that humans are subjects of their own history, not simply objects of either
a biological or sociocultural process.
In understanding the human mind, therefore, we do not have to choose simply
between natural selection and divine intervention as causative agents. Humans
are also social creature, and social processes are no less material than physical
ones. Implicitly, evolutionary psychologists understand this. For however
much they may wish to see humans simply as Darwinian creatures they cannot
deny that humans often act contrary to Darwinian principles. Thus, in his
book Evolution in Mind, the psychologist Henry Plotkin opens his discussion
on human culture by claiming that 'There is not much intellectual risk...
in making the assumption that human culture is the product of human evolution.'
A few pages later, though, he is forced to admit a problem with this view.
If 'culture is the direct product of evolution', how is it possible, he asks,
for culture to create forms that can 'adversely affect our biological fitness?'
How, he wonders, can we understand celibacy or the risking of life and limb
in distant wars? 'The only explanation', Plotkin believes, 'is that culture
entails causal mechanisms that are somehow decoupled... from the causal mechanisms
of our biological evolution'. Richard Dawkins similarly writes in The Selfish
Gene that while 'We are built as gene machines... we have the power to
turn against our creators.'
Steven Pinker has put this point most boldly of all. 'By Darwinian standards',
he writes, 'I am a horrible mistake'. Why? Because he has chosen to remain
childless. 'I am happy to be that way', he adds, 'and if my genes don’t
like it they can go and jump in the lake'.
All this is a very stirring defence of human freedom. But how is it possible?
If culture is 'the direct product of evolution', whence the capacity to 'decouple'
the two? How do we possess 'the power to turn against our creators'? Presumably
Pinker believes that his ability to tell his genes to go 'jump in the lake'
must itself be an evolved trait. But how could such a trait survive? By definition
it reduces biological fitness to zero. So how did it ever get passed on from
one generation to the next? If a chimp or a horse told its genes to go take
a jump, it would not survive very long in evolutionary terms. So how is it
possible for humans to act like this, if we are governed simply by the same
laws that hold sway over the rest of the animal kingdom?
From one perspective, Pinker's 'my genes can go jump' outburst sounds suspiciously
like Sartre's 'Man is what he wills', an existential cry for freedom. From
another perspective, the mysterious ability that Plotkin, Dawkins and Pinker
all attribute to humans to turn against their genes smacks of Cartesian dualism.
We seem, on the one hand, to be the product of our genetic heritage. But,
on the other, we also seem to be animated by some mysterious non-natural force
which turns us into genetic rebels.
One reason why evolutionary psychologists are so keen to stress the notion
of free will is that they are wary of committing the 'naturalistic fallacy'
- the belief that because something is natural it must be right. This belief
underlay social Darwinism and racial science in the nineteenth century, and
today's Darwinists are, understandably, keen to dissociate themselves from
such a view. Pinker, therefore, proposes that ethics should be separate from
the scientific study of behaviour. Science and ethics, he argues in How
the Mind Works, are 'two self-contained systems played out among the same
entities in the world'. The 'science game treats people as material objects,
and its rules are the physical processes that cause behaviour through natural
selection and neurophysiology.' The 'ethics game', on the other hand, 'treats
people as equivalent, sentient, rational, free-willed agents, and its rules
are the calculus that assigns moral value to behaviour through the behaviour's
inherent nature or consequence'.
Ethics, presumably, are not some metaphysical entities, but an aspect of human
behaviour. How then do they originate if not through 'natural selection and
neurophysiology' which Pinker holds to be the basis of all other behaviours?
Descartes, unable to comprehend how a mechanical science could explain the
human mind, divided the human into a mechanical body and an unknowable soul.
Pinker has done much the same - except that he has relabelled the soul as
'ethics'.
Only if we understand the social nature of humanity can we understand human
freedom without resorting to such mysticism. It is absurd to suggest that
we can tell our genes to go jump in the lake. But what we can do is to transform
our evolutionary heritage through social development, through our capacity
for agency and hence for making our history. It is in this process of transformation
that human freedom lies. The unwillingness of evolutionary psychologists to
understand humans as social beings, however, means that, far from providing
a materialist account of human nature, evolutionary psychology is forced to
follow its logic into the murky swamps of Sartrean existentialism or Cartesian
dualism.
All of which brings us to the third premise of evolutionary psychology - the
belief that there exists a conflict between our Stone Age genetic heritage
and the modern world in which we live. 'Our brains', Steven Pinker writes,
'are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, schooling, written language,
governments, police, courts, armies, modern medicine, formal social institutions,
high technology and other newcomers to the human experience.'
One can certainly imagine the distress that might be caused by mismatches
between genetic capacity and environment. If some prankster transported a
herd of elephants to the slopes of Mt Everest, or if a flock of penguins unaccountably
found itself in the Sahara desert, the results might be disastrous. But we
humans have not simply been transported to an alien environment. We have created
that environment, through a long process of historical struggle and development.
It seems bizarre to hold that the brain is 'wired up' to invent modernity
but not to cope with it. If the brain is flexible enough to do the one, then
why not the other?
This is, of course, is not a scientific question, but a philosophical one.
The answer lies in how we choose to understand what it means to be human.
In asserting a mismatch between genetic heritage and modern environment, evolutionary
psychologists are adopting a particular philosophical stance about human nature
and its limits. That is their prerogative. But they should not dress it up
as science.
What the idea of a mismatch between genes and environment articulates is the
sense of dislocation that many people feel today. The first person I recall
making a sustained argument about the problems of such a mismatch was not
an evolutionary psychologist but the Unabomber, perhaps the most potent expression
of the modern sense of alienation. 'I attribute the social and psychological
problems of modern society', he wrote in his manifesto, 'to the fact that
society requires people to love under conditions radically different from
those under which the human race evolved'.
At the height of the Cold War it was a common aphorism that humanity's technical
prowess outstripped its moral advancement. With its 'mismatch' theory, evolutionary
psychology has repackaged this sentiment for a more nihilistic age, when anxiety
and unease arise, not from fear of a nuclear holocaust, but from feeling out
of synch with much of the world.
If evolutionary psychology gives vent to our sense of dislocation, it also
seems to provide a ticket to salvation, by creating a new myth about what
it means to be human. 'People need a sacred narrative', EO Wilson argues in
his book Consilience'. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in
one form or other, however intellectualised.' Such a sacred narrative, he
believes, can be either a religion or a science. 'The true evolutionary epic',
he writes, 'retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious
epic':
The continuity of the human line has been traced through a period of deep history a thousand times older than that conceived by the Western religions. Its study has brought new revelations of great moral importance. It has made us realise that Homo sapiens is far more than a congeries of tribes and races. We are a single gene pool from which individuals are drawn and into which they are dissolved the next generation, forever united as a species by heritage and a common future. Such are the conceptions, based on fact, from which new intimations of immortality can be drawn and a new mythos evolved.
Don't worry, be happy, we're all part of Nature's grand plan. We began with
evolutionary psychology as an objective science of Man. We end with evolutionary
theory as a new (or, perhaps, New Age) religion for mankind. The trouble with
religion, whether drawn from the Book of God or the Book of Nature, is that
it tends to make us blind to the facts.
The Darwinian approach has certainly provided some valuable insights about
human nature. It has demonstrated the weaknesses of many social theories of
human nature, and stressed the importance of understanding human beings in
our biological context. One of the ironies of evolutionary psychology, however,
is this: its adherents believe that their methodology allows them to study
human behaviour with the same scientific objectivity and rigour as is generally
applied to the study of animal behaviour. Yet the mishmash of wild speculation,
banal generalisations, circular arguments, giddy leaps of logic and uncorroborated
assertions which make up the bulk of the discipline would be treated with
derision if applied to study of animal rather than human behaviour. The success
of evolutionary psychology lies less in its scientific insights than in its
ability to fill a gap left by discredited sociological explanations of human
nature and to articulate a view of humanity that seems to make more sense
in a pessimistic age.
And this leads us to a second irony. These criticisms of evolutionary psychology
mirror those that Darwinians themselves, rightly, make about the bulk of twentieth
century psychology, anthropology and social science. Darwinists have demonstrated
convincingly that ideology as much as science motivated the SSSM – in
particular a desire to challenge the then-dominant claims of social Darwinism
and racial theory, and a belief that through social engineering humanity’s
problems could be solved. Unfortunately, however, evolutionary psychology
too seems to reflect the spirit of our times as much as it provides a scientific
view of human nature.