Science of Good and Evil

by Michael Shermer

  26 I defend this statement in greater depth in my book How We Believe (see chapters 4 and 7 in particular).

  27 E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).

  28 Richard D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), and Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1987). F. Miele, “The (Im)moral Animal: A Quick and Dirty Guide to Evolutionary Psychology and the Nature of Human Nature,” Skeptic, vol. 4, no. 1, (1996), pp. 42—49.

  29 E. O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

  30 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), 1163.

  31 Ibid., p. 166. Although this is indeed what we would today call group selection, we must be careful not to hold up Darwin as an unalloyed champion of group selection. He turned to group selection only as a last resort after his attempts to explicate morality through individual selection had failed. Even as he apparently argued for group selection, Darwin proposed what we today would call reciprocal altruism, which is fully explained through individual selection: “As the reasoning powers and foresight of the members became improved, each man would soon learn from experience that if he aided his fellow-men, he would commonly receive aid in return. From this low motive he might acquire the habit of aiding his fellows” (The Descent of Man, 1163).

  If anyone had the motivation to employ Darwin in the service of defending group selection, it was Stephen Jay Gould, yet it was Gould who discovered Darwin’s reluctance to be a group selectionist because “in permitting a true exception to organismal selection, Darwin’s primary attitude exudes extreme reluctance—restriction to minimal groupiness, provision of other explanations in the ordinary organismal mode, limitation to a unique circumstance in a single species (human consciousness for the spread of an idea against the force of organismal selection), and placement within a more general argument for sexual selection, the strongest form of the orthodox mode.” In an interesting deduction from this historical nugget, however, Gould argued that this bodes well for group selection: “The recognition that Darwin, despite such strong reluctance, could not avoid some role for species selection, builds a strong historical argument for the ineluctability of a hierarchical theory of selection.” (Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002], pp. 135—36.)

  32 Michael T. Ghiselin, The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 247.

  33 Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 27,92.

  34 W. D. Hamilton, “Innate Social Aptitudes of Man: An Approach From Evolutionary Genetics,” in Biosocial Anthropology, ed. Robin Fox (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975), pp. 133—35.

  35 David Sloan Wilson, “Nonzero and Nonsense: Group Selection, Nonzerosumness, and the Human Gaia Hypothesis,” Skeptic, vol. 8, no. 1 (2000), p. 85. See also his elaboration on this model in David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  For a critique of Wilson’s theory, see Michael Ruse, “Can Selection Explain the Presbyterians?” Science, vol. 297 (August 30, 2002), p. 1479, in which he answers his title question thusly: “I want hard figures on birth patterns before and after Calvin, and I want to know who had kids and who did not. I want these figures correlated with religious practice and belief. Then and only then will I start to feel comfortable.”

  I asked MIT linguist and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker’s opinion of group selection theory: “I must admit to being skeptical about D. S. Wilson’s new group selection. For one thing, in many cases Wilson seems to bend himself into a pretzel to redescribe gene selection as a kind of group selection (as when he calls an ant colony a group, or a pair of reciprocal altruists as a group). In those cases he’s not wrong, but he doesn’t add anything; the predictions are pretty much the same, and he just seems on a crusade to revive the concept. In other cases (such as individual sacrifice to benefit the group) it just doesn’t seem to fit terribly well with the psychology. If humans were group-selected, life would be very different—we wouldn’t have emotions directed at other individuals like anger, guilt, and jealousy; we wouldn’t have affairs, compete for status, hoard when we can get away with it, lie and cheat, etc. Sure, people risk their lives for the group in warfare, but generally when the risk is probabilistic (so they’re not sure to die), when they are rewarded with status (or in the old days, women), or when they are suckered by promises of 72 virgins in an afterlife.” (Personal correspondence, September 27, 2002.)

  36 Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral, p. 1.

  37 Ibid., p. 21.

  38 Signe Howell, Society and Cosmos: Chewong of Peninsular Malaya (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1984).

  39 Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Marriage, and Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (New York: Times Books, 2003).

  40 There is a sizable body of literature on game theory and cooperation. Here are several excellent resources:

  Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Robert Axelrod and W. D. Hamilton, “The Evolution of Cooperation,” Science, vol. 211 (1981), pp. 1390–96. Robert H. Frank, Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). Douglas R. Hofstadter, “Metamagical Themas: Computer Tournaments of the Prisoner’s Dilemma Suggest How Cooperation Evolves,” Scientific American, vol. 248, no. 5 (1983), pp. 16–26. John Keith Murnighan, Bargaining Games (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1992.). Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (New York: Viking, 1996). Michael Taylor, The Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Robert L. Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 46 (1971), pp. 35–57. John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). On the Internet: Google search “prisoner’s dilemma” will lead to thousands of sites, computer simulations, chat rooms, discussions, bibliographies, and so on, such as http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PRISDIL.html.

  41 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) p. xi.

  42 MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (http://cognet.mit.edu/MITECS/Entry/brown).

  43 Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991), p. 142.

  44 Ibid., p. 143.

  3. Why We Are Immoral

  1 Aaron Sorkin, A Few Good Men (New York: Samuel French, June 1990).

  2 See the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online at http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/e/epicur.htm, or the Aphorisms of Epicurus, online at http://www.ag.wastholm.net/author/Epicurus.

  The defense of God’s goodness in spite of the obvious existence of evil is called theodicy, a word coined by German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. Theodicy became an especially contentious philosophical issue after a November 1755 earthquake leveled the city of Lisbon. In response, the atheist French philosopher Voltaire wrote a bitter poem inquiring of Christians, where was God in Lisbon? Jean-Jacques Rousseau penned a sharp rejoinder to Voltaire, arguing that so-called natural disasters like earthquakes were not acts of God, but natural acts that affected people in unnatural ways because we live in unnatural conditions, like crowded cities.

  3 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733–34), ed. by Frank Brady (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1997). Also available online at http:/hvww.library.utoronto.ca/utellrp/poems/pope10.html .

  4 Mary Neubauer, “For McCaugheys, a Day to Be Thankful in Many Ways,” Athens Banner-Herald, November 28, 1997. Online at http://www.athensnewspapers.com/1997/112897/1128.a3septuplets.html.

 
; 5 See my essay “Only God Can Do That?” in Michael Shermer, The Borderlands of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 66–79.

  6 Misty Bernall, She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall (New York: Plough Publishing House, 1999). There is some dispute about whether Cassie Bernall actually said “yes” to the question about her belief. See http://www.geocities.com/me2kangaru/CassiesYes.html for a dissenting view.

  7 Random House College Dictionary usages of evil include, as adjectives, “morally wrong; immoral; wicked: characterized or accompanied by misfortune or suffering; unfortunate”; and as nouns, in addition to those quoted, “that which is evil; evil quality; intention, or conduct; a disease, as king’s evil; in an evil manner.”

  8 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 14.

  9 Max Frankel, “Willing Executioners?” New York Times Book Review, August 9, 1998.

  10 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper, 1969). See also Hans Askenasy, Are We All Nazis? (Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1978).

  11 Philip Zimbardo, “The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos,” in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1969, ed. W. J. Arnold and D. Levine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970). See also Philip Zimbardo, The Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence (New York: McGrawHill, 1991).

  12 In Gustave M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Co., 1947).

  13 Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 116.

  14 Carol Tavris and C. Wade, Psychology in Perspective, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman /Addison Wesley, 1995), p. 332.

  15 Cited in Y. Bachler, “Document: A Preparatory Document for the Wannsee ‘Conference,’” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, (spring 1995), pp. 121–29.

  16 I first coined the phrase “the evil of banality” in Michael Shermer and A. Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

  17 Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (New York: Random House, 1998), p. xxv.

  18 Ibid., p. xxi.

  19 Ibid., p. xii.

  20 C. Lanzmann, “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann,” American Imago, vol. 48, no. 4, (1991), pp. 473–95.

  21 Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997).

  22 Quoted in Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (New York: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 204.

  23 Baumeister, Evil, p. 14.

  24 Ibid., pp. 73–74.

  25 Ibid., pp. 95–96.

  26 Bart Kosko, Fuzzy Engineering (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992.).

  27 Armchair philosophical ponderings like the blueness of the sky are not the only applications of fuzzy logic. There are now a host of fuzzy machines, such as a fuzzy washing machine that assigns a fractional number to the “dirtiness” of the water (say .8 dirty), then injects the appropriate amount of soap. Or a fuzzy video camera that automatically adjusts the shutter opening to the amount of light, or a “stabilization” device that adjusts to the motion of the video camera operator Cruise missiles are fuzzy weapons that adjust their speed and trajectory according to the changing terrain that is compared to an onboard map. Japanese firms have rejected Aristotle and committed themselves to fuzzy logic, designing fuzzy fuel injectors, fuzzy film, fuzzy computers, fuzzy automatic transmissions, fuzzy dishwashers, fuzzy dryers, fuzzy copy machines, and even a fuzzy golf swing diagnostic system.

  28 Bart Kosko, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic (New York: Hyperion, 1993), p. 250.

  29 Carol Tavris, “All Bad or All Good? Neither,” Los Angeles Times, September 20, 1998, p. M5.

  30 Lawrence Kohlberg, “Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach,” in Moral Development and Behavior, ed. T. Lickona (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976), and Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, vol. 2: The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984).

  31 Kurt Bergling, Moral Development: The Validity of Kohlberg’s Theory (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1981).

  32 R. L. Gorsuch and S. McFarland, “Single vs. Multiple-item Scales for Measuring Religious Values,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 13 (1972), pp. 281–307. S. Selig and G. Teller, “The Moral Development of Children in Three Different School Settings,” Religious Education, vol. 70 (1975), pp. 406–15.

  33 L. Nucci and E. Turiel, “God’s Word, Religious Rules, and Their Relation to Christian and Jewish Children’s Concepts of Morality,” Child Development, vol. 64 (1993), pp. 1475–91. D. Ernsberger and G. Manaster, “Moral Development, Intrinsic/Extrinsic Religious Orientation and Denominational Teachings,” Genetic Psychology Monographs, vol. 104 (1981), pp. 23–41.

  34 S. Sanderson, Religion, Politics, and Morality: An Approach to Religion and Political Belief Systems and Their Relation Through Kohlberg’s Cognitive-Developmental Theory of Moral Judgment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Dissertation Abstracts International 346259B, 1974).

  35 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). For a literature review of Kohlberg’s theory and his critics, see J. M. Darley and T. R. Shultz, “Moral Rules: Their Content and Acquisition,” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 41 (1990), pp. 525–56.

  36 Tavris, “All Bad or All Good? Neither.”

  37 Told to Skeptic senior editor Frank Miele, who was in attendance. Personal correspondence with Frank Miele, November 20, 2000. My interview with Patrick Tierney was on Monday, November 20, 2000, for the science edition of NPR affiliate KPCC’s Airtalk.

  38 Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 15. Kenneth Good, Into the Heart: One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). Jacques Lizot, Tales of the Yanomami: Daily Life in the Venezuelan Forest (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  39 Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado, pp. 132–33.

  40 Margot Roosevelt, “Yanomami: What Have We Done to Them?” Time, vol. 156, no. 14 (October 2, 2000), pp. 77-78.

  41 Since evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker published a letter in defense of Chagnon in the New York Times Book Review (in response to John Horgan’s surprisingly uncritical review of Tierney’s book there), I queried him about some of the specific charges. “The idea that Chagnon caused the Yanomamö to fight is preposterous and contradicted by every account of the Yanomamö and other non-state societies. Tierney is a zealot and a character assassin, and all his serious claims crumble upon scrutiny.” What about the charge of ethical breaches? “There are, of course, serious issues about ethics in ethnography, and I don’t doubt that some of Chagnon’s practices, especially in the 1960s, were questionable (as were the practices in most fields, such as my own—for example, the Milgram studies). But the idea that the problems of Native Americans are caused by anthropologists is crazy. In the issues that matter to us—skepticism, scientific objectivity, classic liberalism, etc.—Chagnon is on the right side.” Personal correspondence with Steven Pinker, December 1, 2000.

  42 Derek Freeman, “Paradigms in Collision: Margaret Mead’s Mistake and What It Has Done to Anthropology,” Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 3 (1997), pp. 66-73.

  43 Ibid. Freeman added this comment about the politics of science: “About this extraordinary action, which is based on the notion that the scientific status of propositions can be settled politically, Sir Karl Popper wrote me: ‘Many sociologists and almost all sociologists of science be
lieve in a relativist theory of truth. That is, truth is what the experts believe, or what the majority of the participants in a culture believe. Holding a view like this your opponents could not admit you were right. How could you be, when all their colleagues thought like they did? In fact, they could prove that you were wrong simply by taking a vote at a meeting of experts. That settled it. And your facts? They meant nothing if sufficiently many experts ignored them, or distorted them, or misinterpreted them.’” Subsequently, Freeman received a personal letter from philosopher Peter Munz, who cut to the core of what lies behind the anthropology wars: “I was so excited, when the scales fell from my eyes that I felt I had to write to you and say what a splendid book. I hope its importance will not get buried in controversies about the emotional attitudes of young Samoans. Its importance reaches far beyond this particular problem. The debate, at heart, is about evolution.”