Akula: On Animal Morality:Sunday morning reading:
I once asked a dyed-in-the-wool sociobiologist to
account for the Shakers, a religious sect which refused
to reproduce - thus, as it were, throwing the gauntlet
down to Darwin. He thought for a comically difficult few seconds and
finally sputtered,
'They're being selected against!'
For him this closed the matter. For the rest
of us, it opens up the possibility of a vast realm of
human action that is not subject to precise Darwinian explanation.
The crucial question of sociobiology is not whether the theory is right
(in important respects it must be)
but how much of human behavior it
accounts for.
TA
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9/25/99
Read on on animal Morality
TA ,
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SOCIOBIOLOGY
the systematic study of the biological basis of social behaviour. The term sociobiology was popularized by the American biologist Edward O. Wilson (q.v.) in his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). Sociobiology attempts to understand and explain animal (and human)
social behaviour in the light of natural selection
and other biological processes. One of its
central tenets is that genes (and their transmission
through successful reproduction) are the central
motivators in animals' struggle
for survival, and that animals will behave in
ways that maximize their chances of transmitting
copies of their genes to succeeding
generations. Since behaviour patterns are to
some extent inherited, the evolutionary process
of natural selection can be
said to foster those behavioural (as well as physical) traits that increase an individual's chances of reproducing.
(see also Index: Wilson, Edward O.)
Sociobiology has contributed several insights to the understanding of animal social behaviour. It explains apparently altruistic behaviour in some animal species as actually being genetically selfish, since
such behaviours usually benefit closely
related individuals whose genes resemble those of the altruistic individual. This insight helps explain why soldier ants sacrifice their lives in order to defend their colony, or why worker honeybees in a hive forego reproduction in order to help their queen
reproduce. Sociobiology can in some cases explain the differences between male and female behaviour in
certain animal species as resulting from the different strategies the sexes must resort to in order to transmit their genes to posterity.
Sociobiology is more controversial, however, when it attempts to explain various human social behaviours in
terms of their adaptive value for reproduction.
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Date: October 6, 1985, Sunday,
Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 48, Column 2; Book Review Desk
Byline: By Melvin Konner; Melvin Konner, author of 'The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit,' is head of the anthropology department at Emory University.
Lead:
VAULTING AMBITION Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature. By Philip Kitcher. 456 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: The
MIT Press. $25.
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A DECADE has passed since the publication of E. O. Wilson's 'Sociobiology: The New Synthesis' - an event that is generally seen as marking the consolidation, if
not the start, of a new field of biological and
behavioral science. It was greeted
with praise in The New York Review of Books by C. H. Waddington, a renowned English geneticist and lifelong progressive, and it
was widely acclaimed as an encyclopedic summary of the evolutionary approach to animal, and human, behavior.
However,
it came under fire from many quarters. Such critics as Richard C. Lewontin at Harvard University,
a leading mathematical geneticist, and Stephen Jay Gould,
a leading paleontologist and naturalist who is also at
Harvard, have devoted substantial time, energy and print to exposing its scientific flaws.
They have also pointed
out its dangerous political implications, arising from the inappropriate application of sociobiological principles to support racist and reactionary ideologies.
Those implications have been puzzlingly ignored by many of the practitioners in the discipline.
Text:
Meanwhile, the new field has grown in numbers and enthusiasm, attracting some of the best young minds in evolutionary biology and animal behavior. Frequent issues of Science, Nature and Scientific American and every issue of such distinguished specialty journals as American Naturalist and Animal Behaviour containnew papers contributing to the research program known as sociobiology, which is basically an application of Darwinian principles to behavior. Hundreds, if not thousands, of investigators
now devote themselves to developing this bitterly controversial new field. Others, fewer but growing in number, seek to extend its principles to the explanation of human behavior and often address their conclusions to a general reading public.
Who is right? It seems a good time for an assessment, and Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy at the
University of Minnesota, has undertaken to provide a decisive one. He previously contributed a valuable analysis of scientific creationism, scrutinizing that dubious enterprise - and inevitably, Darwinism as well - under the cold blue light of the philosophy of science.
He now turns that light on a new and relatively vulnerable part of evolutionary biology itself. Lavish praise of the book by Mr. Lewontin and Mr. Gould leaves no doubt about the importance of this assessment to the most distinguished critics of the discipline.
As Mr. Kitcher appreciates, and all insiders know, Mr. Wilson's synthesis was an important contribution but not a seminal one. The latter distinction is reserved for three currents of thought.
The first is the concept of inclusive fitness. Darwin based the burden of evolutionary competition on the individual.
Inclusive fitness takes that burden off the individual and shares it among relatives, thus making altruism comprehensible in evolutionary terms for the first time.
This concept and its mathematical development are most closely associated with the work W. D. Hamilton did at Cambridge University. The second is the use of game theory calculations to explain much about both competition and the limits to competition. This work, known among/sociobiologists as evolutionary stable strategy, is most closely associated with the work of John Maynard Smith at the University of Sussex in England. The third is the
use of optimization theory, a concept borrowed from the way economists study maximizing profits, utility and other goals. In sociobiology the theory sees reproduction as the goal and explains the behavior and functioning of organisms in the service of that goal. The principal work on it was done by Robert Trivers at Harvard Univesity.
All have in common the Darwinian idea that only those hereditary characteristics which improve reproduction can survive the relentless culling of evolution. These three lines of thought, well developed by the early 1970's, have transformed completely the way scientists from a variety of disciplines think about animal behavior. Mr. Kitcher recognizes this, and in a meticulous analysis
puts his philosopher's stamp of approval on them
- with some reservations - as well as on a large number of empirical studies of animal behavior that derive from and test them. But if humans are animals, these concepts can be applied generally, in some ways at least, to our own behavior. E NTER what Mr. Kitcher derisively calls 'pop sociobiology.'
This misnomer - it subsumes a number of works that received little popular attention, including one full of advanced mathematics - appears to
mean something like 'those works of human sociobiology
which arrive at sweeping conclusions about human nature.'
However, some careful empirical works with quite limited goals are also heavily criticized. Mr. Kitcher draws liberally on previously published critiques, especially those of Mr. Lewontin and Mr. Gould - even repeating some of their jokes. But he also contributes some of the most extended and detailed analyses of sociobiological works published to date.
In some cases these treatments probably go beyond what the works require. No work of sociobiology appears without
being subject to the most in tense scrutiny within the discipline. It is a young field with a limited number of logical possibilities, and inevitably many ideas have been put forth by several people at once. Each is met by a counterproposal, and generally the data do not yet suffice to discriminate clearly between such alternatives. For example, kin selection, group selection, reciprocal
altruism and the exercise known in game theory as
prisoner's dilemma are all hypotheses to account for
what we commonly think of as altruistic or cooperative behavior - a central puzzle for the Darwinian world view.
Proponents of these ideas have attacked each other frequently, so it cannot be surprising that Mr. Kitcher's attacks on them do not seem compellingly original.
Mr. Kitcher has written the most impressive account of sociobiology that has been provided by any critic. No one interested in human sociobiology can afford to ignore his analyses, particularly those in the 15 technical discussions set off from the main text.
I once asked a dyed-in-the-wool sociobiologist to account for the Shakers, a religious sect which refused to reproduce - thus, as it were, throwing the gauntlet down to Darwin. He thought for a comically difficult few seconds and finally sputtered, 'They're being selected against!' For him this closed the matter. For the rest of us, it opens up the possibility of a vast realm of human action that is not subject to precise Darwinian explanation. The crucial question of sociobiology is not whether the theory
is right (in important respects it must be) but how much of human behavior it accounts for.
Sociobiology has not yet fulfilled its promise to solve and sweep away major longstanding puzzles of human motivation and action. Like Mr. Kitcher, I am skeptical that it will. But it is too early to tell. So far, its accounting of altruism, competition, sex differences, parent-offspring conflict and deception, among other phenomena, has extended and in some ways sharpened the mode of discourse on these age-old problems. Mr. Kitcher would do well to study a number of subtler and more rigorous
examples of human sociobiology that his book omits from consideration. Would-be human sociobiologists would do well to study his criticism of some unsuccessful premature efforts.
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you said
Message #1005 from Akula at Sep 23 1999 9:08PM
Many animals mate for life (conventionally moral
in humans), care for young communally, and will protect
the weak
members of a group while they recover. These are
all moral concepts that we expect of humans. PS-
In relation to
your second point, Roman civilization took a lot
form the Greeks. In fact, many Romans had their Greek
slaves
educate them in such things as philosophy and morality. Now that's irony! |
