The Meaning of Human Existence

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.

Liberals truly believe in the SSSM

Liberals in the American sense, that is; in the UK we tend to use the term 'Hampstead Socialist'. Here are some English liberals: Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg; the BBC is liberal, so is The Guardian; sadly, so is The Economist.

It's easy to make a list of the things liberals like: internationalism, multiculturalism, immigration, diversity .. and the things they don't: anti-drug laws, state powers of surveillance, long prison terms, war. In general, liberals tend to the politically-correct.

I'm not interested in either backing or knocking any of these things: I don't like war either, especially when it's gratuitous. In any case, my wife is liberal. Instead, I'm trying to really get to the bottom of what makes a liberal, what really is the fundamental defining quality of liberalism.

I think it's adherence to the 'blank slate' Standard Social-Science Model.

You will recall that this model proposes that human are all nurture, with no important genetic differences when it comes to physical, social, personality or cognitive traits. In this model there is an ideal to which all may/should aspire: it is the person who is intelligent, healthy, agreeable, friendly, tolerant and generally pro-social. Someone very much like a liberal in fact.

The Standard Social-Science Model is spectacularly inconsistent with both everyday observation and the relevant theories (evolution, genetics and genomics, psychometrics, anatomy, etc). So how do liberals deal with such ubiquitous empirical refutation?

• If the unpleasant fact is small and relatively non-threatening (e.g. it happens not to be the case that everyone is of equal potential intelligence) the fact is distanced and ignored.


• If the fact is deeply destabilising to the SSSM and has 'difficult' public policy implications (e.g. the empirical fact that the distribution of intelligence differs between ethnic groups) then this is seen as a major threat and 'repressive tolerance' kicks in (the arguments are ignored and the perpetrators are excluded from the domain of rational dispute by a distancing epithet such as 'racist' - distancing labels generally end in '-ist').

Next question. Why do liberals believe in a model which is empirically wrong - and obviously so? I think there are two reasons.

1. Liberals believe in the SSSM not for intellectual reasons, which would be empirically refutable as discussed, but viscerally. The liberal worldview emerges from the limbic system, not the prefrontal cortex. In this, liberalism is a statement of faith and not of rationality. I hate to say it, but the propensity to be liberal is actually somewhat genetic.


2. Liberal thinking is encapsulated in Enlightenment political thinking, and in its normative social form is the underpinning for the universal franchise and liberal democracy. Après moi le déluge, they surely think. They're wrong about that, by the way, but it's certainly true that a political philosophy based on being generally nice, and having high hopes for personal development, is a big improvement on most prior political philosophies: there are worse things than Patrician Benevolence.

Believing in a Pollyanna-ish, benign and perfectible view of the human condition - and life in general - is a common failing of writers and is particularly damaging if you write science-fiction. Take David Brin, who is ferociously smart, well-connected in US technocratic circles and liberal to the core.

I have just read his door-stopper Existence. Here's an excerpt from this review.

"Starting with a series of snapshots of a world thirty years or so hence, Brin creates a picture where most of today's great threats have occurred and have been, if not overcome, then at least lived through. The seas have risen, nuclear terrorism has been perpetrated and the Yellowstone supervolcano has burped. It's a tomorrow where social and technological change have reshaped the world, and where a new social order is trying to put the brakes on progress, to end the Enlightenment. Beneath the optimism, though, there's danger. The world seems doomed to stagnation, unable to respond to any of a growing list of existential threats.

"But then an astronaut on the last space station, clearing space garbage, finds something strange — something not of this earth. And that means everything is about to change, once again.

"Brin draws on themes he's written about and discussed over much of the last decade, exploring a society shaped by ubiquitous surveillance (and equally ubiquitous sousveillance), where governments and ad hoc social media groups can use the same tools to draw their own conclusions and solve their own problems. It's the scenario he shaped in The Transparent Society, where little brother is the antidote to Big Brother (and that he elaborated on in a conversation with ZDNet earlier this year). But in Existence Brin also shows the downside of radical transparency, exploring how demagogues and propagandists can manipulate transparency to their own ends, using targeted disinformation.

"The picture Brin draws is one of a densely networked world that's easy for us to recognise. Ubiquitous augmented reality layers information on everything we see and do, and a networked society pulls together in clusters, joining together in smart mobs to interpret information and solve problems. The rich and the poor share access to an ocean of information, and understanding is the key to everything. It's also a world where machine learning and artificial intelligence have become everyday tools, and there's an uploaded rat living in the interstices of the internet.

"Of course, as in much of Brin's fiction, there's more. It's a story that travels the world, observing it through the eyes of a crusading journalist, a polemical novelist, an ageing astronaut, an aristocrat (or two) and a peasant shoresteading the ruins under a rising ocean. And as we leave the cradle there's also an answer to the Fermi Paradox, plus a tip of the hat to his popular Uplift novels."

In every fibre of his liberal being, David Brin believes that people are fundamentally friendly and nice, uplifted dolphins are friendly and nice (if a bit boisterous), aliens can be tricksy and disingenuous but Brin writes indulgently of them .. and the heartfelt message of his novel is that the universe awaits those who venture out in the spirit of friendliness and niceness.

Makes you nostalgic for the sheer malevolence of the Inhibitors!

Speculations

1. Dieting Aids

Recovering from a mild dose of food poisoning I note how my appetite has quite gone - the infamous 'illness diet'. Isolating the appetite-suppressing hormone involved would be the ultimate dieting aid, so how hard could it be? Very.

2. Monogamy

Stephen Pinker (in The Blank Slate) noted that monogamy has nothing to do with women's rights but is instead a conspiracy of weak men against the strong, so that every male gets a mate. He argued that most women would prefer to be the second wife of President Bill Clinton than the first wife of Bobo the Clown.

In fact, monogamy seems mostly to suit sedentary farmers and was adopted in European agrarian societies in the Dark Ages, if not before. Nomadic pastoralists are typically aggressive with an 'honour culture' involving high rates of inter-male violence, and presumably mortality. Is it any co-incidence that such cultures neither prescribe nor practice monogamy? Think the Arab tribes which were organised under Islam (four wives), or the Mongolian steppe nomads with their vast harems. Big problem when they settle down.

And don't get me started on selective female abortion (China, India) resulting in way too many males.

3. Cuckolding

Most males have a negative emotional reaction if their wife conceives a child by an unrelated male. The child is a cuckoo in the nest - the genetic implications are obvious.

Some time in the future, it will be possible for Mr and Mrs Average to have their gametes combined by a company which will sequence the pre-foetal DNA and make allele changes for improved health, beauty, intelligence and character. The resulting optimised offspring might well be genetically further from the father than that resulting from any conceivable adulterous mating by his wife.

How, actually, is he going to feel about that?