Science of Good and Evil

by Michael Shermer

  After the initial excitement of evolutionary ethics wore off, its influence on both the public and academic philosophers and natural scientists faded into near oblivion. By the turn of the century the theory of evolution itself was experiencing something of a decline; scientists were openly expressing skepticism that natural selection could do all that Darwin said it could. Cambridge University philosopher G. E. Moore was especially contemptuous of evolutionary ethics, attacking it on the grounds that it violated the “naturalistic fallacy,” mistakenly inferring the ought from the is, or prescribing the way things should be based on a description of the way things are. The “good,” said Moore in his classic Principia Ethica, cannot be quantified like the utilitarians tried to do, nor could it be analyzed for its evolutionary adaptiveness. In fact, it cannot be defined by reference to some “other thing.” Its existence had to be apprehended on its own without outside reference.19

  Synthesis

  By World War I, the study of evolutionary ethics was in serious decline. But as it moved into its second phase between the wars, Julian Huxley and C. H. Waddington revised it—in conjunction with the modern evolutionary synthesis. Julian Huxley reinvigorated evolutionary ethics by grafting it onto the larger intellectual and social movement known as humanism. Huxley, in fact, called himself a religious humanist, “but without belief in any personal God.” Like his grandfather Thomas, Julian cared not at all for traditional religion and did not believe in God, but unlike the senior Huxley, Julian rejected Moore’s charges, arguing that science can not only tell us the way things are, it can direct us toward the way things ought to be:

  In the broadest possible terms evolutionary ethics must be based on a combination of a few main principles: that it is right to realize ever new possibilities in evolution, notably those which are valued for their own sake; that it is right both to respect human individuality and to encourage its fullest development; that it is right to construct a mechanism for further social evolution which shall satisfy these prior conditions as fully, efficiently, and as rapidly as possible.20

  Like Wallace, Julian Huxley’s evolutionary ethics was based on a belief in the progressive nature of evolution, although he did not envision a socialist utopia as an ideal state. He shared with his grandfather an enthusiasm for science and evolutionary thinking, but his vision of ethics was far less combative against nature than Thomas Huxley’s was. As Julian wrote:

  When we look at evolution as a whole, we find, among the many directions which it has taken, one which is characterized by introducing the evolving world-stuff to progressively higher levels of organization and so to new possibilities of being, action, and experience. This direction has culminated in the attainment of a state where the world-stuff (now moulded into human shape) finds that it experiences some of the new possibilities as having value in or for themselves; and further that among these it assigns higher and lower degrees of value, the higher values being those which are more intrinsically or more permanently satisfying, or involve a greater degree of perfection.21

  The latter half of this second renaissance for evolutionary ethics saw it fade once again after the Second World War. This second waning was a result, in part, of an extreme antihereditarianism view in psychology and the social sciences—an understandable response to Nazi eugenics, ethnic cleansing, and especially the Holocaust. As a consequence, however, scientists steered clear of the study of the biological and evolutionary origins of morality, instead focusing on purely cultural explanations. It was a trend mirrored throughout the social sciences and humanities, as scientists and scholars began with a prima facie assumption that social and psychological behavior must primarily be influenced by the environment, not biology.

  Controversy

  Evolutionary ethics lay dormant for three decades until 1975 when Harvard evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson published his 700-page magnum opus, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Ironically, only the final chapter deals with humans (“Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology”), and only in one short section—barely two pages long—does the reader encounter ethics and its possible evolutionary origins. But what is said, when it is said, and who is doing the saying matters as much in science as it does in other human endeavors, and here is what Wilson said: “Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.”22 Like Darwin’s single line at the end of The Origin of Species—“light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (later editions added the modifier “much”)—Witson’s one-liner fired a shot heard ’round the intellectual world. Academic philosophers were incensed that an outsider was encroaching on their turf and doing so in such cold scientific jargon: “Ethical philosophers intuit the deontological canons of morality by consulting the emotive centers of their own hypothalamic-limbic system,” he wrote in Sociobiology reducing thousands of years of philosophy to mere speculation on hormonally driven internal states. “Only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the canons be deciphered.”23 Wilson was vilified in the press, despite his disclaimer at the end of that brief section: “It should also be clear that no single set of moral standards can be applied to all human populations, let alone all sex-age classes within each population. To impose a uniform code is therefore to create complex, intractable moral dilemmas—these, of course, are the current condition of mankind.”24

  At stake in this battle—now known as the “evolution wars”—is nothing less than how human societies and families should be structured, how parents should raise children, how criminals should be handled, among other issues related to the nature of human nature. Also on the line, as the sociologist Ullica Segerstrale observed in her encyclopedic history of the evolution wars—Defenders of the Truth—is “the soul of science.”25

  The story of how an academic textbook by an entomologist could result in one of the most rancorous debates in all of science begins with the reactions to Wilson and his theory by his Harvard colleagues Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. Their Sociobiology Study Group, along with the politically charged, left-leaning organization Science for the People, were involved in the now famous incident at the 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. When Wilson advanced to the podium, demonstrators chanted, “Racist Wilson you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” Someone leaped up on the dais, grabbed a cup of ice water, and dumped it on Wilson’s head, shouting, “Wilson, you are all wet!” This was too much even for Stephen Jay Gould, who admonished the demonstrators, telling them their actions were what Lenin had dismissively called “Infantile Leftism.” The infamously bellicose anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon wasted no time in coming to Wilson’s defense, grabbing one of the attackers and tossing him from the stage.

  Why, Wilson wondered two decades later in his autobiographical book Naturalist, didn’t Gould and Lewontin just come up to his office from theirs (one floor below in the same Harvard building) to discuss their concerns? Why attack him in the very public pages of the New York Review of Books when this all could have been handled in private? The reason is that science is not the private and always-rational enterprise it is often made out to be. Why, Gould and Lewontin could just as easily have asked, didn’t Wilson come down one floor to their offices to discuss with them in private his ideas about applying principles of animal behavior to human societies? The answer is the same: if you want to get your theories out into the marketplace of ideas, you cannot sequester them in your office. You’ve got to make them public, and the more public the better. Hashing the debate out in public gives you the forum you would never get in private. (An analogy here will help. On March 14, 1994, I appeared on Phil Donahue’s live national television show to debunk the Holocaust deniers.26 The producers went to great lengths to keep me separated from them—different limos to the studio, different dress
ing rooms, different green rooms, different entrances to the set, and no talking during commercial breaks. Why? Because, I was told, they wanted the fresh drama of an initial encounter.) In the evolution wars and sociobiology debates, Gould and Lewontin had a scientific agenda that they wanted to air publicly—that adaptationist, gene-centered arguments in evolutionary theory can be carried too far, and that much in the history of life can be explained by nonadaptive processes and a multileveled analysis of genes, individuals, and groups. What better way to do it than to use Wilson as their foil? But who in the general public knows or cares about adaptations, exaptations, spandrels, contingencies, and other esoterica of evolutionary biology? What the public does understand quite well are Nazis, eugenics, race-purification programs, and other abuses of biology of the past century. Thus, sociobiology’s critics reasoned, the best strategy is to begin with its ideological implications—particularly the racist overtones of genetic determinism—to capture an audience, then segue into the scientific arguments about the problems with hyperadaptationism. Gould said as much at a 1984 Harvard meeting Segerstråle attended: “We opened up the debate by taking a strong position. We took a definitive stand in order to open up the debate to scientific criticism. Until there is some legitimacy for expressing contrary opinions, scientists will shut up.” From this (and numerous interviews with all parties involved), Segerstråle concludes: “What I take Gould to be saying here is that the controversy around Wilson’s Sociobiology was, in fact, a vehicle for the real scientific controversy about adaptation! Far, then, from ‘dragging politics into it,’ or being ‘dishonest’ as [Ernst] Mayr accused Gould and Lewontin of being, their political involvement would have been instead a deliberate maneuver to gain a later hearing for their fundamentally scientific argument about adaptation. What Gould seems to have been saying here is that the scientific controversy about adaptation could not have been started without the political controversy about sociobiology.”27

  Before we accuse Gould and Lewontin of being overly Machiavellian in their political machinations, however, we should note that Wilson was not an innocent victim in this debate. It seems unlikely that a Harvard professor could author a book whose title defines a new science of applying biology to human social and moral behavior, in the middle of a decade that was defined by its ideological emphasis on egalitarian politics and cultural determinism, and not expect trouble. In point of fact, of course, all scientists have an agenda and the sooner we recognize that fact and come clean with our own, the better able the public will be to judge scientific theories. Certainly Gould and Lewontin went too far, as all social movements are wont to do. When I first met Ed Wilson, I was surprised at what a kind, generous, and soft-spoken man he is—anything but what I had expected from following the sociobiology debates. Then again, it would appear that Wilson knew exactly what he was doing all along. Throughout his long and illustrious career Wilson has brilliantly orchestrated a scientistic program of biologizing all of human behavior, from mate selection and maternal love to mass genocide and morality. No wonder the evolution wars have been so heated. As he has always done with such aplomb over the decades and through numerous scientific battles, Ed Wilson let his pen do the talking. He responded to his critics with a Pulitzer Prize-winning answer in book form, On Human Nature, in which he succinctly threw down the gauntlet:

  Above all, for our own physical well-being if nothing else, ethical philosophy must not be left in the hands of the merely wise. Although human progress can be achieved by intuition and force of will, only hard-won empirical knowledge of our biological nature will allow us to make optimum choices among the competing criteria of progress.28

  Victory

  Ed Wilson’s gauntlet was taken up by a cadre of scientists, philosophers, and scholars of many stripes, including anthropologist Donald Symons, psychologist Robert Axelrod, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, philosopher Michael Ruse, historian of science Robert Richards, biologist Richard Alexander, evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith, sociologist James Q. Wilson, evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton, primatologist Frans de Waal, and many others. Richard Dawkins’s 1976 The Selfish Gene was especially influential in getting people to think about applying science and evolution to human behavior, including moral behavior. To the concept of genes as carriers of information, Dawkins added “memes”—cultural carriers of information that go beyond biology yet act much like genes in terms of propagation, selection, and mutation. He even treated religious ideas as virus memes that, like computer viruses, invade our mental software, destroying our programs for rational thought and behavior. One of the best books making the case for the evolutionary origins of moral behavior is Matt Ridley’s 1997 The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation. Robert Wright’s 1994 The Moral Animal is an engaging history of evolutionary ethics; Paul Farber’s 1994 The Temptations of Evolutionary Ethics is a scholarly history and critique; Philip Kitcher’s 1995 Vaulting Ambition provides a strong critique; and Paul Thompson’s 1995 Issues in Evolutionary Ethics is a useful collection of the most important works in the field, pro and con. At Skeptic magazine we devoted back-to-back special issues—with pro and con debates—on both evolutionary psychology and evolutionary ethics.29

  As a final statement of victory, of sorts, in 1998 Ed Wilson published Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, a magisterial sweep of the history of knowledge from the Enlightenment to the present. Wilson devoted a full chapter to ethics, as discussed in chapter 1, updating his argument from two decades prior (in Sociobiology and On Human Nature) by reducing the debate about the origins of the moral sense to an either-or choice between transcendentalists and empiricists. Wilson, of course, is an empiricist for whom God is an unnecessary hypothesis. “In simplest terms, the options are as follows: I believe in the independence of moral values, whether from God or not, and I believe that moral values come from human beings alone, whether or not God exists.” For Wilson, even Enlightenment atheist philosophers are still transcendentalists because “they tend to view natural law as a set of principles so powerful, whatever their origin, as to be self-evident to any rational person. In short, transcendental views are fundamentally the same whether God is invoked or not.” For the empiricist, at least in a Wilsonian sense, “if we explore the biological roots of moral behavior, and explain their material origins and biases, we should be able to fashion a wise and enduring ethical consensus.”30 Wilson began his analysis by admonishing ethicists for not opening their arguments with a caveat such as: “this is my starting point, and it could be wrong.” To his eternal (pardon the religious hyperbole) credit, Wilson had the intellectual integrity to end his own treatise on the material origins of ethics with this comment: “And yes—lest I forget—I may be wrong.”31

  Today, evolutionary psychology, and its subfield of evolutionary ethics, are budding sciences ripe with both testable hypotheses and not so testable just-so stories. The debate has proven to be a lively one, and its critics have many important points to make, with plenty of cautions and caveats to go around about inappropriately applying evolutionary theory to human thought and behavior, but in my opinion the theory of evolution has won the day in both psychology and ethics. The field moved into its fourth phase in the early 1990s when sociobiology—under a new covering cloth of evolutionary psychology—gained general acceptance among a sizable group of evolutionary biologists and theorists. But it is only fair that I acknowledge that not everyone will agree with me that the application of evolutionary theory to human psychology and morality achieved victory at any time. Critics of evolution in general, and evolutionary biologists skeptical of evolutionary psychology in particular, may take issue with me on this point.

  Consolidation

  The fifth phase in the history of evolutionary ethics involves a consolidation of many evolutionary concepts, most notably a pluralistic and hierarchical model of evolution that recognizes causal elements other than natural selection—such as group selection—that have opera
ted in human evolution. As in my caveat above, however, there are those who would argue that the consolidation took place in the victory stage and that group selection and hierarchical theory are nothing more than a minor wrinkle in the overall fabric of life. Thus, what follows is as much prescriptive as it is descriptive.

  GROUP SELECTION, HIERARCHICAL EVOLUTIONARY THEORY, AND THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY

  As discussed in chapter 2, group selection has been a controversial subject and remains a topic of hot debate among evolutionary theorists today. Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson recounts the story of how group selection became anathema:

  George C. Williams is regarded as a hero by evolutionary biologists of the individualistic tradition. Specifically, he is the hero who severed the head of group selection and mounted it on a pole as an example of how not to think for future generations. As Williams tells the story (the last time I heard it was at the award ceremony for Sweden’s Crafoord Prize, which Williams received in 1999 along with John Maynard Smith and Ernst Mayr), he was a young postdoctoral associate at the University of Chicago and attended a lecture by Alfred Emerson, a highly respected biologist who portrayed all of nature as like a big termite colony. Williams knew that the evolution of higher-level adaptation was not so simple. As he listened to Emerson he thought “if this is evolution, I want to do something else—like car insurance.” Williams left the lecture muttering “Something must be done.” That something was Adaptation and Natural Selection, first published in 1966 and still widely read. Williams was one of many evolutionists who reacted against the superorganismic perspective but he became the icon for its rejection. I wish I could report otherwise, but scientists need their heroes and heads on poles as much as any other human group.32