In the beginning we should all be physicists. As Sean Carroll has repeatedly pointed out, the laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood.
"Many people resist the implication that this theory is good enough to account for the physics underlying phenomena such as life, or consciousness. They could, in principle, be right, of course; but the only way that could happen is if our understanding of quantum field theory is completely wrong.
When deciding between “life and the brain are complicated and I don’t understand them yet, but if we work harder I think we can do it” and “I understand consciousness well enough to conclude that it can’t possibly be explained within known physics,” it’s an easy choice for me."
Carroll summarises our complete theory of the universe in one equation. As he points out, "No experiment ever done here on Earth has contradicted this model."
For the physicist, life is merely a parameter subspace in the evolution of the universal wavefunction. I'm tempted to mention cats. The physicist is professionally a psychopath. So note that the next time a famous physicist expresses an opinion on politics or public policy. They are talking outside their discipline.
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It's not wrong to start with physics, how could it be? But we seek more enlightenment from biology. At least the subjects we study there are actually living.
The title of this post is the meaning of life. Did you see the word 'human' anywhere?
Consider the plants and animals, the germs and fungi, occupants of this planet for four billion years. Darwin gave us the answer - the meaning of life is to survive and have reproducing progeny. All those ancestral entities which didn't 'get that' were eliminated from reality.
And for most creatures, there is no more meaning than that. If they were to waste their time and energy on doing anything else, they would be outcompeted and removed from the gene pool.
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On to sociology. It seems unbearable to a cultured person in the twenty first century that the meaning of their life is reduced to the number of child-bearing children they manage to create. This has thrown reductionist biologists into confusion.
I once read that the reason Catholic priests were celibate was some variation of the alleged 'gay uncle' phenomenon. Utterly delusional.
To state the obvious, humans are social creatures and large-scale agrarian societies rapidly outcompeted hunter-gathers. Almost all contemporary humans are the descendants of individuals who successfully adapted to living in large-scale cooperative societies.
Until the recent advent of contraception, reproductive success was strongly linked to social status. Social status in large-scale societies selects for social accomplishment: it helps to be good at something people value, and not to be a muppet.
A desire simply to breed is not really enough: your neighbours can get lethally irritated.
It's surprising how many people delude themselves that being an actor, a rock star, a politician or a top executive or even intellectual is not about getting the girl (or, if a girl, getting a better class of admirer).
What do you think?
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Social creatures have complex life histories, no longer purely individualistic. We all recall "Haldane famously joking that he would willingly die for two brothers or eight cousins."
Those celibate Catholic priests are using prosocial psychological drives to inhibit their more primal reproductive imperatives. No society could cohere without such inhibitory mechanisms and since the ages of rape and pillage of outgroups, there has been selection for male self-control.
As ever, there is variation in the population and a celibate occupation strongly selects within that.
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Some conclusions. The biologists are right: for humans the meaning of life is in some extended sense to have offspring. A society which fails to reproduce abolishes itself and vanishes from reality. The extended sense means that we could profitably devote our lives to aiding close kin, or even those whose social-solidarity benefits our kin (the foundation of reciprocal altruism).
We all benefit from the continuing integrity of our societies with their high carrying capacities.
It's OK to be a celibate, rule-abiding priest .. really. Even if you are professionally confused about the meaning of life.
I've been thinking about Frank Salter, who wrote "On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration" back in 2003 (I reviewed this last year). From being a taboo subject a while ago, immigration policy is now plastered across the front pages and camps out in op-ed pieces. When people immigrate to our country we gain their phenotypes in the short run => whatever skills they have to offer. If they stay and reproduce, we also get their alleles. Should we care?
Salter wants to argue that co-ethnics (people of the same race as yourself) are to be considered kin - part of your extended family. The figure I heard was that a random pair of co-ethnics are related at about 1/128 (apparently this is third cousin relatedness). Based on Hamilton's theory of kin selection, Salter suggests that this should lead us to favour co-ethnics over those more distantly related ('other races').*
There is more.
In a review of Salter's book (p.10) this is what Peter Gray (Department of Psychology, Boston College) had to say:
"Salter uses evolutionary theory not to explain behavior but to prescribe it. He clearly equates genetic
interest with human good. In summing up his argument, in the “Afterword,” Salter writes, “My primary aim has not been to explain human behavior, but rather to offer social and political theory about what individuals should do if they want to behave adaptively” (p. 325, Salter’s italics). "
"What we should do, according to Salter, is discriminate by race. We should do this because it is in our genetic interest to do so. Races differ genetically, and we share more genes with people of our own race than with those of different races, so it is in our genetic interest to favor our own race. To Salter, unlike to the rest of us who use evolutionary theory, genetic interest is not just the metaphorical “interest” of the gene, it is the real interest of the person. Salter writes, “Genetic interest residing in a population is a public good that belongs, as it were, to its individual members” (p. 43)."
...
"I’m sure that Salter is not in favor of rape. But his logic states clearly that it would be immoral to pass laws against rape if that behavior is in someone’s genetic interest. When you think of
it, most of our laws — laws against rape, murder, stealing, exploitation, slavery, and the like — are interfering with someone’s ability to pursue their genetic interest."
Yes, it's usually pro-social doves banding together to protect themselves against hawks. Insofar as doves tend to achieve more civilization-wise, this has to be judged a good thing. And here I think is the crux of the argument. A civilised nation is better for all its members in terms of future survival (provided people actually get on and reproduce in the first place!). Looking around the world, and contra-Salter, a rational policy of genetic interests should be trying to boost alleles for intelligence, conscientiousness and general pro-sociality within our own societies. Strangely, that's exactly what immigration policies based on encouraging talent actually do.
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* There is very little evidence of any built-in instinct which identifies somewhat genetically close kin. It seems very unlikely that we have spontaneous emotional connections to a random co-ethnic living in a town miles away. Even in a tight family environment, emotional bonding is apparently as much about growing up in close proximity as about cues from close genetic relatedness.
The Great Man is back in town, promoting his latest book, The Meaning of Human Existence.
I hadn't pegged E. O. Wilson for a liberal - anyone who nailed Marxism so solidly ("Wonderful theory; wrong species.") must surely be better than that. Yet he digs the hole deeper. Apparently he doesn't want to debate with his tormentor, Richard Dawkins, on the grounds that Dawkins is a journalist, not a scientist. Withering. But in science it's not who you are, it's whether you're right that counts. On group (or multi-level) selection, Edward O. Wilson has consistently fought on the wrong side of the barricades.
Dawkins reviewed Wilson's earlier book, The Social Conquest of Earth, in characteristically elegant and stiletto-tipped prose:
"When he received the manuscript of The Origin of Species, John Murray, the publisher, sent it to a referee who suggested that Darwin should jettison all that evolution stuff and concentrate on pigeons. It’s funny in the same way as the spoof review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which praised its interesting “passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways of controlling vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper” but added:
“Unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion this book can not take the place of JR Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping.”
"I am not being funny when I say of Edward Wilson’s latest book that there are interesting and informative chapters on human evolution, and on the ways of social insects (which he knows better than any man alive), and it was a good idea to write a book comparing these two pinnacles of social evolution, but unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory. In particular, Wilson now rejects “kin selection” (I shall explain this below) and replaces it with a revival of “group selection”—the poorly defined and incoherent view that evolution is driven by the differential survival of whole groups of organisms."
The key conceptual idea that it is genes which are selected in natural selection is spelled out by Dawkins thus:
"At stake is the level at which Darwinian selection acts: “survival of the fittest” but, to quote Wilson’s fellow entomologist-turned-anthropologist RD Alexander, the fittest what? The fittest gene, individual, group, species, ecosystem?
"Just as a child may enjoy addressing an envelope: Oxford, England, Europe, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Universe, so biologists with non-analytical minds warm to multi-level selection: a bland, unfocussed ecumenicalism of the sort promoted by (the association may not delight Wilson) the late Stephen Jay Gould. Let a thousand flowers bloom and let Darwinian selection choose among all levels in the hierarchy of life. But it doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny. Darwinian selection is a very particular process, which demands rigorous understanding.
The essential point to grasp is that the gene doesn't belong in the hierarchy I listed. It is on its own as a “replicator,” with its own unique status as a unit of Darwinian selection. Genes, but no other units in life’s hierarchy, make exact copies of themselves in a pool of such copies. It therefore makes a long-term difference which genes are good at surviving and which ones bad. You cannot say the same of individual organisms (they die after passing on their genes and never make copies of themselves). Nor does it apply to groups or species or ecosystems. None make copies of themselves. None are replicators. Genes have that unique status.
"Evolution, then, results from the differential survival of genes in gene pools. “Good” genes become numerous at the expense of “bad.” But what is a gene “good” at? Here’s where the organism enters the stage. Genes flourish or fail in gene pools, but they don’t float freely in the pool like molecules of water. They are locked up in the bodies of individual organisms. The pool is stirred by the process of sexual reproduction, which changes a gene’s partners in every generation. A gene’s success depends on the survival and reproduction of the bodies in which it sits, and which it influences via “phenotypic” effects. This is why I have called the organism a “survival machine” or “vehicle” for the genes that ride inside it. "
I doubt that Wilson doesn't intellectually understand this argument, or even the not-very-hard mathematics of Hamilton's notion of inclusive fitness. Wilson is, I suspect, simply indifferent to analytical, mathematical argumentation which he probably dismisses as simplistic model-building. No, group selection just feels emotionally right, and congruent to his optimistic, liberal outlook on life.
Another fine writer, Stephen Pinker, wrote an essay at Edge which elegantly demolishes the 'theory' of group selection. Here's an excerpt.
"Nepotistic altruism in humans consists of feelings of warmth, solidarity, and tolerance toward those who are likely to be one's kin. It evolved because any genes that encouraged such feelings toward genetic relatives would be benefiting copies of themselves inside those relatives. (This does not, contrary to a common understanding, mean that people love their relatives because of an unconscious desire to perpetuate their genes.) A vast amount of human altruism can be explained in this way. Compared to the way people treat non-relatives, they are far more likely to feed their relatives, nurture them, do them favors, live near them, take risks to protect them, avoid hurting them, back away from fights with them, donate organs to them, and leave them inheritances.
"The cognitive twist is that the recognition of kin among humans depends on environmental cues that other humans can manipulate.Thus people are also altruistic toward their adoptive relatives, and toward a variety of fictive kin such as brothers in arms, fraternities and sororities, occupational and religious brotherhoods, crime families, fatherlands, and mother countries. These faux-families may be created by metaphors, simulacra of family experiences, myths of common descent or common flesh, and other illusions of kinship. None of this wasteful ritualizing and mythologizing would be necessary if "the group" were an elementary cognitive intuition which triggered instinctive loyalty. Instead that loyalty is instinctively triggered by those with whom we are likely to share genes, and extended to others through various manipulations."
Read the whole rather wonderful piece here.
In the end there are only gene pools and allele frequencies. That is the bleak truth underlying modern biology. Those alleles reside in bodies like yours and mine; those alleles which survived to this point did so by making us what we are. As humans we individually survive and reproduce better by being somewhat pro-social (there is, of course, genetic variation in degree). Our feelings mediate between our genetic interests and our bodily actions, helped along by our intellectual competencies. We search for meaning in our lives because that's what we do - and and reject the answer because propagating our own genes seems .. somehow beneath us, and curiously inadequate.*
How speciesist! It works for the housefly.
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* Read Stephen Pinker's essay to be persuaded that the propagation of one's genes is a more-than-sufficient scientific explanation for the most rarefied human achievements in arts, sciences and general good works. Reputation management (q. v.) is a good part of it.
