It makes humans fundamentally
different
from animals.
Steven-Pinker-The-Blank-Slate 1
Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and the other signatories of the "Against 'Sociobiology'" manifesto wrote:
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. 3
Note the tricky framing of the issue. The notion that money is a genetically coded universal is so ridiculous (and not, incidentally, something Wilson ever proposed) that any alternative has to be seen as more plausible than that. But if we take the alternative on its own terms, rather than as one prong in a false dichotomy, Gould and Lewontin seem to be saying that the genetic components of human behavior will be discovered primarily in the "generalities of eating, excreting, and sleeping. " The rest of the slate, presumably, is blank.
This debating tactic -- first deny the Blank Slate, then make it look plausible by pitting it against a straw man ? can be found elsewhere in the writings of the radical scientists. Gould, for instance, writes:
Thus, my criticism of Wilson does not invoke a non-biological "environmentalism"; it merely pits the concept of biological potentiality, with a brain capable of a full range of human behaviors and predisposed to none, against the idea of biological determinism, with specific genes for specific behavioral traits. 4
The idea of "biological determinism" -- that genes cause behavior with 100 percent certainty -- and the idea that every behavioral trait has its own gene, are obviously daft (never mind that Wilson never embraced them). So Gould's dichotomy would seem to leave "biological potentiality" as the only reasonable choice. But what does that mean? The claim that the brain is "capable of a full range of human behaviors" is almost a tautology: how could the brain not be capable of a full range of human behaviors? And the claim that the brain is not predisposed to any human behavior is just a version of the Blank Slate. "Predisposed to none" literally means that all human behaviors have identical probabilities of occurring. So if any person anywhere on the planet has ever committed some act in some circumstance -- abjuring food or sex, impaling himself with spikes, killing her child -- then the brain has no predisposition to avoid that act as compared with the alternatives, such as enjoying food and sex, protecting one's body, or cherishing one's child.
Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin also deny that they are saying that humans are blank slates. 5 But they grant only two concessions to human nature. The first {123} comes not from an appeal to evidence or logic but from their politics: "If [a blank slate] were the case, there could be no social evolution. " Their support for this "argument" consists of an appeal to the authority of Marx, whom they quote as saying, "The materialist doctrine that men are the products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. "6 Their own view is that "the only sensible thing to say about human nature is that it is 'in' that nature to construct its own history. "7 The implication is that any other statement about the psychological makeup of our species -- about our capacity for language, our love of family, our sexual emotions, our typical fears, and so on -- is not "sensible. " Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin do make one concession to biology -- not to the organization of the mind and brain but to the size of the body. "Were human beings only six inches tall there could be no human culture at all as we understand it," they note, because a Lilliputian could not control fire, break rocks with a pick-axe, or carry a brain big enough to support language. It is their only acknowledgment of the possibility that human biology affects human social life.
Eight years later Lewontin reiterated this theory of what is innate in humans: "The most important fact about human genes is that they help to make us as big as we are and to have a central nervous system with as many connections as it has. "8 Once again, the rhetoric has to be unpacked with care. If we take the sentence literally, Lewontin is referring only to "the most important fact" about human genes. Then again, if we take it literally, the sentence is meaningless. How could one ever rank-order the thousands of effects of the genes, all necessary to our existence, and point to one or two at the top of the list? Is our stature more important than the fact that we have a heart, or lungs, or eyes? Is our synapse number more important than our sodium pumps, without which our neurons would fill up with positive ions and shut down? So taking the sentence literally is pointless. The only sensible reading, and the one that fits in the context, is that these are the only important facts about human genes for the human mind. The tens of thousands of genes that are expressed primarily or exclusively in the brain do nothing important but give it lots of connections; the pattern of connections and the organization of the brain (into structures like the hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus, and a cerebral cortex divided into areas) are random, or might as well be. The genes do not give the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? brain multiple memory systems, complicated visual and motor tracts, an ability to learn a language, or a repertoire of emotions (or else the genes do provide these faculties, but they are not "important").
In an update of John Watson's claim that he could turn any infant into a "doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, {124} regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors," Lewontin wrote a book whose jacket precis claims that "our genetic endowments confer a plasticity of psychic and physical development, so that in the course of our lives, from conception to death, each of us, irrespective of race, class, or sex, can develop virtually any identity that lies within the human ambit. "9 Watson admitted he was "going beyond my facts," which was forgivable because at the time he wrote there were no facts. But the declaration on Lewontin's book that any individual can assume any identity (even granting the equivalence of races, sexes, and classes), in defiance of six decades of research in behavioral genetics, is an avowal of faith of uncommon purity. And in a passage that re-erects Durkheim's wall between the biological and the cultural, Lewontin concludes a 1992 book by writing that the genes "have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own nature that can be understood and explored only through that unique form of experience, social action. "10
So while Gould, Lewontin, and Rose deny that they believe in a blank slate, their concessions to evolution and genetics -- that they let us eat, sleep, urinate, defecate, grow bigger than a squirrel, and bring about social change -- reveal them to be empiricists more extreme than Locke himself, who at least recognized the need for an innate faculty of "understanding. " ~
The Noble Savage, too, is a cherished doctrine among critics of the sciences of human nature. In Sociobiology, Wilson mentioned that tribal warfare was common in human prehistory. The against-sociobiologists declared that this had been "strongly rebutted both on the basis of historical and anthropological studies. " I looked up these "studies," which were collected in Ashley Montagu's Man and Aggression. In fact they were just hostile reviews of books by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, the playwright Robert Ardrey, and the novelist William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies). 11 Some of the criticisms were, to be sure, deserved: Ardrey and Lorenz believed in archaic theories such as that aggression was like the discharge of a hydraulic pressure and that evolution acted for the good of the species. But far stronger criticisms of Ardrey and Lorenz had been made by the sociobiologists themselves. (On the second page of The Selfish Gene, for example, Dawkins wrote, "The trouble with these books is that the authors got it totally and utterly wrong. ") In any case, the reviews contained virtually no data about tribal warfare. Nor did Montagu's summary essay, which simply rehashed attacks on the concept of "instinct" from decades of behaviorists. One of the only chapters with data "refuted" Lorenz's claims about warfare and raiding in the Ute Indians by saying they didn't do it any more than other native groups!
Twenty years later, Gould wrote that "Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species. " His new argument comes from what he calls the Great {125} Asymmetry. It is "an essential truth," he writes, that "good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. "12 Moreover, "we perform 10,000 acts of small and unrecorded kindness for each surpassingly rare, but sadly balancing, moment of cruelty. "13 The statistics making up this "essential truth" are pulled out of the air and are certainly wrong: psychopaths, who are definitely not "good and kind people," make up about three or four percent of the male population, not several hundredths of a percent. 14 But even if we accept the figures, the argument assumes that for a species to count as "evil and destructive," it would have to be evil and destructive all the time, like a deranged postal worker on a permanent rampage. It is precisely because one act can balance ten thousand kind ones that we call it "evil. " Also, does it make sense to judge our entire species, as if we were standing en masse at the pearly gates? The issue is not whether our species is "evil and destructive" but whether we house evil and destructive motives, together with the beneficent and constructive ones. If we do, one can try to understand what they are and how they work.
Gould has objected to any attempt to understand the motives for war in the context of human evolution, because "each case of genocide can be matched with numerous incidents of social beneficence; each murderous band can be paired with a pacific clan. "15 Once again a ratio has been conjured out of the blue; the data reviewed in Chapter 3 show that "pacific clans" either do not exist or are considerably outnumbered by the "murderous bands. "16 But for Gould, such facts are beside the point, because he finds it necessary to believe in the pacific clans on moral grounds. Only if humans lack any predisposition for good or evil or anything else, he suggests, do we have grounds for opposing genocide. Here is how he imagines the position of the evolutionary psychologists he disagrees with:
Perhaps the most popular of all explanations for our genocidal capacity cites evolutionary biology as an unfortunate source -- and as an ultimate escape from full moral responsibility. . . . A group devoid of xenophobia and unschooled in murder might invariably succumb to others replete with genes to encode
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? a propensity for such categorization and destruction. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, will band together and systematically kill the members of adjacent groups. Perhaps we are programmed to act in such a manner as well. These grisly propensities once promoted the survival of groups armed with nothing more destructive than teeth and stones. In a world of nuclear bombs, such unchanged (and perhaps unchangeable) inheritances may now spell our undoing (or at least propagate our tragedies) -- but we cannot be blamed for these moral failings. Our accursed genes have made us creatures of the night. 17 {126}
In this passage Gould presents a more-or-less reasonable summary of why scientists might think that human violence can be illuminated by evolution. But then he casually slips in some outrageous non sequiturs ("an ultimate escape from full moral responsibility," "we cannot be blamed"), as if the scientists had no choice but to believe those, too. He concludes his essay:
In 1525, thousands of German peasants were slaughtered. . . , and Michelangelo worked on the Medici Chapel. . . . Both sides of this dichotomy represent our common, evolved humanity. Which, ultimately, shall we choose? As to the potential path of genocide and destruction, let us take this stand. It need not be. We can do otherwise. 18
The implication is that anyone who believes that the causes of genocide might be illuminated by an understanding of the evolved makeup of human beings is in fact taking a sta~nd in favor of genocide!
What about the third member of the trinity, the Ghost in the Machine? The radical scientists are thoroughgoing materialists and could hardly believe in an immaterial soul. But they are equally uncomfortable with any clearly stated alternative, because it would cramp their political belief that we can collectively implement any social arrangement we choose. To update Ryle's description of Descartes's dilemma: as men of scientific acumen they cannot but endorse the claims of biology, yet as political men they cannot accept the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork.
Ordinarily it is not cricket to bring up the political beliefs of scholars in discussing their scholarly arguments, but it is Lewontin and Rose who insist that their scientific beliefs are inseparable from their political ones. Lewontin wrote a book with the biologist Richard Levins called The Dialectical Biologist, which they dedicated to Friedrich Engels ("who got it wrong a lot of the time but got it right where it counted"). In it they wrote, "As working scientists in the field of evolutionary genetics and ecology, we have been attempting with some success to guide our research by a conscious application of Marxist philosophy. "19 In Not in Our Genes, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin declared that they "share a commitment to the prospect of a more socially just -- a socialist -- society" and see their "critical science as an integral part of the struggle to create that society. "20 At one point they frame their disagreement with "reductionism" as follows:
Against this economic reduction as the explanatory principle underlying all human behavior, we could counterpose the . . . revolutionary practitioners and theorists like Mao Tse-tung on the power of human consciousness in both interpreting and changing the world, a power {127} based on an understanding of the essential dialectical unity of the biological and the social, not as two distinct spheres, or separable components of action, but as ontologically coterminous. 21
Lewontin and Rose's commitment to the "dialectical" approach of Marx, Engels, and Mao explains why they deny human nature and also deny that they deny it. The very idea of a durable human nature that can be discussed separately from its ever-changing interaction with the environment is, in their view, a dull-witted mistake. The mistake lies not just in ignoring interactions with the environment -- Lewontin and Rose already knocked over the straw men who do that. The deeper mistake, as they see it, lies in trying to analyze behavior as an interaction between human nature and the human environment (including society) in the first place. 22 The very act of separating them in one's mind, even for the purpose of figuring out how the two interact, "supposes the alienation of the organism and the environment. " That contradicts the principles of dialectical understanding, which says that the two are "ontologically coterminous" -- not just in the trivial sense that no organism lives in a vacuum, but in the sense that they are inseparable in every aspect of their being.
Since the dialectic between organism and environment constantly changes over historical time, with neither one directly causing the other, organisms can alter that dialectic. Thus Rose repeatedly counters the "determinists" with the declaration "We have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing"23 -- presumably echoing Marx's statement that "men make their own history, but they do not make it lust as they
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? please; they make it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. " But Rose never explains who the "we" is, if not highly structured neural circuits, which must get that structure in part from genes and evolution. We can call this doctrine the Pronoun in the Machine.
Gould is not a doctrinarian like Rose and Lewontin, but he too uses the first-person plural pronoun as if it somehow disproved the relevance of genes and evolution to human affairs: "Which . . . shall we choose? . . . Let us take this stand. . . . We can do otherwise. " And he too cites Marx's "wonderful aphorism" about making our own history and believes that Marx vindicated the concept of free will:
Marx himself had a much more subtle view than most of his contemporaries of the differences between human and natural history. He understood that the evolution of consciousness, and the consequent development of social and economic organization, introduced elements of difference and volition that we usually label as "free will. "24 {128}
Subtle indeed is the argument that explains free will in terms of its synonym "volition" (with or without "elements of difference," whatever that means) and attributes it to the equally mysterious "evolution of consciousness. " Basically, Rose and Gould are struggling to make sense of the dichotomy they invented between a naturally selected, genetically organized brain on one side and a desire for peace, justice, and equality on the other. In Part III we will see that the dichotomy is a false one.
The doctrine of the Pronoun in the Machine is not a casual oversight in the radical scientists' world view. It is consistent with their desire for radical political change and their hostility to "bourgeois" democracy. (Lewontin repeatedly uses "bourgeois" as an epithet. ) If the "we" is truly unfettered by biology, then once "we" see the light we can carry out the vision of radical change that we deem correct. But if the "we" is an imperfect product of evolution -- limited in knowledge and wisdom, tempted by status and power, and blinded by self-deception and delusions of moral superiority -- then "we" had better think twice before constructing all that history. As the chapter on politics will explain, constitutional democracy is based on a jaundiced theory of human nature in which "we" are eternally vulnerable to arrogance and corruption. The checks and balances of democratic institutions were explicitly designed to stalemate the often dangerous ambitions of imperfect hu~mans.
The Ghost in the Machine, of course, is far dearer to the political right than to the political left. In his book The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature, the psychologist Morton Hunt has shown that the foes include people on the left, people on the right, and a motley collection of single-issue fanatics in between. 25 So far I have discussed the far-left outrage because it has been deployed in the battlefield of ideas in the universities and the mainstream press. Those on the far right have also been outraged, though until recently they have aimed at different targets and have fought in different arenas.
The longest-standing right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature comes from the religious sectors of the coalition, especially Christian fundamentalism. Anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is certainly not going to believe in the evolution of the mind, and anyone who believes in an immaterial soul is certainly not going to believe that thought and feeling consist of information processing in the tissues of the brain.
The religious opposition to evolution is fueled by several moral fears. Most obviously, the fact of evolution challenges the literal truth of the creation story in the Bible and thus the authority that religion draws from it. As one creationist minister put it, "If the Bible gets it wrong in biology, then why should I trust the Bible when it talks about morality and salvation? "26
But the opposition to evolution goes beyond a desire to defend biblical {129} literalism. Modern religious people may not believe in the literal truth of every miracle narrated in the Bible, but they do believe that humans were designed in God's image and placed on earth for a larger purpose -- namely, to live a moral life by following God's commandments. If humans are accidental products of the mutation and selection of chemical replicators, they worry, morality would have no foundation and we would be left mindlessly obeying biological urges. One creationist, testifying to this danger in front of the U. S. House Judiciary Committee, cited the lyrics of a rock song: "You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals / So let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel. "27 After the 1999 lethal rampage by two teenagers at Columbine High School in Colorado, Tom Delay, the Republican Majority Whip in the House of Representatives, said that such violence is inevitable as long as "our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes, evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud. "28
The most damaging effect of the right-wing opposition to evolution is the corruption of American science education by activists in the creationist movement. Until a Supreme Court decision in 1968, states were allowed to ban the teaching of evolution outright. Since then, creationists have tried to hobble it in ways that they hope will pass constitutional muster. These include removing evolution from science proficiency standards, demanding disclaimers
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? that it is "only a theory," watering down the curriculum, and opposing textbooks with good coverage of evolution or imposing ones with coverage of creationism. In recent years the National Center for Science Education has learned of new instances of these tactics at a rate of about one a week, coming from forty states. 29
The religious right is discomfited not just by evolution but by neuro-science. By exorcising the ghost in the machine, brain science is undermining two moral doctrines that depend on it. One is that every person has a soul, which finds value, exercises free will, and is responsible for its choices. If behavior is controlled instead by circuits in the brain that follow the laws of chemistry, choice and value would be myths and the possibility of moral responsibility would evaporate. As the creationist advocate John West put it, "If human beings (and their beliefs) really are the mindless products of their material existence, then everything that gives meaning to human life -- religion, morality, beauty -- is revealed to be without objective basis. "30
The other moral doctrine (which is found in some, but not all, Christian denominations) is that the soul enters the body at conception and leaves it at death, thereby defining who is a person with a right to life. The doctrine makes abortion, euthanasia, and the harvesting of stem cells from blastocysts equivalent to murder.
It makes humans fundamentally different from animals. And it makes human cloning a violation of the divine order. All this would seem to be threatened by neuroscientists, who say that the self or the soul inheres in neural activity that develops gradually in the brain of an embryo, that can be {130} seen in the brains of animals, and that can break down piecemeal with aging and disease. (We will return to this issue in Chapter 13. )
But the right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature can no longer be associated only with Bible-thumpers and televangelists. Today evolution is being challenged by some of the most cerebral theorists in the formerly secular neoconservative movement. They are embracing a hypothesis called Intelligent Design, originated by the biochemist Michael Behe. 31 The molecular machinery of cells cannot function in a simpler form, Behe argues, and therefore it could not have evolved piecemeal by natural selection. Instead it must have been conceived as a working invention by an intelligent designer. The designer could, in theory, have been an advanced alien from outer space, but everyone knows that the subtext of the theory is that it must have been God.
Biologists reject Behe's argument for a number of reasons. 32 His specific claims about the "irreducible complexity" of biochemistry are unproven or just wrong. He takes every phenomenon whose evolutionary history has not yet been figured out and chalks it up to design by default. When it comes to the intelligent designer, Behe suddenly jettisons all scientific scruples and does not question where the designer came from or how the designer works. And he ignores the overwhelming evidence that the process of evolution, far from being intelligent and purposeful, is wasteful and cruel.
Nonetheless, Intelligent Design has been embraced by leading neoconservatives, including Irving Kristol, Robert Bork, Roger Kimball, and Gertrude Himmelfarb. Other conservative intellectuals have also sympathized with creationism for moral reasons, such as the law professor Philip Johnson, the writer William F. Buckley, the columnist Tom Bethell, and, disconcertingly, the bioethicist Leon Kass -- chair of George W. Bush's new Council on Bioethics and thus a shaper of the nation's policies on biology and medicine. 33 A story entitled "The Deniable Darwin" appeared, astonishingly, on the cover of Commentary, which means that a magazine that was once a leading forum for secular Jewish intellectuals is now more skeptical of evolution than is the Pope! 34
It is not clear whether these worldly thinkers are really convinced that Darwinism is false or whether they think it is important for other people to believe it is false. In a scene from Inherit the Wind, the play about the Scopes Monkey Trial, the prosecutor and defense attorney (based on William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow) are relaxing together after a day in court. The prosecutor says of the Tennessee locals:
They're simple people, Henry; poor people. They work hard and they need to believe in something, something beautiful. Why do you want to take it away from them? It's all they have.
That is not far from the attitude of the neocons. Kristol has written: {131}
If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded -- or even if it suspects -- that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe. 35
He spells out the moral corollary:
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work. 36
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? As the science writer Ronald Bailey observes, "Ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is 'the opium of the people'; they add a heartfelt, 'Thank God! ' "37
Many conservative intellectuals join fundamentalist Christians in deploring neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, which they see as explaining away the soul, eternal values, and free choice. Kass writes:
With science, the leading wing of modern rationalism, has come the progressive demystification of the world. Falling in love, should it still occur, is for the modern temper to be explained not by demonic possession (Eros) born of the soul-smiting sight of the beautiful (Aphrodite) but by a rise in the concentration of some still-to-be-identified polypeptide hormone in the hypothalamus. The power of religious sensibilities and understandings fades too. Even if it is true that the great majority of Americans still profess a belief in God, He is for few of us a God before whom one trembles in fear of judgment. 38
Similarly, the journalist Andrew Ferguson warns his readers that evolutionary psychology "is sure to give you the creeps," because "whether behavior is moral, whether it signifies virtue, is a judgment that the new science, and materialism in general, cannot make. "39 The new sciences, he writes, claim that people are nothing but "meat puppets," a frightening shift from the traditional Judeo-Christian view in which "human beings [are] persons from the start, endowed with a soul, created by God, and infinitely precious. "40
Even the left-baiting author Tom Wolfe, who admires neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, worries about their moral implications. In his essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," he writes that when science has finally killed the soul ("that last refuge of values"), "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make [Nietzsche's] phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame": {132}
Meanwhile, the notion of a self -- a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior -- a self who can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds -- this old-fashioned notion (what's a bootstrap, for God's sake? ) of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slipping away. . . slipping away. . . 41
"Where does that leave self-control? " he asks. "Where, indeed, if people believe this ghostly self does not even exist, and brain imaging proves it, once and for all? "42
An irony in the modern denial of human nature is that partisans at opposite extremes of the political spectrum, who ordinarily can't stand the sight of each other, find themselves strange bedfellows. Recall how the signatories of "Against 'Sociobiology'" wrote that theories like Wilson's "provided an important basis for . . . the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany. " In May 2001 the Education Committee of the Louisiana House of Representatives resolved that "Adolf Hitler and others have exploited the racist views of Darwin and those he influenced . . . to justify the annihilation of millions of purportedly racially inferior individuals. "43 The sponsor of the resolution (which was eventually defeated) cited in its defense a passage by Gould, which is not the first time that he has been cited approvingly in creationist propaganda. 44 Though Gould has been a tireless opponent of creationism, he has been an equally tireless opponent of the idea that evolution can explain mind and morality, and that is the implication of Darwinism that creationists fear most.
The left and the right also agree that the new sciences of human nature threaten the concept of moral responsibility. When Wilson suggested that in humans, as in many other mammals, males have a greater desire for multiple sexual partners than do females, Rose accused him of really saying:
Don't blame your mates for sleeping around, ladies, it's not their fault they are genetically programmed. 45
Compare Tom Wolfe, tongue only partly in cheek:
The male of the human species is genetically hardwired to be polygamous, i. e. , unfaithful to his legal mate. Any magazine-reading male gets the picture soon enough. (Three million years of evolution made me do it! )46 {133}
On one wing we have Gould asking the rhetorical question:
Why do we want to fob off responsibility for our violence and sexism upon our genes? 47
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? And on the other wing we find Ferguson raising the same point:
The "scientific belief" would . . . appear to be corrosive of any notion of free will, personal
responsibility, or universal morality. 48
For Rose and Gould the ghost in the machine is a "we" that can construct history and change the world at will. For Kass, Wolfe, and Ferguson it is a "soul" that makes moral judgments according to religious precepts. But all of them see genetics, neuroscience, and evolution as threats to this~irreducible locus of free choice.
Where does this leave intellectual life today? The hostility to the sciences of human nature from the religious right is likely to increase, but the influence of the right will be felt more in direct appeals to politicians than from changes in the intellectual climate. Any inroads of the religious right into mainstream intellectual life will be limited by their opposition to the theory of evolution itself. Whether it is known as creationism or by the euphemism Intelligent Design, a denial of the theory of natural selection will founder under the weight of the mass of evidence that the theory is correct. How much additional damage the denial will do to science education and biomedical research before it sinks is unknown.
The hostility from the radical left, on the other hand, has left a substantial mark on modern intellectual life, because the so-called radical scientists are now the establishment. I have met many social and cognitive scientists who proudly say they have learned all their biology from Gould and Lewontin. 49 Many intellectuals defer to Lewontin as the infallible pontiff of evolution and genetics, and many philosophers of biology spent time as his apprentice. A sneering review by Rose of every new book on human evolution or genetics has become a fixture of British journalism. As for Gould, Isaac Asimov probably did not intend the irony when he wrote in a book blurb that "Gould can do no wrong," but that is precisely the attitude of many journalists and social scientists. A recent article in New York magazine on the journalist Robert Wright called him a "stalker" and a "young punk" with "penis envy" because he had the temerity to criticize Gould on his logic and facts. 50
In part the respect awarded to the radical scientists has been earned. Quite aside from their scientific accomplishments, Lewontin is an incisive analyst on {134} many scientific and social issues, Gould has written hundreds of superb essays on natural history, and Rose wrote a fine book on the neuroscience of memory. But they have also positioned themselves shrewdly on the intellectual landscape. As the biologist John Alcock explains, "Stephen Jay Gould abhors violence, he speaks out against sexism, he despises Nazis, he finds genocide horrific, he is unfailingly on the side of the angels. Who can argue with such a person? "51 This immunity from argument allowed the radical scientists' unfair attacks on others to become part of the conventional wisdom.
Many writers today casually equate behavioral genetics with eugenics, as if studying the genetic correlates of behavior were the same as coercing people in their decisions about having children. Many equate evolutionary psychology with Social Darwinism, as if studying our evolutionary roots were the same as justifying the station of the poor. The confusions do not come only from the scientifically illiterate but may be found in prestigious publications such as Scientific American and Science. 52 After Wilson argued in Consilience that divisions between fields of human knowledge were becoming obsolete, the historian Tzvetan Todorov wrote sarcastically, "I have a proposal for Wilson's next book . . . [an] analysis of Social Darwinism, the doctrine that was adopted by Hitler, and of the ways it differs from sociobiology. "53 When the Human Genome Project was completed in 2001, its leaders made a ritual denunciation of "genetic determinism," the belief -- held by no one -- that "all characteristics of the person are 'hard-wired' into our genome. "54
Even many scientists are perfectly content with the radicals' social constructionism, not so much because they agree with it but because they are preoccupied in their labs and need picketers outside their window like they need another hole in the head. As the anthropologist John Tooby and the psychologist Leda Cosmides note, the dogma that biology is intrinsically disconnected from the human social order offers scientists "safe conduct across the politicized minefield of modern academic life. "55 As we shall see, even today people who challenge the Blank Slate or the Noble Savage are still sometimes silenced by demonstrators or denounced as Nazis. Even when such attacks are sporadic, they create an atmosphere of intimidation that distorts scholarship far and wide.
But the intellectual climate is showing signs of change. Ideas about human nature, while still anathema to some academics and pundits, are beginning to get a hearing. Scientists, artists, scholars in the humanities, legal theorists, and thoughtful laypeople have expressed a thirst for the new insights about the mind that have been coming out of the biological and cognitive sciences. And the radical science movement, for all its rhetorical success, has turned out to be an empirical wasteland. Twenty-five years of data have not been kind to its predictions. Chimpanzees are not peaceful vegetarians, as Montagu claimed, nor is the heritability of intelligence indistinguishable from zero, IQ a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? {135} "reification" unrelated to the brain, personality and social behavior without any genetic basis, gender differences a product only of "psychocultural expectations," or the number of murderous clans equal to the number of pacific bands. 56 Today the idea of guiding scientific research by "a conscious application of Marxist philosophy" is just embarrassing, and as the evolutionary psychologist Martin Daly pointed out, "Sufficient research to fill a first issue of Dialectical Biology has yet to materialize. "57
In contrast, sociobiology did not, as Sahlins had predicted, turn out to be a passing fad. The title of Alcock's 2001 book The Triumph of Sociobiology says it all: in the study of animal behavior, no one even talks about "sociobiology" or "selfish genes" anymore, because the ideas are part and parcel of the science. 58 In the study of humans, there are major spheres of human experience -- beauty, motherhood, kinship, morality, cooperation, sexuality, violence -- in which evolutionary psychology provides the only coherent theory and has spawned vibrant new areas of empirical research. 59 Behavioral genetics has revivified the study of personality and will only expand with the application of knowledge from the Human Genome Project. 60 Cognitive neuroscience will not shrink from applying its new tools to every aspect of mind and behavior, including the emotionally and politically charged ones. The question is not whether human nature will increasingly be explained by the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution, but what we are going to do with the knowledge. What in fact are the implications for our ideals of equality, progress, responsibility, and the worth of the person? The opponents of the sciences of human nature from the left and the right are correct about one thing: these are vital questions. But that is all the more reason that they be confronted not with fear and loathing but with reason. That is the goal of the next part of the book.
<< {137} >>
HUMAN NATURE WITH A HUMAN FACE
hen Galileo attracted the unwanted attention of the Inquisition in 1633, more was at stake than issues in astronomy. By stating that the W Earth revolved around the sun rather than vice versa, Galileo was contradicting the literal truth of the Bible, such as the passage in which
Joshua issued the successful command "Sun, stand thou still. " Worse, he was challenging a theory of the moral order of the universe.
According to the theory, developed in medieval times, the sphere of the moon divided the universe into an unchanging perfection in the heavens above and a corrupt degeneration in the Earth below (hence Samuel Johnson's disclaimer that he could not "change sublunary nature"). Surrounding the moon were spheres for the inner planets, the sun, the outer planets, and the fixed stars, each cranked by a higher angel. And surrounding them all were the heavens, home to God. Contained within the sphere of the moon, and thus a little lower than the angels, were human souls, and then, in descending order, human bodies, animals (in the order beasts, birds, fish, insects), then plants, minerals, the inanimate elements, nine layers of devils, and finally, at the center of the Earth, Lucifer in hell. The universe was thus arranged in a hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being.
The Great Chain was thick with moral implications. Our home, it was thought, lay at the center of the universe, reflecting the importance of our existence and behavior. People lived their lives in their proper station (king, duke, or peasant), and after death their souls rose to a higher place or sank to a lower one. Everyone had to be mindful that the human abode was a humble place in the scheme of things and that they must look up to catch a glimpse of heavenly perfection. And in a world that seemed always to teeter on the brink of famine and barbarism, the Great Chain offered the comfort of knowing that the nature of things was orderly. If the planets wandered from their spheres, chaos would break out, because everything was connected in the cosmic order. {138}
As Alexander Pope wrote, "From Nature's chain whatever link you strike, / Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. "1
None of this escaped Galileo as he was pounding away at his link. He knew that he could not simply argue on empirical grounds that the division between a corrupt Earth and the unchanging heavens was falsified by sunspots, novas, and moons drifting across Jupiter. He also argued that the moral trappings of the geocentric theory were as dubious as its empirical claims, so if the theory turned out to be false, no one would be the worse. Here is Galileo's alter ego in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, wondering what is so great about being invariant and inalterable:
For my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely because of the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc. that occur in it incessantly. If, not being subject to any changes, it were a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? vast desert of sand or mountain of jasper, or if at the time of the flood the waters which covered it had frozen, and it had remained an enormous globe of ice where nothing was ever born or ever altered or changed, I should deem it a useless lump in the universe, devoid of activity and, in a word, superfluous and essentially nonexistent. This is exactly the difference between a living animal and a dead one; and I say the same of the moon, of Jupiter, and of all other world globes.
. . . Those who so greatly exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, et cetera, are reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire to go on living, and by the terror they have of death. They do not reflect that if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into the world. Such men really deserve to encounter a Medusa's head which would transmute them into statues of jasper or diamond, and thus make them more perfect than they are. 2
Today we see things Galileo's way. It's hard for us to imagine why the three-dimensional arrangement of rock and gas in space should have anything to do with right and wrong or with the meaning and purpose of our lives. The moral sensibilities of Galileo s time eventually adjusted to the astronomical facts, not just because they had to give a nod to reality but because the very idea that morality has something to do with a Great Chain of Being was daffy to begin with.
We are now living, I think, through a similar transition.
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. 3
Note the tricky framing of the issue. The notion that money is a genetically coded universal is so ridiculous (and not, incidentally, something Wilson ever proposed) that any alternative has to be seen as more plausible than that. But if we take the alternative on its own terms, rather than as one prong in a false dichotomy, Gould and Lewontin seem to be saying that the genetic components of human behavior will be discovered primarily in the "generalities of eating, excreting, and sleeping. " The rest of the slate, presumably, is blank.
This debating tactic -- first deny the Blank Slate, then make it look plausible by pitting it against a straw man ? can be found elsewhere in the writings of the radical scientists. Gould, for instance, writes:
Thus, my criticism of Wilson does not invoke a non-biological "environmentalism"; it merely pits the concept of biological potentiality, with a brain capable of a full range of human behaviors and predisposed to none, against the idea of biological determinism, with specific genes for specific behavioral traits. 4
The idea of "biological determinism" -- that genes cause behavior with 100 percent certainty -- and the idea that every behavioral trait has its own gene, are obviously daft (never mind that Wilson never embraced them). So Gould's dichotomy would seem to leave "biological potentiality" as the only reasonable choice. But what does that mean? The claim that the brain is "capable of a full range of human behaviors" is almost a tautology: how could the brain not be capable of a full range of human behaviors? And the claim that the brain is not predisposed to any human behavior is just a version of the Blank Slate. "Predisposed to none" literally means that all human behaviors have identical probabilities of occurring. So if any person anywhere on the planet has ever committed some act in some circumstance -- abjuring food or sex, impaling himself with spikes, killing her child -- then the brain has no predisposition to avoid that act as compared with the alternatives, such as enjoying food and sex, protecting one's body, or cherishing one's child.
Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin also deny that they are saying that humans are blank slates. 5 But they grant only two concessions to human nature. The first {123} comes not from an appeal to evidence or logic but from their politics: "If [a blank slate] were the case, there could be no social evolution. " Their support for this "argument" consists of an appeal to the authority of Marx, whom they quote as saying, "The materialist doctrine that men are the products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. "6 Their own view is that "the only sensible thing to say about human nature is that it is 'in' that nature to construct its own history. "7 The implication is that any other statement about the psychological makeup of our species -- about our capacity for language, our love of family, our sexual emotions, our typical fears, and so on -- is not "sensible. " Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin do make one concession to biology -- not to the organization of the mind and brain but to the size of the body. "Were human beings only six inches tall there could be no human culture at all as we understand it," they note, because a Lilliputian could not control fire, break rocks with a pick-axe, or carry a brain big enough to support language. It is their only acknowledgment of the possibility that human biology affects human social life.
Eight years later Lewontin reiterated this theory of what is innate in humans: "The most important fact about human genes is that they help to make us as big as we are and to have a central nervous system with as many connections as it has. "8 Once again, the rhetoric has to be unpacked with care. If we take the sentence literally, Lewontin is referring only to "the most important fact" about human genes. Then again, if we take it literally, the sentence is meaningless. How could one ever rank-order the thousands of effects of the genes, all necessary to our existence, and point to one or two at the top of the list? Is our stature more important than the fact that we have a heart, or lungs, or eyes? Is our synapse number more important than our sodium pumps, without which our neurons would fill up with positive ions and shut down? So taking the sentence literally is pointless. The only sensible reading, and the one that fits in the context, is that these are the only important facts about human genes for the human mind. The tens of thousands of genes that are expressed primarily or exclusively in the brain do nothing important but give it lots of connections; the pattern of connections and the organization of the brain (into structures like the hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus, and a cerebral cortex divided into areas) are random, or might as well be. The genes do not give the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? brain multiple memory systems, complicated visual and motor tracts, an ability to learn a language, or a repertoire of emotions (or else the genes do provide these faculties, but they are not "important").
In an update of John Watson's claim that he could turn any infant into a "doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, {124} regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors," Lewontin wrote a book whose jacket precis claims that "our genetic endowments confer a plasticity of psychic and physical development, so that in the course of our lives, from conception to death, each of us, irrespective of race, class, or sex, can develop virtually any identity that lies within the human ambit. "9 Watson admitted he was "going beyond my facts," which was forgivable because at the time he wrote there were no facts. But the declaration on Lewontin's book that any individual can assume any identity (even granting the equivalence of races, sexes, and classes), in defiance of six decades of research in behavioral genetics, is an avowal of faith of uncommon purity. And in a passage that re-erects Durkheim's wall between the biological and the cultural, Lewontin concludes a 1992 book by writing that the genes "have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own nature that can be understood and explored only through that unique form of experience, social action. "10
So while Gould, Lewontin, and Rose deny that they believe in a blank slate, their concessions to evolution and genetics -- that they let us eat, sleep, urinate, defecate, grow bigger than a squirrel, and bring about social change -- reveal them to be empiricists more extreme than Locke himself, who at least recognized the need for an innate faculty of "understanding. " ~
The Noble Savage, too, is a cherished doctrine among critics of the sciences of human nature. In Sociobiology, Wilson mentioned that tribal warfare was common in human prehistory. The against-sociobiologists declared that this had been "strongly rebutted both on the basis of historical and anthropological studies. " I looked up these "studies," which were collected in Ashley Montagu's Man and Aggression. In fact they were just hostile reviews of books by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, the playwright Robert Ardrey, and the novelist William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies). 11 Some of the criticisms were, to be sure, deserved: Ardrey and Lorenz believed in archaic theories such as that aggression was like the discharge of a hydraulic pressure and that evolution acted for the good of the species. But far stronger criticisms of Ardrey and Lorenz had been made by the sociobiologists themselves. (On the second page of The Selfish Gene, for example, Dawkins wrote, "The trouble with these books is that the authors got it totally and utterly wrong. ") In any case, the reviews contained virtually no data about tribal warfare. Nor did Montagu's summary essay, which simply rehashed attacks on the concept of "instinct" from decades of behaviorists. One of the only chapters with data "refuted" Lorenz's claims about warfare and raiding in the Ute Indians by saying they didn't do it any more than other native groups!
Twenty years later, Gould wrote that "Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species. " His new argument comes from what he calls the Great {125} Asymmetry. It is "an essential truth," he writes, that "good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. "12 Moreover, "we perform 10,000 acts of small and unrecorded kindness for each surpassingly rare, but sadly balancing, moment of cruelty. "13 The statistics making up this "essential truth" are pulled out of the air and are certainly wrong: psychopaths, who are definitely not "good and kind people," make up about three or four percent of the male population, not several hundredths of a percent. 14 But even if we accept the figures, the argument assumes that for a species to count as "evil and destructive," it would have to be evil and destructive all the time, like a deranged postal worker on a permanent rampage. It is precisely because one act can balance ten thousand kind ones that we call it "evil. " Also, does it make sense to judge our entire species, as if we were standing en masse at the pearly gates? The issue is not whether our species is "evil and destructive" but whether we house evil and destructive motives, together with the beneficent and constructive ones. If we do, one can try to understand what they are and how they work.
Gould has objected to any attempt to understand the motives for war in the context of human evolution, because "each case of genocide can be matched with numerous incidents of social beneficence; each murderous band can be paired with a pacific clan. "15 Once again a ratio has been conjured out of the blue; the data reviewed in Chapter 3 show that "pacific clans" either do not exist or are considerably outnumbered by the "murderous bands. "16 But for Gould, such facts are beside the point, because he finds it necessary to believe in the pacific clans on moral grounds. Only if humans lack any predisposition for good or evil or anything else, he suggests, do we have grounds for opposing genocide. Here is how he imagines the position of the evolutionary psychologists he disagrees with:
Perhaps the most popular of all explanations for our genocidal capacity cites evolutionary biology as an unfortunate source -- and as an ultimate escape from full moral responsibility. . . . A group devoid of xenophobia and unschooled in murder might invariably succumb to others replete with genes to encode
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? a propensity for such categorization and destruction. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, will band together and systematically kill the members of adjacent groups. Perhaps we are programmed to act in such a manner as well. These grisly propensities once promoted the survival of groups armed with nothing more destructive than teeth and stones. In a world of nuclear bombs, such unchanged (and perhaps unchangeable) inheritances may now spell our undoing (or at least propagate our tragedies) -- but we cannot be blamed for these moral failings. Our accursed genes have made us creatures of the night. 17 {126}
In this passage Gould presents a more-or-less reasonable summary of why scientists might think that human violence can be illuminated by evolution. But then he casually slips in some outrageous non sequiturs ("an ultimate escape from full moral responsibility," "we cannot be blamed"), as if the scientists had no choice but to believe those, too. He concludes his essay:
In 1525, thousands of German peasants were slaughtered. . . , and Michelangelo worked on the Medici Chapel. . . . Both sides of this dichotomy represent our common, evolved humanity. Which, ultimately, shall we choose? As to the potential path of genocide and destruction, let us take this stand. It need not be. We can do otherwise. 18
The implication is that anyone who believes that the causes of genocide might be illuminated by an understanding of the evolved makeup of human beings is in fact taking a sta~nd in favor of genocide!
What about the third member of the trinity, the Ghost in the Machine? The radical scientists are thoroughgoing materialists and could hardly believe in an immaterial soul. But they are equally uncomfortable with any clearly stated alternative, because it would cramp their political belief that we can collectively implement any social arrangement we choose. To update Ryle's description of Descartes's dilemma: as men of scientific acumen they cannot but endorse the claims of biology, yet as political men they cannot accept the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork.
Ordinarily it is not cricket to bring up the political beliefs of scholars in discussing their scholarly arguments, but it is Lewontin and Rose who insist that their scientific beliefs are inseparable from their political ones. Lewontin wrote a book with the biologist Richard Levins called The Dialectical Biologist, which they dedicated to Friedrich Engels ("who got it wrong a lot of the time but got it right where it counted"). In it they wrote, "As working scientists in the field of evolutionary genetics and ecology, we have been attempting with some success to guide our research by a conscious application of Marxist philosophy. "19 In Not in Our Genes, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin declared that they "share a commitment to the prospect of a more socially just -- a socialist -- society" and see their "critical science as an integral part of the struggle to create that society. "20 At one point they frame their disagreement with "reductionism" as follows:
Against this economic reduction as the explanatory principle underlying all human behavior, we could counterpose the . . . revolutionary practitioners and theorists like Mao Tse-tung on the power of human consciousness in both interpreting and changing the world, a power {127} based on an understanding of the essential dialectical unity of the biological and the social, not as two distinct spheres, or separable components of action, but as ontologically coterminous. 21
Lewontin and Rose's commitment to the "dialectical" approach of Marx, Engels, and Mao explains why they deny human nature and also deny that they deny it. The very idea of a durable human nature that can be discussed separately from its ever-changing interaction with the environment is, in their view, a dull-witted mistake. The mistake lies not just in ignoring interactions with the environment -- Lewontin and Rose already knocked over the straw men who do that. The deeper mistake, as they see it, lies in trying to analyze behavior as an interaction between human nature and the human environment (including society) in the first place. 22 The very act of separating them in one's mind, even for the purpose of figuring out how the two interact, "supposes the alienation of the organism and the environment. " That contradicts the principles of dialectical understanding, which says that the two are "ontologically coterminous" -- not just in the trivial sense that no organism lives in a vacuum, but in the sense that they are inseparable in every aspect of their being.
Since the dialectic between organism and environment constantly changes over historical time, with neither one directly causing the other, organisms can alter that dialectic. Thus Rose repeatedly counters the "determinists" with the declaration "We have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing"23 -- presumably echoing Marx's statement that "men make their own history, but they do not make it lust as they
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? please; they make it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. " But Rose never explains who the "we" is, if not highly structured neural circuits, which must get that structure in part from genes and evolution. We can call this doctrine the Pronoun in the Machine.
Gould is not a doctrinarian like Rose and Lewontin, but he too uses the first-person plural pronoun as if it somehow disproved the relevance of genes and evolution to human affairs: "Which . . . shall we choose? . . . Let us take this stand. . . . We can do otherwise. " And he too cites Marx's "wonderful aphorism" about making our own history and believes that Marx vindicated the concept of free will:
Marx himself had a much more subtle view than most of his contemporaries of the differences between human and natural history. He understood that the evolution of consciousness, and the consequent development of social and economic organization, introduced elements of difference and volition that we usually label as "free will. "24 {128}
Subtle indeed is the argument that explains free will in terms of its synonym "volition" (with or without "elements of difference," whatever that means) and attributes it to the equally mysterious "evolution of consciousness. " Basically, Rose and Gould are struggling to make sense of the dichotomy they invented between a naturally selected, genetically organized brain on one side and a desire for peace, justice, and equality on the other. In Part III we will see that the dichotomy is a false one.
The doctrine of the Pronoun in the Machine is not a casual oversight in the radical scientists' world view. It is consistent with their desire for radical political change and their hostility to "bourgeois" democracy. (Lewontin repeatedly uses "bourgeois" as an epithet. ) If the "we" is truly unfettered by biology, then once "we" see the light we can carry out the vision of radical change that we deem correct. But if the "we" is an imperfect product of evolution -- limited in knowledge and wisdom, tempted by status and power, and blinded by self-deception and delusions of moral superiority -- then "we" had better think twice before constructing all that history. As the chapter on politics will explain, constitutional democracy is based on a jaundiced theory of human nature in which "we" are eternally vulnerable to arrogance and corruption. The checks and balances of democratic institutions were explicitly designed to stalemate the often dangerous ambitions of imperfect hu~mans.
The Ghost in the Machine, of course, is far dearer to the political right than to the political left. In his book The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature, the psychologist Morton Hunt has shown that the foes include people on the left, people on the right, and a motley collection of single-issue fanatics in between. 25 So far I have discussed the far-left outrage because it has been deployed in the battlefield of ideas in the universities and the mainstream press. Those on the far right have also been outraged, though until recently they have aimed at different targets and have fought in different arenas.
The longest-standing right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature comes from the religious sectors of the coalition, especially Christian fundamentalism. Anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is certainly not going to believe in the evolution of the mind, and anyone who believes in an immaterial soul is certainly not going to believe that thought and feeling consist of information processing in the tissues of the brain.
The religious opposition to evolution is fueled by several moral fears. Most obviously, the fact of evolution challenges the literal truth of the creation story in the Bible and thus the authority that religion draws from it. As one creationist minister put it, "If the Bible gets it wrong in biology, then why should I trust the Bible when it talks about morality and salvation? "26
But the opposition to evolution goes beyond a desire to defend biblical {129} literalism. Modern religious people may not believe in the literal truth of every miracle narrated in the Bible, but they do believe that humans were designed in God's image and placed on earth for a larger purpose -- namely, to live a moral life by following God's commandments. If humans are accidental products of the mutation and selection of chemical replicators, they worry, morality would have no foundation and we would be left mindlessly obeying biological urges. One creationist, testifying to this danger in front of the U. S. House Judiciary Committee, cited the lyrics of a rock song: "You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals / So let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel. "27 After the 1999 lethal rampage by two teenagers at Columbine High School in Colorado, Tom Delay, the Republican Majority Whip in the House of Representatives, said that such violence is inevitable as long as "our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes, evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud. "28
The most damaging effect of the right-wing opposition to evolution is the corruption of American science education by activists in the creationist movement. Until a Supreme Court decision in 1968, states were allowed to ban the teaching of evolution outright. Since then, creationists have tried to hobble it in ways that they hope will pass constitutional muster. These include removing evolution from science proficiency standards, demanding disclaimers
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? that it is "only a theory," watering down the curriculum, and opposing textbooks with good coverage of evolution or imposing ones with coverage of creationism. In recent years the National Center for Science Education has learned of new instances of these tactics at a rate of about one a week, coming from forty states. 29
The religious right is discomfited not just by evolution but by neuro-science. By exorcising the ghost in the machine, brain science is undermining two moral doctrines that depend on it. One is that every person has a soul, which finds value, exercises free will, and is responsible for its choices. If behavior is controlled instead by circuits in the brain that follow the laws of chemistry, choice and value would be myths and the possibility of moral responsibility would evaporate. As the creationist advocate John West put it, "If human beings (and their beliefs) really are the mindless products of their material existence, then everything that gives meaning to human life -- religion, morality, beauty -- is revealed to be without objective basis. "30
The other moral doctrine (which is found in some, but not all, Christian denominations) is that the soul enters the body at conception and leaves it at death, thereby defining who is a person with a right to life. The doctrine makes abortion, euthanasia, and the harvesting of stem cells from blastocysts equivalent to murder.
It makes humans fundamentally different from animals. And it makes human cloning a violation of the divine order. All this would seem to be threatened by neuroscientists, who say that the self or the soul inheres in neural activity that develops gradually in the brain of an embryo, that can be {130} seen in the brains of animals, and that can break down piecemeal with aging and disease. (We will return to this issue in Chapter 13. )
But the right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature can no longer be associated only with Bible-thumpers and televangelists. Today evolution is being challenged by some of the most cerebral theorists in the formerly secular neoconservative movement. They are embracing a hypothesis called Intelligent Design, originated by the biochemist Michael Behe. 31 The molecular machinery of cells cannot function in a simpler form, Behe argues, and therefore it could not have evolved piecemeal by natural selection. Instead it must have been conceived as a working invention by an intelligent designer. The designer could, in theory, have been an advanced alien from outer space, but everyone knows that the subtext of the theory is that it must have been God.
Biologists reject Behe's argument for a number of reasons. 32 His specific claims about the "irreducible complexity" of biochemistry are unproven or just wrong. He takes every phenomenon whose evolutionary history has not yet been figured out and chalks it up to design by default. When it comes to the intelligent designer, Behe suddenly jettisons all scientific scruples and does not question where the designer came from or how the designer works. And he ignores the overwhelming evidence that the process of evolution, far from being intelligent and purposeful, is wasteful and cruel.
Nonetheless, Intelligent Design has been embraced by leading neoconservatives, including Irving Kristol, Robert Bork, Roger Kimball, and Gertrude Himmelfarb. Other conservative intellectuals have also sympathized with creationism for moral reasons, such as the law professor Philip Johnson, the writer William F. Buckley, the columnist Tom Bethell, and, disconcertingly, the bioethicist Leon Kass -- chair of George W. Bush's new Council on Bioethics and thus a shaper of the nation's policies on biology and medicine. 33 A story entitled "The Deniable Darwin" appeared, astonishingly, on the cover of Commentary, which means that a magazine that was once a leading forum for secular Jewish intellectuals is now more skeptical of evolution than is the Pope! 34
It is not clear whether these worldly thinkers are really convinced that Darwinism is false or whether they think it is important for other people to believe it is false. In a scene from Inherit the Wind, the play about the Scopes Monkey Trial, the prosecutor and defense attorney (based on William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow) are relaxing together after a day in court. The prosecutor says of the Tennessee locals:
They're simple people, Henry; poor people. They work hard and they need to believe in something, something beautiful. Why do you want to take it away from them? It's all they have.
That is not far from the attitude of the neocons. Kristol has written: {131}
If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded -- or even if it suspects -- that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe. 35
He spells out the moral corollary:
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work. 36
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? As the science writer Ronald Bailey observes, "Ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is 'the opium of the people'; they add a heartfelt, 'Thank God! ' "37
Many conservative intellectuals join fundamentalist Christians in deploring neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, which they see as explaining away the soul, eternal values, and free choice. Kass writes:
With science, the leading wing of modern rationalism, has come the progressive demystification of the world. Falling in love, should it still occur, is for the modern temper to be explained not by demonic possession (Eros) born of the soul-smiting sight of the beautiful (Aphrodite) but by a rise in the concentration of some still-to-be-identified polypeptide hormone in the hypothalamus. The power of religious sensibilities and understandings fades too. Even if it is true that the great majority of Americans still profess a belief in God, He is for few of us a God before whom one trembles in fear of judgment. 38
Similarly, the journalist Andrew Ferguson warns his readers that evolutionary psychology "is sure to give you the creeps," because "whether behavior is moral, whether it signifies virtue, is a judgment that the new science, and materialism in general, cannot make. "39 The new sciences, he writes, claim that people are nothing but "meat puppets," a frightening shift from the traditional Judeo-Christian view in which "human beings [are] persons from the start, endowed with a soul, created by God, and infinitely precious. "40
Even the left-baiting author Tom Wolfe, who admires neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, worries about their moral implications. In his essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," he writes that when science has finally killed the soul ("that last refuge of values"), "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make [Nietzsche's] phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame": {132}
Meanwhile, the notion of a self -- a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior -- a self who can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds -- this old-fashioned notion (what's a bootstrap, for God's sake? ) of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slipping away. . . slipping away. . . 41
"Where does that leave self-control? " he asks. "Where, indeed, if people believe this ghostly self does not even exist, and brain imaging proves it, once and for all? "42
An irony in the modern denial of human nature is that partisans at opposite extremes of the political spectrum, who ordinarily can't stand the sight of each other, find themselves strange bedfellows. Recall how the signatories of "Against 'Sociobiology'" wrote that theories like Wilson's "provided an important basis for . . . the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany. " In May 2001 the Education Committee of the Louisiana House of Representatives resolved that "Adolf Hitler and others have exploited the racist views of Darwin and those he influenced . . . to justify the annihilation of millions of purportedly racially inferior individuals. "43 The sponsor of the resolution (which was eventually defeated) cited in its defense a passage by Gould, which is not the first time that he has been cited approvingly in creationist propaganda. 44 Though Gould has been a tireless opponent of creationism, he has been an equally tireless opponent of the idea that evolution can explain mind and morality, and that is the implication of Darwinism that creationists fear most.
The left and the right also agree that the new sciences of human nature threaten the concept of moral responsibility. When Wilson suggested that in humans, as in many other mammals, males have a greater desire for multiple sexual partners than do females, Rose accused him of really saying:
Don't blame your mates for sleeping around, ladies, it's not their fault they are genetically programmed. 45
Compare Tom Wolfe, tongue only partly in cheek:
The male of the human species is genetically hardwired to be polygamous, i. e. , unfaithful to his legal mate. Any magazine-reading male gets the picture soon enough. (Three million years of evolution made me do it! )46 {133}
On one wing we have Gould asking the rhetorical question:
Why do we want to fob off responsibility for our violence and sexism upon our genes? 47
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? And on the other wing we find Ferguson raising the same point:
The "scientific belief" would . . . appear to be corrosive of any notion of free will, personal
responsibility, or universal morality. 48
For Rose and Gould the ghost in the machine is a "we" that can construct history and change the world at will. For Kass, Wolfe, and Ferguson it is a "soul" that makes moral judgments according to religious precepts. But all of them see genetics, neuroscience, and evolution as threats to this~irreducible locus of free choice.
Where does this leave intellectual life today? The hostility to the sciences of human nature from the religious right is likely to increase, but the influence of the right will be felt more in direct appeals to politicians than from changes in the intellectual climate. Any inroads of the religious right into mainstream intellectual life will be limited by their opposition to the theory of evolution itself. Whether it is known as creationism or by the euphemism Intelligent Design, a denial of the theory of natural selection will founder under the weight of the mass of evidence that the theory is correct. How much additional damage the denial will do to science education and biomedical research before it sinks is unknown.
The hostility from the radical left, on the other hand, has left a substantial mark on modern intellectual life, because the so-called radical scientists are now the establishment. I have met many social and cognitive scientists who proudly say they have learned all their biology from Gould and Lewontin. 49 Many intellectuals defer to Lewontin as the infallible pontiff of evolution and genetics, and many philosophers of biology spent time as his apprentice. A sneering review by Rose of every new book on human evolution or genetics has become a fixture of British journalism. As for Gould, Isaac Asimov probably did not intend the irony when he wrote in a book blurb that "Gould can do no wrong," but that is precisely the attitude of many journalists and social scientists. A recent article in New York magazine on the journalist Robert Wright called him a "stalker" and a "young punk" with "penis envy" because he had the temerity to criticize Gould on his logic and facts. 50
In part the respect awarded to the radical scientists has been earned. Quite aside from their scientific accomplishments, Lewontin is an incisive analyst on {134} many scientific and social issues, Gould has written hundreds of superb essays on natural history, and Rose wrote a fine book on the neuroscience of memory. But they have also positioned themselves shrewdly on the intellectual landscape. As the biologist John Alcock explains, "Stephen Jay Gould abhors violence, he speaks out against sexism, he despises Nazis, he finds genocide horrific, he is unfailingly on the side of the angels. Who can argue with such a person? "51 This immunity from argument allowed the radical scientists' unfair attacks on others to become part of the conventional wisdom.
Many writers today casually equate behavioral genetics with eugenics, as if studying the genetic correlates of behavior were the same as coercing people in their decisions about having children. Many equate evolutionary psychology with Social Darwinism, as if studying our evolutionary roots were the same as justifying the station of the poor. The confusions do not come only from the scientifically illiterate but may be found in prestigious publications such as Scientific American and Science. 52 After Wilson argued in Consilience that divisions between fields of human knowledge were becoming obsolete, the historian Tzvetan Todorov wrote sarcastically, "I have a proposal for Wilson's next book . . . [an] analysis of Social Darwinism, the doctrine that was adopted by Hitler, and of the ways it differs from sociobiology. "53 When the Human Genome Project was completed in 2001, its leaders made a ritual denunciation of "genetic determinism," the belief -- held by no one -- that "all characteristics of the person are 'hard-wired' into our genome. "54
Even many scientists are perfectly content with the radicals' social constructionism, not so much because they agree with it but because they are preoccupied in their labs and need picketers outside their window like they need another hole in the head. As the anthropologist John Tooby and the psychologist Leda Cosmides note, the dogma that biology is intrinsically disconnected from the human social order offers scientists "safe conduct across the politicized minefield of modern academic life. "55 As we shall see, even today people who challenge the Blank Slate or the Noble Savage are still sometimes silenced by demonstrators or denounced as Nazis. Even when such attacks are sporadic, they create an atmosphere of intimidation that distorts scholarship far and wide.
But the intellectual climate is showing signs of change. Ideas about human nature, while still anathema to some academics and pundits, are beginning to get a hearing. Scientists, artists, scholars in the humanities, legal theorists, and thoughtful laypeople have expressed a thirst for the new insights about the mind that have been coming out of the biological and cognitive sciences. And the radical science movement, for all its rhetorical success, has turned out to be an empirical wasteland. Twenty-five years of data have not been kind to its predictions. Chimpanzees are not peaceful vegetarians, as Montagu claimed, nor is the heritability of intelligence indistinguishable from zero, IQ a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? {135} "reification" unrelated to the brain, personality and social behavior without any genetic basis, gender differences a product only of "psychocultural expectations," or the number of murderous clans equal to the number of pacific bands. 56 Today the idea of guiding scientific research by "a conscious application of Marxist philosophy" is just embarrassing, and as the evolutionary psychologist Martin Daly pointed out, "Sufficient research to fill a first issue of Dialectical Biology has yet to materialize. "57
In contrast, sociobiology did not, as Sahlins had predicted, turn out to be a passing fad. The title of Alcock's 2001 book The Triumph of Sociobiology says it all: in the study of animal behavior, no one even talks about "sociobiology" or "selfish genes" anymore, because the ideas are part and parcel of the science. 58 In the study of humans, there are major spheres of human experience -- beauty, motherhood, kinship, morality, cooperation, sexuality, violence -- in which evolutionary psychology provides the only coherent theory and has spawned vibrant new areas of empirical research. 59 Behavioral genetics has revivified the study of personality and will only expand with the application of knowledge from the Human Genome Project. 60 Cognitive neuroscience will not shrink from applying its new tools to every aspect of mind and behavior, including the emotionally and politically charged ones. The question is not whether human nature will increasingly be explained by the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution, but what we are going to do with the knowledge. What in fact are the implications for our ideals of equality, progress, responsibility, and the worth of the person? The opponents of the sciences of human nature from the left and the right are correct about one thing: these are vital questions. But that is all the more reason that they be confronted not with fear and loathing but with reason. That is the goal of the next part of the book.
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HUMAN NATURE WITH A HUMAN FACE
hen Galileo attracted the unwanted attention of the Inquisition in 1633, more was at stake than issues in astronomy. By stating that the W Earth revolved around the sun rather than vice versa, Galileo was contradicting the literal truth of the Bible, such as the passage in which
Joshua issued the successful command "Sun, stand thou still. " Worse, he was challenging a theory of the moral order of the universe.
According to the theory, developed in medieval times, the sphere of the moon divided the universe into an unchanging perfection in the heavens above and a corrupt degeneration in the Earth below (hence Samuel Johnson's disclaimer that he could not "change sublunary nature"). Surrounding the moon were spheres for the inner planets, the sun, the outer planets, and the fixed stars, each cranked by a higher angel. And surrounding them all were the heavens, home to God. Contained within the sphere of the moon, and thus a little lower than the angels, were human souls, and then, in descending order, human bodies, animals (in the order beasts, birds, fish, insects), then plants, minerals, the inanimate elements, nine layers of devils, and finally, at the center of the Earth, Lucifer in hell. The universe was thus arranged in a hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being.
The Great Chain was thick with moral implications. Our home, it was thought, lay at the center of the universe, reflecting the importance of our existence and behavior. People lived their lives in their proper station (king, duke, or peasant), and after death their souls rose to a higher place or sank to a lower one. Everyone had to be mindful that the human abode was a humble place in the scheme of things and that they must look up to catch a glimpse of heavenly perfection. And in a world that seemed always to teeter on the brink of famine and barbarism, the Great Chain offered the comfort of knowing that the nature of things was orderly. If the planets wandered from their spheres, chaos would break out, because everything was connected in the cosmic order. {138}
As Alexander Pope wrote, "From Nature's chain whatever link you strike, / Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. "1
None of this escaped Galileo as he was pounding away at his link. He knew that he could not simply argue on empirical grounds that the division between a corrupt Earth and the unchanging heavens was falsified by sunspots, novas, and moons drifting across Jupiter. He also argued that the moral trappings of the geocentric theory were as dubious as its empirical claims, so if the theory turned out to be false, no one would be the worse. Here is Galileo's alter ego in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, wondering what is so great about being invariant and inalterable:
For my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely because of the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc. that occur in it incessantly. If, not being subject to any changes, it were a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? vast desert of sand or mountain of jasper, or if at the time of the flood the waters which covered it had frozen, and it had remained an enormous globe of ice where nothing was ever born or ever altered or changed, I should deem it a useless lump in the universe, devoid of activity and, in a word, superfluous and essentially nonexistent. This is exactly the difference between a living animal and a dead one; and I say the same of the moon, of Jupiter, and of all other world globes.
. . . Those who so greatly exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, et cetera, are reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire to go on living, and by the terror they have of death. They do not reflect that if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into the world. Such men really deserve to encounter a Medusa's head which would transmute them into statues of jasper or diamond, and thus make them more perfect than they are. 2
Today we see things Galileo's way. It's hard for us to imagine why the three-dimensional arrangement of rock and gas in space should have anything to do with right and wrong or with the meaning and purpose of our lives. The moral sensibilities of Galileo s time eventually adjusted to the astronomical facts, not just because they had to give a nod to reality but because the very idea that morality has something to do with a Great Chain of Being was daffy to begin with.
We are now living, I think, through a similar transition.
