P2P
12th October 2008, 23:50
In “The Realist Vision,” we saw that the worldview of our age is based on the Blank Slate/Noble Savage theory of human nature. According to this view, there is no innate human nature; rather, people come into the world as blank slates, and their abilities and personalities are shaped entirely by experience. Furthermore, man in his natural, primitive state is a Noble Savage who lives in peace and harmony with his fellow man.
The Blank Slate/Noble Savage worldview is a fantasy. It is contradicted by anthropological research on primitive societies and psychological research on human nature. Even more fundamentally, however, the Utopian Vision contradicts the very principles of life itself. All organisms have come to be what they are through the process of evolution, and evolution is governed by the logic of the selfish gene. Selfish genes produce selfish, competitive organisms that are naturally in a state of conflict. If we are alive today, it is because our ancestors prevailed in this conflict and passed onto us the traits that make up a successful contestant in the great competition that is nature.
The term “selfish gene” comes from Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book of that title. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins summarized the formulation of Darwinism that was emerging at that time and has subsequently become the standard theory among biologists. In this view, the motive force behind life is simply the tendency of genes to make copies of themselves. The origin of life was molecules that were capable of replicating themselves, or “replicators,” as Dawkins calls them. The replicators that prevailed were naturally those that were capable of creating the most copies of themselves. Because habitats were capable of supporting only a finite number of replicators, eventually different varieties came into competition with each other. Competition led the replicators to become more complex cellular organisms, and this same process has led to organisms of ever greater complexity. Eventually, organisms became so complex that the replicators ceased to be the entire organism and became a set of instructions for building organisms(1).
Dawkins expresses the magnificent sweep of the Darwinist vision in this passage:
What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth? Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines(2).
Organisms are merely vehicles that genes build in order to replicate. We are their “weird engines” cobbled together through millenia of random mutations, each one of which enabled our genes to replicate themselves more successfully. The “tortuous, indirect routes” through which genes communicate with the outside world are “adaptations,” that is, characteristics that enabled our ancestors to replicate in the past and hence have become part of our innate design. Some of these adaptations are physical characteristics; others are behaviors.
The discipline of sociobiology, which changed its name to “evolutionary psychology” after the earlier name became a byword, uses the theory of the selfish gene to study the human mind. Evolutionary psychologists reject the Blank Slate view of human nature. Rather, they believe human beings come into the world equipped with a wide variety of psychological adaptations, or instincts, that are designed to solve the typical problems humans faced during the majority of their history. Evolution takes a long time to happen, and people have lived in nation-state societies for a relatively short time in evolutionary terms. Humans spent virtually all of their history as primitive hunter-gatherers living in small bands and began to emerge from this condition only 10,000 years ago during the agricultural revolution. Consequently, evolutionary psychologists believe that our minds evolved to solve the problems faced by hunter-gatherers. As University of California scholars John Tooby and Leda Cosmides say in their excellent introduction to the field, “Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.”
Selfish gene theory accounts for the behavior of primitive peoples much better than the theory of the noble savage. Hunter-gatherer societies are violent and competitive in the most blatant ways. Warfare, for example, is universal in primitive societies. According to anthropologist Lawrence Keeley’s survey War Before Civilization, almost all pre-state societies that anthropologists have studied engaged in warfare, and those that did not had had peace imposed on them by the administration of modern nation-states(3). Moreover, men living in pre-state societies are much more likely to die from warfare than those in state societies. In his famous study of the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazonian rain forest, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who was heavily influenced by sociobiology, found that 30 percent of deaths among adult males were due to violence, which most commonly consisted of warfare between Yanomamo villages. Forty percent of Yanomamo men had participated in a killing of another Yanomamo(4). Keeley’s survey shows such high levels of violence are typical of pre-state societies. By contrast, in 20th-century Europe and the United States, only about one percent of males died from warfare(5).
Just as selfish gene theory predicts, warfare in pre-state societies is centered around sex. In fact, Chagnon found that disputes over women were the primary reason for Yanomamo warfare. Also, the capture of women was always a desired side benefit of warfare(6). Again, the Yanomamo are typical of primitive peoples: Keeley’s survey found that the capture and rape of women have been a common motive for warfare among primitive peoples(7).
Another reason why Yanomamo men engage in warfare is the social prestige that success in fighting brings. We have all seen male deer on television locking horns in order to determine which is the dominant male. Likewise, men in primitive societies achieve dominance through fighting prowess. The Yanomamo have a special initiation ceremony for men who have killed another man: these men become unokais, and they are granted higher status by the tribe than men who have not killed. The motive for the pursuit of dominance among male deer and male humans is the same: dominant males get more mates. Most male deer will never mate at all; virtually all the mating is performed by dominant stags. Similarly, Chagnon found that a Yanomamo unokai had two and a half times more children than a Yanomamo who had never killed. Unokais’ success in getting wives was due not merely to their capture of women, but to the prestige they enjoyed in their societies(8).
Throughout the animal kingdom, the rule is that males are the more aggressive sex. The selfish gene perspective easily makes sense of this sex difference. Due to the facts of male and female biology, a male’s reproductive success is quite closely related to the number of mates he has, whereas a female’s is not. Consequently, males evolve to fight each other for access to females. Inter-male competition leads males to become larger and stronger than females and equips them with fighting mechanisms like horns, antlers, and tusks. The difference in body size and strength between men and women indicates, just as surely as a deer’s antlers, a long history of male competition for mates(9).
Human males compete not only through physical aggression, but through the non-violent accumulation of wealth and power. Indeed, in Western societies, most inter-male competition is non-violent—although physical aggression remains an important determinant of dominance in some sectors of society, particularly in the gang cultures common among blacks and Hispanics. Despite the different form that competition takes in Western societies, the sex difference is still valid. Western men score higher on tests of dominance orientation than women. Men are more likely than women to agree with statements like, “To get ahead in life, it is sometimes necessary to step on others,” “Only the best people should get ahead in this world,” and “Winning is more important than how the game is played.”(10) And Western women are just as attracted to dominant men as Yanomamo women are: wealthy, powerful men have greater sexual opportunity than non-dominant men and get more attractive mates(11).
In the world of the selfish gene, a pure altruist simply cannot evolve. Any organism that is oriented to assuring the good of others, rather than his own, will merely be aiding selfish organisms to compete against him, and genetic mutations that produce such behavior will quickly be eliminated(12). This is not to say that all altruism is a mere illusion: specific, limited forms of altruism do evolve, but only because they too facilitate the replication of our selfish genes. One example is altruism among blood relatives. Not only among humans, but throughout the animal kingdom, organisms behave in ways that benefit their blood relatives with no benefit to themselves. However, this behavior turns out to be altruistic only when viewed from the perspective of the organism; it is selfish when viewed from the perspective of the gene. Blood relatives are organisms that share genes: parents and children share 50 percent of their genes on average, as do full siblings; uncles and nephews, grandparents and grandchildren, and half-siblings share 25 percent of their genes; cousins share one eighth of their genes. Therefore, genes program organisms to aid their relatives because this behavior facilitates the replication of identical genes in the objects of the aid. If someone lays down his life to save four of his siblings, this behavior is altruistic from the point of view of the organism, but selfish from the point of view of the gene. The genes of the altruist will never replicate, but there are twice as many of the altruist’s genes in the bodies of his siblings as in his own (50% x 4 = 200%)(13). Similarly, adaptations for cooperation and exchange evolve in many organisms as well, and these behaviors are fundamental to all human societies. Cooperation also serves the interest of the selfish gene. It entails a cost to each cooperating organism that is compensated by a larger benefit. Hunters in primitive human societies regularly give up some of their catch to the rest of their tribe on days when they are lucky, but it is with a clear expectation of payback on a day when other hunters are lucky. If the payback is not fulfilled, cheated altruists take their revenge through snide gossip about the cheaters and the refusal of future sharing(14). Indeed, humans have evolved a whole suite of emotions and intellectual abilities to maintain a successful system of cooperation that works out to the greater good of all parties: liking attaches us to people who reliably reciprocate our sacrifices; gratitude encourages us to reciprocate the sacrifice of another; anger impels us to take revenge on those who do not reciprocate our sacrifices; guilt warns us that failure to reciprocate a sacrifice may result in the vindictive anger of others(15). Tooby and Cosmides argue that the cooperation has molded our very reasoning abilities.
Though alturism exist, there is no more powerful antidote to the Utopian Vision on which the left is based than the theory of the selfish gene. Man simply has a thirst for dominance that can never be slake.
NOTE: I edited away a good lot of the posts conclusions since it didn't really emphasize the main point, which was the above.
1. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 12-20. ↑
2. Dawkins, pp. 19-20. ↑
3. Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 27-29. ↑
4. Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamo: The Last Days of Eden, 5th ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, p. 239. ↑
5. Keeley, p. 90. ↑
6. Chagnon, p. 220. ↑
7. Keeley, p. 86. ↑
8. Chagnon, pp. 239-40. ↑
9. David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), pp. 278-311. ↑
10. Buss, p. 353. ↑
11. Buss, pp. 104-11. ↑
12. Dawkins, pp. 166-88. ↑
13. Dawkins, pp. 88-108. ↑
14. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 504-06. ↑
15. Pinker, pp. 402-07. ↑
The Blank Slate/Noble Savage worldview is a fantasy. It is contradicted by anthropological research on primitive societies and psychological research on human nature. Even more fundamentally, however, the Utopian Vision contradicts the very principles of life itself. All organisms have come to be what they are through the process of evolution, and evolution is governed by the logic of the selfish gene. Selfish genes produce selfish, competitive organisms that are naturally in a state of conflict. If we are alive today, it is because our ancestors prevailed in this conflict and passed onto us the traits that make up a successful contestant in the great competition that is nature.
The term “selfish gene” comes from Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book of that title. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins summarized the formulation of Darwinism that was emerging at that time and has subsequently become the standard theory among biologists. In this view, the motive force behind life is simply the tendency of genes to make copies of themselves. The origin of life was molecules that were capable of replicating themselves, or “replicators,” as Dawkins calls them. The replicators that prevailed were naturally those that were capable of creating the most copies of themselves. Because habitats were capable of supporting only a finite number of replicators, eventually different varieties came into competition with each other. Competition led the replicators to become more complex cellular organisms, and this same process has led to organisms of ever greater complexity. Eventually, organisms became so complex that the replicators ceased to be the entire organism and became a set of instructions for building organisms(1).
Dawkins expresses the magnificent sweep of the Darwinist vision in this passage:
What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth? Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines(2).
Organisms are merely vehicles that genes build in order to replicate. We are their “weird engines” cobbled together through millenia of random mutations, each one of which enabled our genes to replicate themselves more successfully. The “tortuous, indirect routes” through which genes communicate with the outside world are “adaptations,” that is, characteristics that enabled our ancestors to replicate in the past and hence have become part of our innate design. Some of these adaptations are physical characteristics; others are behaviors.
The discipline of sociobiology, which changed its name to “evolutionary psychology” after the earlier name became a byword, uses the theory of the selfish gene to study the human mind. Evolutionary psychologists reject the Blank Slate view of human nature. Rather, they believe human beings come into the world equipped with a wide variety of psychological adaptations, or instincts, that are designed to solve the typical problems humans faced during the majority of their history. Evolution takes a long time to happen, and people have lived in nation-state societies for a relatively short time in evolutionary terms. Humans spent virtually all of their history as primitive hunter-gatherers living in small bands and began to emerge from this condition only 10,000 years ago during the agricultural revolution. Consequently, evolutionary psychologists believe that our minds evolved to solve the problems faced by hunter-gatherers. As University of California scholars John Tooby and Leda Cosmides say in their excellent introduction to the field, “Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.”
Selfish gene theory accounts for the behavior of primitive peoples much better than the theory of the noble savage. Hunter-gatherer societies are violent and competitive in the most blatant ways. Warfare, for example, is universal in primitive societies. According to anthropologist Lawrence Keeley’s survey War Before Civilization, almost all pre-state societies that anthropologists have studied engaged in warfare, and those that did not had had peace imposed on them by the administration of modern nation-states(3). Moreover, men living in pre-state societies are much more likely to die from warfare than those in state societies. In his famous study of the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazonian rain forest, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who was heavily influenced by sociobiology, found that 30 percent of deaths among adult males were due to violence, which most commonly consisted of warfare between Yanomamo villages. Forty percent of Yanomamo men had participated in a killing of another Yanomamo(4). Keeley’s survey shows such high levels of violence are typical of pre-state societies. By contrast, in 20th-century Europe and the United States, only about one percent of males died from warfare(5).
Just as selfish gene theory predicts, warfare in pre-state societies is centered around sex. In fact, Chagnon found that disputes over women were the primary reason for Yanomamo warfare. Also, the capture of women was always a desired side benefit of warfare(6). Again, the Yanomamo are typical of primitive peoples: Keeley’s survey found that the capture and rape of women have been a common motive for warfare among primitive peoples(7).
Another reason why Yanomamo men engage in warfare is the social prestige that success in fighting brings. We have all seen male deer on television locking horns in order to determine which is the dominant male. Likewise, men in primitive societies achieve dominance through fighting prowess. The Yanomamo have a special initiation ceremony for men who have killed another man: these men become unokais, and they are granted higher status by the tribe than men who have not killed. The motive for the pursuit of dominance among male deer and male humans is the same: dominant males get more mates. Most male deer will never mate at all; virtually all the mating is performed by dominant stags. Similarly, Chagnon found that a Yanomamo unokai had two and a half times more children than a Yanomamo who had never killed. Unokais’ success in getting wives was due not merely to their capture of women, but to the prestige they enjoyed in their societies(8).
Throughout the animal kingdom, the rule is that males are the more aggressive sex. The selfish gene perspective easily makes sense of this sex difference. Due to the facts of male and female biology, a male’s reproductive success is quite closely related to the number of mates he has, whereas a female’s is not. Consequently, males evolve to fight each other for access to females. Inter-male competition leads males to become larger and stronger than females and equips them with fighting mechanisms like horns, antlers, and tusks. The difference in body size and strength between men and women indicates, just as surely as a deer’s antlers, a long history of male competition for mates(9).
Human males compete not only through physical aggression, but through the non-violent accumulation of wealth and power. Indeed, in Western societies, most inter-male competition is non-violent—although physical aggression remains an important determinant of dominance in some sectors of society, particularly in the gang cultures common among blacks and Hispanics. Despite the different form that competition takes in Western societies, the sex difference is still valid. Western men score higher on tests of dominance orientation than women. Men are more likely than women to agree with statements like, “To get ahead in life, it is sometimes necessary to step on others,” “Only the best people should get ahead in this world,” and “Winning is more important than how the game is played.”(10) And Western women are just as attracted to dominant men as Yanomamo women are: wealthy, powerful men have greater sexual opportunity than non-dominant men and get more attractive mates(11).
In the world of the selfish gene, a pure altruist simply cannot evolve. Any organism that is oriented to assuring the good of others, rather than his own, will merely be aiding selfish organisms to compete against him, and genetic mutations that produce such behavior will quickly be eliminated(12). This is not to say that all altruism is a mere illusion: specific, limited forms of altruism do evolve, but only because they too facilitate the replication of our selfish genes. One example is altruism among blood relatives. Not only among humans, but throughout the animal kingdom, organisms behave in ways that benefit their blood relatives with no benefit to themselves. However, this behavior turns out to be altruistic only when viewed from the perspective of the organism; it is selfish when viewed from the perspective of the gene. Blood relatives are organisms that share genes: parents and children share 50 percent of their genes on average, as do full siblings; uncles and nephews, grandparents and grandchildren, and half-siblings share 25 percent of their genes; cousins share one eighth of their genes. Therefore, genes program organisms to aid their relatives because this behavior facilitates the replication of identical genes in the objects of the aid. If someone lays down his life to save four of his siblings, this behavior is altruistic from the point of view of the organism, but selfish from the point of view of the gene. The genes of the altruist will never replicate, but there are twice as many of the altruist’s genes in the bodies of his siblings as in his own (50% x 4 = 200%)(13). Similarly, adaptations for cooperation and exchange evolve in many organisms as well, and these behaviors are fundamental to all human societies. Cooperation also serves the interest of the selfish gene. It entails a cost to each cooperating organism that is compensated by a larger benefit. Hunters in primitive human societies regularly give up some of their catch to the rest of their tribe on days when they are lucky, but it is with a clear expectation of payback on a day when other hunters are lucky. If the payback is not fulfilled, cheated altruists take their revenge through snide gossip about the cheaters and the refusal of future sharing(14). Indeed, humans have evolved a whole suite of emotions and intellectual abilities to maintain a successful system of cooperation that works out to the greater good of all parties: liking attaches us to people who reliably reciprocate our sacrifices; gratitude encourages us to reciprocate the sacrifice of another; anger impels us to take revenge on those who do not reciprocate our sacrifices; guilt warns us that failure to reciprocate a sacrifice may result in the vindictive anger of others(15). Tooby and Cosmides argue that the cooperation has molded our very reasoning abilities.
Though alturism exist, there is no more powerful antidote to the Utopian Vision on which the left is based than the theory of the selfish gene. Man simply has a thirst for dominance that can never be slake.
NOTE: I edited away a good lot of the posts conclusions since it didn't really emphasize the main point, which was the above.
1. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 12-20. ↑
2. Dawkins, pp. 19-20. ↑
3. Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 27-29. ↑
4. Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamo: The Last Days of Eden, 5th ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, p. 239. ↑
5. Keeley, p. 90. ↑
6. Chagnon, p. 220. ↑
7. Keeley, p. 86. ↑
8. Chagnon, pp. 239-40. ↑
9. David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), pp. 278-311. ↑
10. Buss, p. 353. ↑
11. Buss, pp. 104-11. ↑
12. Dawkins, pp. 166-88. ↑
13. Dawkins, pp. 88-108. ↑
14. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 504-06. ↑
15. Pinker, pp. 402-07. ↑